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More "Straddle" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Pasture romped to the fence and whistled at these newcomers. Jean espied a white-faced black horse that gladdened his sight. "Hello, Whiteface! I'll sure straddle you," called Jean. Then up the gentle slope he saw the tall figure of his father—the same as he had seen him thousands of times, bareheaded, shirt sleeved, striding with long step. Jean waved and ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... history to back up the Ten Commandments, or to be an illustration of the value of training-schools and kindergartens, or to afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes. Humanize your facts to the extent of making them interesting, if you have the art to do it, but leave the dog a dog, and the straddle-bug a straddle-bug. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... It is impossible to give the true sense and humour of the passage in English, depending, as it does, on the double meaning of {diabainein} (1) to cross (a river), (2) to stride or straddle (of the legs). The army is unable to cross the Centrites; Xenophon dreams that he is fettered, but the chains drop off his legs and he is able to stride as freely as ever; next morning the two young men come to him with the story how they have found themselves able ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... say he wish he had one, An' 'mongst all de yuthers he'd be de glad un; He'd git a bridle an' a bran' new saddle, An' git on de hoss an' ride 'im straddle; He say, sezee, "He'd do some trottin', Kaze when I git started, I'm a mighty hot un!" Brer Rabbit, he smole a great big smile, Wid, "I can't ride myse'f, kaze I got ...
— Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit • Joel Chandler Harris
... have, Lucindy," he said, gently, quieting his wife by a motion of the hand, "but 'tain't what you think. It's a man's saddle. You'd have to set straddle. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... feature of his painting, should have originated with Donatello. Donatello was, before all things, a realist, and it was probably the habitual attitude of the cavalry soldier of the day, accustomed to straddle over the broad back of his war-horse, but there is little doubt that it was adopted by Signorelli from the "S. George" of Or San Michele, and perhaps half-unconsciously signified to him—what that statue so well embodies—the confident spirit of youth and strength. In his portrait ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... help me do it. An' that hain't all. Tonight 'long 'bout dance time I want that saddle horse o' yourn an' yer sideways saddle, too. They's a gal o' mine come in on the train, which she'll be wantin', mebbe, to take a ride, an' hain't fetched no split-up clothes fer to straddle a real saddle. That sideways contraption you sent fer 'fore yer gal got to ridin' man-ways is the only one in Wolf River, an' likewise hern's the only horse that'll stand fer bein' rigged ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who later along bolted the ticket and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... his short corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a surface of fine plush. We followed it from field to field and from stile ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... straight—but he would die mebby with his head filling up with blood. But finally he made a squirm and raised himself a lot and grabbed the rope at one side of the bar. And then he reached and got the rope on the other side, and set straddle of her. And jest as he done that the wind ketched the balloon good and hard, and she turned out toward Lake Erie. It was too late fur him to pull the rope that sets the parachute loose then, and drop onto ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... case I had," he observed philosophically. "But d'ye know what was the matter with me? Well, I never tumbled to it till afterward, but it was jest because she was like Sallie—talked like her and rode like her, straddle, that way. But I wanter tell you, boy," he added mournfully, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course. The progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path. The world, even including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year. Then the consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... running long, and apt to be paid off at sight: In legal phrase, for every class to understand me still, I never was in stirrups yet a tenant but at will; Or, if you please, in artist terms, I never went a-straddle On any horse without 'a want of keeping' in the saddle. In short," and here I blush'd, abash'd and held my head full low, "I'm one of those whose infant ears have heard the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... must come from a skylight; and that the skylight must be the one that had saved that hidden little office room from being dark. He was no lineman, but he knew enough to be careful about the wires, so it took him several minutes to work his way to where he could straddle a ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... Panisse family through marriage with the daughter of a Marseilles notary, who got the chateau by foreclosing a mortgage. During the Revolutionary period, the property was saved from confiscation by a clever straddle. The owner stayed in France, and supported the Revolution, while the son emigrated with the Bourbons. The peerage was created just a hundred years ago by Louis XVIII, in reward for the refusal of the Panisses to follow Napoleon a second time after ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... before her rooming house. It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too—not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... Barnum pretty weak physically, but had evidently not weakened his will. He left Hopkins in the office figuring up his account and he jumped a-straddle of a bare-backed mule and went up on the hill and rented the new 40-room house, "The Bravadere," and sub-rented enough rooms to pay the expenses of his company. He also got a porter, bus and team and sent ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... spread her wings, wide and flat, stood high upon her six legs and waited. I fairly shouted at this change, for slight though it was, it worked magic, and the queen Atta was a queen no more, but a miniature, straddle-legged aeroplane, pushed into position, and overrun by a crowd of mechanics, putting the finishing touches, tightening the wires, oiling every pliable crevice. A Medium came along, tugged at a leg ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck. Ishikola was a dirty old savage. One of his tambos (tambo being beche-de-mer and Melanesian for "taboo") was that water unavoidable must never touch his skin. He who lived by the salt sea, in a land of tropic downpour, religiously ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... "yet both he and Glaston walk rather A-STRADDLE, methinks. They might have stepped up to thee more straightforwardly, and told thee the trade ill suiteth thee, having little fire, little fantasy, and little learning. Furthermore, that one poet, as one bull, sufficeth for two parishes, ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... a delegation of Irishmen, rather startling from its numbers, entered the yard. Among them was Mr. Farren. They surrounded my lifting-apparatus, while I, unseen, surveyed them from a back window. I saw Mr. Farren take the handle, straddle the hogshead, throw himself into a lifting posture, and, straining every muscle to its utmost tension, give a tremendous pull. But the weight made no sign; and his friends, thinking he was merely feeling it, said, "Wait a bit,—Pat'll have it up the next pull." Mr. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... 16; International Socialist Bureau, 17; American Socialists and the International, 17; The Berne Conference, 18; The Third (Moscow) International, 18; Debs and American Socialists Recognized by Lenine, 20; American Socialists' Straddle Resolution ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... a six-footer, but he loomed large as an elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox, somewhere in the utter silence ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... in connection with a snare. One end is planted in the ground in the centre of the path and the other, slanting up toward the snare, is used as a guide toward the loop, since a bear walking forward would straddle the pole. In a further effort to getting the animal's head in the right place, the hunter smears the upper end of ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black cloth—for evidently his dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days—straddle like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... it can be thrown, the more pieces will be made. If anybody objects, smash it over his head. Do not, under any circumstances, drop the tongs down from the second story; the fall might break its legs, and render the poor thing a cripple for life. Set it straddle of your shoulder, and carry it down carefully. Pile the bedclothes carefully on the floor, and throw the crockery out of the window. By the time you will have attended to all these things, the fire will ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... and lighter heart, A smiling face, a big straw hat, Hum made breeches and all o' that. And when I got there I would just take a peep, To see if old cider mill John was asleep, And if he was I'd go snooking round 'Till a great big round rye straw I'd found; I'd straddle a barrel and quick begin To fill with cider right ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... 'we're a straddle of the raggedest proposition in this country. One of your dusters at this moment is jamming his cayuse through the horizon between here and the post. Pretty soon things is going to bust loose. 'Bout to-morrer evening we'll be eating hog-bosom on ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... steps right along, an' the chap a-straddle of him is got on store-clo'es. Fetch me my rifle, Babe. I'll meet that feller half-way an' make some inquirements about his famerly, an' maybe I'll fetch a ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... looked after him thoughtfully. "Well, dog my skin!" he ejaculated to himself, "ef I hadn't seen that man—that same Ruth Pinkney—straddle a friend's body in this yer very room, and dare a whole crowd to come on, I'd swar that he hadn't any grit in him. Thar's ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... who collared him, "old chap, you can't walk any further; we know you, and as we always make gentlemen ride in these parts, you may just prepare to straddle that rail!" ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... you what you are, Merritt," said Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. "You are a concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... muscles and ligaments are able to dislocate or preternaturally bend their joints. In entertainments of an arena type and even in what are now called "variety performances" are to be seen individuals of this class. These persons can completely straddle two chairs, and do what they call "the split;" they can place their foot about their neck while maintaining the upright position; they can bend almost double at the waist in such a manner that the back of the head ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... mamma took me en come on to de house en when Miss Jane see dat leg, she say, "Cindy, what de matter?" My mamma say, "John call me a liar en I never take it." Miss Jane tell em to send after Sam Watson right den. Sam Watson was a rough old overseer en he been so bowlegged dat if he stand straddle a barrel, he be settin down on it just as good as you settin dere. Sam Watson come dere en make dat fellow lay down on a plank in de fence jam en he take dat cat o' nine tail he have tie round his waist en strike John 75 times. De blood ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... his boyhood on the trails of Pine Mountain, often riding to mill straddle of a mule. When the family moved to Madison County he drove a speedy trotter to a side-bar buggy over the turnpike, then in his own Pierce-Arrow over excellent roads, then in Italy a Y Fiat. He was educated by gradation to speedy ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... ain't a braver man in Grant's army than that one right now a-straddle of your horse. Why, just the way he got your ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... Princess Royal kept straight ahead till they were able to "straddle" even the leading ship of the enemy's line. The Tiger and Lion poured shells into the Seydlitz, but were unable to do much damage to the Moltke. While they were thus engaged the Princess Royal singled out the Derfflinger for her target. The light British cruiser Aurora, Arethusa, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here—and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico, but what he would find out where he was ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... collared him, "old chap, you can't walk any further; we know you, and as we always make gentlemen ride in these parts, you may just prepare to straddle that rail!" ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... wonderful stories, But in the above quotation, I want you to see how multiple it is, and yet it is beautiful. Now there is a very interesting thing yet to tell you about this parallelism. Such poems as those of the "Kalevala" have always to be sung not by one singer but by two. The two singers straddle a bench facing each other and hold each other's hands. Then they sing alternately, each chanting one line, rocking back and forward, pulling each other to and fro as they sing—so that it is like the motion of rowing. One chants a line and pulls backward, then the other chants the ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... explosion—so the man said. The head of the animal lit on the stoop; the fore legs caught a-straddle of the fence; the hind legs kicked in the ditch, and the rest of the critter lay around loose. Pretty soon who should come along but Bill, and he was looking for his dog when he heard the supposed gun go off. The neighbor said, innocentlike: ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams
... I've had a lively tussle with a tarnel grizzly bear. I can rope and throw the longhorn of the wildest Texas brand, And in Indian disagreements I can play a leading hand, But at last I got my master and he surely made me squeal When the boys got me a-straddle ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... do as the Arab had done, and seating herself straddle-legged behind Godwin, to clasp him ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... holding a funnel shaped exactly like a port wine strainer, of which the narrow end was fixed in an incision in the breast, no doubt in the great pectoral artery; while the third, who was depicted as standing straddle-legged over the corpse, held a kind of large jug high in his hand, and poured from it some steaming fluid which fell accurately into the funnel. The most curious part of this sculpture is that both the man with the funnel and the man who pours the fluid are drawn holding their ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... left old Barnum pretty weak physically, but had evidently not weakened his will. He left Hopkins in the office figuring up his account and he jumped a-straddle of a bare-backed mule and went up on the hill and rented the new 40-room house, "The Bravadere," and sub-rented enough rooms to pay the expenses of his company. He also got a porter, bus and team ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... and picked up the hoe. "Stand this way! Straddle the furrow with your back in the direction you are going to hoe; or else stand on the left side of the furrow facing it. Grasp the handle of the hoe in the right hand near the upper end. The back of your hand should be up. Now the left hand should ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and he was, too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... Bonaparte has succeeded. He has with him henceforth money, speculation, the Bourse, the Bank, the counting-room, the strong-box, and all those men who pass so readily from one side to the other, when all they have to straddle is shame. He made of M. Changarnier a dupe, of M. Thiers a stop-gap, of M. de Montalembert an accomplice, of power a cavern, of the budget his farm. They are coining at the Mint a medal, called the medal of the 2nd of December, in honour ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... riles 'em. They take on awful about her ridin' in pants, an' it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin' straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... addressing himself to me), a lady of quality, sir, at whose table I have the honour of dining sometimes. There was Lady Stately and my Lady Larum, and Mrs. Dainty, and Miss Biddy Giggler, upon my word, a very good-natured young lady, with a very pretty fortune sir. There was also my Lord Straddle. Sir John Shrug, and Master Billy Chatter, who is actually a very facetious young gentleman. So, sir, her ladyship seeing me excessively fatigued, for she was the last of fifteen patients (people of distinction, sir) whom I had visited this forenoon, insisted upon my staying dinner, though upon ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... cast-iron fellow who can ride the beam of a snorting, rock-tearing steam-shovel all day, wrestle the night through with various starred Hennessey and its rivals, and continue that round indefinitely without once failing to turn up to straddle his beam in the morning. He seems to have been created without the insertion of nerves, though he is never lacking in "nerve." He is a fine fellow in his way, but you sometimes wish his way branched off from yours for a few hours, when ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... britches when she's on horseback," said old Caleb, justifying his observation. "Rides straddle, like a man. You can't help seeing ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... The theatre, too small, shall suffocate Its squeezed contents, and more than it admits Shall sigh at their exclusion, and return Ungratified. For there some noble lord Shall stuff his shoulders with King Richard's bunch, Or wrap himself in Hamlet's inky cloak, And strut, and storm, and straddle, stamp, and stare, To show the world how Garrick did not act, For Garrick was a worshipper himself; He drew the liturgy, and framed the rites And solemn ceremonial of the day, And called the world to worship on the banks Of Avon famed in song. Ah! pleasant proof That piety has still ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... said Hendrick. "I'll take a turn round of a few hundred yards to show you how. The chief thing you have to guard against is treading with one shoe on the edge of the other, at the same time you must not straddle. Just pass the inner edge of one shoe over the inner edge of the other, and walk very much as if you had no snow-shoes ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... up and chest out, not looking at his feet, as the ataxic always wishes to do. At first this is enough to require; it will not do to be too particular about how his feet are placed, so long as he does not straddle. He can repeat this effort for himself a dozen times a day, for a minute or two each time. Next we try the same position with a little more care about getting the feet pretty near together and parallel, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... choked with rubbish and fallen masonry, the only access to our retreat was by a broken beam projecting from the original doorway. You jumped for this, caught it if you were expert enough, and must swing yourself up to straddle it. You could then gain the string-course of brick which encircled the tower, and, edging along that, reach the lower sill of a window. That window was our front door. The interior was perfectly dry, rainproof and (from all quarters ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... bitterish—I don't exactly know how, but as soon as it was down, I jumped up five times and yelled ‘Out of the way, you little ones, and let me ride’; and after running alongside, and climbing up his slimy scales, I got straddle of a big snake, who turned his head round, blowing his hot, sickening breath in my face. I waved my old wool hat, and kicking him into a fast run, sung out to the little devils to get up behind, and off ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... he serv'd, and fed on vermin; And when these fail'd, he'd suck his claws, And quarter himself upon his paws. And tho' his countrymen, the Huns, 275 Did stew their meat between their bums And th' horses backs o'er which they straddle, And ev'ry man eat up his saddle; He was not half so nice as they, But eat it raw when 't came in's way. 280 He had trac'd countries far and near, More than LE BLANC, the traveller; Who writes, he spous'd in India, Of noble house, a lady gay, ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... scorn for the hapless measure. Looked it all over, and behold! there is no good thing in it. Might have said this in ten minutes, or at most, quarter of an hour. But temptation to straddle irresistible; discoursed for full hour and half; talked clean out of Peers' Gallery FIFE and Earl SPENCER, who had innocently looked in. MADDEN, not to be outdone, talked for another hour and half; out of a possible seven hours' debate three appropriated ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... of the value of training-schools and kindergartens, or to afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes. Humanize your facts to the extent of making them interesting, if you have the art to do it, but leave the dog a dog, and the straddle-bug a straddle-bug. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... house. It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too—not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... Lingo," said Aunt Amanda, "I want to know where we are going and all about it. The idea of me sitting here a-straddle of a mule! And this bonnet simply ruined, and my dress just about fit to go to the rag-bone man, and my hair—Look here, Captain Lingo, I ain't going a step on this mule until ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... dandy, Lyddie! She's a jim-dandy of a little girl! She ought to come out and learn to ride straddle with her cousins. I got a boy about her age—say, they'd look fine together! He's a towhead, like all the rest of 'em—like ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... darling but stupid affectation of nature, by observation of the quantity. How many "periwig-pated fellows" (as Shakspeare called such people), must we suffer, who imagine they are affording the public an enjoyment, when they straddle along the boards with their awkward persons, considering the words which the poet has given them to repeat merely as a necessary evil. Our players are less anxious to please than the French. By the creation of standing national ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... as San Miguel possesses were hermetically closed that night when Angela di Sereno and Nick Hilliard were imprisoned; and Billy, standing on Nick's shoulders, had to work a few tedious moments before he could induce one of these windows to open. By the time the wiry, slim figure was ready to straddle the window-sill, slip out, dangling, and drop on the grass, night had closed in, fragrant and purple in the open, heavy and black in ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... exclamation she tossed her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... his neck, a man climbed the telegraph pole and the other end of the chain was passed up to him and made fast to the cross-arm. Others brought a long forked stick which Miller was made to straddle. By this means he was raised several feet from the ground and then let fall. The first fall broke his neck, but he was raised in this way and let fall a second time. Numberless shots were fired into the dangling body, ...
— The Red Record - Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States • Ida B. Wells-Barnett
... required exertion to keep in motion, and it hurt his feelings. Especially the last. He was a horseman, a jockey, he'd ridden the best blood in the equine world; and here he was condemned through no fault of his own to straddle a cross between a llama and a woolly toy sheep. It hurt his pride. He felt bitterly about it. Indeed, he fairly harped ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... here is the patch we saw so often in the other chase. And the fellow will drink when he can get an opportunity; your drinking Indian always learns to walk with a wider toe than the natural savage, it being the gift of a drunkard to straddle, whether of white or red skin. 'Tis just the length and breadth, too! look at it, Sagamore; you measured the prints more than once, when we hunted the varmints from ...
— The Last of the Mohicans • James Fenimore Cooper
... whisky, thinkin' it was water. The old feller was temp'rence, an' the boys put up a job on him one hot day at gen'ral trainin'. Somebody ast him afterwuds how it made him feel, an' he said he felt as if he was sittin' straddle the meetin' house, an' ev'ry shingle was a Jew's-harp. So I kep' mum fer a while. But jest before we fin'ly got through, an' I hadn't said nothin' fer a spell, Mis' Price turned to me an' says, 'Did you have a pleasant drive ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... did, she would never want to ride. So I told the man he would not suit me. He answered by suddenly throwing himself upon his stomach across the backbone of his horse, and then, by turning round as on a pivot, got up a-straddle of him; then he gave his horse a kick in the ribs that caused him to jump out with all his legs, like a frog, and then off went the spoon-legged animal with a gait that was not a trot, nor yet precisely pacing. He rode around our grass plot twice, and then pulled his horse's head up like the cock ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... the garden. Agatha was sitting at his feet on the top step, reading to him, and the little Chevalier Mondyon, who retained no semblance of the soldier about his person, except the red scarf round his waist, was seated straddle-legged atop of one of the huge white lions which guarded ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... was fired and the job called off. He was a thousand feet deeper than he'd been ordered to go when—blooie! Over the top she went with fourteen hundred barrels.... Desdemona's the name of a camp below here, but they call it Hog Town. More elegant! Down there the derricks actually straddle one another, and they have to board them over to keep from drowning one another out when they blow in. Fellow in Dallas brought in the first well, and it was so big that his stock went from a hundred dollars ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... in the hot water, he cut a couple of long splints of birch, as nearly as possible half an inch wide and an eighth of an inch thick, and put them to steep with the bark. Next he made two or three straddle pins or clamps, like clothes pegs, by splitting the ends of some sticks which had a knot at ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... goin' to help me do it. An' that hain't all. Tonight 'long 'bout dance time I want that saddle horse o' yourn an' yer sideways saddle, too. They's a gal o' mine come in on the train, which she'll be wantin', mebbe, to take a ride, an' hain't fetched no split-up clothes fer to straddle a real saddle. That sideways contraption you sent fer 'fore yer gal got to ridin' man-ways is the only one in Wolf River, an' likewise hern's the only horse that'll stand fer bein' rigged up ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... eh? Well, even at that it's the same old bunk. What about your testimonials? Fake 'em, and forge 'em, and bribe and blackmail for 'em and then stand up to me and pull the pious plate-pusher stuff about being straight. Oh, my Gawd! It'd make a straddle-bug spit at the sun, to hear you. Why, I'm no saint, but the medical line was too strong for my stomach. I got ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... a light beef, beheading and splitting it open, leaving the hide to hold the parts together. By turning the animal flesh side down and taking ropes from a front and hind foot to the pommels of two saddles, the men, by riding apart, could straddle the flames, virtually rubbing the fire out with the dragging carcass. Other men followed with wet blankets and beat out any remaining flames, the work being carried on at a gallop, with a change of horses every mile ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... a large building somewhere in England. I, like the curling tongs, was at last packed up in a box, and brought to America, but it took a rather larger box to take me and my friends, than it took to pack up him and his friends, with all their thin straddle legs." ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... under the nose of England, who was blockading him with ships of the line, frigates, and anything that could hoist a sail, he crossed over, and there he was in France. For he always had the power, mind you, of crossing the seas at one straddle. ...
— Folk Tales Every Child Should Know • Various
... him thoughtfully. "Well, dog my skin!" he ejaculated to himself, "ef I hadn't seen that man—that same Ruth Pinkney—straddle a friend's body in this yer very room, and dare a whole crowd to come on, I'd swar that he hadn't any grit in him. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... remembered about the race and forgot his other loss for a minute, and declared that Mr. Tortoise didn't win the race at all—that he couldn't have covered that much ground in a half a day alone, and he asked Mr. Fox if he was going to let that great straddle bug ruin his reputation for speed and make him the laughing stock of the Big Deep Woods, besides all the other ...
— How Mr. Rabbit Lost his Tail • Albert Bigelow Paine
... when young men watch the growth of their moustache and are critical of their clothes, and so you can imagine the devout awe with which Spiridon approached him. Yegor Alexyevitch had to throw back his head, to straddle his legs like an inverted V, first lift up his arms, then let them fall. Spiridon measured him several times, walking round him during the process like a love-sick pigeon round its mate, going down on one knee, bending double.... My mother, ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... person, is again taken to the tailor's laboratory, and the embrasures carefully and artistically fine-drawn. The process for walking or riding trousers only varies in these particulars—for the one you should stand upright, for the other you should straddle the back of a chair. Trousers cut on these principles entail only two inconveniences, to which every one with the true feelings of a gentleman would willingly submit. You must never attempt to sit down in your walking trousers, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... going all to pieces, so that we'll each have to pick out a timber, and straddle mighty soon, if it keeps on this way!" Bandy-legs ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... answered; "I don't hang up any clothes till the same is claan. It will take a waak's washing to rinder ye fit. If I straddle ye over the line wid yer faat and rid head hanging down and bumping togither, ye'll cut a purty figger a-flapping in ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... drift away from him; but after having refused a dozen times the work of a Strand loafer whom he was in the habit of "treating," he would say, "Send it in, my boy, send it in, I'll see what can be done with it." There was a long counter, and the way to be published by Mr B. was to straddle on the counter and play with a black cat. There was an Irishman behind this counter who, for three pounds a week, edited the magazine, read the MS., looked after the printer and binder, kept the accounts and entertained the visitors. I did ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... children by the water's edge, eager to bathe and yet fearful. There never was anything at once so droll and so pathetic. One did not know whether to laugh or to cry. And when at last she had made an end of all her deprecations and drawings back, and summoned up heart enough to straddle over the rope, one leg at a time, it was a sight to see her ruffle herself up like a peacock and go away down the lane with her damaged nose, seeming to think discretion the better part of valour, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... heavily-printed heading, "Administration of the San Tome Silver Mine. Sulaco. Republic of Costaguana." He had written it furiously, snatching page after page on Charles Gould's table. Mrs. Gould had looked several times over his shoulder as he wrote; but the Senor Administrador, standing straddle-legged, would not even glance at it when it was finished. He had waved it away firmly. It must have been scorn, and not caution, since he never made a remark about the use of the Administration's paper for such a compromising document. And that showed his disdain, the true English disdain ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... that thou shalt go no farther: here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast.' In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... old Flyin' Cloud can't get a good stride in his moccasins. Me, I can straddle out and take holt with my spikes. Them spikes is goin' to put us on easy street. You see! I don't care how good he is, they're goin' to give me four hundred head of broncs and a cute little pigeon to look out for 'em. Me, I'm ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... immunity. But they'll be building ships and soon their navies will attack us, As Artemisia did, and seek to fight us and to sack us. And if they mount, the Knights they'll rob Of a job, For everyone knows how talented they all are in the saddle, Having long practised how to straddle; No matter how they're jogged there up and down, they're never thrown. Then think of Myron's painting, and each horse-backed Amazon In combat hand-to-hand with men.... Come, on these women fall, And in pierced wood-collars ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... a Wednesday morning when the things arrived, and set me in the seventh heaven of satisfaction. My father (for I can scarcely say myself) was trying at this time a "straddle" in wheat between Chicago and New York; the operation so called is, as you know, one of the most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board of finance. On the Thursday, luck began to turn against my father's calculations; and by the Friday evening, I was posted ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of wood mist had broken loose and was floating ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... further it can be thrown, the more pieces will be made. If anybody objects, smash it over his head. Do not, under any circumstances, drop the tongs down from the second story; the fall might break its legs, and render the poor thing a cripple for life. Set it straddle of your shoulder, and carry it down carefully. Pile the bedclothes carefully on the floor, and throw the crockery out of the window. By the time you will have attended to all these things, the fire will certainly be arrested, or the building be burnt down. In either ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... I've got all my eyes picketed on the notes. It would have been as well if I'd reeserved at least one for scenery. But I don't; an' so it befalls that when we-all is in the very heart of the toone, an' at what it's no exaggeration to call a crisis in our destinies, I walks straddle of a stump. An' sech is my fatal momentum that the drum rolls up on the stump, an' I rolls up on the drum. That's the finish; next day the Silver Cornet Band by edict of the Sni-a-bar pop'lace is re-exiled to them woods. But I don't go; old Hickey excloodes me, an' my hopes ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... flashing for them to cope with. In front of the ferry house lay a deep and quaggish puddle of slime, crossable only by ginger-footed work upon sheets of tin. Endymion rafted his tenuous form across with a delicate straddle of spidery limbs. The secretary followed, with a more solid squashing technique. "Ha," cried the new member; "grace before meat!" Endymion and the secretary exchanged secret glances. Lawton, although he knew it not, was elected ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... for concrete were brought in by bottom or side dump gondola cars from pits located about 30 miles out on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. The cars were switched onto the main side track and unloaded under the bins which straddle this track. A receiving hopper, with its top at rail level and long enough to permit two cars to be unloaded at once, received the sand or gravel and distributed it through twelve gate openings onto an 18-in. horizontal belt conveyor 65 ft. long. ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... a little too much for the pony; so it was at a dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his triumphant entry into ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... they get it as high as they can, they'll shoot their jatos, let go, and come bumbling back home. So they have to practice getting back home and landing. For practicing it doesn't matter how they get aloft. When they get down, a big straddle truck on caterpillar treads picks them up—they land in the doggonedest places, sometimes!—and brings 'em back. Then a crane heaves them up on a high-speed truck and they ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... kain't afford to be hawgs, this trip. Straddle your hosses and take 'em over to that far corner where we laid the fence down. Remember what I said about keepin' to the rocky draws. I'll wait here and turn these loose, and foller along and set up the fence after yuh. And keep agoin'—only don't swing over toward Baptista's place, mind. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... impatience for the word. He had that word. And Bland, who had glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed some one coming,—some one who much resembled a messenger boy,—turned the motor over with one mighty pull, and made the cockpit in two jumps and a straddle. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... that boodle in their jeans. I reckon we'll just naturally have t' pike along after 'em an' take care of it ourselves. They ain't got such a rip-roarin' start of us—an' I'm the boy can foller that track from hell t' breakfast an' back again. So let's eat a bite, an' then straddle our caballos for ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Polly; but come to us again, as soon as they are gone.—But, hark ye, Child, if 'tis the Gentleman who was here Yesterday about the Repeating Watch; say, you believe we can't get Intelligence of it 'till to-morrow. For I lent it to Suky Straddle, to make a figure with it to-night at a Tavern in Drury-Lane. If t'other Gentleman calls for the Silver-hilted Sword; you know Beetle-brow'd Jemmy hath it on, and he doth not come from Tunbridge 'till Tuesday Night; so that it cannot be ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... Around Camp: Latrines on opposite side of camp from kitchens. Short camps, straddle trenches. Long camps, trenches 2 by 6 by 12 with seats. Have latrines screened. Burn the trenches out daily and keep covered. Wash ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... ickery Ann, Fillacy, fallacy, Nicholas Dan; Queevery, quavery, English navy, Come striddle, come straddle, come out!" ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... themselves of stepping up the hill to take a look at the cemetery, and there find all they sought. This man stood under the archway of the Pack-horse Inn (by A. Walters), with his soft hat tilted over his nose, a cigar in his mouth, hands in his trouser pockets, and legs a-straddle, and smoked and eyed the passers-by with a ...
— Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... himself. The boy was clad in miniature costume of much the same cut and kind, and proud was he to stagger about the deck with his little legs ridiculously wide apart, in imitation of Thorward and Biarne, both of whom were there, and had, he observed, a tendency to straddle. ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... Kate," said she, "you must have your share too—just turn your bottom towards me and straddle ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... is made for a single night, shallow trenches, 12 inches deep and 15 to 18 inches wide, which the men may straddle, will suffice. ...
— Infantry Drill Regulations, United States Army, 1911 - Corrected to April 15, 1917 (Changes Nos. 1 to 19) • United States War Department
... towards the unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Durer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these men would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the mountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, in Durer's work, as you can see in the imaginary architectural landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighter and bolder ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... ascent of the Cimone della Pala. He led the momentous expedition, taking a hitch of the blind-cord round a branch before he permitted her to move. Two or three times he was obliged to make the cord fast and return to help her, for she was not an 'expert'; her arms seemed soft, and she was inclined to straddle instead of trusting to one foot. But at last they were settled, streaked indeed with moss, on the top branch but two. They rested there, silent, listening to the rooks soothing an outraged dignity. Save for this slowly subsiding demonstration it was marvellously peaceful and remote up there, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Legs a-straddle, grips the tiller This young waif of the old sea; When the wind comes harder, only Laughs ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... for the hapless measure. Looked it all over, and behold! there is no good thing in it. Might have said this in ten minutes, or at most, quarter of an hour. But temptation to straddle irresistible; discoursed for full hour and half; talked clean out of Peers' Gallery FIFE and Earl SPENCER, who had innocently looked in. MADDEN, not to be outdone, talked for another hour and half; out of a possible seven hours' debate three appropriated by two ...
— Punch Volume 102, May 28, 1892 - or the London Charivari • Various
... pointed out as "the man who was looking for the Commissary." Idle children attached themselves to his footsteps, and trotted after him back and forward between the hotel and the office. Leon might try as he liked; he might roll cigarettes, he might straddle, he might cock his hat at a dozen different jaunty inclinations - the part of Almaviva was, under the ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... you don't admire the fanciful brackets and other wooden straddle-bugs people are so fond of decorating their houses with. By the way, if these brackets are purely ornamental, there ought not to be two alike, any more than you'd have two busts or two pictures alike in one room. Suppose you ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... to support their feet. In order to diminish the climb the elephant kneels down in the road. A naked heathen brings a ladder, rests it against the side of the beast and the passengers climb up and take their seats in the saddle. Another naked heathen, who sits straddle the animal's neck, looks around at the load, inquires if everybody is ready, jabs the elephant under the ear with a sharpened iron prong and then the trouble begins. It is a ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... But in the above quotation, I want you to see how multiple it is, and yet it is beautiful. Now there is a very interesting thing yet to tell you about this parallelism. Such poems as those of the "Kalevala" have always to be sung not by one singer but by two. The two singers straddle a bench facing each other and hold each other's hands. Then they sing alternately, each chanting one line, rocking back and forward, pulling each other to and fro as they sing—so that it is like the motion of rowing. One chants a line and pulls backward, then the other chants the next line ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... fifty year that other folk might straddle 'em, here I be now not a penny the better! Often-times, when I see so many good things about, I feel inclined to help myself in common justice ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... mining a leased claim up here, but I'll admit I'm nothing but a wandering cow-puncher—a kind of mounted hobo. I have an itch to keep moving. I've been here a year and I'm crazy to straddle a horse and ride off into the West. I know the South and East pretty well—so the open country for me is off there where the sun goes down." His voice had a touch of poetry in it, and the other man, though he felt the ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... after him thoughtfully. "Well, dog my skin!" he ejaculated to himself, "ef I hadn't seen that man—that same Ruth Pinkney—straddle a friend's body in this yer very room, and dare a whole crowd to come on, I'd swar that he hadn't any grit in ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... keep in motion, and it hurt his feelings. Especially the last. He was a horseman, a jockey, he'd ridden the best blood in the equine world; and here he was condemned through no fault of his own to straddle a cross between a llama and a woolly toy sheep. It hurt his pride. He felt bitterly about it. Indeed, he ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... that hain't all. Tonight 'long 'bout dance time I want that saddle horse o' yourn an' yer sideways saddle, too. They's a gal o' mine come in on the train, which she'll be wantin', mebbe, to take a ride, an' hain't fetched no split-up clothes fer to straddle a real saddle. That sideways contraption you sent fer 'fore yer gal got to ridin' man-ways is the only one in Wolf River, an' likewise hern's the only horse that'll stand fer bein' ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... old an enormous man lived with other members of the Inuit tribe in a village beside a large inlet. He was so tall that he could straddle the inlet, and he used to stand that way every morning and wait for the whales to pass beneath him. As soon as one came along he used to scoop it up just as easily as other men scoop up a minnow. And he ate the whole whale just as other men ...
— A Treasury of Eskimo Tales • Clara Kern Bayliss
... she know what 'tis, for months and months To stoop and straddle in the clogging fallows, Bearing about a living babe within you? And then at night to fat yourself and it ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... a carter see His Grace, the Duke of Ch-rt—s-a, As plump and helpless as a bag, A-straddle of a big-boned nag. "Lord, Sam!" the carter loudly yelled, On by this wondrous sight impelled, "We'll run and watch this noble gander Master a steed, like Alexander." But, when the carter reached the Row, His Grace had left it, long ago. Bucephalus had leaped the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... beloved by Cino of Pistoja. The lower floor being choked with rubbish and fallen masonry, the only access to our retreat was by a broken beam projecting from the original doorway. You jumped for this, caught it if you were expert enough, and must swing yourself up to straddle it. You could then gain the string-course of brick which encircled the tower, and, edging along that, reach the lower sill of a window. That window was our front door. The interior was perfectly dry, rainproof and (from all quarters but one) windproof. Enchanting occupancy to me! fit ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... these here new-fangled britches when she's on horseback," said old Caleb, justifying his observation. "Rides straddle, like a man. You can't help ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... the weight of the bear. Sometimes a guiding-pole is used in connection with a snare. One end is planted in the ground in the centre of the path and the other, slanting up toward the snare, is used as a guide toward the loop, since a bear walking forward would straddle the pole. In a further effort to getting the animal's head in the right place, the hunter smears the upper end ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... formal balance over the centre is that it produces a straddle, as, in hopscotch one lands with both feet on either side of a dividing line. In all pictures of deep perspective the best mode of entrance is to triangulate in, with a series of zigzags, made easy through the habit ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... get it manifested in the head of the State, and it has become the policy of a great empire, it is about time that it should be ruthlessly put away. [Loud applause.] I do not believe he meant all these speeches; it was simply the martial straddle he had acquired. But there were men around him who meant every word of them. This was their religion. Treaties? They tangle the feet of Germany in her advance. Cut them with the sword! Little nations? They hinder the advance of Germany. Trample ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... to the fence and whistled at these newcomers. Jean espied a white-faced black horse that gladdened his sight. "Hello, Whiteface! I'll sure straddle you," called Jean. Then up the gentle slope he saw the tall figure of his father—the same as he had seen him thousands of times, bareheaded, shirt sleeved, striding with long step. Jean ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... one sees at table trying all the sauces, and those petticoats called breeches; those tiny shoes, covered with ribbons, which make you look like feather-legged pigeons; and those large rolls wherein the legs are put every morning, as it were into the stocks, and in which we see these gallants straddle about with their legs as wide apart, as if they were the ...
— The School for Husbands • Moliere
... Ten Commandments, or to be an illustration of the value of training-schools and kindergartens, or to afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes. Humanize your facts to the extent of making them interesting, if you have the art to do it, but leave the dog a dog, and the straddle-bug ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... He sat up straddle-legged like a tailor, and pulled the dog's head on his knee. Frank's eyes were green with excitement, foam rose from his bruised throat, his tail beat a tattoo ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... had to cudgel his brains with considerable gusto before he was able to produce any result. But it dawned upon him finally that if the men were compelled to lie flat on their faces on the ground, and place their hands behind them, Bumpus might straddle each in turn, and fasten their wrists, while he, Giraffe ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... BARNUM sarved me same's he did old Plymouth Rock, that when this august assemblage of Fossilized human bein's comes down onto the mail portion of the U. States, old P.T. be turned over to us. I'le make him think he's got straddle his wooly hoss, and an army of mermades was after him with red ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... of winter! Whut's the fun of foolin' round With the posies dead en buried, en the snows upon the ground? When the wind's a-tossin' blizzards in a most distressin' way Tell you have to set a-straddle of the fire-place all the day! But I tell ye life's a-livin' when the summer grows the grass Over all the nooks en crannies whayre a feller's feet kin pass, En the whole world seems of heaven but a half-forgotten type, When the roas'in'-ears ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... two," she directed, swinging the baby up and depositing him a-straddle her left hip. "You're just ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... to running long, and apt to be paid off at sight. In legal phrase, for every class to understand me still, I never was in stirrups yet a tenant but at will; Or, if you please, in artist's terms, I never went a-straddle On any horse without "a want of keeping" in ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... three hours my soul will smite With prickly seconds, or less tolerably With dull-blade minutes flatwise slapping me. Wait, heart! Time moves. Thou lithe young Western Night, Just-crowned King, slow riding to thy right, Would God that I might straddle mutiny Calm as thou sitt'st yon never-managed sea, Balk'st with his balking, fliest with his flight, Giv'st supple to his rearings and his falls, Nor dropp'st one coronal star about thy brow, Whilst ever dayward thou art steadfast drawn ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... thousand feet deeper than he'd been ordered to go when—blooie! Over the top she went with fourteen hundred barrels.... Desdemona's the name of a camp below here, but they call it Hog Town. More elegant! Down there the derricks actually straddle one another, and they have to board them over to keep from drowning one another out when they blow in. Fellow in Dallas brought in the first well, and it was so big that his stock went from a hundred dollars a share to twelve thousand. All in a few weeks. Of course, he ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... suddenly when it is in a brown study, and you undertake to straddle it, so to speak, and all at once you find the wheelbarrow on top. I may say, I think, safely, that the wheelbarrow is, as a rule, phlegmatic and cool; but when a total stranger startles it, it spreads desolation and destruction on ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... spurs an' put em underneat' o' Caesar's saddle, So dey'd press down in his backbone soon ez Sam had got a-straddle. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... tailed off, to be succeeded by the lower shapes of venerable dwellings adorned with the dormered windows and the hip roofs which distinguished a bygone architectural period. Some distance off in this latter direction the vista between the buildings was cut across by the straddle-bug structure of one of the Elevated roads. All this Mr. Leary comprehended in a quick glance about him, and then he turned on the culprit cabman with rage in ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... main road, far into the heart of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... what you are, Merritt," said Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. "You are a concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a steer in 42 1/2. ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... they desired. A few of them did not need any canoes: they were of such height they could step from island to island, and could wade through the deepest oceans without submerging their heads. Kana would often straddle from Kauai to Oahu, like a colossus of Rhodes, and when a king of Kahiki, who was keeper of the sun, undertook to deprive the people of it, because of some slight, Kana waded across the sea and forced ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... even affected to be listening to the music. The wheel spun again; the game was declared, the rake was busy, but I did not move. At last the man I had displaced touched me on the arm and whispered, "Better make a straddle and divide your stake this time." I did not understand him, but as I saw he was looking at the board, I was obliged to look, too. I drew back dazed and bewildered! Where my coin had lain a moment before was a glittering heap ...
— Under the Redwoods • Bret Harte
... picture, by the way, is in fact a cheap likeness of the old discoverers or geographers. Within the book we find Gustavus Roback, the father of C. W., for whom is used a cut of Jupiter—or some other heathen god—half-naked, a-straddle of an eagle, with a hook in one hand and a quadrant in the other; which is very much like the picture by one of the "Old Masters" of Abraham about to offer up Isaac, and taking a long aim at the poor boy with a flint-lock horse-pistol. Doctor Roback is good ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... finish when he began. Now for that dear Mr. Harlan," Buck replied, vaulting into the saddle. He turned and looked at Hopalong, and his wonder grew. "Hey, you! Yes, you! Come out of that an' put on yore lid! Straddle leather—we ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... Right.' He turned the chair about, sat on it straddle-wise and crossed his arms over the curved top bar. 'Let me see,' he mused, leaning forward, pulling at his cigar and bringing his eyes, after they had travelled over the crowd, back firmly to us. ''Two souls with ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... How politicians straddle the fence, refrain from expressing their opinions, deal in glittering generalities, because of their cowardly fears. How they turn their sails to catch every breath of popular favor. How cautious, politic, wary, they are, and how fears worry and besiege them, whenever they accidentally ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... sort o' fancy, maybe, for the country, but I knew he'd like it fancy—at his age. I got it good an' high, so's it could straddle stumps good. They's so many tree-stumps in our woods, an' I know Sonny ain't a-goin' to drive nowhere but in the woods so long ez they's a livin' thin' to scurry away at his approach, or a flower left in bloom, or a last year's bird's nest to gether. An' the little Sweetheart, ...
— Sonny, A Christmas Guest • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... howl, and Doc' comes up to the bed and says, 'Bein' she is dead, I'll pour a little of this nitric acid in her yeer to make shore.' And as he took the stopper out of the bottle, P'silly opens one eye an' says, 'Doc' Simpson, if you pour that in my yeer, you'll never straddle that hoss of ...
— Shawn of Skarrow • James Tandy Ellis
... enemy. Tubby had emitted nothing but a series of excruciating grunts; but now, when he saw the goat making ready for another charge, he met the animal with a yell, leaping into the air with his legs a-straddle, so that the Billie ran between them, and then Tubby footed it up the gully as fast as he ...
— Wyn's Camping Days - or, The Outing of the Go-Ahead Club • Amy Bell Marlowe
... with wonderful address, brought this great and glorious action to a happy conclusion, resolved to relax his mind after his fatigue, in the conversation of the fair. He therefore set forwards to his lovely Laetitia; but in his way accidentally met with a young lady of his acquaintance, Miss Molly Straddle, who was taking the air in Bridges-street. Miss Molly, seeing Mr. Wild, stopped him, and with a familiarity peculiar to a genteel town education, tapped, or rather slapped him on the back, and asked him to treat her with a pint of wine at a neighbouring tavern. The hero, though ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... I have mentioned more than once, is an odd figure, with his bluff, red face,—coarsely red,—set in silver hair,— his clumsy legs, which he moves in a strange straddle, using, I believe, a broomstick for a staff. The breadth of back of these fat men ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... while, Aunty. I am going to 'rough it'—that is, as much as one can rough it when one is domiciled in a private car. I am going to get a horse and have a look at the country. And Aunty—" here the girl's voice came chokingly, as though some deep emotion agitated her "—I am going to ride 'straddle'!" ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... with me. so i said yes and we went. jest before we got there Beany said you go in and ask for it, and i will wait becaus old Kellog dont like me very well. so i went in and old Kellog was sitting straddle of a seet with big wooden nippers on it and he was sowing on a harness and he said cross like what do you want and i said i want a pint of strap oil and he said o yes i have got some good strap oil and he got down and grabed me by the coller and took ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... ceremony of all. On that day a design emblematic of the totem of the deceased is drawn on the ground, and beside it a shallow trench is dug about a foot deep and fifteen feet long. Over this trench a number of men, elaborately decorated with down of various colours, stand straddle-legged, while a line of women, decorated with red and yellow ochre, crawl along the trench under the long bridge made by the straddling legs of the men. The last woman carries the arm-bone of the dead in its parcel, and as soon as she emerges from the trench, the bone is snatched from ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... Fillacy, fallacy, Nicholas Dan; Queevery, quavery, English navy, Come striddle, come straddle, come out!" ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... don't straddle across the stairs. Let the cabman and the landlady come down, and let me go ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... of pine knots blazes in the centre of a mound, and over it hangs an iron kettle, on a straddle, filled with corn-grits. Around this, and anxiously watching its boiling, are the lean figures of negroes, with haggard and sickly faces, telling but too forcibly the tale of their troubles. They watch and watch, ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... a heavy light brown woman with a basket on her arm. A boy about ten walks beside her carrying a small child about a year old straddle of his back. Her skirts are sweeping the ground. She walks up to the step, puts one foot upon the steps and looks forlornly at all the men, then fixes her look ...
— The Mule-Bone: - A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts • Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes
... possesses were hermetically closed that night when Angela di Sereno and Nick Hilliard were imprisoned; and Billy, standing on Nick's shoulders, had to work a few tedious moments before he could induce one of these windows to open. By the time the wiry, slim figure was ready to straddle the window-sill, slip out, dangling, and drop on the grass, night had closed in, fragrant and purple in the open, heavy and black in ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... and was visibly affected. 'You may have heard, sir,' the patrician went on, 'of a commercial transaction of nature unfathomable to myself—I have not sought for information,' he waved his hand impatiently, 'a transaction called a Straddle?' ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... life, he proved an alibi, or spasmodic paresis, or something, and, having stood a compurgation and "ordeal" trial, was released. The historian very truly but inelegantly says, if memory serves the writer accurately, that Godwin was such a political straddle-bug that he early abandoned the use of pantaloons and returned to the toga, which was the only garment able to stand the strain of his ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye
... assured, and breathing somewhat heavily as he contemplated the distance he had to fall if the telegraph wire should break, was the next to climb a-straddle the crude "air-line" trolley, on its second trip to ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... Turk, or something of that sort; but his real name was Francis Yapp, and a very good fatherly sort of man he was in his way, having a family of his own to look after. He used to ride splendid, at full straddle, with three horses under him—one foot, you know, sir, being on the outer horse's back, and one foot on the inner. Him and Jubber made it out together that he was to act a wild man, flying for his life across some desert, with his only child, and poor little Mary was to ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... that I fear to pull Through mud, and dry my clothes at brave House Beautiful— But it's late in the day, I reckon: had I left years ago Town, wife, and children dear.... Well, Christmas did, you know!— Soon I had met in the valley and tried my cudgel's strength On the enemy horned and winged, a-straddle across its length! Have at his horns, thwick—thwack: they snap, see! Hoof and hoof— Bang, break the fetlock-bones! For love's sake, keep aloof Angels! I'm man and match,—this cudgel for my flail,— To thresh him, hoofs and horns, bat's wing and serpent's ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... blessed the cannon, and the people baptized it, and called it Marie-Jeanne, and the women brought out their little children, and sat them straddle-legged across it, whole rows of them at the same time, till the cannon looked like a huge bunch of grapes on which the fruit clustered thickly. By this time it was dark, and the people lighted huge bonfires through the town, and ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... Every moment he could spare out of school that day, he had been sewing in his snug little bedroom. Such stitches! They looked like pairs of bars trying to straddle a brush fence. For epaulets he arranged pieces of black cloth, the center of each being brightened with a strip of red. His belt was made of white flannel dotted with a flaming row of red stars, and with these were interspersed ...
— The Knights of the White Shield - Up-the-Ladder Club Series, Round One Play • Edward A. Rand
... "Administration of the San Tome Silver Mine. Sulaco. Republic of Costaguana." He had written it furiously, snatching page after page on Charles Gould's table. Mrs. Gould had looked several times over his shoulder as he wrote; but the Senor Administrador, standing straddle-legged, would not even glance at it when it was finished. He had waved it away firmly. It must have been scorn, and not caution, since he never made a remark about the use of the Administration's paper for such a compromising document. And that showed his disdain, the true English ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... pardon, stage-managing's more my business,' news that seemed to cast a gloom over the faces of the ministers; and leaving them to make what they could of his reply, he drew Kate forward confidentially and pointed to an old man sitting straddle-legged on a high narrow table just on a line with the window. He was covered with clay; his forehead and beard were plastered with it, and before him was an iron plate, kept continually whirling by steam, which he could stop by a pressure of his foot. He squeezed a lump of clay ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... negotiated himself around the next corner with the rotary motion of a slightly inebriate straddle-legged old planet, he almost collided with another body which was more nearly spherical and which had apparently no legs at all, only two wide-toed "Old Lady's Comforts" showing beneath the hem of her dress. These toes were now set far apart. The very short old lady above ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... time," he muttered between his compressed lips; "ye shan't git out of me hands till ye's down flat on yer back and mesilf layin' a-straddle of ye. There's a difference between boxin' and sparrin' and I shall taich ye the ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... pressed them closely together and remarked that the narrow channel thus made would just fit his instrument. He placed me half sitting on an ottoman and made me recline on my back on the divan. He then made Amy straddle my chest, her bottom just resting on the top of my breasts, her face turned towards me, thus presenting her delicious buttocks to his gaze. He now stood between my thighs, his right knee coming in contact with my hairy mount. He then placed his instrument between my breasts, and at the same time ...
— The Life and Amours of the Beautiful, Gay and Dashing Kate Percival - The Belle of the Delaware • Kate Percival
... rules and regulations for my feller-citizens—and then again I might have took to gambling and drinking and raising blazes, and broke my poor wife's broom-handle with my hard head. So I reckon we'll let it slide as it is. Now you straddle that cayuse of yours and come along with me and I'll show you some ...
— Red Saunders • Henry Wallace Phillips
... absolutely infantile game. A low, overhanging branch of a tree is chosen, and as many as it will bear, old and young, men and women, straddle it; and, holding on to the higher overhanging branches, they swing up and down with as much spring as they can get out of the ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... old Barnum pretty weak physically, but had evidently not weakened his will. He left Hopkins in the office figuring up his account and he jumped a-straddle of a bare-backed mule and went up on the hill and rented the new 40-room house, "The Bravadere," and sub-rented enough rooms to pay the expenses of his company. He also got a porter, bus and team and sent to the landing to meet every steam boat to carry passengers ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... to do as the Arab had done, and seating herself straddle-legged behind Godwin, to clasp him ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... support, supply support, lend support, give foundations, furnish foundations, afford foundations, supply foundations, lend foundations; bottom, found, base, ground, imbed, embed. maintain, keep on foot; aid &c 707. Adj. supporting, supported &c v.; fundamental; dorsigerous^. Adv. astride on, straddle. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... tarantulas with them, and so we had quite a menagerie arranged along the shelves of the room. Some of these spiders could straddle over a common saucer with their hairy, muscular legs, and when their feelings were hurt, or their dignity offended, they were the wickedest-looking desperadoes the animal world can furnish. If their glass prison-houses ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was coming largely, emphatically, and vaingloriously. He had a wagon well loaded with his more intimate friends, including Jim. He had a following of half his Committee of Vigilance and all the men of like caliber who could find a horse or a mule to straddle. Even the Roman-nosed buckskin of sinister history was in the van of the procession that came charging up the slope with all the speed it could muster after the journey from the town on the ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... is impossible to give the true sense and humour of the passage in English, depending, as it does, on the double meaning of {diabainein} (1) to cross (a river), (2) to stride or straddle (of the legs). The army is unable to cross the Centrites; Xenophon dreams that he is fettered, but the chains drop off his legs and he is able to stride as freely as ever; next morning the two young ...
— Anabasis • Xenophon
... on to de house en when Miss Jane see dat leg, she say, "Cindy, what de matter?" My mamma say, "John call me a liar en I never take it." Miss Jane tell em to send after Sam Watson right den. Sam Watson was a rough old overseer en he been so bowlegged dat if he stand straddle a barrel, he be settin down on it just as good as you settin dere. Sam Watson come dere en make dat fellow lay down on a plank in de fence jam en he take dat cat o' nine tail he have tie round his waist en strike John 75 times. De blood run down off him just like you see a stream ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... confident and quite unsuspicious woman who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual tweeds and gaiters,—buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,—unusually a-straddle, on the hearthrug. ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... micht a' witness the same by gannin to the Shouther o' Birkin Brae." And truly it was as he said, for we found the mark of the little Highlandman's shillela on the fox's head, while he himself was sitting a straddle on him, like "the devil looking over Lincoln Minster," and the dogs ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... and bridges throughout the empire to be painted in the most glaring and fantastic colors, and passed a considerable portion of his time riding on a wooden rocking-horse—a degenerate practice for a scion of the bold Catharine, who used to dress herself in men's clothes, and ride a-straddle on the back of a live horse to review her troops. Alexander I., in his ukase of September, 1827, perpetrated a very fine piece of Russian humor. The period of military service for serfs is fixed at twenty years in the Imperial Guard, and twenty-two in other branches of the service. It ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... see the mules uneasy and apprehensive, I always choose some level spot where there is no fear of rocks coming rolling down on us, and halt there. The first shock may be so slight that one hardly feels it, but the mules know all about it. They straddle their legs and brace themselves up or else lie down on the ground. When I see them do that I know that the next shock is going to be a smart one, and I lie down too. It is nothing when you are out in the country, but in the towns it is terrible. People rush out into ...
— With Cochrane the Dauntless • George Alfred Henty
... corduroys, his mighty calves, his big red rural face. We greeted these things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... caster, roulette, rowel; gear, cogwheel, miter wheel; pulley, sheave (wheel of a pulley). Associated words: spoke, felly, hub, strake, tire, straddle, cog, sprocket, linchpin, arbor, axle, axletree, sprag, traction, trochilics, trochilic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... hung out and my heart was likely to burst. Then when I had to straddle a tree to keep from sliding down I got desperate and mad and hoped an old grizzly would happen along to make an end ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... folks might want to put me back in slavery if I tells how we was used in slavery time, but you asks me for the truth. The overseer was 'straddle his big horse at three o'clock in the mornin', roustin' the hands off to the field. He got them all lined up and then come back to the house for breakfas'. The rows was a mile long and no matter how much grass was in them, if you leaves one sprig on your row they beats you nearly to ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... the race and forgot his other loss for a minute, and declared that Mr. Tortoise didn't win the race at all—that he couldn't have covered that much ground in a half a day alone, and he asked Mr. Fox if he was going to let that great straddle bug ruin his reputation for speed and make him the laughing stock of the Big Deep Woods, besides all the other damage ...
— How Mr. Rabbit Lost his Tail • Albert Bigelow Paine
... or no politics, I want to see a law enforced so long as it's a law. If a party cannot hold together and keep on top with any other system, then the party is 'in' wrong. I don't believe General Waymouth intends to straddle. He'll ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... garment, being removed from your person, is again taken to the tailor's laboratory, and the embrasures carefully and artistically fine-drawn. The process for walking or riding trousers only varies in these particulars—for the one you should stand upright, for the other you should straddle the back of a chair. Trousers cut on these principles entail only two inconveniences, to which every one with the true feelings of a gentleman would willingly submit. You must never attempt to sit down in your walking trousers, or venture to assume an upright ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... just the very worst!" he said with a deep sigh, as he reached a stile and sat down a-straddle ...
— Andy the Acrobat • Peter T. Harkness
... staked, the player to his left, who is called No. 1, has the option of "straddling," i.e. of staking a sum double that of the ante. If No. 1 does not straddle the ante, no other player may do so, and the dealer proceeds to deal ...
— Round Games with Cards • W. H. Peel
... holding the spectacles up to the court, "Your lordship observes, they are made with a straddle As wide as the ridge of the Nose is; in short, Designed to sit close to it, just ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Let us not straddle the fence. Business is a game, and so is politics. Neither knows any sentiment. Suppose you should favour this N.C.O. crowd in a mistaken idea that you were doing the right thing, and that subsequently ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast.' In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as he leaps. The fifth shows the climacteric of the ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... fence and picked up the hoe. "Stand this way! Straddle the furrow with your back in the direction you are going to hoe; or else stand on the left side of the furrow facing it. Grasp the handle of the hoe in the right hand near the upper end. The back of your hand should be up. Now the left hand should be a foot or more ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... doin' any more'n any frog might do. You never see a frog so modest and straightfor'ard as he was, for all he was so gifted. And when it come to fair and square jumping on a dead level, he could get over more ground at one straddle than any animal of his breed you ever see. Jumping on a dead level was his strong suit, you understand; and when it came to that, Smiley would ante up money on him as long as he had a red. Smiley was monstrous proud of his frog, and well he might be, for fellers that had ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and Princess Royal kept straight ahead till they were able to "straddle" even the leading ship of the enemy's line. The Tiger and Lion poured shells into the Seydlitz, but were unable to do much damage to the Moltke. While they were thus engaged the Princess ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... at me," said Hendrick. "I'll take a turn round of a few hundred yards to show you how. The chief thing you have to guard against is treading with one shoe on the edge of the other, at the same time you must not straddle. Just pass the inner edge of one shoe over the inner edge of the other, and walk very much as if you had no snow-shoes on ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... navies is the so-called "armored" cruiser,—a type to which belonged the four principal vessels of Cervera's squadron. The name itself is interesting, as indicating the inveterate tendency of mankind to straddle,—the reluctance to choose one of two opposite things, and frankly to give up the other. Armor, being an element of fighting power, belongs properly to the battleship rather than the cruiser; and in the latter, ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... beheading and splitting it open, leaving the hide to hold the parts together. By turning the animal flesh side down and taking ropes from a front and hind foot to the pommels of two saddles, the men, by riding apart, could straddle the flames, virtually rubbing the fire out with the dragging carcass. Other men followed with wet blankets and beat out any remaining flames, the work being carried on at a gallop, with a change of horses every mile or so, and the fire was thus constantly ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... short, all the necessary paraphernalia and accoutrements of a couple of knights of the cattle country. If they lose the two hundred dollars we win the two outfits! And to-morrow, instead of riding in a Pullman toward San Francisco, we straddle what they call a hay-burner for the blue rim of mountains in ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... concrete were brought in by bottom or side dump gondola cars from pits located about 30 miles out on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. The cars were switched onto the main side track and unloaded under the bins which straddle this track. A receiving hopper, with its top at rail level and long enough to permit two cars to be unloaded at once, received the sand or gravel and distributed it through twelve gate openings onto an 18-in. horizontal belt ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... fond of the children, and were with them as much as they could be during the day. They took them on little picnics and excursions, and two small ponies were trained so Bert and Nan could ride them. As for Flossie and Freddie, they had to ride in the cart. Freddie wanted to be a cowboy, and straddle a pony as Bert did, but his mother thought him too small. But Freddie and Flossie had good times in the cart, so they did ...
— The Bobbsey Twins in the Great West • Laura Lee Hope
... the Republican Party, who could not adopt the Democratic plan for the free coinage of silver, without contradicting all their utterances in the past, denounced this proposal as a subterfuge, a straddle, an attempt to deceive the people and get votes by pledges not meant to ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... fell on the floor. Bime-by we let him down, and he was awfully relieved though his feet were not more than two inches from the floor any of the time. We were just going to slip Pa down a board with slivers in to give him a realizing sense of the rough road a reformed man has to travel, and got him straddle of the board, when the Dutchman came home from the dance fullern a goose, and he drove us boys out, and we left Pa, and the Dutchman said, 'Vot you vas doing here mit dose boys, you old duffer, and vere vas your pants?' and Pa pulled ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... witnessed the unbecoming straddle of this French Bourbon between revolution and reaction, beheld the restoration of another Bourbon in the person of Ferdinand VII to the throne of Spain, and the return of Pope Pius VII, amid the enthusiastic shouts of the Romans, to the ancient see upon the Tiber. About the same time ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... little too much for the pony; so it was at a dignified walk that the Maestro, his naked, dripping, muddy and still defiant prisoner a-straddle in front of him, the captured kite passed over his left arm like a knightly shield, made his ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... Elliptic Pendulum of Fig. 170 is supported on a tripod base made of three pieces of 1-1/2 x 1-1/2 inch wood, 40 inches long, with ends cut off to an angle of 72 degrees to give a convenient straddle, screwed at the top to an oak head 3/4 inch thick, and braced a foot below the top by horizontal crossbars 2 inches wide and 1/2 inch thick. For transport this stand can be replaced by a flat baseboard similar to that of the ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly." This went on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and looked at the little victims ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... if I'd reeserved at least one for scenery. But I don't; an' so it befalls that when we-all is in the very heart of the toone, an' at what it's no exaggeration to call a crisis in our destinies, I walks straddle of a stump. An' sech is my fatal momentum that the drum rolls up on the stump, an' I rolls up on the drum. That's the finish; next day the Silver Cornet Band by edict of the Sni-a-bar pop'lace is re-exiled to them woods. But I don't go; old Hickey excloodes me, an' ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... he said, gently, quieting his wife by a motion of the hand, "but 'tain't what you think. It's a man's saddle. You'd have to set straddle. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... jimmy?" crows Joe. "He's a jolly ole brick, that Frisbie! I'm a-gunter set straddle on the ridge-pole, an' carry a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... blooming old wreck's going all to pieces, so that we'll each have to pick out a timber, and straddle mighty soon, if it keeps on this ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... he's a woman, don't do ut. Don't stop for to say good-by, but straddle yure horse ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... Bland, who had glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed some one coming,—some one who much resembled a messenger boy,—turned the motor over with one mighty pull, and made the cockpit in two jumps and a straddle. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... murmured Jacqueline, with an excited giggle. "Three horses out, Lige. Don't stop to saddle. I suppose you can ride, Caesar Jackson?" She laughed at her own question. Was there ever a country-born darky, or a city-born one, for that matter, unable to straddle a horse from the moment ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... than a hundred yards from its mud-besmeared mouth the convenient mangroves disappear and the little creek assumes becoming airs. Huge tea-trees, with cushiony bark, straddle it, and ferns grow strongly in all its nooks and bends. When the big trees blossom in watery yellow, yellow-eared honey-eaters, blue-bibbed sun-birds, and screeching parrots in accordant colours, assemble joyously, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... horse, and added, that, if I did, she would never want to ride. So I told the man he would not suit me. He answered by suddenly throwing himself upon his stomach across the backbone of his horse, and then, by turning round as on a pivot, got up a-straddle of him; then he gave his horse a kick in the ribs that caused him to jump out with all his legs, like a frog, and then off went the spoon-legged animal with a gait that was not a trot, nor yet precisely pacing. He rode around our grass plot twice, and then pulled his horse's ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... flail with e'er a man that ever stepped in black leather; and at spade-work there wasn't his aquil. Indeed, he had a brain for everything: he could thatch better nor many that arned their bread by it; could make a slide-car, straddle, or any other rough carpenter work, that it would surprise you to think of it; could work a kish or side creel beautifully; mow as much as any two men, and go down a ridge of corn almost as fast as you could walk; was a great hand at ditching, or draining meadows and bogs; but ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... so slippery old Flyin' Cloud can't get a good stride in his moccasins. Me, I can straddle out and take holt with my spikes. Them spikes is goin' to put us on easy street. You see! I don't care how good he is, they're goin' to give me four hundred head of broncs and a cute little pigeon to look out for 'em. Me, I'm goin' to lay ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... to the newcomer. "An' now yu get scarce or Billy will shore straddle yore nerves. He said as how he was goin' to ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... days we both lived on intimate terms with all the live stock. "Laddie," an old black cart-horse, was one of our chief friends. Jem and I used to sit, one behind the other, on his broad back, when our little legs could barely straddle across, and to "grip" with our knees in orthodox fashion was a matter of principle, but impossible in practice. Laddie's pace was always discreet, however, and I do not think we should have found a saddle any improvement, ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... an' the chap a-straddle of him is got on store-clo'es. Fetch me my rifle, Babe. I'll meet that feller half-way an' make some inquirements about his famerly, an' maybe I'll ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... dispatched the tortoise to the earth again, the monkey sitting a-straddle of his back. They came to the mountain again, and the tortoise being a little lazy, waited at the foot while the monkey scampered off, saying he would be back in an hour. The two creatures had become so well acquainted that the old Hard Shell fully ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... stairs, keeping his right eye glaring upon Popham in one corner of the buttery, and at the same time petrifying Whelpdale with his left. From father to son, the Disseisins had always been famous for the manner in which they could straddle their eyes; and in Sir Godfrey the family trait ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... rather our, anticipations of the act. We arranged the line of conduct necessary to be followed so as neither to compromise me or him either. In a short time we had again a delicious fuck. Seated, with outstretched legs, on a chair, he got me to straddle over him, and sink down on his stiff upstanding prick. I have tried this position kneeling, with my husband on his back; but it does not equal the chair fuck. One has so much better a spring from one's feet than from one's knees, besides, the man is brought more face to face, ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... Dutch, may I be shot—ow! me leg! Here, ye butcher, don't ye know better'n to handle a mon like a trunk! Kneel, ye spalpeen, whilst I straddle the neck av ye!" ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and he was, too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... leaders and business men, particularly in the East, were disposed to call for a definite party statement in favor of a gold standard and had reached the point where they could not be put off by the usual meaningless straddle. Thomas C. Platt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Joseph B. Foraker, Charles W. Fairbanks and other party chiefs were among them. Hanna was ready to declare for gold after he had been assured of the nomination of his candidate. McKinley ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... like the long ridge of a hill; and it was a good hour's walk, no doubt, for a short-legged Pygmy to journey from head to foot of the Giant. He would lay down his great hand flat on the grass, and challenge the tallest of them to clamber upon it, and straddle from finger to finger. So fearless were they, that they made nothing of creeping in among the folds of his garments. When his head lay sidewise on the earth, they would march boldly up, and peep into the great ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... tossed her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... British tank, one of the most powerful and effective weapons yet loosed against the Germans. They are useful in tearing down the barbed-wire entanglements on the Boche side of No Man's Land, and they can clear the way up to and past the trenches, which they can straddle and wriggle across like ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... hotter, all three of the investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contented himself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up the ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... had left old Barnum pretty weak physically, but had evidently not weakened his will. He left Hopkins in the office figuring up his account and he jumped a-straddle of a bare-backed mule and went up on the hill and rented the new 40-room house, "The Bravadere," and sub-rented enough rooms to pay the expenses of his company. He also got a porter, bus and team and sent to the landing ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... in preference to King Henry the Eighth. Though, as a woman, I bear him no rancour, for his wives were—fools, point blank. No man was ever so manageable. My diplomatist is getting liker and liker to him every day. Leaner, of course, and does not habitually straddle. Whiskers and morals, I mean. We must be silent before our prudish sister. Not a prude? We talk diplomacy, dearest. He complains of the exclusiveness of the port of Oporto, and would have strict alliance between ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... at the work—one superintending, one holding a funnel shaped exactly like a port wine strainer, of which the narrow end was fixed in an incision in the breast, no doubt in the great pectoral artery; while the third, who was depicted as standing straddle-legged over the corpse, held a kind of large jug high in his hand, and poured from it some steaming fluid which fell accurately into the funnel. The most curious part of this sculpture is that both the man with the funnel and the man who pours the fluid are drawn holding their noses, either ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... "I don't hang up any clothes till the same is claan. It will take a waak's washing to rinder ye fit. If I straddle ye over the line wid yer faat and rid head hanging down and bumping togither, ye'll cut a purty figger a-flapping in ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... indeed but a "poor, bare, forked animal,"—worse clothed than the birds, worse housed than the beaver, worse fed than the jackal. "Weak in himself," says Carlyle, "and of small stature, he stands on a basis, at most for the flattest-soled, of some half square foot, insecurely enough; has to straddle out his legs, Jest the very wind supplant him. Feeblest of bipeds! Three quintals are a crushing load for him; the steer of the meadow tosses him aloft like a waste rag. Nevertheless he can use tools, can devise tools: with these the ...
— Industrial Biography - Iron Workers and Tool Makers • Samuel Smiles
... received? Nolkejumskoi(453) has been to see it, and liked the windows and staircase. I can't conceive how he entered it. I should have figured him like Gulliver cutting down some of the largest oaks in Windsor Forest to make joint-stools, in order to straddle over the battlements and peep in at the windows of Lilliput. I can't deny myself this reflection (even though he liked Strawberry,) as he has not employed you as ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... smiling face, a big straw hat, Hum made breeches and all o' that. And when I got there I would just take a peep, To see if old cider mill John was asleep, And if he was I'd go snooking round 'Till a great big round rye straw I'd found; I'd straddle a barrel and quick begin To fill with cider right up ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... herrin, an' we micht a' witness the same by gannin to the Shouther o' Birkin Brae." And truly it was as he said, for we found the mark of the little Highlandman's shillela on the fox's head, while he himself was sitting a straddle on him, like "the devil looking over Lincoln Minster," and the dogs lying ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, No. - 537, March 10, 1832 • Various
... lawless, the ultimate breastwork before the final ditch into which in his hour the gunfighter has finally gone down. Desperate characters, men wanted in two states and perhaps in many more, flocked here where they found the one chance to live out their riotous lives riotously. Here they could "straddle" the line, and when wanted upon one side slip to the other. And hereabouts, for very many miles in all directions, the big cattle men, the small ranchers, the "little fellows," all slept "with their eyes open and ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... bull-elk, nearly a six-footer, but he loomed large as an elephant, came clacking past between the ranked tree-boles, stopping a moment to straddle a sapling and browse; while the wolverine, sitting motionless and wide-legged, watched him. Once a lynx, with its eternal, set grin, floated by, half-seen, half-guessed, as if a wisp of wood mist had broken loose and was floating about. Once a fox, somewhere in the utter silence ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... squire, whom I have mentioned more than once, is an odd figure, with his bluff, red face,—coarsely red,—set in silver hair,— his clumsy legs, which he moves in a strange straddle, using, I believe, a broomstick for a staff. The breadth of back of these fat men is ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cudgel his brains with considerable gusto before he was able to produce any result. But it dawned upon him finally that if the men were compelled to lie flat on their faces on the ground, and place their hands behind them, Bumpus might straddle each in turn, and fasten their wrists, while he, Giraffe ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... to me), a lady of quality, sir, at whose table I have the honour of dining sometimes. There was Lady Stately and my Lady Larum, and Mrs. Dainty, and Miss Biddy Giggler, upon my word, a very good-natured young lady, with a very pretty fortune sir. There was also my Lord Straddle. Sir John Shrug, and Master Billy Chatter, who is actually a very facetious young gentleman. So, sir, her ladyship seeing me excessively fatigued, for she was the last of fifteen patients (people of distinction, sir) whom I had visited this forenoon, insisted upon my staying dinner, though ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... quotation, I want you to see how multiple it is, and yet it is beautiful. Now there is a very interesting thing yet to tell you about this parallelism. Such poems as those of the "Kalevala" have always to be sung not by one singer but by two. The two singers straddle a bench facing each other and hold each other's hands. Then they sing alternately, each chanting one line, rocking back and forward, pulling each other to and fro as they sing—so that it is like the motion of rowing. ...
— Books and Habits from the Lectures of Lafcadio Hearn • Lafcadio Hearn
... roulette, rowel; gear, cogwheel, miter wheel; pulley, sheave (wheel of a pulley). Associated words: spoke, felly, hub, strake, tire, straddle, cog, sprocket, linchpin, arbor, axle, axletree, sprag, traction, trochilics, trochilic, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... and carrying in their hands curiously-shaped sticks, were walking about in all directions. They all looked very earnest, some of them were gloomy, some positively furious. Occasionally they stopped, placed themselves in an uncouth straddle-legged attitude, whirled their sticks, looked eagerly towards the horizon, and then marched on again as solemnly as before. One party in particular attracted the attention of Father TIME. It was a large, mixed gathering of men, and women, and children. They all moved or stood at ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... tasted sweetish and bitterish—I don't exactly know how, but as soon as it was down, I jumped up five times and yelled ‘Out of the way, you little ones, and let me ride’; and after running alongside, and climbing up his slimy scales, I got straddle of a big snake, who turned his head round, blowing his hot, sickening breath in my face. I waved my old wool hat, and kicking him into a fast run, sung out to the little devils to get up behind, and off we started, screeching, ‘Hurrah for Hell!’ The old gentleman rolled over and bent ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... frowning, with his legs a-straddle. "Doggy Bates tells me that you told him you could whack me with ...
— Poison Island • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... dem spurs an' put em underneat' o' Caesar's saddle, So dey'd press down in his backbone soon ez Sam had got a-straddle. ...
— Fifty years & Other Poems • James Weldon Johnson
... fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywhere, he would bet how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find out where he was bound for ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... out of the burning house, throwing armfuls of goods right and left. The "Hecla" was a-straddle of the well, and rows of men were ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... laid out in 125-foot-long rows and one equally long raised bed. Each row grows only one or two types of vegetables. The central focus of my water-wise garden is its irrigation system. Two lines of low-angle sprinklers, only 4 feet apart, straddle an intensively irrigated raised bed running down the center of the garden. The sprinklers I use are Naans, a unique Israeli design that emits very little water and throws at a very low angle (available ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... effective weapons yet loosed against the Germans. They are useful in tearing down the barbed-wire entanglements on the Boche side of No Man's Land, and they can clear the way up to and past the trenches, which they can straddle and wriggle ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... happened. They moved straight toward each other. In the middle of Main Street they met. The Wooden Indian jumped straddle of the Shaghorn Buffalo. And the Shaghorn Buffalo put his head down and ran like a prairie wind straight west ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... dangerous; and when you get it manifested in the head of the State, and it has become the policy of a great empire, it is about time that it should be ruthlessly put away. [Loud applause.] I do not believe he meant all these speeches; it was simply the martial straddle he had acquired. But there were men around him who meant every word of them. This was their religion. Treaties? They tangle the feet of Germany in her advance. Cut them with the sword! Little nations? They hinder the advance of Germany. Trample ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... must needs wait until the end of the world or go to the Indies after it. And he has had his breakfast served in Master Geoffrey Inchbold's own room at the Swan, and swears that he will walk the whole way to Coventry sooner than straddle the horse that the burgesses have sent him ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... dangerous, and when you get it manifested in the head of the State, and it has become the policy of a great Empire, it is about time when that should be ruthlessly put away. I do not believe he meant all these speeches. It was simply the martial straddle which he had acquired; but there were men around him who meant every word of it. This was their religion. Treaties? They tangled the feet of Germany in her advance. Cut them with the sword. Little nations? They hinder ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... supposed to help push you from the rear. In my case the Bedouins had a very easy job, while the Sheik enjoyed a sinecure. The stones are about a yard high, and the only difficulty of the ascent lies in the straddle which must be made to cover these stones. The ascent is made on the northeast corner of the pyramid, and much help is gained by inequalities in the great slabs of limestone which enable one to get a foothold. Two rests were made on the upward climb, but we ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... tasted practical revenge. Though a grown girl of nineteen, she still kept three or four dolls. And I would steal her dolls, pull their dresses for shame over their heads, and set them straddle the banisters. ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... devices, in short grass and flank-fires, was the killing of a light beef, beheading and splitting it open, leaving the hide to hold the parts together. By turning the animal flesh side down and taking ropes from a front and hind foot to the pommels of two saddles, the men, by riding apart, could straddle the flames, virtually rubbing the fire out with the dragging carcass. Other men followed with wet blankets and beat out any remaining flames, the work being carried on at a gallop, with a change of horses every mile or so, and the fire was thus ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... here new-fangled britches when she's on horseback," said old Caleb, justifying his observation. "Rides straddle, like a man. You can't help ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... seen, in gay, equestrian pride, Some well-rouged youth round Astley's Circus ride Two stately steeds—standing, with graceful straddle, Like him of Rhodes, with foot on either saddle, While to soft tunes—some jigs and some andantes— He steers around ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... things with horns are apt to do when we are trying our best to get out of their way. Overtaking him, the bull would have run his long, sharp horns directly under the young fugitive's arms, and, giving him a toss high up in the air, let him drop down a-straddle of his back, just behind the hump, for a pleasant evening ride. Understand me, now—I am not positive in saying that this is precisely what the bison would have done had our hero taken to his heels. Though the thing may have happened once or ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... stealth. Stoyte, to stagger. Strae death, death in bed. (i. e., on straw). Staik, to stroke. Strak, struck. Strang, strong. Straught, straight. Straught, to stretch. Streekit, stretched. Striddle, to straddle. Stron't, lanted. Strunt, liquor. Strunt, to swagger. Studdie, an anvil. Stumpie, dim. of stump; a worn quill. Sturt, worry, trouble. Sturt, to fret; to vex. Sturtin, frighted, staggered. Styme, the faintest trace. Sucker, sugar. Sud, ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... Miss Jane see dat leg, she say, "Cindy, what de matter?" My mamma say, "John call me a liar en I never take it." Miss Jane tell em to send after Sam Watson right den. Sam Watson was a rough old overseer en he been so bowlegged dat if he stand straddle a barrel, he be settin down on it just as good as you settin dere. Sam Watson come dere en make dat fellow lay down on a plank in de fence jam en he take dat cat o' nine tail he have tie round his waist en strike John 75 times. De blood run down off him just like ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... thinkin' he's a woman, don't do ut. Don't stop for to say good-by, but straddle yure horse an' be off ...
— A Little Union Scout • Joel Chandler Harris
... the hot water, he cut a couple of long splints of birch, as nearly as possible half an inch wide and an eighth of an inch thick, and put them to steep with the bark. Next he made two or three straddle pins or clamps, like clothes pegs, by splitting the ends of some sticks which had a knot ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... shame I got to straddle strange horses just because there ain't another in the country like you, Coaley," he muttered, leaning forward to smooth the silky hide under the crinkly mane. "It's going to set hard, now I'm tellin' yuh, to throw my saddle ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... Wednesday morning when the things arrived, and set me in the seventh heaven of satisfaction. My father (for I can scarcely say myself) was trying at this time a "straddle" in wheat between Chicago and New York; the operation so called is, as you know, one of the most tempting and least safe upon the chess-board of finance. On the Thursday, luck began to turn against ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... foundations, furnish foundations, afford foundations, supply foundations, lend foundations; bottom, found, base, ground, imbed, embed. maintain, keep on foot; aid &c 707. Adj. supporting, supported &c v.; fundamental; dorsigerous^. Adv. astride on, straddle. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... one that had saved that hidden little office room from being dark. He was no lineman, but he knew enough to be careful about the wires, so it took him several minutes to work his way to where he could straddle a crosstree ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who later along bolted the ticket and ran ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... crows Joe. "He's a jolly ole brick, that Frisbie! I'm a-gunter set straddle on the ridge-pole, an' carry ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... was a thousand feet deeper than he'd been ordered to go when—blooie! Over the top she went with fourteen hundred barrels.... Desdemona's the name of a camp below here, but they call it Hog Town. More elegant! Down there the derricks actually straddle one another, and they have to board them over to keep from drowning one another out when they blow in. Fellow in Dallas brought in the first well, and it was so big that his stock went from a hundred dollars a share to twelve thousand. All in a ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... 'Fortune'; and in a twinkling, under the nose of England, who was blockading him with ships of the line, frigates, and anything that could hoist a sail, he crossed over, and there he was in France. For he always had the power, mind you, of crossing the seas at one straddle. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... man on the Platte, soldier, cowboy, Indian or halfbreed, but fell abashed if a laundress looked at him. Billy Ray, captain of the sorrel troop and the best light rider in Wyoming, was the only man he ever allowed to straddle a beautiful thoroughbred mare he had bought in Kentucky, but, bad hands or good, there wasn't a riding woman at Frayne who hadn't backed Lorna time and again, because to a woman the major ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... man who was looking for the Commissary." Idle children attached themselves to his footsteps, and trotted after him back and forward between the hotel and the office. Leon might try as he liked; he might roll cigarettes, he might straddle, he might cock his hat at a dozen different jaunty inclinations - the part of Almaviva was, under the circumstances, difficult ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gravel for concrete were brought in by bottom or side dump gondola cars from pits located about 30 miles out on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. The cars were switched onto the main side track and unloaded under the bins which straddle this track. A receiving hopper, with its top at rail level and long enough to permit two cars to be unloaded at once, received the sand or gravel and distributed it through twelve gate openings onto an 18-in. horizontal ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... nothin', but us hear'd tell o' burnin's in Scooba an' Meridian. I were a-plowin' a mule an' de Yankees made me take him out. De las' I seen o' dat mule, he were headed for Scooba wid three Yankees a-straddle of 'im. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... right along, an' the chap a-straddle of him is got on store-clo'es. Fetch me my rifle, Babe. I'll meet that feller half-way an' make some inquirements about his famerly, an' maybe I'll ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... boys. We kain't afford to be hawgs, this trip. Straddle your hosses and take 'em over to that far corner where we laid the fence down. Remember what I said about keepin' to the rocky draws. I'll wait here and turn these loose, and foller along and set up the fence after yuh. And keep agoin'—only don't swing over toward Baptista's ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... tended horses fifty year that other folk might straddle 'em, here I be now not a penny the better! Often-times, when I see so many good things about, I feel inclined to help myself in common ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... taking a hitch of the blind-cord round a branch before he permitted her to move. Two or three times he was obliged to make the cord fast and return to help her, for she was not an 'expert'; her arms seemed soft, and she was inclined to straddle instead of trusting to one foot. But at last they were settled, streaked indeed with moss, on the top branch but two. They rested there, silent, listening to the rooks soothing an outraged dignity. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... here, Captain Lingo," said Aunt Amanda, "I want to know where we are going and all about it. The idea of me sitting here a-straddle of a mule! And this bonnet simply ruined, and my dress just about fit to go to the rag-bone man, and my hair—Look here, Captain Lingo, I ain't going a step on this mule until you tell ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... sort of roaring was heard without; her eyes gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly." This went on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and looked at the little ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... pint of strap oil to oil some harnes, and if i wood go with him ferst he would go with me. so i said yes and we went. jest before we got there Beany said you go in and ask for it, and i will wait becaus old Kellog dont like me very well. so i went in and old Kellog was sitting straddle of a seet with big wooden nippers on it and he was sowing on a harness and he said cross like what do you want and i said i want a pint of strap oil and he said o yes i have got some good strap oil and he got down and grabed me by the coller and took down a strap and licked me till i hollered. ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... modern navies is the so-called "armored" cruiser,—a type to which belonged the four principal vessels of Cervera's squadron. The name itself is interesting, as indicating the inveterate tendency of mankind to straddle,—the reluctance to choose one of two opposite things, and frankly to give up the other. Armor, being an element of fighting power, belongs properly to the battleship rather than the cruiser; and in the latter, if the weight spent in armor detracts ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... even if his knee come straight—but he would die mebby with his head filling up with blood. But finally he made a squirm and raised himself a lot and grabbed the rope at one side of the bar. And then he reached and got the rope on the other side, and set straddle of her. And jest as he done that the wind ketched the balloon good and hard, and she turned out toward Lake Erie. It was too late fur him to pull the rope that sets the parachute loose then, and drop ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... Dick. "No, sirree, yo' cain't git me to straddle that there animal. Ef 'twas a hoss I'd be tickled to death, but you cain't git a snorting ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... sufficiently large to raise and support the weight of the bear. Sometimes a guiding-pole is used in connection with a snare. One end is planted in the ground in the centre of the path and the other, slanting up toward the snare, is used as a guide toward the loop, since a bear walking forward would straddle the pole. In a further effort to getting the animal's head in the right place, the hunter smears the upper end of the ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... way they would beg to stop for just a moment at the famous well with two porphyry lions. Andrea was tall enough to clamber by himself after the manner of young Venetians, and nothing would do but Paolo must lift Maria, so she, too, would proudly straddle one of the fierce figures. There they would sit while the old caretaker would count the pigeons bathing and ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... the big Swede's plans. All Hands And Feet, depending on his sheer horse power and superior weight, always fought in mass formation, as it were. His modus operandi was to embrace his enemy in those terrible arms, squeeze the breath out of him with one bearlike hug, then lay him on the deck, straddle him, and pummel him into insensibility at his leisure. Matt gave ground rapidly and held up a ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... a last vindictive popping. As the smoke slowly eddied away, the youth saw that the charge had been repulsed. The enemy were scattered into reluctant groups. He saw a man climb to the top of the fence, straddle the rail, and fire a parting shot. The waves had receded, leaving bits of ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... wuz tipped wid gol', an' de buckles on de bridle wuz solid gol'. When de ladies went to ride dey wore long skirts of red, blue, an' green velvet, an' dey had plumes on dey hats dat blew in de win'. Dey wouldn' be caught wearin' britches an' ridin' straddle like de womens do dese days. In dem times ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... and return, but many were too flashing for them to cope with. In front of the ferry house lay a deep and quaggish puddle of slime, crossable only by ginger-footed work upon sheets of tin. Endymion rafted his tenuous form across with a delicate straddle of spidery limbs. The secretary followed, with a more solid squashing technique. "Ha," cried the new member; "grace before meat!" Endymion and the secretary exchanged secret glances. Lawton, although he knew it not, was ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... and wings, all scrubbing and cleaning as hard as they could. She chose a clear space, spread her wings, wide and flat, stood high upon her six legs and waited. I fairly shouted at this change, for slight though it was, it worked magic, and the queen Atta was a queen no more, but a miniature, straddle-legged aeroplane, pushed into position, and overrun by a crowd of mechanics, putting the finishing touches, tightening the wires, oiling every pliable crevice. A Medium came along, tugged at a leg and the obliging little plane lifted it for ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... ill grace to my aunt Susan's insistence upon the resources of his dress-suit. In my memory those black legs of his, in a particularly thin and shiny black cloth—for evidently his dress-suit dated from adolescent and slenderer days—straddle like the Colossus of Rhodes over my approach to my mother's funeral. Moreover, I was inconvenienced and distracted by a silk hat he had bought me, my first silk hat, much ennobled, as his was also, by a deep ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... two or three dances to help out—and now here are my girls that can't be satisfied to sit down and hem good crash towels for their mother, but must turn themselves into boys, and play ranchmen and baseball and hockey on the ice, and Wild West shows with the dogs and the pony—and even riding him a-straddle—and want to go to college just because their two brothers are going, and, for all I know, join a fraternity and have secrets from their own mother and a football team!" She paused long enough ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... of Fig. 170 is supported on a tripod base made of three pieces of 1-1/2 x 1-1/2 inch wood, 40 inches long, with ends cut off to an angle of 72 degrees to give a convenient straddle, screwed at the top to an oak head 3/4 inch thick, and braced a foot below the top by horizontal crossbars 2 inches wide and 1/2 inch thick. For transport this stand can be replaced by a flat baseboard similar to that of the Rectilinear Harmonograph ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... balance over the centre is that it produces a straddle, as, in hopscotch one lands with both feet on either side of a dividing line. In all pictures of deep perspective the best mode of entrance is to triangulate in, with a series of zigzags, made easy through ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... in de 'streme norf part of Mississippi nigh de Tennessee line. You mought say dat it was 'bout straddle of de state line and it wasn't no great piece from where us libed to Moscow what was de station on de ole Memfis en Charston Railroad. My white folks was de Abernathys. You neber do hear 'bout many folks wid dat name these times, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... have been digging potatoes, with a sober grin such as came to him always after he had swapped 'hosses' and got the worst of it. Then he would show me again, with a little impatience in his manner, how to hold the handle and straddle the row. He would watch me for a moment, turn to Uncle Eb, laugh hopelessly and say: 'Thet boy'll hev to be a minister. ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... this time," he muttered between his compressed lips; "ye shan't git out of me hands till ye's down flat on yer back and mesilf layin' a-straddle of ye. There's a difference between boxin' and sparrin' and I shall taich ye the ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... don't admire the fanciful brackets and other wooden straddle-bugs people are so fond of decorating their houses with. By the way, if these brackets are purely ornamental, there ought not to be two alike, any more than you'd have two busts or two pictures alike in one room. Suppose you collect ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... in spite of skillful navigation and perfect machinery? Still to-day the sea has a residue of the uncontrollable, and probably will have for some ages to come. Neptune has not ceased from his wrath against the man of thought, who tries to straddle and ride him, and Zeus still supports at times the Sea-god's appeal for honor, when his prerogative is violated. Yet not always by any means, for Zeus belongs to the true Olympians, deities of intelligence, who once put down ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... out as it were, with empty desirous hands, towards the unborn possibilities of the engineer. And Durer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards creative invention. In our times these men would have wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and inaccessible places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the mountain masses of the world. You can see, time after time, in Durer's work, as you can see in the imaginary architectural landscape of the Pompeian walls, the dream of structures, lighter and bolder ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... more commercially, in riding I am quite Averse to running long, and apt to be paid off at sight: In legal phrase, for every class to understand me still, I never was in stirrups yet a tenant but at will; Or, if you please, in artist terms, I never went a-straddle On any horse without 'a want of keeping' in the saddle. In short," and here I blush'd, abash'd and held my head full low, "I'm one of those whose infant ears have heard the chimes ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... up a position with his back to the fire and his legs a-straddle. Cai stuck his hands in his pockets and stared gloomily out of window. For some three minutes neither spoke, then Cai, of a sudden, gave ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... at once wafted to any port they desired. A few of them did not need any canoes: they were of such height they could step from island to island, and could wade through the deepest oceans without submerging their heads. Kana would often straddle from Kauai to Oahu, like a colossus of Rhodes, and when a king of Kahiki, who was keeper of the sun, undertook to deprive the people of it, because of some slight, Kana waded across the sea and forced that king to behave himself instanter; then, having seen the light properly placed ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... occupied in the inspiriting task of dragging a dead sheep after his horse, to make a trail to lead the wild dogs up to some poisoned meat; while the lady, clad in light and airy garments, with a huge white sunbonnet for head-gear, would be riding straddle-legged in search of strayed cows. When Grant left the station, and went away to make his fortune in mining, it was, perhaps, just a coincidence that this magnificent young creature grew tired of the old place and "cleared out," too. ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... her rooming house. It was as long and as lean and as brown as a witch, and, to the more fanciful, something even of the riding of a broom in the straddle of the doorway, with an empty flagpole jutting from it. And then there was the cat, too—not a black one with gold eyes, just one of the city's myriad of mackerel ones, with chewed ear and a skillful crouch for the leap from ash to ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... with a brave faith and faculty of patience that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course. The progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path. The world, even including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year. Then the consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to the public to "assist" at the opening of a ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... their navies will attack us, As Artemisia did, and seek to fight us and to sack us. And if they mount, the Knights they'll rob Of a job, For everyone knows how talented they all are in the saddle, Having long practised how to straddle; No matter how they're jogged there up and down, they're never thrown. Then think of Myron's painting, and each horse-backed Amazon In combat hand-to-hand with men.... Come, on these women fall, And in pierced wood-collars let's stick quick The ...
— Lysistrata • Aristophanes
... of Costaguana." He had written it furiously, snatching page after page on Charles Gould's table. Mrs. Gould had looked several times over his shoulder as he wrote; but the Senor Administrador, standing straddle-legged, would not even glance at it when it was finished. He had waved it away firmly. It must have been scorn, and not caution, since he never made a remark about the use of the Administration's paper for such a compromising document. And that showed his disdain, the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... anything. But I don't care. I go straight to God and I say, 'Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son.' But I am His son, for all that, and I know it and He knows it; and Apollyon may straddle across the way as much as he likes, but he can't stop me. If he does stop me, he ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... you are, Merritt," said Greenbrier, laying one elbow in his salad and the other in his butter. "You are a concentrated, effete, unconditional, short-sleeved, gotch-eared Miss Sally Walker. God made you perpendicular and suitable to ride straddle and use cuss words in the original. Wherefore you have suffered his handiwork to elapse by removing yourself to New York and putting on little shoes tied with strings, and making faces when you talk. I've seen you rope and tie a steer in 42 1/2. If you was to see one now you'd write to the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... on a wheelbarrow suddenly when it is in a brown study, and you undertake to straddle it, so to speak, and all at once you find the wheelbarrow on top. I may say, I think, safely, that the wheelbarrow is, as a rule, phlegmatic and cool; but when a total stranger startles it, it spreads desolation and destruction ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... there ain't a braver man in Grant's army than that one right now a-straddle of your horse. Why, just the way he got your ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... and the embrasures carefully and artistically fine-drawn. The process for walking or riding trousers only varies in these particulars—for the one you should stand upright, for the other you should straddle the back of a chair. Trousers cut on these principles entail only two inconveniences, to which every one with the true feelings of a gentleman would willingly submit. You must never attempt to sit down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... But the round grating under the timbers yonder, where Hanne's father drowned himself, was a thing one never grew weary of. The depths were forever bubbling upward, filling the little children with a secret horror; and the half- grown girls would stand a-straddle over the grating, shuddering at the cold breath that came murmuring up from below. The grating was sure enough the way down to hell, and if you gazed long enough you could see the faintest glimmer of the inky stream that ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... standing largely a-straddle with the thumbs of his gloved hands hooked into his sword-belt. He was rosy as a pippin and cheery as ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... as took my widest strides To straddle halfway down her zides; An' champen Vi'let, sprack an' light, That foam'd an' pull'd wi' all her might: An' Whitevoot, leaezy in the treaece, Wi' cunnen looks an' show-white feaece; Bezides a bay woone, short-tail Jack, That wer a treaece-hoss ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... here will I spill thy soul! And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast.' In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by foot and pinion, and roaring as ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... masther more nor a year at the very most. He could handle a flail with e'er a man that ever stepped in black leather; and at spade-work there wasn't his aquil. Indeed, he had a brain for everything: he could thatch better nor many that arned their bread by it; could make a slide-car, straddle, or any other rough carpenter work, that it would surprise you to think of it; could work a kish or side creel beautifully; mow as much as any two men, and go down a ridge of corn almost as fast as you could walk; was a great hand at ditching, or draining meadows and bogs; but ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... ditches there. 270 SCRIMANSKY was his cousin-german, With whom he serv'd, and fed on vermin; And when these fail'd, he'd suck his claws, And quarter himself upon his paws. And tho' his countrymen, the Huns, 275 Did stew their meat between their bums And th' horses backs o'er which they straddle, And ev'ry man eat up his saddle; He was not half so nice as they, But eat it raw when 't came in's way. 280 He had trac'd countries far and near, More than LE BLANC, the traveller; Who writes, he ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... in your hands, laying quiet enough, as Charlie made you straddle over him, and settle yourself down on his big upstanding prick, till it was all out of sight in your cunt. "Now ride him well, Gertie, or you will be made to move yourself," and he stepped away to cut his switch, a couple of ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... him the meaning whereof they might not catch, and again they laughed; and that deal passed on. And next came a bigger rout, a half score or so, and they also laughing and jeering; but amidst them, plain to see riding a-straddle, their ankles twisted together under the horses' bellies, their hands bound behind them, first Atra, black- clad as erst; then Aurea, in a gown of wheat-colour; then Viridis, green-clad. Atra rode upright, and looking straight before her; Aurea hung her head all she might, and ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... longer alone; hosts of Little People passed them, going in the same direction. Peter said most of them rode "straddle-legs" on night birds or moths, while some flew along on a funny thing that was horse before and weeds behind. I judge this must have been the buchailin buidhe or benweed, which the faeries bewitch and ride the same as a witch ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... that, my dear," returned Fanfreluche. "Gracious! whatever is there that stands the test of knowing it well? I have heard Beltran say, that you find out what an awful humbug the Staubbach is when you go up to the top and see you can straddle across it. Well, the Staubbach is just like everything in this life. Keep your distance, and how well the creature looks!—all veiled in its spray, and all bright with its prismatic colours, so deep, and so vast, and so very impressive. But just ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... the pack-mules were all cropping peacefully at the hay that had been liberally distributed among them because there was hardly grass enough for a "burro." We were all ready to turn in, but there stood our temporary commander, his long legs a-straddle, his hands clasped behind him, and the flickering light of the fire betraying in his face both ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Latrines on opposite side of camp from kitchens. Short camps, straddle trenches. Long camps, trenches 2 by 6 by 12 with seats. Have latrines screened. Burn the trenches out daily and keep covered. Wash ...
— Military Instructors Manual • James P. Cole and Oliver Schoonmaker
... travelling from camp to camp, a firestick or burning brand is carried and replaced when nearly consumed. The gins sometimes carry two of these, one in front and one behind, the flames pointing inwards; and with a baby sitting straddle-legs over their neck and a cooliman under their arms ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... politics, I want to see a law enforced so long as it's a law. If a party cannot hold together and keep on top with any other system, then the party is 'in' wrong. I don't believe General Waymouth intends to straddle. ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day
... hunt is organised, and a kangaroo selected from the game captured. It is cut open and the spleen and liver rubbed over the back of the man. He then walks solemnly down to the nearest water, and standing straddle-legs in it washes himself. All the young untried warriors swim between his legs. This is supposed to impart courage and strength to them. The following day, at early dawn, he dashes out of his house, fully armed, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... singing, Reddy? Seems to me y'u had ought to take that voice into grand opera. The way y'u straddle them high notes is a caution for fair. What was it y'u was singing? Sounded like 'Would I were far ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... not entirely assured, and breathing somewhat heavily as he contemplated the distance he had to fall if the telegraph wire should break, was the next to climb a-straddle the crude "air-line" trolley, on its second trip to the ...
— The Brighton Boys in the Radio Service • James R. Driscoll
... the word. He had that word. And Bland, who had glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed some one coming,—some one who much resembled a messenger boy,—turned the motor over with one mighty pull, and made the cockpit in two jumps and a straddle. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... up the road at a lively pace. The rider was seated a-straddle, and so Samuel was slow to realize that it was a woman. It was only when he saw her wave her hand and call to them that he ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... the cake basket hung on the hat rail, and the teapot was thrust out of reach of harm beneath the oak bench. Lettice was lying down upstairs, but all the rest of the household were gathered together, the visitors provided with chairs in honour of their position, Norah seated on the stairs, Raymond straddle-leg over the banister, Mr Bertrand and Geraldine lowly on buffets, while Hilary was perched on the top of a huge packing chest, enveloped in a pink "pinafore," and looking all the prettier because her brown hair was ruffled a little out of ...
— Sisters Three • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... can she know what 'tis, for months and months To stoop and straddle in the clogging fallows, Bearing about a living babe within you? And then at night to fat yourself and it ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... action to a happy conclusion, resolved to relax his mind after his fatigue, in the conversation of the fair. He therefore set forwards to his lovely Laetitia; but in his way accidentally met with a young lady of his acquaintance, Miss Molly Straddle, who was taking the air in Bridges-street. Miss Molly, seeing Mr. Wild, stopped him, and with a familiarity peculiar to a genteel town education, tapped, or rather slapped him on the back, and asked him ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... wheels ran within an inch of a rather steep bank, and straight ahead was a short line of broken limestone so common on bluegrass turnpikes, but Judith had the Southern girl's trust and courage, and seemed to notice the reckless drive as little as did Crittenden, who made the wheels straddle the stones, when the variation of an inch or two would have lamed ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... things as children greet the loved pictures in a storybook lost and mourned and found again. We recognised them as one recognises the handwriting on letter-backs. Beside the road we saw a ploughboy straddle whistling on a stile, and he had the merit of being not only a ploughboy but a Gainsborough. Beyond the stile, across the level velvet of a meadow, a footpath wandered like a streak drawn by a finger over a surface of fine plush. ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James
... To hell with them! Besides, for the matter of that, he was feeling sort of sick himself—sort of numb and shivery—and he staggered like a drunken man as he went slowly back up to the wall. It was all he could do to straddle the blamed thing, and then it was only with the help of a wounded Samoan who took his hand. The Kanaka, dizzily seen through a kind of mist, was no other than Tua; together, like men in a dream, they searched for Fetuao's body; and dragging it ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... she answered; "I don't hang up any clothes till the same is claan. It will take a waak's washing to rinder ye fit. If I straddle ye over the line wid yer faat and rid head hanging down and bumping togither, ye'll cut a purty figger a-flapping ...
— The Launch Boys' Adventures in Northern Waters • Edward S. Ellis
... he muttered between his compressed lips; "ye shan't git out of me hands till ye's down flat on yer back and mesilf layin' a-straddle of ye. There's a difference between boxin' and sparrin' and I shall taich ye the same, as ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... climb the elephant kneels down in the road. A naked heathen brings a ladder, rests it against the side of the beast and the passengers climb up and take their seats in the saddle. Another naked heathen, who sits straddle the animal's neck, looks around at the load, inquires if everybody is ready, jabs the elephant under the ear with a sharpened iron prong and then the trouble begins. It is a good deal like ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... lessons. The patient is directed to stand at "Attention," head up and chest out, not looking at his feet, as the ataxic always wishes to do. At first this is enough to require; it will not do to be too particular about how his feet are placed, so long as he does not straddle. He can repeat this effort for himself a dozen times a day, for a minute or two each time. Next we try the same position with a little more care about getting the feet pretty near together and parallel, ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... the job called off. He was a thousand feet deeper than he'd been ordered to go when—blooie! Over the top she went with fourteen hundred barrels.... Desdemona's the name of a camp below here, but they call it Hog Town. More elegant! Down there the derricks actually straddle one another, and they have to board them over to keep from drowning one another out when they blow in. Fellow in Dallas brought in the first well, and it was so big that his stock went from a hundred dollars a share to ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... bucket was a soap box attached to a rope, which passed through a pulley at the top of the well. The pulley was supported by a tripod made by firmly lashing together the upper ends of three stout poles and spreading their lower ends far enough apart to straddle the mouth of the well, as shown in Fig. 282. After the well had been carried down to a sufficient depth, we began laying the stone wall, which was to form the permanent lining. We knew that the wooden walls would not do, because they would soon decay. Our stone wall, which was ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... trees and about fifty stumps—were pretty well cleared; and then came a problem that could n't be worked-out on a draught-board. I have already said that we had n't any draught horses; indeed, the only thing on the selection like a horse was an old "tuppy" mare that Dad used to straddle. The date of her foaling went further back than Dad's, I believe; and she was shaped something like an alderman. We found her one day in about eighteen inches of mud, with both eyes picked out by the crows, and her hide bearing evidence that a feathery tribe had ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... thatch of brown, gazed straight into the face of every man on the Platte, soldier, cowboy, Indian or halfbreed, but fell abashed if a laundress looked at him. Billy Ray, captain of the sorrel troop and the best light rider in Wyoming, was the only man he ever allowed to straddle a beautiful thoroughbred mare he had bought in Kentucky, but, bad hands or good, there wasn't a riding woman at Frayne who hadn't backed Lorna time and again, because to a woman the ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... building somewhere in England. I, like the curling tongs, was at last packed up in a box, and brought to America, but it took a rather larger box to take me and my friends, than it took to pack up him and his friends, with all their thin straddle legs." ...
— Who Spoke Next • Eliza Lee Follen
... softening in the hot water, he cut a couple of long splints of birch, as nearly as possible half an inch wide and an eighth of an inch thick, and put them to steep with the bark. Next he made two or three straddle pins or clamps, like clothes pegs, by splitting the ends of some sticks which had a knot at ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Straddle Ridge swapped mules," replied the clerk, "and now each is accusing the other of ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... thrown, the more pieces will be made. If anybody objects, smash it over his head. Do not, under any circumstances, drop the tongs down from the second story; the fall might break its legs, and render the poor thing a cripple for life. Set it straddle of your shoulder, and carry it down carefully. Pile the bedclothes carefully on the floor, and throw the crockery out of the window. By the time you will have attended to all these things, the fire will certainly be arrested, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... investigations of radiation detection equipment in configurations suitable for deployment at seaports, which may include underwater or water surface detection equipment and detection equipment that can be mounted on cranes and straddle cars used to move shipping containers; and (3) have the authority to establish or contract with 1 or more federally funded research and development centers to provide independent analysis of homeland security issues and carry out other responsibilities ...
— Homeland Security Act of 2002 - Updated Through October 14, 2008 • Committee on Homeland Security, U.S. House of Representatives
... dead, but I can't tell you how; He left me six horses to follow the plough; With my whim wham waddle ho! Strim stram straddle ho! Bubble ho! ...
— The Baby's Opera • Walter Crane
... to hear what it was—I've been laying here all this time waiting to know what great thing it was that skeered you so much. I never laughed so in all my life as I did when he got a-straddle of you. I was coming up to the sled, when I saw you streaking it through the vines and briers, and then I squatted down awhile to see ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... Joe. "He's a jolly ole brick, that Frisbie! I'm a-gunter set straddle on the ridge-pole, an' carry a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... training-schools and kindergartens, or to afford a commentary upon the vanity of human wishes. Humanize your facts to the extent of making them interesting, if you have the art to do it, but leave the dog a dog, and the straddle-bug a straddle-bug. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... feet and lighter heart, A smiling face, a big straw hat, Hum made breeches and all o' that. And when I got there I would just take a peep, To see if old cider mill John was asleep, And if he was I'd go snooking round 'Till a great big round rye straw I'd found; I'd straddle a barrel and quick begin To fill with cider right up to ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... even at that it's the same old bunk. What about your testimonials? Fake 'em, and forge 'em, and bribe and blackmail for 'em and then stand up to me and pull the pious plate-pusher stuff about being straight. Oh, my Gawd! It'd make a straddle-bug spit at the sun, to hear you. Why, I'm no saint, but the medical line was too strong for my stomach. ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... afford to be hawgs, this trip. Straddle your hosses and take 'em over to that far corner where we laid the fence down. Remember what I said about keepin' to the rocky draws. I'll wait here and turn these loose, and foller along and set up the fence after yuh. And keep agoin'—only don't swing over toward Baptista's place, mind. ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... arr-e-e'd and forced his cattle into a scrambling gallop, and we drew up with the deserted carriage, whose mules were standing straddle-legged, and panting as though they were going to burst. He pulled up there, but Haigh snatched hold of the reins through the front window, and turning the animals off the road, sent them with a yell into ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... supply support, lend support, give foundations, furnish foundations, afford foundations, supply foundations, lend foundations; bottom, found, base, ground, imbed, embed. maintain, keep on foot; aid &c 707. Adj. supporting, supported &c v.; fundamental; dorsigerous^. Adv. astride on, straddle. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... he'd finish when he began. Now for that dear Mr. Harlan," Buck replied, vaulting into the saddle. He turned and looked at Hopalong, and his wonder grew. "Hey, you! Yes, you! Come out of that an' put on yore lid! Straddle leather—we can't stay here ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... a-straddle, grips the tiller This young waif of the old sea; When the wind comes harder, only Laughs "Hurrah!" ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... our earliest days we both lived on intimate terms with all the live stock. "Laddie," an old black cart-horse, was one of our chief friends. Jem and I used to sit, one behind the other, on his broad back, when our little legs could barely straddle across, and to "grip" with our knees in orthodox fashion was a matter of principle, but impossible in practice. Laddie's pace was always discreet, however, and I do not think we should have found a saddle any improvement, even ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... I beg your pardon, stage-managing's more my business,' news that seemed to cast a gloom over the faces of the ministers; and leaving them to make what they could of his reply, he drew Kate forward confidentially and pointed to an old man sitting straddle-legged on a high narrow table just on a line with the window. He was covered with clay; his forehead and beard were plastered with it, and before him was an iron plate, kept continually whirling by steam, which he could stop by a pressure ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore
... a flaming dart at his breast.' In the cut he throws a dart with either hand, belching pointed flames out of his mouth, spreading his broad vans, and straddling the while across the path, as only a fiend can straddle who has just sworn by his infernal den. The defence will not be long against such vice, such flames, such red-hot nether energy. And in the fourth cut, to be sure, he has leaped bodily upon his victim, sped by ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her eyes gleamed, her nostrils quivered like a horse planning a gallop, and in the middle of one of your best sentences she simply faded away with some horrible man at the other end of the table who was probably "the only man in London who can do the Double Straddle properly." This went on the whole of the meal, and it made connected conversation quite difficult. For my own part I went on eating, and when I had properly digested I went out and looked at the little victims ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various
... village. The next day a hunt is organised, and a kangaroo selected from the game captured. It is cut open and the spleen and liver rubbed over the back of the man. He then walks solemnly down to the nearest water, and standing straddle-legs in it washes himself. All the young untried warriors swim between his legs. This is supposed to impart courage and strength to them. The following day, at early dawn, he dashes out of his house, fully armed, and calls aloud the name of his victim. Having satisfied himself ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... consider camels: only think Of camels long enough, and you'ld go mad— With all their humps and lumps; their knobbly knees, Splay feet, and straddle legs; their sagging necks, Flat flanks, and scraggy tails, and monstrous teeth. I've not forgotten the first fiend I met: 'Twas in a lane in Smyrna, just a ditch Between the shuttered houses, and so narrow ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... bought bikes and are chasing the girl in bloomers. One-half the great she-world's on wheels—the other wondering how it feels to ride clothespin fashion. Clearly the Women's Rescue League cannot stem the tide— not even with the help of the ICONOCLAST and ex- Governor Hogg; it must either straddle a bike and join in the stampede, climb a fence or get run over. Hevings! is there no help for us—no halting-place this side of hetairism? Are we all pedaling at breakneck pace to the Grove of Daphne, where lust is law? Is the bike ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... was passive in your hands, laying quiet enough, as Charlie made you straddle over him, and settle yourself down on his big upstanding prick, till it was all out of sight in your cunt. "Now ride him well, Gertie, or you will be made to move yourself," and he stepped away to cut his switch, a couple of minutes ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... go with me. so i said yes and we went. jest before we got there Beany said you go in and ask for it, and i will wait becaus old Kellog dont like me very well. so i went in and old Kellog was sitting straddle of a seet with big wooden nippers on it and he was sowing on a harness and he said cross like what do you want and i said i want a pint of strap oil and he said o yes i have got some good strap oil and he got down and grabed ...
— 'Sequil' - Or Things Whitch Aint Finished in the First • Henry A. Shute
... asked me if I intended to purchase that horse, and added, that, if I did, she would never want to ride. So I told the man he would not suit me. He answered by suddenly throwing himself upon his stomach across the backbone of his horse, and then, by turning round as on a pivot, got up a-straddle of him; then he gave his horse a kick in the ribs that caused him to jump out with all his legs, like a frog, and then off went the spoon-legged animal with a gait that was not a trot, nor yet precisely pacing. He rode around our grass plot twice, and then pulled his horse's head ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... with one masther more nor a year at the very most. He could handle a flail with e'er a man that ever stepped in black leather; and at spade-work there wasn't his aquil. Indeed, he had a brain for everything: he could thatch better nor many that arned their bread by it; could make a slide-car, straddle, or any other rough carpenter work, that it would surprise you to think of it; could work a kish or side creel beautifully; mow as much as any two men, and go down a ridge of corn almost as fast as you could walk; was a great hand at ditching, or draining ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... tried to dissuade us the next day from going down into the canon: "Don't straddle a mule and poke your noses down to the ground, and plunge down that dangerous icy trail, imagining, because you get a few shivers down your backs, you are seeing the glories of the canon, or getting any conception ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... notes. It would have been as well if I'd reeserved at least one for scenery. But I don't; an' so it befalls that when we-all is in the very heart of the toone, an' at what it's no exaggeration to call a crisis in our destinies, I walks straddle of a stump. An' sech is my fatal momentum that the drum rolls up on the stump, an' I rolls up on the drum. That's the finish; next day the Silver Cornet Band by edict of the Sni-a-bar pop'lace is re-exiled to them woods. But I don't go; old Hickey excloodes me, an' my hopes of moosical ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... to help push you from the rear. In my case the Bedouins had a very easy job, while the Sheik enjoyed a sinecure. The stones are about a yard high, and the only difficulty of the ascent lies in the straddle which must be made to cover these stones. The ascent is made on the northeast corner of the pyramid, and much help is gained by inequalities in the great slabs of limestone which enable one to get a foothold. Two rests were made on the upward climb, but we came down without any ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... the round grating under the timbers yonder, where Hanne's father drowned himself, was a thing one never grew weary of. The depths were forever bubbling upward, filling the little children with a secret horror; and the half- grown girls would stand a-straddle over the grating, shuddering at the cold breath that came murmuring up from below. The grating was sure enough the way down to hell, and if you gazed long enough you could see the faintest glimmer of the inky stream that ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... Giraffe had to cudgel his brains with considerable gusto before he was able to produce any result. But it dawned upon him finally that if the men were compelled to lie flat on their faces on the ground, and place their hands behind them, Bumpus might straddle each in turn, and fasten their wrists, while he, Giraffe threatened ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... large stone across the aperture, over which the horse had to straddle. This being above two feet in height, when the animal had got its forelegs over Wilder checked it to a stand. Hitherto following him with forced obedience, it now trembled, and showed a strong determination to go back. There was an expression, ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... was to do as the Arab had done, and seating herself straddle-legged behind Godwin, to clasp ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... blade and waited with visible impatience for the word. He had that word. And Bland, who had glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed some one coming,—some one who much resembled a messenger boy,—turned the motor over with one mighty pull, and made the cockpit in two jumps and a straddle. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... six hundred paces when, at a sudden turning, I came upon her, where she held a little urchin a-straddle of her big deer-hound "Courage." The child gave chuckles o' delight as he slipped from side to side, and the sun through the beech-leaves made their heads as like as two crown pieces. Even as I ...
— A Brother To Dragons and Other Old-time Tales • Amelie Rives
... speak still more commercially, in riding I am quite Averse to running long, and apt to be paid off at sight: In legal phrase, for every class to understand me still, I never was in stirrups yet a tenant but at will; Or, if you please, in artist terms, I never went a-straddle On any horse without 'a want of keeping' in the saddle. In short," and here I blush'd, abash'd and held my head full low, "I'm one of those whose infant ears have heard ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... liked the windows and staircase. I can't conceive how he entered it. I should have figured him like Gulliver cutting down some of the largest oaks in Windsor Forest to make joint-stools, in order to straddle over the battlements and peep in at the windows of Lilliput. I can't deny myself this reflection (even though he liked Strawberry,) as he has not employed ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... the tortoise to the earth again, the monkey sitting a-straddle of his back. They came to the mountain again, and the tortoise being a little lazy, waited at the foot while the monkey scampered off, saying he would be back in an hour. The two creatures had become so well acquainted that the old Hard Shell fully ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... dwindled from an uproar to a last vindictive popping. As the smoke slowly eddied away, the youth saw that the charge had been repulsed. The enemy were scattered into reluctant groups. He saw a man climb to the top of the fence, straddle the rail, and fire a parting shot. The waves had receded, leaving bits of dark debris upon ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... nuff gol' tacks. De fringe wuz tipped wid gol', an' de buckles on de bridle wuz solid gol'. When de ladies went to ride dey wore long skirts of red, blue, an' green velvet, an' dey had plumes on dey hats dat blew in de win'. Dey wouldn' be caught wearin' britches an' ridin' straddle like de womens do dese days. In dem ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States • Various
... hard-breathing little snorts which he meant for growls, when one of the other pups began to nuzzle the bone; and, at times, these snorts would be vehement enough to make him lose his balance and roll helplessly off the bone on to the ground. Then the other three pups would straddle across his tubby body and snort defiance at him, each with a paw planted victoriously in his protuberant stomach or ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... patience that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course. The progress is slow, silent, but sure. The world, busy in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path. The world, even including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year. Then the consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to the public ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... sixteenth century. The chateau, after a succession of proprietors, came to the Panisse family through marriage with the daughter of a Marseilles notary, who got the chateau by foreclosing a mortgage. During the Revolutionary period, the property was saved from confiscation by a clever straddle. The owner stayed in France, and supported the Revolution, while the son emigrated with the Bourbons. The peerage was created just a hundred years ago by Louis XVIII, in reward for the refusal of the Panisses to follow Napoleon a second time after ...
— Riviera Towns • Herbert Adams Gibbons
... dang darn shame I got to straddle strange horses just because there ain't another in the country like you, Coaley," he muttered, leaning forward to smooth the silky hide under the crinkly mane. "It's going to set hard, now I'm tellin' yuh, to throw my saddle on some plain, ordinary cayuse. But it's a bet I can't afford to overlook; ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... in the happy position called in American speculative circles 'a straddle.' If a man has an hallucination when alone, he was in circumstances conducive to the sleeping state. So the hallucination is probably a dream. But, if the seer was in company, who all had the same hallucination, then they all had the same points de repere, and ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... a dead sheep after his horse, to make a trail to lead the wild dogs up to some poisoned meat; while the lady, clad in light and airy garments, with a huge white sunbonnet for head-gear, would be riding straddle-legged in search of strayed cows. When Grant left the station, and went away to make his fortune in mining, it was, perhaps, just a coincidence that this magnificent young creature grew tired of the old place and "cleared ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... late in the day, I reckon: had I left years ago Town, wife, and children dear.... Well, Christmas did, you know!— Soon I had met in the valley and tried my cudgel's strength On the enemy horned and winged, a-straddle across its length! Have at his horns, thwick—thwack: they snap, see! Hoof and hoof— Bang, break the fetlock-bones! For love's sake, keep aloof Angels! I'm man and match,—this cudgel for my flail,— To thresh him, hoofs ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... that riles 'em. They take on awful about her ridin' in pants, an' it certainly is a heap more modest than ridin' straddle in a hitched up caliker skirt, same as some ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... about," he mused. "Well, if Shin-je is built in our proportions that makes it about right. The length of this thing would give him just about a two thousand foot leg. Yes—he could just about straddle ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... was the killing of a light beef, beheading and splitting it open, leaving the hide to hold the parts together. By turning the animal flesh side down and taking ropes from a front and hind foot to the pommels of two saddles, the men, by riding apart, could straddle the flames, virtually rubbing the fire out with the dragging carcass. Other men followed with wet blankets and beat out any remaining flames, the work being carried on at a gallop, with a change of horses every mile or so, and the fire was thus constantly ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... thoughtfully. "Well, dog my skin!" he ejaculated to himself, "ef I hadn't seen that man—that same Ruth Pinkney—straddle a friend's body in this yer very room, and dare a whole crowd to come on, I'd swar that he hadn't any grit in him. ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... few drops. It tasted sweetish and bitterish—I don't exactly know how, but as soon as it was down, I jumped up five times and yelled ‘Out of the way, you little ones, and let me ride’; and after running alongside, and climbing up his slimy scales, I got straddle of a big snake, who turned his head round, blowing his hot, sickening breath in my face. I waved my old wool hat, and kicking him into a fast run, sung out to the little devils to get up behind, and ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... told you that the mountaineer hates as long as he remembers, and that he never forgets. Do you know that Dave sent his horse back to the stable here to be hired out for his keep, and told it right and left that when you came back he was comin', too, and he was goin' to straddle that horse until he found you, and then one of you had to die? How he found out you were comin' about this time I don't know, but he has sent word that he'll be here. Looks like he hasn't made much ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... the upper portion of the mainmast bitts projected out of the water, so, Jackson, climbing down on to these and supporting himself as well as he could by balancing his body with his feet | extended outwards straddle-ways, commenced to slash away at the mast here; while the rest of the men, under Mr Marline's directions, proceeded to clear away the rigging and unreeve those ropes which they were able to reach, ...
— The White Squall - A Story of the Sargasso Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... depending on his sheer horse power and superior weight, always fought in mass formation, as it were. His modus operandi was to embrace his enemy in those terrible arms, squeeze the breath out of him with one bearlike hug, then lay him on the deck, straddle him, and pummel him into insensibility at his leisure. Matt gave ground rapidly and held up a ...
— Cappy Ricks • Peter B. Kyne
... heavy light brown woman with a basket on her arm. A boy about ten walks beside her carrying a small child about a year old straddle of his back. Her skirts are sweeping the ground. She walks up to the step, puts one foot upon the steps and looks forlornly at all the men, then fixes her ...
— The Mule-Bone: - A Comedy of Negro Life in Three Acts • Zora Hurston and Langston Hughes
... corrals and stables. The herds of the two troops and the pack-mules were all cropping peacefully at the hay that had been liberally distributed among them because there was hardly grass enough for a "burro." We were all ready to turn in, but there stood our temporary commander, his long legs a-straddle, his hands clasped behind him, and the flickering light of the fire betraying in his face ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Customers in t'other Room: Go, talk with 'em, Polly; but come to us again, as soon as they are gone.—But, hark ye, Child, if 'tis the Gentleman who was here Yesterday about the Repeating Watch; say, you believe we can't get Intelligence of it 'till to-morrow. For I lent it to Suky Straddle, to make a figure with it to-night at a Tavern in Drury-Lane. If t'other Gentleman calls for the Silver-hilted Sword; you know Beetle-brow'd Jemmy hath it on, and he doth not come from Tunbridge 'till Tuesday Night; so that it cannot ...
— The Beggar's Opera • John Gay
... Sometimes a guiding-pole is used in connection with a snare. One end is planted in the ground in the centre of the path and the other, slanting up toward the snare, is used as a guide toward the loop, since a bear walking forward would straddle the pole. In a further effort to getting the animal's head in the right place, the hunter smears the upper end of ...
— The Drama of the Forests - Romance and Adventure • Arthur Heming
... plain speakin' done on some subjects when he comes back, and given' squaws a free rein and lettin' 'em ride rough-shod over everybody and everything is one of 'era. Things is gittin' mighty funny when a danged squaw kin straddle my horses and ride 'em to death, and sass me when I say a word agin ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... her book to the desk, where it sprawled at a straddle, and hurried to the rail. Fifty feet away a large rowboat was approaching containing seven men, six of them rowing and one standing up in the stern keeping time to their song with ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... unsuspicious woman who descended in a warm October sunshine to the surprise. In the breakfast-room she discovered an awe-stricken Snagsby standing with his plate-basket before her husband, and her husband wearing strange unusual tweeds and gaiters,—buttoned gaiters, and standing a-straddle,—unusually a-straddle, on ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... there was two birds sitting on a fence he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here—and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even seen a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take to get wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico, but what he would find out where he was bound for and how long he was on the road. Lots of boys here ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... old wreck's going all to pieces, so that we'll each have to pick out a timber, and straddle mighty soon, if it keeps on this ...
— Afloat on the Flood • Lawrence J. Leslie
... of formal balance over the centre is that it produces a straddle, as, in hopscotch one lands with both feet on either side of a dividing line. In all pictures of deep perspective the best mode of entrance is to triangulate in, with a series of zigzags, made easy through the habit of the eye to follow lines, especially long and receding ones. It is the ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... head of the State, and it has become the policy of a great empire, it is about time that it should be ruthlessly put away. [Loud applause.] I do not believe he meant all these speeches; it was simply the martial straddle he had acquired. But there were men around him who meant every word of them. This was their religion. Treaties? They tangle the feet of Germany in her advance. Cut them with the sword! Little nations? They hinder the advance of Germany. Trample them in the mire under the German ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... on the north side of S. Mark's has a famous well, with two porphyry lions beside it on which small Venetians love to straddle. A bathing-place for pigeons is here too, and I have counted twenty-seven in it at once. Here one day I found an artist at work on the head of an old man—a cunning old rascal with short-cropped grey hair, a wrinkled ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... him, and one young man cast a jeer at him the meaning whereof they might not catch, and again they laughed; and that deal passed on. And next came a bigger rout, a half score or so, and they also laughing and jeering; but amidst them, plain to see riding a-straddle, their ankles twisted together under the horses' bellies, their hands bound behind them, first Atra, black- clad as erst; then Aurea, in a gown of wheat-colour; then Viridis, green-clad. Atra rode upright, ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... and don't straddle across the stairs. Let the cabman and the landlady come down, and let me ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... Canal, and on the way they would beg to stop for just a moment at the famous well with two porphyry lions. Andrea was tall enough to clamber by himself after the manner of young Venetians, and nothing would do but Paolo must lift Maria, so she, too, would proudly straddle one of the fierce figures. There they would sit while the old caretaker would count the pigeons bathing and ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... the fence and picked up the hoe. "Stand this way! Straddle the furrow with your back in the direction you are going to hoe; or else stand on the left side of the furrow facing it. Grasp the handle of the hoe in the right hand near the upper end. The back ...
— The Library of Work and Play: Gardening and Farming. • Ellen Eddy Shaw
... empty nutshells; the cloth was wine-stained, and bestrewn with ashes and breadcrumbs, the air heady with the fumes of tobacco. Those of the guests who still lingered at the table had pushed their chairs back or askew, and sat, some a-straddle, some even with their feet on the cloth. John was confabbing with half a dozen black-coats in a corner. Each held a wineglass in his hand from which he sipped, while John, legs apart, did all the ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... what happened. They moved straight toward each other. In the middle of Main Street they met. The Wooden Indian jumped straddle of the Shaghorn Buffalo. And the Shaghorn Buffalo put his head down and ran like a prairie wind straight west on ...
— Rootabaga Stories • Carl Sandburg
... whom I have mentioned more than once, is an odd figure, with his bluff, red face,—coarsely red,—set in silver hair,— his clumsy legs, which he moves in a strange straddle, using, I believe, a broomstick for a staff. The breadth of back of these fat ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... floor being choked with rubbish and fallen masonry, the only access to our retreat was by a broken beam projecting from the original doorway. You jumped for this, caught it if you were expert enough, and must swing yourself up to straddle it. You could then gain the string-course of brick which encircled the tower, and, edging along that, reach the lower sill of a window. That window was our front door. The interior was perfectly dry, rainproof and (from ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... colors, and passed a considerable portion of his time riding on a wooden rocking-horse—a degenerate practice for a scion of the bold Catharine, who used to dress herself in men's clothes, and ride a-straddle on the back of a live horse to review her troops. Alexander I., in his ukase of September, 1827, perpetrated a very fine piece of Russian humor. The period of military service for serfs is fixed at twenty years in the Imperial Guard, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the keyhole, and through it saw a narrow segment of the room. Ad Miller was sitting a-straddle a chair, his elbows on the back. Another man, one not visible to the cowpuncher, was announcing a ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... Lucindy," he said, gently, quieting his wife by a motion of the hand, "but 'tain't what you think. It's a man's saddle. You'd have to set straddle. ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... some time, and it was all I could do to keep even by playing on the square with big "injins," as I found them very good card players. I held out a hand, but had to wait some time for the "wild man of the forest." At last there was a big "blind and straddle," and I kept raising it before the draw. They all "stayed," and drew two or three cards (I do not remember which). I took one, and when we came to "show down," I was the lucky fellow. This was too much for the bucks, so three of them ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... Bluewater would say; and yet I never see the fellow straddle a horse that I do not wish it were a studding-sail-boom run out to leeward! We sailors fancy we ride, Mr. Wychecombe, but it is some such fancy as a marine has for the fore-topmast-cross-trees. Can a horse be had, to ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... year tell er dis, en nothin'd do but he mus' rack 'roun' en see how ole Brer Fox gittin' on. W'en he git whar Brer Fox house is, he year a mighty lammin' en a blammin' en lo en beholes, dar 'uz Brer Fox settin' straddle er de comb er de roof nailin' on shingles des ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... Fig. 170 is supported on a tripod base made of three pieces of 1-1/2 x 1-1/2 inch wood, 40 inches long, with ends cut off to an angle of 72 degrees to give a convenient straddle, screwed at the top to an oak head 3/4 inch thick, and braced a foot below the top by horizontal crossbars 2 inches wide and 1/2 inch thick. For transport this stand can be replaced by a flat baseboard similar to that of the Rectilinear Harmonograph ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... shows one with a single blade and that may be used in very narrow rows. Two-wheeled hoes (Fig. 92) are often used, particularly when it is necessary to have the implement very steady, and the wheels may straddle the rows of low plants. Many of these wheel-hoes are provided with various shapes of blades, so that the implement may be adjusted to many kinds of work. Nearly all the weeding of beds of onions and like plants can be done by means of these wheel-hoes, if ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... spectacles up to the court, "Your lordship observes, they are made with a straddle As wide as the ridge of the Nose is; in short, Designed to sit close to it, ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... enemies of the Republican Party, who could not adopt the Democratic plan for the free coinage of silver, without contradicting all their utterances in the past, denounced this proposal as a subterfuge, a straddle, an attempt to deceive the people and get votes by pledges not meant ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... in 125-foot-long rows and one equally long raised bed. Each row grows only one or two types of vegetables. The central focus of my water-wise garden is its irrigation system. Two lines of low-angle sprinklers, only 4 feet apart, straddle an intensively irrigated raised bed running down the center of the garden. The sprinklers I use are Naans, a unique Israeli design that emits very little water and throws at a very low angle (available from TSC and some garden centers). Their maximum reach is about 18 ...
— Gardening Without Irrigation: or without much, anyway • Steve Solomon
... at last they came to the land of "the straddle-bug"—the squatters' watch dog—three boards nailed together (like a stack of army muskets) to mark a claim. Burke resembled a man taking his first sea-voyage. His eyes searched the plain restlessly, and his brain dreamed. Bailey, ...
— The Moccasin Ranch - A Story of Dakota • Hamlin Garland
... Though, as a woman, I bear him no rancour, for his wives were—fools, point blank. No man was ever so manageable. My diplomatist is getting liker and liker to him every day. Leaner, of course, and does not habitually straddle. Whiskers and morals, I mean. We must be silent before our prudish sister. Not a prude? We talk diplomacy, dearest. He complains of the exclusiveness of the port of Oporto, and would have strict alliance between Portugal and England, with mutual privileges. I wish the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... captain, raising himself with difficulty on his feet. "If one of you dismount, he dies. Tom, my good fellow, you will help me to straddle Roanoke again." ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... full split, with a fair wind on the packet, went right off home and said to his wife, 'Now do for gracious' sake, mother, jist look here, and see how slick them folks go along; and that captain has nothin' to do all day, but sit straddle legs across his tiller, and order about his sailors, or talk like a gentleman to his passengers; he's got most as easy a time of it as Ami Cuttle has, since he took up the fur trade, a-snarin' rabbits. I guess I'll buy a vessel, and leave the lads to do the ploughin' and ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... down and rose up among their horse, in the black tents, that loved and hated among their horse, that lived and died among their horse, and ye would talk to me o' spells. Did I but say the word to that black horse, not you nor any o' the folk ye cam' crooked among would straddle him and live to boast ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... He has with him henceforth money, speculation, the Bourse, the Bank, the counting-room, the strong-box, and all those men who pass so readily from one side to the other, when all they have to straddle is shame. He made of M. Changarnier a dupe, of M. Thiers a stop-gap, of M. de Montalembert an accomplice, of power a cavern, of the budget his farm. They are coining at the Mint a medal, called the medal of the 2nd of December, in honour of the ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... fence, he would bet you which one would fly first; or if there was a camp-meeting, he would be there reg'lar to bet on Parson Walker, which he judged to be the best exhorter about here, and so he was, too, and a good man. If he even see a straddle-bug start to go anywheres, he would bet you how long it would take him to get to—to wherever he was going to, and if you took him up, he would foller that straddle-bug to Mexico but what he would find ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... orders to me—not yet. You haven't the right; and when you have, you can save your breath by not giving that one. This horse comes from Kentucky, and so do I; her name will stay Dixie as long as I straddle her, and I propose to straddle her until one of us dies, or,"—he smiled and nodded across the river—"somebody over there gets her who won't object to her name as much as ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... Commissary." Idle children attached themselves to his footsteps, and trotted after him back and forward between the hotel and the office. Leon might try as he liked; he might roll cigarettes, he might straddle, he might cock his hat at a dozen different jaunty inclinations - the part of Almaviva was, under the ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... such a praist, as the likes of yees has no nade of throubling! Yer conscience is aisy, Misther Straddle, so that yer belly is filled, and yer wages is paid. ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... I would have you sigh For the Aveiro bakeress, 380 For the inn you'll come to by and by And then we'll off with the packsaddle And the innkeeper we'll straddle If he have not, to slake our thirstiness, Good wine at threepence and kid at less, And for hard bread soft buttermilk, A fair wench to serve and sheets of silk, If the floor's strewn with rushes the night be long, If it hails, be ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... delegation of Irishmen, rather startling from its numbers, entered the yard. Among them was Mr. Farren. They surrounded my lifting-apparatus, while I, unseen, surveyed them from a back window. I saw Mr. Farren take the handle, straddle the hogshead, throw himself into a lifting posture, and, straining every muscle to its utmost tension, give a tremendous pull. But the weight made no sign; and his friends, thinking he was merely feeling it, said, "Wait a bit,—Pat'll have it up the next pull." Mr. Farren rested a moment,—then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contented himself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up the ratlines of the mizzen ...
— Michael, Brother of Jerry • Jack London
... gits Tom in de stomach with he knee and a lick side de jaw at de same time and down go Tom and de udder nigger jumps on him with both feets, den straddle him and hits with right, left, right, left, right, side Tom's head. Dere Tom lay, makin' no 'sistance. Everybody am saysin', 'Tom have met he match, him am done.' Both am bleedin' and am awful sight. Well, dat new nigger 'laxes for to git he wind and ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves. - Texas Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
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