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More "Shambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Michael, roughly, as he passed near him, and threatening him with his fist. Susan's back was turned to the pair. The expression of Willie's face changed from vacancy to fear, and he came shambling up to Susan, who put her arm round him, and, as if protected by that shelter, he began making faces at Michael. Susan saw what was going on, and, as if now first struck by the strangeness of her brother's ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, nudging Sir Gilbert, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... heat of the day or the cool of the evening, the giant Mexican strode on by the side of the two horsemen, sometimes trotting like a dog, more often walking with a shambling, wide-reaching step, tireless as any wild animal. His feet, seamed and parched into the semblance rather of horn than of flesh and bone, were quite bare, though now it was a time of year when the nights at least were very cool and when freezing weather might come at any time. He was clad ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... were cattle for sale later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... their canvas sides make themselves conspicuous, and so do the bakers' carts; while light and neat American wagonettes glide rapidly along among less attractive vehicles. Now and then a Chinaman passes, with his peculiar shambling gait, with a pole across his shoulders balancing his baskets of "truck"; women with oranges and bananas for a penny apiece meet one at every corner, and still the sidewalks are so broad, and the streets so wide, ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... appearance, who consumed hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, for his breakfast; ate his prawns with their heads and their tails on, drank scalding hot tea, and performed so many horrifying acts that one almost doubted that he was human; and by Christopher Nubbles, a shock-headed, shambling, awkward, devoted lad, the only element of cheerfulness that ever came into her life. In this book appear Richard Swiveller and his Marchioness, Sampson and Sarah Brass and Mrs. Jarley, who to be appreciated must be seen and known, as Dickens has ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... still a long time, and the first sound he heard was of slow and cautious footsteps. He listened to them attentively and he wondered. A warrior surely would not come walking in a manner that soon became shambling. Putting his ear to the earth he heard a soft and uncertain crush, crush, and then, raising his head a little, he traced a dark, ambiguous figure. But he knew it, nevertheless, by the two red eyes blinking in doubt ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... through which the German prisoners were being led, I hurriedly fixed my camera and filmed them shambling in, holding their hands up, their nerves completely shattered by the intensity of our terrific bombardment. Some were covered with wounds, others were carrying our wounded Tommies in on stretchers. It was an extraordinary sight. Ten minutes before these ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... within the charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... certain forms he did meet, But scarce might behold their faces; From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox, And shambling were their paces! ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ten minutes in the rain; then a shambling footstep shambled down the path, and an old face peered out between the trellised iron work. "Who is it?" an ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... Sir, your travellers Need fleeter steeds than we poor shambling folks Who stay at home. To my unskilful sense, Speed for the chase and vigour for the tilt, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sometimes they moved. This was not now a wolf country, but two-footed wolves were plenty, and as dangerous. The hangers-on of the army—beggars, feagues, and footpads—hovered, like the cowardly beasts of prey they were, about the outskirts of the city. Did a leaf rustle, we started; did a shambling shape in the gloom whine for alms, we made ready for onset. Gilles produced from some place of concealment—his jerkin, or his leggings, or somewhere—a brace of pistols, and we walked with finger on trigger, taking ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... its enthusiasm in honor of Clive. From a flagstaff newly erected on the roof of the Four Alls on the Newport Road, a square of bunting flapped in the breeze. Inside the inn the innkeeper was drawing a pint of ale for his one solitary customer, a shambling countryman with a shock of very red hair, and eyes ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... quay in silence, and had nearly reached the end of it, when the figure of a man turned the corner of the houses and advanced at a shambling trot ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... his bunch of keys, and made his way to the shed, Riglett shambling behind at an interval of ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... in a sort of terror, the tall figure as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the house. The three moved on to the wing containing Ume's chamber, and the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this last stress," heard old Kano falter, "Farewell, my son, no one shall disturb you in ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... bodies lay side-by-side in the front part of the shambling house, there sat in the kitchen, so the story goes, a slatternly old crone peeling potatoes for supper—should the few straggling boarders return with an appetite, now that all the shooting ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... at those about him, and shook his head. He appeared to hesitate about asking any more questions, and after shambling back and forth a dozen times, or more, he stopped at the pile of debris, and picked up a thick disk-like piece of metal, to one side of which was a short ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Treasures of the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... like the first reformed platoon of an army after fleeing from disaster. The leader of the platoon was a small boy. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and he looked as if he were sorely afraid. After him came half a dozen men with shambling gait. One was an Irishman, two were English, one was a German and one a colored man. Two of them carried pickaxes in their hands, which they had been using to clear away the wreckage across ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes lost his gun, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... along behind. Don't you want to?" And off started the little cavalcade, with Cricket driving, because she was the smallest, and could perch up on the others' knees, while old Billy, all beam, jogged after, making almost as good time, with his long legs and shambling gait, as ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... lamb was gamboling, Upon a pleasant day, And four grey wolves came shambling, And stopped to see it play In the sun. Said the lamb, "Perhaps I may Charm these creatures with my play, And they'll let me ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... while the poor king ambled up and down the apartment in a piteous state of uncertainty, which was made more ridiculous by his shambling circular mode of managing his legs, and his ungainly fashion on such occasions of fiddling with the bunches of ribbons which fastened the lower part ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... take so much trouble to convey such bulky articles was not quite clear. Now that he was a miner he had no use for them, and at River Bend they were not saleable. This man, Abner Kent, came to Ferguson's tent, where he and Tom were resting after the labors of the day. He was a tall man, with a shambling gait and an ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... down from the hill into Eysden, we were in the midst of these peasants, fleeing before the red wrath rolling up into the sky. They came shambling in with a few possessions on which they had hurriedly laid their hands, singly or in families, a ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... and a tall hat stealing cautiously around, not across the square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt about for the latch, opened ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... abruptly, and stood quite still a moment, fronting the meeting, as though appealing to them, through the mere squalid physical weakness he could find no more words to express. Then, with a sort of shambling bow, he turned away, and the main body of the meeting clapped excitedly, while at the back some of the "sweaters" grinned, and chatted sarcastic things in Yiddish with their neighbours. Tressady saw Lady Maxwell rise eagerly as the old man passed her, take his hand, ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and the dawn found him still moving, a mere automaton of a man, haggard and shambling, no longer willing his progress, but somehow incredibly advancing. He found water and drank it, fell, got up, and still, right foot, left foot, he went on. Some time during that advance he had found a trail, and he kept to it automatically. He felt no surprise and no relief when he saw ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the Pennington features. After all, there was nothing mean and cunning about them. The eyes were wild, and perhaps fierce, but they were honest and frank still. The clothes were much worn and torn, but the body they covered was strong and shapely. There was nothing weak or shambling in those six ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... corncake, he pondered over the strange fate of this fascinating young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry—so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude—fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks—doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of her ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... personality, Miss Clairville, threw him altogether on the society of the village, but, apart from Poussette, who had become mysteriously friendly again, the two individuals most in need of his ministrations were Mme. Poussette and the shambling guide, Edmund Crabbe, in whom were the dregs of a being originally more than the preacher's equal. Old world distinctions would seem to be of small account in such a hamlet as St. Ignace and yet questions of caste were felt ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... to Hartford, shortly afterward, Bok was just turning into Forrest Street when a little old woman came shambling along toward him, unconscious, apparently, of people or surroundings. In her hand she carried a small tree-switch. Bok did not notice her until just as he had passed her he heard her calling to him: "Young man, young ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... little interchange a procession of men streaming homeward in their hundreds came walking down the Embankment in twos and threes or singly, shambling past the loosely gathered ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, and made merry ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... one more when we see him afterwards in the town, marching along with a flat-footed shambling tread, holding an umbrella in front of him in his clenched fist (as all french priests hold it),—a figure as ...
— Normandy Picturesque • Henry Blackburn
... off to church in her long jacket; goes shambling down the hill with her feet turning in and out any odd way. A sweet and ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... a pleasant beginning. But if Georgiana, before her guest arrived, had thought the old house shabby, she felt it now to be positively shambling. She struggled mightily against this attitude of mind, knowing that it was unworthy of her, but, as she led this wonderful, winsome creature, whom she knew to be accustomed only to the softnesses of life, up over the worn stair carpeting to the room she had prepared for her, ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... it; how I don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin. I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means. He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one can make a shot at most things ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... at the door leading out from one of the transepts, and Mr Harding passed them as they were speaking together. He was a little, withered, shambling old man, with bent shoulders, dressed in knee-breeches and long black gaiters, which hung rather loosely about his poor old legs,—rubbing his hands one over the other as he went. And yet he walked quickly; not tottering as he walked, but with an uncertain, doubtful ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... out a rough, shambling-looking young man down the great kitchen garden into which he had led me. This gentleman was in his coat, and he was apparently busy doing nothing with a hoe, upon which he rested himself, and took off a very ragged fur cap to wipe his brow as we came up, saluting ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... has opened my eyes and scattered my foolish prejudices to the four winds. At every turn, some new surprise awaits me. My typical farmer, with his shock of untrimmed hair and beard, his stooping shoulders, his shambling, plow-following gait, his great cow-hide boots, his coarse, soiled, slouchy, ill-fitting blouse and overalls, his grimy hands, his ill-at-ease, uncultured manners, and his born-tired expression of countenance, I cannot find. In his place, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... Releasing the hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned towards Brant ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... there found a messenger to take the horses to their stable. All through the streets they had passed men in one uniform or another, who looked stout and well-fed, who strode in the middle of the pavement, while the Poles, whose clothes were poor and threadbare, shuffled aside in their patched and shambling boots to make way for the conqueror. Sometimes they would turn and look back at some sword-bearer who was more offensive than usual, with reflective eyes as if marking him in order to know him at a future time. As is always ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... with them o'er the sea Into the lovely land of Italy, Whose loveliness was more resplendent made By the mere passing of that cavalcade, With plumes, and cloaks, and housings, and the stir Of jewelled bridle and of golden spur. And lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country towns ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... Later they would both come out of their bathing-boxes, and the "brute" would be a smartly dressed officer carrying himself with ease and distinction, and the "aristocrat" would be an untidy, uncouth "Tommy" shambling along. Truly on sight one should never judge a man ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... were indicated. This obscene drawing is matched by many equally odious. Abject domesticity, ignominies of married life, of middle-age, of money-making; the old common jape against the mother-in-law; abominable weddings: in one drawing a bridegroom with shambling side-long legs asks his bride if she is nervous; she is a widow, and she answers, "No, never was." In all these things there is very little humour. Where Keene achieved fun was in the figures of his schoolboys. The hint of tenderness ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... departure there came the shambling trot of another horse, and Piet Vreiboom, slouched like a sack in the saddle rode up and rolled ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... bolt fell. One day a big, angular, shambling girl, with Margret's suspicious eyes and cynical mouth, crossed by the ferry to the Island. She had a trunk, which Barney Ryder, general carrier to the Island, would have lifted to his ass-cart, but the new-comer scornfully waved him away. 'Come here, you ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled cabbage, however, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... (which he brought in in complete silence, and which was exceedingly unpalatable), he lurked behind trees and crept along hedges, shooting birds. Even Reddin felt awed and could not gather courage to expostulate with him. In and out of the stealthy afternoon shadows, black and solemn, went the shambling old figure with his relentless face and outraged heart. He shot thrushes as they fluted after a meal of wild raspberries; he shot tiny silky willow-wrens, robins, and swallows—their sacredness did not awe ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... While shambling through the forest one day Mother Bruin made a wonderful discovery. She came to a tree which had recently fallen to the forest floor and from within came a curious humming. She stopped abruptly to listen, her great head cocked to one side and her eyes shining ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... Louisburg alive with torches where the French are sinking ships to obstruct the entrance and setting fire to fishing stages that might interfere with cannon aim. The next night, May 1, Vaughan's New Hampshire boys—raw farmers, shambling in their gait, singing as they march—swing through the woods along the marsh {217} behind the fort, and take up a position on a hill to the far side of Louisburg, creating an enormous bonfire with the French tar and ships' tackling stored here. The result of this harmless maneuver was simply ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,—a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour! Let the ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... ancient and modern learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the prospect; but when I view you in another light, and represent you awkward, ungraceful, ill-bred, with vulgar air and manners, shambling toward me with inattention and DISTRACTIONS, I shall not pretend to describe to you what I feel; but will do as a skillful painter did formerly—draw a veil before ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who now found how the wind set, with an accent of exceeding contempt, at the doubt expressed—"have I heard, quo'she!!!" and as he spoke he changed his shambling, skulking, dodging pace into a manly and authoritative step, readjusted his cocked hat, and suffered his brow to emerge from under it in all the pride of aristocracy, like the sun ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... you find a bear, be he a grizzly, black, or polar, basking in the tropical sun, or freezing upon the ice-floe, he will still be the same droll old chap, shuffling and shambling, sniffing and inquiring with his keen nose. If he be the smaller black or brown bear, he will often be found in the company of man, conducting himself with dignity, and generally showing much good behavior for ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... He is lazy and indifferent; he knows not how to sit nor how to stand, and he falls asleep over his plate at dinner; and since this great, shambling fellow has appeared here, you have grown ten years older, my love. Besides, he drinks, I assure you that ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... The shambling mountaineer stretched himself to his lean length of six feet two, and wagged an incredulous head. Out of pale eyes he studied the man before him until the newcomer from "down-below" felt that, in ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... without guard, went off together, Robin driving his shambling horse and rickety cart beside the ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... Shambling awkwardly forward, simulating all the uncouthness possible, I retained my wits sufficiently to note our surroundings—the long, narrow passage, scarcely exceeding a yard in width, with numerous doors opening on either side. Several of these stood ajar, and I perceived berths within, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... and apparently of the same height and shambling manner, whom she had seen in Nicko's garden, worried her quite as much—indeed, worried her even more than the sight of the mysterious creature the ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... dark, sombre day, with a steady downpour of rain. Only a dim light pervaded the courtroom, and the spectators caught a very indistinct view of the prisoner when the guards brought him in. But his heavy, shambling walk, the manner in which he dropped into his seat, and his passive, stupid appearance were not at all prepossessing. Several times his advocate—one of Mon. Danval's assistants—spoke to him, but he simply shook ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... the stairs—a shambling step. Bet knew it. She stood up, and when her father entered the room, confronted him ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... this Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed in a book, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... lay a wreath on murdered LINCOLN'S bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... of the mouth; to say nothing about rusty hair protruding through the holes of a brown hat, not made for the wearer—long, sinewy arms, all of one thickness, terminating in huge, hairy, horny hands, chiefly knuckles and nails—a shambling gait, notwithstanding that his legs are finely proportioned, as if the night prowler were cautious not to be heard by the sleeping house, nor to awaken—so noiseless his stealthy advances—the unchained mastiff in ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... shambling bear was right in the mouth of the cave. He gave a roar that seemed to shake ...
— Crusoes of the Frozen North • Gordon Stables
... brought to the table and opened. A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment. Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an outcast of ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... we design to return by the west road, that he will watch our motions, and endeavour to pay his respects to us at Dumfries. — Accordingly he took his leave of us at a place half way betwixt Morpeth and Alnwick, and pranced away in great state, mounted on a tall, meagre, raw-boned, shambling grey gelding, without e'er a tooth in his head, the very counter-part of the rider; and, indeed, the appearance of the two was so picturesque, that I would give twenty guineas to have them tolerably ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... interesting, and once more emerging, bent his steps in the direction of the harbour-road. Just before getting to the point where the pavement ceased and the houses isolated themselves, he overtook a shambling, stooping, unshaven man, who at first sight appeared like a professional tramp, his shoulders having a perceptible greasiness as they passed under the gaslight. Each pedestrian momentarily turned and regarded the other, and ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... had space to quote a particularly fine passage—you will find it on pp. 72-74—in which Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through the dust and brushing the dew off English ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... yards ahead of him was a tall, gaunt Virginian, clad in butternut-colored jeans of queer cut and pattern, and a great bell-crowned hat of rough, gray beaver. Though his gait was shambling and his huge splay feet rose and fell in the most awkward way, he went over the ground with a swiftness that made it rather doubtful whether Jake was gaining on him at all. But the latter was encouraged by the sings ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... the lower regions—quick, shambling footsteps pattered on the stone corridor outside—the door opened suddenly—and a tall lean yellow old man, sharp as to his eyes, shrewd as to his lips, fussily restless as to all his movements, entered the room, with two huge Labrador dogs at his heels, and took ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... Monte di Trinita, which may be taken to be the central points of English or American Rome. Yet you must have passed by the Bocca della Verita on your way to your drive on the Via Appia and the tomb of Caecilia Metella. Do you not remember a large, shambling, unkempt-looking open space, a sort of cross in appearance between the piazza of a city and a farmyard, a little after passing the remains of the Teatro di Marcello, the grand old arches of which are now, in the whirligig of Time's revenges, turned into blacksmiths' ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double debt to pay—kitchen ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... to find themselves confronted with an absolute endorsement of the truth of Lennie's statements. A stranger of about fourteen was walking towards them, or perhaps "shambling" would be a better description of her method of progress. She stooped badly, swung her arms in an awkward fashion, and shuffled her feet along the grass; her eyes were vacant, her chin was retreating, and her mouth was set in a foolish smile. For a full ghastly minute ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... too early to wait upon Mrs. Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill, entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. Other guests were harboured by that hospitable sward, shambling, downcast lice of the town. These, having shuffled thither, dropped, huddled and slept. His way was not theirs: to him the open space was his domain. He ranged the streets, one saw, as if they had been the South Downs, with the long stride and ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... pedagogue, for such his dress bespoke him. A long, lean, shambling, stooping figure was surmounted by a head thatched with lank, black hair somewhat inclining to grey. His features had the cast of habitual authority, which I suppose Dionysius carried with him from the throne to the schoolmaster's ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... sidewalk strolled a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... winter's day, a loafer applied for a pair of shoes. He had on an old, shambling pair, out at both toes. The old Wine-Prince was sitting with a pair of slippers on, and had his own ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... is the institution upon which the commerce of the desert depends. A more awkward, ungainly beast can hardly be imagined—a shambling collection of humps, bumps, knobs, protruding joints, and sprawling legs seemingly attached to a head and neck in the near foreground. But that shambling gait will carry a load three times as heavy as the stoutest pack mule can bear, and it will ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... to look after him, so uncouth was his shambling figure. Several officers followed him with their eyes, to see that he did not beg ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... light, and Jack caught a clearer view of the man. What he saw sent a shiver through him. A great change had come over his friend. His untidy dress,—always so neat and well kept; his haggard eyes and shambling, unsteady walk, so different from his springy, debonair manner, all showed that he had been and still was under some terrible mental strain. That he had not been drinking was evident from his utterance and gait. This last discovery when his condition was considered, disturbed ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye must needs come to the world's end at this time o' night?' exclaimed a voice at this instant; and, turning their heads, they saw a rickety individual shambling round from the back door with a horn lantern ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... the soldier's key turn in the lock, but soon he heard it and his heart pumped. He glanced at White, but the gray figure, flattened against the wall, never moved. The door swung open and the soldier, merely a shambling peon, bearing the tray, entered. Behind him according to custom came the second man who stood in the doorway, leaning upon his musket. But he stood there only an instant. A pair of long, powerful arms which must have seemed to him at that moment like the antennae ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... in on the top of the sack, and the man bent his energies to starting his old horse once more on his shambling trot. ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... sink helplessly. The bear had come from the west right up to the Fram, had stopped and inspected the work that was going on, had then retreated a little, made a considerable detour, and set off eastward at its easy, shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship. It had rummaged about in every hole and corner where there seemed to be any chance of finding food, and had rooted in the snow after anything the dogs had left, or whatever else it might be. It ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... is that he shall hate the prowling great paws of the Plebs, whilst Plebs by inherent nature goes mad at the sight of Bully's jowl. "Drop it!" cries Plebs. "Hands off!" growls Bully. It is hands against head, the shambling, servile body in a rage of insurrection at last against ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... Oh, the shambling sea is a sexton old, And well his work is done; With an equal grave for lord and knave, He ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... his friend Jack Bunsby,[141] with a head too ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger; good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the starched Dombey household so ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and that I could count upon his engrossing the attention of my offspring for a considerable period. Accordingly, I was surprised some five minutes later to observe the fisherman (who wore no skates) shambling across the pond toward the shore. Glancing from him to his late station I perceived a little group of skaters gathered around my son and heir, who was dabbling with a stick in the abandoned hole. They appeared to be diverted by something and ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... truth of the shocking rumour which had reached her about Edith's projected visit, the confirmation of which was the sole object of her colloquy, wagged her way out of the shop again successfully, and was duly assisted by the page-boy into her shambling little ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... tranquil, echoing courts into the Sabbath stillness of the Strand. An occasional halt at a shop-window was sufficient to assure him that the watcher of the Temple was still on his heels. The man, he was interested to see, played his part very unobtrusively, shambling along in nonchalant fashion, mostly hugging the sides of the houses, ready to dart out of sight into a doorway or down a side turning, should he by any mischance arrive too close on the heels of ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... but she made haste to call Cyrus, who came shambling along the hall from the cabin. The parlor was dark, for though it was a day of sunshine and merry May wind, Gussie kept the shutters bowed—but Cyrus could see the pale intensity of his visitor's face. There was a moment's silence, broken by a ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... base for his supper; and, at the same time darting his fork into the dish, as if stabbing with his lance; cook, you cook! —sail this way, cook! the old black, not in any very high glee at having been previously routed from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, assisting his step with his tongs, which, after a clumsy fashion, ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... shrugged. "The difficulty is that he won't name his price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something, across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you! Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even offered to let me take my stuff ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... accordingly blessed his people in a shambling manner, not at all to his own satisfaction, and had walked back to his palace with his mind very doubtful as to what he would say to his chaplain on the subject. He did not remain long in doubt. He had hardly doffed his lawn when the partner of all his toils entered his study ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to me of Ned Brooke's face as I had seen it the day before at the gate, coupled with the remembrance of seeing him walking down the lane at a quick pace, so unlike his usual shambling gait, while I ran through ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... not strike him that poverty and crime are near neighbours; that the circumstances which make the honest man poor, make the lazy man a thief. Leonard was too young to be suspicious. He scarcely saw a shambling poorly-dressed rather wasted man whom he passed, and who afterwards stumbled along a very little way behind him. Nor did he specially notice two rather well-dressed but coarse-looking men who kept just ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... central points of English or American Rome. Yet you must have passed by the Bocca della Verita on your way to your drive on the Via Appia and the tomb of Caecilia Metella. Do you not remember a large, shambling, unkempt-looking open space, a sort of cross in appearance between the piazza of a city and a farmyard, a little after passing the remains of the Teatro di Marcello, the grand old arches of which are now, in the whirligig of Time's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... took that for a signal—or perhaps he made another that we did not see—the six undoubted gipsies got up and left the room, shambling out in single file with the awkward gait they share in common ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... him that poverty and crime are near neighbours; that the circumstances which make the honest man poor, make the lazy man a thief. Leonard was too young to be suspicious. He scarcely saw a shambling poorly-dressed rather wasted man whom he passed, and who afterwards stumbled along a very little way behind him. Nor did he specially notice two rather well-dressed but coarse-looking men who ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... a shambling sort of gait, half walk, half amble, but manage to get over the ground very quickly, and for such cumbersome animals are very nimble-footed. It is almost ludicrous to see the huge beasts picking their way along a narrow "bund" or crossing some ditch by a bridge of ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... his cap and sauntered on, turning once or twice to look at his lordship and a queer lop-sided figure shambling rapidly towards him. ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... Upon a pleasant day, And four grey wolves came shambling, And stopped to see it play In the sun. Said the lamb, "Perhaps I may Charm these creatures with my play, And they'll let me go away, When ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... Tom, and as he came up, grinning and shambling, she indicated to him her pleasure that he should row her upon the river. The idea of being alone in a small boat for perhaps fifteen minutes with the belle of Newville, and the object of his own secret and distant adoration, ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... Paul found himself in a brief space of time standing hand in hand with Master Tonks, and looking him squarely in the eye. The fist Paul held in his own was like a mason's mallet, but its owner was of a clumsy and shambling build. Paul silently breathed the one word 'tactics,' and he and his opponent fell back from each other. He thought Master Tonk's attitude curiously awkward, but he had no guess as to what lay behind it. He sparred for an opening. It ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... merchandise are slung on rough pack-saddles, made of coarse sacking. Shambling along with knees bent together, sores on every joint, and frequently an eye knocked out, the poor pony's back gets cruelly galled; when the bazaar is reached, he is hobbled as tightly as possible, the coarse ropes cutting ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... of miles, perhaps, I walked thoughtfully, and I do not believe I once thought of the bear shambling silently behind me. I had been dreaming a day-dream—not building a castle in the air, for I had seen before me a castle already built. I had simply been dreaming myself into it, into its life, into its possessions, into the ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... novice, who was an ill-looking, one-sided, shambling lad, with sunken eyes set close together in his head—'if the society would burn his house down—for he's not insured—or beat him as he comes home from his club at night, or help me to carry off his daughter, and marry her ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... grasped the fact that it was true; his heart blazed in his bosom; he threw back his head and, had his nose been larger, he would have sniffed the breeze like a warhorse. He advanced upon her in a quick, shambling slouch. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. "Tedham!" ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... tables occupied by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was, who drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps riding along in their jaunty turn-outs used to chaff the good deacon on the character of his steed, and satirically challenge him to a brush. The ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... walked with a rather shambling but self-important gait to the table next mine, carefully placed his manuscript upon a chair, and sat down upon it. He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... Knockowen was a poor shambling sort of house. Strangers wondered why Maurice Gorman, who owned Kilgorman as well, chose to live in this place instead of the fine mansion near the lough mouth. But to the country people this was no mystery. Kilgorman had an evil name, and for twelve years, since its late master died, had ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... to cross the station by the under-ground passage and wait twenty minutes for a squalid, shambling local train which took them to Shawport, at the foot ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... verified a moment later by the appearance of three shambling figures in the lighted zone. The bear is noted for his curiosity, and the boys realized, too, that the feast of fish must have ...
— Boy Scouts in Northern Wilds • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... old man, who seemed to be counting the hours till bed-time, and she a tailored, rather overfed figure, with a freshly varnished face and unhealthy, bright, bold eyes, walking slightly ahead of her shambling companion, looking nervously about her in search of some indefinite thing that was gone from ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... fascinating young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry—so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude—fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks—doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... visit to Hartford, shortly afterward, Bok was just turning into Forrest Street when a little old woman came shambling along toward him, unconscious, apparently, of people or surroundings. In her hand she carried a small tree-switch. Bok did not notice her until just as he had passed her he heard her calling to him: "Young man, young man." Bok retraced his ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... quite still a long time, and the first sound he heard was of slow and cautious footsteps. He listened to them attentively and he wondered. A warrior surely would not come walking in a manner that soon became shambling. Putting his ear to the earth he heard a soft and uncertain crush, crush, and then, raising his head a little, he traced a dark, ambiguous figure. But he knew it, nevertheless, by the two red eyes blinking in doubt and dismay. It was a black bear, doubtless the ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to the shambling old man who came forward again. And as he bent over the tiny scrap of paper, as though endeavoring to make out what the writing on it meant, every sound ceased until the silence of death seemed to hover over ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne
... upon which the commerce of the desert depends. A more awkward, ungainly beast can hardly be imagined—a shambling collection of humps, bumps, knobs, protruding joints, and sprawling legs seemingly attached to a head and neck in the near foreground. But that shambling gait will carry a load three times as heavy as the stoutest pack mule can bear, and it will carry ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... But if Georgiana, before her guest arrived, had thought the old house shabby, she felt it now to be positively shambling. She struggled mightily against this attitude of mind, knowing that it was unworthy of her, but, as she led this wonderful, winsome creature, whom she knew to be accustomed only to the softnesses of life, up over the worn stair carpeting to the room she had prepared for her, she was wondering how ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... them go, side by side, Jude shambling as usual, Joyce stepping as if hastening to ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... dwarf of hideous appearance, who consumed hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, for his breakfast; ate his prawns with their heads and their tails on, drank scalding hot tea, and performed so many horrifying acts that one almost doubted that he was human; and by Christopher Nubbles, a shock-headed, shambling, awkward, devoted lad, the only element of cheerfulness that ever came into her life. In this book appear Richard Swiveller and his Marchioness, Sampson and Sarah Brass and Mrs. Jarley, who to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... easily discouraged, and that I could count upon his engrossing the attention of my offspring for a considerable period. Accordingly, I was surprised some five minutes later to observe the fisherman (who wore no skates) shambling across the pond toward the shore. Glancing from him to his late station I perceived a little group of skaters gathered around my son and heir, who was dabbling with a stick in the abandoned hole. They appeared to be diverted by something and one of them, my friend Harry ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... her head; but she made haste to call Cyrus, who came shambling along the hall from the cabin. The parlor was dark, for though it was a day of sunshine and merry May wind, Gussie kept the shutters bowed—but Cyrus could see the pale intensity of his visitor's face. There was a moment's silence, broken by a ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... were united by strong ties of common interest, nevertheless their diverse characteristics and traits produced trouble at times. Pedro was dull, honorable, and frank; Juan was hawk-eyed and double-faced. Pedro had so large a body and so awkward and shambling a gait, that Juan could not help laughing at him and saying sarcastic things to him. Juan ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... furtively, in a sort of terror, the tall figure as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the house. The three moved on to the wing containing Ume's chamber, and the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this last stress," heard old Kano falter, "Farewell, ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... were gray old farm- houses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and like freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... The others departed or lay down to sleep on the ground. The fire slackened, and only now and then a shell came with its diabolical scream like a dragon into the town. All at last was quiet, when there came shambling to me an odd figure. There had been some slight attempt by him to look like a soldier—he had a feather in his hat—but he carried his rifle as if after deer or raccoons, and as if he were used ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... Phosphate then lost its charm upon the proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to 'eat all his economies,' and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure. It was getting dusk when we parted. My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work. He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... he wishes to (no one ever "sent" a Grind to college). He has a sallow skin, a watery eye, a shambling gait, but he has the facts. His clothes are outgrown, his coat shiny, his linen a dull ecru, his hands clammy. He reads a book as he walks, and when he bumps into you, he always exculpates himself ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the bright-plumaged bird when flying about. On horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, grim-visaged, hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his horse were all one, while on foot he was the most shambling, scambling, crooked-going crab that ever was seen. He was a complete mash of a man. He had been scalped by the branch of a tree, his nose knocked into a thing like a button by the kick of a horse, his teeth sent down his throat by a fall, his collar-bone fractured, his left leg broken and his ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... picking," said Sir Geoffrey, "on the bones of the old estate; and Dame Margaret and I will be content with the less, that you young folks may have your share of it. I am turned frugal already, Julian. You see what a north-country shambling bit of a Galloway nag I ride upon—a different beast, I wot, from my own old Black Hastings, who had but one fault, and that was his wish to turn down ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... dockyards;—ugly in face; for he had one wall-eye, and was so far under-jawed as to prove that a bull-dog had had something to do with his creation;—ugly in shape; for although larger than a pointer, and strongly built, he was coarse and shambling in his make, with his fore legs bowed out. His ears and tail had never been docked which was a pity as the more you curtailed his proportions the better looking the cur would have been. But his ears, although not cut, were torn to ribbons by the various encounters with ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... Vladimir Turenski, a shambling not-too-bright deaf mute, had made his fully documented ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... to view— Of wanton waste and reckless gambling, What darker paths shall he pursue With sacrilegious step and shambling? What coarse defiance, haply, hurl At lights beyond his comprehension— An attitudinising churl ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... small and shambling German, whose head had a long white cap upon it, rendering more filthy his dull complexion, and upon whose feet the chains clanked as he slowly advanced, preceded by two officers, flanked by a Lutheran clergyman, and followed, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... in the ring from the audience in the sixpenny seats. I wish I had space to quote a particularly fine passage—you will find it on pp. 72-74—in which Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through the dust and brushing the ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the faint sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside. The door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by the help of a crutch, his eyes were ...
— The Red Room • H. G. Wells
... began to come like the first reformed platoon of an army after fleeing from disaster. The leader of the platoon was a small boy. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and he looked as if he were sorely afraid. After him came half a dozen men with shambling gait. One was an Irishman, two were English, one was a German and one a colored man. Two of them carried pickaxes in their hands, which they had been using to clear away ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... judges put their heads together and whispered and planned and discussed. Then they brought forth this sufficiently shambling conclusion—but it was the best they could do, in so close a place: they said the Pope was so far away; and it was not necessary to go to him anyway, because the present judges had sufficient power and authority to deal with the present case, ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... may rouse his son yet the more, planting might in his heart, to call an assembly of the long-haired Achaeans and speak out to all the wooers who slaughter continually the sheep of his thronging flocks, and his kine with trailing feet and shambling gait. And I will guide him to Sparta and to sandy Pylos to seek tidings of his dear father's return, if peradventure he may hear thereof and that so he may be had in good ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... Meffia's proximity, by her lackadaisical manner, by her shambling gait, by her sleep-walking attitude, most of all by the peculiar thin, sour odor which Meffia exhaled. At the sight of Meffia's elaborately disagreeable demeanor of isolation, all Brinnaria's natural self began to boil in ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... eleven. It is reported, and is probably true, that the whole Boer force has surrendered. If so we have missed little or nothing. About twenty prisoners came in in the morning, quaint, rough people, shambling along on diminutive ponies. In the afternoon Williams went foraging for the officers, and I visited our Scotch friends, the donors of the cabbage, who were very kind, and asked me in. The married son had just come in from Basutoland, where he had ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... and the tall, shambling white were amiably straying up and down the narrow borders of the road, ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... human habitation in the middle of a stretch of flat and ragged country that reminded her a little of parts of Surrey. The station was just a shed on a foundation of planks which lay flush with the rails. From this shed, as the train clanked in, there emerged a tall, shambling man in a weather-beaten overcoat. He had a clean-shaven, wrinkled face, and he looked doubtfully at Jill with small eyes. Something in his expression reminded Jill of her father, as a bad caricature of a public man will recall the ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... low spirits. I had been able to eat nothing during the preceding day. I lay there half asleep, half awake, for, I suppose, a long time, hearing the window rattle sometimes when the cannon was noisy and feeling under the jerky reflections on the wall as though I were in an old shambling cab driving along a dark road, I thought a good deal about that talk with Semyonov that I had. What a strange man! But then I do not understand him at all. I don't think I understand any Russian, such a mixture of hardness and softness as they are, kind and then ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... witches, that made Detroit feared by the early settlers, none were more dreaded than the Nain Rouge (Red Dwarf), or Demon of the Strait, for it appeared only when there was to be trouble. In that it delighted. It was a shambling, red-faced creature, with a cold, glittering eye and teeth protruding from a grinning mouth. Cadillac, founder of Detroit, having struck at it, presently lost his seigniory and his fortunes. It was seen scampering along the shore on the night before the attack on Bloody ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... heard in the hall, and a little peaky man, with his slippers very much down at the heels, came shambling into the room. Mr. McIntyre, sen., was pale and furtive-looking, with a thin straggling red beard shot with grey, and a sunken downcast face. Ill-fortune and ill-health had both left their marks upon him. Ten years before he had been one ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... advanced with rifles poised, ready to give the coup de grce to his bearship; when, with a thundering growl, another "grizzly" came shambling swiftly out from the bushes, and made directly for Franois. Before the party recovered from their surprise at this new appearance on the scene, the brute reared up and seized Franois by the leg, which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... gaining, and listen to the pitiful tale of lost health and vitality he will tell you. Mark well the wasted hand, the putty-like skin, the black-ringed, lack-lustre eyes, the heavy lip, the labored breath—read the consequences of his sin and crime in his shame-faced way, his shambling gait, his nerveless hands, his fluttering heart, his weakened muscles, and his tottering memory ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... days to social amenities other than the out-hanging latch-string and the general pot, he had succeeded to his own satisfaction as a knight of the carpet. Quick to take a cue, he circulated with an aplomb which his striking garments and long shambling gait only heightened, and talked choppy and disconnected fragments with whomsoever he ran up against. The Miss Mortimer, who spoke Parisian French, took him aback with her symbolists; but he evened matters up with a goodly measure of the bastard lingo of the Canadian voyageurs, and left ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... stone demijohn was almost the only tangible reminder there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough to clear the place of its debt—the biggest thing by far in his heritage. Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood—and Denny's acres were mostly rocks. Old Denny would have ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... unbelieving, and impious scorner was a man of shreds and patches, a pot-valiant tailor, whose ungartered hosen, loose knee-strings, and thin shambling legs, sufficiently betokened the sedentary nature of his avocations. "I wonder the parson hasn't gi'en her a lift wi' Pharaoh and his host ere this," ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... jealousy: only a solemn sense that Mr. Wilson had been greatly favored. Brad's wife sewed together a dark slate-colored cambric, for the elephant's hide, and wet and wrinkled it, as her husband bade her, for the shambling shoulders and flanks. It was she who made the ears, from a pattern cunningly conceived; and she stuffed the legs with fine shavings brought from the planing-mill at Sudleigh. Then there came an intoxicating day when the trunk took shape, the glass-bottle eyes were inserted, and Brad sprung ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... gentle movement of my hand directed my people to follow me, and I made a sudden rush forward at full speed. Off went the herd, shambling along at a tremendous pace, whisking their long tails above their hind quarters, and, taking exactly the direction I had anticipated, they offered me a shoulder shot at a little within two hundred yards' distance. Unfortunately, I fell into a deep ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... should think of a race that, with care and attention, might be brought to considerable perfection; but they are never properly broken for the saddle. The Americans who have spoken to me about riding say that they do not like a horse to have what we consider proper paces, but prefer a shambling sort of half-trot, half-canter, which they judiciously call a rack, and which is the ugliest pace to behold, and the most difficult to endure, possible. They never use a curb, but ride their horses upon the snaffle entirely, dragging ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... one way by hate and one by love, Drain'd of her force, again she sat, and spake To Tristram, as he knelt before her, saying, "O hunter, and O blower of the horn, Harper, and thou hast been a rover too, For, ere I mated with my shambling king, Ye twain had fallen out about the bride Of one—his name is out of me—the prize, If prize she were—(what marvel—she could see)— Thine, friend; and ever since my craven seeks To wreck thee ...
— The Last Tournament • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... night, and the dawn found him still moving, a mere automaton of a man, haggard and shambling, no longer willing his progress, but somehow incredibly advancing. He found water and drank it, fell, got up, and still, right foot, left foot, he went on. Some time during that advance he had found a trail, and he kept to it automatically. He ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... its narrow, uneven sidewalk, for he swung without hesitation into the gloom and, with hands hooked behind his back, his stick held, as was his custom, close to his armpit, made his way past its shambling hovels and warehouses. Now and then he would pause, following with his eyes the curve of the great steel highway, carried on the stone shoulders of successive arches, the sweep of its lines marked ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... singular figure appeared at the doorway. It was that of a very old man, with long white hair, which escaped from beneath the eaves of an exceedingly high-peaked hat. He stooped considerably, and moved along with a shambling gait. I could not see much of his face, which, as the landlady stood behind him with the lamp, was consequently in deep shadow. I could observe, however, that his eyes sparkled like those of a ferret. He advanced to the foot of the bed, in which I was still lying, ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... helplessly. The bear had come from the west right up to the Fram, had stopped and inspected the work that was going on, had then retreated a little, made a considerable detour, and set off eastward at its easy, shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship. It had rummaged about in every hole and corner where there seemed to be any chance of finding food, and had rooted in the snow after anything the dogs had ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... what is fittest for him is fit for the chattering monkey, is too absurd to give us pause. And yet how does Mr. Darwin know that the monkey has been climbing up, all these hundred thousand or million years, into man, as one of the congenital freaks of nature, and not man shambling down into the monkey as a reverse congenital freak. Children have sometimes been born with a singular resemblance to the ape family, but no ape has ever, to Mr. Darwin's knowledge, produced issue more manlike than itself. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Jean Ramel had been conveyed to the Pantheon in the wretched paupers' hearse, which conveys them to the common grave at the shambling trot of some thin and ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... Strength we fear and yet despise; Savage,—whose relentless tusks Are content with acorn husks; Robber,—whose exploits ne'er soared O'er the bee's or squirrel's hoard; Whiskered chin and feeble nose, Claws of steel on baby toes,— Here, in solitude and shade, Shambling, shuffling plantigrade, Be ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... stood looking at him. Good-for-nothing was written in every line of the shiftless, shambling figure, and pictured in every rag of the fluttering raiment, and yet—the fellow really was hungry,—and again came the thought of that fifteen cents. The young man was hungry himself; had been hungry many a time in the past, and downright, gnawing, helpless hunger is a great leveler of mankind; ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... A shambling, loose-jointed giant rolled out of one of the tents, yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Then he sighted the strange canoe and was wide awake ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... and descended them. He counted fifteen. He emerged into a timbered underground passage, well lit with lamps, filled with what seemed to be mercury vapor. Behind him walked his guard: behind the guard he heard Luke Evans shambling. Both chains were clinking, and again Dick's fury almost ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... time, the horsemen could not perceive that they were gaining on the camelopards trotting before them in long shambling strides. They were not losing ground, however, and this inspired ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... step to the beating of a drum they marched to their prayer hall. Kansas Shorty, supported in his unsteady gait by two brethren of the Army, walked in the midst of the procession, while Joe kept some distance in the rear, never permitting his eyes to stray off the shambling form of the man who held the key to the riddle that had so effectively spoiled ...
— The Trail of the Tramp • A-No. 1 (AKA Leon Ray Livingston)
... hitch, jolt; jog, joggle, jostle, buffet, hustle, disturb, stir, shake up, churn, jounce, wallop, whip, vellicate[obs3]. Adj. shaking &c. v.; agitated tremulous; desultory, subsultory|; saltatoric[obs3]; quasative[obs3]; shambling; giddy-paced, saltatory[obs3], convulsive, unquiet, restless, all of a twitter. Adv. by fits and starts; subsultorily| &c. adj[obs3].; per saltum[Lat]; hop skip and jump; in convulsions, in fits. Phr. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... fisherman who had not run for thirty years came along the edge of the quay at a shambling trot, with a coil of rope over his arm. John Blundell saw him and, mindful of the farmer's warning about kissing of fingers, etc., raised his disengaged arm and took that frenzied gentleman below the surface again. By the time they came up he was very glad for his own ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... mocked my swine-herd, who for a year and a half wore out the county court's chains. Ever since he walks with a shambling step, as if one leg was always trying to avoid knocking the other with the chain. Now we can both laugh at ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... the Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone could see any promise in the shambling youngster. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... After all, there was nothing mean and cunning about them. The eyes were wild, and perhaps fierce, but they were honest and frank still. The clothes were much worn and torn, but the body they covered was strong and shapely. There was nothing weak or shambling in those six feet ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... moment that she set eyes upon him, shambling awkwardly into the yard at her husband's heels, Jabe Smith's wife was inhospitable toward the ungainly youngling of the wild. She declared that he would take all the milk. And he did. For the next two months she was unable ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... reply. The hoofs ahead seemed to quicken into a shambling trot, that was all. And after a little he heard them ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... clumsy in their weakness and haste. They were galloping skeletons draped in mangy hide, and they out-distanced the boys who herded them. But this was only for a time. Then they fell back to a walk, a quick, eager, shambling, sore-footed walk; and they no longer were lured aside by the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... see whether the Israelite could be weaned from his traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... is that he won't name his price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something, across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you! Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even offered to ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... in the lower regions—quick, shambling footsteps pattered on the stone corridor outside—the door opened suddenly—and a tall lean yellow old man, sharp as to his eyes, shrewd as to his lips, fussily restless as to all his movements, entered the room, with two huge Labrador dogs at his heels, and took his seat in a violent hurry. ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... the Amenhotep Dicky did not speak, but once he turned round to look after the outcast, who was shambling along the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... hidden facts of structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... any very high glee at having been previously roused from his warm hammock at a most unseasonable hour, came shambling along from his galley, for, like many old blacks, there was something the matter with his knee-pans, which he did not keep well scoured like his other pans; this old Fleece, as they called him, came shuffling and limping along, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... us away into the suburbs, thereby taking us in a manner off the stones, and otherwise represents in his own proper person, buttons and all, less one of the dapper urchins we are now more particularly referring to, than the shambling hobbledehoy. Even in the unfinished story with which the Author's voluminous writings were closed, there was portrayed an entirely novel specimen, one marked by the most grotesque extravagance, in the shape of that impish malignant, "the Deputy," whose pastime at once and whole ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... strolled a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... and with a knowing look at Rust, and a shambling bow to the girl, he went out, and seated himself on a chair in the hall, having taken the precaution to send his companion to keep an eye on the windows, which were within ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... his leave early in the evening and hurried back to his hotel. As he crossed the street to hail a cab, he thought he saw a short, baggy figure shambling along in the shadow on the other side, looking up at ...
— The Mystery of Mary • Grace Livingston Hill
... supported by so much history should at least be genuine—the history may be all right, but the tooth is a shambling hoax, at best a crude proxy for the molar of Gautama. Intelligent priests of Buddhism must know this, but the millions of common people finding solace in the faith have never heard the truth—and wouldn't believe it if they did. No more ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... the afternoon, shambling along, his eyes glaring, his lips moving wordlessly, and he took up the trail. But it led only to the office of the Silver Queen Development Company, where the scar-faced man doubled at his desk, and, stuffing a cigar into his mouth, chewed ...
— The Cross-Cut • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... was judicial, but I saw his great frame swaying like a shambling ox. I marveled that he could show emotion. My own body ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... direction, trailing upon the ground and bagging about his ankles, so that even with trussed-up skirts he could make little progress. He ran once, but the long gown clogged him so that he slowed down into a shambling walk, and finally plumped ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... stood in such a shambling, bow-legged sort of an attitude that even the politest of the girls smiled; and those who were specially anxious that the Reds should win felt more than ever ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... was very quiet; for at present there was no one in it except the woman and the servant who had been up to my room. The servant was a poor London drudge, who was left in charge by the owners of the house, and who had been forbidden to speak to me. After a while I heard her heavy, shambling footsteps coming slowly up the staircase, and passing my door on her way to the attics above; they sounded louder than usual, and I turned my head round involuntarily. A thin, fine streak of light, ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... upon his shambling conscience? Every instinct of an honest man about me answered, No. As he had done for fifteen years past, so he would do for fifteen years to come. As long as he was comfortable himself, his mother would never get a line out of him. Perhaps his voice recalled hers, but I almost fancied ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... moment, Oswald," said the Earl. And then Lord Brentford did make something of a shambling speech, in which he expressed a hope that they two might for the future live together on friendly terms, forgetting the past. He ought to have been prepared for the occasion, and the speech was poor and shambling. But I think that it was more useful than it might have ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... banker was not of a build to hurry even to a fire. Before they had gone far they perceived another man coming across the Dunes towards The Hague. As he approached, Cornish recognized the man known as Uncle Ben. He was shambling along on unsteady legs, and carried his earthly belongings in a canvas sack of doubtful cleanliness. The recognition was apparently mutual; for Uncle Ben deviated from his path to come and ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... though she was not attracted either by the voice, nor by the lad's shambling, uncivil manner,—"come in, and I will get you ...
— Hildegarde's Holiday - a story for girls • Laura E. Richards
... Green, and the towering front of the Cathedral itself. He was, for a moment, a kind of presiding deity over all this. He loved it and believed in it and trusted it exactly as though it had been the work of his own hands. Halfway towards the Arden Gate he overtook poor old shambling Canon Morphew, who really ought, in the Archdeacon's opinion, to have died long ago. However, as he hadn't died the Archdeacon felt kindly towards him, and he had, when he talked to the old man, a sense of beneficence and charity very warming to ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... surrounding forest even yet held its ancient creatures— the swift and graceful deer, the soft-footed panther, the shambling black bear, the wild hog, the wolf, all manner of furred creatures, great store of noble wild fowl—all these thriving after the fecund fashion of this brooding land. It was a kingdom, this wild world, a realm in the wilderness; ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... and cloaks, and housings, and the stir Of jewelled bridle and of golden spur. And lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country towns through which ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... He went off, shambling along with his face turned toward the sky and his feet taking care of themselves. ...
— The Motor Girls On Cedar Lake - The Hermit of Fern Island • Margaret Penrose
... in this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half- kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward to have coffee and some ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... himself and sniffed angrily. A wide gang plank was now being lowered from the boat, and as it touched the bank the boy stepped quickly aboard, followed by the wet, shambling Bear. ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of simple and exquisite melody—the lazy vivacity and impulsive inconsequence of style—the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of absolute ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... I saw that it had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... James, and all good royal folks had always done; and lo! he must lose his head for it. His was altogether a more gentlemanly and respectable performance than that of Henry, not wanting in a sort of ideal magnificence, which his brutal predecessor, or even his shambling old father never dreamed of. But so it is; it is not always on those who are sinners above all men that the tower of Siloam falls, but only on those who happen to be under it when its time comes. So I intend to cherish a little partiality for gentlemanly, magnificent Charles I.; and certainly ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... in broad-banded harness, soft with oil and glittering with brasses, was shambling indolently down the hill, resisting her own momentum by the diagonal motion the old man had likened to a dog's sidewise trot. The looped trace-chains were jingling a merry dithyramb, her head was nodding, her tail swaying, and Seffy, propped by his elbow on her broad back, one leg swung between ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume II. (of X.) • Various
... This shambling, scrubby looking man, with the clear blue eyes, was now the idol of the people. Lincoln too saw his genius as a leader, and willingly yielding to the popular demand made him commander-in-chief of all the ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... by the door. They now advanced. One was gaunt and haggard, his face disfigured by a great red scar, the other was a shockheaded individual who moved with a shambling gait. Both carried rifles and both ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... hilltop, as the huge gleaming castle came into view from a new angle, revealing its marvellous beauty, he thought with a touch of pity of the shambling figure of the stricken man limping through its halls helpless, lonely, miserable. What strange pranks Fate plays with the mighty as well as the lowly! So frail was the broken body now he did not dare risk a cold by taking ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... bowed his head, and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... finished supper, when we heard a great rumbling, and I knew neighbors Campbell and McEttrick had arrived on their way to town; so I began to prepare supper for them. I hadn't expected a woman, and was surprised when I saw the largest, most ungainly person I have ever met come shambling toward me. ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... back his beard to the fashion that had prevailed twenty years earlier, when he was young and interesting, and once more emerging, bent his steps in the direction of the harbour-road. Just before getting to the point where the pavement ceased and the houses isolated themselves, he overtook a shambling, stooping, unshaven man, who at first sight appeared like a professional tramp, his shoulders having a perceptible greasiness as they passed under the gaslight. Each pedestrian momentarily turned and regarded the other, and the tramp-like gentleman ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... years of age, low of stature, meagre, mean-visaged, muddy-complexioned, and altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion, in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all, coincided, it was that he was inoffensive, but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage, and had considerable facility of speech when any person could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... his shambling, easy-going way, old Jim had drifted into nearly every heart in the camp. His townsmen knew he had once had a good education, for outcroppings thereof jutted from his personality even as his cheek-bones jutted out of ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... 'The murderer!' and he sprang forward to throw himself on the shaking, shambling wretch. Mosk eluded him, but uttered a squeaking cry like the shriek of a hunted hare in the jaws of the greyhound. The next instant the room seemed to swarm with men, and the bishop as in a dream heard the merciless formula of the law pronounced ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... corrugated iron and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... my eyes and made furrows in the sooty mud that covered my face, from having fallen full length down on the burnt earth," writes the dauntless hunter, in relating this story. "I sobbed for breath as I toiled at a shambling trot after them, as nearly done out as could ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... surged a small but excited procession. A lean boy on horseback, without saddle or bridle and guiding the shambling colt he rode by a halter strap, led the van. Behind him, as lean as he, and about seven feet tall, a farmer, whiskered like a cartoon, kept pace easily with the horse. Behind came a roly-poly old lady, her apron strings fluttering in the breeze as she bowled along dragging ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang—I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed—in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, open fields. Waram's few hundred ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... they manage somehow to get through their work in life; but they never feel brisk or buoyant. They never know high health, with its attendant cheerfulness. It is a rare case to find such a combination of muscle and intellect as existed in Christopher North: the commoner type is the shambling Wordsworth, whom even his partial sister thought so mean-looking when she saw him walking with a handsome man. Let it be repeated, most civilized men are physically unsound. For one thing, most educated men are ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... blear-eyed rogue, much the worse for wear and ale, came shambling out at the summons. His listlessness vanished quickly enough, however, at sight of the Knight and his following; and bowing to the ground he asked how he might ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... in a malevolent attempt to utterly disperse and scatter the "Half-way House," which seemed to have wholly lost its way, and strayed into the open, where, dazed and bewildered, unprepared and unprotected, it was exposed to the taunting fury of the blast. A loose, shambling, disjointed, hastily built structure—representing the worst features of Pioneer renaissance—it rattled its loose window-sashes like chattering teeth, banged its ill-hung shutters, and admitted so much of the invading storm, that ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts promised a long, damp crawl ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows wrote!' says Fitzgerald in one of his letters; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... stopped and shambling steps came along the landing as someone slopped along, dragging his slippers into which he had merely thrust his toes. There was a scratching sort of tap at the ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... expression of a fascinated bird. So we stood silent, when the prisoner again began to sneeze from the body of the cart; and at the sound, prompt as a transformation, the driver had whipped up his horses and was shambling off round the corner of the house, and Mr. Fenn, recovering his wits with a gulp, had turned to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... naibours! Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye must needs come to the world's end at this time o' night?' exclaimed a voice at this instant; and, turning their heads, they saw a rickety individual shambling round from the back door with a horn ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... He came at length to a brilliantly-lighted room, where a dark man with an exceedingly high forehead and wonderfully piercing eyes was sitting up in bed. The dark eyes lighted with pleasure as they fell upon Bell's queer, shambling figure and ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"—that apartment ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... alike and apparently of the same height and shambling manner, whom she had seen in Nicko's garden, worried her quite as much—indeed, worried her even more than the sight of the mysterious creature the peasants called ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... another. They "worship it after their fashion," says a third. Have we another case of "the heathen in his blindness"? Only here he "bows down" not to "gods of wood and stone," but to a live thing, uncouth, shambling ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes fixed upon the big bull, ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... about the interest now due to the old farmer. But he was glad that the principal there had yet some time to run. However, the skinny old fellow gave him some trouble by coming after him every day or two on a scraggy old white horse, furnished with a musty old saddle, and goaded into his shambling old paces with a withered old raw hide. All the neighbors said that surely Death himself on the pale horse was after poor China Aster now. And something so it proved; for, ere long, China Aster found himself involved in ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... along the wood-path beyond the Light, heard the shambling steps behind her. She turned and saw Mark. He was tall and lank. He leaned forward from the shoulders loosely, and his face had the patient, dull expression of a faithful, but none too fine ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... we, and what do we mean by Ourselves? When I meet a ragged, shuffling tramp on the road (and I meet a good many of them in my lonely walks) I often find myself asking the question, "How did that shambling vagabond come to his present condition? Did his father turn him out of doors? Did his mother drink? Did he learn nothing but lying and swearing and thieving when he was a child? Was his grandfather hanged for some crime, or was his great-grandfather a ruffian killed in a fight?" And I say to ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... But he was no longer among bog and heather. He was running—shambling now—along a road. The loping pursuit of that nameless, shapeless Something sounded like ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... the bench under the old russet apple-tree by the back door one day, regretting her evil fate, she heard footsteps approaching, and, pushing back her old sun-bonnet, looked up to see a shabby, shambling, oldish man coming around the side of the house and gazing in at the windows, "What ye ...
— McClure's Magazine, March, 1896, Vol. VI., No. 4. • Various
... hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... my three men were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... at first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the three in the cabin were playing cards and Tom was preparing lunch, Jarrow came shambling aft, and without a word went over the side and into the long boat. When Trask went out on deck the captain was pulling slowly for the shore, making a course to land near where Dinshaw was toiling in the broiling sun at his ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously into the wake. As he came nearer, he seemed to me aged and haggard, and I thought ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... came back no reply. The hoofs ahead seemed to quicken into a shambling trot, that was all. And after a little he heard them ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... square of pavement, keeping close to the dark wall and avoiding the streak of light that fell on the flagstones from a window in the opposite house. Seen from that height he was of course fore-shortened and probably looked more shambling and decrepit than he was. He picked his way along with exaggerated care and looked like a silly old cat crossing a wet street. When he reached the gate that led into an alley way between two buildings, he felt ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... coats, dyed hair, servants' feet, and a dozen and one other subjects, quite other than the superphysical, successively occupied my thoughts. Imagine, then, my surprise and the shock I received, when, on glancing at the gravel in front of me, I saw two shadows—two enigmatical shadows. A dog came shambling along the path, showed its teeth, snarled, sprang on one side, and, with bristling hair, fled for its life. I examined the plot of ground behind me; there was nothing that could in any way account for the shadows, nothing like them. Something rubbed against ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... the sound a creature came shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim recognized ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... at a bare table. Another seated at the window, his chair tipped back, his feet on the sill, a pipe between his teeth. Buzz, shambling, suddenly ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... and of short unstressed vowels separated by a liquid consonant, in such words, for instance, as "dissolute," or "amorous." By a variety of small observances, which, when fully stated, make up a formidable code, he mended the shambling gait of the loose dramatic blank verse, and made of it a worthy ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... days of actual warfare were over we had completely forgotten those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... yet held its ancient creatures— the swift and graceful deer, the soft-footed panther, the shambling black bear, the wild hog, the wolf, all manner of furred creatures, great store of noble wild fowl—all these thriving after the fecund fashion of this brooding land. It was a kingdom, this wild world, a realm in the wilderness; a kingdom fit ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... polish the tusks, there was no jealousy: only a solemn sense that Mr. Wilson had been greatly favored. Brad's wife sewed together a dark slate-colored cambric, for the elephant's hide, and wet and wrinkled it, as her husband bade her, for the shambling shoulders and flanks. It was she who made the ears, from a pattern cunningly conceived; and she stuffed the legs with fine shavings brought from the planing-mill at Sudleigh. Then there came an intoxicating day when the trunk took ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... room that moment to lay the luncheon, she proposed a turn in the garden, and fetched Mr. Trinder's hat herself, and guided him to a side-walk, where they could not be seen from the drawing-room windows. Nan followed them, and tried to keep step with Mr. Trinder's shambling footsteps, as he walked between the girls with a hot perplexed face, and still ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... descending the hill, he got on his horse and swam the stream. It carried him below, but he was waiting for them when they reached the level. He was tall, shambling, and bony, and roved over them with a pleasant, ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... ascertaining their attention to his interests. Ware was one of his most trusted lieutenants, however, and everything that he had ever seen or heard satisfied him of the man's faithfulness. So he made haste to relieve him from embarrassment, for the tall, awkward, shambling fellow ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... street, certain forms he did meet, But scarce might behold their faces; From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox, And shambling were their paces! ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... torn down to give place to the new structure. When a boy I had often been in the old shop, and have heard the founder, Bishop Allen, preach in the wooden building. He was much reverenced. I remember his appearance, and his feeble, shambling gait as he approached the close of an ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... hour, in the heat of the day or the cool of the evening, the giant Mexican strode on by the side of the two horsemen, sometimes trotting like a dog, more often walking with a shambling, wide-reaching step, tireless as any wild animal. His feet, seamed and parched into the semblance rather of horn than of flesh and bone, were quite bare, though now it was a time of year when the nights at least were very cool and when freezing weather might ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... honest pedagogue, for such his dress bespoke him. A long, lean, shambling, stooping figure was surmounted by a head thatched with lank, black hair somewhat inclining to grey. His features had the cast of habitual authority, which I suppose Dionysius carried with him from the ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... did not fly, but sat gravely on the log in front of Uncle Jim's hotel, and waited for the creaking, stage, white with far-gathered dust, to climb the last pitch of the road up from the arroyo and come on with the shambling trot of a pair of tired mules for the final nourish at the end of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... along the quay in silence, and had nearly reached the end of it, when the figure of a man turned the corner of the houses and advanced at a shambling trot ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... the little cavalcade, with Cricket driving, because she was the smallest, and could perch up on the others' knees, while old Billy, all beam, jogged after, making almost as good time, with his long legs and shambling gait, as ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... mumbled the captain, meekly shambling toward the table, and, in his anxiety to give no cause for unpleasantness, beginning to empty ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... sly-looking, houses wicked-looking, houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans against a wall, his hands in his pockets, a primrose held between his teeth, contemplating ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,—a mere enameled vessel of dishonor! Let the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... weaned from his traditionary pursuits and transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned towards ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... carcasses, the living deaths—women, blasted by disease and drink till their shame brought not tuppence in the open mart; and men, in fantastic rags, wrenched by hardship and exposure out of all semblance of men, their faces in a perpetual writhe of pain, grinning idiotically, shambling like apes, dying with every step they took and each breath they drew. And there were young girls, of eighteen and twenty, with trim bodies and faces yet untouched with twist and bloat, who had fetched the bottom of the Abyss plump, in one swift fall. ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... we advanced at a shambling gallop, the horsemen gaining on us every moment. Now I thought that all was over, especially when of a sudden from behind the White Rock emerged ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Colonel, who was all himself again now that the hour for action had arrived. "I wish to Heaven I could see Tippy Tilly or any of his friends. Now is the time for them to help us." He watched the mad stream of fugitives as they flew past upon their shambling, squattering, loose-jointed beasts, but the black face of the Egyptian ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging emotions and mysterious fixity—like no human being that ever lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... beings who are only happy when they have merged their individuality in another's and joined their fate to his. He attached himself to John from the first, and as often as he was at liberty he was hanging about him, ready to fetch and carry in his shambling gait, which was like the roll of an old dog. The expression of his beardless face was that of a boy, and he had no conversation, for he always agreed with everything that ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... to their stable. All through the streets they had passed men in one uniform or another, who looked stout and well-fed, who strode in the middle of the pavement, while the Poles, whose clothes were poor and threadbare, shuffled aside in their patched and shambling boots to make way for the conqueror. Sometimes they would turn and look back at some sword-bearer who was more offensive than usual, with reflective eyes as if marking him in order to know him at a future time. As is always the case, it was the smaller ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... date, 1576, Perez was really the friend of Escovedo. But Escovedo would not be advised; he wrote an impatient memorial to the King, denouncing his stitchless policy (descosido), his dilatory, shambling, idealess proceedings. So, at least, Sir William Stirling-Maxwell asserts in his Don John of Austria: 'the word used by Escovedo was descosido, "unstitched."' But Mr. Froude says that Philip used the expression, later, in reference ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... or even impolite, just to show us his humanity. But no, he is always grave, earnest, dignified, and rebukingly handsome. The college "grind" with bulging forehead, round shoulders, myopic vision and shambling gait is well known in every college, and serves as the butt of innumerable practical jokes. But no one took liberties with Emanuel Swedenborg either in boyhood or in after-life. His countenance was stern, yet not forbidding; his form tall, manly and muscular, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... an hotel in this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half- kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... time a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts promised a long, damp ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... bunch of keys, and made his way to the shed, Riglett shambling behind at an interval ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... hairless travesty of a coyote move out of a draw and halt directly in the path of the mad coyote. Cripp stood there grinning till he felt the other's teeth score his unprotected hide; then he whirled and snapped back at him. The mad coyote kept straight on and Cripp followed at his own queer shambling gait. He drew close and ran alongside, and for a hundred yards they exchanged slashes in a senseless sort of way. Breed could see the blood oozing from the fur of the mad coyote's neck, and the blobs of white foam sliding down Cripp's shiny hide. Then the mad coyote fell ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts
... surlily back, draining his thick cup of coffee and shambling out, chewing a toothpick. At the door he looked back with his lips pulled down, mouthing a ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... thoughts were passing through her mind she happened to glance out of the window. Nutty was shambling through the garden with his pail, a bowed, shuffling pillar of gloom. As Elizabeth watched, he dropped the pail and lashed the air violently for a while. From her knowledge of bees ('It is needful to remember that bees resent ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... gangling cattle-man with drooping grizzled mustache, came shambling up to the steps. His weather-beaten chaps were much too short for his lengthy limbs, the collar of his faded flannel shirt lacked an inch of meeting at the throat, its sleeves were shrunken until his hairy hands hung down ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... not hear the soldier's key turn in the lock, but soon he heard it and his heart pumped. He glanced at White, but the gray figure, flattened against the wall, never moved. The door swung open and the soldier, merely a shambling peon, bearing the tray, entered. Behind him according to custom came the second man who stood in the doorway, leaning upon his musket. But he stood there only an instant. A pair of long, powerful arms which must have seemed to him at that ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of a ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... sharp cry and a jump. A bear on its hind legs, slow, shambling, rolling its loose shoulders, was stretching a paw towards him. The bear dropped heavily on four paws again, and a laugh came from ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... fell on as miserable a looking wretch as ever hid himself from the eyes of day—dirty, ragged, bloated, forlorn, with scarcely a trace of manhood in his swollen and disfigured face. His steps, quick from excitement a few moments before, were now shambling and made with difficulty. He had not far to walk for what he was seeking. The ministers to his appetite were all about him, a dozen in every block of that terrible district that seemed as if forsaken by God and man. Into ...
— Cast Adrift • T. S. Arthur
... within me to say. I doubt if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee-room"; more probably you have a table d'hote meal served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I heard telling an Englishman there in those disheartening ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... trifle over six feet in height, with yellowish, sandy hair, high cheek bones, a rough and mottled skin, a high but narrow forehead, a pair of eyes somewhat like those of a ferret, long, ungainly limbs, and a shambling walk. A coat of rusty black, with very long tails, magnified his apparent height, and nothing that he ...
— Hector's Inheritance - or The Boys of Smith Institute • Horatio Alger
... Bunsby,[141] with a head too ponderous to lay-to, and so falling victim to the inveterate MacStinger; good-hearted, modest, considerate Toots, whose brains rapidly go as his whiskers come, but who yet gets back from contact with the world, in his shambling way, some fragments of the sense pumped out of him by the forcing Blimbers; breathless Susan Nipper, beaming Polly Toodle, the plaintive Wickham, and the awful Pipchin, each with her duty in the starched Dombey household ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... sang to any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang—I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed—in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, open fields. Waram's few hundred pounds ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... who knows what might have grown up under a great Byzantine culture? The farms were solidly built houses with great well-filled yards, surrounded by high and defensible walls. We came into stations where long shambling youths, dressed in badly made European clothes, lounged and ogled the girls in "this style, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... last hour by the graceful sympathy of troops of friends; but the State-protected vice has such a withering effect that it scorches up friendship as a fiery breath from a furnace might scorch a grass blade. If one of my joyous, delightful lads could just watch the shambling, dirty figure of such a failure as I have described; if he could see the sneers of amused passers-by, the timid glances of women, the contemptuous off-hand speech of the children—"Oh! him! That's old, boozy ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... with attention. A singularly powerful man, not so tall as Kenelm by some inches, but still above the middle height, herculean shoulders and chest, the lower limbs not in equal proportion,—a sort of slouching, shambling gait. As he advanced the moonlight fell on his face; it was a handsome one. He wore no hat, and his hair, of a light brown, curled close. His face was fresh-coloured, with aquiline features; his age apparently about six ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... changed though he was. He wore a fashionable wig, and his clothes fitted well a figure that, once shambling and loose-jointed, had now all the erectness of the soldier, but the face ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... time for an early breakfast when we arrived at this hotel, and the quaintest coloured gentlemen waited on us; they were rather aged, and had a shambling way of dragging their feet, but the most sympathetic manners, just suited to the four honeymoon pairs who were seated at little tables round. That was a curious coincidence, wasn't it, Mamma, to find four pairs in one hotel in that state. None of the bridegrooms were over twenty-five, ...
— Elizabeth Visits America • Elinor Glyn
... bugles, the mutter and roar of the artillery, came the Yell. Their shambling trot quickened. Men were running now, forming a great wave to lick up at the breastworks. Men in that line did not know—or care—that they were moving without the promised support on right and left; they did not hear the disturbed orders of the officers still striving to slow them, to wrench them ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... them nearer to the light of the upper air. At other times he could do little more than follow with his eye the tall figure of Nathan, plunging from shadow to shadow, and knoll to knoll, with a pace both free and rapid, and little resembling the shambling, hesitating step with which he moved among the haunts of his contemners and oppressors. As for the dog, little Peter, he was only with difficulty seen when ascending some such illuminated knoll as has been mentioned, when he might ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... the animals being lost to their owners; but such is rarely to be apprehended, except in the case of some incorrigible beasts who are not to be trusted. We certainly have known horses, so hobbled, make off in a sort of shambling gallop, by drawing up the two confined feet together, and progressing in short leaps; but, in general, a horse so turned out at night, after a day's hard ride, has a sort of tacit understanding with his master that he is ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... other as they obeyed; and a heavy, shambling, graceless man, dressed in the most exaggerated fopperies of the day, but with a face which even sickliness, that refines most faces, could not divest of the most vacant dulness, and a mien and gait to which no attire could give dignity, passed through the group, bowing awkwardly ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... terrible going it had been the last few days! Soft slush, in which the snow-shoes sink helplessly. The bear had come from the west right up to the Fram, had stopped and inspected the work that was going on, had then retreated a little, made a considerable detour, and set off eastward at its easy, shambling gait, without deigning to pay any further attention to such a trifle as a ship. It had rummaged about in every hole and corner where there seemed to be any chance of finding food, and had rooted in the snow after anything ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... it had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the rocks ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... Collins; and the reply was followed by the shuffling sound of several pairs of feet, the owners of which came shambling into the room the next moment, with naked cutlasses in their hands, while one of them carried, in addition, a length of some three or ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Sarah Barmby, who lived in one of those little shabby villas on the London road and looked after her father. She moved about the villa in an unseeing, shambling way, hitting herself against the furniture. Her face was heavy with a gentle, brooding goodness, and she had little eyes that blinked and twinkled in the heaviness, as if something amused her. At first you kept on wondering what the joke was, till you saw it was only a habit Sarah had. ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... thin as I am fat, and his clothes hang on him in the most comical way. He is very tall and shambling, wears a ragged beard and a broad Stetson hat, and suffers amazingly from hay fever in the autumn. (In fact, his essay on "Hay Fever" is the best thing he ever wrote, I think.) As he came striding up the ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... one all-prevalent truth in normal existence is jealously to exclude it from his book.... For "living" is to be conscious of an incessant series of less than momentary sensations, of about equal poignancy, for the most part, and of nearly equal unimportance. Art attempts to marshal the shambling procession into trimness, to usurp the role of memory and convention in assigning to some of these sensations an especial prominence, and, in the old phrase, to lend perspective to the forest we cannot see because of the trees. ...
— Contemporary American Literature - Bibliographies and Study Outlines • John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
... have a shambling sort of gait, half walk, half amble, but manage to get over the ground very quickly, and for such cumbersome animals are very nimble-footed. It is almost ludicrous to see the huge beasts picking their way along a narrow "bund" or crossing some ditch by a bridge of fallen logs, but ...
— Burma - Peeps at Many Lands • R.Talbot Kelly
... noise, wilt'a?" said Michael, roughly, as he passed near him, and threatening him with his fist. Susan's back was turned to the pair. The expression of Willie's face changed from vacancy to fear, and he came shambling up to Susan, who put her arm round him, and, as if protected by that shelter, he began making faces at Michael. Susan saw what was going on, and, as if now first struck by the strangeness of her brother's manner, she looked anxiously at Michael for an explanation. Michael ...
— Half a Life-Time Ago • Elizabeth Gaskell
... brain of a drowning man; that same crowded my brain during the few moments which swung in to us Daniel, scowling, masterful, his raw bulk and his long shambling stride ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... helmet. His aim in life is to gain possession of the helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft enough to know that it is quite possible, ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... expected to go striding through miles of alder swamp and dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of men and bondage, before setting himself to get acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung temper was badly jarred. He drew off, shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling with spacious stride down along the barrier towards the brook. The four cows, in single file, hurried after him anxiously, afraid he might ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... was gone; they heard him slipping and shambling on the polished oak of the stairs. Nancy screamed when there came the sound of a heavy fall. ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... A quick step, yet shambling, came along the lobby. There was a pause, as of one gathering heart for a venture; then a clumsy ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... follows the conversion of wheat fields and grazing land into vineyards and orchards. Not even Riverside can compare with it in the rapid evolution of a great source of wealth which ten years ago was almost unknown. What has transformed Fresno from a shambling, dirty resort of cowboys and wheat ranchers into one of the prettiest cities in California is the raisin grape. Though nearly all fruits may be grown here, yet this is pre-eminently the home of the raisin ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... again, and the shambling lad felt dimly as if the scent of the sandalwood were sweeter, and the lamp-flame clearer. But the stranger's ...
— Christmas Stories And Legends • Various
... more, planting might in his heart, to call an assembly of the long-haired Achaeans and speak out to all the wooers who slaughter continually the sheep of his thronging flocks, and his kine with trailing feet and shambling gait. And I will guide him to Sparta and to sandy Pylos to seek tidings of his dear father's return, if peradventure he may hear thereof and that so he may be had in ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... ten o'clock, they buried Saunders on a certain little knoll among the sagebrush; buried him without much ceremony, it is true, but with more respect than he had received when he was alive and shambling sneakily among them. Good Indian was there, saying little and listening attentively to the comments made upon the subject, and when the last bit of yellow gravel had been spatted into place he rode down through the Indian ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... will not readily admit within the charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to translate, so to speak, into the colloquial ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... meagre, mean-visaged, muddy complexioned, and altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all coincided, it was that he was inoffensive but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage and had considerable facility of speech, when any person could be found who thought ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of talking, awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes lost his gun, his dog, his most indispensable garments; got ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... waving plumes, and their silver spurs glittered in the sun. Then came the angel-monarch in rich attire surrounded by his counselors and the flower of his knights. The men-at-arms and servants brought up the rear of the procession, and among them, on a shambling piebald steed, his ape perched behind him and his cloak of foxtails flapping in the wind, rode the jester-king—a strange sight which caused unbounded merriment in all the country towns through which the ...
— The Children's Longfellow - Told in Prose • Doris Hayman
... his wine hath spilt As Scorpions smote him treblefold, Is thrown into a stagnant sea By Lordly Helm of bad repute, Whose visage, curl'd in ughly mien, Vext at each leper's font of spleen, Invokes a hairless witch to scan The shambling hordes that boon refute, Who lifts her unguis, long and lean, To curse each vyper's bloody dream, Each mongrel and forsaken man. Then quivers that cippus' hurl'd As templed vaults are splinter'd wide; And fearful fancies cleave the ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... academy. I like our fellows to look well, upright, gentlemanlike. There is Master Fielding—he with the black eye. What a magnificent build of a boy! There is Master Scott, one of the heads of the school. Did you ever see the fellow more hearty and manly? Yonder lean, shambling, cadaverous lad, who is always borrowing money, telling lies, leering after the house-maids, is Master Laurence Sterne—a bishop's grandson, and himself intended for the Church; for shame, you little reprobate! But what a genius the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... me his hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... yards behind, and was consequently unable to overhear the conversation. He went shambling along, half whimpering and not unfrequently invoking the God of Israel; but every now and then a cunning light gleamed from his eyes, and his lips became compressed with a ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... sufficient firmness to ascend. Paul, being the lightest, helped by his companions, had got up some way, when a gruff shout made them turn round, and old Charcoal, as they called the black, was seen shambling along on his crutches towards them. He beckoned Paul to come down from the tree in a way which showed that he would not be disobeyed. They saw that he had a basket on his back, and, pointing to the fountain to intimate that he wanted water, he set about turning its contents, ...
— Paul Gerrard - The Cabin Boy • W.H.G. Kingston
... Elizabeth, and James, and all good royal folks had always done; and lo! he must lose his head for it. His was altogether a more gentlemanly and respectable performance than that of Henry, not wanting in a sort of ideal magnificence, which his brutal predecessor, or even his shambling old father never dreamed of. But so it is; it is not always on those who are sinners above all men that the tower of Siloam falls, but only on those who happen to be under it when its time comes. So I intend to cherish a little partiality for gentlemanly, magnificent ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... heads together and whispered and planned and discussed. Then they brought forth this sufficiently shambling conclusion—but it was the best they could do, in so close a place: they said the Pope was so far away; and it was not necessary to go to him anyway, because the present judges had sufficient power and authority to deal with the present case, and were in effect ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his last wish, Jean Ramel had been conveyed to the Pantheon in the wretched paupers' hearse, which conveys them to the common grave at the shambling trot of some ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... an Indian bent his bow against a bear shambling across a little sunny glade. The arrow did its errand, and where the creature fell, there we sat down and feasted beside a fire kindled by rubbing two sticks together. According to their wont the Indians ate ravenously, and when the meal was ended began to smoke, each warrior ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... for campaigning. Streams and springs were numerous, and there were fine sites for camps. The deserted toll-houses along the way glowered mournfully through the rent windows, and I fancied them, sometimes, as I rode at night, haunted by the shambling tollman. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... cunning about them. The eyes were wild, and perhaps fierce, but they were honest and frank still. The clothes were much worn and torn, but the body they covered was strong and shapely. There was nothing weak or shambling in those ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... inquiry at Williamstown I find that none of the professors at Williams saw an encouraging gleam of aptitude for anything in the big-eyed, shambling youth whom Mr. Tufts had assiduously coached to meet the requirements of matriculation. There is a shadowy tradition that he did fairly well in his Latin themes when the subject suited his fancy, but his fancy more often led him to a sporting resort, kept by an ex-pugilist named Pettit, ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... shock-headed, shambling, awkward lad with an uncommonly wide mouth, very red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and certainly the most comical expression of face I ever saw. He stopped short at the door on seeing a stranger, twirled in his ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... offence intended in his badly huddled nudes; he only delineates in simple, naked fashion the horrors of some undressed humans. His landscapes are primitive though suffused by perceptible atmosphere; while the rough architecture, shambling figures, harsh colouring do not quite destroy the impression of general vitality. You could not say with Walt Whitman that his stunted trees were "uttering joyous leaves of dark green." They utter, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the squatters that said something sharp to him one day in a way that showed us boys that he thought himself as good as he was. And he stood up straight and looked him in the face, till we hardly could think he was the same man that was so bent and shambling and broken-down-looking most times. He used to live in a little hut in the township all by himself. It was just big enough to hold him and us at our lessons. He had his dinner at the inn, along with Mr. and Mrs. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... first, the Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone could see any promise in the shambling youngster. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... the bonfire burned brighter, lighting up the scene—the shambling stores around the jail on the public square, the better citizens making appeals in vain for law and order, the shouting, fool-hardy mob, waiting for Richard Travis to say the word, and he sitting among them pale, and terribly silent with ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... stillness of the Strand. An occasional halt at a shop-window was sufficient to assure him that the watcher of the Temple was still on his heels. The man, he was interested to see, played his part very unobtrusively, shambling along in nonchalant fashion, mostly hugging the sides of the houses, ready to dart out of sight into a doorway or down a side turning, should he by any mischance arrive too close on the heels ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... would have declined if only they could have thought of the proper method of doing so. As it was, they only succeeded in shambling through the parsonage door, instinctively concealing their half-smoked ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... He found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, prodding ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... strange-looking beast. It has a big head and a heavy shaggy mane. The hind part of its body is much lower than its shoulders, and its hind-legs are short. This odd formation gives it an awkward shambling manner of walking, which is ...
— Harper's Young People, May 11, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... shape means ugliness. (10) The stiff-limbed dog will come home limping from the hunting-field; (11) just as want of strength and thinness of coat go hand in hand with incapacity for toil. (12) The lanky-legged, unsymmetrical dog, with his shambling gait and ill-compacted frame, ranges heavily; while the spiritless animal will leave his work to skulk off out of the sun into shade and lie down. Want of nose means scenting the hare with difficulty, ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... without a word, holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. Pasquale put down ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... through a year for promised recompense, and he laid on us his commands. I round their city built the Trojans a wall, wide and most fair, that the city might be unstormed, and thou Phoebus, didst herd shambling crook-horned kine among the spurs of woody many-folded Ida. But when the joyous seasons were accomplishing the term of hire, then redoubtable Laomedon robbed us of all hire, and sent us off with threats. He threatened that he would bind together our feet and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer (Lang, Leaf, Myers trans.)
... rivulet, I had placed a cup to collect the slow and tepid drops that were all now coming down the reed for Heru. And as I went back each time with that sickly spoonful at the bottom of the vessel all the dying beasts lifted their heads and watched—the thirsty wolves shambling after me; the boars half sat up and grunted plaintively; the panthers, too weak to rise, beat the dusty ground with their tails; and from the portico the blue storks, with trailing wings, croaked ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... murderer!' and he sprang forward to throw himself on the shaking, shambling wretch. Mosk eluded him, but uttered a squeaking cry like the shriek of a hunted hare in the jaws of the greyhound. The next instant the room seemed to swarm with men, and the bishop as in a dream heard the merciless formula of ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... moment there came a stir from the room beyond, the tap-tap of a cane and shuffling steps across the polished parquet. Dysart's grip relaxed, his hand fell away, and he made a ghastly grimace as a little old gentleman came half-trotting, half-shambling to the doorway. He was small and dapper and pink-skinned under his wig; the pink was paint; his lips and eyes peered and simpered; from one bird-claw hand dangled ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... Oswald," said the Earl. And then Lord Brentford did make something of a shambling speech, in which he expressed a hope that they two might for the future live together on friendly terms, forgetting the past. He ought to have been prepared for the occasion, and the speech was poor ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... was at her usual place on the edge of the precipice that looked down upon the deep, divided channels of the great river. She turned on hearing the deep breathing of Pepin and the shambling of Antoine as they passed over some loose gravel behind her. She rose to her feet with a little cry of welcome. There was something in the dwarfs face that spoke of a settled purpose and hope. Their late awkward meeting ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... they turned through, dragging their awkwardly shambling burden. As they gained the front porch the front door was flung wide, and Mrs. Adams stood there, peering out, to find what was the meaning of this scuffling and grunting. Charley was glad to see her, framed ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... slight incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... go and see," she said, and hurried from the room, Aunt Phillis shambling after her ...
— Elsie's Kith and Kin • Martha Finley
... short or long. He does it; how I don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin. I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means. He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one can make a shot at most things when driven to it, and I object ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Yorke, seated together at one end of the table, arose as Gully entered. Standing curiously still, as if carved in stone, their bitter eyes alone betraying their emotions, silently they gazed at the huge, gaunt, unkempt figure that came shambling towards them. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"—that apartment sacred to Sundays, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... unsteadily on his heel and left her. The shadows among the gravestones down hill laid hands on his broken, shambling figure, and he became a shadow. Once the shadow stumbled. And as if that distant, awkward act had aroused Mary from a kind of lethargy, she broke forward a step, reaching ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Cold and dark as mid-winter. I shall send with this two new photographs of myself for your opinion. My father regards this life "as a shambling sort of omnibus which is taking him to his hotel." Is that not well said? It came out in a rather pleasant and entirely amicable discussion which we had this afternoon on a walk. The colouring of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought I, as the three great animals wheeled in their tracks, and went away like lightning. What was strange to us, they did not gallop, as most deer do, but went off in a sort of shambling trot, like a 'pacing' horse, and quite as fast as a horse ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... answer, for her heart was breaking, but turned and went into her room. Burrell had an irresistible desire to tell Gale that he wanted his daughter for his wife; it would be an unwonted pleasure to startle this iron-gray old man and the shawled and shambling mummy of red, with the unwinking eyes that always reminded him of two ox-heart cherries; but he had given Necia his promise. So he descended to the exchange of ordinary topics, and inquired for news ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... one of them spoke: "Come, Bob, let's go over and see if we can't tuck away some of that grub." So both turned their backs upon the train, and upon me; and as they went over to see if they couldn't "tuck away some of that grub," I got a view of their heavy shoulders, and their shambling, awkward gait. A pair of old draft horses, going out in the morning to take their places in front of their truck, would not move more stiffly than those ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... and began to explain in a rather shambling fashion that he had been there some time and "intended to hunt him up, of course"; but he had "been so taken up with business," ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... whatever description should be molested." As the fields in places were enclosed by rail fences, it was strictly against orders to disturb any of the fences. This order had been religiously obeyed all the while, until this night on the top of the Blue Ridge. A shambling, tumble-down rail fence was near the camp of the Third South Carolina, not around any field, however, but apparently to prevent stock from passing on the western side of the mountain. At night while the troops lay in the open air, without any protection whatever, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... "I would not disturb you like this unless—steady there, for Heaven's sake Professor, don't kick till you've heard me out!" For, the mule, in a clumsy, shambling way which betrayed the novice, was slowly revolving on his own axis so as to bring his hind-quarters into action, while still keeping his only serviceable eye upon his ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... upon the proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to 'eat all his economies,' and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure. It was getting dusk when we parted. My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work. He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy cries. His presence ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... to this Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed in a book, though, in fact, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... late. Already he was on his way towards them, shambling rather than walking down the room, an unwholesome, unattractive, even repulsive figure. He seemed to have shrunken in size since his arrival in England, and his brother's clothes, always too large, hung ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pulling at the wooden pin transfixing his throat just under the mandible-equipped jaw, holding his head at an unnatural angle. Without seeming to notice the others of his kind, the Throg came on at a shambling run, straight at Shann as if he could actually see through the dark and had marked down the Terran for personal vengeance. There was something so uncanny about that forward dash that Shann retreated. As his hand ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... 21 stood at that particular corner he could not exactly say, but he thinks it must have been three or four minutes before he noticed a suspicious-looking individual shambling along under the shadow of the garden walls. He was working his way cautiously in the direction of the cul-de-sac, and D 21, also keeping well within the shadow, went ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... said, however, and he could not recall them. He had no time to speak of anything, or to think of what course they should now pursue. Coming straight toward the tree with an awkward, shambling, but speedy gait withal, the monster would soon reach the spot where they stood. Its movements showed it to be in a state of excitement—the natural consequence of its late conflict with the crocodile. If seen, they would come in for a share of its ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... house door slouched a year-old hound puppy with shambling feet and lean ribs. It stood for a moment, whining and wagging a disconsolate tail at the woman's feet, then came suddenly to life and charged a razor-back hog that was rooting at will in what should have been a ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... house, professedly a Christian. He began to tamper with the wall. First a tiny little bit of stone taken out that did not show the daylight through; then a little bigger, and a bigger. And the serpent struck its fangs into him, and if you saw him now, he is a shambling wreck, outside of society, and, as we sometimes tremblingly think, beyond hope. Young men! 'whoso breaketh an hedge, a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... to the old dark manor-house upon the side of the hill a youth had been riding. His mount was a sorry one, a weedy, shambling, long-haired colt, and his patched tunic of faded purple with stained leather belt presented no very smart appearance; yet in the bearing of the man, in the poise of his head, in his easy graceful carriage, and in the bold glance ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
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