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More "Shuffling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Time went to the window for a moment and beckoned into the darkened street. Then I heard footsteps, clumsy and hesitant they seemed, upon the stairs. And in a moment a figure stood framed in the doorway—the figure of Father Christmas. He stood shuffling his feet, a timid, apologetic look ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock
... at Talmage's Church in Brooklyn—you've heard Talmage over here of course.' He faintly indicated contempt for Talmage. 'And after my first collection he sent for me into the church parlour, and he said to me: "Mr. Twemlow, next time you collect, put some snap into it; don't go shuffling along as if you were dead." So you see this morning, although I haven't collected for years, I thought of that and tried to put ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... had we finished breakfast when a knock came at the open door, and we beheld a tall and dignified fellah depositing his staff against the doorpost and shuffling off his slippers at the call ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... Mule to return that evening, which was his night away from home at Puente de Rey. She hurried to the door, therefore, when she heard, after nightfall, the clatter of hoofs in the narrow street, and the shuffling of iron heels at her very step. She opened the door, and in the bright moonlight saw the cocked-hats and long cloaks of the Guardia Civil. There were other men behind them, and a beast shuffled his feet as he ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... that's what I intensely dislike, Mr Maine. If there is anything that annoys, irritates, or makes me dissatisfied with the men— the gentlemen under my command, it is evasion, shuffling, shirking, or prevarication." ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... nearly as possible opposite the elevator, so that we might arrive at the foot of the stairs but a moment before Madge and Henry, and we could hear the two fathers shuffling on the street floor, when suddenly, as we reached the third floor, we heard a whisper from Henry in the elevator. The elevator had stuck fast between the third and fourth floors. As with one mind, Lemuel and I ...
— The Water Goats and Other Troubles • Ellis Parker Butler
... could see no more; but there was a sound of struggling, renewed at intervals with silent but fearful energy. It was evident, however, that the parties were approaching the door, for he heard the solid oak sound twice or thrice, as the feet of the combatants, in shuffling hither and thither over the floor, struck upon it. After a slight pause he heard the door thrown open with such violence that the leaf seemed to strike the side-wall of the hall, for it was so dark without that this ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heavy carts which purveyed the only water suitable for drinking and culinary purposes; and by the sounds of wood-sawing and wood-chopping before the doors of the adjacent houses—sounds quickly blending themselves with the shuffling feet of the slaves cleaning the doorsteps and sidewalks, and chattering, singing, quarrelling the while with their neighbours, or with other early ministers to the city's ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... Crown officers and Sir Peregrine Maitland. Each of the two officers concerned, immediately upon receiving his summons, caused the fact to be communicated to the Lieutenant-Governor, and each wrote a shuffling letter to the Chairman of the Committee. Later in the day the Lieutenant-Governor positively declined to permit the attendance of the persons summoned, assigning as a reason that he had not been made acquainted with the facts as to which it was desired to interrogate ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... as was in his brother's power; and the looks they cast towards him, and the sly torments they attempted to inflict, by no means invited him back to them. The lessons, where he had a long inveterate habit of shuffling, came under Norman's eye at the same time. He always prepared them in his presence, instead of in the most secret manner possible, and with all Anderson's expeditious modes of avoiding the making them of any use. Norman sat by, and gave such help ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... on a moderate computation, a hundred people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees, at one time; while others, who were going up, or had come down—and a few who had done both, and were going up again for the second time— stood loitering in the porch below, where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-box, rattled ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... There was the shuffling of many feet for an instant—then a pause, a pause which was full of awe—then, with a roar like thunder, six hundred throats broke into wild applause for Jesus, whom such people ever gladly heard; and straightway, for the first time in the history ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... The shuffling tread of the insurgent infantry echoed across the gravel court-yard; torches behind the walls were extinguished; ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... lanterns of every colour that paper can be painted, and of every size, from six inches high to six feet. The crowd wear their gayest kimonos, and the moosmes are brilliant in flowered or striped silks and splendid sashes, and the air is full of the rattle of the shuffling clogs and the tinkling samisen played in almost ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... sit down. The dancing is not so energetic as many of those commonly indulged in for amusement only. The steps consist of two treading movements made by each foot in succession. Keeping time with the drum-beats, at the same time there is a shuffling movement made by the dancer forward, around and among his companions, but getting back toward his place before the verse is ended. The attitude during these movements consists in bending the body forward, while the knees are ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the plow-line with which he had intended to tie Simon's hands, turned his back to that individual, in order to prevent his witnessing the operation of mixing. He then sat down, and very leisurely commenced shuffling the cards, making, however, an exceedingly awkward job of it. Restive kings and queens jumped from his hands, or obstinately refused to slide into the company of the rest of the pack. Occasionally a sprightly knave would ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... complexion, and his eyes are blue, small, and sunken. His mouth is well-shaped, and his features are regular. His beard is worn around the throat and under the chin, and is perfectly white. His hands are small and soft; but his feet and legs are awkward and clumsy, and this gives to him a peculiar shuffling motion in walking. He is abstracted in manner, and when accosted suddenly replies abruptly, and as ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... dancers and musicians slowly, with shuffling steps. The quiet is broken by a note on a gong, struck softly, and there is an almost inaudible flute melody on reeds, and liquid notes struck on empty bamboos. These dusky figures are Kachin men, with red turbans, and ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... shuffle of the men something rather familiar. We have seen them before—just for a few minutes it is true; but under circumstances that impressed some of their characteristics upon us. The very last we saw of them they were shuffling away in the darkness along a railroad track, after promising that eventually they would wreak dire vengeance upon Billy, who ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the snow and came to a stop with a clang and a roar, disgorging a chattering holiday crowd who paused for a change of cars at Cotesville on their southbound trips. Uncle Noah hastened his shuffling footsteps: the Northern Express with its horde of transient visitors had been a vital part of the inspiration. Upon the station platform people stamped up and down in the snow or laughed and chatted, quite oblivious to the timid gaze of the ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... Lem Gildy was shuffling along the road. He was a particularly unprepossessing man, with a reddish growth of whiskers which he never seemed to take the trouble to shave off, and they stuck out like so many bristles in a ...
— The Motor Girls • Margaret Penrose
... to satisfy himself it was alright, when he noticed Wilson shuffling about with the inner pocket of ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... raised by his saddle to a great height above the humble level of the back that he bestrides, and using an awfully sharp bit, is able to lift the crest of his nag, and force him into a strangely fast shuffling walk, the orthodox pace for the journey. My comrade and I, using English saddles, could not easily keep our beasts up to this peculiar amble; besides, we thought it a bore to be followed by our ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... off the table and began shuffling them. "Exactly. As long as Snookums gets his questions answered, he keeps himself busy. Our young boot ensign has been assigned to the duty of keeping that mechanical Peeping Tom out of our hair for an hour. By then, it will be lunch time." He cleared his throat. "We ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... move slightly, so that both ears were uncovered. No, nothing was to be heard. I was trying to compose myself to sleep again, persuading myself that I had been dreaming, when again—yes most distinctly—there was a sound. A sort of shuffling, scraping noise, which seemed to come from the direction of the passage leading from the tapestry room to the garden. Fear made me selfish. I pushed Mary, then shook ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... In the new shuffling of partners, the elder Miss Bowater found herself close to Anne, and at once inquired warmly for Miles, with knowledge and interest in naval affairs derived from a sailor brother, Miles's chief friend and messmate in his training and earlier ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cemetery of the old carboniferous gods, and it seems to have been prepared by gentle hands and watched over with kindly care. Good crops of hay and grain were growing above their black remains, and rural life seemed to go on in the usual way. The shuffling and the deformation of the earth's surface which attended the laying down of the coal-beds is not anywhere evident. The hand of that wonderful husbandman, Father Time, has smoothed ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... the ship's drummer, who strikes a peculiar beat—short, broken, rolling, shuffling—like the sound made by the march into battle of iron-heeled grenadiers. It is a regular tune, with a fine song composed to it; the words of the chorus, being most artistically arranged, may give ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... was a stream of blood, running into the eye of the setting sun, beautiful, yet weird and menacing. It broadened, deepened, and every day countless streams swelled its volume. Islands waded in it greenly. Always we heard it singing, a seething, hissing noise supposed to be the pebbles shuffling on ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... gazelles torn by eagles, would recompense him for the trouble, expense, and fatigue of this long journey. He turned his horse to the right, and moved round in his saddle, so that he might observe the humps and the long, bird-like necks and the shuffling gait of the camels. They never seemed to become ordinary to him, and he liked them for their picturesqueness, deciding that the word "picturesque" was as applicable to them as the word "beautiful" is applicable to the horse. He liked to see these Arab horses ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... a sound of shuffling in the porch, the door was thrown open, and a gaunt, haggard man, with torn, snow-sprinkled garments, pale face, and bloodshot eyes, stood pictured on the background ...
— The Red Man's Revenge - A Tale of The Red River Flood • R.M. Ballantyne
... no notice when Stobart appeared. He was quite unconscious. The drover shouted, but there was no more response than if the desert silence had remained unbroken. By the tracks of his shuffling bare feet he must have been drawing that terrible circle for several hours, while the pitiless sun beat down on his unprotected head. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and was dark-coloured and ...
— In the Musgrave Ranges • Jim Bushman
... that moment heavy footsteps sounded upon the stairs, and two constables, conducted by the shuffling old man, appeared ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... is shuffling; the motion of the body, which is never upright as in man, but bent forward, is somewhat rolling, or from side to side. The arms being longer than the Chimpanzee, it does not stoop as much in walking; like that animal, it makes progression by thrusting its arms forward, resting the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Ambition, and my Queene: May one be pardon'd, and retaine th'offence? In the corrupted currants of this world, Offences gilded hand may shoue by Iustice [Sidenote: showe] And oft 'tis seene, the wicked prize it selfe Buyes out the Law; but 'tis not so aboue, There is no shuffling, there the Action lyes In his true Nature, and we our selues compell'd Euen to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To giue in euidence. What then? What rests? Try what Repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it, when one cannot repent?[4] Oh wretched state! Oh bosome, blacke as death! Oh ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... back at school in Constantinople, shuffling their feet and throwing ink pellets at one another; Raisuli, home again in the old mountains, was working up the kidnapping business, which had fallen off sadly in his absence under the charge of an incompetent locum tenens; and the Chinese, the Bollygollans, and ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... candidate to Mrs. Perkins, as the shuffling feet on the porch shuffled off into the night, "what ...
— The Booming of Acre Hill - And Other Reminiscences of Urban and Suburban Life • John Kendrick Bangs
... gone, Schwalliger turned and winked slowly at the minions of the law, and went quietly into a corner with them, and there was the sound of the shuffling of silken paper. Later on he found the old man and returned him his ten, and went back ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... it won't be worth two bits when it gets here." He peered at the little man coming toward them down the passage, flapping and shuffling, and carrying, held before him in both hands, a ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... Rufford, if I say that that's what we used to call shuffling, at school. Because a man ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... this is a very crooked and shuffling policy for the great British Empire to pursue. And others, that the Gladstone policy ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 20, March 25, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... not be a shuffling of the cards? Take the question of servant-girls for instance. Where there are two or more servants in a family their lot is far better than that of the factory girl. But it is quite a different matter with the maid-of-all-work, the household drudge, who ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... knew quite well that such matters did not settle themselves, but he seems to have imagined that all he had to do was to sit tight and that matters would have to come his way. The tricky and shuffling behavior to which he descended would be unbelievable of a man of his standing were there not an authentic record made by himself. The suspense finally became so intolerable that the Cabinet acted without consulting the President any longer on the point. The Secretary of War submitted to his colleagues ...
— Washington and His Colleagues • Henry Jones Ford
... as to who they are; when they became regarded as a peculiar race of wandering, wastrel, ragamuffin vagabonds; the primary object they had in view in setting out upon their shuffling, skulking, sneaking, dark pilgrimage; whether they were driven at the point of the sword, or allured onwards by the love of gold, designing dark deeds of plunder, cruelty, and murder, or anxious to seek a haven of rest; the route by which they travelled, whether over hill ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... gratifying it. For weeks I lived in a state of continual fever; my nights were turned into days; and, during the few hours of sleep—but not of repose—which gave me strength to return to the gaming-table, the rattling of the dice and the shuffling of the cards haunted me in my dreams, with alternations of exultation and despair, as vivid though not as distinct, as in my waking hours. At first, (the old history of all such cases,) I won immensely, and this encouraged me ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... his eyebrows at Elizabeth, at the bright fire behind her, and all the comfort of the new farmhouse. Yet under his shuffling manner there was a certain note of confidence. He was appealing to that Homeric hospitality which prevails throughout the farms of ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... David heard a shuffling sound from a near-by office. He straightened stiffly, wondering dully who the newcomer was. The watchman probably, on a round of inspection. Or perhaps Jonathan, who came to his office sometimes of nights to work off odds and ends ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... over of the most sinister riddle in the morality of Frederick the Great—these passages are, one must frankly say, disingenuous. But it is, so to speak, a generous disingenuousness; the heat and momentum of sincere admirations, not the shuffling fear and flattery of the constitutional or patriotic historian. It bears most resemblance to the incurable prejudices of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... drearily past the windows, and the children must have the lights lighted for their writing lesson. She was tired of it all, with an utter and hopeless weariness. Tired of the bells, and the whispering, and the shuffling feet, of the books that smelled of pencil-dust and ink and little dusty fingers; tired of the blackboards, cleaned in great irregular scallops by small and zealous arms; of the clear-ticking big clock; of little girls who sulked, and little girls who cried after hours in ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... voice that made me jump; 'what is this story I hear of Collins? Now, no shuffling,' says he; 'I've traced it home to you, and I want your authority. I always looked upon Collins as a decent sort of oddity,' says he; 'and I'm determined to sift this matter thoroughly.' Frightened me out of a year's growth." Moriarty paused, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... thunderous than ever; then, when peace had been restored, there was a general rising, though here and there a final glass was drunk with "stosst an! setzt an! fertig! los!" and its attendant ceremonies. The meeting had broken up by common consent; there was a shuffling of footsteps, and some disjointed talking and calling down the empty hall, were the lights were already ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... are not. Mr. Triterite, you may depend upon it, will never get the church, even though he has you to support him." Saying this, he turned on his heel and left me, followed by his train, who, precisely as the others had done, muttered as they went, "shabby fellow," "mean scamp," "shuffling conduct," "snake in the grass" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... skirmish on the second line of defense of the Spaniards, and after Greene's brigade moved through Malate, meeting a shuffling foe, the open space at the luneta, just south of the walled city, was reached about 1 p. m. A white flag was flying at the southwest bastion, and I rode forward to meet it under a heavy fire from our right ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... sair'd, served. sark, shirt. sassenach, Saxon, Southron. saugh, willow. saut, salt. sax, six. scartit, scratched. scunnert, disgusted to the verge of nausea. shakers, pit the shakers on me, set me trembling with fear. shauchle, shamble, walk in a shuffling manner. shoon, shoes. shouther, shoulder. sib, related, like. sic, such. siccar, sure. sicht, sight. sichtit, sighted. siller, money. sin, since. sinon, sinew; wi' a gey teuch sinon in your neck, possessed of good stamina. skaith, harm. skeely, skilful. sklimmin', ...
— The Auld Doctor and other Poems and Songs in Scots • David Rorie
... that for all the good he could do he might just as well not hurry back again, resigned himself to the inevitable, picked up his bridle, went into the shuffling herd of horses, and caught the one pointed out to him. It was a big, raw-boned, ragged-hipped bay, a horse that would have been a gentleman under any other conditions, but from long buffalo-hunting had become a careless-going, loose-jointed ruffian, taking his life in his hands every day. He bit ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... admiral," he said; and he was in the act of shuffling his cards when he caught sight of ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... with rank smoke and the fumes of stale beer. The floor was strewn with sawdust, streaked and circled by shuffling feet; the mirror backing the bar was covered with soiled gauze dotted with tawdry roses, and an indescribable dinginess seemed to have laid its sordid fingers on ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... him at Bedford Court Mansions, and, shuffling up the steps into the hall, he addressed himself ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... had attained the age of one hundred years, and who had been known for three quarters of a century as a fortune-teller, died in Vienna. Apparently gifted with the faculty of prescience, intimately acquainted with the shuffling of cards, deeply learned in the lore of the prophetic lines traced by the graver of Fate upon human hands and feet, this lady devoted her days to the unravelling of the tangled secrets of the future, charging those whose curiosity prompted them to pry into the regions of the ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... his hat very far back from his forehead. He removed it, still quite abstractedly, and retired with long, shuffling ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... Trinity must have been shuffling china plates like cards, from the clatter that could be heard in the Great Court. Jacob's rooms, however, were in Neville's Court; at the top; so that reaching his door one went in a little out of breath; but he wasn't there. Dining in Hall, presumably. It will be quite dark in Neville's ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... him good-bye and straightway forgot him. Once he had his two horses "lined out" in their shuffling little trail-trot that was their natural gait, he picked up his dream where he had been interrupted. Where his body went mattered little to Johnny Jewel, so long as he was left alone with his thoughts. So presently his eyes were once more staring vacantly ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... No word was spoken. The silence was only broken by their shuffling feet, by the startling report of each blow, by De Chauxville's repeated ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... A shuffling of muddy feet ensued; then a lesser sound that came with the giving out of many breaths; a sound that has no name but which has been known since days when men and women settled back in the circus of the Caesars and waited for the lions to ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... through a lot. There were trees in the very heart of this big meadow, and when Cora reached a clump of birches she was suddenly startled to see an old woman shuffling after her. Cora stopped instantly. It was broad daylight, so she had no thought ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... Harris, pulling on a very large pair of white cotton gloves—thus did he live up to the standards of the policemen's ball—came shuffling across the hall, and his aghast expression when he caught sight of Mrs. Maitland was a faint consolation ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... bedside again, feeling that this was indeed a true forecast of his own doom. The sun seemed already shut out from him in the morning of his day, the prison silence settling, never to be broken again in those shadows where shuffling men filed by, with eyes downcast and faces gray, like the ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to Marion's assistance. She sank obediently into one of the great chairs, too dazed even for curiosity as to what was passing in the hail. Derek closed the door behind him, and, though confused sounds of voices and shuffling feet reached her, she gave them but a dulled attention. It was not till he came back that her stunned intelligence revived sufficiently to enable ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... us for a moment," profoundly remarks Professor Sedgwick, "suppose that there are some religious difficulties in the conclusions of geology. How, then, are we to solve them? Not by making a world after a pattern of our own—not by shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the earth, and then dealing them out in such a way as to play the game of an ignorant or dishonest hypothesis—not by shutting our eyes to facts, or denying the evidence of our senses—but by patient investigation, ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... ago walks the village-street to day, and chooses the same wife that he married a hundred years since, and must be buried again to-morrow under the same kindred dust that has already covered him half a score of times. The stone threshold of his cottage is worn away with his hobnailed footsteps, shuffling over it from the reign of the first Plantagenet to that of Victoria. Better than this is the lot of our restless countrymen, whose modern instinct bids them tend always towards "fresh woods and pastures new." Rather than such monotony of sluggish ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two paces, glaring defiantly at Dolores, waiting for men to follow. An uneasy shuffling of feet was his only answer for a moment; then his eyes shifted with cooling ardor at sight of Dolores. For a breath after he had ceased speaking, the girl stood like a splendid statue, except for the glitter of her eyes and a slight quivering ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... frigate saw all this, and he beheld at the same time the clusters of happy sailors, sauntering with light step and pleasant faces up and down the waist and gangways; and he heard, too, the scraping of a fiddle on the forecastle, the shuffling, dancing feet, and the least notion of a jovial sea-song coming up from the gun-deck. Yes, it must have been a glorious pride with which that gallant officer gazed around him from the quarter-deck ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... of the Caucasian's habit of shuffling off on God those ills for which he will not face the responsibility himself, and I am inclined to think that this is one of them. In my own experience the explanation of "God's Will" made to the mother of a little family left fatherless, or to the parents ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... helmet. Tricasse ripped up the mail-sack with his long clasp-knife. "They stole our mail; they will not steal it again," observed Tricasse, sorting the letters and shuffling them ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... quiet and deserted. A single hack rattled under his window, and Arthur could hear its lessening sound until it was lost in the sweet clangor of the bells. He lay in bed, and did not see the people in the street; but he heard the shuffling and the slouching, the dragging step and the bright, quick footfall. There were gay bonnets and black hats already stirring—early worshippers at the mass at St. Peter's or St. Patrick's—but the great population of ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Pelle stood there shuffling, in order to fight down his tears; but he had to snigger with mischievous delight at the ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... seemed a very long time, stamping in the snow to keep their feet warm. At last they heard the sound of slow shuffling footsteps approaching the door from the inside. It seemed, as the Mole remarked to the Rat, like some one walking in carpet slippers that were too large for him and down at heel; which was intelligent of Mole, because that ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... soft light over the big table. The magazines and papers lay unopened, just as they had been brought from the office by Uncle George. A book that for a month, Harry had been trying to read, was lying where he had dropped it to answer a call. While he hesitated, the old negro came shuffling in with the ...
— The Calling Of Dan Matthews • Harold Bell Wright
... the deacon from the sleigh, "for this is New Year's and we're going to make a day of it." And he laughed away as heartily as might be—so heartily, indeed, that the parson joined in the laughter himself as he came shuffling down the icy ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... had struggled to this upright position, he was making frantic, miserable efforts to raise himself still further. He, too, had heard the dull thud of feet, the shuffling gait of men ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... moved at that shuffling, restful amble which all prairie horses acquire, he leaned down over the horn of his saddle and peered ahead. The man was sitting stock still ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... on all sides, and nearly to the ceiling, with carved bookcases of walnut blackened with age to the colour of old mahogany. There were a number of massive tables in the room, upon which the light fell agreeably from high clerestory windows at each end of the apartment. Meschini himself was shuffling along in a pair of ancient leather slippers with a large volume under his arm, clad in very threadbare black clothes and wearing a dingy skullcap on his head. He was a man somewhat under the middle size, badly made, though possessing considerable physical strength. His complexion ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... sufficiently solid proof of the value in which the former held the labours of the latter. There could be no violation of any great moral feeling in the transaction thus simply considered; for the labourer was worthy of his hire; but the evasive subtleties and shuffling subterfuges by which the literary intercourse was stubbornly denied, and attempted to be set aside, by Professor White, is matter of perfect astonishment! In the mean while, Dr. Parr steadily continued his critical labours, believing that the Professor sought no aid but his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 495, June 25, 1831 • Various
... officers' tents, kitchens, canteen, and appurtenances in the rear were blotted out by the ground, because of its height above her. She could discern the forms of one or two sentries moving to and fro across the disc of the moon at intervals. She could hear the frequent shuffling and tossing of the horses tied to the pickets; and in the other direction the miles-long voice of the sea, whispering a louder note at those points of its length where hampered in its ebb and flow ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... a bunch of cattle might shuffling along a dusty road. The night was so quiet you could hear things plain from a long ways off. It growed a little louder and a little nearer. And then it struck a plank bridge somewheres, and come acrost it with a clatter. Then I knowed it wasn't cattle. Cows and ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... voice. "You obtained a few results, Miller a few more; but Fowler and I, for our pains, reaped the rich reward. By remaining long on the watch-tower we saw the armies pass. Harmony and patience are essentials in the production of these marvels. With people yawning or shuffling about uneasily, results are ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... The shadows move about, And some one seems to overhear our talk. The fire is low; the candles flicker out; The ghosts of former tenants want to walk. Already they are shuffling through the gloom. I felt an old man touch my shoulder-blade; Once he was married here; they love this room, He and his woman and the child they made. Dead, dead, they are, yet some familiar sound, Creeping along the brink of happy life, Revives their memory from ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... and dug for hours. They could not tunnel straight on account of stones; but by the end of the night they were under the kitchen floor. Benjamin was on his back, scratching upwards. Peter's claws were worn down; he was outside the tunnel, shuffling sand away. He called out that it was morning—sunrise; and that the jays were making a noise down below in ...
— A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories • Beatrix Potter
... had been afraid of the river and of the bare hills and the Indians. He felt that his mother, also, had been afraid. He pictured again—and he picture was blurred and indistinct-the day when strange men had brought his father mysteriously home; men who were silent save for the shuffling of their feet, and who carried their big ...
— The Lure of the Dim Trails • by (AKA B. M. Sinclair) B. M. Bower
... choking in Alfred's throat, and a good deal of shuffling done with his boots. It was so much more of a struggle for the sturdy boy than the gentle little girl; but he stood manfully on his feet at last, and his words, though few, were fraught with as much meaning ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... them spake a word, but all stood shifting uneasily beneath Penfeather's quick bright eye, shuffling their feet and casting furtive glances ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... gate, and calling aloud, traversed an empty compound, already heated by the new-risen sun. A cooler fringe of veranda, or shallow cloister, lined a second court. Two figures met him,—the dark-eyed Miss Drake, all in white, and behind her a shuffling, grinning native woman, who carried a basin, in which permanganate of potash swam gleaming ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... cartridge, and coolly threw open the cabin door. He was a tall, ruddy-faced, wide-mouthed man, much like the kindly manager of the show. At sight of him, standing there in the door, the bear was overjoyed, and broke into a shuffling run. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... last Obed rose to the level of the occasion. He rapidly reloaded the emptied chambers of his revolver. Stepping to the door of the inner room he spoke some soothing words, and then hurrying back, he drew the ponderous bedstead away. Outside he heard shuffling, as of footsteps, and thought they might be dragging away those who had been wounded last. All this had been done in a moment. To unlock the door, to spring forward with leveled pistol upon his assailants, was but ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... communism, could he have found any that did not seem to him at variance with ineradicable instincts of human nature. All his life the artist and the moralist in him alike were in rebellion against the bourgeois spirit,—against timid, negative, and shuffling substitutes for active and courageous well-doing,—and declined to worship at the shrine of what he called the bestial goddesses Comfort and Respectability. The moralist in him helped the artist by backing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... long and lovingly, and at last, shuffling a little nearer to the cabinet, she whispered: "I don't like saying 'good-bye' a bit. I wish you needn't go away. Don't you think you might stay after all if you liked, and help mother to get well in some other way? You belong ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... you couldn't have done better than send him there,' replied Thistlewood, shuffling his feet and fidgeting with his hands. 'Mrs. Abbott is an admirable teacher. She quite agrees with me—I should say that I quite agree with her. But I am forgetting, Mrs. Rolfe, that you know her ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... is never a lady, But the commonest wench on the street, Shuffling, shabby and shady, Shameless to pass or meet. Walk with her once—it's a weakness! Talk to her twice—it's a crime! Thrust her away when she gives you 'good day,' And the besom won't board you next time. Largesse! Largesse, ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... threshold and called the owner by name. There was a shuffling sound in an inner room and the scraping of a match. A minute later a door was opened and an old woman stood in the aperture, fully dressed and carrying a lamp ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... from the wall the wicker cage containing the three white pigeons: and going before him, with small hunched shoulders, and shuffling her feet along the flagstones, she led the way into a courtyard, where, sure enough, they found a tethered he-goat. Of a dark blue color this beast was, and his eyes were wiser than the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... clambering down the stairs from the conning tower and called out, feebly, yet with sufficient strength to make himself heard above the sound of shuffling feet. ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... energetic as many of those commonly indulged in for amusement only. The steps consist of two treading movements made by each foot in succession. Keeping time with the drum-beats, at the same time there is a shuffling movement made by the dancer forward, around and among his companions, but getting back toward his place before the verse is ended. The attitude during these movements consists in bending the body forward, while the knees are bent, giving one the ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... a glimpse into futurity; so, after shuffling the cards, and when the fair damsel had cut them, I dealt a portion to the prophetic beggar. Like others of his profession, before predicting the shadowy events that were moving on to meet me, he gave proof of his preternatural science, by describing scenes through which I had already ...
— The Seven Vagabonds (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... she is never a lady, But the commonest wench on the street, Shuffling, shabby and shady, Shameless to pass or meet. Walk with her once—it's a weakness! Talk to her twice—it's a crime! Thrust her away when she gives you 'good day,' And the besom won't board you next time. Largesse! ...
— Songs from Books • Rudyard Kipling
... constitutional, a frank focussing of the new forces emergent from the slow dissolution of Feudalism and the rapid growth of a modern world. Towards such a man the House of Commons had an uneasy hostility. He did not play the game. Whig and Tory, yellow and blue, the immemorial shuffling of Cabinet cards, the tricks and honours—he seemed to live outside them all. He was no clubman in 'The best club in England.' He did not debate for argument's sake or to upset Ministers. He was not bounded by the walls of the Chamber nor ruler from the Speaker's chair; the ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... noise through her nose and said over her shoulder, even as she sailed on. "Besides being a Haer, I'm an M.D., captain. At the ludicrous sight of a man shuffling about in his shorts, I ...
— Mercenary • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... b'y thaar?" called out Hiram Bangs, as they were all shuffling forward again, now that the palaver was over and the subject thoroughly discussed, as they thought, in all its bearings; "yer won't leather him no more? The little cuss warn't to blame; the nigger said ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... with their sea legs on, and able to go anywhere, (for we had no passengers;) and I will own there was a pleasant feeling of superiority in being able to walk the deck, and eat, and go about, and comparing one's self with two poor, miserable, pale creatures, staggering and shuffling about decks, or holding on and looking up with giddy heads, to see us climbing to the mast-heads, or sitting quietly at work on the ends of the lofty yards. A well man at sea has little sympathy with one who is seasick; he is too apt to be conscious of a comparison favorable to his own manhood. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the pitiful mask he called his face a single familiar feature. A few scraggly, yellow-white locks had supplanted the thick, dark hair that had covered his head. His limbs were bent and twisted, he walked with a shuffling, unsteady gait, his body doubled forward. His teeth were gone—knocked out by his savage masters. Even his mentality was but a sorry mockery of what ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... there were, on a moderate computation, a hundred people, slowly shuffling up these stairs, on their knees, at one time; while others, who were going up, or had come down—and a few who had done both, and were going up again for the second time— stood loitering in the porch below, where an old gentleman in a sort of watch-box, rattled a tin canister, with a slit in the ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Jargon: and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... highroad before the chateau. The air was full of mingled sounds, as, for example, the singing of the soldiers in the distance, which sounds like the droning of bees far away and always heralds an advance of troops; the rhythmic shuffling of feet, the thud of horses' hoofs, the chugging of autos which carry the superior officers, and the heavy wheels of the gun carriages with their clanking chains. Their order, equipment and discipline are admirable ...
— Lige on the Line of March - An American Girl's Experiences When the Germans Came Through Belgium • Glenna Lindsley Bigelow
... on the water-front, silent and dark and drear; Only the black tide weltering, only the hissing snow; And I, alone, like a storm-tossed wreck, on this night of the glad New Year, Shuffling along in the icy wind, ghastly and gaunt ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,— the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern Germans, they read a literature, whilst other mortals ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the piano, and sang and danced and acted a gypsy encampment. Nirmatsky was dressed up as a bear, and made to drink salt water. Count Malevsky showed us several sorts of card tricks, and finished, after shuffling the cards, by dealing himself all the trumps at whist, on which Lushin 'had the honour of congratulating him.' Meidanov recited portions from his poem 'The Manslayer' (romanticism was at its height at this ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... the thieving butler he had discharged in London. His attention did not linger on this familiar soft-shuffling tool of the master thief, however, but snapped back to the big, good looking young man with the branching shoulders and erect, ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... sent for us, and we mounted them, the animals kneeling at the word of command for us to do so. Our party, six in number, was divided so that four persons, including the driver, rode on each elephant. They were large and docile creatures, being respectively seventy and ninety years of age. Their shuffling, flat-footed tread is peculiar, but not very unpleasant, except when the driver hurries the animals; but even then the gait is not nearly so trying to the rider as is that of the camel, which is only comparable to a Cunarder pitching in a head ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... Miss Josephine. Now I come to think of it, I expect Hart is at home; I heard him shuffling about overhead ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... This was a new one to Ferris. His eyes followed the trio of puppies shuffling ringward. He saw that all three were on leather leashes and that their chains had been left in the stalls. Presumably there was a law against chains in the ring. And Link had ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... at the helmet. Tricasse ripped up the mail-sack with his long clasp-knife. "They stole our mail; they will not steal it again," observed Tricasse, sorting the letters and shuffling them like cards. ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... and then Mrs. Jakes, now the only servant in the house, was heard shuffling along the passage, followed by a ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... commences with a measured clapping of hands; a few low notes succeed, which, as the audience joins in, swell into a lively air; when some wild-looking "ghilly" in a long, tattered coat springs into the centre of the circle and begins shuffling. As he proceeds the singing grows gradually louder, accompanied from time to time with a more violent clapping of hands. Even shouts and screams are occasionally added to spur him on. Excited to the highest pitch of enthusiasm he then hops about with vigor, springing on the very ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... slowly, with shuffling steps. The quiet is broken by a note on a gong, struck softly, and there is an almost inaudible flute melody on reeds, and liquid notes struck on empty bamboos. These dusky figures are Kachin men, with red turbans, ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... heard feet on the gravel outside, round the corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling footsteps at the door, and two voices ...
— The Immortal Moment - The Story of Kitty Tailleur • May Sinclair
... overhead shuffling a little louder, as they seemed further off. They were climbing the stair he believed. They wore rubber heels! Link had worn rubber heels! And Shorty's shoes were covered with old overshoes! Had they come back, perhaps to hide from their pursuers? His heart sank. If that were so he ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... favourites of fortune, who had found an obscure asylum there; some picture of the crumpled little table d'hote, at two dollars and a half a week, where everything felt sticky, which went forward in the low-ceiled basement, under the conduct of a couple of shuffling negresses, who mingled in the conversation and indulged in low, mysterious chuckles when it took a facetious turn. But we need, in strictness, concern ourselves with it no further than to gather the implication that the young Mississippian, even a year and a half after that momentous ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... boy, a sallow, dirty-looking lad of about eighteen, but stunted and, dwarfed for his age, came shuffling by us, to follow the carpenter, and he held one hand to his eye and spoke in answer with his ...
— Through Forest and Stream - The Quest of the Quetzal • George Manville Fenn
... to set down," and the watcher squatted upon the floor, bracing against the wall. His dulling perceptions were sufficiently acute to detect shuffling footsteps on the porch and the cautious ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... kennel, you two," said Black Beard. And Dick heard the crushing under foot and the kicking aside of broken china, and a shuffling ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... three hundred good guineas here!" he said. There was a shuffling behind them, and, as Phips turned, a figure lunged on him, clutched and hugged the ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the Caucasian's habit of shuffling off on God those ills for which he will not face the responsibility himself, and I am inclined to think that this is one of them. In my own experience the explanation of "God's Will" made to the mother of a little family left fatherless, or ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... thank him, for the bishop's move shut up her play in a corner. She did her best, but her king's resources were cut off; and after a little shuffling she was obliged to surrender at discretion. Miss Broadus arose, pleased, and reiterating her thanks to Mr. Carlisle, and walked away; as conscious that her presence was no more needed ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner
... the voice of Baptiste. "I thought you would wish to know it," he added, and with that he went shuffling down ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... Brotherhood in America, of which the Canadian government seemed unable to say much that was definite, however they might have apprehended mischief from this quarter. It was known at home, that but little confidence could be placed in the efficiency and honesty of a Cabinet that tolerated a shuffling inebriate at its head; so that from the contradictory official documents reaching the Castle from Canada, through the Imperial authorities, it was, I suppose, deemed advisable to send me out to learn something of the true state ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... and only one dark chestnut. They are not cobs, and look 'very little of them', and have no beauty; but one of these little brutes, ungroomed, half-fed, seldom stabled, will carry a six-and-a-half-foot Dutchman sixty miles a day, day after day, at a shuffling easy canter, six miles an hour. You 'off saddle' every three hours, and let him roll; you also let him drink all he can get; his coat shines and his eye is bright, and unsoundness is very rare. They are never properly broke, ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... up and down they talked of professional beggars and what a problem they are to India, because they both happened as they turned to catch sight of Umra with the one eye, entering through the little gate in the wall and shuffling without modesty or a moment's hesitation to his favorite seat among the shrubs, whence to view ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... with soul intent On Death and Dread and Doom: The hangman, with his little bag, Went shuffling through the gloom And each man trembled as he crept ...
— The Ballad of Reading Gaol • Oscar Wilde
... graders to read and do math at the third grade level — and that's not asking too much. Testing is the only way to identify and help students who are falling behind. This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics. I refuse to give up on any child — and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... shuffling, in order to fight down his tears; but he had to snigger with mischievous delight at the idea of Jeppe's ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... know which. "Are you all right?" the Duchess' voice whispered, and no doubt my face was ashen. "Quite," whispered my voice. But this pathetic monosyllable was the last gasp of the social instinct in me. Suddenly, as the "voluntary" swelled to its close, there was a great sharp shuffling noise. The congregation had risen to its feet, at the entry of choir and vicar. Braxton had risen, leaving me in daylight. I beheld his towering back. The Duchess, beside him, glanced round at me. But I could not, ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... "Naturally," she nodded, shuffling the pack with her smooth, savant fingers and laying them out as she repeated the formula: "Qui frappe? Qui entre? Qui prend chaise? Qui parle? Oh, the deuce! it's always the same! Tiens! je m'ennui!" There was a flash of her bare arm, a flutter, and the ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... forward two paces, glaring defiantly at Dolores, waiting for men to follow. An uneasy shuffling of feet was his only answer for a moment; then his eyes shifted with cooling ardor at sight of Dolores. For a breath after he had ceased speaking, the girl stood like a splendid statue, except for the glitter of her eyes and a slight quivering of her limbs; it ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... satisfy himself it was alright, when he noticed Wilson shuffling about with the inner pocket of ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... to scuffle through 'em!" said Marjorie, as she led the way, shuffling along, almost knee-deep in the ...
— Marjorie's Busy Days • Carolyn Wells
... of himself, and of course the gas flared up immediately. I do not think that I had ever seen any one more surprised. This power of generating static electricity from their own bodies was naturally a source of immense delight to the Lansdowne children. They loved, after shuffling their feet on the carpet, to creep up to any adult relation and touch them lightly on the ear, a most sensitive spot. There would be a little spark, a little shock, and a little exclamation of surprise. Outside the children's schoolroom there was a lobby warmed by a ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... dimming ears below, a huge shout that shook the ground. Feet pounded him down into semi-unconsciousness; there was a mighty shuffling to and fro over him, and then the feet were gone. A huge well-remembered hand, caught him, heaved him upright. It was Grim. His face was a wreck, battered out of all semblance, but those blue mild eyes were flaming with ...
— Slaves of Mercury • Nat Schachner
... lies over there, but produces less and less every year. The land is exhausted," Sir Robert thought, "The fellow is either quixotic or doesn't wish to sell. I rather think the first: there has certainly been no shuffling and pretending." Aloud he said, "The soil can't be exhausted. It is virgin still compared to that of England, and all that it needs is careful cultivation. It seems to me that what ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... darkness pass after this. For the Moon has gone out. The very dogs are still, and I watch for the first light of the dawn before making my way homeward. Again the noise of shuffling feet. The morning call is about to begin, and my night watch is over. 'Allah ho Akbar! Allah ho Akbar!' The east grows gray, and presently saffron; the dawn wind comes up as though the Muezzin had summoned it; and, as one man, the City ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... From the room opposite came the sound of somebody moving a heavy package of some kind, and presently the man called Reggie and the Rajah appeared shuffling a big case between them. The box scraped over the polished parquet floor, leaving deep scratches as it went; amidst a strained, breathing silence it was pushed into the dining-room. Sartoris watched these proceedings with a curious ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... settlements again I should like to buy my Uncle Bob a present." With knitted brows he considered what this should be, canvassing Yancy's needs. He had about decided on a ring such as Captain Murrell was wearing, when he heard the shuffling of bare feet over the ground and a voice spoke ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... saffron, purple, pink, and golden tulips without number. The air was vibrant with unfamiliar noises. From one of the balconies near at hand, though unseen, a gong, a pipe, and some kind of stringed instrument wailed and thundered in unison. There was a vast shuffling of padded soles and a continuous interchange of singsong monosyllables, high-pitched and staccato, while from every hand rose the strange aromas of the East—sandalwood, punk, incense, oil, and the ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... bears were all shuffling across the ice to get at the sailing sleds. They were fast bunching immediately in the front ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... self enveloped in a similar apron, was dusting his room as he entered it. She nodded absently, with a casual "Good-morning, Mr. Smith," as she continued at her work. Even the placing of the two big trunks, which the shuffling men brought in, won from her only a listless glance or two. Then, without speaking again, she left the room, ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... saw that in the curious shuffling of cards he had been chosen as the dinner escort of a tall and stately Russian beauty. I watched them walk across the waxen floor and heard him say to her, "Sure if I had time I would telegraph for me roller skates to guide ye safely over the ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... tell the Lords whether, in old times, he, Francis Bacon, had not, under his own hand, repeatedly asserted the truth of what he now represented as idle pretexts. It is painful to go on with this lamentable story. Bacon returned a shuffling answer to the Earl's question, and, as if the allusion to Pisistratus were not sufficiently offensive, made another allusion still more unjustifiable. He compared Essex to Henry Duke of Guise, and the rash attempt in the city to the day of the barricades at Paris. Why Bacon had ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Nearest at hand was the half-moon of Indian lodges with the hollow of the crescent facing the stream, and a caldron fire burning in the midst. Around the fire a ring of warriors naked to the breech-clout kept time in a slow shuffling dance to a monotonous chanting; and for onlookers there was an outer ring of squatting figures—the visiting ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... alteration—apparently reflecting a mental change—so often to be seen in one who has consorted with Chinamen. Even the light eyes seemed to have grown slightly oblique; the voice, the unimpassioned greeting, were those of a son of Cathay. He carried himself with a stoop and had a queer, shuffling gait. ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... right," said Gertie, impressed by his deferential manner. "Only it seemed to me rather odd. And just now my nerves are somewhat jerky." He touched his cap, and was shuffling off, when she recalled him. "Stroll along with me, and let's have a talk. What do you do for ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... the young man behind the desk, and when the same freckle-faced lad, who had pointed out to Joe the manager, came shuffling up, the lad took our hero's satchel, and did a little one-step glide ...
— Baseball Joe in the Big League - or, A Young Pitcher's Hardest Struggles • Lester Chadwick
... habitat rarely leaves the forest, and it is a helpless animal in the open plain. The two dogs ran ahead, followed by Colonel Rondon and Kermit, with me behind carrying the rifle. In a minute or two the hounds overtook the cantering, shuffling creature, and promptly began a fight with it; the combatants were so mixed up that I had to wait another minute or so before I could fire without risk of hitting a dog. We carried our prize back to the bank ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... did," retorted Phemie pertly. But here a pushing of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her. Clementina fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded a leaf on the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door opened to the strangers ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... (1743-1805), a noted theologian. Cf. "On the Clerical Character" in "Political Essays" (Works, III, 276): "This same shuffling divine is the same Dr. Paley, who afterwards employed the whole of his life, and his moderate second-hand abilities, in tampering with religion, morality, and politics,—in trimming between his convenience and his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... come here," he cried in stentorian German. There was a gentle shuffling sound and a creaking of a board from the direction of the other car or room and a large figure appeared in the ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... a round shallow tray, 40 centimeters in diameter and usually of plaited rattan strips with a rim of thicker rattan. It is held in both hands and by a series of shuffling motions, which are better seen than described, accompained[sic] by a peculiar movement of the thumb of the left hand, the chaff and the little broken fragments of rice are thrown off into another receptacle for ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... shoulder. "You will find no difficulty. I will write again to-night. You must of course have money to get there and may need to buy a few necessaries besides; here is your first week's wages in advance," and I thrust a sovereign into his hand. He stared down at it with blinking eyes, shuffling awkwardly with his feet, and at that moment his face seemed very worn, and lined, and his hair very grey, yet I had a feeling that I should not regret my quixotic action ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... people that were on the streets sought shelter in the shade of the houses. Only sun-burnt street-pavers in bast shoes were sitting in the middle of the street, setting boulders into the hot sand; gloomy policemen in unstarched blouses and carrying revolvers attached to yellow cords, were lazily shuffling about, and tram-cars with drawn blinds on the sides exposed to the sun, and drawn by white-hooded horses, were running up ...
— The Awakening - The Resurrection • Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy
... in an empty pocket for his revolver, which had fallen out as we struggled on the floor. I saw it there now with my starting eyeballs, kicked about by our shuffling feet. I tried to make a dive for it, but Levy had seen it also, and he kicked it through the banisters without relaxing his murderous hold. I could have sworn afterwards that I heard the weapon fall with a clatter on the wooden stairs. But what I still ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... from the Father, but nevertheless agreed with Arius in thinking that the Son had a beginning of existence, were called Semi-Arians; and were received into communion by Athanasius, in spite of this disagreement. To me it seemed to be a most unworthy shuffling with words, to say that the Son was begotten, but was never begotten. The very form of our past participle is invented to indicate an event in past time. If the Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite time, but indicates a process ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... were making merry over their lunch, the door of the shop opened and shuffling feet were heard outside in the ...
— The Merriweather Girls and the Mystery of the Queen's Fan • Lizette M. Edholm
... goes down. A shiver follows the whiskey and a very little of the water follows the shiver. The man goes out with his arms close to his sides, his gait shuffling and his head hanging. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... for governing. He showed me his hand. I showed him mine. We played open-handed, like two at whist. He did not doubt my honesty, and I astonished him by taking him quite in earnest. He has dealt with diplomatists, who imagine nothing but shuffling: the old Ironer! I love him for his love of common sense, his contempt of mean deceit. He will outwit you, but his dexterity is a giant's—a simple evolution rapidly performed: and nothing so much perplexes ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... moment there was shuffling of feet outside, and Nepapinas came in. St. Pierre held out his two great, bandaged hands, and David met them with his own, one bandaged and one free. Not a word was spoken between them, but their eyes were the eyes of men between whom had suddenly come the faith ...
— The Flaming Forest • James Oliver Curwood
... within hearing, from oldest to youngest, would be wriggling and shuffling, as if through some magic piper's bewitchment; for even those who at first affected contemptuous indifference would be ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... more and wildly. The sense of it dawned on me. She was calling Goliath. He came shuffling from his usual hiding place—the curtains. A diverting little monster. I bear him no ill will. Although I grow slightly envious of his madness. Yet his madness is a terrific flattery. It is involved and piquant and ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... her at an awful distance, never venturing to offer her a bit of broiled lark, or set before her a dish of crabs,—beaming back with a grin from ear to ear, if Miss Agatha so much as smiled on her, breaking into the wildest of dances and shuffling out the shrillest of tunes after every such incident. Moreover, Miss Agatha was hedged about with a dignity of grief, and the indistinct pity given her made her safe from other intrusion; for Mas'r ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... usual. Will you make the third, Lavvie?" inquired Valentine, shuffling the cards. "It's no use asking Zack; he can't even ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... ketches, when the boatswain doubted whether any of these were the one he had provided to furnish them. "We are betrayed!" cried Rawleigh, and ordered the watermen to row back: he strictly examined the boatswain; alas! his ingenuity was baffled by a shuffling villain, whose real answer appeared when a wherry hailed the boat: Rawleigh observed that it contained Herbert's crew. He saw that all was now discovered. He took Stucley aside; his ingenious mind still suggesting projects for himself to return home in safety, or how Stucley might plead that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... across their chest and half-closed eyes. One of them came up to Lars Peter. "Are you doing anything tonight?" said he. "There's a couple of us here—retired farmers—going to have a jolly evening together. We want a partner." He drew a pack of cards from his breast-pocket, and began shuffling them. ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Shuffling down the long slope, its tired legs moving automatically, the drooping pony swerved a little and then came to a halt, trembling with fright. Startled out of his unpleasant ruminations, his lips tensing over his teeth ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... heard, shuffling and secret, in the hall and very near at hand. A soft, uncertain touch fell upon the smooth glass of the door; down its length the inquiring fingers traveled; then the handle was tried, held ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... hundred, fell into line together, and the men, of whom there were two hundred and fifty, joining, a circle was formed, which travelled around with the same shuffling step already described. The drummers and other musicians—twenty or twenty-five of them—marched in a contrary direction to and from and around the fire, inside the large ring; for at the distance kept by the outsiders the area ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... generally held, and the various articles exhibited, damaged and sound, under the shade of some tree in the centre of the town; where an Englishman would be amused to see one of the first merchants shuffling round with a handful of tea, and telling the audience that it is just upon the rise, and recommending that he be allowed to send home ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... to Nottingham he greeted the scowling gate-keeper blithely and proceeded to the market-place. Boldly he led his shuffling horse to the place where the butchers ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... the tense, suffocating hours of the night they heard the sounds of many footsteps shuffling about the outer room; there were hoarse, guttural, subdued good-byes and well-wishes, the creaking of heavy doors and the dropping of bolts. Eventually King, who had been listening alertly, realised ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... however, was not for her brother at that moment. Her eyes were fixed unswervingly upon the figure in the once-white drill trousers and bobbed swallow-tail coat and shuffling boots. She was staring from wide and, Caleb noted, rather horror-stricken eyes at the huge steel trap above the blanket pack. But the boy who must have received her glance full in his face had not faltered a step in his advance. He went forward until ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... little could be seen through the thick green branches of the tree outside. From the yard below came the sound of wheels, and of men's excited voices. There came also the twinkle of lanterns borne by hurrying hands, and the tramp of shuffling feet. In the window David shivered. There were no wide sweep of mountain, hill, and valley, no Silver Lake, no restful hush, no daddy,—no beautiful Things that Were. There was only the dreary, hollow mockery of the Things they ...
— Just David • Eleanor H. Porter
... on the lower steps, close to the Piazza di Spagna; but as one ascends to the last platform, before reaching the upper piazza in front of the Trinit de' Monti, a curious squat figure, with two withered and crumpled legs, spread out at right angles and clothed in long stockings, comes shuffling along on his knees and hands, which are protected by clogs. As it approaches, it turns suddenly up from its quadrupedal position, takes off its hat, shows a broad, stout, legless torso, with a vigorous chest and a ruddy face, as of a person ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... back quite white with fright as he did so. For there was a series of thumping, shuffling sounds, and a shrill noise that made ...
— A Prisoner of Morro - In the Hands of the Enemy • Upton Sinclair
... it came toward us at a ponderous, shuffling trot. I turned to Perry to suggest that it might be wise to seek other surroundings—the idea had evidently occurred to Perry previously, for he was already a hundred paces away, and with each second his prodigious bounds ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... ruffian—I would give you a clout on the head.... Go away!" Men in couples or threes stood pensive or moved silently along the bulwarks in the waist. The first busy day of a homeward passage was sinking into the dull peace of resumed routine. Aft, on the high poop, Mr. Baker walked shuffling and grunted to himself in the pauses of his thoughts. Forward, the look-out man, erect between the flukes of the two anchors, hummed an endless tune, keeping his eyes fixed dutifully ahead in a vacant stare. A multitude of stars coming out into the clear night peopled the emptiness of the sky. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... up, and carried him to Zelie, who was in a neighbouring room. She had brought with her some of the coloured bricks, and "nests" of Japanese boxes which generally amused him. He was soon sitting on the floor, aimlessly shuffling the bricks, and apparently happy. As his father was returning to the sickroom a note was put into his hand by the Rector. It contained these few words—"Don't make final arrangements with the Ramsays till you have seen me. Think I could ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... moment yawned, extending his folded arms above his head and stretching his crossed legs under the table as far as possible, upon noticing which all laughed. His Excellency wished to change the course of the conversation, so, throwing down the cards he had been shuffling, he said half seriously: "Come, come, enough of jokes and cards! Let's get to work, to work in earnest, since we still have a half-hour before breakfast. Are there many matters ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... of being four years in stepping from one door of the "White House" to the other, ceases to be the meed of a dignified ambition when it results from a skilful shuffling of political cards, rather than from strength and steadiness of ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... and finding it locked knocked on it impatiently with the iron ring of the padlock. Heavy footsteps were audible behind the fence as though someone in slippers trodden down at heel were carelessly shuffling towards the gate, and a husky female voice asked some question in German which Kuzma Vassilyevitch did not understand: like a regular sailor he knew no language but Russian. The girl answered in ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... familiar. They were evidently "habitues del l'enfer"—men to whom cards and dice were as absolutely necessary now, as brandy and tobacco to the drunkard. These men were always at play. Even the smallest interval found them still shuffling the cards, and looking up at every opening of the door, as if in hungering anticipation of the prey. At such periods alone might you behold any expression of anxiety in their faces. This disappeared entirely the moment ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... as he heard the shuffling of feet. Men were carrying out the prisoner. With feeble anger he brushed aside the hand of a cuirassier who was trying to staunch the ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... deadened, muffled, shuffling sound directly in our front, followed by a strange noise of scraping, as if with a dull ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... feet of the old man shuffling across the kitchen floor, and the outer door opening and shutting softly; and through the windows at the back of the room, he saw, without heeding, as the Belgians passed and went up into the fields ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... it was quiet in the jungle, the only sound being the wind blowing in the trees, or the rubbing of the rough-skinned elephants' bodies, one against the other, making a queer, shuffling noise. The big animals crowded together in the middle of the stockade trap, and waited for ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... loci, the Chevalier himself, was not the last to welcome this prime stay and ornament of his establishment. He came shuffling forward with a hundred apish conges and chers milors, to express his happiness at seeing Lord Dalgarno again.—"I hope you do bring back the sun with you, Milor—You did carry away the sun and moon from your pauvre ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... are merely innocent, and have nothing else to recommend them, but that there is no hurt in them. Whether any kind of gaming has even thus much to say for itself I shall not determine: but I think it is very wonderful to see persons of the best sense passing a dozen hours together in shuffling and dividing a pack of cards, with no other conversation, but what is made up of a few game-phrases, and no other ideas, but those of red or black spots ranged together in different figures. Would not ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... days since there arrived a prisoner, driven in on foot by a mounted Cossack, sent back by the officer commanding the reconnoissance party which had captured him. He came up the street, shuffling at a quick walk to keep ahead of the horse and the thin, sinister Cossack—an elderly farmer, in work-stained clothes, with the lean neck and pursed jaws of a hard bargainer. In all his bearing and person there was evident ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... a sound of struggling, renewed at intervals with silent but fearful energy. It was evident, however, that the parties were approaching the door, for he heard the solid oak sound twice or thrice, as the feet of the combatants, in shuffling hither and thither over the floor, struck upon it. After a slight pause he heard the door thrown open with such violence that the leaf seemed to strike the side-wall of the hall, for it was so dark without that this ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume I. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... Porky, still shuffling along. "Don't believe it. Don't want to be related to anybody as heedless as you. What is this school, anyway? Don't want to go to school. Know all I want to know. Know how to get all I want to eat and how to make everybody get out of my way and leave ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... This Trevor knew from description was close to the mountain range, in which lay the gully he was in quest of. The hope which had begun to rise increased, and communicating itself, probably by sympathetic electricity, to the horse, produced a shuffling gallop, which ere long brought them to a clump of wood. On rounding this they came in sight of ...
— Twice Bought • R.M. Ballantyne
... there not be a shuffling of the cards? Take the question of servant-girls for instance. Where there are two or more servants in a family their lot is far better than that of the factory girl. But it is quite a different matter with the maid-of-all-work, the household ...
— The Living Present • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... oracle, in a very oracular manner, shuffling the cards as she spoke; "no, give up nothing, but keep all you can. That is the way ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... and there was an air of dignity and refinement about her which made you feel reverence for her at first sight. As I approached to take the chair offered to me, the other person, who appeared to be a sort of attendant, was shuffling her feet to rise; but as soon as Mrs Delmar had said, "You are welcome, Captain Keene; sit still," she continued, "my child, there is no occasion to go away." I could scarcely help smiling at the old lady calling a woman of ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... crown, mine own ambition and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain the offence? In the corrupted currents of this world Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice. And oft 't is seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law: but 't is not so above; There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature; and we ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults, To give in evidence. What then? what rests? Try what repentance can: what can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state! O bosom black ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... to his father, who, dropping the plow-line with which he had intended to tie Simon's hands, turned his back to that individual, in order to prevent his witnessing the operation of mixing. He then sat down, and very leisurely commenced shuffling the cards, making, however, an exceedingly awkward job of it. Restive kings and queens jumped from his hands, or obstinately refused to slide into the company of the rest of the pack. Occasionally a sprightly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... the grapes fall; she then literally rolls over them until many are attached to her spines, and marches back to her babies in the cave. "One day," says Plutarch, "when we were all together, we had the chance of seeing this with our own eyes—it looked as if a bunch of grapes was shuffling along the ground, so thickly covered was ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... Perhaps none so grateful as OLD MORALITY. Curious to note how, when beholding the welcome last folio of his discourse, OLD MORALITY, uplifting his voice, said, "And now to——", there was a sudden movement in the crowd, a shuffling of feet, a rustling of garments, a motion as if the congregation were about to rise to receive the benediction. But OLD MORALITY was only about to observe, "And now to bring these imperfect remarks to a conclusion, I would entreat the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... Legerdemaine: that is, the nimble conueyance and right dexteritie of the hand, the which is performed diuers waies, especially three: The first and princiall consisteth in hiding & conueying of balls: The second in alteration of money: The third in the shuffling of Cards: and he that is expert in these, may shew many feates, and much pleasure. There are diuers and rare experiments to be showne by confederacy, either priuate or publike, all which in place conuenient, shall be spoken ...
— The Art of Iugling or Legerdemaine • Samuel Rid
... among others I shall produce to shew the disorder in which this pretended word of God, the Bible, has been put together, and the uncertainty of who the authors were, we have only to look at the first three verses in Ezra, and the last two in 2 Chronicles; for by what kind of cutting and shuffling has it been that the first three verses in Ezra should be the last two verses in 2 Chronicles, or that the last two in 2 Chronicles should be the first three in Ezra? Either the authors did not know their own works or the compilers did not know ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... vain that I knocked. No doubt they had heard me coming and had recognised me by my heavy shuffling step. The door was never opened to ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... a large creek that flanks it on the left. In the profound hush of things, every sound on either shore was distinctly heard. A large bed of ducks were feeding over on the Maryland side, a mile or more away, and the multitudinous sputtering and shuffling of their bills in the water sounded deceptively near. Silently we paddled in that direction. When about half a mile from them, all sound of feeding suddenly ceased; then, after a time, as we kept on, there was a great clamor of wings, and the whole bed appeared to take ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... gave Him the true perspective. Things worked into proportion. He never lost this wilderness perspective. The wilderness means to Him alone with God, the false perspective, the flaming of near lights, the noise of men's shuffling feet all gone. And when He went out among men for work, that wilderness atmosphere went with Him. And when the crowds thickened, and work piled up, and dangers intensified, off He would go for a fresh bit of ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... pale yellow light of the oil lamp on the Commandants desk fell on the military faces, figures and trappings of the men in the room. The shuffling tramp of soldiers in the dark street below died away in the direction of the river. I felt the military tenseness of the scene. I realised that I was inside the German lines on a bluff that was succeeding but might collapse at ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... when, as to-day, midwinter rains swept drearily past the windows, and the children must have the lights lighted for their writing lesson. She was tired of it all, with an utter and hopeless weariness. Tired of the bells, and the whispering, and the shuffling feet, of the books that smelled of pencil-dust and ink and little dusty fingers; tired of the blackboards, cleaned in great irregular scallops by small and zealous arms; of the clear-ticking big clock; of little girls who sulked, and little girls who cried after hours in the hall because they had ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... as the students call it, proceeded for some minutes, and nothing was heard in the hall but the sharp whistle and ring of the blades and the sound of shuffling feet upon the sawdust-covered floor. All at once Hollenstein turned his hand completely round upon his wrist in the act of striking what is called a deep-carte, remained a moment in this singular position, which seemed to confuse ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... chapel slowly died, And figures muffled by the moon Went shuffling home on either side— One seeking her—she said: How soon! And then ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... He arrives, shuffling his slippers along the floor, and examines all the laughing faces. As he cannot hear, he hesitates to sit down, and this time his ...
— The New Book Of Martyrs • Georges Duhamel
... worked by torchlight, and now and then a revolver shot, there had been added the inciting music of stringed instruments, cymbals, and such—some in dance measures, some solo, while immediately at hand sounded the shuffling stamp of waltz, ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... that," cried the hag, disabling him for the moment, by a severe blow on the arm from her staff. And shuffling off with an agility which could scarcely have been expected from her, she passed through a gate near her, and disappeared ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... flanked by composition metal reflectors, concentrated light upon the shelled spot, leaving the remainder of the room in variant shadow. The low murmur of suppressed conversation, accompanied by the unconscious shuffling of restless feet, sounded through the place. Becoming constantly more noticeable, an unpleasant, penetrating odor, of the unclean ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... with his feeble shuffling steps, so unlike the step of youth; Ida following him, thinking sadly of the autumn afternoons when he used to come leaping out of his boat—young, bright, and seemingly full of life and energy, and when she half believed she ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... for his purpose, and it had broken down under him amid evidences of confusion which he could not account for. All at once his sense of physical ascendancy had melted away—disappeared. He looked at Lady Cressage for an instant, and knew there was something shuffling and nerveless in the way his glance then shifted to the dim mountain chain beyond. His heart fluttered surprisingly inside his breast, during ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... whisper, for my ears were eager to catch the sound of my love's footsteps; so I went back to the gates again; then I heard a quick shuffling of feet, and before I could turn around my arms were pinioned, my eyes were bandaged, and some woollen substance ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... had scarcely ceased to echo when I heard the shuffling of feet within, and the sound of chains and bolts being withdrawn. The door opened. A man stood before me holding a lighted candle which he shaded with his hand. His faded black clothes, once apparently a butler's dress, his white hair and advanced age left me in no ...
— Winsome Winnie and other New Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... books must be put by for swords, I wot, When this wild journey to the West begins. 'Tis change enough! O shifting, shuffling life! Come, Shakespeare, magic mason, build me worlds That never shake however winds may blow, Founded on dream imperishable! (Sits and reads. ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... chance. I think there is a strong tendency in them all to excite a passion for gaming, which will not be satisfied without something more stimulating than mere amusement. If I see a boy rolling marbles, or a young man shuffling cards, I think he is in the high road to ruin. Marbles is a dirty play. It treads on the heels of low company and gambling. We frequently hear boys crying out, with all the braggardism of a practiced gambler, "I'll bet" so and so. But all betting ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb
... resume his forward march. If he halted again it would be forever; of that he felt perfectly assured, but neither the imminence nor the character of the peril in which he stood seemed sufficient to arouse him from his lethargy. Yet he kept on, walking with the shuffling stride of a mechanical doll; now he wavered and hesitated, as though the propelling spring had wellnigh run down. The night reek, hot and damp, hung like a poisoned veil upon his mouth and lips; he could not breathe; he gasped and threw ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... the pulpit, the lecturer began to read in a mechanical voice. The restless shuffling of feet and a volley of dry coughs soon spoke the hostile attitude of the audience, a longing for the coming of Valerian Harassan. The Professor did not heed them. He read on, pompous phrases such as might have come from the lips of Mr. Pound. He was unconscious ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... impossible. At one place I found the rocks wholly impassable, and choosing the broader of two ledges which ran left and right, I worked out along the cliff, only to find that the ledge ran into the precipices, and I had to retrace my steps, if the shuffling motions I made could be so called. Then I took the harder of the two, which zigzagged backwards and forwards across the rocks. At one place I saw a thing which moved me very strangely. This was a heap of bones, green, slimy, and ill-smelling, with some tattered rags of cloth about them, ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... wandering about the room, from one object to another. Sometimes he would fix them intently on the wall, and then suddenly starting, as if from a reverie, he would commence making certain mysterious movements with his thumbs and forefingers, as if he were shuffling something ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... mute, eyeing one another expectantly, each hoping someone else might have valuable information to offer. The hush finally was broken by a shuffling of feet as two strangers thrust their way through the crowd and ranged themselves on either side of ...
— The Substitute Prisoner • Max Marcin
... the trail and listened to the slow complaining of the wheels and the shuffling of the feet of horses and oxen in the dust as the whole train moved onward. For a little while he could hear them and could see the bulk of the wagon tops outlined against the stars, then the long ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs
... in their dreams to those who are left, that long night's march in the desert. It was like a dream itself, the silence of it as they were borne forward upon those soft, shuffling sponge feet, and the flitting, flickering figures which oscillated upon every side of them. The whole universe seemed to be hung as a monstrous time-dial in front of them. A star would glimmer like a lantern on the very level of their path. They ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is played by thoroughly shuffling all of the tiles face down in the middle of the table, and forming them in a double-tiered, hollow square, called the wall. This wall is then broken at some point determined by the dice and each player draws an original hand of 13 tiles. This leaves about two-thirds ...
— Pung Chow - The Game of a Hundred Intelligences. Also known as Mah-Diao, Mah-Jong, Mah-Cheuk, Mah-Juck and Pe-Ling • Lew Lysle Harr
... the mining town was already alive. The one long, irregular street was jammed with constantly moving figures, the numerous saloons ablaze, the pianos sounding noisily, the shuffling of feet in the crowded dance-halls incessant. Fakers were everywhere industriously hawking their useless wares and entertaining the loitering crowds, while the roar of voices was continuous. Cowboys from the wide plains, miners from the hidden gulches, ragged, hopeful prospectors from ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... looked inquiringly at Wollaston, who stood before her like a culprit, blushing and shuffling, and yet with a sort ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... bench sat John C. Underwood, a crawling, shambling, shuffling, ignorant demagogue who had set a new standard of judicial honor and dignity. He had selected one of the handsomest homes in Virginia, ordered it confiscated as a Federal judge, and made his wife buy it in and convey it to him after ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... was, it brought no immediate answer. Again I knocked; then feet came shuffling along the passage. I had aroused my sleepy wretch; doubtless he would come groaning (for Jonah might not curse save in the way of religion), and rubbing his eyes, to let me in. The door opened and Jonah appeared; his eyes were not dull with ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... however, without disturbance, or sight of an enemy, until we came nearly to the edge of the town and saw the glistening roof of the church appear above the foliage,—where sat sundry carrion-loving buzzards, elbowing each other, shuffling to and fro with outspread wings, and chuckling, doubtless, over the promise of glorious times. As we go on, suddenly heads appear over the bushes less than a hundred yards in front, and we hear the vindictive whistle of Minie-balls above us. Our leader, calling upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... and messieurs how you can dance," cried Chacot. "Strike up, Jean," he added to his son, who, getting down a riddle from the wall, commenced scraping away, and producing a merry tune. Up got the bear, and began shuffling and leaping about, in a fashion which strangely resembled an Irish jig, at the same time singing in a voice which sounded remarkably like that of a human being. The audience applauded; but the bear at length, ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... change her manner. There was in her, as her life had shown, a power of endurance, an ability to sacrifice herself in order to do the thing that seemed necessary, and to do it without shuffling or whining. Whatever else her career had done for her, it undoubtedly had strengthened this part of her nature. And now the result of her training showed. With her superior intelligence for the first time free ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... honour; the room was cleared, music struck up, and festivity was soon in progress. What a display of neat ankles and deft feet in mocassins! What a clattering of sabots and shuffling of "beefs"! The perspiration rolled off the brow of the musician, and young Lecour was whirling round like a madcap with the daughter of the ferryman of Repentigny, when the latch was again lifted, ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... lacerated souls, clutching their greasy dog-eared cards, climb to a squalid Valhalla, and there, in tobacco-stinking, sweat-stinking rooms, like those of the little cafes behind the lines, sit in groups of five, shuffling, dealing, taking tricks, always with the same slam of the cards on the table, pausing now and then to ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... us young bucks jest step up and say we was good dancers, and we start shuffling while de rest of de ...
— Slave Narratives, Oklahoma - A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From - Interviews with Former Slaves • Various
... During the intervening fortnight Dudley never appeared, as he used sometimes to do before, at luncheon, nor looked in at the window as we were at breakfast. He contented himself with one day placing himself in my way in the hall in his shooting accoutrements, and, with a clumsy, shuffling kind of respect, and ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... all the fierce lunges or gets out of their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous bundle.—If my young friend, whose excellent article I have referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence among the clergy, I am satisfied that we should ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Beevor's room and fetched the documents he had mentioned—at least they would keep him occupied until it was time to go to his club and lunch. He had no sooner settled down to his calculations, however, when he heard a shuffling step on the landing, followed by a knock at Beevor's office-door. "More work for Beevor," he thought; "what luck the fellow has! I'd better go in and explain that he's just left town ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... busy atmosphere, where his own studies took so much of his time and energy, and where everybody else was in some way similarly employed, that dismal self-consciousness which so drearily looked on himself shuffling along through fruitless, uncongenial days was cracking off him as the chestnut husk cracks when the kernel within swells ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... stamped in my memory. I can still see the scene in its every detail, and I know I shall carry the picture with me to the grave; the long, low room with its blackened ceiling, the garish yellow gaslight, the smoke haze, the crowded tables, Otto, shuffling hither and hither with his mean and sulky air, Frau Hedwig, preoccupied at her desk, red-eyed, a graven image of woe, and Haase, presiding over the beer-engine, silent, defiant, calm, but watchful ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... disorganised the manoeuvres by frightening the colonel's horse. In 1858 I was quartered for a time with a naval brigade; and once, when there was an alarm of the enemy, Jack went to the front with all his pets, including Bruin, which brought up the rear, shuffling along in blissful ignorance of the bubble reputation to be found at the ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... guide, whose legs stuck out like a pair of compasses beneath his tattered gown, his shaking head threatening dislodgment to hat and wig, while his elbows churned at every jolt, making play with the shuffling gait of his spavined and ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... 'I'm patrol-leader, and I give orders. I don't mean to go shuffling over the heath ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... the finishing touches to the last of the batch, when there was a shuffling of feet in the outer room, followed by a knock on the door. The next moment there entered a short, burly young man, around whom there hung, like an aroma, an indescribable air of toughness, partly due, perhaps, to the fact ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... retorted Phemie pertly. But here a pushing of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her. Clementina fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded a leaf on the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door opened to the strangers ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... expected, from the title of this chapter, that I shall introduce a set of ruffians armed with missive weapons; or, having named a trump, a set of gamblers shuffling and dealing out the cards: But whatever veneration I may entertain for these two fag ends of our species, I shall certainly introduce a class of people, which, though of the lower orders, are ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... a sudden cloud had come over his bright face, his figure seemed to have collapsed, the light seemed to have faded out of his hair. With a shuffling step, the very antithesis of his brisk, elastic tread, he turned to the door and ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not worth having, without the means of gratifying it. For weeks I lived in a state of continual fever; my nights were turned into days; and, during the few hours of sleep—but not of repose—which gave me strength to return to the gaming-table, the rattling of the dice and the shuffling of the cards haunted me in my dreams, with alternations of exultation and despair, as vivid though not as distinct, as in my waking hours. At first, (the old history of all such cases,) I won immensely, and this encouraged ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... requested. While he was shuffling the cards for a new deal, the players beat time with their feet to the music that floated in from the dance-hall. The tune seemed to have an unusually exhilarating effect on Happy Halliday, for ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... fearful mistake of attacking the animal. My friend Mr. Ernest Gibson, of Buenos Ayres, in a communication to the Ibis, describes an encounter he actually witnessed between a carancho and a skunk. Riding home one afternoon, he spied a skunk "shuffling along in the erratic manner usual to that odoriferous quadruped;" following it at a very short distance was an eagle-vulture, evidently bent on mischief. Every time the bird came near the bushy ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... comes back in their dreams to those who are left, that long night's march in the desert. It was like a dream itself, the silence of it as they were borne forward upon those soft, shuffling sponge feet, and the flitting, flickering figures which oscillated upon every side of them. The whole universe seemed to be hung as a monstrous time-dial in front of them. A star would glimmer like a lantern on ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her walk home, although Arnold Sherman laid himself out to be especially entertaining. Her heart yearned after Ludovic, whose shuffling footsteps she heard behind her. She feared that she had been very cruel, but she was in for it now. She steeled herself by the reflection that it was all for his own good, and she talked to Arnold Sherman as if he were the one man in the world. Poor, deserted Ludovic, ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... rapping was, it brought no immediate answer. Again I knocked; then feet came shuffling along the passage. I had aroused my sleepy wretch; doubtless he would come groaning (for Jonah might not curse save in the way of religion), and rubbing his eyes, to let me in. The door opened and Jonah appeared; his eyes were ...
— Simon Dale • Anthony Hope
... almost reached the limit of their strength. He had just reached the conclusion, having been interrupted several times by Abner's exclamations, when, ahead of them, on the road, they spied a figure shuffling along in the dust. The two boys were on the rear seat of the rig, so that the man, when he saw the rig approaching, having turned his head at the sound of hoofs, did not ...
— The Ocean Wireless Boys And The Naval Code • John Henry Goldfrap, AKA Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Lady Muriel had to stop through sheer exhaustion, but Mr Bunker, merely letting her go, pursued his solitary way, double-shuffling ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... no reply. I was wondering what The Author would have said had he seen us at that moment—The Jinnee shuffling ahead in heelless slippers and Oriental dress, upon his woolly head a red fez with a silver crescent on it, and on his breast a string of saphies, verses from the Koran, in exquisite Arabic script, framed in flat ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... question, Mama Therese preferred personally to receive all letters and contrived to be on hand at the postman's customary hours of call. But to-night she only realized that he had come and gone when, happening to glance toward the caisse, she saw Sofia shuffling the half-dozen envelopes which ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... something seemed to tell her that here she might find help. So, after waiting a little longer, she screwed up her courage again, and rapped once more, this time more loudly; and this time, at any rate, her knock called forth response. There were sounds of hasty shuffling steps across the floor, and then a voice, old and evidently trembling, called through ...
— Dick and Brownie • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... love, and the lights and the fire, And the fiddler's old tune and the shuffling of feet; For there in a while shall be rest and desire, And there shall the morrow's ...
— Chants for Socialists • William Morris
... Turks were back at school in Constantinople, shuffling their feet and throwing ink pellets at one another; Raisuli, home again in the old mountains, was working up the kidnapping business, which had fallen off sadly in his absence under the charge of an incompetent locum tenens; and the Chinese, the Bollygollans, and the ...
— The Swoop! or How Clarence Saved England - A Tale of the Great Invasion • P. G. Wodehouse
... Now I come to think of it, I expect Hart is at home; I heard him shuffling about ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... a rude table, was food and a jack of small-beer. Whether the time was morning or evening he could not tell, but it was very dark; what little light entered the room came through a narrow slit, high up in the wall, and all things smelled strangely of damp. Somewhere he could hear faintly a slow, shuffling step and the rustle of a dress; then the mew of ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... torrent-like importunity. "I'll try, sir," said the peace-loving old man, "but I have no hope," and he hobbled from the room. He left the door open as he went, and Harry, tortured by impatience, heard him shuffling over the hall floor ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... every man within hearing, from oldest to youngest, would be wriggling and shuffling, as if through some magic piper's bewitchment; for even those who at first affected contemptuous indifference would be drawn ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... dropping the log into place he may have made some little sound that reached the ears of the crazy man within the cabin. Max heard a shuffling of feet. Then the door was shaken, at first gently, and then with more and more violence, until the very walls of the cabin seemed to quiver ...
— The Strange Cabin on Catamount Island • Lawrence J. Leslie
... swiftly about. It came from the door of a noisy and crowded mart of chance recently erected, but already the scene of many quarrels. The blare of music which had issued from it swiftly ceased. There was a momentary silence; then a sound of shuffling feet, of ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... couple of notes, and the cotillon paused in the very act of the break. The shuffling of feet grew still, and the conversation ceased. A diamond brooch had been found, no doubt, or some supper announcement was to be made. But Jerry Haight, with a great sweep of his arm, the forgotten cigarette between his ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... and 'Stoneborough' was the cry. Hastily springing out, shuffling the tickets into the porter's hand, and grappling Leonard's arm as if he feared an escape, Dr. May hurried him into the empty streets, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... went into the drawing-room. The drawing-room was even smaller than the dining-room. On the walls hung some monstrosities of portraits; in front of the sofa, of which the stuffing protruded in several places, stood a green table; on the sofa sat Ivan Semyonitch, already shuffling the cards. Near him on the extreme edge of a low chair sat a spare woman in a white cap and a black gown, yellow and wrinkled, with short-sighted eyes and thin cat-like lips. 'Here,' said Ivan Semyonitch, 'let me introduce him; the first man's dead; ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... brutes lived on before they came to gaol. Besworded warders guarded the entrances to the various outbuildings. From twenty to thirty poor human beings were manacled in their cells, condemned to die, knowing not how soon the pleasure of the emperor may permit of them shuffling off this mortal coil: one grey-haired old man was among the number, and to see him stolidly waiting for his doom ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... came shuffling into the room in a pair of old bedroom slippers. She had on a skirt that she used to go skating in, and a somewhat tumbled middy-blouse. Her hair was wopsed around her head anyhow—it really takes one of Rose's own words to describe it. As a toilet ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... gold, lay where he had made his lonely camps; orchards nestled by little lakes and in mountain valleys where he had trapped the beaver; strings of brass-bound, vestibuled coaches whirled where he had ridden his pony with the pack train shuffling behind. And here, on the Coldstream, he had made his last stand, taken up land, and turned, when past his prime, to the quiet life of ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... seem to play with each other much," commented Colin as the two walked among the holluschickie, who showed neither fear nor excitement, merely shuffling aside a foot or ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... strayed, to infer our opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,— the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern Germans, they read ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... adverse for the moment to Arthur Berkeley's well meant designs for shuffling off the trammels of his ecclesiastical habit. He was destined to appear in public at least once more, not only in the black coat and white tie of his everyday professional costume, but even in the flowing snowy surplice of a solemn and decorous spiritual function. The very next morning's ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... stout-hearted one," said the ostler admiringly. "Tony and I a-watched her and the dog a-driving him through the gates. With his bundle on his back, he was a-shuffling along, a-nigh on his all-fours; and the madam at his heels, with her head up in the air, and her ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... Allard and William, shuffling into the recruiting office in Palos, doubtless think that this is a strange place for them to meet, and rather a wild business that they are embarked upon, among all these bloody Spaniards. Some how I feel more confidence in Allard than in William, knowing, as I do so well, this William of Galway, ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... said, holding up the big roan's head. "Don't you hang your head with me." He eased the horse to a jerky start and they were off for Brill's at a shuffling trot. Three times in the first mile Blue bunched himself nervously and made a few stiff jumps but each time Harris held him steady. The pace was increased to a long, swinging trot and he felt the play of powerful muscles under him as the ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... More visitors came. Shuffling and self-conscious mill-workers, walking on their toes; draggled women; a Chinese boy; a girl with a rouged face and a too confident manner. A hum of conversation hung over the long room. The sunlight came in and turned to glory, not only the tulips and the red tablecloth, but also the brass ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... he had struggled to this upright position, he was making frantic, miserable efforts to raise himself still further. He, too, had heard the dull thud of feet, the shuffling gait of men when carrying a ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... Our representatives in Congress have acted with such consummate unwisdom that one may say we have no future there. Mr. —— and Mr. —— (as precious a pair of rascals as ever wrought upon the ignorance of a country) have disgusted all thoughtful men of whatever party; while the shuffling of our better men on the question of public honesty, their folly in allowing such people as Blaine and Conkling to taunt them into cheap hurlings back of defiance (as the silly Southern newspapers term it), their inconceivable mistake in ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... everything,—the formal arrangements, further than as they promote the moral principles of government, and the keeping desperately wicked persons as the subjects of laws and not the makers of them, to be of little importance. What signifies the cutting and shuffling of cards, while the pack still remains the same? As a basis for such a connection as has subsisted between the powers of Europe, we had nothing to fear, but from the lapses and frailties of men,—and that was enough; but this new ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... us all. Mr. Tyler half rose and half frowned as he noticed Mr. Pakenham shuffling as though he ...
— 54-40 or Fight • Emerson Hough
... himself to his feet by means of any chair, table, or indeed anything that he may get hold of. To avoid injuring him, no flimsy chairs or spindle-legged tables should be allowed in his nursery. He will next begin to sidle around a chair, shuffling his feet in a vague fashion, and sometimes, needing both of his hands to seize some coveted object, he will stand without clinging, leaning on his stomach. An unhurried child may remain ...
— Study of Child Life • Marion Foster Washburne
... station was reached. An engine was shunting up and down, piecing the troop trains together, and in twenty minutes the Battalion was shuffling down the platform, the empty trains on either side. Two companies were to go to each train, twelve men to a third-class compartment, N.C.O.s second class, Officers first. As soon as the men were in their seats, ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... said the dealer, pausing in shuffling the cards, "I s'pose ye hev all hearn 'bout Walter Wyatt's ...
— His Unquiet Ghost - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... dread regalia, gifted with a charm Potent to the rebellious. When the bell Tinkles the school hour, inward streams the crowd, And bending heads proclaim the task commenc'd. Upon his throne with magisterial brow The teacher sits, round casting frowning looks As the low giggle and the shuffling foot Betray the covert jest, or idleness. Oft does he call with deep and pompous voice, The class before him, and shrill chattering tones In pert or blundering answers, break the soft And dreamy hum of study, heretofore Like ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... shaft of sunshine pierced the rosy glass windows and fell upon the hieratic figure of the bearded Christ, which glowed supernally. In the chancel the Psalms had died away and the only sound was that of sandals shuffling over marble floors. The man turned the lock. It was a return to the world as if one had participated in ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... beneath the desk came sounds of gasps, heavy breathing, then shuffling footsteps. Clayton pushed the picture back into place, then took off the skin-painted vest he wore, with the flat box on its inside. He snapped a switch on the side ...
— The Fourth Invasion • Henry Josephs
... about a hundred yards from the house, now scampering along and beating up the dew from the morning grass, now crouched nearly flat so as hardly to be seen among the tall green blades, then hopping quietly along with an awkward, shuffling gait, or sitting up on its hind legs, with raised ears, listening to some distant sound; but still as it resumed its gambols, again going round and round, tracing upon the green sward a labyrinth of meandering lines. Sir Philip watched it for several moments with a faint smile, and then said to himself, ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... in the kitchen when the two ladies came to pay her a visit. She was sitting in a low, stoutly made chair which had been fashioned expressly for her huge frame, and was shuffling a pack of ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... nature." During these excursions, we might suppose some varieties, which had the skin of the webbed intervals of their toes less developed, to succeed best in walking on the land, and in the course of several generations they might exchange their present gait or manner of shuffling along and jumping by aid of the tail and their fin-like extremities, for feet better ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... knew by their shuffling, Clubs would be Trump; mass, here's the Knave, and he can do any good upon 'em: Clubs, ...
— The Puritain Widow • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... far behind, just emerging from the scrub, are seen those who, from their wandering habits, must wear the bracelets, hurrying and shuffling along with a rattle of chains, tripping up in their eagerness to be even with their mates in the scramble for water: presently they pause to look about and neigh—a delay resented by those behind by a friendly bite, answered ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... No shuffling, no evasion, no embarrassment, even under this crucial test. The Colonel was nonplussed. He led Tracy to a chromo which had suffered damage in a former owner's hands through being used as a lamp mat, and said, with a flourish of his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... silence she Would mumble a sentence audibly, Or shake her head as if to say, "You silly souls, to act this way!" And never a sound from night I'd hear, Unless some far-off cock crowed clear; Or her old shuffling thumb should turn Another page; and rapt and stern, Through her great glasses bent on me She'd glance into reality; And shake her round old silvery head, With—"You!—I thought you was in bed!"— Only to tilt her book again, And rooted in ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... thrusting-spear, and the third, an exceeding tall man, bore a long broad-bladed war-sword. Thus they went, brown of skin beneath their flower-garlands, their long hair bleached by the sun falling about their shoulders; high they strode amongst the shuffling carles and tripping women of the later-come thralls. But when they heard the music, and saw that they were coming to the Gate in triumph, strange thoughts of old memories swelled up in their hearts, and they refrained them not from weeping, ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... hostile distance. To smoke or to converse was forbidden. In the dark, the black mass of the regiment, bristling with its bayonets like some huge, porcupine-like creature, crawled steadily onward, filling the air with the shuffling of innumerable feet. The men kept stumbling over each other, and swore viciously in half tones; they slipped in the mud and sank knee-deep into the wheel-tracks filled with cold water. "Some ...
— The Shield • Various
... Three, with a look on his face that could only bear one interpretation. Belinda had been perverse, unkind, icy—had, in fact, thrown him over. You could read it in the angle of his cap, in the broken lace dragging from his boots, in his shuffling progress, and in the dulled gleam of his brass-mounted cans. From that date he became a frowning pessimist, perpetrating wheezes and squeaks and mumblings, quaverings and hoarse murmurs, instead of the customary sportive yelp. 'Tis an unkind world, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... thunders of the cascade. She began to fear lest madness seize her if she remained longer thus supinely crouching amid the terrors of this place. Obeying a sudden impulse, she got up, and gropingly, with shuffling, cautious steps, moved across the cavern. When she reached the opposite wall, she got down on hands and knees, and crawled until her searching fingers found the emptiness of the hole through which the men had passed. Then, she drew back a little, and sat with ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... some of the higher officers, while three or four other young aides were near. The sifts of snow turned after a while into a fine but steady snow, which continued half an hour. The backs of the soldiers were covered with white, while their faces burned. Then there was a shuffling sound at every fire, as the men turned their backs to the blaze and their ...
— The Scouts of Stonewall • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and shuffling into the next room, he whispers, "Washington!" The girl is sent out to get refreshments. It is in vain that she seeks to sign or speak to the man who sits there so calmly before the fire, for her father is never out of sight or hearing. After ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... day of October, 1851, there was shuffling about the streets of Syracuse, in the quiet pursuit of his simple avocations, a colored person, as nearly "of no account'' as any ever seen. So far as was known he had no surname, and, indeed, no Christian name, save the fragment ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... when I saw that in the curious shuffling of cards he had been chosen as the dinner escort of a tall and stately Russian beauty. I watched them walk across the waxen floor and heard him say to her, "Sure if I had time I would telegraph for me roller ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... my memory. I can still see the scene in its every detail, and I know I shall carry the picture with me to the grave; the long, low room with its blackened ceiling, the garish yellow gaslight, the smoke haze, the crowded tables, Otto, shuffling hither and hither with his mean and sulky air, Frau Hedwig, preoccupied at her desk, red-eyed, a graven image of woe, and Haase, presiding over the beer-engine, silent, defiant, calm, but watchful every ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... grapes fall; she then literally rolls over them until many are attached to her spines, and marches back to her babies in the cave. "One day," says Plutarch, "when we were all together, we had the chance of seeing this with our own eyes—it looked as if a bunch of grapes was shuffling along the ground, so thickly covered was ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... depending on manual dexterity rather than physical force) is held by a woman; and anyone who will watch girls making change before the pneumatic tubes in the great department stores about Christmas time will experience the same wonder one feels on first seeing a professional gambler shuffling cards. ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... which I have not added a word. We shall see soon how Madame de Maintenon kept her word to me, and if I am not right in owing her a grudge for this promise with a double meaning, with which it was her caprice to decoy me by her shuffling. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... she heard the cautious, stuffless tread of his rubber-soled shoes shuffling along the hall. But Bunting only woke to the fact when the ...
— The Lodger • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... but I do not think it could have been later than the 20th. It had been four months since the day of arrival, a long, marvelous summer such as I would hardly know again. When I think of that time I shall always hear the ceaseless slippered, shuffling walk, and see the white figure with its rocking, rolling movement passing up and down the long gallery, with that preternaturally beautiful landscape behind, and I shall hear his deliberate speech—always deliberate, save at rare intervals; always impressive, whatever ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... from Kaluna brought out a man with a female horde behind him, all shuffling into clothes as we approached, and we stiffly dismounted from the wet saddles in which we had sat for ten hours, and stiffly hobbled up into the littered verandah, the water dripping from our clothes, and squeezing out of our boots at every step. Inside there was one room about 18 x 14 ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... different substance from the Father, but nevertheless agreed with Arius in thinking that the Son had a beginning of existence, were called Semi-Arians; and were received into communion by Athanasius, in spite of this disagreement. To me it seemed to be a most unworthy shuffling with words, to say that the Son was begotten, but was never begotten. The very form of our past participle is invented to indicate an event in past time. If the Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... to fourteen; afterwards folding the pieces identically, so that the numbers written upon them were concealed, and it became impossible to distinguish one piece from another. These papers I put on the ground in one of the men's caps, mixing and shuffling them all together; and next I called for a square of canvas. They brought me a boat's lug sail, which I caused to be spread flat and smooth upon the ground; and then I had the chest lifted on to the ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... he said irritably; "she knew she might have them if she wanted." It was as though he were giving a shuffling excuse for some fault of his own ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... and the singular vision faded with the reflected light which had filled the room. The moment after, I heard the shuffling feet of the slattern girl coming to show us out of the room, but, singularly enough, as you will think, not out of the house! Without a word we followed her—Adolph, who knew the customs of the place, merely slipping a five-franc ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... would return, shuffling, smoking a dangling cigarette, his hat cocked against the sun; he would give her full particulars and then return to his bell. . . . She had come to San Juan to make a home here, to become a part of it, to make it a portion of her. To arrive upon a day like this was ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... now connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson River at Albany, N.Y. There he turned architect, then returned to Europe, settled, married, and was knighted in England. He occupied eighteen years of his life in building an unproductive tunnel beneath the river Thames at London; invented a method of shuffling cards without using the hands, and several of her devices for dispensing with labor, which, upon completion, were abandoned from economical motives. On his decease, his son and heir, I.K. Brunel, whose practical experience in the Thames Tunnel job, where his biographers assert ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... might be, consenting, no doubt, to come out without being dragged; congratulating, perhaps (as the manner was), the searchers on their success. A murmur of answer came back, and then one sharp, peevish voice by itself. Again Mr. Garlick spoke, and there followed the shuffling of movements for a long while; and then, so far as the little chamber was concerned, empty silence. But from the hall rose up a steady murmur of talk ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... friend, and a short colloquy ensued, which ended in the latter shuffling off in the direction of the other revellers. Such is the buoyancy of youth that a moment later he was dancing a two-step with every appearance of careless enjoyment. The future, with its storms, seemed to have ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... the brother came rushing over him and he yielded himself again to the wonder of the situation till he was reawakened to realities by the shuffling of feet on the stairway and the raised tones of Mrs. Deo as she tried to make herself understood by her new and somewhat difficult guest. A maid followed in their wake, and from some as yet unexplored region below there rose the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... anything soft underfoot frightens a locomotive as it does an elephant. But the men behind seemed quite calm. The wrecking-crew were climbing carelessly from the caboose to the tender—even jesting with the engineer, for he heard a shuffling of feet among the coal, and the snatch of ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... still in the dark. You speak of shuffling and dealing; pray, for what end? And since you seem rather unwilling to die than otherwise, I must own that I cannot conceive what brings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... say you couldn't have done better than send him there,' replied Thistlewood, shuffling his feet and fidgeting with his hands. 'Mrs. Abbott is an admirable teacher. She quite agrees with me—I should say that I quite agree with her. But I am forgetting, Mrs. Rolfe, that you know her better than ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... M. Georges began shuffling them; the other turned to Graham and asked politely if he ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... on the night preceding his wedding was an Auld Licht ever known to stay out after ten o'clock. So weekly conclaves at street-corners came to an end at a comparatively early hour, one Coelebs after another shuffling silently from the square until it echoed, deserted, to the town-house clock. The last of the gallants, gradually discovering that he was alone, would look around him musingly, and, taking in the situation, slowly wend his way home. On no other night of the week was ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie
... affirmed that the law applies both to Europeans and Natives, the conclusion cannot be avoided that it is directed exclusively against the Native. This is the naked truth that turns all other explanations of the fact into mere shuffling and juggling. And the reader will find that in Section 11, at the end of the statute which is here reproduced (whether the omission of Europeans was a mistake of the Parliamentary draftsmen, or the printers, we know not), it is expressly stated that "this Act may be cited for all purposes ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... window, then quickly disappeared. He paid no attention to this, but soon he heard the vestibule door open. He thought it was his orderly, returning late, drunk as usual. The step was an unfamiliar one, and he heard the shuffling sound of ...
— The Queen Of Spades - 1901 • Alexander Sergeievitch Poushkin
... some. They go shuffling along, precisely as if their shoes were down at the heel—"slipshod"—and they could not lift up their feet in consequence. If it is dusty or sandy, they kick up the dust before them and fill their skirts with it. This is exceedingly ungraceful. If I were a gentleman, I really do not think I could ...
— How To Behave: A Pocket Manual Of Republican Etiquette, And Guide To Correct Personal Habits • Samuel R Wells
... man lived many years,—lived to hear tender voices bless him, and to see pale faces brighten at the sound of his footfall. Yes, for many years the quaint, shuffling figure moved about our streets, and his hoarse but kindly voice—oh, very kindly now!—was heard repeating to the children that pathetic old story of "Once ther' wuz a littl' boy." And where the dear old feet trod the grass grew greenest, ...
— The Holy Cross and Other Tales • Eugene Field
... light in the distance which marked their destination. In five minutes the horses dashed into a wide clearing. An immense log fire burned in front of a two-story structure. Streams of light poured from the small windows; the squeaking of fiddles, the shuffling of many feet, and gay laughter came ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... i. Shuffling—-Each person has a right to shuffle the cards before the deal; but it is usual for the elder hand only; ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... and tried to read, but the late fall wind swirled mournfully about the house and beat down the chimney, causing the fire to cast disturbing shadows across the walls. Her loneliness, and her nervousness, grew sharper. The restless, shuffling footsteps stimulated her imagination. Perhaps a mental breakdown was responsible for this alteration. She was tempted to ring for Jenkins, the butler, to share her vigil; or for one of the two women servants, now far at the ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... seen him when he stood up to sing at our concerts—his tight little figure stepping to and fro, and his feet shuffling to the air, his eyes seeking and bestowing encouragement—and to have enjoyed the bow, so nicely calculated between jest and earnest, between grace and clumsiness, with which he brought each song to a conclusion. He was not only a great favourite among ourselves, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... across the backs of chairs, evidently intending a serious session. In this procedure the last of the party now followed suit,—the Honorable William Jones, state senator from Belmont, Missouri. Seating himself, the latter now in turn began shuffling a pack between fingers short, puffy, freckled and experienced. His stooped shoulders thrust forward a beardless round face, whose permanently arched eyebrows seemed to ask a continuous question, his short, dark hair receded from a high forehead, and a thick mid-body ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... the governor seem to act the part of a ruler. He threw off, as with a violent effort, all of his shuffling and weakness, and stood before us a man. Perhaps the little sympathy which he saw expressed upon the faces of his suite was the cause ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... they were sitting in a group before the hotel when a man was seen approaching them with shuffling steps. Uncle John looked at him closely and Mumbles leaped from Patsy's lap and rushed at the stranger ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... A or B are such curious workmen, and can make a sham shuffle with a pack of cards so artfully, that you would believe they were splitting them, when at the time they will not displace a single card from its order! Such is the SHARPER'S shuffling. ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume II (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... returned with a pair of cocoa nuts lined with leather, which she put on her feet. Now all limping and shuffling was at an end. She threw away her stick and walked briskly across the glass floor, drawing little Jem after her. At last she paused in a room which looked almost like a kitchen, it was so full of pots and pans, but the tables were of mahogany and the ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various
... Timewell ended his tale a general shuffling and rising announced the conclusion of the meal. The company filed slowly out in order of seniority, all wearing the same gloomy and earnest expression, with grave gait and downcast eyes. These Puritan ways were, it is true, familiar to me from childhood, yet I had never before ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... door. There was no response. He knocked again, and listened intently. Now he heard a sound—like a smothered cry or groan. He opened the door quickly and entered. It was dark. In another room beyond was a light. From it came the same sound he had heard before, but louder; also there was a shuffling footstep. Springing forward to the half-open door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-stricken eyes of Constantine Jopp—the same look that he had seen at the theatre when his hands were on ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... pedal, Upward, downward, hither, thither, How the weaver makes them go: As the weaver wills they go. Up and down the web is plying, And across the woof is flying; What a rattling! What a battling! What a shuffling! What a scuffling! As the weaver makes his shuttle Hither, thither, scud and scuttle. Threads in single, threads in double; How they mingle, what a trouble! Every color, what profusion! Every motion, what confusion! While the web and woof are mingling, Signal bells ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... in Alfred's throat, and a good deal of shuffling done with his boots. It was so much more of a struggle for the sturdy boy than the gentle little girl; but he stood manfully on his feet at last, and his words, though few, were fraught with as much meaning as any which had been spoken there that evening, ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... pains to finish undressing with dignified deliberation. Sophia's behaviour under the blow seemed too good to be true; but it gave her courage. At length she turned out the gas and lay down by Sophia. And there was a little shuffling, and then stillness ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... midwinter rains swept drearily past the windows, and the children must have the lights lighted for their writing lesson. She was tired of it all, with an utter and hopeless weariness. Tired of the bells, and the whispering, and the shuffling feet, of the books that smelled of pencil-dust and ink and little dusty fingers; tired of the blackboards, cleaned in great irregular scallops by small and zealous arms; of the clear-ticking big clock; of little girls ...
— Mother • Kathleen Norris
... of New Comedy. Assuredly he rates it too highly, as later investigations have indicated.[38] But here for the first time we are able to quote a well-balanced appreciation of some essential features of Plautine drama: a "capricious shuffling of incidents" and "caricature." In fact it will be our endeavor to show that the palliata was not a true art form, but merely an outer shell or mold into which Plautus poured ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... boys clambering down the stairs from the conning tower and called out, feebly, yet with sufficient strength to make himself heard above the sound of shuffling feet. ...
— Boy Scouts in a Submarine • G. Harvey Ralphson
... so that wherever one goes, in every quarter and at every hour, among the busy confident strongly-stepping Parisians one sees these other people, dazed and slowly moving—men and women with sordid bundles on their backs, shuffling along hesitatingly in their tattered shoes, children dragging at their hands and tired-out babies pressed against their shoulders: the great army of the Refugees. Their faces are unmistakable and unforgettable. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... Than one of these same metre ballet-mongers; I had rather hear a brazen canstick turn'd, Or a dry wheel grate on the axletree; And that would set my teeth nothing on edge, Nothing so much as mincing poetry: 'Tis like the forced gait of a shuffling nag. ...
— King Henry IV, The First Part • William Shakespeare [Hudson edition]
... sides, and nearly to the ceiling, with carved bookcases of walnut blackened with age to the colour of old mahogany. There were a number of massive tables in the room, upon which the light fell agreeably from high clerestory windows at each end of the apartment. Meschini himself was shuffling along in a pair of ancient leather slippers with a large volume under his arm, clad in very threadbare black clothes and wearing a dingy skullcap on his head. He was a man somewhat under the middle size, badly made, though possessing considerable physical ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford
... light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam. Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse the ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... to bed. The shadows move about, And some one seems to overhear our talk. The fire is low; the candles flicker out; The ghosts of former tenants want to walk. Already they are shuffling through the gloom. I felt an old man touch my shoulder-blade; Once he was married here; they love this room, He and his woman and the child they made. Dead, dead, they are, yet some familiar sound, Creeping along the brink of happy life, Revives their ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... jacket, with a rusty velvet cap on his head, and very bright short-sighted eyes behind round spectacles. This figure appeared in the doorway, stood looking at them a moment, as if bewildered as to why he or they were there at all; and then, with a hasty shuffling movement, darted across the floor ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... heavy, shuffling step passed into the adjoining bedroom, and soon the wretched man was in stupor. As Mildred came out she saw Belle, who had returned from her work, looking toward the room in which her father slept, with a lowering, reckless expression that made her ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... glitters with flames and reflections. A cloak brushes aside, And the yellow of satin Licks out over the coloured inlays of the pavement. Under the gold crucifixes There is a meeting of hands Reaching from black mantles. Sighing embraces, bold investigations, Hide in confessionals, Sheltered by the shuffling of feet. Gorgeous—barbaric In its mail of jewels and gold, Saint Mark's looks down at the swarm of black masks; And outside in the palace gardens brown leaves fall, Flutter, Fall. Brown, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... sing in passing. I hear them in the orchards, in the groves, in the woods, as they pause to feed in their northward journey, their brief, lisping, shuffling, insect-like notes requiring to be searched for by the ear, as their forms by the eye. But the ear is not tasked to identify the songs of the kinglets, as they tarry briefly with us in spring. In fact, there is generally a week in April or ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... equipped with the thousand feet of sensitive celluloid film, and the operating handle, they had risen from the ranks of mere helpers to be expert operators. And now they were qualified to take moving pictures of anything from a crowd, shuffling along the street, to a more complicated scene, such as a flood, earthquake or volcanic eruption. And, incidentally, I might mention that they had been in all three of these ...
— The Moving Picture Boys at Panama - Stirring Adventures Along the Great Canal • Victor Appleton
... They surrendered, shuffling out and down the slippery stone steps. Each man dropped his gun in the little pile that grew and grew until the old Ranger shook his head, pondering. That men of this kind should have access to arms and ammunition of the ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... and musicians slowly, with shuffling steps. The quiet is broken by a note on a gong, struck softly, and there is an almost inaudible flute melody on reeds, and liquid notes struck on empty bamboos. These dusky figures are Kachin men, with red turbans, and short, white, very loose kilts and bolero ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... small stock of patience was nearly exhausted, we were rewarded by hearing the study-door slowly open, followed by the tread of a well-known footstep in the passage. The next sound that reached 60our ears was a quick shuffling of feet upon the oil-cloth, as if the person advancing had "shyed" at some unexpected object; then came the muttered exclamation, "Bless my heart, what's this?" And immediately afterwards Dr. Mildman's face, wearing an expression of the most thorough perplexity and bewilderment, appeared ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Now, the snout of a bear is its most precious and tender organ, and a blow upon that will rouse even the most timid species of them to fury. So it was with this one. She saw whence the shot came; and, as soon as she had given her head a few shakes, she came in a shuffling gallop ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... myself of such contempt, I made a communication to the French ambassador, Prince Polignac, and offered to go to France, and transfer to the French government, the entire advantages of the discovery; but after deluding me, and shuffling for some time, I found it necessary to treat him with the same contempt as ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 342, November 22, 1828 • Various
... doggery well worthy of the gallows, think Lehwald and I. "Could n't help it; ferocity of wild men," says Nadasti. "Well; but why not attack, then, with your ferocity?" Confused Court-martial put these questions, at Vienna subsequently; and Ruffian Trenck, some say, got injustice, Nadasti shuffling things upon him; for which one cares almost nothing. Lehwald, lying at Trautenau, had heard the firing at sunrise; and instantly marched to help: he only arrived to give Nadasti a slash or two, and was too ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... where the old city had been the ghastly sight of Turks cut down by yeomanry during a hot pursuit offended the senses of sight and smell, and when you saw natives moving towards their village at a rate somewhat in excess of their customary shuffling gait you were almost led to think that their superstitious fears were driving them home before sundown lest darkness should raise the ghosts of the Turkish dead. A few of the Jewish settlers, whose ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... had their effect with the angry, pushing, shuffling, elbowing, wailing, weeping crowd, in a pause like ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... the servant was contagious. Uel began to believe the master would come. He was congratulating himself upon the precaution he had taken in leaving a man at the port to conduct him rightly when he heard a shuffling of feet below stairs. He listened startled. There were several men in the company. Steps shook the floor. Uel and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... THAN FOR LIQUOR.—This appetite is far stronger and more uncontrollable than that for liquor, and we can spot its victim as readily as though he were an ordinary bummer. He has a pallid complexion, a shifting, shuffling manner and can't look you in the face. If you manage to catch his eye for an instant you will observe that its pupil is contracted to an almost invisible point. It is no exaggeration to say that he would barter his very soul for that which indulgence has made him too poor to purchase, and where ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... they told him that it was the Sultan's custom to make a banquet for the people on the first of each month and that all the lieges were bound to go and eat of it. Furthermore the women directed him to the racing-ground, where the feast was spread. So he entered at a shuffling trot; and, finding no place empty, save that before the dish of sweet rice already noticed, took his seat right opposite it and stretched out his hand towards the dish; whereupon the folk cried out to him, saying, "O our brother, what wouldst thou do?" Quoth he, "I would eat my fill of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... herself at the table and was shuffling a pack of cards. "Fifty-cent reading?" she asked, as he took the chair ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... the air of one considering deeply. Then he gave Thekla one of the surprises of her life; he rose from his chair, he walked in his shuffling, unheeled slippers across the room to where the old woman sat; he put one arm on the back of the chair and stiffly bent over her and ...
— Stories of a Western Town • Octave Thanet
... favours, fuss and fluster, incense, 'The Voice that breathed o'er Eden,' suppressed nervous excitement, maddening delay, shuffling and whispers, acute long-drawn-out boredom of the men, sentimental interest of the women, tears of emotion from dressmakers in the background, disgusted resignation on the part of people who wanted to be at Kempton (and couldn't hear results as soon as they wished), envy and jealousy, admiration ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... left, Felipe heard the door of old Spooner's room open and close, following which there was a faltering, shuffling step on the stairs and the thump, thump, thump of a cane, growing fainter until it could be heard ...
— Frank Merriwell's Pursuit - How to Win • Burt L. Standish
... of what is right, what is just, what is honourable, what is lovely in goodness. The man who imitates the God of the Calvinist, that phantasm of a morbid or dreaming imagination, cannot fail to have his moral sentiments corrupted, and to become deceptive, shuffling, treacherous, and eventually insensible to the misery ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... find Mr. Millard, a Frenchman, who is an employe of Mr. Bowling's, and is going back to Tezcuco with us; and we walk down to the canal with him, half a dozen Indian porters with baskets following us, and trotting along in the queer shuffling way that is habitual to them. At the landing-place we find a number of canoes, and a crowd of Indians, men and women, in scanty cotton garments which show the dirt in an unpleasant manner. A canoe is going ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Deerfoot could not stifle a feeling of resentment over the contemptuous behavior of Taggarak toward him. Instead of contenting himself with merely challenging the Shawanoe to mortal combat, he sent him word that all that was left for him to do was to choose between two methods of shuffling off the mortal coil. It was to be the Spirit Circle or by the knife of the Blackfoot. This scornful treatment of the youth angered him, and it was one of the reasons why he decided to adopt a policy which in other circumstances he would have ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... really a matter of common sense: We expect third graders to read and do math at the third grade level — and that's not asking too much. Testing is the only way to identify and help students who are falling behind. This nation will not go back to the days of simply shuffling children along from grade to grade without them learning the basics. I refuse to give up on any child — and the No Child Left Behind Act is opening the door of opportunity to all of America's ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... expedients must necessarily prove false and hollow. "Though a lie be ever so well dressed," says George Herbert, "it is ever overcome." Downright lying, though bolder and more vicious, is even less contemptible than such kind of shuffling and equivocation. ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... have the big front chamber?" said the little boy, shuffling his feet, and looking down at ...
— Captain Horace • Sophie May
... manuscript on the pulpit, the lecturer began to read in a mechanical voice. The restless shuffling of feet and a volley of dry coughs soon spoke the hostile attitude of the audience, a longing for the coming of Valerian Harassan. The Professor did not heed them. He read on, pompous phrases such as might have come from the lips of ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... he could not estimate. When the door was closed the prisoner lay with his head leaning against it, and for a time the silence was intense. By and by he found that by turning his head so that his ear was placed against the panel of the door, he heard distinctly the footfalls outside, and even a shuffling sound near him, which seemed to indicate that a man was on guard at the other side of the oak. Presently some one approached, and in spite of the low tones used, Wilhelm not only heard what was being said, but recognised the voice of von Brent, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... a glare of ice. Matilda was afraid, and went cautiously; Maria and the others took the opportunity for a grand slide, and ran and slipped and slid and sailed away homewards, like mad things. One after another, they passed her and rushed along, till Matilda was left the last, slowly shuffling her little feet over the track the feet of the others had made doubly slippery; when quick steps came up behind her, and a pleasant ...
— What She Could • Susan Warner
... reached to within an inch or so of the pavement, that it would have been impossible for a passer-by to have decided whether it was that of a man or a woman; but the manner in which it bent, added to a shuffling uncertainty of gait—a sort of "feeling the way" movement of the feet—as Mr. Narkom guided it across the pavement to the door, suggested either great age or a state of total blindness: an affliction, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... cracked a special signal. Whereupon, instead of ignoring the hoop as he had done before, he stuck his head through it and marched off with it hanging on his neck. All four hoops he gathered up in this way, and, retiring with them to his place, stood shuffling restlessly and grunting with impatience until he was relieved of the ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... come in, when Edith and the doctor appeared at the bottom of the alley, but her tone changed when she recognized the doctor, and she said, by way of apology, that she didn't like her daughter to dance before strangers. So the music and the dance went on, even little dots of girls and boys shuffling about in a stiff-legged fashion, with applause from all the windows, and at last a largesse of pennies—as many as five altogether—for the musicians. And the sun fell ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... Judge's bench sat John C. Underwood, a crawling, shambling, shuffling, ignorant demagogue who had set a new standard of judicial honor and dignity. He had selected one of the handsomest homes in Virginia, ordered it confiscated as a Federal judge, and made his wife buy it in and convey it to ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... the prisoner, the shuffling of the jury, the calling over and swearing in of the witnesses, the reading of the charge began. The narrow-chested, pale-faced secretary, far too thin for his uniform, and with sticking plaster on his check, read it in a low, thick bass, rapidly ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... He sat up and listened, putting out his hand to where his rifle stood in the corner near his bunk. The lad heard stealthy footsteps pattering about on the deck of the airship. There was a soft, shuffling sound, such as a lion or a tiger makes, when walking on bare boards. In spite of himself, Tom felt the hair on his head beginning to creep, and a shiver ...
— Tom Swift and his Electric Rifle • Victor Appleton
... here almost excluded. With great difficulty and much entreaty, the visitors prevailed on three grown-up ladies to stand up to perform the Otaheitan dance, which they consented to with a reluctance that showed it was done only to oblige them. It was little more than a shuffling of the feet, sliding past each other, and snapping their fingers. They did not long continue this diversion, considering it as too great a levity, and only the three beforementioned ladies could be prevailed on ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... of rice from each village. They are accustomed to carry burdens of from sixty to ninety pounds weight on journeys that take them twenty or thirty days; and it astonishes a lowlander to see with what ease they walk over these hills, generally going a shuffling or ambling pace. Their loads are placed in a long triangular basket, supported by a fillet across the forehead, resting upon the back and back part of the head, the broadest end of the triangle being uppermost, considerably above the head, and the small end coming down as low as the loins. ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the Red Schoolhouse. Examinations were over; books laid aside. And the walls re-echoed to thrilling sounds,—to happy voices and shuffling feet, to poetry, marches, and songs. They were practising for Commencement, for Closing Day. And at home the parents were busy, too, making white dresses and sashes for the girls, buying new suits for the boys in town, or making some over ...
— Half-Past Seven Stories • Robert Gordon Anderson
... glad to make you my compliments," said Mr. Gusher, making one of his best bows, and moving backward with a shuffling motion, "I am so glad to make you my friend," he continued, bowing and placing his right hand on his heart. Mattie's beauty was quite up to the picture Mr. Gusher had drawn of it in his imagination. But her manner was so cold and formal that it not only disappointed but annoyed him. Instead of ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Instinctively she approached him, and for the first and last time he touched lightly with his cold lips the forehead of her he loved so well. They mounted the steps, she leaning on his arm, and entered the rose-coloured boudoir where the marchioness was seated, impatiently shuffling the cards, while ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... in predicting a crisis; much less to tell when it begins to be nascent, or is fairly midwived into the world. But I should say the world was at the eve of the highest scene of earthly power and grandeur, that has ever yet been displayed to the view of mankind. The cards are shuffling fast through all Europe. Who will win the prize is with God. This, however, I know, detur digniori. The next universal monarchy will be favorable to the human race; for it must be founded on the principles of equity, ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... eye of the setting sun, beautiful, yet weird and menacing. It broadened, deepened, and every day countless streams swelled its volume. Islands waded in it greenly. Always we heard it singing, a seething, hissing noise supposed to be the pebbles shuffling on the bottom. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... for a long time he lay, listening. Was there another person in the room? Mr. Grimm's ears were keenly alive for the inadvertent shuffling of a foot; or the sound of breathing. Nothing. Even the night roar of the city was missing; the silence was oppressive. At last he opened his eyes. A pall of gloom encompassed him—a pall without one rift of light. His fingers, moving slowly, ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... southern side of the Seine. Then came the clatter of cavalry—the rattle of horses' feet, and the ominous clank of empty scabbards against spur and buckle. A word of command, and a scrambling halt. Then silence again, broken only by the shuffling of feet (not too well clad) in ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... have possessed—were extortion and the uprooting of the last vestiges of civilization and law; his instruments, the dagger and the lash; his amusement, the torture of unwitting offenders; his serious occupation, the shuffling of cards. For gambling the man had an insatiable thirst; he played once for forty hours without intermission; it was death to refuse a game with him; no one might cease playing without his express commands; no one durst win the stakes; and as a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... eldest with him until little Flora's head dropped, heavy with sleep, on his breast. Then a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he sent them, almost hurriedly, away. He had scarcely done so when there was a shuffling noise in the hall, the parlor-door was flung open with a jar, ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... one class, and all the penuriousness and rapacity in another, which met in the dissolute indolence of a peace of twenty years. But a more striking feature in these "Ordinaries" showed itself as soon as "the voyder had cleared the table." Then began "the shuffling and cutting on one side, and the bones rattling on the other." The "Ordinarie," in fact, was a gambling-house, like those now expressively termed "Hells," and I doubt if the present "Infernos" exceed the whole diablerie ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the shuffling of many feet for an instant—then a pause, a pause which was full of awe—then, with a roar like thunder, six hundred throats broke into wild applause for Jesus, whom such people ever gladly heard; and straightway, for the first time in the history of organized ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... see clearly the quiet upper lights, His sure guides. These forty days gave Him the true perspective. Things worked into proportion. He never lost this wilderness perspective. The wilderness means to Him alone with God, the false perspective, the flaming of near lights, the noise of men's shuffling feet all gone. And when He went out among men for work, that wilderness atmosphere went with Him. And when the crowds thickened, and work piled up, and dangers intensified, off He would go for a ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... crookedness and collusion between the Crown officers and Sir Peregrine Maitland. Each of the two officers concerned, immediately upon receiving his summons, caused the fact to be communicated to the Lieutenant-Governor, and each wrote a shuffling letter to the Chairman of the Committee. Later in the day the Lieutenant-Governor positively declined to permit the attendance of the persons summoned, assigning as a reason that he had not been made acquainted with ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent
... features are regular. His beard is worn around the throat and under the chin, and is perfectly white. His hands are small and soft; but his feet and legs are awkward and clumsy, and this gives to him a peculiar shuffling motion in walking. He is abstracted in manner, and when accosted suddenly replies abruptly, and ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
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