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More "Ungainly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... heads of the church could take refuge! Perhaps they shaved off all the hair from their bodies in sign of supereminent self-abasement, leaving themselves naked to the cuticle, that they might prove, by ocular evidence, what a poor ungainly set of wretches they really were, carnally considered; or perhaps they went on all-fours to heaven, in sign of their unfitness to enter into the presence of the pure of mind in an attitude more erect and confident. Well, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shadow grew ungainly, the dyked path struck across a long wet field against the black soil of which the dozens of white-clad peons with their mattocks gleamed like grains of rice on an ebony surface. Beyond, it entered foothills, flanked a peak, and joined a wide road leading directly to an immense cluster of buildings ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... got a very good look at them in their cribs, but one day when they were old enough to be let out, I went up with Miss Laura to the yard where they were kept. Such queer, ungainly, large-boned creatures they were, and such a good time they were having, running and jumping ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders
... Presidency. He is now replaced, I think, by a Mr. Falkner. He is a tall, stout, gentlemanly man, but, while a perfect gentleman in his conversation, and having less of the American accent than most Americans, his manner is somewhat ungainly—perhaps owing to his make, which is large and a little inclining ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... against us; for a sailor looks half a dozen times to windward for once that he glances over the lee rail. And my efforts during the last hour have convinced me of the impossibility of driving this ungainly structure to windward by merely swimming. If I only had an oar, or a paddle of some sort, I might be able to do something; but then, you see, I haven't, so it is of no use to think further of that. The wind is dropping, which is a point in our ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the distance at work with a huge buffalo, and exclaiming, "Hi-yah! belly good walkee now," rushed off in that direction. He soon returned with the buffalo and his owner, and indicated that we could cross on the back of the former. The huge, ungainly beast threw up his head and snorted when he caught sight of the "fanquis," or foreign devils, but a pull at the ring through his nose soon ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various
... the tempestuous darkness. They advanced with difficulty, side by side, speaking low. Rough customers to deal with. Their faces were emaciated from excessive drinking: their eyes gleamed, their voices were hoarse: a brutal pair! But their movements were souple and lively: they walked with that ungainly swagger affected by the light-fingered gentry and the criminals ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... to where a party of tourists, obviously American, waited. The boys watched as the animal came to a halt. The driver bowed to the party. Then, taking a thin stick, he tapped the camel on bony knees that were wrapped in worn burlap. Instantly the camel let out a heartrending groan. Its ungainly legs folded like a poorly designed beach chair, and moaning in ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... and many a sailor. It would seem unlikely that any living thing should seek rest in such a place, or find it. Nevertheless, frail and delicate flowers bloom there, flowers of both the land and the sea; heavy, ungainly seals disport in the swelling waves, and find grateful retreats back in the inmost bores of its storm-lashed caverns; while in many a chink and hollow of the highest crags, not visible from beneath, a great variety of waterfowl make homes ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... but wont to steal O'er the lyre in gentle mood. From the sparkling waterfalls, From the brook that purling calls, Shall Silenus' loathsome beast Be allow'd at will to feast? Aganippe's * wave he sips With profane and spreading lips,— With ungainly feet stamps madly, Till the waters ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... Bright red were those lobsters, and fine-looking fellows, every one of them, in spite of Mrs. Lee's poor opinion; but they were a little too well dressed, even for a dinner-party. Their thick shoulders were adorned with collars of the daintiest material and finish, while every ungainly "flipper" wore a "cuff" which had been manufactured for very different uses. Plenty of cuffs and collars, and queer enough the lobsters looked in them. All the queerer because every item of lace and linen was variegated with huge black ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various
... You hold you dead and dumb, Or scorn my beckoning, And will not come; And I say, "'Twere mood ungainly To store her memory so:" I say it vainly ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... score of years. Nor did the negotiations appear altogether hopeless. The suitor was, indeed, we have seen, as insignificant in body as he was contemptible in intellectual ability. Moreover, the deep traces left on his face by the small-pox rendered him sufficiently ungainly. The blemish was said to be increasing, instead of diminishing, with his years.[1331] But the French courtiers might perhaps have overcome this impediment had Elizabeth been able to see it to be her interest to contract ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... sail their new craft it stuck midway across the dam of Rutledge's mill at New Salem, a village of fifteen or twenty houses not many miles from their starting-point. With its bow high in air, and its stern under water, it looked like some ungainly fish trying to fly, or some bird making an unsuccessful attempt to swim. The voyagers appeared to have suffered irreparable shipwreck at the very outset of their venture, and men and women came down from their houses to offer advice or to make fun of the young boatmen as they waded about in ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... the Borinage coal field exceeds twenty million tons a year. Its ungainly features of shafts, chimneys, and mounds of debris are relieved in places by woodlands, an appearance of a hilly country is presented where the pit mounds have been planted with fir trees. Apart from its mining aspect, Mons is a city of ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of 12) - The War Begins, Invasion of Belgium, Battle of the Marne • Francis J. Reynolds, Allen L. Churchill, and Francis Trevelyan
... regarded generally as an ungainly man, and so he was; and yet on occasions he appeared to me to be superior in dignity and nobility to almost any other man whom I have ever seen. I was present when the committee from the National Convention, that gave his first nomination for ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... favor his audience were, yet he showed not the slightest embarrassment; this, and his noble, dignified mien, agreeably surprised those who expected from what they had been told to behold an awkward man with an ungainly figure. A murmur of approbation ran through the hall on his appearance; and electrified by this welcome, he gained all hearts from the first act. His movements were full of grace and dignity; he had ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... opened swiftly, and he saw mine host before him, eyeing him with those bad eyes; of too much girth, you might have said, to be nimble, yet somehow suggesting to the swift intuition of youth, as Rodriguez looked at him standing upon his door-step, the spirit and shape of a spider, who despite her ungainly build is ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... I should think,' replies Lippa, who is watching the ungainly not to say peculiar movements, of a stout elderly female who ...
— Lippa • Beatrice Egerton
... hasn't anything like that!" laughed Ned. "That was only Harry's crazy notion after he saw something big and ungainly careening about the enclosed yard of Shop Thirteen. Hello, there go Mary Nestor and her father!" and Ned pointed to the opposite side of the street where the girl and Mr. Nestor could be seen in the light of a ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... called a leather tongue. At the back of the boot is a small strap, which is used to fasten the ski heel-strap securely to the boot. Once fixed on the ski, the foot is so secure no fall can loosen it, and the only way to extricate the foot is to undo the three straps. Outside these huge ungainly hair stockings and strangely comfortable boots very thick gaiters are worn. It is very necessary to keep the feet and legs warm in such a cold land as Norway, where the mercury freezes oft-times in the thermometers, ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... from the shoulders. In the latter case a corset becomes useless, the body is left free and unconfined for respiration and motion, there is more health, and consequently more beauty. Indeed all the most ungainly and uncomfortable articles of dress that fashion has ever in her folly prescribed, not the tight corset merely, but the farthingale, the vertugadin, the hoop, the crinoline, and that modern monstrosity the so-called 'dress improver' also, all of them have owed their origin to the same error, ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... man, somewhat ungainly of figure and homely of face. But his large, deep eyes of velvety nut-brown were very beautiful and marvellously bright and clear for a man of his age. He wore a little pointed, well-cared-for beard, innocent of gray; but his hair was grizzled, and altogether ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in the Quadrilateral, it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... evenings of every week, the leaders of this party met in the saloon of Madame Roland, to deliberate respecting their measures. Among them there was a young lawyer from the country, with a stupid expression of countenance, sallow complexion, and ungainly gestures, who had made himself excessively unpopular by the prosy speeches with which he was ever wearying the Assembly. He had often been floored by argument and coughed down by contempt, but he seemed alike insensible to sarcasm and ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... fact was, I meant to follow the policy of the Aberdeen government when starving to death one of the bravest armies that ever faced a foe. Instead of expanding plains and undulating hills, such as Smooth had pictures to his mind in his boyhood, I found the seat of war an ungainly mud-puddle, with ramparts of savage-looking citizens menacing each other from its opposite banks. Between these banks the amusement of war was every now and then kept up with doubtful results. That something more than ordinary was to pay I felt assumed by the grimaces of the contending ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... part of the town, where gaudily painted door jambs and window frames and wonderfully prosperous gardens proclaim the immigrant from sunny Italy. Not infrequently an old warehouse, store, or church is transformed into an ungainly and evil-odored barracks, housing scores of men who do their own washing and cooking. Those who do not dwell in the cities are at work in construction camps—for the Italian has succeeded the Irishman as the knight of the pick and shovel. The great bulk of these ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... Ungainly, awkward, repulsive-looking as these creatures are, with their great projecting harelips and their hairy humps, they have the compensation of being most priceless treasures to all those who "dwell in tents" in the vast sandy plains ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... only brother. Both were tall, good-looking young men, though there was not even a family resemblance between the grey-eyed and fairhaired David, with his smooth-shaven face and slender well-proportioned figure, and his loose-limbed, rather ungainly cousin, whose appearance of great strength made up for his lack of grace, and whose large melting brown eyes made one forget the faults which the hypercritical might have found in the rest of his face: the rather large nose, and the mouth which was ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... faint resemblance of one "every inch a priest." The very antipodes to the 'bonhomie' of this figure, confronted him as croupier at the foot of the table. This, as I afterwards learned, was no less a person than Mister Donovan, the coadjutor or "curate;" he was a tall, spare, ungainly looking man of about five and thirty, with a pale, ascetic countenance, the only readable expression of which vibrated between low suspicion and intense vulgarity: over his low, projecting forehead ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... halls Costigan stalked to a certain storage room, where with all due precaution he donned his own suit of Triplanetary armor. Making an ungainly bundle of the other Solarian equipment stored there, he dragged it along behind him as he clanked back toward his prison, until he neared the dock at which was moored the Nevian space-speedster which he was determined ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... every step, Inspector Weymouth ascended, ungainly, that frail and moving stair. Arrived beside me, he wiped the perspiration from his face ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... brutes stood with stiffly erected ears, then they poured from the grove toward the river's bank, covering the distance with great, ungainly leaps. ...
— The Gods of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... and with their lithe and apparently boneless shapes conformed to the rude and sharp angles, they are a wonderful, but not a graceful or pleasing sight. At a little distance they look like huge maggots, and their slow, ungainly motions upon the land do not lessen this resemblance. Swimming in the ocean, at a distance from the land, they are inconspicuous objects, as nothing but the head shows above water, and that only at intervals. But ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... shall pass his childhood and youth in the guise of a wild boar, only to be transformed into an Adonis at last by the hand of the woman who is disinterested enough to love him despite his formidable tusks and ungainly figure? ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... to be witty, but only succeed in being pert, are insufferable; and as for attempts to be comic they are disgraceful in women whether they succeed or fail. The comic is ungainly and exaggerated, and so is in some sort related to the sublime. The elephant is comic, the camel and the giraffe are comic, all overgrowth ...
— Glimpses of Bengal • Sir Rabindranath Tagore
... clothes, too, were queer. He had on a dingy purple velvet jacket, covered with frayed gold lace, tawdry tinsel braid, tarnished gilt buttons, with long, wide red and white striped cotton trousers, from which his dusky ankles and bare flat feet flopped about like the fins of some great ungainly fish. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... for members of the board of directors. But in the early days of the switchover, the idea of a board of directors smacked too strongly of the old system of corporate organization to suit the men. The solution had been simple, if a trifle ungainly. Everyone who owned stock in Robling Titanium was automatically a member of the board of directors, with Torkleson as chairman of the board. The stockholders numbered over ...
— Meeting of the Board • Alan Edward Nourse
... curtailed of its fair proportions; ill-made, ill- shaped, ill-proportioned; crooked &c (distorted) 243; hard featured, hard visaged; ill-favored, hard-favored, evil-favored; ill-looking; unprepossessing, unattractive, uninviting, unpleasing. graceless, inelegant; ungraceful, ungainly, uncouth, stiff; rugged, rough, gross, rude, awkward, clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish^; lumbering; hulky^, hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; grisly, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... highly, and laid on the effects with a liberal brush, while Burke was subtle, incisive and refined. Burton's features were strong and heavy, and his figure was portly and ungainly. Burke was lithe and graceful. His face was plain, but wonderfully expressive. The versatility of this rare actor was remarkable, his pathos being quite as striking a feature as his comedy. {HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} His dramatic effects sprung more from intuition ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Rip van - Winkle • Charles Burke
... in full, but every instant she expected the revelation would take place, and with each separate movement of the phantasm her suspense became more and more intolerable. At last it stood on the floor of the cellar, a broad, ungainly, horribly ungainly figure, that glided up to and past her into the far cellar. There it halted, as nearly as she could judge on the new tiles, and remained standing. As she gazed at it, too fascinated to remove her eyes, there was a loud, reverberating crash, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... had just caught the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly Selenite lying motionless among the ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... with a writhe of his ungainly person, 'we may keep the door shut. We needn't make it known to ALL ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... family, as native to America as is Ashley's peculiar sense of beauty which you won't acknowledge. It is as ugly to look at, the plant is, all spines and thick, graceless, fleshy pads; as ugly as Ashley life looks to you. And this crabbed, ungainly plant-creature is faithfully, religiously tended all the year around by the wife of a farmer, because once a year, just once, it puts forth a wonderful exotic flower of extreme beauty. When the bud begins to show its color she sends out word to all her neighbors to be ready. And we are ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... to him no longer. He was now only anxious to part from the man and return with the news to Lady Chepstow, and was casting round in his mind for some excuse to avoid going indoors with him and wasting precious time in breaking bread and eating salt, when there lurched out of an adjoining doorway an ungainly figure in turban and sandals and the full flower of that grotesque regalia which passes muster at cheap theatres and masquerade balls for the costume of a Cingalese. The fellow had bent forward ...
— Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... down a flight of steps to the beach, and stumbled across the soft sand towards the sea. One or two boats were lying out in the surf—heavy Dutch fishing-boats, known technically as "pinks," flat-bottomed, round-prowed, keel less, heavy and ungainly vessels, but strong as wood and iron and workmanship could make them. Some seemed to be afloat, others bumped heavily and continuously; while a few lay stolidly on the ground with the waves breaking right over them ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... duke was an idiot. She was very much mistaken. If she had but broken up the ice, she would have found that the water below was not shallow. The duke, in fact, like many other Englishmen, though he did not like the trouble of showing forth, and had an ungainly manner, was a man who had read a good deal, possessed a sound head and an honourable mind, though he did not know what it was to love anybody, to care much for anything, and was at once perfectly sated and yet perfectly ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... parted the bushes and peeped through, he almost shouted in his excitement. He had reached the Big Pass. A broad river swept rapidly by, and along the banks wild carabao rolled and splashed, making queer diminutive sounds, not in keeping with their ungainly size. Piang was careful to keep out of sight, as they are apt to be dangerous when their very uncertain ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart
... ducking, Seized both his legs, and chucking Dobbs sideways, splash he went,— The wherry swayed, then righted, While I, somewhat excited, Over the water bent; Three times he rose, but vainly I clutched his form ungainly, He sank, while sighs and sobs Beneath the waves seemed muttered, And all the night-winds uttered In ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... day members of this community are off fishing in deep water; but what they like best to do is to crawl up on the rocks and grunt and bellow, or go to sleep in the sun. Some of them lie half in water, their tails floating and their ungainly heads wagging. These uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in. Some crawl to the tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they repose on the broken surfaces like masses of jelly. When they are all at home the rocks have not room ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... more absurd than a ridden camel galloping away in the moonlight, with his neck stretched out in front of him and his four ungainly legs in the air all together, it is three more camels doing the same thing. They looked like a giant's washing blown off the line flapping before a high wind, and made hardly more noise. The whack-whack-whack of sticks on the beasts' rumps was as distinct ...
— The Lion of Petra • Talbot Mundy
... feathers is so comical as a crow baby, with its awkward bows and ungainly hops, its tottering steps on the fence and its mincing, tight-boot sort of gait on the ground, its eager fluttering when it has hopes of food, and its loud and ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... ungainly Fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning— Little relevancy bore; For we can not help agreeing That no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing Bird above his chamber door— Bird or ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... deacon. A soldier on the outer edge of the extended line swings his rifle with swift, backhanded motion over his shoulder, and brings the butt amidst the crowd of carrion. The vultures hop with grotesque, ungainly motions from their prey, and stand with wings extended and clawed feet apart, their necks outstretched and curved heads dripping slime and blood, a fitting setting amidst the black ruin of war. The charger now looks upward ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... Yes, a good fellow. But there now—he doesn't satisfy the mistress, she says his appearance is ungainly. And now they've gone and told tales about him for letting some peasants into the kitchen yesterday. It is a bad look-out: they may dismiss him. And he is a ...
— Redemption and Two Other Plays • Leo Tolstoy et al
... him during the service, came to him, as he passed out, to give him greeting and a word of condolence. For that time only he passed them by, as if they had been wooden images. His spirit had been strained to its uttermost, and would bear no more. He made his way home with an ungainly, swift gait,—home to the dear bedside,—down upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... this, the negative survives, while the affirmative is gone; thus 'wieldy' (Chaucer) survives only in 'unwieldy'; 'couth' and 'couthly' (both in Spenser), only in 'uncouth' and 'uncouthly'; 'rule' (Foxe) only in 'unruly'; 'gainly' (Henry More) in 'ungainly'; these last two were both of them serviceable words, and have been ill lost{153}; 'gainly' is indeed still common in the West Riding of Yorkshire; 'exorable' (Holland) and 'evitable' only in 'inexorable' and 'inevitable'; 'faultless' remains, but hardly 'faultful' (Shakespeare). ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... round, so as to place her between his adversary and himself. As it proved, it was the very best thing that he could have done. The rough, half-blinded and maddened by the blows which he had received, struck out with all his ungainly strength, just as his partner's head swung round in front of him. There was a noise like that of a stone hitting a wall, a deep groan, her grasp relaxed, and she dropped a dead weight upon the pavement, while the Admiral ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... all references to their ungainly movement and doltish intellect, the Wild Goose, of which the White-fronted is one of the most interesting, is held in high estimation by the sportsman, and even he, if keen of observation, will learn from it many things that will ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II., No. 5, November 1897 - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... his resentment at having to profess a religion he did not believe, in this new discovery of the scholastic importance of clothing. He went along with an eye to all the shop windows that afforded a view of his person. Indisputably his trousers were ungainly, flapping abominably over his boots and bagging terribly at the knees, and his boots were not only worn and ugly but extremely ill blacked. His wrists projected offensively from his coat sleeves, he perceived a huge asymmetry in the collar of his jacket, ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... describe him when he was at the climax of his power, and he no longer possesses anything in common with his Russian counterpart, Professor Pobiedenotsoff, except in a singular peculiarity of appearance. Indeed, Hintzpeter's looks invite caricature. He is lanky, ungainly and lantern-jawed, and seems like a man who has never been young, and who has not yet obtained the venerability of old age. His manners are exceedingly ungracious, and even repellent, but when once he becomes interested in a discussion ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the tapping, there came, instead, the sound of someone or something, scrambling on to the window-sill,—as if some creature, unable to reach the window from the ground, was endeavouring to gain the vantage of the sill. Some ungainly creature, unskilled in surmounting such an obstacle as a perpendicular brick wall. There was the noise of what seemed to be the scratching of claws, as if it experienced considerable difficulty in obtaining a hold on the unyielding surface. What kind of creature ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... Eyes.—A school teacher has remarked that many children are awkward, not through being ungainly in walking, but wholly because of impaired vision. It has been her experience with children in her department who were usually awkward and who had their eyes examined that there was something wrong with the vision, which was quickly overcome ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... to the window, and threw it open. The cool night air came in refreshingly. In the distance, the dark shapes of the mountains stood out forbiddingly in the moonlight. Millions of stars winked and twinkled. Gaunt cacti reared their ungainly shapes—beautiful because of ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... a note to George Borrow, so on him we called,—a tall, ungainly, uncouth man, with great physical strength, a quick penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation. He was sitting on one side of the fire, and his old mother on the other. His spirits always sink in wet weather, and to-day was very rainy, but he was courteous ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... earth is that?" suddenly cried the Captain, seizing his rifle and gazing into the gently swaying branches overhead. We looked, and saw an ungainly creature huddled among the spreading fronds, glaring at us with eyes that were half-human, half-catlike ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... people will profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting monument that no repetition ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... one who ever knew, and I found out by chance. Ted Harper had borrowed "Fights for the Flag" from me, and when I got it back there was a soiled piece of paper in it with something written in Ted's ungainly hand. I thought he had been copying a passage, and anxious to see what had struck him, I opened the sheet out and read these words:—"O God, it's a hard business praying. But Roger made me promise. And you know how decent he's been to me and the crowd. Listen ...
— The Comrade In White • W. H. Leathem
... thy heart warmed with the sweet promise of Christ's acceptance of the coming sinner, and that will make thee make more haste unto him. Discouraging thoughts they are like unto cold weather, they benumb the senses, and make us go ungainly about our business; but the sweet and warm gleads8 of promise are like the comfortable beams of the sun, which liven and refresh. 9 You see how little the bee and fly do play in the air in winter; why, the cold hinders them from doing it; but when the wind and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... said Pathfinder reproachfully, though he took her hand with kindness, "I have not desarved this. I know I am wild, and uncouth, and ungainly—" ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... desire to win the favour of the assembly by the same means. So he got up from his place and began dancing, but he cut such a ridiculous figure as he plunged about, and made such a grotesque exhibition of his ungainly person, that the beasts all fell upon him with ridicule and ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... adieu before the arrival of the older women in the rear, who with their heavy nailed boots were running towards us, plunging about in the deep ground in clumsy attempts at juvenile activity. A few of the young women were very pretty, but, as usual in Cyprus, their figures were ungainly, and their movements, hampered by baggy trousers and enormous high boots, were ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... Egmont Hake ("Macmillan's Magazine," 1882, Vol. XLV.) went so far as to say that Borrow was "perhaps the handsomest man of his day." On the other hand, Caroline Fox, the Quakeress, who called on Borrow in October, 1843, described him as "a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation." It was on April 11th, 1843, that Sir Robert Peel pronounced his striking eulogy on ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... render it, the writer who pre-eminently in his generation had busied himself to "detect and save," in human creatures, such sparks of virtue as misery or vice had not availed to extinguish; to discover what is beautiful and comely under what commonly passes for the ungainly and the deformed; to draw happiness and hopefulness from despair itself; and, above all, so to have made known to his own countrymen the wants and sufferings of the poor, the ignorant, and the neglected, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the candle and softly opened his door. The sudden cold draft from the hall made the candle flare, but as it steadied, Hinton saw that an old cot had been placed across the door opposite his, as if on guard, and that beside it knelt an ungainly figure in white, with his head clasped in his hands. It was Mr. Opp ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... was made in six days, was one woman; but Mrs. Maloney, standing with bare arms over the smoke of a wood fire under the pine trees, was another; and Peter Sangree, the Canadian pupil, with his pale skin, and his loose, though not ungainly figure, stood beside her in very unfavourable contrast as he scraped potatoes and sliced bacon with slender white fingers that seemed better suited to hold a pen than a knife. She ordered him about like a slave, and he obeyed, too, with willing pleasure, for in spite of his general ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... side, admiring Madame Frehlter's poodle. Madelon could afford to be civil to the poodle before company. The contrast between the two girls was sufficiently striking. Cydalise was fair and bright-looking—Mademoiselle Frehlter was square and ungainly of figure, swarthy of ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... his own use. That was necessary, obligatory. Yet, why must he retain it? He did not propose to return and live here at any future time. This episode was over—or rather, had it not simply failed of completion? Was it not, like all the rest, maimed, lopped off ungainly, docked? Then, where came in the obligation to reserve these rooms? He could not remember. Yet he knew that he was compelled ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... awkward misshapen limbs resembled the contorted branches of wind-blown trees, and whose coarse and repulsive countenances betokened that malignant delight in evil-doing which only demons are supposed to know. These ungainly servitors possessed themselves of the Laureate's chafing steeds, and led them and the chariot away into some unseen courtyard; while the Laureate himself, still saying no word, kept fast hold of his companion's arm, and hurried ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... death animating so many of nature's aspects. The city is man-made. Well planned, properly built and organized, it might have become an ornament beautifying and exalting nature. Page the cities of the West one by one—they are monotonous, ungainly, ugly slums and rookeries set off by an ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... taste, of environment and experience, not these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious memento mori sort of impression, but that more disquieting reminder of the ugly and over-elaborate thing ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... and from near them rose the smoke. There was, however, no sign of life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... was room for improvement. Changes were made indeed, but these changes can hardly be said to have been made in the direction of either comfort, convenience, or good taste. The "Albert hat" (as it was called), one of the ugliest, most ungainly, and preposterous of military shakoes that was ever invented, made its appearance about this time, and the idea was credited (rightly or wrongly) to the amiable prince. Constant reference to this preposterous invention ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... the quarter-deck, and regarding us with looks of undisguised alarm. They were totally unarmed, and most of them unclothed. One or two, however, wore portions of European attire. One had on a pair of duck trousers, which were much too large for him, and stuck out in a most ungainly manner; another wore nothing but the common, scanty, native garment round the loins and a black beaver hat; but the most ludicrous personage of all, and one who seemed to be chief, was a tall, middle-aged man, of a mild, simple expression ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... prolonged drought at a susceptible period of development, and had never recovered. The one proof that blood ran in her veins was the pimply quality of her ruined complexion, and the pimples of that brickish expanse proved that the blood was thin and bad. Her hands and feet were large and ungainly; the skin of the fingers was roughened by coarse contacts to the texture of emery-paper. On six days a week she wore black; on the seventh a kind of discreet half-mourning. She was honest, capable, and industrious; and beyond the confines of her occupation ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... boy had flung himself from his horse, dropping the reins to the ground, and the animal, although snorting and shivering, had no thought of disgracing his training by breaking his parole. With quick, ungainly strides the boy brought himself to the upturned machine. It was curious that he should appear to such disadvantage on his feet. In the saddle ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... large; where, after many years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my little pretensions to wisdom—I have met with few who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility, are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... a dreadful fascination he watched the ungainly, hill-like reptile shuffle ponderously forward and realized that, high on its back, was fixed a small fort, rather like those howdahs or boxes which are fastened to the backs of elephants. Chilled with the nearness of death, Nelson counted six mail-clad warriors in the howdah. Then the true ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... her father, and where was Ste. Marie? The first question answered itself, for as she turned her eyes toward the west she saw O'Hara's tall, ungainly figure disappearing in the direction of the house. She called his name twice, but it may be that the man did not hear, for he went on without pausing and was ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... never quite sure if Isabel were eighteen or twenty, or whether Clara or Susie came next. He once forgot Laura altogether, and was only reminded of her existence by the shock of surprise at seeing the awkward-looking, ungainly girl standing before him, looking shyly up in ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... some scholarship, whose ambition had been crushed by the weight of his possessions. He had a remarkably fine library at Challis Court, but he made little use of it, for he spent the greater part of his time in travel. In appearance he was rather an ungainly man; his great head and the bulk of his big shoulders were something too heavy ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... had died when she was a very little girl. He was a man of remarkable character. He had great strength of will and immense determination; and Maggie, his only child, took after him. She resembled him in appearance also, for he was very plain of face and rather ungainly of figure. Maggie's mother, on the other hand, was a delicate, pretty, blue-eyed woman, who could as little manage her headstrong young daughter as a lamb could manage a young lion. Mrs. Howland was intensely amiable. Maggie was very good to ...
— The School Queens • L. T. Meade
... the demonstrations displayed by their beaux. It was pleasant to look at the nice little straw-goods damsel with the boyish hair, and to mark the contrast between her kitten glidings and the premeditated atrocities of Raw Material, as he wove and unwove his ungainly legs before her, in a manner appalling to witness. She had only a common palm-leaf fan, I remarked,—worth, probably, about two cents. But Young New York, as he waited patiently for the deadly ocean-malady ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... though he has all the evening been admiring her vastly, and would have given anything for such a chance; but next, having to "lie the length of a looby, the breadth of a booby," &c., he is eminently successful—yet, who shall say the ungainly cub may not one day be an ornament to society! Poor Muff! he has no mother or sisters—the only specimens of girlhood known to him are the maids at home, and the school-master's daughter, that dines with the parlour-boarders at Addle House:—brave boy, thou art clever, but ...
— Christmas Comes but Once A Year - Showing What Mr. Brown Did, Thought, and Intended to Do, - during that Festive Season. • Luke Limner
... but surely struggled out of the ugliness of her childhood; and John Crewys, regarding her critically in the lamplight, decided she would develop, one of these days, into a very handsome young woman; in spite of an ungainly stoop, a wide mouth that pouted rather too much, and a nose that inclined ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... where a horse must needs lose flesh daily, from pure lack of provender. However, there was no time to make a change, so I was fain to hope that easy journeys at first, and a light weight on his back, might gradually bring the ungainly beast into better form. It appeared that he was just recovering from the distemper and "sore tongue," which had followed each other in rapid succession. These two diseases are the terror and bane of Virginian and Maryland stables. An animal who has once surmounted them is supposed to be ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... Collot d'Herbois to find the door; he tore it open, letting in a feeble ray of light from the corridor. He stood in the doorway one moment, his slouchy, ungainly form distinctly outlined against the lighter background beyond, a look of exultant and malicious triumph, of deadly hate and cruelty distinctly imprinted on his face and with upraised hand wildly ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... motionless. The other foot was drawn up so as to be hidden in the feathers of the under part of its body. Its neck was crooked back so far that its long bill rested on its breast. It was seemingly asleep, and looked so ungainly that Ellen laughed outright, despite Addison's injunctions ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... conducted papers in the kingdom, and had a wide-spread circulation. Mr. Baines represented Leeds as successor to Mr. Macaulay, and as representative of that town was one of the most useful members of parliament. He was not a man of refined bearing or mental cultivation; as a public speaker he was ungainly in manner, his pronunciation common and provincial, his voice monotonous, and his style dry and commonplace; but he was serviceable, practical, pertinent, experienced; and the soundness of his judgment, and the weight of his character, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... the tutelary images of most great Italian towns. I have examined nineteen of them, and made drafts of them. If they came from the sky, our worst sculptors are our angels. But my mind is easy on that score. Ungainly statue or villainous daub fell never yet from heaven to smuggle the bread out of capable workmen's mouths. All this is Pagan, and arose thus. The Trojans had Oriental imaginations, and feigned that their ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... of the orchard was still further to the left, near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge, ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted from ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... analyze it is to discover that it is extremely melodious; that it reflects a gloomy mood; that at the root of its sorrow is the mysterious "lost Lenore"; and that, as in most of Poe's works, a fantastic element is introduced, an "ungainly fowl" addressed with grotesque dignity as "Sir, or Madame," to divert attention from the fact that the poet's grief is not simple or human ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... loomed in the dusk, heavy and formidable. He was as big as a man, somewhat lank, and covered with coarse hair the colour of cocoanut matting. This afternoon, when the early patrons entered, they found him hanging limply by one arm, like a great ungainly bat. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... sympathetic ears. Being both plump and energetic, she suffered cruelly in the heat; mopped her face without shame between her sentences; and, according to Frank Olliver, lived chiefly on lime-squash, and a limitless admiration for her missionary husband,—a large, ungainly man, with the manners of a shy schoolboy, and the wrapt gaze of a seer; a man who, in an age of fanaticism, would have walked smiling to the rack. As it was, he walked with no less equanimity through the pestilential ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... This was a big, ungainly, beak-nosed boy, whose sleeves were much too short, and trousers-legs likewise, to hide Nature's abundant gift to him in the matter of bone and knuckle. He was freckled and wore a grin that was ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... any joint in his body independently of the rest. He cracked his fingers persistently when he talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in everything ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... provided for—an important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and loose morals—the gaunt ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... well. There followed a moment of angry controversy, during which the startled negroes rested upon their oars, while the enraged guard threatened to fire if they drifted a yard closer. In the midst of this hubbub a head suddenly popped up above the rail. Then a tall, ungainly figure, clad in a faded, ill-fitting uniform, raised itself slowly, leaning far out over the side, a pair of weak eyes, shadowed by colored glasses, gazing down inquiringly into the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... to the ungainly externals of Jack Tier. She now wore a cap, thus concealing the short, gray bristles of hair, and lending to her countenance a little of that softness which is a requisite of female character. Some attention had also been paid to the rest of her attire; and Jack was, altogether, less repulsive ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... the old philosopher could not control his anger, and shouted to his companion: "Oh, you innocent lamb of knowledge! You gentle sucking doves, all of you! And would you give the name of arguments to those distorted, clumsy, narrow-minded, ungainly, crippled things? Yes, I have just now been listening to the fruits of some of this present-day culture, and my ears are still ringing with the sound of historical 'self-understood' things, of over-wise and pitiless ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... likewise furnished with a felt hat well garnished with turnpike tickets; and a carter's whip. Thus equipped, he was to saunter into the office, as some country fellow from Covent Garden market might be supposed to do for the gratification of his curiousity; and as he was as awkward, ungainly, and raw-boned a fellow as need be, Mr. Fagin had no fear but that he would look the part ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... it was entirely different. His drawing may have been as faulty as people said it was, and he may have been as fond as they also said of bestowing upon all his subjects exaggerated and almost ungainly features, which possibly belonged to the Blessed Damozel, but were not the most indisputable part of her blessedness. But they were, despite their similarity of type, all personal and individual, and all suggestive to the mind and ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... enough law to become an attorney, and went to Springfield, and after that it was only a short time before he had won his clients. His cousin Denny came to hear him try one of his first cases. He watched the tall, lank young fellow, still as ungainly as in his early boyhood, and heard him tell the jury some of those same stories he had read aloud before ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... together to where the creature lay. The Maid durst not look on the dead monster, but Walter noted that he was girt with a big ungainly sax; so he drew it from the sheath, and there smote off the hideous head of the fiend with his own weapon. Then they twain together laboured the earth, she with Walter's sword, he with the ugly sax, till they had made a grave deep and ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... all smiles, and Toby returned her welcome something sheepishly. He cut a quaint figure with his broad, ungainly shoulders supporting his rather pumpkin face. Then his arms were a little too long and terminated ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... the table and held out her arms—the thin, fleshless arms—straight, no deviation to the ungainly shoulders. There was unconscious drama in it. Yet she was the last person ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... a heavy spattering of loose earth, and a squelching of saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was reflected and endorsed by the ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... that the poor Welsh puddler once lived, but this figure of the mill-woman cut in korl. I have it here in a corner of my library. I keep it hid behind a curtain,—it is such a rough, ungainly thing. Yet there are about it touches, grand sweeps of outline, that show a master's hand. Sometimes,—to-night, for instance,—the curtain is accidentally drawn back, and I see a bare arm stretched out imploringly in the darkness, and an eager, wolfish face ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... abandoned their young to their fate. They perched on trees a hundred yards or so distant, and watched to see what would go forward. Rob worked his way on up the tree and peered curiously over the edge of the wretched brush-heap which served as the nest. Here he saw two large, ungainly young birds, not yet able to fly, but able to spit, scratch, and flap their wings. Getting a good foothold on a supporting branch, Rob made several attempts to get hold of the young birds. Finally he succeeded in getting one ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... which he had developed, ever have become an acrobat? He was the leanest, scraggiest long thing I have ever seen. Six foot four of stringy sinew and bone, with inordinately long legs, around which his khaki slacks flapped, as though they hid stilts instead of human limbs. His arms swung long and ungainly, the sleeves of his tunic far above the bony wrist, as though his tailor in cutting the garment had repudiated as fantastic the evidence of his measurements. Yet, when one might have expected to find hands of a talon-like knottiness, to correspond with the sparse rugosity ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... receptacle on which the pistils sit well formed and capable of being developed into a perfect berry, or do they look ungainly in shape? Are the petals pure white or slightly crimson? Are there many runners, or few, or none? Do the new runners bear blossoms and fruit? If so, when do they commence to bud and bloom? When do the berries begin to ripen? Notice the size and shape of the fruit, also the color. You can tell ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... brother as a duty, than strove to repress it. Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the bond when he had wedded my mother. Gregory was lumpish and loutish, awkward and ungainly, marring whatever he meddled in, and many a hard word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm, who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated the stepson. I am ashamed—my heart is sore to think how I fell into the fashion of the family, ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell
... maker of the three nests, of which the last was half as large as the others, produced no less than a thousand eggs; eight hundred were deposited in the larger nests and two or three hundred in the smaller. Truly a fine family, but a thought ungainly, were it not that only a few ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... momentary silence spake Some Vessel of a more ungainly Make; "They sneer at me for leaning all awry: What! did the Hand then of the ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... or an occasional cottonwood, yellow-breasted meadowlarks were singing sweetly. At intervals a flock of curlews circled above the rider, uttering their sharp, plaintive cries; then they would drop to the ground and run rapidly to and fro on their frail, stilt-like legs, their long ungainly bills darting from side to side in search ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... of the graces of life. Let thy body be stalwart, yet not ungainly either in motion or in repose. Let not thy face alone, but thy whole body, make manifest the alertness of thy mind. Yet let all this be without affectation. (Book vii., ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... curious boat-bill heron is found,—its short thick neck and enormous beak giving it a clumsy, ungainly look alongside the elegant flamingo. The beak may be likened to two boats, laid one upon the other, gunwale to gunwale, the upper part of the mandible representing the keel. It feeds on the Crustacea which it picks up on the ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... quite like, who thinks of hating her for it? If one's mother is a little provoking and tedious under the oppressive weight of years or sickness, who thinks of making a great hardship of it? But if the poor, humble friend is only a little awkward or ungainly, she is odious; and if the poor, deserted mother, or widow, wife, or aged suffering creature is a little irritable or tedious, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... born of, a hard-working, hard-fighting stock. She fell to wondering what her life would have been like had she been born a Chinese woman, or an Italian woman like those she saw, head-shawled or bareheaded, squat, ungainly and swarthy, who carried great loads of driftwood on their heads up from the beach. Then she laughed at her foolishness, remembered Billy and the four-roomed cottage on Pine Street, and went to bed with her mind filled for the hundredth time with ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... is an impressive or at least a striking and unusual figure; he is tall, lank, and ungainly, almost Lincolnesque in the carelessness of his apparel and the exceeding awkwardness of his postures and manners. His angular features, sharp nose, pale face, and dark hair suggest the strain of ascetism, almost of fanaticism, which runs ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... sitting, Trina was no longer frank and straight-forward. Now she was circumspect, reserved, distant. He could no longer open his mouth; words failed him. At one sitting in particular they had said but good-day and good-by to each other. He felt that he was clumsy and ungainly. He told ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... Snozzle was quiet, rich, and philosophical; and Saunders made a Judy of himself with unparalleled success. Frank Finch got his deserts in the hands of a Mr. Everett; for being a lover, no matter how awkward and ungainly an actor ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... being the leaders of the herds are always singled out, and after a desperate and trying gallop over a rugged country, the huntsman finds himself going stride for stride alongside one of these Kings of the Forest, and wondering how an animal so ungainly in his gait, can get over the country at such a pace. Jumping over fallen trees, and dodging round others, he at last finds himself on a clear spot, when drawing a pistol from his holster, and riding up so as almost to touch the animal's side, he ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... met any one, or passed through a town, glances of surprise and curiosity followed them; for it seemed as if the living images of night and day were walking side by side over the land. Fausch's clothes were dark and coarse, such as he always wore. They hung loose and heavy about his ungainly form, his hands were blackened, and his large head, which was set upon his broad shoulders as if thrust forward to meet some obstacle, matched them in color; his thick curly hair was deep black, and his face looked as if tanned by the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... on the tin box. Coutlass did not drop it but turned his head to look behind him. Schillingschen swung for his face with a clenched fist and the whole weight and strength of his ungainly body. He would have broken the jaw he aimed at had the blow landed; but the Greek's wit ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... uncouth animation out of the rocks which he has torn from among the moss of the moorland, and heaves into the darkened air the pile of iron buttress and rugged wall, instinct with work of an imagination as wild and wayward as the northern sea; creations of ungainly shape and rigid limb, but full of wolfish life; fierce as the winds that beat, and changeful as the clouds that ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... swarming with animal life, as is to be expected in the luxurious East. There are no fewer than thirty mosques in the town, whose minarets give it a beautiful and picturesque appearance, albeit that the buildings themselves are imperfect, and ungainly in architectural detail. The Mussulmans have a school in the town, where Turkish and Slavish are taught. Girls are, however, debarred this advantage, and indeed no institution of any kind exists throughout the province for their ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... first-aid pouch and a long ungainly rifle patterned after the Daniel Boone period, and you have an idea of ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... went for walks along the river with an enormous mother and ungainly sisters, escorted gravely by Dundas. The mess did not approve ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... than ten minutes it loomed up before him, a mass of deeper black in the blackness. No white vision floated on the broken battlements this night, as Sir Norman looked wistfully up at them; but neither was there any ungainly dwarf, with two-edged sword, guarding the ruined entrance; and Sir Norman passed unmolested in. He sought the spiral staircase which La Masque had spoken of, and, passing carefully from one ancient chamber ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... practically test my competency. Of course, I prepared myself specially by diligence, and care, and prayer, to stand this new ordeal. But I failed to please even the indulgent vicar, though he got his curate for nothing, and though his fair daughter amiably welcomed the not ungainly Coelebs; and as for the severe old clerk,—he naively blurted out, "Tell'ee what, sir, it won't do: you looks well,—but what means them stops?" Alas! they meant the rebellion of tongue and lips against every difficult ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... you want to," added the generous Colon, who was a very long-legged fellow, a magnificent sprinter, with a peculiar habit of leaping as he ran, that often reminded people of the ungainly jumps of a kangaroo. But he nearly always "got there ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... the sight of the big ungainly figure. The man seemed to personify all of the things against which his soul was in revolt and he stopped and stood crouched, a ferocious light burning in ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... stairs with boyish impetuosity, looking so fine that Uncle Ith hardly knew him. It was difficult to realize that the ungainly, ignorant boy of a few years back, had become this nice-looking, graceful young gentleman. Thus readily does the rough diamond of a good heart and brain, under the guiding hands of Ambition and Love, take its polish from contact with the world ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... "ribbons," and was therefore utterly unskilled in the matter of driving; and so it came about that old Jack was so confused at the start that he made a most awkward and wretched appearance in his effort to get off, being all "mixed up," as the saying is,—so much so that the crowd roared at his ungainly efforts, and his flying rivals were twenty rods away before he even got started. But at last he got his huge body in a straight line, and, leaving his miserable shuffle, squared away to his work, and, ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... frayed gold lace, tawdry tinsel braid, tarnished gilt buttons, with long, wide red and white striped cotton trousers, from which his dusky ankles and bare flat feet flopped about like the fins of some great ungainly fish. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader," he says of his essays (in the "Introduction on Gargoyles" in Alarms and Discursions), "does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... practicing attorney. An old farmer who was involved in a lawsuit came to Richmond to attend its trial. "Who is the best lawyer in Richmond?" he asked of his host, the innkeeper of the Eagle tavern. The latter pointed to a tall, ungainly, bareheaded man who had just passed, eating cherries from his hat and exchanging jests with other loiterers like himself. "That is he," said the innkeeper; "John Marshall is his name." But the old countryman, ...
— John Marshall and the Constitution - A Chronicle of the Supreme Court, Volume 16 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Edward S. Corwin
... centre of the grim picture, a mere cluster of rude, unpainted houses, poorly erected shacks, grimy tents flapping in the never ceasing wind swirling across the treeless waste, the ugly red station, the rough cow-pens filled with lowing cattle, the huge, ungainly stores, their false fronts decorated by amateur wielders of the paint brush, and the garish dens of vice tucked in everywhere. The pendulum of life never ceased swinging. Society was mixed; no man cared who his neighbor was, or dared to ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... the figure of an exceptionally big and ungainly Selenite lying motionless among the stems, ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... summed up by Faye and Harkness in 1881.[788] The methods employed in its investigation fall (as we have seen) into three separate classes—the trigonometrical, the gravitational, and the "phototachymetrical"—an ungainly adjective used to describe the method by the velocity of light. Each has its special difficulties and sources of error; each has counter-balancing advantages. The only trustworthy result from celestial surveys, was at that time furnished ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... but after Silence spake A Vessel of a more ungainly Make: "They sneer at me for leaning all awry; What? did the Hand then ...
— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam • Omar Khayyam
... arriving." He opened the door and shouted for the guards, and for his son, Narsisi, who arrived as they were unlocking Jason who recognized him as the same droop-eyed and sleepy looking D'zertano who had been helping Edipon to drive their ungainly vehicle. ...
— The Ethical Engineer • Henry Maxwell Dempsey
... ill-proportioned; crooked &c. (distorted) 243; hard featured, hard visaged; ill-favored, hard-favored, evil-favored; ill-looking; unprepossessing, unattractive, uninviting, unpleasing. graceless, inelegant; ungraceful, ungainly, uncouth, stiff; rugged, rough, gross, rude, awkward, clumsy, slouching, rickety; gawky; lumping, lumpish[obs3]; lumbering; hulky[obs3], hulking; unwieldy. squalid, haggard; grim, grim faced, grim visaged; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... intimated, James, wearied by several hours in the saddle, for it was his pleasure to hunt or horseback in Waltham forest and in other royal chases, had retired early to his bed chamber. He had eaten heartily, for despite his ungainly person the First of the Stuarts was a famous trenchman. Freed from his quilted clothes and mellow with strong wine, he admitted to his presence two ...
— The Fifth of November - A Romance of the Stuarts • Charles S. Bentley
... and ungainly figure troubled him in no slight degree as they moved off together, they seemed to express in some indescribable fashion so much of dull and patient pain, and they were so much at variance with the free grandeur of the scene surrounding ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... alone difference of taste, of environment and experience, not these alone make up the sum of their unlikeness. You had only to look from the fresh simplicity of white muslin blouse and olive-coloured cloth in the one case, to the ungainly expensiveness of the black silk gown of the married woman, in order to get from the first a sense of dainty morning freshness, and from Mrs. Fox-Moore not alone a lugubrious memento mori sort of impression, but that ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... interval of restlessness, an observant person might have noticed, sitting in the back part of the room, the rather ungainly figure of the tall fellow, Brent Gaylong, organizer of the Church Mice of Newburgh. He seemed to be the center of a clamoring, ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... Caldigate remained in the house Mrs. Bolton was almost silent. The duties of a hostess she performed in a stiff ungainly way. She asked him whether he would have hashed mutton or cold beef, and allowed him to pour a little sherry into her wine-glass. But beyond this there was not much conversation. Mr. Bolton had said what he had ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... and water-tight timbers it presented a scene of varied beauty. Grasshoppers disported gayly upon its rugged surface, occasionally leaping inadvertently into the surrounding surf and kicking their ungainly legs ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... earth—nay, even the strongest voice could not. Then the Soul gazed on the lion in his strength; on the deer in his beauty. He saw the large-eyed bull with the cow by his side, licking her calf. The stately horse, the huge elephant, the ungainly camel—could any of these subdue the earth? He looked down, and they made it shake with their heavy tread, but the Soul knew that the earth could not be subdued by them. Then he saw a pair of monkeys climbing ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... there racking his brain for a solution to the mystery, a key rasped in the door across the room. He turned his head. A gas jet above the wretched little washstand lighted the room but poorly. The door opened slowly. A tall, ungainly woman entered the room—a creature with a sallow, weather-beaten ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish manners and ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... on a large farm with immense fields, the ponderous and ungainly steam, tackle gives one a sensation of intrusion. Such a field can be found on a farm between Evesham and Alcester; it contains 300 acres. The occupier, speaking of it, mentioned that it was all wheat that year except one corner. To a question as to the size ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... corner of the orchard was still further to the left, near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge, ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted from the old wood. Next you passed ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... barbarism. As yet we have not seen very distinctly how the various branches of the family, as they parted off, and took up separate ground, became marked by external features so peculiar. Why are the Africans black, and generally marked by coarse features and ungainly forms? Why are the Mongolians generally yellow, the Americans red, the Caucasians white? Why the flat features of the Chinese, the small stature of the Laps, the soft round forms of the English, the lank features of their descendants, the Americans? All of these phenomena appear, ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... apt to have the advantage in easy grace of manner and in unassuming confidence, and consequently be more agreeable in the superficial relations of life. To compare these advantages with the virtues and utilities would be foolish. Much of the noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, ungainly persons; but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners and what we call high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy labor of the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged against the use of Brown ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... you, nothing an't the matter with me,' returned Clemency - and truly too, to judge from her well-soaped face, in which there gleamed as usual the very soul of good-humour, which, ungainly as she was, made her quite engaging. Abrasions on the elbows are not generally understood, it is true, to range within that class of personal charms called beauty-spots. But, it is better, going through the world, to have the arms chafed in that narrow ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... Yet not for the world would my father have grudged him anything that money could purchase. That was, as it were, in the bond when he had wedded my mother. Gregory was lumpish and loutish, awkward and ungainly, marring whatever he meddled in, and many a hard word and sharp scolding did he get from the people about the farm, who hardly waited till my father's back was turned before they rated the stepson. I am ashamed—my heart ...
— The Half-Brothers • Elizabeth Gaskell
... bandanna over the head, a tight-fitting or folded fichu, a short ballet sort of a skirt, black stockings, and a gaily bordered apron and dainty, high-heeled, tiny shoes—in strong contrast in size and form to the ungainly feet of the women of ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... in "Humphrey Clinker"; of a fretful temper, yet generous and kind, who has a sister, MISS TABITHA, an ungainly maiden at forty-five, and of anything but ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... himself before the King, overwhelming him with blessings, and these royal commands were in due course executed. So it came about that Lesueur's frescos led to startling revelations, and enabled the Carthusians to keep their splendid property intact, ungainly though this ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... and a kind of implication that she had a discerning taste in such matters, and was something of a critic—John Browdie proceeded to consider the words of some north-country ditty, and to take his wife's recollection respecting the same. This done, he made divers ungainly movements in his chair, and singling out one particular fly on the ceiling from the other flies there asleep, fixed his eyes upon him, and began to roar a meek sentiment (supposed to be uttered by ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... house beautiful women were idling, or feasting, or dreaming. He was conscious of their presence all about him, and shrank slightly as he wondered if they were scrutinising his ungainly person. He was suddenly ashamed of his tight-fitting cut-a- way coat and striped trousers. Really he ought to get a new suit! These garments were ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... were limp and quiet as he led them through the wood, strange ungainly mechanisms which a whiff of a scent could set in motion. A pinafore, which Joan had worn at breakfast, was served to them for an indication of the work they had to do; they snuffed at it languidly for some seconds. Then the colonel ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... a compact and charming plant, which sends up numbers of stems from the bottom in place of continually growing upward and thus becoming ungainly; it bears a profusion of elegantly curled, tasseled, and variegated foliage, very catching to the eye, and unlike any of its predecessors. The other, P. dumosum, is of similar habit, the foliage being crested and fringed after the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various
... This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here in the dingy receiving room, redolent of bloody tasks. Evidently he had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... Those years were not altogether happy ones, for Johnson's huge ungainly figure, and shabby, patched clothes were matters for laughter among his fellow- students. He became a sloven in his dress. His gown was tattered and his linen dirty, and his toes showed through his boots. Yet when some one, meaning ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... neither spoke: Anthony sat slowly stirring his tea, and staring moodily into the flames: the bacon on his plate lay untouched. From time to time his mother, laying down her knife and fork, looked across at him in unconcealed asperity, pursing her wide, ungainly mouth. At last, abruptly setting down ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... have said, against the bulwarks, where he lay like some horrible, ungainly sort of puppet, life-size, indeed, but how different from life's colour or life's comeliness! In that position I could easily have my way with him, and as the habit of tragical adventures had worn off almost all my terror for the dead, I took him by the waist as if he had been a sack of ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the vicinity of Chudak.... Alice wrote to Princess G—— today at T——.... I am NOT much impressed nor FAVORABLY by the attitude of these natives in the hills.... They seem to be a mongrel mixture of Tartar and Mongolian who are always ready, like the huge ungainly bears we have encountered in our pilgrimage, to grapple and devour one for the mere pleasure of seeing blood!... Maria seems quite interested in these notes,—today she insisted on giving me her impressions of how a NOVEL should be written.... She says that to make a story ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe
... that many had killed themselves for hopeless love of her. For this was the most dangerous of the world's creatures—a royal coquette. Such would our own Queen Bess have been had not God, for the good of England, given her a plain face and an ungainly form. For surely the devil is in it when a woman can command both love and men. Queen Christina, since the death of a husband who was years older than herself (and, as some say, before that historic event), had played a woman's game with that skill which men only half recognise, and had ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... positive means of ascertaining. Perhaps the object of it may have considered him a mere school-boy, and treated him as such; or his own shyness may have been in his way, and his "rules for behavior and conversation" may as yet have sat awkwardly on him, and rendered him formal and ungainly when he most sought to please. Even in later years he was apt to be silent and embarrassed in female society. "He was a very bashful young man," said an old lady, whom he used to visit when they were both in their nonage. "I used often to wish ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... his eyes on the pavement, and the shiny toes of his patent leather boots turned well out. His bowed legs were encased in loose black trousers, and had as many angles as the forepaws of a Dachshund or a Dandie Dinmont. The peculiarities of his ungainly gait and figure were even more apparent than usual, and as he walked he swung his long arms, that ended in large black gloves which looked as if they were stuffed ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass down the ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... ensnared his wits, perhaps it was the delight of kneeling to Kate even in this humble capacity. In either case, the result was equally grotesque; Kate found her dainty feet neatly enclosed in the professor's ungainly arctics, while he hopelessly contemplated her overshoe and the size of his ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... chestnuts and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of the beak of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... and another, and another. A woman, holding a heavy Bible after the fashion of a shield, was stooping and striking at her knees with a stick, striving to bring her to the ground; and with the cruel laughter that hailed the hag's ungainly efforts were mingled other and more ugly sounds, low curses, execrations, and always one fatal word, "Witch! Witch!"—fatal word spat at her by writhing mouths, hissed at her by pale lips, tossed broadcast on the cold morning wind, to breed wherever it flew fear ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman
... not made to get on. Mackintosh was an ugly man, with ungainly gestures, a tall thin fellow, with a narrow chest and bowed shoulders. He had sallow, sunken cheeks, and his eyes were large and sombre. He was a great reader, and when his books arrived and were unpacked Walker came over to his quarters and looked at them. Then he turned to Mackintosh ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... rotter of a boat Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote, Lay stranded in mid-stream; With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That made me think of legs and a broken spine; Soon, all too soon, Ungainly and forlorn to lie Full in the eye Of the cynical, discomfortable moon That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky, A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned; The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing; The poor old ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... well do it agin!" The man's nervousness increased, his mouth was open and his eyes were staring. With a violent effort of the will he mastered his fear and saluted correctly although in a grotesque and ungainly fashion. ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... long, loosely-limbed youth of two-and-twenty, with broad shoulders, a heavy overhanging brow, dark gray serious eyes, and a mouth scarcely curved, and so fast shut as to disclose hardly any lip. The hair was dark and lank; the air was of ungainly force, that had not yet found its purpose, and therefore was not at ease; and but for the educated cast of countenance he would have had a peasant look, in the brown, homely undress garb, which to most youths of his age would ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the largest (as it also is the largest of antelopes), being sometimes of the size and weight of a full-grown horse! It is an animal of rather an ungainly appearance; but its beautiful buff colour and mild disposition make up for its ungraceful shape; and it is scarcely ever out of good condition. Its home is Southern Africa, where it is still found in large herds; and its flesh affords ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... Royal advised. "Better come to the launching. Ain't she a bear?" He gazed fondly at the bluff-bowed, ungainly barge. "I'm goin' to bust a bottle of wine on her nose when she wets her feet. First rainy-weather hack we ever had in the ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 'King William was King James's son,' too. I always loved to play, but was hardly ever chosen because I was so fat and ungainly. I remember once, though, when I went to a children's party in a pale blue silk dress that made me look like a young mountain. I thought myself superlatively beautiful, however, and the rest of the ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... became the object of marked attention. Possibly it was my vocabulary, which was consistent with my vocation, together with my ungainly appearance, that differentiated me from my partners. George Edwards was neat in appearance, had a great fund of Western stories and experiences, and the two of us were constantly being importuned for incidents of a frontier nature. Both my partners, especially the Senator, were constantly ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... that nobody can tell what it means. To analyze it is to discover that it is extremely melodious; that it reflects a gloomy mood; that at the root of its sorrow is the mysterious "lost Lenore"; and that, as in most of Poe's works, a fantastic element is introduced, an "ungainly fowl" addressed with grotesque dignity as "Sir, or Madame," to divert attention from the fact that the poet's grief is not simple or human enough ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... across in his mind at his square ungainly house, full-fronting the afternoon sun. He tried to repress a shudder. 'I think, do you know, I ought ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... themselves in the mirror of the lake. He convinced himself that his eyes and his mind were having sport with him, and turning away, he made a little circle in the woods about their camp. All was well. He heard a swish overhead, but he knew that it was a night bird, a rustling came, and an ungainly form lumbered through a thicket, but it was a small black bear, and coming back to the hollow, he looked ...
— The Hunters of the Hills • Joseph Altsheler
... be expressed by "{Sh}ee{p}-faced" (69), a term his own mother applied to him when a boy. In his childhood, he was blue-eyed, hawk-nosed, slender, and ungainly, "{Ch}u{b}by" (69), by Ex., expresses his birth-date. A more vivid concurrence can scarcely be imagined, since he and Bonaparte were both born in the ...
— Assimilative Memory - or, How to Attend and Never Forget • Marcus Dwight Larrowe (AKA Prof. A. Loisette)
... to lift its arm and point more imperatively toward the peak. Its ungainly head seemed to turn and nod at Casey. What did the darned thing want? Casey would go when he, got good and ready. Perhaps he would go that way, and perhaps he would not. Right here was good enough for Casey Ryan at present; and you could ask ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... puzzling his brain as to how he could raise the necessary funds to pay off his friend, he saw the tall, ungainly form of a backwoods planter shuffling down ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... flowered gown—lilac flowers on a white ground, to be particular—an apron and a long duffle cloak. Fortunately Highland women are tall and large, for the Prince's height, 5 feet 10 inches, though moderate for a man, looked ungainly ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... Proconsul with his Raising of the King's Son in the Brancacci Chapel; the grand attitude and draperies of Ghirlandajo's Zachariah with the vulgar dress and movements of the Florentine citizens surrounding him; Benozzo Gozzoli's noble naked figure of Noah with his ungainly, hideously dressed figure of Cosimo de' Medici; Mantegna's exquisite Judith with his preposterous Marquis of Mantua; in short, all the purely realistic with all the purely idealistic painting of the fifteenth century. We may give one ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... chiefly to blame, and his verdict is probably just. A man takes a considerably longer stride than a woman; but, for all that, it is still possible, even in these days of hobble skirts, for man and maid to walk in step, as all true lovers know. But it can only be managed by his moderating his ungainly stride to her more modest one, and, perhaps, by her unconsciously lengthening her step under the invigorating influence of his support. Which is a parable. Mark Rutherford says that 'Mr. Cardew had not learned the art of being happy with his wife; he did not know that ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... battle, a raw, ungainly, but powerful looking youth from Kintail was seen staring about, as the Mackenzies were starting to meet the enemy, in an apparently idiotic manner, as if looking for something. He ultimately came ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... and the Saxon,—and of these two is our nation blent. But just at present it exhibits the love of glare and finery of the one, without its true and tender taste,—and the sturdy, practical utilitarianism of the other, without its simple-hearted, home-loving poetry. The boy is a great boy,—awkward, ungainly, and in the way; but he has eyes, tongue, feet, and hands to some (future) purpose. And that in good taste, good sense, refinement, and hopeful culture, our big boy has been growing, we hope will be apparent, even ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... middle of it. And this, again, was not inappropriate—it was typical of all the ways of the city. It was a city which had grown up by accident, with nobody to care about it or to help it; it was huge and ungainly, crude, uncomfortable, and grotesque. There was nowhere in it a beautiful sight upon which a man could rest his eyes, without having them tortured by something ugly near by. At the foot of the slope of the River Drive ran a hideous freight-railroad; and across the river the beautiful ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... ain't it, Master Hugh Ritson?" said Drayton, with an ungainly bow, and a vast show of civility, followed instantly by a sidelong leer at his ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... poor ungainly character, all awry, and not in a straight line." James certainly wrote a slovenly scrawl, strongly indicative of that personal negligence which he carried into all the little things of life; and Buchanan, who had made him an excellent scholar, may receive the disgrace ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... tapping, there came, instead, the sound of someone or something, scrambling on to the window-sill,—as if some creature, unable to reach the window from the ground, was endeavouring to gain the vantage of the sill. Some ungainly creature, unskilled in surmounting such an obstacle as a perpendicular brick wall. There was the noise of what seemed to be the scratching of claws, as if it experienced considerable difficulty in obtaining ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... held all the pride of a child with a new toy, but he released the grip, and the ungainly gun swung smoothly back to its ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... looked up from his newspaper in some surprise, and got up to greet his visitor. He was not in uniform, and his rough, ungainly figure and round red face revealed the countryman, but from the crown of his close-cropped bullet head to his thick-soled boots he looked like a rural policeman. There was an awkward pose about him as he stood up—a clumsy effort to maintain the semblance of ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... this a first-aid pouch and a long ungainly rifle patterned after the Daniel Boone period, and you have an idea of ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... I had received, and remembered only the months he had goaded me. And I was even beginning to speculate how I could best pick a quarrel with him on any issue but politics, when an unexpected incident diverted me. Of a sudden the tall, ungainly form of Percy Singleton filled the doorway, wrapped in a greatcoat. He swept the room at a glance, and then strode rapidly toward ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... between the Pilot fish above mentioned and their huge ungainly lord, seems one of the most inscrutable things in nature. At any rate, it poses poor me to comprehend. That a monster so ferocious, should suffer five or six little sparks, hardly fourteen inches long, to gambol about his grim hull ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... following rather humorous account of a series of camel races, copied from its pages, serves to show something of how the sporting proclivities of the English army of occupation enlist the services of even the awkward and ungainly ships of the desert: ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same angle over ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... terrible how little everybody writes, and how much of that little disappears in the capacious maw of the Post Office. Many letters, both from and to me, I now know to have been lost in transit: my eye is on the Sydney Post Office, a large ungainly structure with a tower, as being not a hundred miles from the scene of disappearance; but then I have no proof. The Tragic Muse you announced to me as coming; I had already ordered it from a Sydney bookseller: about two months ago he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... unmindful of the graces of life. Let thy body be stalwart, yet not ungainly either in motion or in repose. Let not thy face alone, but thy whole body, make manifest the alertness of thy mind. Yet let all this be without affectation. (Book vii., ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... these reflections, and continued eating with an abstracted air, Reine Vincart was rapidly examining the reserved, almost ungainly, young man, who did not dare address any conversation to her, and who was equally stiff and constrained with those sitting near him. She made a mental comparison of him with Claudet, the bold huntsman, alert, resolute, full of dash and spirit, and a feeling of charitable compassion arose ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... unreasonable to deny that which nearly everybody experiences. Now nearly everyone experiences that certain times, or places, hearing of certain words meetings of men or animals, uncanny or ungainly actions, are presages of good or evil to come. Therefore it seems not ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... heard and read of Megaleep as an awkward, ungainly animal, but almost my first glimpse of him scattered all that to the winds and set my nerves a-tingling in a way that they still remember. It was on a great chain of barrens in the New Brunswick wilderness. I was following the trail of a herd of caribou one day, ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... are sufficiently punished, however, for being so foolish as to be flattered by our invitation. For, my dear, we weren't asked to a swell dinner at all; we were invited to what was intended for a "Bohemian" affair (but it was only a dull and ungainly one), and it was apparently taken for granted that, as Dick painted and I hadn't millions, we were decidedly eligible. Of course, as you know, there is no such thing as a real ...
— The Smart Set - Correspondence & Conversations • Clyde Fitch
... the dotted lines, it will fold up and form a perfect triangular pyramid. And I would first remind my readers that the primary colours of the solar spectrum are seven—violet, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. When I was a child I was taught to remember these by the ungainly word formed by the initials of the ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the rags Of mortal perished beauty and be old? Or is there power left upon my mouth Like colour, and lilting of ruin in my eyes? Am I still rare enough to be your mate? Then why must I shame at feasts and bear myself In shy ungainly ways, made flushed and conscious By squat numb gestures of my shapeless head— Ay, and its wagging shadow—clouted up, Twice tangled with a bundle of hot hair, Like a thick cot-quean's in the settling time? There are few ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird or beast upon the sculptured ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... suits. The boats were next. They were typical landing craft, shaped like rectangular boxes. There was no need for streamlining in the vacuum of space. They were not pressurized. Only men in space suits rode in the ungainly boxes. ...
— Rip Foster Rides the Gray Planet • Blake Savage
... very serious and melancholy, and soon imbibes their sombre spirit, assuming their slow solemn gait. The mother-camel never licks or shows any particular fondness for its young beyond opening her legs for the foal to suck. At best, the camel, as an animal, is a most ungainly and unlovely creature. What surprises me most are the bites of the male-camel. He bites his neighbour, without passion or any apparent provocation, and simply because he has nothing else to do en route, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... somewhat more than life-size. Only one adverse impression is cast: that of petrifaction. The figures, almost without exception, appear as integral parts of the architectural fabric, rather than as added ornament. They are most ungainly, tall, stiff, and column-like, much more so than similar works at Reims, or at Amiens, where the sculpture has something of the vigour and warmth ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... was still,—and during that time I doubt if I even drew my breath. Then I felt it begin to move, in wobbling fashion, with awkward, ungainly gait, stopping every now and then, as if for rest. I was conscious that it was progressing, slowly, yet surely, towards the head of the bed. The emotion of horror with which I realised what this progression might mean, will ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... snow. About half-way across a tinkle of bells is heard, clear and musical, in the distance. Presently a large caravan looms out of the dusk—fifty or sixty camels and half a dozen men. The latter exchange a cheery "Good night" with my guide. Slowly the ungainly, heavily laden beasts file past us, gaunt and spectral in the twilight, the bells die away on the still wintry air, and we are again alone on the desolate plain—not a sign of life, not a sound to be heard, but the crunching of snow under our horses' feet, and ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... the antique statues, the smoked-up walls of the Sistine Chapel, and the cracks in Raphael's frescos. He condemns everything as rubbish which has not an external perfection; forgetting that, as in human nature, the most precious treasures are sometimes allied with an ungainly exterior. Yet in this he only echoes the impressions of thousands of others who have gone to the Vatican and returned disconsolate, because amid a perplexing multitude of objects they knew not where to look for consummate art. One can imagine ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... in unconcerned nakedness. Here and there were men of brawn, whose skins shone clear and ruddy. They took splendid poses, standing massively like chiefs. When they had dressed in their ungainly garments there was an extraordinary change. They then showed bumps and ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... haven't they done? One could forgive their being dirty and stupid and noisy and rude; one could forgive their ugliness, the ineffable banality of their faces, their goggle-eyes, their protruding teeth, their ungainly motions; but the trait one can't forgive is their venality. They're so mercenary. They're always thinking how much they can get out of you—everlastingly touching their hats and expecting you to put your hand in your pocket. Oh, no, believe me, there's no health in the People. ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... life long always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at the commonest, but not surprised by the most strange; free from the idols of size and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the minutest objects, beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each thing not carnally, as the vulgar do, by its size or its pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amount of Divine thought revealed to Man therein; holding every phenomenon worth the noting down; believing ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... shore, where an abundance of rocks were to be had. It was their intention to load it with "lighthouse material," and tow it to the island. It required all their skill to accomplish this object, for the raft was a most ungainly thing to manage. The Zephyr was so long that they could not row round so as to bring the raft alongside the bank, and when they attempted to push it in, the paint, and even the planks of ...
— All Aboard; or, Life on the Lake - A Sequel to "The Boat Club" • Oliver Optic
... spacious drawing-room. With what straining eyes and breathless anxiety he scrutinized them! Now he saw a lady of noble carriage walking to and fro,—that might be Lady Langdon; by and by he caught sight of a gaunt, ungainly figure, and recognized Lady Vivian. Who would have believed that a glimpse of that angular, unsymmetrical form could ever have called such radiance to the eyes of a young and handsome man?—could have kindled such a glow upon his cheeks?—could ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... certain issue.' What the Irishman said is totally obliterated from my mind; but I remember that he became very warm and intemperate in his expressions; upon which Johnson rose, and quietly walked away. When he had retired, his antagonist took his revenge, as he thought, by saying, 'He has a most ungainly figure, and an affectation of pomposity, unworthy ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... have a more pleasing expression, but the timid furtive look, the ungainly gait, and the ungraceful contour of their abak skirts, detract from the moderate beauty that they possess in their youth. After marriage their ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... all German houses, attends at the common door, and who, in this case, lived in a couple of musty little closets opening into the lower hall, and eked out his official salary by cobbling shoes. He was an odd, grotesque humorist, of most ungainly exterior, black haired and bearded, with a squint, a squab nose, and a short but very powerful figure. Dirty he was beyond belief, and he was abominably fragrant of vile tobacco. For my part, I could not endure this fellow; but Paton, who ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... to say something pleasant to Miss Lydia, but could only manage to tell her that she had changed wonderfully and that she had a great advantage over me in that I was the same ungainly boy she ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... out into the open. A few paces away stood a couple under a tree. And toward them Dolly hastened, now holding to the arm of her companion. Then he recognized Ann and saw that she was with a tall, ungainly young man of eighteen or twenty. The ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... peasant had a docile bear, A bear of manners pleasant, And all the love she had to spare She lavished on the peasant: She proved her deep affection plainly (The method was a bit ungainly). ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... for it. He had been endeavouring to persuade the storekeeper that he would return in the course of a week with a number of skins amply sufficient to pay his debts; but the wary trader, looking at his ungainly figure and discovering that he was a "Britisher," was unwilling to trust him. Finding that all his arguments were useless, taking a book from his pocket, he had sat down in a corner of the store, philosophically ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... More slaves must then be fed, more horses too, And chariots bought. Now have I nought to do, If I would even to Tarentum ride, But mount my bobtailed mule, my wallets tied Across his flanks, which, napping as we go, With my ungainly ankles to and fro, Work his unhappy sides a ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... that his personal appearance, as much as anything, was displeasing to her fastidiousness. He was so big, so awkward; his hands and feet were so clumsy. A little more and he would have been ungainly; perhaps she considered him ungainly as it was. He had tried to negative his defects by spending a great deal of money on his clothes and being as particular as a girl about his nails; but he felt that with all his efforts he was but a bumpkin ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... her hair seemed light in contrast. It was evident that she had studied grace so thoroughly that her manner and carriage appeared unstudied and natural. She never seemed self-conscious, and yet no one had ever seen her in an ungainly posture or had known her to make an awkward gesture. This grace, however, like a finished style in writing, was tinged so strongly with her own individuality that it appeared original as compared with the fashionable ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... during the service, came to him, as he passed out, to give him greeting and a word of condolence. For that time only he passed them by, as if they had been wooden images. His spirit had been strained to its uttermost, and would bear no more. He made his way home with an ungainly, swift gait,—home to the dear bedside,—down upon his knees,—struggling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... formidable. He was as big as a man, somewhat lank, and covered with coarse hair the colour of cocoanut matting. This afternoon, when the early patrons entered, they found him hanging limply by one arm, like a great ungainly bat. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... and barked. Then, as one, both rushed the fighting beast, but for the first time from the same side, leaving it a clear path to retreat. It made a rush before which they fled easily, and then it whirled with a speed and grace, which did not fit its ungainly, ill-proportioned body, and jumped toward the cleft, the coyotes making no effort to hinder ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... apprehension of having his vehicle broken to pieces, and himself killed or crippled by the collision of those thirty-two ton masses. Even if a man had no carriage of his own, what inducement could he have to take so ungainly a conveyance. Three hours is more than the maximum difference by which the ordinary speed of coaches could be exceeded; and it is not one traveller in a thousand to whom an arrival in London and Birmingham three hours sooner would ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... close to them sprang into the air as if they had received an electric shock. At the same instant a white cloudlet of smoke rose above the grass, and a few seconds later the sharp crack of the trapper's rifle broke on their ears. The huge ungainly brutes bounded away, leaving one of their number behind. He writhed violently, and then lay gently down. A moment of suspense followed, for he might rise again and run beyond pursuit, as buffalo often do under a deadly wound! But no! he curled his tail, gasped ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... folks are at home," remarked the "long, lank man," with an off-hand air of familiarity, comfortably settling himself in an arm-chair before the smouldering fire, and thrusting out his ungainly feet as far as possible. "Would be glad ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... the tall ungainly beast realised directly that it was being pursued, and separating from the herd, went off at a clumsy gallop, its neck outstretched, and its tail whisking about as it kept ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... the other hand, characteristically Saxon. The nearest parallel to them is to be found in the imposts of the chancel arch at Worth in Sussex, a place far away from Roman sites. The Worth imposts, like the bases at Bosham, are huge and ungainly, testifying both to the general love of bigness in the Saxon builder and to his comparative ignorance of the normal features which in the eleventh century were everywhere else crystallising into Romanesque. Saxon England stood outside the general development of European architecture, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... flesh daily, from pure lack of provender. However, there was no time to make a change, so I was fain to hope that easy journeys at first, and a light weight on his back, might gradually bring the ungainly beast into better form. It appeared that he was just recovering from the distemper and "sore tongue," which had followed each other in rapid succession. These two diseases are the terror and bane of Virginian and Maryland stables. ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... turn, perceived that the tall man, ungainly as he was, affected a bizarre individualism in the matter of dress. His clothing cried out, rather than suggested, that it was expensive. His feet were cased in button shoes with fancy tops; his waistcoat, cut in the extreme of style, revealed that ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... now, scarcely to be seen for cobwebs. Its hour had come at last. Even as I stretched out my hand a dozen horrid things hurried tumultuously back into darkness. Even as I laid my hand on it, a big ungainly spider, scared but half incredulous, started in alarm, hesitated, and finally made off ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... heart warmed with the sweet promise of Christ's acceptance of the coming sinner, and that will make thee make more haste unto him. Discouraging thoughts they are like unto cold weather, they benumb the senses, and make us go ungainly about our business; but the sweet and warm gleads8 of promise are like the comfortable beams of the sun, which liven and refresh. 9 You see how little the bee and fly do play in the air in winter; why, the cold hinders them from doing it; but when the wind and sun is warm, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... rude lips I speak, ungainly is the manner of my speech as one leaping among furrows, as one advancing unevenly; for all this I fear to raise thine anger, and to provoke instead of appeasing thee; nevertheless, thou wilt do unto me as may ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... derived some pleasure from displaying a figure so beautiful, with no adornment except its native gracefulness; but how great must have been the chagrin of the Princesses, of many of the Court ladies, indeed, of all in any way ungainly or deformed, when called to exhibit themselves by the side of a bewitching person like hers, unaided by the whalebone and horse-hair paddings with which they had hitherto been made up, and which placed the best form on a level with the worst? ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 3 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... of those unmarried women whose portrait can be drawn in one word which will enable the least imaginative mind to picture her; she was ungainly. She knew her own ugliness and was the first to laugh at it, showing her long teeth, yellow as her complexion and her bony hands. She was gay and hearty. She wore the famous short gown of former days, a very full skirt with pockets full of keys, a cap with ribbons ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... Bay. There was only one brick house (which he had built himself, but had been obliged to sell in a season unfavorable for wild beasts), and the other edifices dropped through the social scale to some picturesque barns thatched with straw. These he excused to his Americans, but added that the ungainly thatch was sometimes useful in saving the lives of the cattle toward the end of an unusually ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... remembered, though she had not attended many dances. He recalled suddenly that a Christmas tree or a Fourth of July picnic had usually been the occasions when Mary Hope, with her skirts just hitting her shoe tops in front and sagging in an ungainly fashion behind, had teetered solemnly through a "square" dance with him. Mother Douglas herself had always sat very straight and prim on a bench, her hands folded in her lap and her eyes blinking disapprovingly at the ungodly ones ...
— Rim o' the World • B. M. Bower
... All Yankees do not carry about with them an unmistakable certificate of their origin, but Ebenezer Onthank was a typical New Englander. His face was long and thin, his expression shrewd and good-natured, his limbs were long and ungainly. In later life, with the addition of forty or fifty pounds of flesh, he would be much improved ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... presented no feminine charms to view; and her short coarse petticoat showed her red legs nearly to the knee; for, except on Sundays, she knew not the use of shoes and stockings. But though Kate was ungainly and ugly, she was useful, and grateful—very fond of the whole family, and particularly attached to the two young ladies, in whose behalf she doubtless performed many a service, acceptable enough to them, but of which, had she known of them, the widow ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... last was half as large as the others, produced no less than a thousand eggs; eight hundred were deposited in the larger nests and two or three hundred in the smaller. Truly a fine family, but a thought ungainly, were it not that only a few of its ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... of procedure, undoubtedly, is for the beginner to become familiar with two or three of the most common gestures, learning how to make them and just what they signify. He should then use them. They may seem mechanical and ungainly at first, but constant practice both in private and before a class will soon enable him to make them with considerable emphasis and ease. From this point on, the road is clear. The knowledge that he can use his hands to good advantage, even in a limited way, will soon cause him to ...
— Practical Argumentation • George K. Pattee
... And he hungered for spring to come again when he should go with the Turner boys to take another raft of logs down the river to the capital. Spring came, and going out to the back pasture one morning, Chad found a long-legged, ungainly creature stumbling awkwardly about his old mare—a colt! That, too, he owed the Major, and he would have burst with pride had he known that the colt's sire was a famous stallion in the Bluegrass. That spring he did go down the river again. He did not let the Major ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... outreckoning, You hold you dead and dumb, Or scorn my beckoning, And will not come; And I say, "'Twere mood ungainly To store her memory so:" I say it vainly - ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... love being finished, he went about the house on tiptoe, found brown paper and twine, put the hood back into the box with his half-sheet peeping from between the frills where the little face would go, and made it up, with his undeft fingers, into an ungainly parcel, which he addressed to himself as before. After that he did his accustomed duty with the lamp and the door, and lay down in ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... attorney, and went to Springfield, and after that it was only a short time before he had won his clients. His cousin Denny came to hear him try one of his first cases. He watched the tall, lank young fellow, still as ungainly as in his early boyhood, and heard him tell the jury some of those same stories he had ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland
... whiteness, had the exquisite softness and smoothness of white satin. For a long time, at the ungraceful age between twelve and eighteen, she had looked awkwardly tall, climbing trees like a boy. Then, from the ungainly hoyden had been evolved this ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... the pool lay in a sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... face and ungainly figure troubled him in no slight degree as they moved off together, they seemed to express in some indescribable fashion so much of dull and patient pain, and they were so much at variance with the free grandeur of the scene surrounding them. It was as if a new element were introduced into ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... he should do. This absorption seemed to ignore completely the other occupants of the room, of whom he was the central, commanding figure. The head nurse held the lamp carelessly, resting her hand over one hip thrown out, her figure drooping into an ungainly pose. She gazed at the surgeon steadily, as if puzzled at his intense preoccupation over the common case of a man "shot in a row." Her eyes travelled over the surgeon's neat-fitting evening dress, which was so bizarre here ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... to possess the power of moving any joint in his body independently of the rest. He cracked his fingers persistently when he talked after a fashion that would have been intolerable in anyone but Capper. His hands were always in some ungainly attitude, and yet they were wonderful hands, strong and sensitive, the colour of ivory. His eyes were small and green, sharp as the eyes of a lizard. They seemed to take in ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... pointing nose. There was some weakness, but not much, in the full, projecting lower lip and the slightly receding chin that caused his short, tightened upper lip to look indrawn and strained; and the big, ungainly, jutting ears consorted oddly with the serious look of high purpose that marked his face in repose. It was as though Puck had turned poet and then had turned preacher. One looked at the fleshy lower lip and the jutting ears, and thought of a careless, impish ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... gentlemen of the gown, whose awkward, spruce, prim, sneering, and smirking countenances, the very tone of their voices, and an ungainly strut in their walk, without one single talent for any one office, have contrived to get good preferment by the mere force of flattery and cringing: for which two virtues (the only two virtues they pretend to) they ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... however, so very little, for it was of ungainly sprawling structure, pushing out an odd limb that might have been cut off with a curtain. The walls nodded fixedly to one another so that the ceiling was only half the size of the floor. The furniture comprised but the commonest necessities. This attic of the Ansells was nearer heaven than most ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... She felt very shy about this, but that was because she did not know her own power. To her astonishment, Priscilla found that she could act. If the part suited her she could throw herself into it so that she ceased to be awkward, ungainly Priscilla Peel. Out of herself she was no longer awkward, no longer ungainly. She could only personate certain characters; light and airy parts she could not attempt, but where much depended on passion and emotion Priscilla could do splendidly. Every day her friends found ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... into our saddles and straightening the ranks in high expectation. We started at a trot, two or three patrols galloping out in front, towards the high ground, while the regiment followed in mass—a great square block of ungainly brown figures and little horses, hung all over with water-bottles, saddle-bags, picketing-gear, tins of bully-beef, all jolting and jangling together; the polish of peace gone; soldiers without glitter; horsemen without grace; but still a regiment of ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... talks with Richie—perhaps the happiest talks in her life, for Richie, whose mind and body had undergone for long years the exquisite discipline of pain, was delightfully unexpected in his views, and his whole lean, ungainly frame vibrated with the eager joy of ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... with Jefferson is the difference among his portraits. This is due to the varying periods at which they were made. As we have stated, he was raw-boned, freckled and ungainly in his youth, but showed a marked improvement in middle life. When he became old, many esteemed him good looking, though it can hardly be ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.
... loping up with elbows flapping loosely, as was his ungainly habit. His grin was wide and golden as of yore, his hat at the same angle over ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... the fires that had been kindled to kill them. There were also patches of forest still to be seen among these fields, where the land had not yet been cleared. In spite of all this, the town was very advanced, every improvement being of the newest kind because so recently achieved. Upon huge ungainly tree-trunks roughly erected along the streets, electric lamps hung, and telephone wires crossed and recrossed one another from roof to roof. There was even an electric tram that ran straight through the town and some distance into the country on either side. ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... numerous hills, and majestic mountains. In some of the passes we saw bramble-berries growing; and the many other flowers, though of great beauty, did not remind us of youth and of home like the ungainly thorny bramble-bushes. We were a week in crossing the highlands in a northerly direction; then we descended into the Upper Shire Valley, which is nearly 1200 feet above the level of the sea. This valley is wonderfully fertile, and supports a large population. After leaving the somewhat ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... it, then, that the moment his eye fell upon this ungainly woman, the pair of them appeared suddenly as other than they were? Whence came that transforming dignity and sense of power that enveloped them both as by magic? What was it about that massive woman that made her appear instantly regal, and set her on a throne in some dark and dreadful scenery, ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... past the outer barriers, at which the soldiers of the Duke Casimir kept guard, than a vast, ungainly wight ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... would not be able to tell his rock from any other. The heavy body, its ungainly movement and thin bones would explain everything. Besides, there was no motive for killing the Martian and what penalty could there be? It couldn't ...
— Martians Never Die • Lucius Daniel
... the rocks, and with their lithe and apparently boneless shapes conformed to the rude and sharp angles, they are a wonderful, but not a graceful or pleasing sight. At a little distance they look like huge maggots, and their slow, ungainly motions upon the land do not lessen this resemblance. Swimming in the ocean, at a distance from the land, they are inconspicuous objects, as nothing but the head shows above water, and that only at intervals. ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... a huge place—huge, ungainly, and uselessly extensive; built at a time when, at any rate in Ireland, men considered neither beauty, aptitude, nor economy. It is three stories high, and stands round a quadrangle, in which there are ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... went on growing together. By his fondness for worthless minions, and by the sanction which he gave to their tyranny and rapacity, he kept discontent constantly alive. His cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision. Even in his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently unkingly. Throughout the whole course of his reign, all the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... distinguished by as great height as has ever been reached by ordinary man, and, in these instances, I have never failed to notice that his form discloses almost faultless proportions, the Indian being never ungainly or gaunt. I think, on the whole, that I do no injustice to the white man, when I credit the Indian with a better-knit frame ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... Governor presided, sitting in a high backed rocking-chair; which, by the by, the natives call a "Missionary Horse." The colonial Secretary acted as chief-clerk, and Doctor Prout, in gold-bowed spectacles, as his assistant. An ungainly lad, with big feet and striped hose, seemed to engross in his own person the offices of door-keeper, sergeant-at-arms, and page. The council proper consisted of ten members, who sat at separate desks, arranged semi-circularly in front ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... I speak, ungainly is the manner of my speech as one leaping among furrows, as one advancing unevenly; for all this I fear to raise thine anger, and to provoke instead of appeasing thee; nevertheless, thou wilt do unto me as may please thee. O Lord, thou hast held ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Catharine, Union, Clinton, Franklin, Centre, and Tompkins Markets. With the exception of Tompkins Market, they are, as far as the houses are concerned, unmitigated nuisances to the city. They are in the last stages of dilapidation, and from without present the most ungainly spectacles to be witnessed in New York. The streets around them are always dirty and crowded, and in the hot days of the summer the air is loaded with foul smells which arise ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... him with those bad eyes; of too much girth, you might have said, to be nimble, yet somehow suggesting to the swift intuition of youth, as Rodriguez looked at him standing upon his door-step, the spirit and shape of a spider, who despite her ungainly build is agile enough in ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... Furneaux. "In fact, I feel rather bad about it. I woke up at eight o'clock, and pictured you and Bates and his wife lying about in No. 18 in very uncomfortable and ungainly attitudes. I was so worried and miserable that I telephoned your hall porter to learn the worst, and was quite astonished when he said that Bates had just been chatting with him. You don't understand, of course. I forgot to tell you about the lift. Wong Li Fu's special delegate ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... cheap urns and obelisks for his employers' retailing. But the question why numberless people will profane the memory of their departed by these public advertisements of Slap & Dash, and their evil trade, is a more difficult problem. For surely nothing could be more unmeaning or more ungainly than the monumental urn, unless it be the monumental obelisk. The plain cross, by contrast, has the tenderest meaning, and is a simple and fitting monument that ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... humor. Once, indeed, he was touched to the quick by a piece of schoolboy pertness. After playing on the flute, he spoke with enthusiasm of music, as delightful in itself, and as a valuable accomplishment for a gentleman, whereupon a youngster, with a glance at his ungainly person, wished to know if he considered himself a gentleman. Poor Goldsmith, feelingly alive to the awkwardness of his appearance and the humility of his situation, winced at this unthinking sneer, which long rankled ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... At length the tall, ungainly figure and ungracious visage of Ebenezer presented themselves. The upper part of his form, notwithstanding the season required no such defence, was shrouded in a large great-coat, belted over his under habiliments, and crested with a huge cowl of the same stuff, which, when drawn over the ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... of noise, The ragged peoples storm the palaces, They rave, they laugh, they thirst, they lap the stream That trickles from the regal vestments down, And, lapping, smack their heated chaps for more, And ply their daggers for it, till the kings All die and lie in a crooked sprawl of death, Ungainly, foul, and stiff as any heap Of villeins rotting on a battle-field. 'Tis true, that when these things have come to pass Then never a king shall rule again in France, For every villein shall be king in France: And who hath ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... of the river round the rice plantation. It is true that there is something very dreadful in the thick shapeless mass, uniform in colour almost to the black slime on which it lies basking, and which you hardly detect till it begins to move. But even those ungainly crocodiles never sickened me as those rapid, lithe, and sinuous serpents do. Did I ever tell you that the people at the rice plantation caught a young alligator and brought it to the house, and it was kept for some time in ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... and good-natured jests. At the door she reached back, caught Mostyn's hand, and drew him out into the open. A few paces away stood a couple under a tree. And toward them Dolly hastened, now holding to the arm of her companion. Then he recognized Ann and saw that she was with a tall, ungainly young man of eighteen or twenty. The two ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... very large bundle it was, as it lay, in disjecta membra, before the astonished eyes of the first learned palaeontologist who gazed, in wondering delight, on its strange proportions. As it rears its ungainly form some eighteen feet above us, Madam, you may gather some idea of what it was in its native forests, I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of years ago. You need not snuggle up to me so, Tommy. The creature is not alive, unless it is enjoying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blest with seeing bird above his chamber door— Bird ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... important matter, for the Schulenburgs were as poor as they were proud—and she was too unattractive to get into mischief. But it is the unexpected that often happens; and no sooner had the Elector's son and heir, George, set eyes on the ungainly maid-of-honour than he promptly fell head over ears in love with her, to the amazement of the entire Court, and to the disgust of his mother, and of his newly-made bride, Sophia Dorothea of Zell. To George—an awkward, sullen young man of loutish ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... short, stoutish, ungainly man past seventy, and he suffers from chronic indigestion. He is one of those people of whom it is difficult to believe that they ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it appears; passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment. There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads, and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks. And meanwhile the Doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too facile ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had on a dingy purple velvet jacket, covered with frayed gold lace, tawdry tinsel braid, tarnished gilt buttons, with long, wide red and white striped cotton trousers, from which his dusky ankles and bare flat feet flopped about like the fins of some great ungainly fish. ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... is said to have been one of the two handsomest men in Europe,—the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV., being the other. Some authorities, however, have represented him as ungainly in person and rough in manners. Tarleton was originally bred to the law, but quitted law for the army early in life. He was son to a mayor of Liverpool, born in 1754, of ancient family. He wrote his own memoirs after returning from America. Afterwards in Parliament. Never afterwards ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... religion, but one who might actually have claimed something like divine worship, had he cared to do so. Though the fantastic pretensions of Caligula had brought some contempt [215] on that claim, which had become almost a jest under the ungainly Claudius, yet, from Augustus downwards, a vague divinity had seemed to surround the Caesars even in this life; and the peculiar character of Aurelius, at once a ceremonious polytheist never forgetful of his pontifical calling, and a philosopher whose mystic speculation encircled ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... exacted. But he was not without his consolations; he could sing a song well, and, at a new insult, could blow off excitement through his flute. The popular picture of him in these days is of a slow, hesitating, somewhat hollow voice, a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about the college courts on the wait for misery ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... one, or passed through a town, glances of surprise and curiosity followed them; for it seemed as if the living images of night and day were walking side by side over the land. Fausch's clothes were dark and coarse, such as he always wore. They hung loose and heavy about his ungainly form, his hands were blackened, and his large head, which was set upon his broad shoulders as if thrust forward to meet some obstacle, matched them in color; his thick curly hair was deep black, and his face looked as if tanned by the hot sun of some foreign land. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... gawky, ragged umbels, coarse docks, rank nettles, and many other things which I don't know, and never wish to see again. Near the end of this descent my mare took the bit between her teeth and carried me at an ungainly gallop into the beautifully situated, precipitous village of Ichikawa, which is absolutely saturated with moisture by the spray of a fine waterfall which tumbles through the middle of it, and its trees and road-side are green with the Protococcus viridis. The Transport ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... not fitted for long travel through a country where a horse must needs lose flesh daily, from pure lack of provender. However, there was no time to make a change, so I was fain to hope that easy journeys at first, and a light weight on his back, might gradually bring the ungainly beast into better form. It appeared that he was just recovering from the distemper and "sore tongue," which had followed each other in rapid succession. These two diseases are the terror and bane of Virginian ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... three words were uttered sotto voce, but the coroner heard him, and followed his ungainly figure with a glance of some curiosity, as he settled himself at the desk on the ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... quiet halls Costigan stalked to a certain storage room, where with all due precaution he donned his own suit of Triplanetary armor. Making an ungainly bundle of the other Solarian equipment stored there, he dragged it along behind him as he clanked back toward his prison, until he neared the dock at which was moored the Nevian space-speedster which he was determined to take. Here, he knew, was the first of many critical points. ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith
... not how many other professions, now began to find that his genius did not lie to the mallet. Davie was stage-mad; but for the stage nature seemed to have fitted him rather indifferently: she had given him a squat ungainly figure, an inexpressive face, a voice that in its intonations somewhat resembled the grating of a carpenter's saw; and, withal, no very nice conception of either comic or serious character; but he could recite in the "big bow-wow style," ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... from three to four hundred penguins would scramble out on to the stones with great rapidity, at once exchanging the vigorous and graceful movements for which they were so remarkable while in the water for the most ludicrous and ungainly ones possible now that they were on terra firma; for, they tumbled about on the shingle and apparently with difficulty assumed the normal position which is their habit when on land—that of standing upright on their feet. These latter are set too far back for their bodies ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... as Hazlitt somewhere mentioned who called Wordsworth a dunce. Hazlitt was quite incapable of such a solecism. He knew, nobody better, that a telling caricature must be a good likeness. If he darkens the shades, and here and there exaggerates an ungainly feature, we still know that the shade exists and that the feature is not symmetrical. De Quincey reports the saying of some admiring friend of Hazlitt, who confessed to a shudder whenever Hazlitt used his habitual gesture of placing his hand within his waistcoat. The ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... graces of life. Let thy body be stalwart, yet not ungainly either in motion or in repose. Let not thy face alone, but thy whole body, make manifest the alertness of thy mind. Yet let all this be without affectation. (Book vii., ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... did not altogether obscure, the natural civility of an amiable disposition, as well as the acquired habits of politeness which he had learned in the good society that frequented Lord Bidmore's mansion. He not only indulged in neglect of dress and appearance, and all those ungainly tricks which men are apt to acquire by living very much alone, but besides, and especially, he became probably the most abstracted and absent man of a profession peculiarly liable to cherish such habits. ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... Breaking the sunset's wistful and solemn dream, An old, black rotter of a boat Past service to the labouring, tumbling flote, Lay stranded in mid-stream; With a horrid list, a frightening lapse from the line, That made me think of legs and a broken spine; Soon, all too soon, Ungainly and forlorn to lie Full in the eye Of the cynical, discomfortable moon That, as I looked, stared from the fading sky, A clown's face flour'd for work. And by and by The wide-winged sunset wanned and waned; The lean night-wind crept westward, chilling and sighing; The poor old hulk remained, Stuck ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... be likened to A desert ship. (This is not new.) He is a most ungainly craft, With frowning turrets fore and aft We little realize on earth, How much we owe to his great girth, For should he ever shrink so small As through the needle's eye to crawl, Rich men might climb the golden stairs And so leave ...
— This Giddy Globe • Oliver Herford
... the woodsman, in the clearing stood, Hemmed by the solemn forest stretching round; Stalwart, ungainly, honest-eyed and rude, The genius of that solitude profound. He clove the way that future millions trod, He passed, unmoved by worldly fear or pelf; In all his lusty toil he found not God, Though in the wilderness he ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... and lilies and cardinal and other rare flowers. We used to call him Trainer Thoreau, because the boys called the soldiers the "trainers," and he had a long, measured stride and an erect carriage which made him seem something like a soldier, although he was short and rather ungainly in figure. He had a curved nose which reminded one a little of ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... woman's working in the field while man measures tapes or counts thimbles, or in his doing other in-door work for which woman's light touch renders her better qualified. When we look at women who have become coarse in the expression of their features, and ungainly in form and movement, through the weight of their daily toil, we see the folly of those who would make the woman the equal, or the rival, instead of the helpmeet of man; and feel indignation that, since many of our women must earn their own livelihood, we have not a ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... time a good many yards off, with the eyes still following, and slowly revolving on their axes so as to follow without the head being turned round. It is this spectacle which has drawn off your friend's attention; and you notice his whole figure twisted into an ungainly form, intended to be dignified or easy, and assumed because he fancied that the passerby was looking at him. Oh the pettiness of human nature! Then you will find people afraid that they have given offence by saying or doing things which the party they suppose offended had really never observed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... mighty movement of the beast—a threshing that nearly blinded the men in the cloud of bloodstained seeds it raised. With something between a curse and a sob, the mule lunged at its crib as if attempting to get bodily into it. But no: it was only trying to perch on its edge! Now it had succeeded. The ungainly beast hung there a second, two, three. From its uplifted throat issued that usually innocuous phrase, a phrase now a thing ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... best days could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They turned down one street, under the wondering eyes of old ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... was an ungainly Scotch pedant, who was incapable of appreciating heroism and manliness in others, because of his own deficiency in all such qualities. He lavished favors and titles on unworthy favorites, and incurred the contempt of wise men for his follies ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... "Princess" in her turn denuded herself of her wealth of wig, and Madame Depine watched with unsmiling satisfaction the stretchings of tape across the ungainly cranium. ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of the flocks of Phoebus ever began life as a more ungainly duckling than Ibsen did. The ingenuity of biographers has done its best to brighten up the dreary record of his childhood with anecdotes, yet the sum of them all is but a dismal story. The only talent which was supposed to lurk in the napkin was that for painting. A little while before he ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... notion of why I have collected all the nonsensical things there are. I have not the patience nor perhaps the constructive intelligence to state the connecting link between all these chaotic papers. But it could be stated. This row of shapeless and ungainly monsters which I now set before the reader does not consist of separate idols cut out capriciously in lonely valleys or various islands. These monsters are meant for the gargoyles of a definite cathedral. I have to carve the gargoyles, because I can carve ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... rock, beneath the moss, a hole Leads to his home, the den wherein he sleeps; Lulled by near noises of the laboring mole Tunneling its mine—like some ungainly Troll— Or by the tireless cricket there that keeps Picking its rusty and monotonous lute; Or slower sounds of grass that creeps and creeps, And trees unrolling ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... of the river, rows of brilliant red flamingos were standing in the shallow water, fishing, and here and there a pelican with his ungainly beak. Our Chinese crew were having their meal of rice when we walked forward, and the national chopsticks were hard at work. We talked to several of them. They could all speak a little Spanish, and were ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... Spot's ungainly feet pawed the snow impatiently, as he strained in his collar stretching the tow-line so taut that George feared it might snap. Equally unavailing were Queen's sudden leaps and frantic plunges. The more they struggled, the more firmly Baldy held ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... ugly uninviting place to look at, with but few visible signs of wealth. The earth, which had been burrowed out by these human rabbits in their search after tin, lay around in huge ungainly heaps; the overground buildings of the establishment consisted of a few ill-arranged sheds, already apparently in a state of decadence; dirt and slush, and pods of water confined by muddy dams, abounded on every ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... to the Girondists. Four evenings of every week, the leaders of this party met in the saloon of Madame Roland, to deliberate respecting their measures. Among them there was a young lawyer from the country, with a stupid expression of countenance, sallow complexion, and ungainly gestures, who had made himself excessively unpopular by the prosy speeches with which he was ever wearying the Assembly. He had often been floored by argument and coughed down by contempt, but he seemed alike insensible to sarcasm ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... enough to dress at his leisure, before dinner. He entered the drawing-room—a tall, lean man, all in ungainly black, with a white choker, with either a black wig, or black hair dressed in imitation of one, a pair of spectacles, and a dark, sharp, short visage, rubbing his large hands together, and with a short brisk nod to me, whom he plainly regarded merely ...
— Uncle Silas - A Tale of Bartram-Haugh • J.S. Le Fanu
... was mostly eaten up by the dog, and he was left to beg a precarious support from the good-will and charity of his shipmates, all of whom were equally disgusted with the commander's cruelty and the ungainly ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... in 1625, the nation turned hopefully to the young prince, who thus far had pleased them in many ways. In contrast to the ungainly, rickety, garrulous James, Charles was kingly in appearance, bearing, and demeanor. He was reserved in speech and manner. So far, the stubbornness which he had inherited from his father was mistaken ...
— The Development of Religious Liberty in Connecticut • M. Louise Greene, Ph. D.
... Billie. You made the right guess when you sized him up and thought he couldn't hold the job. He certainly doesn't belong, Billie, for this ranch is the homing nest of the peace doves, and he's just an ungainly young game rooster starting out with a dare against the world, and only himself for a backer. Honest,—if that misguided youth had been landed in jail, I don't reckon there's anyone in Arizona with little enough sense to ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... without visible bridges, small, dark, oblique eyes, with heavy lids and imperceptible eyebrows, wide mouths, full lips, thick, big, projecting ears, deformed by great hoops, straight black hair nearly as coarse as horsehair, and short, square, ungainly figures. The faces of the men are smooth. The women seldom exceed five feet in height, and a man is tall at ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... to turn furiously upon the boy, under the impression that he was the nigger in question; but at the same moment he caught sight of a full-blooded, woolly-headed West Coast African leading a very large camel by a rope, the great ungainly beast mincing and blinking as it gently put down, one after the other, its soft, spongy feet, which seemed to spread out on the gravelled road, while their high-shouldered owner kept on turning its bird-like head from side to side, muttering ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... after the other, with his teeth, and carry them along the deck. Nobody gave him the opportunity, but I dare say he could have done it; for he was a gallant, noble figure of a man, even in the Cappuccino dress, which is the ugliest and most ungainly that can ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... not happy," thought Count Victor, watching the lady who was compelled to be a partner in these ungainly gambols. ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... departed, and a few minutes later our flotilla was under way. We stayed over night at Biha, a small but clean Dayak kampong. The Murungs, as seen here for the first time, are rather shy, dark-complexioned, somewhat short and strongly set people. They are not ugly, though their mouths always seem ungainly. The next day we arrived at a Malay kampong, Muara Topu, which is less attractive on account of its lack of cleanliness and its pretense of ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... further to the left, near a tier of rocks which there began to soar upwards. There you found yourself in a veritable land of fire, in a natural hot-house, on which the sun fell freely. At first, you had to make your way through huge, ungainly fig trees, which stretched out grey branches like arms weary of lying still, and whose villose leather-like foliage was so dense that in order to pass one constantly had to snap off twigs that had sprouted from the ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... co-Vestals were immediately liked and speedily loved by Brinnaria. Meffia, a month older than herself and looking six years younger, was a small, awkward, ungainly girl, with pale blue eyes, pale yellow hair and babyish pink complexion. She had never had an ill hour in her life, yet she always appeared ailing, shrank from any effort, hated exercise and exertion and at every necessity for movement ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... working-room crowded with books, at the College de France. Madame Renan was away, and he had abandoned his large library for something more easily warmed. My first sight of him was something of a shock—of the large, ungainly figure, the genial face with its spreading cheeks and humorous eyes, the big head with its scanty locks of hair. I think he felt an amused and kindly interest in the two young folk from Oxford who had come as pilgrims ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... concluded from all this that the young shrikes were out, and I longed with all my heart to stay and watch the charming process of changing from the ungainly creatures they were at that moment to the full-grown and feathered beauties they would be when they appeared on the tree; to see them getting their education, learning to follow their parents about, and finally seeking their own food, still keeping together in a family party, as I had seen ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... anything like that!" laughed Ned. "That was only Harry's crazy notion after he saw something big and ungainly careening about the enclosed yard of Shop Thirteen. Hello, there go Mary Nestor and her father!" and Ned pointed to the opposite side of the street where the girl and Mr. Nestor could be seen in the light of a ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... a mere hut, painted red, entirely dwarfed by an ungainly chimney of rough stone. The little hut was built against a huge boulder, which towered above the chimney itself, and looked as though it had stood there since the foundation of the earth. There was a rustic veranda along the front of this diminutive dwelling, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... attracting her attention. The fact that we shall be to leeward of her when she passes will be against us; for a sailor looks half a dozen times to windward for once that he glances over the lee rail. And my efforts during the last hour have convinced me of the impossibility of driving this ungainly structure to windward by merely swimming. If I only had an oar, or a paddle of some sort, I might be able to do something; but then, you see, I haven't, so it is of no use to think further of that. The wind is dropping, which is a point in our favour, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... particularly prudent, eloquent, and agreeable in conversation with people of distinction. He was also a far-travelled man, who had been long in foreign parts. Thorarin was a remarkably ugly man, principally because he had very ungainly limbs. He had great ugly hands, and his feet were still uglier. Thorarin was in Tunsberg when this event happened which has just been related, and he was known to King Olaf by their having had conversations together. Thorarin was just ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... "Tall, gaunt, ungainly, ill clad, with a homeliness of manner that was unique in itself, I confess that my heart sank within me as I remembered that this was the man chosen by a great nation to become its ruler in the gravest ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... trying vainly, With much effort, forced, ungainly, To entice the rugged door To yield up its wondrous lore, With a sudden burst of thunder All its frame is dashed asunder; The gulfy silence, lightning-fleet, Shooteth hellward at thy feet. Take thou heed lest evil terror Snare thee in a downward error, Drag thee through the narrow ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... was a very tall woman, being about the same height as her brother, thirty or thirty-three years of age, with a plain, though good-humoured looking face, over which her coarse hair was divided on the left temple. She had long ungainly limbs, and was very awkward in the use of them, and though not absolutely disagreeable in her appearance, she was so nearly so, that she would hardly have got married without the assistance of the "two small pigs, and thrifle of change," ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... Christian man, cherishing a high regard for woman and for the proprieties of life feel that he was promoting woman's interests and the cause of temperance by being introduced to a temperance meeting by Miss Susan B. Anthony, her ungainly form rigged out in bloomer costume and provoking the thoughtless to laughter and ridicule by her very motions upon the platform? Would he feel that he was honoring the women of his country by accepting as their representatives women whom they must and do despise? Will any pretend to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters' whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth flickering and feeling as ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... to steal O'er the lyre in gentle mood. From the sparkling waterfalls, From the brook that purling calls, Shall Silenus' loathsome beast Be allow'd at will to feast? Aganippe's * wave he sips With profane and spreading lips,— With ungainly feet stamps madly, Till ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... of loose earth, and a squelching of saddle-leather, as the Klopstock youth lumbered up to the rails and delivered himself of loud, cheerful greetings. Joyeuse laid his ears well back as the ungainly bay cob and his appropriately matched rider drew up beside him; his verdict was reflected and endorsed by the cold stare of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... party, perhaps thirty in number, went to the White House and were shown into the great East Room. We had been there for about ten minutes when one of the doors nearest the street was opened, and a young man entered who held the door open for the admission of a tall, ungainly man dressed in a rather dusty suit of black. My first impression was that this was some rural tourist who had blundered into the place; for, really, he seemed less at home there than any other person present, and looked about for an ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... feed in his vessels at home, had been induced by a large representations to take charge of the craft and run her in the Pedee trade, bringing rice to Charleston. On being told the craft was all ready for sea, he repaired on board, and, to his chagrin, found two black men for a crew, and a most ungainly old wench, seven shades blacker than Egyptian darkness, for a cook. This was imposition enough to arouse his feelings, for but one of the men knew any thing about a vessel; but on examining the stores, the reader may judge of his feelings, if he have any idea of supplying ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... him by his word, and James was forced to go. When he showed the photograph, Mrs. Pritchard-Wallace looked at it with a curious expression. It was the work of a country photographer, awkward and ungainly, with the head stiffly poised, and the eyes hard and fixed; the general impression was ungraceful and devoid of charm, Mrs. Wallace noticed the ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... drawn up half way to his elbows and his trousers half way to his knees. The muscles scarcely keep pace with the bones in their growth, and tend to be flabby and to lack usual tonicity. It is difficult for the youth to hold his back straight and his shoulders back; he is awkward and ungainly in his movements and becomes easily fatigued because of the condition of his muscles. But the muscles follow immediately in their development and rapidly gain volume and tonicity, filling out the arms, legs, back and shoulders with large ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... shook him off violently, and continued the race. The collision had cracked my temper, and I had a mind to give Muckle John a lesson in civility. For Muckle John it was beyond doubt; not two men in the broad earth had that ungainly bend of neck. ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... So, under his ungainly monk's habit, he continues his profession of rhetorician. He has come to Thagaste with the intention of retiring from the world and living in God; and here he is disputing, lecturing, writing more than ever. The world pursues him and occupies him even in his retreat. ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... German Michel[1] allows himself to be persuaded by his schoolmaster that he must go about in an English dress-coat, and that nothing else will do. Accordingly he has bullied his father into giving it to him; and with his awkward manners this ungainly creature presents in it a sufficiently ridiculous figure. But the dress-coat will some day be too tight for him and incommode him. It will not be very long before he feels it in trial by jury. This institution arose in the most ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... these two men a Mr. Roose wrote in concluding his paper: "We are all familiar with Johnson's huge, ungainly form, arrayed in brown suit more or less dilapidated, singed, bushy wig, black stockings, and mean old shoes. A quaint little figure, Lamb comes before our vision, in costume uncontemporary and as queer as himself, consisting ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... The horsemen received this ungainly addition to their party with polite composure, and the genteel element of the spectators remained silent too from the force of good breeding and good feeling; but the "roughs," always critically a-loose in a crowd, shouted and screamed with derisive hilarity. What ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... of the day members of this community are off fishing in deep water; but what they like best to do is to crawl up on the rocks and grunt and bellow, or go to sleep in the sun. Some of them lie half in water, their tails floating and their ungainly heads wagging. These uneasy ones are always wriggling out or plunging in. Some crawl to the tops of the rocks and lie like gunny bags stuffed with meal, or they repose on the broken surfaces like masses of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... preserve fully the esteem and regard of none. His capacity was considerable; but fitter to discourse on general maxims, than to conduct any intricate business: his intentions were just; but more adapted to the conduct of private life than to the government of kingdoms. Awkward in his person, and ungainly in his manners, he was ill qualified to command respect; partial and undiscerning in his affections, he was little fitted to acquire general love. Of a feeble temper, more than of a frail judgment; exposed to our ridicule ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... the slightest sound. They were a motley crew, armed with every conceivable sort of knife or war club, but sturdy fellows, ready and willing enough to give a good account of themselves. Watkins was forward, swallowed up in the smother of mist, but Schmitt held a place next me, a huge, ungainly figure in the dull light. So still it was I began to doubt having heard the voice at all—could it have been imagination? But no; that was impossible, for the sound had reached all of us alike. Somewhere out yonder, that boat was creeping along silently, seeking ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... southerly direction. Soon they came to a place which had been kept open by walruses as a breathing-hole. Here they got out, hid the sledge and dogs behind a hummock, and, getting ready their spears and harpoons, prepared for an encounter. After waiting some time a walrus thrust its ungainly head up through the young ice that covered the hole, and began to disport itself in elephantine, or rather ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Nothing is more distressing to a sensitive person, or more ridiculous to one gifted with refinement, than to see a lady laboring under the consciousness of a fine gown or a gentleman who is stiff, awkward and ungainly in a brand-new coat. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... cradle even, and its own life of adventure and of training. Here is proof of it. This little hut was the cradle of one of the great sons of men, a man of singular, delightful, vital genius who presently emerged upon the great stage of the nation's history, gaunt, shy, ungainly, but dominant and majestic, a natural ruler of men, himself inevitably the central figure of the great plot. No man can explain this, but every man can see how it demonstrates the vigor of democracy, where every door is open, in every hamlet and countryside, in city and ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... which caused Collot d'Herbois to find the door; he tore it open, letting in a feeble ray of light from the corridor. He stood in the doorway one moment, his slouchy, ungainly form distinctly outlined against the lighter background beyond, a look of exultant and malicious triumph, of deadly hate and cruelty distinctly imprinted on his face and with upraised hand wildly flourishing the precious ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... exaggerated and intensified until he was scarce human in his appearance. The neck was drawn out like a plucked chicken's, making the rest of him seem the more obese and unnatural by the contrast. He was clad only in his long night-dress, and his swollen ankles and ungainly feet protruded starkly from beneath it. Beside him stood a smart-looking police-inspector, who was ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... what dark, and the terrible form of the mystery loomed in the dusk, heavy and formidable. He was as big as a man, somewhat lank, and covered with coarse hair the colour of cocoanut matting. This afternoon, when the early patrons entered, they found him hanging limply by one arm, like a great ungainly bat. ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... About half-way across a tinkle of bells is heard, clear and musical, in the distance. Presently a large caravan looms out of the dusk—fifty or sixty camels and half a dozen men. The latter exchange a cheery "Good night" with my guide. Slowly the ungainly, heavily laden beasts file past us, gaunt and spectral in the twilight, the bells die away on the still wintry air, and we are again alone on the desolate plain—not a sign of life, not a sound to be heard, but the crunching of snow ...
— A Ride to India across Persia and Baluchistan • Harry De Windt
... face the worldly situation, if a little sadly, at any rate with the courage of practical energy. It was she who stood in one ungainly house after another and schemed how to make discomforts tolerable, while Scrope raged unhelpfully at landlordism and the responsibility of the church for economic disorder. It was she who at last took decisions into her hands when he was too jaded to do anything ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... When Mr. Buchanan, with a Jew broker at one elbow and a Frenchman at the other, (strange representatives of American diplomacy!) signed his name to the Ostend circular, was he not setting a writing-lesson for American youth to copy, and one which the pirate hand of Walker did copy in ungainly letters of fire and blood ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... familiarity with the exquisite beauty of line of a well-shaped bust. I might show how thorough acquaintance with the ideal nude foot would probably have much modified the foot-torturing boots and high heels, which wring the foot out of all beauty of line, and throw the body forward into an awkward and ungainly attitude. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... frank stare of your unsophisticated savage. Indeed, they had all seemed remarkably taciturn, and when they did speak, endowed with very uncanny voices. What was wrong with them? Then I recalled the eyes of Montgomery's ungainly attendant. ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... nothing whatever to do with May Fair. Except in being a Yorkshireman he was quite the opposite of Milnes. He had at that time no social or political position; he never had a vestige of Milnes's wit or variety; he was a tall, rough, ungainly figure, affecting the singular form of self-defense which the Yorkshiremen and Lancashiremen seem to hold dear — the exterior roughness assumed to cover an internal, emotional, almost sentimental nature. ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... was real and how much acting on her part, although it did seem genuine enough when she could not be looking for relief. Yet, as she stood there calmly mistress of herself while Efaw Kotee writhed beneath her scorn, I was reminded of an angler who had hooked an ungainly fish—she with intellect at one end, he at the other representing brute strength, fear, cunning; both connected by a barely visible thread that in this case was not a line, but Fate. For another moment she let him writhe, then ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... man. Though dabbling in all three elements, and indeed possessing some rudimental claims to all, the penguin is at home in none. On land it stumps; afloat it sculls; in the air it flops. As if ashamed of her failure, Nature keeps this ungainly child hidden away at the ends of the earth, in the Straits of Magellan, and on the abased ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... high spirits with comical sporting. The mules frolicked together, pitching hind quarters, rearing to box and nipping at Simon. Fully as gay was he, though his shaggy flanks were gaunt. He played at goring them, or frisked in ungainly circles. Occasionally, however, he gave signs of ill-humour, lowered his broad horns threateningly, even at Dallas, pawed up the new grown grass, and charged to and fro on the bend, his voice lifted ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... their silence was in no way conspicuous, for the whole air throbbed with the rising and falling shriek of the saws, the trampling of the falls, and the obscurely rhythmic rush of the torrent around the island base. They were presently joined by Susan, shambling on her ungainly legs, wagging her big ears, and stretching out her long, ugly, flexible, overhanging nose to sniff inquiringly at the Boy's jacket. A comparatively new member of MacPhairrson's family, she was still full of curiosity ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... was diverted from Bessie and, shouting furiously, ran toward her with the idea of saving his wheel. So it was no trick at all for the two girls, light on their feet and graceful in their movements, to avoid the shambling, ungainly, overgrown boy, who, smarting from the pain of the scratches Dolly had ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... attire, ungainly as were his movements, there was in his withdrawal a touch of dignity, even a hint of the sublime; and Molly could ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... swift and sudden, and gloom settled upon the country; for in spite of ancestry, self-education, ungainly figure, ill-fitting clothes, the soul of the man had conquered even the stubborn South, while the cold-blooded North was stricken to the heart. The noblest one of all ...
— Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days • Annie L. Burton
... starving enough to go and feed at a cat and dog or any other Chinese restaurant, my hosts at least, who had not learned that bananas are sustenance for men as well as "food for gods," were famished. As we ate "clem pie" or "dined with Duke Humphrey," two water buffaloes, dark gray ungainly forms, with little more hair than elephants, recurved horns, and muzzles like deer, watched us closely, until a Tartar drove them off. Such beasts, which stand in the water and plaster themselves ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... his eighth year, has been described as a tall, ungainly, fast-growing, long-legged lad, clad in the garb of the frontier. This consisted of a shirt of linsey-woolsey, a coarse homespun material made of linen and wool, a pair of home-made moccasins, deerskin leggings or breeches, and a hunting shirt of the same material. This costume ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... extremity. She was chilled, and sat down before the glowing hearth to warm her benumbed fingers. Presently a tall woman, in a short-sleeved frock and large deer-skin moccasins, strode into the room, and with a deep, ungainly courtesy asked, "What the lady would be thinking to take for a bit ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... the major such a queer person, and quite unlike what he had been represented, all joined in drinking his health and flattering his vanity. And when it was ten o'clock, there came divers delegations of ungainly persons, (from the custom house, and the post office, and Tammany Hall, and various other halls,) such as fighting men and vagabonds, who, being headed by such ambitious politicians as the invincible George Branders, and flanked by the too honest Emanuel Hart, presented an ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... once existed, and from near them rose the smoke. There was, however, no sign of life; and not a sound broke the awful silence of the desert, as we breasted the rise. Then a vulture flapped lazily up in front of us, and another and another and a tiger- wolf (hyena) lurched its gorged and ungainly carcass down ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... of Europe would have been changed. Maps, too, and schoolbooks, and the life-story of a small Prince. But he went on. Stronger than his young guide, he did not crawl, but bent aside the stiff and ungainly branches of the firs. He battled with the thicket, and came out victorious.. He was not so old, then, or so feeble. His arm would have been strong for the King, had not— "There ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... "such are the tutelary images of most great Italian towns. I have examined nineteen of them, and made drafts of them. If they came from the sky, our worst sculptors are our angels. But my mind is easy on that score. Ungainly statue or villainous daub fell never yet from heaven to smuggle the bread out of capable workmen's mouths. All this is Pagan, and arose thus. The Trojans had Oriental imaginations, and feigned that their Palladium, a wooden statue three cubits long, fell down from heaven. The Greeks took ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... coast, river banks, and the formation of the country in general, has the effect to diminish still more the outlines of any particular scene. Beautiful as it is, beyond all competition, the Hudson would seem still more so, were it not for these high and ungainly spars." ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
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