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More "Wiry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hand Astro suddenly grabbed for Roger's neck, but the wiry cadet dashed along the slidewalk out of reach and the big Venusian rumbled after him. ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... dark or light in spots. Now and again a trumpet rang out its distant note of defiance; now and again some portion of the line seemed to manoeuvre or change front, as if to tempt attack, while from time to time a flurry of horsemen—dark-skinned riders, bending low upon the necks of wiry little steeds and urging them with shrill, barbarous cries—swept almost up to the ditch, and brandished their darts, making obscene gestures and shouting words that brought the blood to the faces of the garrison, though they understood not ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... the heavy night dews still lie glittering on the grass, when the cobwebs seem strung with pearls, and faint lines of soft fleecy mist lie in the hollows by the watercourses; long ere the hot, fiery sun has left his crimson bed behind the cold grey horizon, we are out on our favourite horse, the wiry, long-limbed syce or groom trotting along behind us. The mehter or dog-keeper is also in attendance with a couple of greyhounds in leash, and a motley pack of wicked little terriers frisking and ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... been so unlucky as to come across that old rip, Josepha would still be mine; for I, you know, should never have placed her on the stage. She would have lived obscure, well conducted, and mine. Oh! if you could but have seen her eight years ago, slight and wiry, with the golden skin of an Andalusian, as they say, black hair as shiny as satin, an eye that flashed lightning under long brown lashes, the style of a duchess in every movement, the modesty of a dependent, decent grace, and the pretty ways of a wild fawn. And by that Hulot's doing ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... been home, about three weeks, when a dashing young Englishman took the Capital by storm. One of those tall, lean, wiry-looking fellows with clothes so well-fitting that a pocket-full of bank-notes would have utterly destroyed the desired effect. He wore very long and very pointed shoes, and a peculiar little hat, made of hideous tweed, with flaps tied over the low crown with fluttering ribbons. He carried ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... with a long cadaverous face, very strongly pronounced features and small sinister eyes, over which the level brows almost met across the sharp bridge of nose. His close black garb buttoned to the chin, outlined his wiry angular limbs with an almost painful distinctness, and the lean right hand which he placed across his breast as he bowed profoundly to the King, looked more like the shrunken hand of a corpse than that of a living man. The ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... raked him with keen eyes that missed not a detail. He was certain that he had never seen the man before, yet he knew at once that the trim, wiry figure, so clean of build and so gallant of bearing, could belong only to Wolf Leroy, the most ruthless outlaw of the Southwest. It was written in his jaunty insolence, in the flashing eyes. He was a handsome fellow, white-toothed, black-haired, lithely ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... fair-haired, grey-eyed, stern-faced, with thin nostrils, that quivered like those of a well-bred horse, narrow-flanked, broad-chested, though somewhat slight of limb and body, for he was but young, and had scarcely come to a man's weight, but lithe and wiry as a tiger. Piet taller and more massive, for he had the age of him by five years, with round Kaffir eyes, black and cruel, coarse black hair that grew low upon his brow, full red lips, the lower drooping so that the large white teeth and a line of gums could be seen ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... neither tall nor short, five feet eight and a half to be exact, with the well-knit frame and springy step of a young man who had been an athlete from his boyhood. He was slim, but wiry, and carried his head with a half-defiant backward slant which told of pluck and breed. His face was tanned brown, in spite of his City hours, but his hair and slight moustache were flaxen, and his ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast, He was something like a racehorse undersized, With a touch of Timor pony — three parts thoroughbred at least — And such as are by mountain horsemen prized. He was hard and tough and wiry — just the sort that won't say die — There was courage in his quick impatient tread; And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye, And the proud and ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... small stature he was, and thinly built, but evidently one who could endure a great deal before parting with life. He had all the subtle wiry look of the carnivora, as well as their disposition. The eyes, as already observed, obliqued strongly downwards. The balls were not globe-shaped, but rather obtuse cones, of which the pupil was the apex. Both ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... mysterious BACON to explore Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore; With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine 240 The crystal'd nitre, and the sulphurous mine; Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain, And close an airy ocean in a grain.— Pent in dark chambers of cylindric brass Slumbers in grim repose the sooty mass; 245 Lit by the brilliant spark, from grain to grain Runs the quick fire ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... bought for him a little, wiry bay cayuse, and both he and Stella had taught him to ride, and Dick could now throw a rope with reasonable ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... a man about thirty years of age, spare built, but wiry as an Indian. He had black hair and eyes; he was not educated, but was naturally a bright man; was brave as a lion; could ride like a Comanche; was a splendid shot, and had been West; took up a gold ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... youth, handsome, dark, smiling, offered to bet with him on the result of the races. Collie declined, but gained his point. He learned the Mexican's choice for first place, a lean, wiry buckskin with a goat head and a wicked eye, but with wonderful flanks and withers. Collie meditated. As a result he placed something like fifty dollars in bets with various ranchers, naming the Mexican horse for first place. Word went round ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... looked at him. Who can he be? Tall, broad-shouldered, wiry; his eyes restless, so that she could not see them rightly; besides, she was standing quite close to him, just where he had suddenly appeared before her with his dog and ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Maud, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was kneeling beside the tub scrubbing a little wiry-haired yellow puppy, who ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... was a grand, rolling upland of a country that they had fled to; cool, summer weather all the year round, and no mosquitoes. Hospitable smoke curled from a dozen chimneys; shepherds galloped up on wiry horses and away again; scarlet passion-vines poured over roofs and verandas like cataracts of glory; and there was incessant laughter and chatter of children ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... half-breed, ready to shoot in case a weapon was drawn. But McFann merely made a headlong dive for Lowell's legs, and there was a rough-and-tumble fight about the camp-fire which was settled only when the agent managed to get a lock on his wiry opponent which pinned McFann's back to ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... and Bob Temple were chums, a little under 18 years of age each. It was their bitterest regret that they had been too young to take any part in the World War some years before. Frank was dark, curly-haired, of medium height and slim, but strong and wiry. Bob was fair and sleepy-eyed, a fraction under six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. A third chum and the leader of the trio was Jack Hampton, 19 years of age. He had gone to New Mexico several months before with ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... wiry, active man, by name Jackson, a native, colonially convicted, very clever among horses, a capital light-weight boxer, and in running superb, a pupil and PROTEGE of the immortal "flying pieman," (May ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols. It was our boys—thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs, and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than any one else in ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noontide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single pair ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... I have the water boiling back there, and was just about to make some coffee. You will drink a cup with me. And how is la belle dame? Always handsome! always healthy! always contented!" She took Edna's hand between her strong wiry fingers, holding it loosely without warmth, and executing a sort of double theme upon the back ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... thicket, and the whole world, and you with it, seems breaking into blossom,—why, then you know what light is and can do. The very wind there by day is bright, now faint, now stinging, and makes a low, wiry music through the loose sprays, as if they were tense harp-strings. Nothing startles; all is like a grand composition utterly wrought out. What a blessing it is that the blacks have been imported there,—their swarthiness is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... and had even written to his widowed mother, who lived alone in a Dorsetshire village, asking her advice about the girl. Gladys was disturbed in her solitude by Miss Peck, who came to the door in rather an excited and officious manner. She was a little, wiry spinster, past middle life, eccentric, but kind-hearted. She had bestowed a great deal of gratuitous and genuine kindness on her lodgers, though knowing very well that she would not likely get any return but gratitude for it; but times were hard with her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... we know where you have been," said a small fellow, who wore a yellow chevron on his arm. He had a thin moustache and a sharp nose, and rode a wiry, dull sorrel horse. "You may just as well tell us all about it. We know you've been to see 'em, and we are going to make you ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... was introduced to the mail-carrier who was to be his guide. He was a thin, wiry man, named Givens. In age, Calhoun put him down at about forty. The few days during which Calhoun was with Givens gave him a very high opinion of the guide's bravery and sagacity. Givens related many of his hairbreadth escapes during their journey, and seemed to treat them as ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... of the wounds at the same time, over half an hour elapsing between the first and the last. Up to receiving the last wound he had declined to leave the firing-line, but by that time he had lost so much blood that he had to be sent to the rear. The man's wiry toughness was as notable as ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... A small, wiry, middle-aged man, with an honest, lantern-jawed face, entered the living room bearing a breakfast tray. After one glance, keeping his eyes cast ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Mr. Sheep," said Richard, handing her half a dozen long black wiry hairs. "And he's old and cross and has been known to butt people. I don't think he'd hurt you, ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... Warrick farm, five er six mild, anyhow, from wher' the mill stood. Great stout fellers, they was; and little Jake, the father of 'em, wasn't no man at all—not much bigger'n you, I rickon. Le' me see, now:—Ther was Tomps Burk, Wade Elwood, and Joe and Ben Carter, and Wesley Morris, John Coke—wiry little cuss, he was, afore he got his leg sawed off—and Ezry, and—Well, I don't jist mind all the boys—'s a long time ago, and I never was much of a hand far names.—Now, some folks'll hear a name and never fergit ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... this to the noble lords, who had for years scented in Caesar's existence and prosperity destruction to their own oligarchic rule of almost the known world. But when Cato, the most violent anti-Caesarian of them all, a sharp, wiry man with angular features, and keen black ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... interesting camp in more ways than one. The vaqueiros with their wives and families were housed on the two sides of the field in which our tents were pitched. On one side was a big, whitewashed, tile-roofed house in which the foreman dwelt—an olive- skinned, slightly built, wiry man, with an olive-skinned wife and eight as pretty, fair-haired children as one could wish to see. He usually went barefoot, and his manners were not merely good but distinguished. Corrals and outbuildings were ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... absurdities of inconvenience is the greatest I ever met with. It is scarcely large enough for a small sheep to enter. Every person entering a garden must not only stoop but crawl through the gate. It is fortunate there are no lusty people here, all being bony and wiry like the Arabs. Not being dependant on rain, the gardens only suffer from the locusts, and now and then a blighting wind. In the Spring of this year these insect marauders passed over the oasis and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... his sitting-room with the effect of a small explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry little figure. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... uniform was the only dark spot at the board, but his big onyx eyes made up for it. He was fraternising effusively with the Captain of the Lushkar team, who was wondering how many of Dirkovitch's Cossacks his own dark wiry down-country-men could account for in a fair charge. But one does not speak of these ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... of the firm consisted in the collection of house-rents, frequently entailing visits from tenants and questions of repairs. A certain Mr. Smith, a wiry little grey-headed man, with a keen face and a decisive manner, looked after this branch; and the gusto with which he did it was one of Henry's earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... islands scattered over the tropical ocean, especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no inhabitants but insects and reptiles—lizards, spiders, snakes,—with vast tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and the slime of the ocean. If there ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... and died, and no wonder, since the soil was a hard white clay resembling china clay. But although trees refused to grow there it was always clothed in a vegetation of its own; all the hardiest weeds were there, and covered the entire barren area to the depth of a man's knees. These weeds had thin wiry stalks and small sickly leaves and flowers, and would die each summer long before their time. This barren piece of ground had a great attraction for me as a small boy, and I visited it daily and would roam about it among the miserable half-dead weeds ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... entirely back there at the creek crossing, and if there weren't Indians all round us, nothing would have fetched them along. There goes Davies, coddling 'em again, damn it! That man would spoil any troop——Mr. Davies!" he called, and a gaunt, wiry fellow, with a stiff beard sprouting on his thin, haggard face, turned away from a bedraggled trooper who had thrown himself in utter abandonment among the dripping sage brush at the side of the trail, and came to his ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... bank, just a little way below the great falls of Roaring River. Here he abandoned the old road that was so seldom traveled since lumbering operations had been stopped in that district, owing to the removal of available pine and spruce. At a word from him the dogs sat down in their traces, their wiry coats giving out a thin vapor, and he went down the path to the log building. The door was closed and he had already noted that no film of smoke came from the stove-pipe. While it was evident that Ennis was not at home Stefan knocked ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... like the good looks of others. He looked well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is rare in another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built, square in the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear weather-beaten complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the self-effacing manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born, machine-trained, perfectly ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... aspect. His pants were stuffed in the legs of his long boots, and he wore a kind of hunting frock, which reached nearly to his knees. He was lean and lank, but, annealed in the hardships of backwoods life, he was wiry and sinewy. He was about fifty years old, though his gray hair and beard alone appeared to betray his age. He was from the south; a fine specimen of the real Kentucky hunter—"half horse and ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... morning early Geoffrey proceeded with the two men who had been selected to accompany him to his usual look-out. Both were active, wiry men, and entered fully into the spirit of the undertaking when Geoffrey explained its nature to them. They looked out of the dormer-window at the sharp roof slanting away in front of them and up ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... parents, he had come over to the States, and had become a naturalised citizen, such characters being known in that region as Conches. Hot sand and sea air had burned his countenance to a mahogany tint. He was small and wiry. His costume consisted of a broad-brimmed hat, a coarse blue cloth jacket worn above a jersey, while his nether man was clothed in leather gaiters reaching to the thighs, and strong boots, so that he was prepared for service either afloat or ashore. He carried a rusty rifle, with a powder-horn ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... to the north, sometimes to the south, in the hopes of discovering the smallest puddle. At last we had to halt to rest the weary cattle, though we could find no water, and without it they showed no inclination to crop the hard, wiry grass. We therefore remained but a short time, and once more pushed forward. As evening approached we began to feel very anxious, for without water the oxen ould scarcely perform their next day's journey. The sun, ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... that Tom saw him approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 1865, he writes: "Though the intellectual man had greatly grown meantime, few persons would recognize the hearty, blithesome, genial, and wiry Abraham Lincoln of earlier days in the sixteenth President of the United States, with his stooping figure, dull eyes, careworn face, and languid frame. The old clear laugh never came back; the even temper was sometimes disturbed; and his natural charity for all was often ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... loved dogs dearly. In his novels and poetical works his knowledge of them and his regard often appear. He loved them, from the stately deerhound to the wiry terrier. He was quite up to the ways of their education. Dandie Dinmont, in "Guy Mannering," speaking of his terriers, says, "I had them a' regularly entered, first wi' rottens, then wi' stots and weasels, and then wi' the tods and brocks, and now they fear naething that ever comes wi' a hairy ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces when the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,—"the white man's foot," as the Indians called it,—the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass" and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;—all these plants, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his outstanding ears, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... dwellings he became a thing[gy] Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome, Drooped as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing, To whom the boundless air alone were home: Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome, As eagerly the barred-up bird will beat His breast and beak against his wiry dome Till the blood tinge his plumage—so the heat Of his impeded Soul would through his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... his Cyclops-like limbs sprawling down upon the floor. Scarred and brutish, indeed, was his face, one ear missing, the other beaten flat by boxing gloves; but Democrates had a distinct feeling that under his battered visage and wiry black hair lurked greater penetration of human motive and more ability to play therewith than the chance observer might allow. The Athenian deliberately ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and obviously savage temper. The latter—well, it is not easy to say what were his chief characteristics, so firmly did he control the features of a fine countenance in which the tiger-like blue eyes alone seemed untamable. He was not much above the middle height; but his compact frame was wiry and ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the corpse of a thin-faced tall wiry man, somewhat foxy of aspect, lying on a ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... in some wonder. He was a short, wiry man, and arrayed in a close-fitting costume resembling that of the circus athlete ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... of the first houses built in the foothills. My great-grandfather was really the first settler in these parts and originally located his cabin where the mill now stands. 'Little Bill Thompson,' he was called, for he was a small, wiry man—very different from grandfather, who in his prime was a powerful man of over six feet. Little Bill Hill and Little Bill Creek were named after this pioneer great-grandsire, who was quite successful raising flocks ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... her little play box, and returned with the knife. It was almost as large as the Chintz Imp, but he possessed so much wiry strength in his thin arms and backbone that he was able to clamber up the chimney ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... eager, dark man, with too much "way." He dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet-black beads for eyes, a scrubby little black chin, wiry black hair striking out from his head in prongs like hair-pins, and a complexion that was very dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of both. He had dirty hands, and dirty, broken nails, and looked as if he had been ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... them is an old woman I took across in my felucca to pleasure my girl's brother—she tended him once when he chopped through his foot near her hut just on the edge of the hills. Seventy years, or nearly, and tough and wiry yet, and can help neatly with a boat. And money laid by, too, but is she idle? Never. She spins her hemp and weaves osiers into baskets and changes them for goats' hams. That with polenta keeps her all winter—and well, too. She is very close. The money, no one ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby—as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to the Refinery, the visitors were committed to a little wiry old man, called Jimmy, who first showed them a grewsome monster, own cousin to him who threw oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer. This one was called an air-pump, and, with his attendant steam-engine, inhabited a house by himself. His ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... feudalism, carry a charm with them. They are symbolic, definitive; they bestow a personality on the wearer, which satisfies the mind, by enabling it instantly to classify him, to connect him with a thousand stories and associations; and to my young mind, the wiry, shrewd, honest, grim old serving-man seemed the incarnation of all the wonders of Newmarket, and the hunting-kennel, and the steeple-chase, of which I had read, with alternate admiration and contempt, in the newspapers. He ushered me in with a good breeding which surprised me;—without ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... noticed the sameness of the faces about him. A short wiry man sprang at him, and with a broken sword, stabbed him in the left shoulder. Alexis caught him by the throat with his right hand, and the man gave a choking screech as he lifted him clear off ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true, but the cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet this was Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who knew every goat-trail ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... several times on a wiry, jerking little fellow, whom he recognized as Jean La Marche, the fiddler, a censitaire of the manor of Tilly. He was a well-known character, and had drawn a large circle of the crowd ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... few or many muscles, if moderate care and patience be exercised on the part of the examiner. This form of chorea is almost always a disease of childhood. So-called post-hemiplegic chorea is, in the opinion of both Hammond and Gray, simply athetosis. The silly, dancing, posturing, wiry movements, and the facial distortion observed in Huntington's chorea would hardly be mistaken by a careful observer for athetosis. The two diseases, however, are somewhat alike. Paralysis agitans (shaking ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... corner of the room a large evergreen tree, sparkling with candles and tinsel stars, was hung with bags of pink and white tarletan and festoons of puffy popcorn. Near it sat an old man playing the violin; and his whole wiry self seemed to quiver with joy to the tune of his merry "Money Musk." In the center of the room two gray-haired men were dancing an old-time jig, bobbing, bowing, and twisting about in a gleeful attempt to outdo each other. Watching them were three old women and another old man, eating ice ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... tall and wiry, and 'peared like a young man what had parstured 'mongst wild oats. He seemed cut out for a gintleman, but run to seed too quick and turned out nigh kin to a dead beat. One-half of him was hanssum, 'minded me ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... at the wiry, well-knit, upright figure, and at the fresh, elderly, but virile face, with its sombre eyes and its snowy hair, thought once again of the ancient saw which she had quoted to herself the night before, only to dismiss it finally from her mind. This man was no fool, nor ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... ideas of discipline are based on cast iron rules, espies the laggard and administers a sharp rebuke. A squad of marines dash from the "barracks" below and line up at the secondary battery guns on the forecastle. Some of the marines are hatless and coatless, and one wiry little private shambles along on one foot. He stumbles against a hatch-coaming and kicks his shoe ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... numerous atajos, in charge of their arrieros. We observe the mules, small, smooth, light-limbed, and vicious. We glance at the heavy alparejas and bright worsted apishamores. We notice the tight wiry mustangs, ridden by the arrieros; the high-peaked saddles and hair bridles; the swarth faces and pointed beards of the riders; the huge spurs that tinkle at every step; the exclamations, "Hola, mula! malraya! vaya!" We notice all these, and they tell us we are journeying ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... forty-six years of age, tall, lean, wiry, had been a farmer all his life. His wife had died three years before, and a year later, he had lost his farm through an imperfect title. Understanding machinery and being a fair carpenter, he then came to the city, with $200 in his pocket, joined the Carpenter's Union, and tried to make a living ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... overtook a man who was reading as he walked, a second book being held under his arm. It was a young workman of three- or four-and-twenty, tall, of wiry frame, square-shouldered, upright. Grail grasped his shoulder ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... to hold up for public acceptance and guidance. Without doubt, the most thoroughly ludicrous scene I ever witnessed was furnished by a 'woman's rights' meeting,' which I looked in upon one night in New York, as I returned from Europe. The speaker was a raw- boned, wiry, angular, short-haired, lemon-visaged female of very certain age; with a hand like a bronze gauntlet, and a voice as distracting as the shrill squeak of a cracked cornet-a-piston. Over the wrongs and grievances of her ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... same plan, formed of two leaves, stiff and strong, soldered at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... rode with them over the wild marshes of Solway moss to the Bridge of Gretna, where they formed into two lines, and between them Patsy passed into England. Patsy looked out and kissed her hand to them. They were all sitting still on their wiry little beasts except Stair, who had dismounted, and stood uncovered till the carriage, with its two flanking riders, had passed into the distance. Stair got blown a kiss all to himself, but if he saw it he took no notice, and so was left standing pensive ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... trench life with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf, send out a clean, fair, ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... mystic chamber, which seemed a fitting laboratory for a necromancer, when I was startled at beholding a human countenance staring at me from a dusky corner. It was that of a small, shrivelled old man with thin cheeks, bright eyes, and gray, wiry, projecting eyebrows. I at first doubted whether it were not a mummy curiously preserved, but it moved, and I saw that it was alive. It was another of these black-cloaked old men, and, as I regarded his quaint physiognomy, his obsolete garb, and the hideous and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... apparently unarmed; his arm was lean but wiry, and his hands dry, but of an aristocratic whiteness and delicacy, and he leaned on the shoulder of an officer, who, with his hand on his sword, had watched the scenes in the Buytenhof with eager curiosity, very natural in a military man, ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Justice Destourbet, having strong, wiry limbs, ascended cheerily the steep mountain-path. His tall, spare figure, always in advance of his companion, was visible through the tender green of the young oaks, clothed in a brown coat, a black cravat, and a very high hat, which the justice, who loved correctness ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bone-white arms, along with waving, ribbonlike appendages less easy to define. The thing was reared half up along the hall door, inspecting its surface with these members; then suddenly it flung itself around and flashed over to the outer lock door. Three arms shot out; wiry fingers caught the three spin-locks simultaneously, began to ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... locality, has long been celebrated for its greyhounds, which are known to be large and wiry-coated. They are probably types of the early Celtic greyhounds, which, yielding to the influences of a colder climate than that they came from, became coated with a thick and wiry hair. In Ireland, as being milder in its climate, the frame ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... reappeared, mounted on a fine, wiry pony, and leading on either side a tough little animal, saddled and bridled and ready ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... kindly, and who had such bright, deep, quiet brown eyes. Margaret, standing in the doorway, scrutinised the three, and felt a sinking at the heart. Basil Montfort was a tall boy for his age, slender and wiry, with tow-coloured hair that stood straight on end, thin lips that curled up at the corners with a suggestion of malice, and piercing gray eyes, which he had a trick of screwing up till they were ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... with the swell mob. Sergeant Mith, a smooth-faced man with a fresh bright complexion, and a strange air of simplicity, is a dab at housebreakers. Sergeant Fendall, a light- haired, well-spoken, polite person, is a prodigious hand at pursuing private inquiries of a delicate nature. Straw, a little wiry Sergeant of meek demeanour and strong sense, would knock at a door and ask a series of questions in any mild character you choose to prescribe to him, from a charity-boy upwards, and seem as innocent as an infant. They are, one and all, respectable-looking ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... hear, although she was clutching her nephew's arm hard, and the veins in her thin temples and her throat were swelling purple. When he had entered she had sprung at him. "Did you hear about it? I want to know if you knew about it," said she, grasping his arm with her wiry fingers, as if she were trying to ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a few moments, the red-headed man, a wiry little fellow, went forward till he came to where an old pine had recently fallen across the track. There he kicked off his snow-shoes, picked them up, ran along the trunk, jumped into the snow from among the branches, put on his snow-shoes, and started northwestward. His ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... thing off, his fingers closing on wiry fur as he caught and squeezed. The thing went limp, and suddenly melted in his hands. He heard it splash as it struck the damp ground at ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... nights without water. Started at 7 o'clock, same course, 315 degrees, through scrub and a light sandy soil. At four miles got to the rise, which is a scrubby sand-hill. From this I can see nothing, the scrub being so thick; it is of a nasty, tough, wiry description, and has torn our hands and saddle-bags to pieces. I got up a tree to look over the top of this scrub, which is about twelve feet high, and I could see our course for a long distance; it appears to be the same terrible scrub, with no sign of any creeks. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... very characteristic nose—it was a combative nose, and a decided pug. So was the nose on the window-pane. Plunger's hair, too, was peculiar to Plunger. It was wiry, stubborn hair, with a tuft in front which resembled the comb of a turkey-cock. The same peculiarity was seen in the head on the window. And Plunger's eyebrows had a way of mounting to his head, as though they were anxious to get on terms of friendship with ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... she lives still,—scarce older to appearance than twenty years before,—prim, wiry, active,—proof against all ailments, it would seem. It is hard to conceive of her as yielding to the great conqueror. If the tongue and an inflexibility of temper were the weapons, she would whip Death from her chamber at the last. It seems like amiability almost to hear such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see, 120 As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry grass; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... strong; he was wiry. He was never sick, was always good-natured, never a bully, always a friend of the weak, the small and the unprotected. He must have been a funny-looking boy. His skin was sallow, and his hair was ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was history in his face—distinct chapters of it; his brow was not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in his forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past troubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had been brought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that he might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin, they had resulted from those months of despondency when all ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... nature, he would certainly have found himself going round the house a second time. He seemed so anxious to be asked questions, too, that James felt he must be on his guard. He began to suffer from his exertions, for, though wiry enough for a man of his long build, he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... steps toward her flew a figure which, as Patty afterward described it, seemed like a wild Indian! A slight, wiry figure, rather tall and very awkward, and possessed of a nervous force that expressed itself ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... way to get home. Each of the passengers, I among the number, had a good Winchester rifle, with plenty of ammunition. The coach was a crude rattle-trap, noisy and rough, but strong and well adapted to the journey. It was drawn by four horses of the country, small but wiry. We had long reaches between changes. The stations for meals had means of defense, and the food set before us was substantial, mainly buffalo beef, chickens and bread. A good appetite (always a sure thing on the plains) was the best sauce ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the knock at the door a singular young man stood at the threshold. He was short, wiry, and very dark. His nose was long and complacently tilted at the end. His eyes were small and very black. His mouth was a wide, uncertain slit. In his hand he carried a light cane and a silk hat of the flat-brimmed French type. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... come, and the grass, which grew scarcely ankle-deep on the great levels, was once more white and dry, but in the hollows that had held the melting snow it stood waist-high, scented with peppermint, harsh and wiry, and Winston had set out with every man he had to harvest it. Already a line of loaded wagons crawled slowly across the prairie, and men and horses moved half-seen amid the dust that whirled about another sloo. Out of ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... A slim, wiry youth in high-heeled boots came out of the house with Brad Charlton just as the buggy stopped at the porch of the horse ranch. He ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... and the ground at the edge of the precipice had given way with him; it showed a recent founder of a few inches. Then he clutched at a branch of broom as he fell; but it slipped through his fingers, cutting them; for there was blood on the wiry stem. I knelt by the side of the cliff and craned my head over. I scarcely dared to look. In spite of the birds, my heart ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... palm in his own two hands and bent over it. He was not weeping and he was not talking, but he stood with his head lowered until only the wiry black hair was visible, and in his throat rose guttural and incoherent ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed upon ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... genuine liking. There was a quality very winning in the youthful East-sider and now that the chance for betterment had come his way Steve felt sure that the boy would make good. There was a lot of pluck and grit in that wiry little frame; a lot of honesty too, Stephen reflected, with a blush. He was not at all sure but that in the matter of fearlessness and moral courage the New York lad had the lead of him. Certainly he was not one who shrank from ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... said a thin, wiry, iron-jawed man, who wore a huge sombrero and leather breeches, "I'm Bill Buckhorn, o' 'Rapahoe, an' thet's a place whar we don't 'low no critter like this yere Black Harry ter go waltzin' round more then sixteen brief second by ther clock. We ketches ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... rather an odd article to be used on such a night. Then Jim came face to face with the man who carried the lantern, and saw who he was—Deacon Amos Whittle. To Jim's mind, the man resembled a fox, skulking along the road, although Deacon Amos Whittle was not predatory. He was a small, thin, wiry man with a queer swirl of ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... year, a jade of a charming creature must needs send me out for a piece of ice to put in her wine. It was evening and a hard frost. I shall never forget the cold, cutting, dreary, dead look of every thing out of doors, with a wind through the wiry trees, and the snow on the ground, contrasted with the sudden return to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Superintendent—who made a perfect chaperon—and herself. It had seemed, somehow, almost providential that they should be thrown together. Yes, Rose-Marie remembered how she had been attracted to Dr. Blanchard at the very first—how she had found nothing wanting in his wiry strength, his broad shoulders, his ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... plain people. Yet in the end, it was the plain people, those who neither labored with their hands nor lived by the labor of others—it was the plain people who vanquished him. Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man, hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved others. He had one fetish, power. And one pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters. Howard would be an iron ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the word as though he had been a member of Monsieur Crapeau's class in French elementary sounds, and with a start which seemed to shake every fibre in his wiry frame. ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... went dead over the Piazza, to the obelisks, I so close on his traces that I could not have missed him if I had chosen for murder. It was like coursing a hare, for hare-like in his pains, he began to scream—not very loudly; a wretched, wrung and wiry appeal, like some bad woman's, was all he could muster. Between the obelisks he fell on his knees, and when I reached him was praying, "Sancta Mater! Diva Mater! Ab hostium incidiis libera me!" I saw a head at a window, a head in a night-cap—a man's. Over it peeped another—a woman's. But I knew ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... a tall, thin boy of fifteen, wiry and strong, and with a face as smooth and pink-and-white as a girl's. That he was so girlish looking was a sore subject with the boy, and whenever any unwise boy called him "Girly" instead of "Curly" it started ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her paternally. His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a good-night kiss. She closed the door, and went away from it to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of this scarce commodity upon me in their hospitality, and kept up a bonfire all night. They mounted their wiry ponies and performed feats of horsemanship, in one of which all the animals threw themselves on their hind legs in a circle when a man in the centre clapped his hands; and they crowded my tent to see my sketches, and were not satisfied till I executed some daubs ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... well; he was still a wiry athletic man, and his step as elastic and springy as ever. The constant exercise he had been in the habit of taking had preserved his health and condition, and these in their turn had enabled him to maintain his cheerfulness and humour. The lines in his ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... tall, thin man, his hair gray, shading a majestic forehead, and but slightly wrinkled with the summers of over sixty years; his eyes were partly closed, but when preaching they glowed with animation, and were brightened by the tears that dimmed them; his long, wiry fingers were interlocked and raised towards his breast in the attitude of deep contemplation. The rough soutane and leather belt, the beads and missionary cross partly hid in his breast, declared him to be a follower of St. Ignatius. In the hallowed austerity of his whole appearance, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... tossing the pebbles, recumbent on one elbow. His long sinewy legs were incased in slick jean trousers of stovepipe lines and stiffness. He wore no coat. A faded blue shirt covered his barrel of a body, and his slouch hat was off, exposing long, light, wiry hair and a freckled neck. His lean jaws were covered by a two weeks' growth of beard. About him drooped hazels and alders. From one end to the other Ripley Creek was beautiful; there was no lovelier ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... was a very heavily built man, with a bullet-shaped head, and a square resolute jaw, partially cloaked by a short sparse beard of coarse wiry hair. His voice and his laugh were both loud and boisterous, and he usually affected an air of open, noisy good-fellowship, which was but little in keeping with his character. When he saw Imam Bakar approaching him, with the slow and solemn tread of one who believes himself to ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for the success of their hopes. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times—who had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of the feudal spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... were mounted on swift, wiry horses. Their long hunting shirts were girded with bead-worked belts. Some wore caps made of mink or of coonskins, with the tails hanging down behind; others had soft hats, in each of which was fastened either a sprig of ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... halting in the utmost anxiety, was able to see as it drove past the stile (near which he now stood) that it contained only the servant and not Eldred; further, he made out that Eldred was following on foot. From behind the tall hedge by the stile leading into the road he watched the thin wiry figure pass quickly by with the parcel beneath its arm, and feeling in its pockets. Just as he passed the stile something fell out of a pocket upon the grass, but with so little sound that Eldred was not conscious ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... general, born at Cambrai, "a wiry, elastic, unwearied man ... creature," as he boasted in his old age, "of God and his own sword ... on the whole, one of Heaven's Swiss"; took when already grey to the Revolution and fought on its behalf; gained the battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; conquered Belgium, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shearing after he was an old man; he drove the "rig" of say eighteen feet from side to side, and never lifted his hand till he had a sheaf. He used a long sickle, and drew the corn to him. I cannot describe his method properly. He was a tall, thin, wiry man, with very long arms. My father used to tell how my grandfather sent two men and two women to give George Bruce a day's shearing, and how George came with a little girl (who did little or nothing but make bands for her master), and how ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... that two uncommonly strong old squaws had him by the hair, three half-grown boys were clinging to his legs, and a powerful warrior laid hold of his right shoulder. He deemed it wisest in such a position to yield as quickly and gracefully as he could, in the hope that the two wiry old women would be detached speedily from his hair. This object was achieved as soon as the Sioux saw that he did not resist, and the vigilant Pine Tree stood before him, watching with an expression that Dick feared ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... morning, after a long night march, they had sought such shade as the burning rocks might afford, scooping up the tepid water from the natural tanks at the bottom of the canon and thanking Providence it was not alkali. The lieutenant commanding, a tall, wiry, keen-faced young fellow, had made the rounds of his camp at sunset, carefully picking up and scrutinizing the feet of his horses and sending the farrier to tack on here and there a starting shoe. Gaunt and sunburned were his short-coupled California ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and curly wigs, as like as two puppy dogs of the same breed. They were only known apart by their intimate friends, and were always together, romping, laughing, snarling, squabbling, huffing and helping each other against the world. Each of them owned a wiry terrier, and in their relations to each other the two dogs (who were marvellously alike) closely followed ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gave no symptoms of joy at this warm greeting; but, screwing his wiry frame out of the captain's caresses, his eye flashed like a spark of fire quickly up and down and all around the apartment, as if making a mental inventory of the furniture, and not omitting his tall companion, from the crown of his head to the toes of his straw slippers, when he quietly ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... they would follow him to the hills. They were as keen on the trail as Yaquis and as relentless as wolves. Their horses, raw-hide tough, could stand a forced ride that would kill an ordinary horse. And Ramon's wiry little cayuse, though willing to go on until he dropped, could not last ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... when you broiled it yourself on a forked stick Frontispiece Laura took the new cousin up to her room 26 Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade. 140 "I'm getting dinner all by ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... His wiry figure disappeared through the door a moment later, and Gilbert was alone. He asked himself whether the Queen had meant to insult him, and he could not believe it. But presently, as he remembered all that had happened, it ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... ploughed up where we had fought. The ground was also dyed with blood for several yards round, and where it had fallen the grass was withered up to the roots, as if scorched with fire. We also picked up a cluster of hairs—long, wiry, crooked hairs, barbed at the ends like fish-hooks; also three or four scales like fish-scales, only rougher, and as large as doubloons. The spot where the fight took place is now called La Canada del Diablo, and I have heard that since ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson
... cried loudly. And before he could say "Jack Robinson" a tuft of the wiry stuff covered his eyebrow. "Keep your face still!" And, to his horror, the gum was daubed from the borders of the beard, halfway up to his eyes, and little prickly ends of hair were held in Peggy's palm and pressed against his cheeks until they were ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... to have come from bent grass, "a stiff, wiry growth, little known in America." John Bent, the first of the name in America, was born in Penton-Grafton, England, in November, 1596. He came to America in his forty-second year, and settled in Sudbury, ...
— The Chignecto Isthmus And Its First Settlers • Howard Trueman
... one toil at the great task with this hurry and tumult of birds just outside the open window? I hear the Thrush, and the Blackbird, that romantic liar; then the delicate cadence, the wiry descending scale of the Willow-wren, or the Blackcap's stave of mellow music. All these are familiar—but what is that unknown voice, that thrilling note? I hurry out; the voice flees and I follow; and when I return and sit down again to my task, the Yellowhammer trills ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... nervous, and wiry—have their histories also. But how rarely we see squirrels in winter! The naturalists say they are mostly torpid; yet evidently that little pocket-faced depredator, the chipmunk, was not carrying buckwheat for so many days to his hole for nothing: was he anticipating ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... English language. U or oo as in you or do is naturally the lowest in color. Sing E with the freedom of action as suggested, and think it high in the face. Make no effort to influence the form. The form of E is naturally very small. E will be found in this way to be free and bright, not hard and wiry. Sing oo in the same way. The form of oo is also very small. Oo should have a flute-like sound. It will be found that in E high resonance predominates. In oo low color. In studying the vowels the aim should be to equalize them by placing, reinforcing, ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... hail a boy swung down the loft ladder. He was wiry thin, with a thick mop of sun-bleached hair and a flashing grin. At the sight of ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... man who would kill you wantonly, but to one who would not scruple to kill you for a purpose, and who would do the job quickly and neatly, and not be found out. Was he physically strong? Though he looked very wiry, he was little and narrow, like his eyes. He could not overpower me by force, I thought (and instinctively I squared my shoulders against the cushions, that he might realise the impossibility of overpowering me), but I ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noontide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... hoping he might see Tom Walker again, in which case he meant to interview him. Nor was he disappointed, for sauntering in the same direction and chewing gum, with his cap on the back of his head and his hands in his pockets, was a tall, wiry fellow, whom Jack instantly spotted as Tom Walker, the bully, who was to ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... Burris Farm, we passed our outlying pickets—Irregular Riflemen from the Scoharie and Sacandaga, tall, lean, wiry men, whose leaf-brown rifle-dress so perfectly blended with the tree-trunks that we were aware of them only when they halted us. And, Lord! To see them scowl at my Indians as they let us through, so that I almost expected a volley in our backs, and was relieved ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... He was a little, wiry man, about forty-five years of age, with sharp, intelligent face, and an expression ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood
... the morrow when we moved down the mountain-side with the army of the Tribes, fierce and savage-looking men. The scouts were out before us, then came the great body of their cavalry mounted on wiry horses, while to right and left and behind, the foot soldiers marched in regiments, each under the command of ...
— Ayesha - The Further History of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed • H. Rider Haggard
... sewing, and add an occasional day or two of fuller meals, in consequence of which they were oftener than ever hungry and cold, and in desperate trouble about the rent of their room. Tembarom, who was a wiry, enterprising little fellow, sometimes found an odd job himself. He carried notes and parcels when any one would trust him with them, he split old boxes into kindling- wood, more than once he "minded" a baby when its mother left its perambulator ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the Solomon Islands are the worst to deal with, as they have ugly dispositions; they are inclined to resent what they believe to be an insult, and they are a strong, wiry race. They are quarrelsome among themselves, and probably their tendency to quarrel is increased by the fact that many of them are cannibals. Sometimes we miss one of these fellows, and though we hunt everywhere, it is impossible to find him. There are vague rumors that he has been ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... ever strayed Hardy was startled by their appearance. Gaunt, rough, stunted, with sharp hips and hollow flanks and bellies swollen from eating the unprofitable browse of cactus and bitter shrubs, they nevertheless sprinted along on their wiry legs like mountain bucks; and a peculiar wild, haggard stare, stamped upon the faces of the old cows, showed its replica even in the twos and yearlings. Yet he forbore to ask Creede the question which arose involuntarily to his lips, for ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... bonnets are present, and hardly as many hats, for nearly all the women and girls wear the shawl pulled over their heads, Lancashire fashion. In appearance the people contrast favourably with those of the inland towns of county Mayo. The men look active and wiry, and the women are well grown and in many cases have an air of distinction foreign to the heavy-browed, black-haired Celt of the interior. Altogether the picture is well worthy of a master of colour, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... anxious anticipations, she entered the room, and saw before her a figure not wholly unlike what she had imagined: a wiry, resolute-looking man, with knitted brows, lips close-set, and heavy feet firmly planted on the carpet. He was respectably dressed, but nothing more, and in his large bare hands held a brown hat marked with a grease spot. One would have judged him a skilled mechanic. ...
— The Paying Guest • George Gissing
... a cheery and cheeky voice coming round the jog; "oo'd a thought of meetin' a play hactor 'ere in the bush! Down, Muggins, down," the latter to a largish and wiry-looking terrier, the ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... almost a scream, and started up the clay bank to meet them, all the wild blood of the range breaking out in an instant. Margaret called to Eric just as he threw himself out of the saddle and caught her pony's bit. But the wiry little animal had gone mad and was kicking and biting like a devil. Her wild brothers of the range were all about her, neighing, and pawing the earth, and striking her with their forefeet and snapping at her flanks. It was the old liberty of the ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... sorrowful, and by the time a golden gleam shot out of the east Quackalina knew that her first glance into the nest must bring her grief. The tiny restless things beneath her brooding wings were chirping in an unknown tongue. But their wiry Japanesy voices, that clinked together like little copper kettles, were very young and helpless, and Quackalina was a true mother-duck, and her heart ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... young and callow, but this man had grey hair and was apparently nearing middle age. His face, which was pale and showed signs of ill-health, was clearly cut and refined. His frame was well-built and wiry, and he had a pair of steady grey eyes and a quiet, dignified manner which seemed strangely incongruous in the position old McAllister had so ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... tall, thin boy of fifteen, wiry and strong, and with a face as smooth and pink-and-white as a girl's. That he was so girlish looking was a sore subject with the boy, and whenever any unwise boy called him "Girly" instead of "Curly" it started ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... Phil Matlack, entered the hall, Mr. Archibald looked at him with some surprise, for he was not the conventional tall, gaunt, wiry, keen-eyed backwoodsman who had naturally appeared to his mental vision. This man was of medium height, a little round-shouldered, dressed in a gray shirt, faded brown trousers very baggy at the knees, a pair of conspicuous blue woollen socks, ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... heard his name repeated there as the name of one closely associated with the later fortunes of the Greek nation, and linking the present with times now distant; some of them may have seen him, and may remember the slight wiry form which seemed to bear years so lightly, the keen eye and grisled moustache and soldierly bearing, and perhaps the antique and ceremonious courtesy, stately yet cordial, recalling a type of manners long past, with which he welcomed those who had a claim on his attentions or friendly offices. ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... women of your class—ladies, you call them." She accented the title, without bitterness. A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... conditions, of the too vehement life which, under the moral, the intellectual and other aspects, incessantly struggled within him. Too vehement;—which would have required a frame of oak and iron to contain it: in a thin though most wiry body of flesh and bone, it incessantly "wore holes," and so found outlet for itself. He could take no rest, he had never learned that art; he was, as we often reproached him, fatally incapable of ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... also alter the development of the muscles very much, by dint of training; all the world knows that exercise has a great effect in this way; we always expect to find the arm of a blacksmith hard and wiry, and possessing a large development of the brachial muscles. No doubt training, which is one of the forms of external conditions, converts what are originally only instructions, teachings, into habits, or, in other words, into organizations, to a great extent; but this ...
— The Perpetuation Of Living Beings, Hereditary Transmission And Variation • Thomas H. Huxley
... lean, wiry, brown, silent man. He had a weary look, and a very steady, attentive eye. It was rumoured that he was tired of the humdrum life among the people in our parts, and longing to go back and wander off on the tramp again in the wild places of the East. Except what ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... something not too determined about his chin. He bore no resemblance to those pictures of efficient Americans in advertisements with which Europe is familiar,—eagle-faced gentlemen with intimidatingly firm mouths and chins, wiry creatures, physically and mentally perfect, offering in capital letters to make you Just Like Them. Mr. Twist was the reverse of eagle-faced. He was also the reverse of good-looking; that is, he would have been very handsome indeed, as Anna-Rose remarked several days later to Anna-Felicitas, ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... shelter of the pines, here and there; and when he saw Whitwell making his way up the hill-side road, Westover felt that if there must be any human presence it should be some savage clad in skins, instead of the philosopher in his rubber boots and his clothing-store ulster. He preferred the small, wiry shape of Jombateeste, in his blue woollen cap and his Canadian footgear, as he ran round the corner of the house toward the barn, and left the breath of his pipe in the fine air ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... riders sped desperately away, and then with all the wiry, sinewy strength of her lithe and slender form, Esther hurled herself upon another slender figure, speeding after these, afoot. Desperately she clung to it in spite of savage blows and strainings. And so they found her, as forth they came,—a rush of shrieking, startled, candle-bearing ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... not yet described the rest of the party round the fire. There was Bartle Won, a faithful follower, for many years, of Uncle Jeff; but as unlike him as it was possible that any two human beings could be. Bartle was a wiry little fellow, with bow legs, broad shoulders (one rather higher than the other), and a big head, out of which shone a pair of gray eyes, keen as those of a hawk—the only point in which he resembled Uncle Jeff. He was wonderfully active and strong, ...
— In the Rocky Mountains - A Tale of Adventure • W. H. G. Kingston
... have suffered in reputation from their observers. "Those who inhabit," says Livingstone, "the hot sandy plains of the desert possess generally thin, wiry forms, capable of great exertion, and severe privation. Many are of low stature, but not dwarfish; the specimens brought to Europe have been selected, like coster-mongers' dogs, on account of their extreme ugliness; consequently English ideas ...
— The Future of the Colored Race in America • William Aikman
... incessant pull of the curb bit, trotted past young ladies and gentlemen with note-books, who had been sent by an eager Press to record the activities of the truly great. Handsome women rode in the Row with their children mounted on wiry ponies (always a charming sight); and middle-aged, angular females, wearing the customary riding-hat which reduces beauty to plainness and plainness to caricature, rode melancholy quadrupeds, determined to do that which is done by those who are ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... minutely described. A native five feet eight, perhaps. Very tall for a Tagal, slender, sinewy, and with a tuft of wiry hair and sixteen inches of shirt missing. "For further particulars and the missing sixteen inches, as well as the hair, inquire at Colonel Brent's, Number ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... grass. Here, said Howard, were the outer fringes of the grazing land; his cattle sometimes strayed as far as this. The spot chosen for nooning was a suspicion less breathlessly hot; there was a sluggish spring ringed about with wiry green grass and shaded by a clump ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... the clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... fine constitution, active and wiry; but the cramped life and squalid worry of a year-in year-out, semi-detached, suburban existence had, as he told himself, played the mischief with his nerves, and now to this was added the ghastly vista of impending actual beggary. Whatever he did and wherever he went this thought would not ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... "Freckles"—a wiry looking little fellow, with carotty locks and a freckled nose, whose leaping ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... was, to tell the truth, slightly ashamed, rang at the gates, arrived at the house door, announced himself as Mr. Underwood, asked to see his sisters; and after a long labyrinth of matted passages, found himself in a pretty countrified room, where a wiry, elderly, sensible lady, with grey hair and a keen face, gave him a friendly reception, drew a favourable, but not enthusiastic, picture of Robina's steadiness and industry, and said that Angela was a ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Austrian territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the frontier. There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare. There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... peace of mind; without five pair of scissors she could not be happy; and Tricopherous was essential to her well-being: indeed, she often said she would rather give up coffee than Tricopherous, for her hair was black and wiry and curly, and caps she abhorred, so that of a winter's day her head presented the most irrelevant and volatile aspect, each particular hair taking a twist on its own responsibility, and improvising a wild halo about ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... Tessie would walk toward the screen door with a little flaunting sway of the hips. Her mother's eyes, following the slim figure, had a sort of grudging love in them. A spare, caustic, wiry little woman, Tessie's mother. Tessie resembled her as a water colour may resemble a blurred charcoal sketch. Tessie's wide mouth curved into humour lines. She was the cut-up of the escapement department at the watch factory; the older woman's ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... bright yellow ilimu-flowers or brilliant scarlet pomegranate-blossoms strung on a fibre of the banana-stalk—sometimes they are woven of ferns or of a fragrant wild vine called maile. Maria was seated astride on a wiry little black horse, and instead of slipping her bare feet into the stirrups she clasped the irons with her toes. Besides her long, flowing black dress she wore a width of bright red-flowered damask tied around her waist, caught ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... in the foothills. My great-grandfather was really the first settler in these parts and originally located his cabin where the mill now stands. 'Little Bill Thompson,' he was called, for he was a small, wiry man—very different from grandfather, who in his prime was a powerful man of over six feet. Little Bill Hill and Little Bill Creek were named after this pioneer great-grandsire, who was quite successful raising flocks of sheep on the plateau. Before he died ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... ridgy-spined, long-horned cattle, which have been several months eating their way from Texas, with their escort of four or five much-spurred horsemen, in peaked hats, blue-hooded coats, and high boots, heavily armed with revolvers and repeating rifles, and riding small wiry horses. A solitary wagon, with a white tilt, drawn by eight oxen, is probably bearing an emigrant and his fortunes to Colorado. On one of the dreary spaces of the settlement six white-tilted wagons, each with twelve oxen, are ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... of the twisting alley, he came to where a gleam from a shuttered window showed a slatted glimpse of a woman struggling in the arms of a lean, wiry peasant of the Camargue. Riviere seized him by the collar and shook him off as one shakes a dog from the midst of a fray. The man loosed his grip of the woman, and snarling like a dog, writhed himself free of Riviere. Then, whipping out a knife from ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... girl of our times is a creature who has not a particle of vitality to spare,—no reserved stock of force to draw upon in cases of family exigency. She is exquisitely strung, she is cultivated, she is refined; but she is too nervous, too wiry, too sensitive,—she burns away too fast; only the easiest of circumstances, the most watchful of care and nursing, can keep her within the limits of comfortable health; and yet this is the creature who must undertake family life in a country where it is next to ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... patriots, bulwark of the Cuban cause, was seated in a hammock, reading some letters; O'Reilly recognized him instantly from the many pictures he had seen. Gomez was a keen, wiry old man; the color of his swarthy, sun-bitten cheeks was thrown into deeper relief by his snow-white mustache and goatee. He looked up at Judson's salute and then turned a pail of brilliant eyes, as hard as glass, upon O'Reilly. ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... old in the study of this particular branch of natural history. Bansemer was fifty-five years old in this year of 1898. He was thinner than in the old New York days, but the bull-like vigour had given way to the wiry strength of the leopard. The once black hair was almost white, and grew low and thick on his forehead. Immaculately dressed, ever straight and aggressive in carriage, he soon became a figure of whom all eyes took notice, even in the most crowded of ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... cheek bones, showing him enough of the Indian make to be a good hunter; a crank, steady eye, indicating honest motives, and a good resolution, that won't allow a man to rest easy till his object is carried out; and lastly, a well-put-together, wiry frame, to bear fatigues, and do the work which so large a head must often lay out for it. Yes, he passes muster with me bravely: let him in, with ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... and was led in triumph to the jingling old piano, and with a screechy wiry voice, sang those very abominable old ditties which I had heard her sing at ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hussein was a well-known employee of Abou Saood. This ruffian was an Arab. He was a tall, wiry fellow, with a determined but brutal cast of countenance, who was celebrated as a scoundrel among scoundrels. Even his fellows dreaded his brutality. There was no crime that he had not committed; and as his only ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... no attention to Kannoa's reply—which, to do her justice, was very mild—for, at the moment, Arbalik himself rose to address the assembly. He was a fine specimen of an Eskimo—a good-looking young savage; slim and wiry, with a nose not too flat, and only a little turned up; a mouth that was well shaped and pleasant to look at, though very large, and absolutely cavernous when in the act of yawning; and his eyes looked sharp ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... his tactics. He discovered at his banker's one day a keen, communicative, wiry, shrewd, etc., etc., enterprising, etc., 'made a hundred thousand dollars' sort of a little man, named Briggs, who was traveling in order to travel, and grumble. Mr. Shodd 'came the ignorant game' over this Briggs; pumped ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... brightening pattern of crop, and grass and vine. The beggars tormented them on the approach to Genzano, as they tormented of old Horace and Maecenas; and presently the long falling street of the town, with its multitudes of short, wiry, brown-faced folk, its clatter of children and mules, its barbers and wine shops, brought them in sight again of the emerald-green Campagna, and the shiny hazes over the sea. In front rose the tower-topped hill of Monte Giove, marking the site of Corioli; and just as they turned towards Nemi ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... question or a sudden shame. She hid him in a rosy flush which a breath could have made flame unbearably, and she hid from him behind the light garrulity of Mrs. Cafferty, through which now and again, as through a veil, she saw the spike of his helmet, a wiry bristling moustache, a surge of great shoulders. On these ghostly indications she heaped a tornado of words which swamped the wraith, but she knew he was waiting to catch her alone, and would certainly catch her, and the ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... south Cheyenne country after small bands of Indians, whose fleet ponies keep them just out of range of the carbines and just out of reach of the horses, who, grain-fed all winter, are now losing speed, strength, and bottom on the scant and wiry grass they find in the sandy valleys. Truscott and Webb are eager to go forward, but orders say wait. Mrs. Truscott is again almost in heaven. Jack has been with her nearly a fortnight. They are domiciled in their new ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... broad brim of his hat. He had on a surtout coat, a blue checked shirt; the collar standing up, and kept in its place with a wisp of black neckerchief; no waistcoat; and a large pocket-handkerchief thrust into his breast, which was all broad and open. At his heels followed a wiry, sharp-eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now with one man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace, with his head in ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... handsome man, on the right, sat Mr. Jermyn, looking fifteen years younger without his false beard. Then came a very black-looking man, with a face all eyebrows. Then a soldier in uniform. Then a little, wiry man, who jumped about as though excited—I could only see him when he jumped: he had an unpleasant, saturnine face, which frightened me. That, as far as I could see, was the whole company. When I first ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... besieging a citadel. He was full of animal exuberance, and his eyes, a trifle faded, it must be admitted, were still keenly alive and observant. He was big of bone, florid of skin, and his hair—what remained of it—was wiry and bleached. His clothes, possibly cut from an old measure, hung loosely about the girth—a sign that time had taken its tithe. For thirty-five years he had served his country by cunning speeches and bursts of fine oratory; he had wandered over the globe, lulling suspicions here and arousing ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... not, (We know not what the use O life, nor know the aim, the end, nor really aught we know, But know the work, the need goes on and shall go on, the death-envelop'd march of peace as well as war goes on,) For great campaigns of peace the same the wiry threads to weave, We know not why or what, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... now passing a small camp on the further side of the mound they had crossed. Three rows of tents, and aligned with each on the reverse flank a line of horses picketed—small, almost ponies, thin in the flank, wiry, but extremely rough. There had been no pains taken in grooming them evidently. As for the men loafing or swaggering about, those who were fully dressed were so stuck all over with arms—pistols, swords, daggers—that one ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... sand-papered, had prominent teeth, like those of a baboon, in a wrinkled, wizened monkey face, across which were three tattooed bands, and possessed a little, long-armed, spare figure, bent and wiry. He clambered up and down his mast, fetching things at his master's behest; leapt nonchalantly for our rail or his own spar, as the case might be, across the staggering abyss; clung so well with his ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Cardinal, in his wiry and peculiar tone, which was broken at intervals by a hoarse and hollow cough—"had he conspired against the sovereign or against the state, my duty as a minister, and my devotion as a subject, would have compelled me on this occasion to remain silent; but it was against my person alone ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... the flagship, sir," said the wiry little cock-eyed head waiter, who was hopping about the room "like a parched pea on a griddle," as dad expressed it, stopping to flick the dust from the mantelpiece with his napkin as he replied to the mute inquiry he could read in my glance. "Look, sir! They've h'isted the ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... evil, so near as she was to the dwelling of her old mistress; and she looked up to where in time past was the fair and wicked house, and saw that all was changed indeed; for no longer was the isle goodly with meadow and orchard and garden, but was waste and bare, and nought grew on it save thin and wiry grass, already seeding even ere June was born, and here and there hard and ugly herbs, with scarce aught that might be called a flower amongst them. Trees there were yet, but the most of them stark dead, and the best dying fast. No beasts she saw, nor fowl; nothing ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris
... the two robots coming up from either side, behind him. His eyes were well accustomed to the dark now, and he managed to dodge most of the shadowy vines and branches before they could snag or trip him. Even so, he stumbled in the wiry underbrush and his legs were a mass of stinging slashes from ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... said a small, wiry man; "but I'm not so much interested in that as I am in the question whether or not I've got a big future ...
— The Store Boy • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... way for us to go down, at all events," said Barkins, after we had listened for a few moments for Ching's song, and the wiry notes of his instrument. ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... of serious disease. It should be remembered that a lessening quantity of food is required from middle life on. This applies to all the elements of food. It is noticeable that a fat person seldom lives to old age, most octogenarians being thin and wiry, and almost all attribute their long life to increasing watchfulness over their health, and largely over what ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... measured the distance traveled each day by counting the footsteps. The plains were flat, save for an occasional channel cut by some river half buried in the sand; they were barren, except for a short wiry grass and a small rim of shrubs and stunted trees along ...
— Introductory American History • Henry Eldridge Bourne and Elbert Jay Benton
... comes that woman back; and a man with her. Willis, you must help me out." Roberts gets falteringly to his feet, and stands in helpless apprehension, while Mr. and Mrs. McIlheny bear down upon him from the door. Mr. McIlheny, a small and wiry Irishman, is a little more vivid for the refreshment he has taken. He is in his best black suit, and the silk hat which he wears at a threatening slant gives dignified impressiveness to his figure and carriage. With some dumb-show of inquiry and assurance between himself and his wife, he ...
— The Albany Depot - A Farce • W. D. Howells
... the studio of William Story, whom my father had slightly known in Salem before he became a voluntary exile from America. Mr. Story was at this time a small, wiry, nervous personage, smiling easily, but as much through nervousness as from any inner source or outward provocation of mirth, and as he smiled he would stroke his cheeks, which were covered with a short, brown beard, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... waiting in the next room, puffing quietly on a long cigarette. They left together, walking down the hall in silence. Neel glanced sideways at the wiry, dark-skinned Brazilian and wondered what he could say to smooth things out. He still had his reservations about Costa, but he'd keep them to himself now. Abravanel had ordered peace between them, and what the old man said ...
— The K-Factor • Harry Harrison (AKA Henry Maxwell Dempsey)
... heavy gilt fringe, a pastel-blue carpet, and upon the opposite wall a great canopy of rich purple velvet bearing the double-headed eagle embroidered in gold. The apartment was splendidly decorated, and in the center of the parquet floor, with his back to the light, was the thin, wiry figure of an elderly man in a funereal frock-coat, in the lapel of which showed the red and yellow ribbon of the Order of Saint Anne. His hands were behind his back, and he stood purposely in such a position that when ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces when the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,—"the white man's foot," as the Indians called it,—the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass" and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;—all ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... next and Willet followed. When the three were in the bushes, clinging to their tough and wiry strength, they found that the difficulties, as they invariably do, had decreased. Below them the slope was not so steep by any means, and, by holding to the rocky outcrops and scant bushes, they could make the full descent of the mountain. While they rested for a little ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... and all above the lower part of the bosom was bare; and though she looked not more than middle aged, her skin seemed as if it had been regularly prepared to receive the impression of her last will and testament; her head was defended by a chevaux-de-frise of black wiry hair, which pointed fiercely in every direction, while her eyes looked like two burnt holes in a blanket. I had no sooner opened the door than she stuck her arms a-kimbo, and, opening a mouth, which stretched from ear to ear, ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... themselves in the lion's den with the lion in close proximity glaring upon them. He sat at a desk opening mail and looked frowningly at them over his spectacles. He was thin and wiry, his gray hair was rumpled in a way which suggested perpetual perplexity or annoyance, and his general aspect could not be said to be either ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... competitive work, or, as above stated, to have labored hard, or to have worked at high tension, or in great excitement, or with mental worry, all of which tend, as long as there is health, to increase the blood pressure. These men may add weight from the age of 40 on, or they may be thin and wiry. Besides the hypertension there is likely to be a too sturdily acting heart, which is often hypertrophied, and there is an accentuated closure of the aortic valve. There may be dizziness, or no head symptoms at all. Nicotin is likely to ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.
... Bruce came in. Of medium height and a wiry build, his quick kindly smile of greeting did not conceal the fine tight lines about his mouth and between his eyes. His small trim moustache was black, but his hair already showed streaks of gray although he was not quite ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... Loftgreen, a tough, wiry young fellow, struggled desperately, and freeing his right arm struck one of the Chilenos a blow that sent him down as if he had been shot, and cried out loudly, "Murder!" "Mutiny!", Mancillo meanwhile making ...
— The South Seaman - An Incident In The Sea Story Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... profitable objective for the Blooms, for which they gave me a position, and a small interest that has kept me from wandering far from Warsaw. In the first days they told me about Spenski—his remarkable workmanship—and pointed out the wiry, red-headed little chap with the quick imperative smile you've seen. We got on well together from the first. It has been no small thing for me that he likes my ways. I got him in this service, by the way, and I don't know whether I'm very proud of that. He's a lot more ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort
... dark, smiling, offered to bet with him on the result of the races. Collie declined, but gained his point. He learned the Mexican's choice for first place, a lean, wiry buckskin with a goat head and a wicked eye, but with wonderful flanks and withers. Collie meditated. As a result he placed something like fifty dollars in bets with various ranchers, naming the Mexican horse ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Torches, held aloft, cast a flickering light over young soldiers in faded uniforms, men in deerskin, and women in home-made linsey. Colden, and his two lieutenants, Wilton and Carson, stood together. They were thin, and their faces brown, but they looked wiry and rugged. Colden shook Robert's ...
— The Rulers of the Lakes - A Story of George and Champlain • Joseph A. Altsheler
... here and there by scattered trees. Inquiring for the largest vine proprietor we were directed to an open porte-cochre, and on entering the large court encountered half-a-dozen labouring men engaged in various farm occupations. Addressing one whom we took to be the foreman, he referred us to a wiry little old man, in shirt-sleeves and sabots, absorbed in the refreshing pursuit of turning over a big heap of rich manure with a fork. He proved to be M. Oury, the owner of I forget how many acres of vines, and a remarkably intelligent peasant, considering what dunderheads ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... as I had left them eight months and one fortnight ago! For an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I saw—we were so marvelously sympathetic in all things. Her next words undeceived me— "Not a soul in sight! Come along, Jack, and I'll race you to the Reservoir buildings!" Her wiry little Arab was off like a bird, my Waler following close behind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half a minute brought us within fifty yards of the 'rickshaw. I pulled my Waler and fell back a little. The 'rickshaw ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... roaring into the station, and a small, wiry bulldog of a man had sprung from a first-class carriage. We all three shook hands, and I saw at once from the reverential way in which Lestrade gazed at my companion that he had learned a good deal since the days when they had first worked together. I could well remember the scorn which the ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... told him. "We must have two men who can be relied on, and I can put my hand on another who's younger and a little more wiry than I am." He turned to George. "What you have to do is to lie close in the sloo grass until the fellows come for the liquor, when you'll follow them to the reservation, without their seeing you. Then you'll ride up and make sure you would know them again. They ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... was the first to come in, having received permission from Captain Davenant to gallop on ahead. They had met the enemy, and had inflicted a decisive defeat upon them, but the greater part had escaped, by taking to the hills on their wiry little horses, which were able to traverse bogs and quagmires ...
— Orange and Green - A Tale of the Boyne and Limerick • G. A. Henty
... Quiet in manner, wiry in build, clear of eye, with an atmosphere of earnestness about him, Ross G. Marvin had been an invaluable member of the expedition. Through the long hot weeks preceding the sailing of the Roosevelt, ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary
... loose gravel under foot well nigh as hot as the floor of an oven. Such yelling and leaping as there was in getting over this ground would be hard to surpass. We could not have crossed at all—until toward sunset—had it not been for a few small, wiry bushes growing here and there, into which we every now and then thrust our feet to cool. There was no little judgment necessary in selecting your bush; for if not chosen judiciously, the chances were that, on springing forward again, and finding the next bush so far off that an intermediate ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... A medium-sized, wiry, compactly-built man bodily, Hardy bore lightly the weight of his forty-five years. His hair was of that uncertain sandy colour which somehow never seems to turn gray; the edges of the crisply-curling forelock being soaped, rolled ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... shoes, bore about the same resemblance to each other that a three months dead jay nailed to a keeper's lodge bears to the bright-plumaged bird when flying about. On horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, grim-visaged, hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his horse were all one, while on foot he was the most shambling, scambling, crooked-going crab that ever was seen. He ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... patiently, but wandered restlessly up and down the long platform. All at once there came to his ears the sound of a familiar voice, and, turning, he saw, advancing towards him, in the full glare of an electric light, three men, all young and evidently in high spirits. One, thin, brown, and wiry, was dressed as a cowboy of the Western plains. Another, who was a giant in stature, wore a golf suit of gray tweed; while the third, of boyish aspect, whom Ridge recognized as the son of a well-known New York millionaire, was clad ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... the best country house-gardener type, serviceably dressed in corduroy, wool bonnet, and ribbed stockings, James Brown collided with the small and wiry landlord, to his ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... eyes of the man when he repeated the order, while his voice grew more imperative as he stretched a lean, wiry hand toward the dog. The animal's eyes gleamed and his sensitive nose ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... the Multifarious forsook Bo-hea, Pe-koe, and Wiry-leaf'd Gun-pow-der, To revel in the lip and sunny look Of the young stranger; spite of all they'd vow'd her, The ladies each with jealous anger shook, And rail'd against the simple maid aloud—Ah! This woman's pride ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... was going to strike were frightful to behold; and when a Cuckoo looked out of a trap-door in the Palace, and gave note six times, it shook him, each time, like a spectral voice—or like a something wiry plucking ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... damp, a revolver, a hunting-knife, a cloth mackintosh, and lastly, strapped upon his back like a knapsack, a tin box containing the fetish, Little Bonsa, which was too precious to be trusted to anyone else. It was quite a sufficient load for any white man in that climate, but being very wiry, Alan did not feel its weight, at any rate ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... and a wiry shepherd, placing himself before the entrance to the grotto, and using his staff as a spear, said: "Men of Bethlehem, ye cannot enter; the ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link between the Violets and the Droseraceae, placing ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... the Dobbs part of herself, and develop the Estcourt part; but the Dobbs part was natural, and the Estcourt superficial, and the Dobbses were one and all singularly unattractive—a race of eager, restless, wiry little men and women, anxious to get as much as they could, and keep it as long as they could, a family succeeding in gathering a good deal of money together in one place, and failing entirely in the art of making friends. Susie was the best of them, and had been the pretty one at home; yet ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... mending and making over. She was the dearest, funniest old woman who ever went out sewing by the day. Her face was round, and somehow made you think of a very nice baked apple, it was so criss-crossed, and lined by a thousand good-natured puckers. She was small and wiry, and wore caps and a false front, which was just the color of a dusty Newfoundland dog's back. Her eyes were dim, and she used spectacles; but for all that, she was an excellent worker. Every one liked Miss Petingill though Aunt Izzie ...
— What Katy Did • Susan Coolidge
... straggling and stinted tree became a bush, and the latter finally disappeared in the shape of a tuft of pale green, that adhered to some crevice in the rocks like so much moss. Even the mountain grasses, for which Switzerland is so justly celebrated, grew thin and wiry; and by the time the travellers reached the circular basin at the foot of the peak of Velan, which is called La Plaine de Prou, there only remained, in the most genial season of the year, and that in isolated spots between the rocks, a sufficiency of nourishment for the support of a ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... difficulty. The Adige he described as beset with a two-fold risk - the avoidance of the bridges, which courted suspicion, and the thin ice and only partially frozen river, which had to be traversed in the dark. The vigour, the zest with which the wiry veteran 'shoulder'd his crutch and show'd how fields were won' was not ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... be packed over that awful height. Jim, anxious to save time, collared three wiry Indians and bargained with them. For ten cents a pound they were ready to pack the gear. He agreed, and she saw them take on to their backs an immense burden. Each of them carried no less than 200 pounds. With these crushing weights ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... taken a small house on the outskirts of the town, where he lived with his two daughters. He must have been upwards of sixty at the time of the first visit I paid to Cranford after I had left it as a residence. But he had a wiry, well-trained, elastic figure, a stiff military throw-back of his head, and a springing step, which made him appear much younger than he was. His eldest daughter looked almost as old as himself, and betrayed the fact that his real was more than ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... weighed heavily on my mind of obtaining plucky, honest, wiry, healthy servants, of whatever caste they might be, who would be ready for the sake of a good salary and a handsome reward to brave the many discomforts, hardships, and perils my expedition was likely to involve. Both at Naini Tal and here scores of servants and Shikaris (sporting attendants) offered ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... First rode John Avery on Bayard, with his wife behind him on the pillion; then, on Blanche, a white mare, came Ursula, with Kate strapped before her; on the black farm mare, which had no particular name, rode Tom, with Barbara behind, and Walter before him; and lastly, on a wiry white nag, came Robin, with Philippa on the pillion. So they moved slowly away from the home which, for aught they knew, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... good reason that visitors were few and far between—and there was (except to doting parents, perhaps) very little to admire about him. He lost his chubbiness and his pink prettiness and became thin and wiry, brown ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... tones with Negansahima. Indeed, like father and son seemed this strangely assorted pair. Maren remembered afterward how near together they had stood, the wild savage in his elk teeth and scant buckskin garments, an indiscreet band of yellow paint showing a corner above his blanket, and the dark, wiry trader with the grey eyes. Scattered, here and there among the braves were many Bois-Brules, lean Runners of the Burnt Woods, belonging she knew to the North-west Company. Also in that moment she saw the frowning face and ugly eyes of Bois DesCaut beneath the white lock on his temple. Long afterward ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... spirit of this haunt by day and night is well described as an overgrown school-boy. He is a man of a slim, but wiry figure, about five feet ten inches in height. His face at this period was juvenile and beardless. The nose and chin were shapely and prominent, the mouth firm, the forehead wide and full above, but not very high. It was shaded by dark chestnut hair, just silvered with grey. His most remarkable ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... moment the two were grappling in a furious fight. John was smaller than Peter, but he was wiry and as lithe and powerful as a trained athlete, so that he was a match, at first, for the rugged strength of Peter. But he had had a hard day, and gradually Peter's strength wore him down, and, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Long Lake - Bessie King in Summer Camp • Jane L. Stewart
... animated by human breath. This person was apparently lying on his back, his face hid, his form not to be traced, a wild confusion of shawls and cushions, out of which, like some wily and dangerous reptile, glided the spiral involutions of his pipe. Next to the invisible sat a little wiry man with a red nose, sparkling eyes, and a white beard. His black turban intimated that he was a Hebrew, and indeed he was well known as Barizy of the Tower, a description which he had obtained from his residence near the Tower of David, and which distinguished him from his cousin, ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... such a dear old woman as one reads about in books. Her cheeks were all criss-crossed with little wrinkles, which made her look as if she were always smiling. Her forehead was smooth, her eyes kind and blue. She was small, thin, and wiry. Her laugh was as fresh as a young woman's. Mell loved her at once, and was sure that she should be happy to live with her and ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... This was a wiry, shrewd-looking individual, whose hair was all touseled and who was only partially dressed, as if he had been aroused from sleep. He moved to a chair and drew toward him a little package of documents with a ...
— The Boys of Bellwood School • Frank V. Webster
... weapon, and then gave a loud cry of triumph, as he leapt into the water and dragged out a large salmon-like fish called "utu", which was at once brought ashore for my inspection. The man who had struck it—an active, wiry old fellow named Viliamu (William) was panting with excitement. Some large gatala, he said, had just made their appearance with the utu and were pursuing the small fish; therefore would we please hurry forward with our preparations. Then the leader of the entire party stood up and bellowed ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... Stephen, instead of going to his work in the pit, had been rambling, without aim or purpose, over the dreary uplands; here and there stretching himself upon the wiry heath, where the sun had dried away the snow, and hiding his face from the light, while he gave way to an anguish of grief, and broke the deep silence with a loud and very bitter cry. It was death, sudden death, he was lamenting. Only yesterday ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... white, butterfly-shaped, consisting of standard petal partly enfolding wings and keel. Calyx tubular, 4 or 5 toothed; 10 stamens (9 and 1); 1 pistil. (Also solitary fertile flowers, lacking petals, on thread-like, creeping branches from lower axils or underground). Stem: Twining wiry brownish-hairy, to 8 ft. long. Leaves: Compounded of 3 thin leaflets, egg-shaped at base, acutely pointed at tip. Fruit: Hairy pod 1 in. long. Also 1-seeded, pale, rounded, underground peanut. Preferred Habitat - Moist ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... more sculpturesque sight than that of a finely formed, well-grown young Indian struggling on his scaffold with an unusually powerful fish. Every muscle of his wiry frame stands out in its turn in unveiled relief, and you see in him attitudes of grace and power which will not let you regret the Apollo Belvedere or the Gladiator. The only pity is that this ideal Indian ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... near the turn of the road, it came down, and with a wiry spring or two brought itself close to my feet, and continued to keep up with me, as I quickened my pace. It was at my left side, so close to my leg that I felt every moment as if I should ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... was dexterously raised high enough to let the beasts all into the squirrel-cage. Then handy Tim Stubbs punched a hole in the bandbox opposite to the entrance of the squirrel-cage, and one by one the leopards and the rest were allowed to make their way into the wiry prison. The tiger made a dash, but in vain; he was imprisoned ...
— The Last of the Peterkins - With Others of Their Kin • Lucretia P. Hale
... than Percival St. John, but without his look of cheerful and comely health. His complexion had not the florid hues that should have accompanied that strength of body; it was pale, though not sickly; the expression grave, the lines deep, the face strongly marked. By his side trotted painfully a wiry, yellowish, footsore Scotch terrier. Beau sprang from his master's caress, cocked his handsome head on one side, and suspended in silent halt his right fore-paw. Percival cast over his left shoulder a careless glance at the intruder. The last heeded neither Beau ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Duke de Morny, inviting us to go with him in his loge to see a new play called "Le deluge." It was not much of a play; but it was awfully amusing to see. Noah and his three sons and his three daughters-in-law marched into the ark dragging after them some wiry, emaciated debris of the Jardin des Plantes, which looked as if they had not eaten for a week. The amount of whipping and poking with sticks which was necessary to get them up the plank was amazing; I think they had had either too few or too many rehearsals. But they were all finally ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... the slip-way, little suspecting that Miriam and Sep were just above him behind the dyke, where they had sat three days before listening to Dormer Colville's story of the little boy who was a King. To-night he ran the boat into the coarse and wiry grass where Septimus Marvin's own dinghy lay, half hidden by the reeds, and he stumbled ashore clutching at the dewy grass as he climbed the ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... stratum at the bottom of crevices, where it could be detached in opalescent plates and leaves of the thickness of paper. These superficial deposits evidently might have been formed from water holding the metal in solution. Occasionally, deep cracks contained nuggets and wiry masses which looked as if they had ...
— The Moon Metal • Garrett P. Serviss
... stall next to Pacer, was a small, jet-black mare, with a lean head, slender legs, and a curious restless manner. She was a regular greyhound of a horse, no spare flesh, yet wiry and able to do a great deal of work. She was a wicked looking little thing, so I thought I had better keep at a safe distance from ...
— Beautiful Joe • Marshall Saunders
... keenly as I made my bow, for I had heard something of him in Philadelphia, and in Kentucky there had been so many tales of the wonderful things he could do that I think most people looked upon him as a dealer in black arts. But he was in no respect my idea of a Mephisto. He was small and wiry of build, and dressed in black small-clothes, with ruffles of finest lace at wrist ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... did he inherit this family peculiarity that he had not been a year in the government of the province before he was universally denominated William the Testy. His appearance answered to his name. He was a brisk, wiry, waspish little old gentleman, such a one as may now and then be seen stumping about our city in a broad-skirted coat with huge buttons, a cocked hat stuck on the back of his head, and a cane as ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... did not seem to get any light from this statement. He turned his eyes again upon the face of Mr. Dexter, and stood in thought for almost a minute. Then he examined her pulse again. It had a strong, rapid, wiry beat. Stooping, he looked very closely at the condition of her skin; then shook his head, and said something ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... indeed was Mr. Spriggs. A thin wiry little man about 5 feet 2 inches, with thin sandy coloured hair (a trifle bald), twinkly little blue eyes, a very pink face and carroty coloured moustache. He was attired in a rough tweed suit with knickaboccers, a ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... Smith, is lean and lanky and can stretch a long arm and a trade card for an amazing distance to just beneath your nose. But Larkin is small and wiry and has a knack of squeezing himself right into the midst of your mountain of luggage and children and porters, and earnestly informing you that Octavius Smith keeps the best bacon in the district, and promising you that if you deal with him, he, Larkin, ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... a plain of green wiry grass and thin flowering bushes; but high above our heads patches of snow hung in the folds and crevices of the great walls of rock. The little lake was as round as a staring eye. The garrison of the fort were just driving in their small herd of cattle when we appeared. ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... succeeding centuries of Italian history his kind was only too common; the immorality with which he worked out his selfish aims was systematically adopted by princes like the Visconti, and reduced to rule by theorists like Machiavelli. Ezzelino, a small, pale, wiry man, with terror in his face and enthusiasm for evil in his heart, lived a foe to luxury, cold to the pathos of children, dead to the enchantment of women. His one passion was the greed of power, heightened by the lust for blood. Originally ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... a sort of stupor, from which he was awakened by a knock, and the entrance of a nervous, little wiry gentleman whose clothes of rusty black had the effect of having been purchased in a ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... knew that two uncommonly strong old squaws had him by the hair, three half-grown boys were clinging to his legs, and a powerful warrior laid hold of his right shoulder. He deemed it wisest in such a position to yield as quickly and gracefully as he could, in the hope that the two wiry old women would be detached speedily from his hair. This object was achieved as soon as the Sioux saw that he did not resist, and the vigilant Pine Tree stood before him, watching with an expression that Dick feared ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... blocked the road, and the ground at the edge of the precipice had given way with him; it showed a recent founder of a few inches. Then he clutched at a branch of broom as he fell; but it slipped through his fingers, cutting them; for there was blood on the wiry stem. I knelt by the side of the cliff and craned my head over. I scarcely dared to look. In spite of the birds, my ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... systematically. From the moment that Tom saw him approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and explosive force; his hands were immensely large, hairy, sun-burned, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... cold, dry voice again. "What have you to say? It is hanging, Monsieur, hanging by the neck." The speaker was a man of sixty, white of hair, but wiry and active. "Ha! in a mask, eh? That looks bad for you. You are not a common thief, then? . . . That was a good stroke, but not quite high ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... with a cruel mouth, at one corner of which lurked a treacherous sneer, that showed the true character of the individual, for aside from these two features his face was not an unpleasant one. The forehead was high and well developed, the chin square and masculine. The wiry, but carefully brushed hair was already becoming gray around the temples. So much for Mr. William H. Reynolds, so far as his mental ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... the landing stage than I found a code flash summoning Dan Dean and me to Divisional Detective Headquarters. Dan "Snap" Dean was one of my closest friends. He was electron-radio operator of the Planetara. A small, wiry, red-headed chap, with a quick, ready laugh and the kind of wit ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... ears. Almost all of them were Nationaux from the Faubourgs, and although they were not armed, they wore a kepi, or some other distinctive military badge. As well as I could judge, nine out of ten were working men. Their object, as a sharp, wiry artizan bellowed into my ear, was to force the Government to consent to the election of a Commune, in order that the Chassepots may be more fairly distributed between the bourgeois and the ouvriers, and that Paris shall no longer render itself ridiculous by waiting within its ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... a smudge of wiry willows on the weary Kuskoquim; Now a flare of gummy pine-knots where Vancouver's scaur is grim; Now a gleam of sunny ceiba, when the Cuban ...
— Rhymes of a Rolling Stone • Robert W. Service
... is an erect, wiry young figure of an athlete. As he trades at the Seven-League Boot and Shoe Concern, it never bothers him to accompany you on the longest tramps. His feet simply cannot be tired out. As for his hands, they are always alert to ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... and wept as much as would have filled an ink bottle when at last he went off to Edinburgh to study his father's profession. Five years after that did I tide at Birtwhistle's, and when I left had become cock myself, for I was wiry and as tough as whalebone, though I never ran to weight and sinew like my great predecessor. It was in Jubilee Year that I left Birtwhistle's, and then for three years I stayed at home learning the ways of the cattle; but still ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... known, though he played so savage a game that he was never given his international cap. He was well-grown, five foot nine perhaps, with square shoulders, an arching chest, and a quick jerky way of walking. He had a round strong head, bristling with short wiry black hair. His face was wonderfully ugly, but it was the ugliness of character, which is as attractive as beauty. His jaw and eyebrows were scraggy and rough-hewn, his nose aggressive and red-shot, his eyes small and near set, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
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