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More "Sprawl" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be— Needn't fence it in fer me! Jes' the whole sky overhead, And the whole airth underneath— Sorto' so's a man kin breathe Like he ort, and kind o' has Elbow-room to keerlessly Sprawl out len'thways on the grass Where the shadders thick and soft As the kivvers on the bed Mother fixes in the loft ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... vehicle whatever, but the fleetest no more than just touched the flying cutter, though a hundred soggy mittens grasped for it, then reeled and whirled till sometimes the wearers of those daring mittens plunged flat in the snow and lay a-sprawl, reflecting. For this was the holiday time, and all the boys and girls in town were out, most ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... a little more out of my work than I have made for a long while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences—they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much pleasure in their inexhaustible eloquence. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... blow the man down! Way-ay, blow the man down. O blow the man down in Liverpool town! Give me some time to blow the man down. 'Twas aboard a Black-Bailer I first served my time, And in that Black-Bailer I wasted my prime. 'Tis larboard and starboard on deck you will sprawl, For blowers and strikers command the Black Ball. So, it's blow ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... enjoy innocent fun as much as he ought, but, as I have shown, there are few or none in which the element of humor is altogether wanting. The two of whom I am just now speaking, shook with laughter, as they saw Lone Bear sprawl over Deerfoot, his heels flying in air, and their mirth became so great when the young Shawanoe used his crown as a stepping stone, that ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... intended, he gave three little taps on the wall and lay listening, all agog.... Three like little taps answered! This was so unexpected that at first he sat wondering whether he could believe his ears; then he began to swim and sprawl in his bed, bit his teeth so as not to shout out his overflowing delight and started banging on the wall, this time with his fists. It was too late to-night: to-morrow, he would go to her and ask her ... ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... heart began to beat again heavily, for his hands, which flew up, were resting upon one side of a long, slight, fruit-gathering ladder—one of those which sprawl out widely at the foot, and run up very narrow at the top, a form which makes them safe from tilting sidewise, and so balanced that they are easy to carry about ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and the skies ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... don't cut me soon, farmer, I shall sprawl on the ground," said the Rye, and she bowed her heavy ear quite ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... the failing party must be cast out of this presence. Later they learn that good sense and character make their own forms every moment, and speak or abstain, take wine or refuse it, stay or go, sit in a chair or sprawl with children on the floor, or stand on their head, or what else soever, in a new and aboriginal way; and that strong will is always in fashion, let who will be unfashionable. All that fashion demands is composure and self-content. A circle of men perfectly ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... right, child," returned the giant placidly; and then Verity put down Babs on the grass to sprawl among the daisies. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... one another as high as the hurricane deck, so that the roosters and the buglers vied with each other in continual contests. It was like traveling with a floating menagerie. Twice a day the bugles sounded the call for breakfast and dinner, and the soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on the deck around square tin cans filled with soup or red wine, from which they fed themselves with spoons and into which they dipped their rations of hard tack, after first breaking them on the deck with a blow from a bayonet or ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... Dale, And with the Lady prioress of the house To play at leap-frog, naked in their smocks, Until the merry wenches at their mass Cry teehee weehee; And tickling these mad lasses in their flanks, They'll sprawl, and squeak, and pinch their fellow Nuns. Be lively, boys, before the wench we lose, I'll make the ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... large, hundred-ounce poke of dust, and I unloose the thong. Suddenly with a mad shout I scatter its contents round the hall. Like a shower of golden rain it falls on men and women alike. See how they grovel for it, the brutes, the vampires! How they fight and grab and sprawl over it! How they shriek and howl and curse! It is like an arena of wild beasts; it is pandemonium. Oh, how I despise them! My gorge rises, but—to the end, to the end. ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... to the Punch-Bowl," said the Broom-Squire; "but I'll not go for half-an-hour, becos I don't want to overtake that lanky, black-jawed chap as they call Lonegon. He ain't got much love for me, and might try to repay that blow on his wrist, and sprawl on the floor I ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... as Sir Hubert Pine," retorted the millionaire, slipping off the stone to sprawl full-length on the grass. "I am truly and really one of the lot in ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in sculpture, in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures at points in the roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at others. Marvels of riches are lavished upon chapels and altars, which again are so burdened with bronze gilded or silver plated, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... silver bell you hear, That summons you to all the pride of prayer: Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven. On painted ceilings you devoutly stare, Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre,[51] On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie, And bring all Paradise before your eye. To rest, the cushion and soft dean invite, Who never mentions hell[51] to ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... a spot that will someday lie in the shade of a great oak, a group of students sit, sprawl, lie. The oldest of them is sixteen, and it is true that not one of them has any reverence for college degrees, because the entrance requirements demand the scholastic level of bachelor in the arts, the sciences, ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... you find as my fist runs to size, set it down to that quill, dear old pal; Correspondents is on to me lately, complains as I write like a gal. Sixteen words to the page, and slopscrawly, all dashes and blobs. Well, it's true; But a quill and big sprawl is the fashion, so wot is a feller ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... words when the giant carcass of Philip tottered and fell, dragging Kate along with it, who never for a moment lost or loosened her hold. Her opponent now began to sprawl and kick out his feet from a sense of suffocation, and in attempting to call for assistance, nothing but low, deep gurgling noises could issue from his lips, now livid with the pressure on his throat and covered with foam. His face, too, at all times ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... have been correct, that in her there was a resurrection of some unknown ancestor, either on the father's or mother's side. She was a big girl—her father was rather short and squat—with black hair and dark eyes, limbs loosely set, with a tendency to sprawl, large feet and hands. She had a handsome, regular face, a little freckled; but the mouth, although it was beautifully curved, was a trifle too long, and except when she was in a passion, was not ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... arise in a democratic society as frequently as elsewhere; but it might not be so well fed or so well assimilated. There would at least be no artificial and simulated merit; everybody would take his ease in his inn and sprawl unbuttoned without respect for any finer judgment or performance than that which he himself was inclined to. The only excellence subsisting would be spontaneous excellence, inwardly prompted, sure of itself, and inwardly ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... stride, Kirkwood was inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... live the grimy-faced workers, their sagging, shapeless women and their litters of children. Their windows open upon broken little streets and bubbling alleys. Idiot-faced wooden houses sprawl over one another with their rumps in the mud. The years hammer away—digesting the paint from houses. The years grind away, yet life persists. Beneath the grinding of the years, life gropes, shrieks, sweats. And in ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... shy at you; SALISBURY stout, and bespectacled CROSS, Each in his season has joined in the cry at you, Little, 'twould seem, to your damage or loss. Still you eight-headed and lanky-limbed monster, you Sprawl and monopolise, spread and devour. Many assail you, but hitherto, none stir you. Say, has the hero arrived, and the hour? No Infant Hercules, surely, can tackle you, Ancient abortion, with hope of success. It needeth a true full-grown hero to shackle you, Jupiter's ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... When, at last, Hodges stirred from his indolent sprawl, knocked the dottle from his pipe, and looked up at her, she shrank visibly. The blood rushed back to her heart in a flood, leaving her pallid, and she was trembling. Even in the feeble light from the guttering candle, Hodges could ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... by a certain grim Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: "Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered." There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... shelves admit not any modern book. And now the chapel's silver bell you hear, That summons you to all the pride of prayer; Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven. On painted ceilings you devoutly stare, Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre, On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie, And bring all Paradise before your eye. To rest, the cushion and soft Dean invite, Who never mentions hell to ears polite. But hark! the chiming clocks to dinner call; A hundred ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... view to the east. Here barren pastures sprawl over the hills, dotted in places with herds of cattle or flocks of mountain sheep. But the Valley of Lavedan, which we expected now to overlook, is not yet in sight. After a long descent before us, there is another ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... perfume. The Abbey stands in a rocky valley looking south. The grounds are laid out in a succession of terraces, and from every nook and crevice rare specimens of cacti, sedums, and mesembryanthemums with their orange and purple bloom sprawl over the rocks and run riot among the borders. In the gardens South American aloes throw up their flowering stalks heavy with aromatic fragrance, 20 feet high, and giant dracaenas wave their feathery heads in the balmy breeze. Exotic palms, the bamboo, the sugar-cane, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... may be said that other countries produce the freckle-backed salmon and the dark broad-shouldered turbot; though trout frequent many a stream besides those of England, and lobsters sprawl on other sands than ours; yet, let it be remembered, that our native country possesses these altogether, while other lands only know them separately; that, above all, whitebait is peculiarly our country's—our city's own! Blessings and eternal praises be on ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... having missed the excitement at Bogova, he fairly writhed with envy of Stubbs and Wilson. As he listened he hitched back and forth in his chair, leaned over the table until he threatened to sprawl among the glasses, and groaned jealously at every crisis. Wilson told his story as simply as possible from its beginning; the scenes at the house, his finding the map, his adventures in Bogova, the ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... out in much better spirits. But they make not many steps—if steps they can be called—before discovering the difficulties at which the old sealer has hinted, saying, "ye'll see." Steps, indeed! Their progress is more a sprawl than a walk; a continuous climb and scramble over trunks of fallen trees, many so decayed as to give way under their weight, letting them down to their armpits in a mass of sodden stuff, as soft as mud, and equally bedaubing. Even if disposed, they could no longer laugh at the cook's changed colour, ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... didn't behave well at all. They seemed to want to do everything they could to bother them. They would sprawl way apart; then they would toe in and run into ...
— The Dutch Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... the design is spoilt by the broken and curly volutes which sprawl across the aisles, by ugly finials at the corners, and by a rather clumsy balustrading ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... dim afternoon was closing, he was allowed, for half an hour before sleep, to sprawl upon the carpet in front of the fire. He had with him his rattle and a large bear which he stroked because it was comfortable; he had no personal ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... the place, went on—all the offices of life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce less that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions rage and plots thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps even to anything ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... repair day, rips are sewed up, buttons sewed on clothing, and for the initiated, the darning of socks. In camps with permanent buildings a big log fire roars in the fireplace, the boys sprawl on the floor with their faces toward the fire, and while the rain plays a tattoo[1] upon the roof some one reads aloud an interesting story, such as "Treasure Island," "The Shadowless Man," "The Bishop's Shadow," ...
— Camping For Boys • H.W. Gibson
... as a professor or expounder. He says indeed many happy things about his favourite passages, but they evidently represent rather afterthought than forethought. He is not good at generalities, and when he tries them is apt, instead of flying (as an Ariel of criticism should do), to sprawl. Yet it was impossible for a man who was so almost invariably right in particulars, to go very wrong in general; and the worst that can be said of Leigh Hunt's general critical axioms and conclusions is that they are much better than the reasons that support them. ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... to her. At night when the young king was sleeping, his wife was to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about him. When this was done, he woke up and cried "Oh, what makes me shudder so?—-what makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah! now I know what it ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... chickens were piled on top of one another as high as the hurricane deck, so that the roosters and the buglers vied with each other in continual contests. It was like traveling with a floating menagerie. Twice a day the bugles sounded the call for breakfast and dinner, and the soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on the deck around square tin cans filled with soup or red wine, from which they fed themselves with spoons and into which they dipped their rations of hard tack, after first breaking them on the ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... seemly toggery of the godly, and enter meekly into the tabernacle, hoping to pass unobserved, the parson is sure to detect us and explode a bombful of bosh upon our devoted head. No sooner do we pick up a religious weekly than we stumble and sprawl through a bewildering succession of inanities, manufactured expressly to ensnare our simple feet. If we take up a tract we are laid out cold by an apostolic knock straight from the clerical shoulder. We cannot walk out of a pleasant Sunday without being keeled Over by a stroke of pious lightning ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... made a little more out of my work than I have made for a long while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences—they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles and quack drugs from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sprawl," Roy said. "There are more of us, too, only they're not here. They're by ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... water on the Bayport boundary. On pleasant Saturday afternoons or Sundays, when the poetic fit was on him, Albert, with a half dozen pencils in his pocket, and a rhyming dictionary and a scribbling pad in another, was wont to stroll towards one or the other of these two retreats. There he would sprawl amid the beachgrass or upon the pine-needles and dream and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... calves were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... deck, shivering slightly under the throb of the engines, or occasionally swaying slowly forward or slowly back as the ship's course changes, but otherwise motionless, for here the sea is always calm. You raise your head, look about, sprawl in a new position on your mattress, fall asleep. On one of these occasions you find unexpectedly that the velvet-gray night has become steel-gray dawn, and that the kindly old quartermaster is bending over you. Sleepily, very sleepily, ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... goldfinch's nest, and "the flat stone on which he heard, for the first time, the mellow ringing of the bellringer frog." (1/4.) Later, when writing to his brother, he was to recall the good days of still careless life, when "he would sprawl, the sun on his belly, on the mosses of the wood of Vezins, eating his black bread and cream" or "ring the bells of Saint-Lons" and "pull the tails of the bulls of ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... never finished, for with a sprawl, the "Parson" stumbled over the blade of grass and came down on the ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks
... Roasting clams as in the old days When the Tamals lived upon it. Gone are now the limpid shallows; Gone the oysters and the mussels, And no more are grassy meadows Dappled with the spreading oak trees; For great factories, grim and sordid, Sprawl in squalid blocks around it, And the smoke of forge and furnace Rise from ...
— The Legends of San Francisco • George W. Caldwell
... inspired but little affection. The younger apes Tarzan still played with occasionally. In his savage way he loved them; but they were far from satisfying or restful companions. Tantor was a great mountain of calm, of poise, of stability. It was restful and satisfying to sprawl upon his rough pate and pour one's vague hopes and aspirations into the great ears which flapped ponderously to and fro in apparent understanding. Of all the jungle folk, Tantor commanded Tarzan's greatest love since Kala had been taken from him. Sometimes ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... gudgeons brought to her. At night when the young king was sleeping, his wife was to draw the clothes off him and empty the bucketful of cold water with the gudgeons in it over him, so that the little fishes would sprawl about him. When this was done, he woke up and cried "Oh, what makes me shudder so?—-what makes me shudder so, dear wife? Ah! now I know ...
— Household Tales by Brothers Grimm • Grimm Brothers
... little ducks, even if hatched at all, soon die. The way by which those who buy them find out whether they are likely to live, is by holding them up by their beaks. If the heat has not been too great, they will sprawl out their little wings and feet, but if hatched too soon they hang motionless. They are fed on boiled rice, herbs, and little fish, chopped small. When old enough to learn to swim, they are put under the care of a clever old duck, trained to the business. A number of these ducks ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... stretched out in swifter stride, Kirkwood was inspired to put a spoke in his wheel; and a foot thrust suddenly out from behind the gate-post accomplished his purpose with more success than he had dared anticipate. Stumbling, the mate plunged headlong, arms and legs a-sprawl; and the momentum of his pace, though checked, carried him along the sidewalk, face downwards, a full yard ere he ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... him by the peculiar slant of his slouch hat, the rosy glow of his face, and the way in which his trousers clung to the curves of his well-developed legs, and ended in a sprawl that half covered his shoes. I recognized, too, a carpet-bag, a ninety-nine-cent affair, an "occasion," with galvanized iron clasps and paper-leather sides,—the ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... sleepy. Nothing to be seen outside, but darkness made visible; nothing inside but every variety of bunch into which the human form can be twisted, rolled, or "massed," as Miss Prescott says of her jewels. Every man's legs sprawl drowsily, every woman's head (but mine,) nods, till it finally settles on somebody's shoulder, a new proof of the truth of the everlasting oak and vine simile; children fret; lovers whisper; old folks snore, and somebody privately imbibes ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... holding Watts in a sitting posture by a firm grip on his collar, allowed the limp figure to sprawl headlong again. He wanted to plunge both hands deeply into his trousers pockets, because men of his type associate attitude so closely with thought that the one is apt to become almost dependent on the other. And so, ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... Once, when it looked as if Nelson were getting the worst of it, French Frank and John Barleycorn sprang unfairly into the fight. Scotty protested and reached for French Frank, who whirled upon him and fell on top of him in a pummelling clinch after a sprawl of twenty feet across the sand. In the course of separating these two, half a dozen fights started amongst the rest of us. These fights were finished, one way or the other, or we separated them with drinks, while all the time Nelson and Soup Kennedy ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... Presently, perhaps, there would be a baby, and then their cup of domestic happiness would be overflowing. Babcock's long ungratified yearning for the things of the spirit were fully met by these cosey evenings, which he would have been glad to continue to the crack of doom. To smoke and sprawl and read a little, and exchange chit-chat, was poetry enough for him. So contented was he that his joy was apt to find an outlet in ditties and whistling—he possessed a slightly tuneful, rollicking knack at both—a proceeding which commonly culminated in his causing Selma to sit beside him on ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... after, shouting for help. Then Keston stumbled and went down in a sprawl on the rough gray ice. The bear was almost on him and there was nothing I ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... happy-hearted indifference to morals. It was fight or look on, all day and every day; and sing, gamble, dance, carouse half the night every night. They had a most noble good time. You never saw such people. Those banks of beautiful ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors, would see a knight sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lanceshaft the thickness of your ankle clean through him and the blood spouting, and instead of fainting they would clap their hands and crowd each other for a better view; only sometimes one would dive into her handkerchief, and look ostentatiously broken-hearted, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... it, the huddle of the green body and the fantastic sprawl of the limbs in the moonlight told me clearly enough that it was all over with him. My bullet had passed through his heart, and it was only his own iron will which had held him so long in the saddle. He had lived hard, this ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... two hundred varieties of cowpeas. These varieties differ in form, in the size of seed and of pod, in the color of seed and of pod, and in the time of ripening. They differ, too, in the manner of growth. Some grow erect; others sprawl on the ground. In selecting varieties it is well to choose those that grow straight up, those that are hardy, those that fruit early and abundantly, and those that hold their leaves. The variety selected for seed should also suit ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... somewhere about the calves of those lean legs that were carrying him over the roots with such provoking rapidity, and have often wondered since why I refrained; but I did, and continued to scuttle after him, now slipping down and barking my shins, now nearly losing my carbine, and often compelled to sprawl on all fours. He was now forty or fifty yards ahead of me, and I was nearly giving up the useless chase, when an unforeseen accident turned the tables in my favour, and caused me to push on with redoubled vigour. As we approached the bay, the whole of the roots and lower portions of the ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... divided we sprawl," Roy said. "There are more of us, too, only they're not here. They're by ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a world it is— Where full-grown men cut capers in the German, Cotillion, waltz, or what you will, and whizz And spin and hop and sprawl about like mermen! I wonder if our future Grant or Sherman, As these youths pass their time, is passing his— If eagles ever come from painted eggs, Or deeds of arms succeed to ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl, Here godless boys God's glories squall, Here Scotsmen's heads do guard the wall, But Corby's walks ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... And with the Lady prioress of the house To play at leap-frog, naked in their smocks, Until the merry wenches at their mass Cry teehee weehee; And tickling these mad lasses in their flanks, They'll sprawl, and squeak, and pinch their fellow Nuns. Be lively, boys, before the wench we lose, I'll make the ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... chapel's silver bell you hear, That summons you to all the pride of prayer: Light quirks of music, broken and uneven, Make the soul dance upon a jig to heaven. On painted ceiling you devoutly stare, Where sprawl the saints of Verrio or Laguerre, On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie, And bring all ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... the shadows. I ask, where am I? Go way, then, Mallare. Leave me. I persist without Mallare. I remain. Let me dissolve into this. Let me sprawl before the door of enchantments. It is illusion. Let it be. She will come out. Rita, my vanished one, come back to me. It is I who ask. Not the Cold One, not the Indifferent One, not Mallare. But I ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... irregular. The cloister is duly placed on the south side of the church, and the chief buildings occupy their usual positions round it. But the cloister garth, as at Chichester, is not rectangular, and all the surrounding buildings are thus made to sprawl in a very awkward fashion. The church follows the plan adopted by the Austin canons in their northern abbeys, and has only one aisle to the nave—that to the north; while the choir is long, narrow and aisleless. Each transept has an aisle to the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... smile at the expense of a fellow-creature who has loyally held out his hand to her, she is casting herself into a mire from which it will be impossible, with the best will in the world, ever to rescue her. I dwell so many miles above the puddles in which these filthy little vermin sprawl and crawl and bawl their cheap obscenities, that I cannot possibly be spattered by the witticisms of a Verdurin!" he cried, tossing up his head and arrogantly straightening his body. "God knows that I have honestly attempted to pull Odette out of that sewer, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... the little Jew's oration was interrupted by the hostile impact of a fist upon the point of his bearded chin and he toppled backward to a sprawl on the pavement. ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... summer of 1921 made it the first impulse of travelers to plunge straight into the cool, kindly ocean, where they could wade and bathe in the surf, sprawl for hours in the sand, or indulge in races and various games ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... through happiness, Shoals of small bright fishes were; In and out weed-thickets bent Perch and carp, and sauntering went With mounching jaws and eyes a-stare; Or on a lotus leaf would crawl A brindled loach to bask and sprawl, Tasting the warm sun ere it dipped Into the water; but quick as fear Back his shining brown head slipped To crouch on the gravel of his lair, Where the cooled sunbeams, broke in wrack, Spilt shattered ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... Mary proudly. "I transplanted them, and I put them in close. Pa said I would need to take out every second one, but I said we'd try them this way for once. You know the way cabbages sprawl and straggle all over the place—all gone to leaves. Well, mine won't, you bet, they'll heart up, because there's nothing else for them to do. Pa admits now its the best way. They've got no room to grow spraddly and ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... unloose the thong. Suddenly with a mad shout I scatter its contents round the hall. Like a shower of golden rain it falls on men and women alike. See how they grovel for it, the brutes, the vampires! How they fight and grab and sprawl over it! How they shriek and howl and curse! It is like an arena of wild beasts; it is pandemonium. Oh, how I despise them! My gorge rises, but—to the end, to the end. I ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... rave, they laugh, they thirst, they lap the stream That trickles from the regal vestments down, And, lapping, smack their heated chaps for more, And ply their daggers for it, till the kings All die and lie in a crooked sprawl of death, Ungainly, foul, and stiff as any heap Of villeins rotting on a battle-field. 'Tis true, that when these things have come to pass Then never a king shall rule again in France, For every villein shall be king in France: And who ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... on the fingers on one hand were sufficient to decide the issue. A shot sung in through the uncovered window which carried back no "spat" to the man who fired it. But the eyes which had guided it beheld the half-breed at the counter sprawl across the account book which had yielded him so much satisfaction. Almost at the instant of his fall a lean, agile, dusky, disreputable figure leaped into the room through the aperture which his knife ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... head, and finishing his tea went on deck with the cook, and gave himself up to all the delights of a quiet sprawl. Fatigued with their exertions, neither of them moved until nine o'clock, and then, with a farewell glance in the direction in which Dick might be expected to come, ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... to any vehicle whatever, but the fleetest no more than just touched the flying cutter, though a hundred soggy mittens grasped for it, then reeled and whirled till sometimes the wearers of those daring mittens plunged flat in the snow and lay a-sprawl, reflecting. For this was the holiday time, and all the boys and girls in town were out, most of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... old fire blaze An' the youngsters shout An' the dog on the rug Sprawl full length out, An' Mother an' I Sort o' settle down— An' it's little we ...
— When Day is Done • Edgar A. Guest
... standing around. When we left Bolivar we were in considerable of a hurry, with no time to primp or comb our hair, and neither did we bring our tents along, so we are just living out of doors now, and "boarding at Sprawl's." There is plenty of wood, though, to make fires, and we have jayhawked enough planks and boards to lie on to keep us out of the mud, so we just curl up at night in our blankets with all our clothes ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... from Paris some day, stop a night at Amiens and take the Cathedral seriously. Half the stately interior of that glorious thirteenth century pile is encrusted and overlaid by hideous gewgaw monstrosities of the flashiest Bernini and baroque period. There they sprawl their obtrusive legs and wave their flaunting theatrical wings to the utter destruction of all repose and consistency in one of the noblest and most perfect buildings of Europe. Nowadays, any child, any ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... does, anyhow? You don't suppose I worked, do you? Because I didn't. I ate and drank and slept and went in swimmin' with the court officers and did a little fishin' an' fightin'; and on moonlight nights I used to sprawl in the grass out on the edge of Hakatuea with my head in my queen's lap, rubberin' up at the Southern Cross and watchin' the rollers breakin' white over the reef. And everything'd be as still as death except for that eternal swishin' of the surf on the beach, babblin' of 'Peace! ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... soon began to cling and crawl Straight up, with strong endeavor; But down it came with a slippery sprawl, As near to the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... top edge off it, filling the air with a volcano of mud, dirt, smoke, and shrieking splinters, and, either from the shock of the explosion or in an attempt to escape it, throwing the man off his balance on the ledge of the firing-step to sprawl full length in the mud. In the swirl of noise and smoke and flying earth Rawbon just glimpsed the plunging fall of a man's body, and felt a curious sickly feeling at the pit of his stomach. He was relieved beyond words to see the figure ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... I detest That waiting; though it seems so safe to fight Behind high walls, and hurl down foes into Deep fosses, or behold them sprawl on spikes Strewed to receive them, still I like it not— 560 My soul seems lukewarm; but when I set on them, Though they were piled on mountains, I would have A pluck at them, or perish in hot ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... in some beggar's hauffet squattle; There ye may creep and sprawl and sprattle Wi' ither kindred jumping cattle, In shoals and nations, Whare horn nor bane ne'er daur ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... She sat on a three-legg'd steal, and a dim coal smook'd within the rim of a brandreth, oor which a seety rattencreak hung dangling fra a black randletree. The walls were plaister'd with dirt, and a stee, with hardly a rung, was rear'd into a loft. Araund the woman her lile ans sprawl'd on the hearth, some whiting speals, some snottering and crying, and ya ruddy-cheek'd lad threw on a bullen to make a loww, for its mother to find her loup. By this sweal ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... watched furtively. When, at last, Hodges stirred from his indolent sprawl, knocked the dottle from his pipe, and looked up at her, she shrank visibly. The blood rushed back to her heart in a flood, leaving her pallid, and she was trembling. Even in the feeble light from the guttering candle, Hodges could perceive her disturbance. ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... short in the ray of candlelight that was fitfully and feebly capering on the windy blackness outside the open workshop of Crickledon, the carpenter, fronting the sea-beach. Mr. Tinnnan's house was inquired for. Crickledon left off planing; at half-sprawl over the board, he bawled out, "Turn to the right; right ahead; can't mistake it." He nodded to one of the cronies intent on watching his labours: "Not unless they mean to be bait for whiting-pout. Who's that for Tinman, I wonder?" ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... man down. O blow the man down in Liverpool town! Give me some time to blow the man down. 'Twas aboard a Black-Bailer I first served my time, And in that Black-Bailer I wasted my prime. 'Tis larboard and starboard on deck you will sprawl, For blowers and strikers command the Black Ball. So, it's blow the ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... of matter. Like the chance crowd on which you may look down in the square of a great city, they range from the infant to the worn and sinking aged. There is this difference, however, that the embryos of worlds sprawl, gigantic and luminous, across the expanse; that the dark and mighty bodies of the dead rush, like the rest, at twenty or fifty miles a second; and that at intervals some appalling blaze, that dims even the fearful furnaces of the living, seems to announce ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... Anything rather than that fetid huddling, that shameless communal sprawl. And yet, was this so much better? The nearness to the surface was meaningless; it only tantalized. And the ...
— The Moon is Green • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... nephew went on a reconnoitering expedition to the end of the passage, and reported that the jump-off there was higher than himself but he could get down. I now crawled through the hole and found the passage to be a "crawl" or rather a "sprawl," from fifteen to eighteen inches high, but having an ample width varying from three to six feet. The smooth, straight floor has a steep downward inclination and ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... her," said Sue. "Really, from out there, it sounded suspiciously like murder." She stared at her brother. He was not kneeling now, but half-sitting, half-lying, in an awkward sprawl, at Farvel's feet, much as if he had thrown himself down in a ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... the stranger, "and next time you see me remember who I am," and he spoke a name in the Swede's ear—a name that more effectually subdued the scoundrel than many beatings—then he gave him a push that carried him bodily through the tent doorway to sprawl upon the turf beyond. ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... boy turned a somersault for every extra, while the baby, trying to follow his example, bunched over in a sidewise sprawl and cut his foot on the axe with which his mother had prized up the box-lid. That sobered them, they carried the books indoors. Mrs. Duncan had a top shelf in her closet cleared for them, far above the ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... suppleness should have warned him, Dolly Poole provoked a quarrel, and being himself a stout fellow, nor unaccustomed to athletic exercises, began to spar; the next moment he was at the other end of the room full sprawl on the floor; and two minutes afterwards, the quarrel made up by conciliating banqueters, with every bone in his skin seeming still to rattle, he was generously blubbering out that he never bore malice, and shaking hands with Jasper Losely ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the instrument panel were two very comfortable-looking strange low seats. They seemed to be facing backwards until I realized they were meant to be knelt into. The occupant, I could see, would sort of sprawl forward, his hands free for button-pushing and ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... found, first of all, to be scrupulously neat. It stood on a knoll, as do most gulch cabins, in order that occasional freshets might pass below, and the knoll looked as though it had been clipped with a pair of scissors. Not a crooked little juniper bush was allowed to intrude its plebeian sprawl among the dignified pines and the gracefully infrequent bushes. In front of the cabin itself was a "rockery" of pink quartz, on which were piled elk antlers. The building was L-shaped, of two low stories, had a veranda ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... clear as mud. Let's sit down here just as if we were going to take a rest; let's sprawl on the ground just as if we weren't thinking about that shack at all. Then we can talk ...
— Roy Blakeley's Bee-line Hike • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... its first year the infant begins to crawl and toddle about the room and gallery, to sprawl into the hearth and eat charcoal, and to get into all sorts of mischief in the usual way. During the first year he lives chiefly on his mother's milk, but takes also thick rice-water from an ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... a sure taste gave her that ultra-smart appearance which does everything for a type that is less attractive in a dinner gown, and still less in negligee. And which, after marriage, usually lets a straight strand of hair sprawl ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... mother thinks of her sailor son As clutched in the arms of war, But mother should listen, as I have done, To this same little, innocent sailor son Sprawl in ...
— Biltmore Oswald - The Diary of a Hapless Recruit • J. Thorne Smith, Jr.
... common explanation may have been correct, that in her there was a resurrection of some unknown ancestor, either on the father's or mother's side. She was a big girl—her father was rather short and squat—with black hair and dark eyes, limbs loosely set, with a tendency to sprawl, large feet and hands. She had a handsome, regular face, a little freckled; but the mouth, although it was beautifully curved, was a trifle too long, and except when she was in a passion, was not sufficiently under the control ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... air Went darting gaily here and there; Now crossed a mirror's face, and next Shot up amidst the sprawl'd, perplex'd Olympus overhead. At last, Jerk'd sidelong by a random cast, The striker miss'd it, and it fell Full on the book DICK knew ...
— Collected Poems - In Two Volumes, Vol. II • Austin Dobson
... The street is narrow and dirty, lined by old brick houses; here and there is a carved doorway with brackets, showing that, like most streets in the vicinity, it was better built than now inhabited, and it is probable that where sickly children now sprawl on doorsteps stately ladies in hoops and silken skirts once stepped forth. St. George's National Schools are here, and a public-house with the odd name of Hole in the Wall, a name adopted by Mr. Morrison in his ...
— Holborn and Bloomsbury - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... child," returned the giant placidly; and then Verity put down Babs on the grass to sprawl among ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... nobs. Many have menaced you, some had a shy at you; SALISBURY stout, and bespectacled CROSS, Each in his season has joined in the cry at you, Little, 'twould seem, to your damage or loss. Still you eight-headed and lanky-limbed monster, you Sprawl and monopolise, spread and devour. Many assail you, but hitherto, none stir you. Say, has the hero arrived, and the hour? No Infant Hercules, surely, can tackle you, Ancient abortion, with hope of success. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... journey, they set out in much better spirits. But they make not many steps—if steps they can be called—before discovering the difficulties at which the old sealer has hinted, saying, "ye'll see." Steps, indeed! Their progress is more a sprawl than a walk; a continuous climb and scramble over trunks of fallen trees, many so decayed as to give way under their weight, letting them down to their armpits in a mass of sodden stuff, as soft ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... the civic museum, entrusted, just now, to the care of a quite remarkably ignorant and slatternly woman. It contains two rooms, whose exhibits are smothered in dust and cobwebs; as neglected, in short, as her own brats that sprawl about its floor. I enquired whether she possessed no catalogue to show where the objects, bearing no labels, had been found. A catalogue was unnecessary, she said; she ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... calms, so it seemed as if the masses of rock that hung poised on the canyon rim through countless storms, chose the stillest hour of the stillest night to ride like avalanches the headlong slopes, plunge over dizzy cliffs and crash and sprawl in dying thunders from ledge to ledge into the river below. All these noises, big and little, were familiar to Laramie's ears. He could hear them in his sleep without losing the thread of a dream; but the echo of a single footstep would ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... place of Beauty, Strength, Simplicity. Each varied colour, of the brightest hue, The green, the red, the yellow, and the blue, In every part the dazzled eyes behold, Here streak'd with silver, there enrich'd with gold; While fancied forms upon the ceiling sprawl, And ...
— The First of April - Or, The Triumphs of Folly: A Poem Dedicated to a Celebrated - Duchess. By the author of The Diaboliad. • William Combe
... son do, if he could have kept him by his side and fashioned his life. But that boy was gone; long years ago he had left him, and none had come after him to stand in his place. His little, worn books, which he used to sprawl upon the floor and read, were treasured there on their sacred shelf behind the bookcase glass. The light had failed out of the eyes which had found wonders in them, more ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... quite plainly. He could see them as separate human figures; but he was increasingly surprised by the way in which they moved as one man. They seemed to be dressed in dark clothes and plain hats, like any common crowd out of the streets; but they did not spread and sprawl and trail by various lines to the attack, as would be natural in an ordinary mob. They moved with a sort of dreadful and wicked woodenness, like ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... quietly from our trenches on the night of the 12th, I am thankful to say. It was so dark that I could not see the man in front of me, though I could touch him with my hand. I "came," as the Irish say, a great sprawl over a bridge across a ditch, the chief difficulty being to find my uniform cap in the darkness and mud, as, of course, one did not wish to give away where we were by even a flash from one's electric torch. However, here we are in billets ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... repression of speed, but also by keeping the cars at such an amazing heat that the victims promptly fade into a swoon. Nowhere will you see a more complete abandonment to the wild postures of fatigue and despair than in the pathetic sprawl of these human forms upon the simmering plush settees. A hot eddy of some varnish-tinctured vapour—certainly not air—rises from under the seats and wraps the traveller in a nightmarish trance. Occasionally he starts wildly from his dream and glares frightfully ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... hair like spun black glass, circled with faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery across the breasts, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized Toad God, Nebran. Her features were delicate, chiseled, pale; a Dry-town face, all human, all woman, but set in an alien and unearthly repose. The great eyes gleamed red. They were fixed, almost unseeing, ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... there was no doubt about that, but his ordeal in the water had told on him severely. He grabbed Clancy's outstretched hand desparingly, and was assisted to climb over the bulwarks. Once aboard, he fell in a sprawl on the ...
— Owen Clancy's Happy Trail - or, The Motor Wizard in California • Burt L. Standish
... most of whatever artist there is in me has been given to turbine machines and boat building and the problem of flying, and do what I will I fail to see how I can be other than a lax, undisciplined story-teller. I must sprawl and flounder, comment and theorise, if I am to get the thing out I have in mind. And it isn't a constructed tale I have to tell, but unmanageable realities. My love-story—and if only I can keep up the spirit ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the outfit," I went on, "that have got any sprawl to them; and they are old Tom their bunged-up horse, ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... Derby and to pick a winner, he had made Monte Carlo recognise that he had come,—although he did not go into detail as to the manner of his departure,—and he had brought home a present for everybody. The skin he had taken from a lion somewhere in some remote jungle to sprawl, rug fashion in Wanda's room, where it created no little havoc in the furniture arrangement and finally caused the dressing table to be shifted to a corner to make place for the enormous, gaping head with the fierce eyes; an Indian shawl for ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... haffet squattle; There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle, In shoals and nations; Whare horn nor bane ne'er ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... missed the excitement at Bogova, he fairly writhed with envy of Stubbs and Wilson. As he listened he hitched back and forth in his chair, leaned over the table until he threatened to sprawl among the glasses, and groaned jealously at every crisis. Wilson told his story as simply as possible from its beginning; the scenes at the house, his finding the map, his adventures in Bogova, the long trip ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... Titanic force. His sentences are often clumsily built. He himself said of them: "Perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered." There is no modern writer who possesses so large a profusion of figurative language. His works are also full of the pithiest and most memorable sayings, ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... unattractive; but Margarita's daughter, perfect in health, beautiful as a baby angel, active, daring, and enchantingly affectionate, satisfied the old lady's pride completely and she sat for hours contentedly watching her sprawl on an ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... mother was sorting, counting, and arranging where things should go, she sat in the window sullen and unhappy, looking out at the pansy-bed. Peter grew tired of a companion who did nothing to amuse him, and began to sprawl and scramble upstairs. ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... him be put on his feet early; but allow him to crawl, and sprawl, and kick about the floor, until his body and ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... he passed through the place, went on—all the offices of life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce less that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions rage and plots thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps even to anything at all outside. The signs of this met him at ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... find as my fist runs to size, set it down to that quill, dear old pal; Correspondents is on to me lately, complains as I write like a gal. Sixteen words to the page, and slopscrawly, all dashes and blobs. Well, it's true; But a quill and big sprawl is the fashion, so wot is a feller ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 15, 1891 • Various
... rocks. The earth on which men have lived, where the work of their hand is evident, with all the sentiment of the presence of man, with smoke arising from numberless homes, is foreign to Mr. Hone. The monsters of the primeval world might sprawl on the rocks, for all the evidence of lapse of time since their day, in many of his pictures. He, too, has refined away his world until only fragments of the earth remain to him where he can dream in; and these are waste places, where the salt of the sea is in the wind, and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... therefore can never be taught perfectly to children; to say nothing of distracting their attention with two difficult things at the same time. But that boys should stand motionless, while they are pronouncing the most impassioned language, is extremely absurd and unnatural; and that they should sprawl into an aukward, ungain, and desultory action, is still more offensive and disgusting. What then remains, but that such a general style of action be adopted, as shall be easily conceived and easily executed, which, though not expressive of any particular passion, shall ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... a dignified stare, made a signal to the engineer, and the Wiggle started forward, as was her wont, with a jerk which put upon Bones the alternative of making a most undignified sprawl or clutching a very hot smoke-stack. He chose the latter, recovered his balance with an easy grace, punctiliously saluted the tiny flag of the Zaire as he whizzed past her, and under the very eyes of Hamilton, with all the ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... Save for this, there is nothing to show that white men ever visit these seas, and, sailing up the coast in a native craft, you may almost fancy yourself one of the early explorers skirting the lovely shores of some undiscovered country. As you sprawl on the bamboo decking under the shadow of the immense palm leaf sail—which is so ingeniously rigged that, if taken aback, the boat must turn turtle, unless, by the blessing of the gods, the mast parts asunder—you look out through half-closed eyelids at a very beautiful ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... many lights, which, when thus suddenly disclosed, blinded him at first. Then Raimbaut perceived Guillaume lying a-sprawl across an oaken chest. The Prince had fallen backward and lay in this posture, glaring at the intruders with horrible eyes which did not move and would not ever move again. His breast was crimson, for some one had stabbed him. A woman stood above the corpse and lighted yet another candle while ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... period of its triumphant union with the antique; and Raphael's grand gods and goddesses, his exquisite Eros and radiant Psyche of the Farnesina, are indeed succeeded but too soon by the Olympus of Giulio Romano, an Olympus of harlots and acrobats, who smirk and mouth and wriggle and sprawl ignobly on the walls and ceilings of the dismantled palace which crumbles away among the stunted willows, the stagnant pools, and rank grass of the marshes of Mantua. But this is no more the fault of antiquity ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... favourable impression. But a year or two after his return, he was joined by a Labour representative who displayed the characteristics of altogether a different sort. For one thing, he was a vulgarly overdressed man, and he used to sprawl about the benches with outstretched arms, making his cry of condescending patronage heard in answer to any utterance of which he might approve from such inconsiderable persons as Gladstone or Harcourt or Forster. His "Hear, hear, hear," was the very essence of a self-satisfied ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... behind me at the moment—professed to see in the distance, when he suddenly lurched against me, as if he had slipped and lost his footing. That was what I believed in that startling moment—but as I went head first overboard I was aware that his fall was confined to a sprawl into the scuppers. Overboard I went!—but he remained where he was. And my weight—I was weighing a good thirteen stone at that time, being a big and hefty youngster—carried me down and down into the green water, ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... care for me!" he cried; "no such people ever lived. My father was a drunken scoundrel, who suffered his children to grow up about him as he would have suffered a litter of puppies to sprawl upon his hearth, only because there was less trouble in letting them lie there than in kicking them out. My mother was a good woman in the beginning, I know; but she must have been something more than a mortal woman if she had not lost some of her goodness in twelve years ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... ['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin, And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh: And while above his head ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... corner, looking wrathfully at the offender; who without any more ado instantly occupied it. It was a fine thing to hear the jingling of the twenty pieces in his pocket, the oaths which he distributed between the landlord, the guests, and the liquor—to remark the sprawl of his mighty jack-boots, before the sweep of which the timid guests edged farther and farther away; and the languishing leers which he cast on the landlady, as with wide-spread arms he attempted to ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... repaid Brogten with a cuff which felled him to the ground. Brogten was mad with fury. At that moment the men were running round the corner, at the bend of the Iscam, in full career, and hundreds on both sides of the river must have seen him sprawl before the man's blow. He sprang to his feet, and, blind with rage, lifted the clasp-knife with which he had cut the ropes. A second more, and it would have been buried to the handle in the right arm which, quick ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... usual grim-browed resolution, foot in front, horse in rear; but they have a terrible problem at that Kesselsdorf, with its retrenched batteries, and numerous grenadiers fighting under cover. The very ground is sore against them; uphill, and the trampled snow wearing into a slide, so that you sprawl and stagger sadly. Thirty-one big guns, and about 9,000 small, pouring out mere death on you, from that knoll-head. The Prussians stagger; cannot stand it; bend to rightwards, and get out of shot-range; cannot manage it this bout. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... with such amazing velocity it was invisible; but, ere the crouching convict could press the trigger of his rifle, he was seen to sprawl forward, his gun flying from his grasp. The terrible javelin had gone entirely through his body as though it were tissue paper, and pinned him like an ...
— The Land of Mystery • Edward S. Ellis
... now ... and, if he only dared ... and, quicker indeed than he intended, he gave three little taps on the wall and lay listening, all agog.... Three like little taps answered! This was so unexpected that at first he sat wondering whether he could believe his ears; then he began to swim and sprawl in his bed, bit his teeth so as not to shout out his overflowing delight and started banging on the wall, this time with his fists. It was too late to-night: to-morrow, he would go to her and ask her ... and then they would both ... and he would no ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... eye. They are entirely open to the street in front, but in the far dim recesses of every one there is a species of carved reredos, over which dragons, lacquered black, or lacquered red, gilded or silvered, sprawl artistically. In front of this screen there is always a red-covered joss table, where red lights burn, and incense-sticks smoulder, all of which, as shall be explained later, are precautions to thwart the machinations of the peculiarly malevolent local devils. In food shops, ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... and never were four hard-worked old ladies who deserved it better. All a woman can do in war-time they do daily and cheerfully. Just as their men-folk are doing it at the Front; and now, with the mops and pails laid aside, they sprawl gracefully at ease. There is no intention on their part to consider peace terms until a decisive victory has been gained in the field (Sarah Ann Dowey), until the Kaiser is put to the right-about (Emma Mickleham), and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... wager that Hamdi Effendi did not concern himself greatly as to the way in which the ladies of his harem filled up their time. And now I come to think of it, he certainly did not allow Carlotta to sprawl about his own private and particular drawing-room. I will not westernise her too rapidly. The Turkish educational system ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... lately I had continually seen current in North Wales, bearing for their heraldic distinction three human legs in armor, but so placed in relation to each other that always one leg is vertical and mounting guard on behalf of the other two, which, therefore, are enabled to sprawl aloft in the air—in fact, to be as absurdly negligent as they choose, relying upon their vigilant brother below, and upon the written legend or motto, STABIT QUOCUNQUE JECERIS (Stand it will upright, though you should fling it in any conceivable direction). ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... a rocky valley looking south. The grounds are laid out in a succession of terraces, and from every nook and crevice rare specimens of cacti, sedums, and mesembryanthemums with their orange and purple bloom sprawl over the rocks and run riot among the borders. In the gardens South American aloes throw up their flowering stalks heavy with aromatic fragrance, 20 feet high, and giant dracaenas wave their feathery heads in the balmy breeze. Exotic palms, the bamboo, the sugar-cane, and the cotton plant grow ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... today. Practically anybody who chose could walk into the palace and see the king playing with his children, or paring his nails. The people possessed the monarch, as the people possess Primrose Hill; that is, they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all over it. The old French monarchy was founded on the excellent principle that a cat may look at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even where the press is free for criticism it is only used for adulation. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... milkman, arose to his feet. He had been sitting with a stiff sprawl in the corner of a small divan. He arose when the fragrance of that Havana cigar smote his nostrils like the odor of battle. He was in great boots stained with the red shale, for the roads outside Banbridge were heavy ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is, as before said, blackguardly and bleak. Paris swarms before us, full of famine, shame, and death; monks and the servants of great lords hold high wassail upon cakes and pastry; the poor man licks his lips before the baker's window; people with patched eyes sprawl all night under the stalls; chuckling Tabary transcribes an improper romance; bare-bosomed lasses and ruffling students swagger in the streets; the drunkard goes stumbling homeward; the graveyard is full of bones; and away on Montfaucon, Colin de Cayeux ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the kitchen-garden. The country does not ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... writer. Of his sentences perhaps not more than nine-tenths stand straight on their legs; the remainder are in quite angular attitudes, buttressed up by props (of parentheses and dashes), and ever with this or the other tagrag hanging from them; a few even sprawl out helplessly on all sides, quite broken-backed and dismembered. Nevertheless, in almost his very worst moods, there lies in him a singular attraction. A wild tone pervades the whole utterance of the man, like its keynote and regulator; now screwing itself aloft as into the Song of ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... in some beggar's haffet squattle; There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle, Wi' ither kindred, jumping cattle, In shoals and nations; Whaur horn nor bane ne'er daur unsettle Your ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a flash, the younger combatant gave up the fight. But as he turned, instead of merely crawling away defeated, he made a sudden convulsive sprawl which the older bull was not expecting, and dug his teeth into the cow who had given rise to all the trouble, and lifted her bodily. The old beachmaster, his mane bristling with rage, made after him, but the younger bull, although he was forced to move on the stump of his wounded flipper, held ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... of the "sitting room" where the ancient, wispy landlady sat among her antimacassared chairs and the ridiculous tiny seashell ashtrays that overflowed after two butts. He wanted desperately to get in and sprawl in the huge bat-winged chair by the fire and stroke the enormous old gray cat that would leap up and trample and paw his stomach before settling down to grumble to itself asthmatically ...
— Far from Home • J.A. Taylor
... end of his tether; and the quick jerk, which caused the tree itself to crack, brought him to his haunches, while the noose tightening on his throat was fast strangling him. But for the thick matted hair it would have done so, but this saved him, and he continued to sprawl and struggle at the end of the rope. The tree kept on cracking, and as I began to fear that it might give way and precipitate me to the ground, I thought it better to slip down. I ran direct to where I had dropped the caps; and, having got hold of the box, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... were not many ... merely to walk along the sides of the five cars in my keeping, and see that the calves kept on their legs and did not sprawl over each other ... sometimes one of them would get crushed against the side of the car, and his leg would protrude through the slats. And I would push his leg back, to keep it from being broken ... I made my rounds every time the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... I hadn't married a fiery sojer, to make me bring fatherless children into the world, all through his dreadful calling! Why didn't a man of no sprawl content me! ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... an inner beauty than Il Gesu, which is the most baroque church in Rome, without the power of coming together for a unity of effect which baroque churches sometimes have. It is a tumult of virtuosity in painting, in sculpture, in architecture. Statues sprawl into frescoed figures at points in the roof, and frescoed figures emerge in marble at others. Marvels of riches are lavished upon chapels and altars, which again are so burdened with bronze gilded or silver plated, and precious stones wrought and unwrought, that the soul, ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... upset him off his somewhat wobbly legs. But as time passed Spot began to weary of never-ending play. There were moments when Spot wanted to lie still and doze. But as soon as he had settled himself for a nap the puppy was sure to come bouncing up and sprawl all over him. He would seize one of Spot's long ears between his teeth and give it a bit of a nip. Sometimes he would even pull ...
— The Tale of Old Dog Spot • Arthur Scott Bailey
... the buglers vied with each other in continual contests. It was like traveling with a floating menagerie. Twice a day the bugles sounded the call for breakfast and dinner, and the soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on the deck around square tin cans filled with soup or red wine, from which they fed themselves with spoons and into which they dipped their rations of hard tack, after first breaking ...
— Cuba in War Time • Richard Harding Davis
... the rope, and up they went, the Dodo sinking to the ground with a ridiculous sprawl ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... beautiful of our flowering shrubs, and some of the richest of our fruit-bearing trees, are unable to raise themselves from the ground without the assistance of their stronger kindred. This is the case with the honeysuckle, the ivy, and the grape vine. Left to themselves on the open plain, they sprawl upon the ground, choked with the grass, and cropped and trampled on by beasts, until at length they perish. But placed in woods or hedgerows, they clasp with their living tendrils, or embrace with their whole bodies, their vigorous neighbors, climb to the light and sunshine ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... greedier than I," retorted Papillon. "He will eat till he won't be able to run about with us after dinner; and then he will sprawl upon mother's satin train by the fire, with Ganymede and Phosphor, and she will tell everybody how good and gentle he is, and how much better bred than his sister. And now, if people are ever going to leave off eating, we may as well begin our games before ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... we feel inclined to sit down and let men sprawl all over us, or run into people with knives. I never heard such stuff. A mountain ledge, a well-balanced load, a driver you can trust to let you pick your own way, and I'm your mule. But—the other things—no!" said Billy, with a stamp of ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... tendency which ever accompanies them, and which, just as soon as the stress and strain of life reaches a certain degree of intensity, unfailingly produces its characteristic breakdown; the patient is seized with confusion, is overcome by feeling, indulges in an emotional sprawl, is flooded with terrible apprehensions and distracting sensations, may even go into a convulsive fit, and, in extreme cases, even become ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... made a little more out of my work than I have made for a long while back; though even now I cannot make things fall into sentences - they only sprawl over the paper in bald orphan clauses. Then I was about in the afternoon with Baxter; and we had a good deal of fun, first rhyming on the names of all the shops we passed, and afterwards buying needles and quack drugs from open-air vendors, and taking much pleasure in their inexhaustible ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... water, like so many spaniels; And though all the while it grew hotter and hotter, They swam just as if they were hunting an otter. 'Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sex All wading with gentlemen up to their necks, And view them so prettily tumble and sprawl In a great smoking kettle as big as our hall; And to-day many persons of rank and condition Were boil'd, by ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Willetts was a kind of odd number at camp was evidenced by his unfamiliarity with the things that were very familiar to most boys there. He was too restless to hang around the pavilion or sprawl under the trees or idle about with the others in and near Council Shack. He never read the bulletin board posted outside, and the inside was a place of so little interest to him that he had not even seen the beautiful canoe that was ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... pleasant Saturday afternoons or Sundays, when the poetic fit was on him, Albert, with a half dozen pencils in his pocket, and a rhyming dictionary and a scribbling pad in another, was wont to stroll towards one or the other of these two retreats. There he would sprawl amid the beachgrass or upon the pine-needles and dream and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... else,—long years, lost hopes, regret; Sighs for the joys we ne'er attain, Prayers we have lifted all in vain; Tears for the faces seen no more, Once as the roses at the door! Take the enchanted book—And lo, On grassy swards of long ago, Sprawl out again, beneath the shade The breezy old-home orchard made, The veriest barefoot boy indeed— And I will listen ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... he had to dismount, then, after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under the forelegs of the silver-grey mare, who only pricked forward her sharp little ears. She was used to that work; and the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from Nostromo's revolver, reeling a little along the street and snarling ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... dangle from the fire escapes Or sprawl over the stoops... Upturned faces glimmer pallidly— Herring-yellow faces, spotted as with a mold, And moist faces of girls Like dank white lilies, And infants' faces with open parched mouths that suck at the air ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... about blouses... perhaps they were "slommucky." She remembered phrases she had heard about people's figures... "falling abroad"... "the middle-aged sprawl"... that would come early to her as she was so old and worried... perhaps that was why one had to wear boned bodices... and never breathe in gulps of air like this?... It was as if all the worry ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson
... and blind, and others sprawl, And stagger in the Long-Knife's villages; And some are dead, and some have fled away, And some are lurking in the forest here, Sneaking, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... sheer idleness; and, dressed like natives, but still retaining some foreign element of gait or attitude, still perhaps with some relic (such as a single eye-glass) of the officer and gentleman, they sprawl in palm-leaf verandahs and entertain an island audience with memoirs of the music-hall. And there are still others, less pliable, less capable, less fortunate, perhaps less base, who continue, even in these isles of ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
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