"Misshapen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with his gold pince-nez and gold watch-chair, his red rosette, and a large and remarkably fine diamond sparking on one of his little fingers, looked so eminently respectable that it was difficult to associate him with the wretched misshapen newspaper parcel—his only luggage!—which he eyed so jealously. However, as the attendants were all liberally fee'd, they remained strictly polite even if they felt amused. I ordered a hansom to be ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly
... happenings had seemed utterly remote from herself; and to her imagination the word "murderer" had connoted an eccentric, cunning, mentally misshapen monster, lacking all resemblance to the vast bulk of human kind. She tried to realize that, if Mark Gifford's tale were true, a man with whom she herself had long been in close sympathy, and whose peculiar character she had rather prided herself ...
— From Out the Vasty Deep • Mrs. Belloc Lowndes
... carefully removing all the traces of her occupation, as habit dictated, she raised her arms in prayer, beseeching the gods of her native land to protect the beautiful woman to whom she had loaned her own misshapen form, which had now been of genuine service, and who had gone forth to meet so many dangers, but also a happiness whose very hope had been denied ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... were excited by the shrill voice, the uncouth gestures, and the strange deformity of the Huns. These savages of Scythia were compared (and the picture had some resemblance) to the animals who walked very awkwardly on two legs, and to the misshapen figures, the Termini, which were often placed on the bridges of antiquity. They were distinguished from the rest of the human species by their broad shoulders, flat noses, and small black eyes deeply buried in the head, and as they were almost destitute of beards they never enjoyed ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... voice through the dark chasm, or the silver columns that shoot aloft, worked by the gnomes from the mines of the mountains of Taunus; but of the strange inhabitants that from time to time they came upon. They found in one solitary cell, lined with dried moss, two misshapen elves, of a larger size than common, with a plebeian working-day aspect, who were chatting noisily together, and making a pair of boots: these were the Hausmannen or domestic elves, that dance into tradesmen's houses of a night, and play all sorts ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... channel and completely blocking it lay a single span of an iron bridge. Although twisted and misshapen, it was still intact, the framework of its overhead truss-work retaining its cage-like shape. Behind it the logs had of course piled up in a jam, which, sinking rapidly to the bed of the channel, had ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... it is work, but it is well repaid. All troubles where failing nerves are concerned may be treated with some modification of this heat and rubbing. Our readers can easily adapt it to particular needs by a little thought. See Spine, Misshapen, and Massage. ...
— Papers on Health • John Kirk
... the infinite serenity that thrilled through each, was not reported, as not being a part of the social lesson. And yet, when the weak and foolish deed was done, and a life, with its possibilities and responsibilities, had passed out of the misshapen thing that dangled between earth and sky, the birds sang, the flowers bloomed, the sun shone, as cheerily as before; and possibly the "Red Dog ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... the same compactness as it was packed upon his, by the time I had reached my twenty-first birthday. By that time he and I had been alone together for eight long years, for my mother had left us with tiny, misshapen Pierre as a heart burden but with only each other ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... on the ridge of the hills which can be seen from Grindelwald; but he was still far from his new home. They pointed out to him other clefts, other meadows, other woods and rocky paths, and other houses. Strange men made their appearance before him, and what men! They were misshapen, wretched-looking creatures, with yellow complexions; and on their necks were dark, ugly lumps of flesh, hanging down like bags. They were called cretins. They dragged themselves along painfully, and stared at the strangers with vacant eyes. The women looked more dreadful ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... up and down their channel. At a reckless speed motorcyclists, carrying urgent messages, swerved through it all; and in the ditches that ran alongside, refugees were stumbling on, fleeing from the new terror, their crouching, misshapen figures like players from a grotesque drama of ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... alleys in which they sleep and eat, to pray and to bathe, as well as to breathe the fresh air and to bask in the sun. The hideous fakirs, or begging Oriental monks, make their fixed abode here, living entirely in the open air, most of them diseased, and all misshapen by voluntarily acquired deformity. Their distorted limbs are fixed in attitudes of penance until they become set and immovable. There are pious believers enough to kneel before them and to give them food and money by which means to support ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... things unknown. I have sometimes thought whether the spirits that love solitary places, may not delight in appropriating, for embodiment momentary and partial, such a present shape as may happen to fit one of their passing moods; whether it is always the mere gnarled, crone-like hawthorn, or misshapen rock, that, between the wanderer and the pale sky, suddenly appals him with the sense of another. The hawthorn, the rock, the dead pine, is indeed there, ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... more than once, but now he was reared up again at the door, pulling at it with mighty tooth and claw. It seemed to both as they looked down the barrels of their rifles and chose the vulnerable spot that, monstrous and misshapen, he was constantly growing in size, so powerful was the effect of the moonlight and their imagination. But it ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the condition of perfect repose, is at once hastened by the low temperature, and disturbed by the commotion in the air. Across the broad expanse of open plains, along mountain-sides, through groves of trees, and over the smooth surface of frozen lakes and rivers, millions of misshapen and broken crystals are driven by the wind, piled up in heaps, or accumulated in confused masses under the lee of every obstruction, having been subjected on the way to such violence of agitation and collision that the characteristic ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... common spires and smoky chimneys would now seem without it! The Monument, recording the delusions of faction, and the Tower, with all its gloomy associations, were visible in the reach of the river. Of Churches there appeared a monotonous groupe; while the houses presented a dingy and misshapen mass, as uninteresting at the distance of seven miles as an ant-hill at the distance of seven feet. Indeed, any wretch capable of setting his foot upon an ant-hill, and of destroying it, because ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... palpable, as fashions are shown to be absurd by caricatures, which so lead to their extirpation. The buffoon and the zany are useful in their places. The ingenious artificer and craftsman, like Solomon, searches the earth for his materials, and transforms the misshapen matter into glorious workmanship. The world is conquered by the head even more than by the hands. Nor will any assembly talk forever. After a time, when it has listened long enough, it quietly puts the silly, the shallow, and the superficial to ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... want two of you to follow this misshapen dwarf, and find out where he comes from. I want to get hold of the scoundrels who sent him ...
— Cast Upon the Breakers • Horatio Alger
... exhibits before us the witches with their unhallowed rites, peoples the air with sportive fairies and sylphs; and these beings, though existing only in the imagination, nevertheless possess such truth and consistency, that even with such misshapen abortions as Caliban, he extorts the assenting conviction, that were there such beings they would so conduct themselves. In a word, as he carries a bold and pregnant fancy into the kingdom of nature, on the other hand, he carries nature into the region of fancy, which lies beyond the confines of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... broad-soled street shoes to the high-heeled, misshapen things on her companion's feet. The latter looked at them, too, with pride and affection. "I'm going to wear them at the wedding and I thought that, being they was so tight, I'd best break ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... the great room was filled with eaters, just as the vast court was filled with vehicles of every sort—wagons, gigs, chars-a-bancs, tilburies, innumerable vehicles which have no name, yellow with mud, misshapen, pieced together, raising their shafts to heaven like two arms, or it may be with their nose on the ground and their rear ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... far more than I did, and he was even wilder about strange countries. He had as adventurous a spirit as any lad in the school, cramped up as it was in that misshapen body. I knew he'd have liked to go round the world as well as I, and he often laughed and said—"What's more, Jack, if I'd the money I would. People are very kind to poor wretches like me all over the ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... of grand, mammoth civilization, gloomy and goblin. They seem to have floundered up out of Nile mud, like that old, slimy, pre-Adamite brood, the what's-their-name—megalosaurus, ichthyosaurus, pterodactyle, iguanodon, and other misshapen abominations, with now and then wreaths of lotus and water lilies round ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... girl, pausing to listen to the subdued hum of conversation coming from the soldiers' berths, turned strangely sick and giddy. She drew herself up, however, and held out her hand to a man who came rapidly across the misshapen shadows, thrown by the sulkily swinging lantern, to meet her. It was the young soldier who had been that day sentry at the ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... near the top of the limiting wall. From its outward appearance it might have been expected to be rough, but it was not so; it was knotty to the eye, but perfectly smooth to the foot, and, when cut, showed itself perfectly clear and limpid. It did not separate under the axe into misshapen pieces, with faces of every possible variation from regularity, that is, with what is called vitreous fracture, but rather separated into a number of nuts of limpid ice, each being of a prismatic form, and of ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... every stroke of which produced a sound like the report of a cannon. This roused the sleepers abruptly, and just as they sprang up, and began to look around in astonishment, for the cause of so startling a commotion, the creature cast its misshapen head downwards, and, throwing its immense flukes high into the air, disappeared. We watched anxiously to see where it would rise, conscious of the perils of such a neighbourhood, and that even a ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... masculine articles, but were nevertheless made by a man's boot-maker, and there was only one place in London where they could be made sufficiently ugly to suit her; and infinite were the pains she took to procure the heavy, thick, cumbrous, misshapen things that as much as possible concealed and disfigured her finely turned ankles and high, arched, Norman instep. Indeed, her whole attire, peculiar (and very ugly, I thought it) as it was, was so by malice prepense on her part. And whereas the general ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... express the awful ire of William the Testy on hearing of the catastrophe at Fort Goed Hoop. For three good hours his rage was too great for words, or rather the words were too great for him (being a very small man), and he was nearly choked by the misshapen, nine-cornered Dutch oaths and epithets which crowded at one into his gullet. At length his words found vent, and for three days he kept up a constant discharge, anathematising the Yankees, man, woman, and child, for a set of dieven, schobbejacken, deugenieten, twist-zoekeren, blaes-kaken, ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their ...
— Keep Out • Fredric Brown
... the little woodland knoll, there came riding past a knight full armed, a lady with him, and behind them a dwarf, misshapen and evil-looking, and they passed without word or salutation to ...
— Stories from Le Morte D'Arthur and the Mabinogion • Beatrice Clay
... giant misshapen lump as he crouched. His torch was a little stab of blue in the deep shadow enveloping him. Intent upon his work, he did not see me. Perhaps he thought his fellows had broken our ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... going to church very proud of themselves, when they heard a girl laughing at them, on which her companion rebuked her, saying, "You shouldn't laugh; you might be struck so!" She thought the dandies were two misshapen idiots.] ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... suspicion that it is NOT so and so, but is only allowed to pass as such), a delight in uncertainty and ambiguity, an exulting enjoyment of arbitrary, out-of-the-way narrowness and mystery, of the too-near, of the foreground, of the magnified, the diminished, the misshapen, the beautified—an enjoyment of the arbitrariness of all these manifestations of power. Finally, in this connection, there is the not unscrupulous readiness of the spirit to deceive other spirits and dissemble before ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... 'retinue,' as you are pleased to call his gang of thugs, is that hideous, misshapen monster that shrieks like a ghoul. I suppose that he too was hunting for the ruby Friday night—after having stolen it the night before." My sarcasm failed to touch Burke. ...
— The Paternoster Ruby • Charles Edmonds Walk
... do look entirely too tall and straight in here," said Miss Blair, and laughed again, with genuine glee. "Beauty is only a matter of comparison, you know," said she. "If one is ugly and misshapen, all she has to do is to surround herself with things ugly and misshapen, and she gets the effect of perfect harmony, which is the highest beauty in the world. Here I am in harmony after I have been out of tune. ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Borg, both elbows on table and huge misshapen hands supporting chin and jaws, sat puffing stinking Siwash tobacco and staring straight before him. It would have seemed ruminative, the stare, had his eyes been softer or had he blinked; as it was, his face was ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... advancing on Old Maggie with threatening eyes. As the woman recoiled he caught her arm in one of his ugly, misshapen hands and jerked her away from the bed. Old ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lovers; most of whom were sailors or owners of craft in the harbour. Their dress is very becoming, and some of them were pretty. The black silk mantilla is a very beautiful head dress, and much to be preferred to the misshapen bonnet with which fashion commands the fair to disfigure themselves in other parts of Europe. The petticoat is also of black silk, with the body of white muslin. Some one likened them to magpies: i'faith, they talked as fast; but who would not wish to hear the beautiful Arabic flowing softly from ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... /fee'ping kree'ch*r-izm/ /n./ A deliberate spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... poor creature's age might have been anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five; for the twisted and misshapen body, angular and hard; the scrawny, wry neck; the old-young face, thin and sallow, with furtive, beady-black eyes, gave no hint of her years. As a matter of fact, I happened to know that Judith Taylor, daughter of the notorious Ozark moonshiner, Jap Taylor, was just past twenty the year she ...
— The Re-Creation of Brian Kent • Harold Bell Wright
... a heavy watch-chain and a fashionable collar. His garb was once that of a professional man. Now his face is entirely altered. Gouts of carmine are spotted over his cheeks; wounds are visible on his forehead. His nose is crooked and his teeth are misshapen. His ...
— David Lockwin—The People's Idol • John McGovern
... stand before the fire surveying me with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the fonder he was ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... whomsoever they pleased. This belief may have originated in the abnormal appearance presented by certain individuals in consequence of physical deformities or peculiarities. The uncanny impression made by dwarfs, persons with misshapen limbs, with a strange look in their eyes, and, above all, the insane would give rise to the view that some people, for the very reason of their variation from the normal type, possessed peculiar powers. But by the side of such as were distinguished by bodily defects, those ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... assert equality with the queen of flowers, and would not be eclipsed by the fragrant loveliness of their beautiful dependents. The borders of box, which had once been trimmed and trained into fanciful points and tufts and convolutions of verdure, had grown into misshapen clumps; and the white, pebbly walks no longer ...
— Step by Step - or, Tidy's Way to Freedom • The American Tract Society
... sprig of terebinth, his eye, armed with the magnifying glass, follows the slow manoeuvres of the terebinth louse, whose proboscis "cunningly distils the venom which causes the leaf to swell and produces those enormous tumours, those misshapen and monstrous galls, in which the young ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... the runt bad learned, and a merry time they had scrambling after the delicious eggs as their mother broke open more ant-galleries, and sent them and their contents rolling down the bank, till every little partridge had so crammed his little crop that he was positively misshapen ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. Finally he succeeded in grafting a branch from an affected ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... the gross, sensual lips, the mandril-like jaw, the misshapen ear, I see not merely a lifelike portrait of a Hun but a composite photograph of all Huns, something which should hang in every house in the kingdom until the terms of such a peace have been imposed which will make the shambles in Belgium, Poland, and Serbia an eternal nightmare of the ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... themselves into rippling lakes of decidedly overdone toffee; and in similar fashion piled up sacks of coffee berries were roasting themselves not wisely but too well. Pyramids of flour were much in the same way baking themselves into cakes, monstrously misshapen, and much more badly burnt than King Alfred's ever were. "The Boers are poor cooks," laughingly explained our men; "they bake in bulk without proper mixing." Nevertheless, along that line everything seemed very much ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... maiden's smile. Till once on a day in summer My soul was touched with a gleam, And I woke from my morbid fancies Like one from an evil dream, And knew that the gods in their wisdom Had made and set me apart. Lean, misshapen, and ugly.... No toy for a maiden's heart. And I felt with a heart awakened That leapt in a riot of joy, The heart of a wise man and proud Not the heart of a moody boy. Viewing the old things anew ...
— A Legend of Old Persia and Other Poems • A. B. S. Tennyson
... have existed only in a rudimentary form, and Nemhotep, standing as best he can upon his misshapen feet, seems to be off his balance, and ready to fall forward upon his face. It would be difficult to find another work of art in which the characteristics of dwarfdom are more ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... has saved thousands of sufferers after long years of agonizing attacks. Joints swollen and misshapen by Inflammatory Rheumatism, nerves and muscles overpowered by the intense misery of Chronic Rheumatism and Sciatica have been restored to health and strength—pain and swelling banished by the marvelous properties ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... knows not of such transformation? Do you not see with your own eyes the chrysalis fact assume by degrees the wings of fiction? Half formed by the necessities of the time, a fact is hidden in the ground obscure and incomplete, rough, misshapen, like a block of marble not yet rough-hewn. The first who unearth it, and take it in hand, would wish it differently shaped, and pass it, already a little rounded, into other hands; others polish it as they pass it along; in a short time it is exhibited transformed ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... high degree, he sorely pined. Thereupon Belphebe renewed her efforts to cure him, until he was strong enough to accompany her into the forest. They were hunting there one day when Timias beheld a damsel fleeing from a misshapen monster, whom he attacked, but against whom he could not prevail, because the monster opposed the lady as a shield to every blow which Timias tried to deal him. It was only by a feint, therefore, that Timias made the monster drop the lady, and he ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... imprecations: wouldn't even eat. Then again the demon of work would drive him with thong and spur: he would rush to his craters, to his laboratories, to his ledger for the purpose of entering unintelligible commentaries. He had some peculiar contrivance, like a misshapen retort, with which he collected gases from the craterlets. Whenever I'd hear one of those smash, I knew it was a ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... to an immense Banana tree, out of which flew a cloud of blueish pigeons. The leaves of this Banana looked six or seven feet long and about one wide; the fruit was hanging in every direction, looking like large misshapen cucumbers. Benjie had taught us not to cut it crossways, but from end to end, as it tasted better when cut wrong. But it was curious when cut wrong what an exact cross was pictured in the middle. Twined in the Banana tree was an immense gourd plant. At ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... over and over Amy washed and soothed the red, misshapen foot. The repugnance she had felt to touching it had all vanished when she saw how acute must have been the old man's suffering and ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... lived in a misshapen attic room which I rented of an Irish family in what was then a Gentile neighborhood. I had chosen that street for the English I had expected to hear around me. I had lived more than two months in that attic, and almost the only English I heard from my neighbors were ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... pointed out to him. Mr. McLean was seen standing there hat in hand by a man on the road. This man was Dr. McQueen hobbling home from the Forest Muir; he did not hobble as a rule, but hobble everyone must on that misshapen brae, except Murdoch Gelatley, who, being short in one leg elsewhere, is here the only straight man. McQueen's sharp eyes, however, picked out not only the stranger but Tommy crouching behind Haggart's stone, and him did the doctor's famous ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... or carve it in marble—its perfect shape, fine tinting, the lines of the features, the beauty of the eyes, the wealth of the dark, clustering hair, were all as near artistic perfection as could be. But all else spoke of deformity—the badly bent back, the twisted body, the short leg, the misshapen foot. It was as if Nature had endeavoured in some wickedly mischievous freak to show how beauty and ugliness can ...
— The Rayner-Slade Amalgamation • J. S. Fletcher
... his hat and stumbled down-stairs, out into the night. Crossing the street, he went at once to Bollo's Wine Shop. The hunchback was sitting on a garbage-can, almost at the entrance. At the sight of this misshapen figure, the irritating memory of the Italian and his impossible music recurred to Suvaroff. A sudden sinister cruelty came over him; he felt a wanton ruthlessness that the sight of ugliness sometimes engenders in natures ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... from all about rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices—an uncanny, animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some Chinese Dante. But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight, hunched body. There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long, yellow hands clasped ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... railway. I meant to wait for him there to hear his report, but at the same time I took his address—Eugene Falloon, Rue Pre Fleuri—where I could give him an appointment in case I missed him at the terminus. He was a long, lean, hungry-looking fellow, clumsily made, with an enormous head and misshapen hands and feet; but he was no fool this Falloon, and his local ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... window, was lined with books. On the wall over the fireplace hung a large map of Africa. Rendel looked intently at it as he thought of the stirring pages of history that were in the making on that huge, misshapen continent, of the field that it was going to be for the statesmen and administrators of the future: he thought of Lord Belmont, only two years older than himself, with whom he had been at Eton and ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... "So misshapen a figure, it may readily be supposed, made a very good target for the shafts of mockery. Nicholas, however, troubled himself but little about them; and it was small complaint you heard from him so long as he was well paid, got his savoury morsel, and, above all, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... immense, but less than that of benevolence; and their philoprogenitiveness takes rather the character of compassion and tenderness to things that need aid or protection than of the animal love of offspring. I never met with one person deformed or misshapen. The beauty of their countenances is not only in symmetry of feature, but in a smoothness of surface, which continues without line or wrinkle to the extreme of old age, and a serene sweetness of expression, combined with that majesty which seems to come from consciousness ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... extremely rare to find a woman who shows even the modest sightliness that her sex is theoretically capable of; it is only the rare beauty who is even tolerable. The average woman, until art comes to her aid, is ungraceful, misshapen, badly calved and crudely articulated, even for a woman. If she has a good torso, she is almost sure to be bow-legged. If she has good legs, she is almost sure to have bad teeth. If she has good teeth, she is ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... which draped the rock, the Grotto opened, with the eternal flaring of its candles. From a distance it looked rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and modest aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it, turning all faces pale and bowing every head. The statue of the Virgin had become a mere white spot, which seemed to move amid the quiver of the atmosphere, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... opening by mere sweetness and suggestion of sound some golden door at which the Imagination itself had knocked in vain; rhyme, which can turn man's utterance to the speech of gods; rhyme, the one chord we have added to the Greek lyre, became in Robert Browning's hands a grotesque, misshapen thing, which at times made him masquerade in poetry as a low comedian, and ride Pegasus too often with his tongue in his cheek. There are moments when he wounds us by monstrous music. Nay, if he ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... it may produce a misshapen mouth or fingers. It constantly stimulates the flow of saliva and certainly aggravates disturbances of digestion during which the sucking habit is likely to be practised. It may lead to thrush or other forms of infection of the mouth. It is not necessary as a means of quieting a child, ...
— The Care and Feeding of Children - A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses • L. Emmett Holt
... this lowly organised order are wingless, dull-coloured, minute insects, with ugly, almost misshapen heads and bodies. Their sexes do not differ, but they are interesting as shewing us that the males pay sedulous court to the females even low down in the animal scale. Sir J. Lubbock (17. 'Transact. ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... excellent time to show the necessity for bone-building mineral in the diet of babies and young children. If they do not get this mineral substance during the growth period, they cannot have hard, rigid bones, and their bodies are apt to become misshapen—bow legs, curved spines, etc. This substance is also necessary for ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Household Management • Ministry of Education
... possible reader with a pleasing impression of the personality of the subject. With material of this sort at hand, the autobiographer sets to work to construct a fair and gracious monument, being easily persuaded that it would be a barbarous act to mar its symmetry by the introduction of loathly and misshapen blocks like those which Cardan, had he been the artist, would have chosen ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... trembled, And there fell a few drops from it On the verdant plain beneath her. Then the busy bees flew thither Straightway, eagerly to drink them, And the butterfly came quickly That he, too, might find a drop there; Even the misshapen spider Thither crawl'd and suck'd ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... as he emphasizes, was drawn in a clumsy manner from the womb with a forceps. His head is misshapen, like a noodle. His nose also. He has gone through the usual illnesses. He enjoys a complicated form of syphillis. It has eaten holes the size of fists in ...
— The Prose of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... you got there, mammy?" said Jason gently. She hesitated, and at last held out her hand—in the palm lay a misshapen bullet. ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... an American trotter which had been lent to him by a friend. As it was a glorious night, I thought it might be rather fun, so we walked down Grosvenor Street into Park Lane; and there stood the buggy under a lamp. American trotters always appear to be misshapen; they are like coloured prints that are not quite in drawing ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... swept the room, came to rest on the figure of a heavy duty robot of familiar design. Semi-human in form, it looked like some misshapen, bent, headless giant. He inspected it: Meyers Robot, Inc. Earth designed ...
— The Beast of Space • F.E. Hardart
... in the evening to watch the plant setters at work in the moonlight on the French farm. He did not make his presence known but hid himself in a fence corner behind bushes and watched the workers. As he saw the stooped misshapen figures crawling slowly along and heard the words of the old man driving them like cattle, his heart was deeply touched and he wanted to protest. In the dim light the slowly moving figures of women appeared, and after them came the crouched crawling men. ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... other—that, David Rizzio, who from an errant minstrel had risen to this perilous eminence, a man of a swarthy, ill-favoured countenance redeemed by the intelligence that glowed in his dark eyes, and of a body so slight and fragile as to seem almost misshapen. His age was not above thirty, yet indifferent health, early privation, and misfortune had so set their mark upon him that he had all the appearance of a man of fifty. He was dressed with sombre magnificence, and a jewel of great price smouldered upon the middle ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... defect, so it is with the mind. They call that a disease where the whole body is corrupted; they call that sickness where a disease is attended with a weakness, and that a defect where the parts of the body are not well compacted together; from whence it follows that the members are misshapen, crooked, and deformed. So that these two, a disease and sickness, proceed from a violent concussion and perturbation of the health of the whole body; but a defect discovers itself even when the body is in perfect health. But a disease ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... are all positive obstacles to both mental and physical improvement, for thoughts are real things. The patient must actively co-operate with the healer, and make himself transparent to the truth. That which is misshapen has to grow symmetrical. Even if the mind could be instantly permeated with the belief of health, the body will need a little time to completely change its expression. Should these limitations discourage anyone? Not in the least, but rather the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... staring wooden Doric columns of its post office and hotel, beat upon the cold green shutters of its best houses, and powdered the angular, stiff, dark figures in its streets. From the level of the street, the four principal churches of the town stood out starkly, even while their misshapen spires were kindly hidden in the low, driving storm. Near the railroad station, the new Methodist chapel, whose resemblance to an enormous locomotive was further heightened by the addition of a pyramidal row of front steps, like a cowcatcher, stood ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... without making obeisance to the four corners, and paying them other kindly attentions; those who live in untidy houses are also likewise punished. The Kirkonwaeki (church-folk) are little deformed beings living under the altars of churches. These misshapen things are supposed to be able to aid ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... the floor and, lifting the candle, looked in at the yellowed old playthings, the flimsy, spineless paper-dolls, the faded silk rags, the discolored bits of papers, the misshapen staggering paste-board chairs and bed, which had seemed so delightful and enchanting to her then, far better than any actual room she knew. A homesickness for the past came over her. It was not only Margaret who was dead. The other little girl who had played ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... there is one surpassingly strange relic of the past. The palace of the Farnesi, like many a haunt of upstart tyranny and beggared pride on these Italian plains, rises misshapen and disconsolate above the stream that bears the city's name. The squalor of this gray-brown edifice of formless brick, left naked like the palace of the same Farnesi at Piacenza, has something even horrid in it now that only vague memory survives of its former uses. The princely sprezzatura ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... all, and finds equally legitimate whatever affords recreation to the Humanity-God, in the great variety of its tastes. Then high aspirations are extinguished, the beautiful gives place to the agreeable; and since the ugly and misshapen please a vicious taste, room must be made for the ugly in the Pantheon of beauty. Art despoiled of its crown becomes the sad, and often the ignoble slave of the tastes and caprices of the public. I do not insist further. The pretension of the worshippers of humanity ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... "Nushka! you shall have a sweetheart, You shall have a handsome husband!" "Ugh!" the old men all responded, 215 From their seats beneath the pine-trees. And whene'er a youth or maiden Found a crooked ear in husking, Found a maize-ear in the husking Blighted, mildewed, or misshapen, 220 Then they laughed and sang together, Crept and limped about the corn-fields, Mimicked in their gait and gestures Some old man, bent almost double, Singing singly or together: 225 "Wagemin, the thief of ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... this. They are a fierce, morose, and intractable people, though capable of forming most devoted friendships when their confidence has once been gained.' Mark that, Watson. Now, then, listen to this. 'They are naturally hideous, having large, misshapen heads, small, fierce eyes, and distorted features. Their feet and hands, however, are remarkably small. So intractable and fierce are they that all the efforts of the British official have failed to win them over in any degree. They have always been a terror to shipwrecked crews, ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were excellent, yet that, after a few days, the skin shrank and puckered in so abominable a fashion as to render all the labour bestowed upon it of no avail. This was most unfortunately tried upon a twenty pound pike, and so utterly misshapen did it become as to necessitate the relaxing of the specimen—the removal of the clay—and the ultimate shaping up again, by the dry plaster process. [Footnote: Several correspondents have written as to the relaxing of fish skins. This is a very easy process, nothing more ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... waited. Above the chant we could hear the striking of the city clocks, and the occasional rattle of a cart in the street overhead. The absolute watchfulness and expectation, the dim, mysterious half-light of the cellar falling in a grewsome way upon the misshapen bulk of a Chinese deity in the back ground, a faint smell of opium-smoke mingling with spice, and the dreadful uncertainty of what we were really waiting for, sent an uncomfortable thrill down our backs, and made us look at each other with a forced and unnatural smile. ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... It is difficult to summarize the legend, it varies so considerably in the versions. Marcolf in the best-known forms, which are certainly older than Zabara, is "right rude and great of body, of visage greatly misshapen and foul." Sometimes he is a dwarf, sometimes a giant; he is never normal. He appears with his counterpart, a sluttish wife, before Solomon, who, recognizing him as famous for his wit and wisdom, challenges him to a trial of wisdom, promising ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... the watchers could readily understand their words. Two of them sat with their faces toward the main entrance and the third man faced them. Carnes bit his lip as he looked at the man at the head of the table. He was twisted and misshapen in body, a grotesque dwarf with a hunched back, not over four feet in height. His massive head, sunken between his hunched shoulders, showed a tremendous dome of cranium and a brow wider and even higher than Dr. Bird's. The rest ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... wolf or hyna shapes, and to suck the breath from dying soldiers, or to enter houses and steal the infants from their cradles. Modern Greeks call any savage-looking man, with dark complexion, and with distorted, misshapen limbs, a {Greek brkolakas}, and suppose him to be invested with power ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the other, putting his hand on Ernie's misshapen shoulder. "No, I won't forget this," he went on. "You didn't have to interfere, but you did. Plucky thing to do. They say you come from Virginia. Well, you've proved it. Thank you for doing this. My name's Dick Cronk. ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... he spoke. He pointed to a misshapen heap of something lying on the ground at his feet. "It was ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... most delightful dream: he was living in a country where there were no cats, nor any other living things but slugs, snails, and grubs; while all kinds of fruit grew in profusion, so that there was no difficulty in obtaining any amount of food; but one great drawback to his happiness was an ugly, misshapen little bird, which would keep running after him, and crying, "Peedle-weedle-wee, peedle-weedle-wee," or else shouting at him ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... except that he took rather too much pleasure in tormenting an ugly monster called Caliban, for he owed him a grudge, because he was the son of his old enemy Sycorax. This Caliban, Prospero found in the woods, a strange misshapen thing, far less human in form than an ape; he took him home to his cell, and taught him to speak; and Prospero would have been very kind to him, but the bad nature which Caliban inherited from his ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... at the misshapen, starved, sick, stumbling hulks of men who trod the dreary round of the windlass. Mr. Pike was right. These were not the brisk, devilish, able-bodied men who manned the ships of the old clipper-ship days; who fought their officers, who had the points ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... to him that the poor devil was merely one of the weaker vessels that go down the stream of life, borne this way and that by the current that sweeps them on, with little enough chance from the beginning, having come warped and misshapen from the hands of the potter. And now Jimmie was about to die. Well, whether it had been Jimmie Clayton or another who had shot him that night down in Texas, he would heed the entreaty of the letter and go to him ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... appeared of no greater importance in her eyes than the child, with the crooked back, making her choice of sweets. Her own emotions, indeed, interested her no longer, but she was aware of a dull curiosity concerning the crippled child. Would her whole life become misshapen because of the physical form which she wore like an outer garment? And she felt, at the thought, that she would like to stand upon the side of the child and upon the side of all who were oppressed and made miserable by the crookedness either of the ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... She's honest, well-bred, yes; and kind, but with all that there is still something about her that degenerates her into a petty, blind, even in some respects misshapen animal. In any case, she isn't a man. I tell you as a friend, as the only man to whom I can lay bare my soul. I love Natasha, it's true, but sometimes she seems extraordinarily vulgar, and then I lose myself and ...
— Plays by Chekhov, Second Series • Anton Chekhov
... when he named his dog Titian. But having done his duty in this matter, he found it convenient to shorten the name into Tit—sometimes Tittles. Tittles had no face whatever, as far as could be seen by the naked eye. His whole misshapen body was covered with long shaggy hair of a light grey colour. Only the end of his black nose was visible in front and the extreme point of his tail in rear. But for these two landmarks it would have been utterly impossible to tell which end of the ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... the curse upon the last-born son of the son that had prevented him from begetting a younger son than the three he had. The descendants of Ham through Canaan therefore have red eyes, because Ham looked upon the nakedness of his father; they have misshapen lips, because Ham spoke with his lips to his brothers about the unseemly condition of his father; they have twisted curly hair, because Ham turned and twisted his head round to see the nakedness of his father; ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... certain place called Lesche, where the elders of the tribe sat in judgment upon the child. If they thought it well-built and strong, they ordered the father to bring it up, and assigned one of the nine thousand plots of land to it; but if it was mean-looking or misshapen, they sent it away to the place called the Exposure, a glen upon the side of Mount Taeygetus; for they considered that if a child did not start in possession of health and strength, it was better both for itself and for the state that he should ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... would put such a face on you that yir mother wouldna know you; but I'm here wi' my friends" (great applause from the doorway, where the crowd was listening to the interview) "for a commercial transaction. Div ye no ken, ye misshapen object, that we're here on a special invitation of yir master, sent this mornin' to the Vennel?" (strong confirmation given under oath by Jess Mitchell), "and I'll juist give you the terms thereof, ye two-faced, leein', unprincipled wratch" (enthusiastic ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... at last, and a man came in,—Dr. Knowles, the principal owner of the factory. He nodded shortly to her, and, going to the desk, turned over the books, peering suspiciously at her work. An old man, overgrown, looking like a huge misshapen mass of flesh, as he ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... after I heard him strike flint and steel and presently he lighted a candle-end by whose welcome beam I saw we stood in a roomy cave. And an evil place I thought it, full of unexpected corners, littered with all manner of odds and ends and divers misshapen bundles. Having set down the candle, the highwayman drew a dingy blanket before the cave mouth and turned to scowl at me, eyeing my shrinking person over from dripping hat to sodden boots; and well might I shrink, for surely few waking ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... it drifted between my monoplane and the sun. On the upper curve of its huge body there were three great projections which I can only describe as enormous bubbles, and I was convinced as I looked at them that they were charged with some extremely light gas which served to buoy up the misshapen and semi-solid mass in the rarefied air. The creature moved swiftly along, keeping pace easily with the monoplane, and for twenty miles or more it formed my horrible escort, hovering over me like a bird of prey which is ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peaks. From the slight elevation or "bench" upon which he sat he looked down upon a greasewood flat where patches of alkali gleamed dazzling white under the noon-day sun. The flat was quarter-circled by a waterless creek upon whose banks grew a few misshapen and ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... absolutely alone. The house was rather large, and the windows of some of the rooms were nailed up with boards on the outside, which gave a particularly deserted appearance to the whole erection. From the front door an irregular series of rough and misshapen steps, cut in the solid rock, led down to the edge of the streamlet, which, at their extremity, was hollowed into a basin through which the water trickled. This was evidently the means of water supply to the dweller or ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Compare with these jagged misshapen distichs the neat fabric which Hoole's machine produces in unlimited abundance. We take the first lines on which we open in his version of Tasso. They are neither better nor ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... tender's anchor from the sand and pulled sharply across the water to the Gar. A reddish, misshapen moon hung in the east, and when he had mounted to his deck it was suddenly obscured by a high, racing scud of cloud; the air had a damper, thicker feel. He instinctively moved to the barometer, which he found depressed. The wind, that had continued steadily ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was that of his unhappy sovereign. Even before the riot which had made the cardinal supreme in the state, he had succeeded in introducing into the palace a new confessor selected by himself. In a very short time the King's malady took a new form. That he was too weak to lift his food to his misshapen mouth, that, at thirty-seven, he had the bald head and wrinkled face of a man of seventy, that his complexion was turning from yellow to green, that he frequently fell down in fits and remained long insensible, these ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Madden could follow the slender outline of the mysterious craft that had towed the Vulcan to this uncanny spot. It had now left the tug and was gliding away to the great misshapen fabric that sprawled on ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... necessary to our comfort and happiness. Think what you would be, if, through infirmity, you were not at liberty to go hither and thither at will like the young hart or gazelle! We grieve naturally if our children's feet are deformed or misshapen at birth, but what a crime it is to destroy the form and strength of the foot as God has made it! It is true that the Manchu women in China rejoice in the feet which the beneficent Creator has given them. The Dowager ...
— By the Golden Gate • Joseph Carey
... noblest of barbarians, recoiled in horror from their physical and mental deformity. Their voices were shrill, their gestures uncouth, and their shapes scarcely human. They are said by a Gothic historian to have resembled brutes set up awkwardly on their hind legs, or to the misshapen figures (something like, I suppose, the grotesque forms of medieval sculpture), which were placed upon the bridges of antiquity. Their shoulders were broad, their noses flat, and their eyes black, small, and deeply buried in their head. They had little hair on their skulls, and no beard. The report ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the fountain," said the blind child, "listening to the falling water, and the neighbors came to fill their pitchers, and I heard them talking. It was terrible! it seems that every one in the whole village is either bald or cross-eyed, wrinkled or misshapen. All ...
— The Silver Crown - Another Book of Fables • Laura E. Richards
... posed for Quasimodo of Hugo's "Notre-Dame." Decrepit, misshapen, deaf, diminutive, he lived in Paris about 1839, and was organ-blower and bell-ringer in the church of Saint-Louis en l'Ile. He also acted as messenger in the confidential financial correspondence between Bricheteau and Dorlange-Sallenauve. ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... a stout, elderly woman interrupted the girl's persuasions. The elderly woman's back was turned, and the back-loose, bulging, and misshapen—began a convulsive heaving. ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... this log. From a distance men had seen him there many times, sometimes squatted, motionless as the big turtles that would crawl upon its dipping tip in his absence, sometimes erect and vigilant like a creek crane, his misshapen yellow form outlined against the yellow sun, the yellow water, the yellow banks—all of ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... stopped it, but the wall flared into equal and opposite energy, so that matter was raised not to the twelve thousand Morey had estimated but nearer twenty-four thousand degrees. It was over in less than half an hour, and a broken, misshapen mass of blue incandescence floated in space. It would fall now, toward the sun, and it would, because it was motionless and the sun moved, take an eccentric orbit about that sun. Eventually, perhaps, it would wipe out the four inferior planets, ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... dialects at present in use. The radical appears to be snag, knag, or nag (Knoge, Cordylus, cf. Knuckle), a protuberance, knot, lump; being a term chiefly applied to knots in trees, rough pieces of wood, &c., and in its derivatives strongly expressive of (so to speak) misshapen lumpiness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various
... Each instantly looked around him, and beheld a plain trampled, bare and devastated, all the trees cut down within a few feet from the surface, and farther off craggy hills, the highest of which appeared to be the most misshapen. It had all the appearance of an extinguished and destroyed volcano. The ground was covered all around with fragments of helmets and cuirasses, broken drums, gun-stocks, tatters of uniforms, and standards ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... houses that affected to be palaces, the filthiness and gothicism of the churches, the vandalic structure of the theaters of that time, and the many and many and many disagreeable objects that all day fell under my notice, and worst of all the unspeakably misshapen and beplastered faces of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... extinguish the sunlight of life, as that old wolf of the tribe of Fenrir devoured little Red Riding-Hood with her robe of scarlet twilight. [74] Thus we arrive at a true werewolf myth. The storm-wind, or howling Rakshasa of Hindu folk-lore, is "a great misshapen giant with red beard and red hair, with pointed protruding teeth, ready to lacerate and devour human flesh; his body is covered with coarse, bristling hair, his huge mouth is open, he looks from side to side as he walks, ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... photo-screen. Close by Elza, partially behind her, I saw something small, no taller than Elza's waist. A naked thing of sleek, glistening skin. The monstrosity of a human child; a bulging head, wavering upon a neck incapable of supporting it; a thick round body; twisted, misshapen limbs. A face ... human? It made my gorge rise with its gruesome suggestion of humanity. Nostrils—no nose; a mouth, lipless, but red like a curved gash with upturned corners to make the travesty of a grin; a triangle ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... her into fire. The sudden horror of it almost caused collapse. Commotion within—cold and quake and nausea and agony—deadened her hearing and darkened her sight. But Creech's hard hands quickened her. She could see him then, though not clearly. His face seemed inhuman, misshapen, gray. His hands pulled at her arms—a last precaution to see that she was tightly bound. Then with the deft fingers of a rider he slipped ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... minutes, a priest of tall stature, with gray hair and a stern countenance, clad in a long black cassock, stalked slowly along one of the aisles of the church. A short, old, misshapen man, badly dressed, leaning upon an umbrella, accompanied him, and from time to time whispered in his ear, when the priest would stop to listen with a profound and ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... should bear the impress of that man's life and occupation, the chief ornaments of the dwelling were a curious collection of calcinations, that had been discovered from time to time in the lime-kiln—misshapen ingots of strange substance, some of them like ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... they had been ugly, misshapen, vulgar; if only they had spoken with coarse, rough voices, or irritated him by their inferior social tone, or shown themselves unworthy to be the heirs of Tilgate—why then, the Colonel might possibly have forgiven himself! But to see his own two sons, the sons he had never set ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... the Red Beast we hunted these three years through was a most poisonous thing, that it should belch forth such pests as Lord George Germaine, and Loring, and Cunningham, and turn the baronets and gentry of County Tryon into murdering and misshapen ghouls! ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... Misshapen and grim in its old, sinister expression of feature, the baby lay exposed. The face was grotesque in its weazened fixity; the little legs were twisted, and the thin body lay crooked among its blankets. The big eyes stared into the horrified ones above them as if pleading ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... the He-Goats. There was the band of the local cadets, spontaneous in its enthusiasm, its zest for martial music no different, of course. Just behind these lads a strange figure walked in the procession, a bent and misshapen old man, whose face had no expression but a fixed and hypnotic stare. He was keeping time to the measure of the boys' music by snapping the spring of a mouse-trap which he held aloft. I could not find him in the program. Was he also drunk? Or was he a terrible ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... saw coming toward them a misshapen old man. This was Merlin in a strange disguise, though the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester
... her into a closet, and was greatly amazed at sing numerous articles about which my common sense could tell me nothing. There were phials of all shapes and sizes, stones of different colours, metals, minerals, big nails and small nails, pincers, crucibles, misshapen images, and the like. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... always been, and so it is with us individually, as we too well know. Ah, brethren! the seductions are omnipresent, and our poor eyes are very weak, and we turn away from the Lord to look on these misshapen monsters that are seeking by their gaze to draw us into destruction. I wonder how many professing Christians are in this audience who once saw Jesus Christ a great deal more clearly, and contemplated Him a great deal more fixedly, and turned their hearts to Him far more lovingly, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said, and, at her nod of acquiescence, puzzled out the words that emotion and her awkward position had made unsteady and misshapen. Then, he nodded his head with satisfaction, and tucked the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... success of this, his first hunting in the unknown land, the wolf slept for a few hours in his bushy retreat, and then, when the misshapen moon was up, went prowling cautiously around the outskirts of the scattered little settlement. Everywhere the man-smell kept him on his guard. Once he was careless enough to get between the wind and a farmyard, whereupon a watchful cur started a barking, which was taken up ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... 'Go straight forward,' and then Butch began to jump and thump, so Valentine placed Cob-Handle and Keen-Point in his girdle, and took Butch in his hand. Holding the point straight before him, he went towards the misshapen creature. Its red and watery eyes were blinking and winking, and its arms were threshing the air with the clubs at such a tremendous rate that Valentine thought his hour had surely come. But he shut his eyes and went straight at the creature. The sharp ...
— Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country • Joel Chandler Harris
... reason, and her magic power is often displayed in converting deformities into beauties, but there is certainly no court, of which the taste is so absurd, grotesque, and monstrous, as that to which Major Denham was now introduced. An enormous protruding belly, and a huge misshapen head, are the two features, without which it is vain to aspire to the rank of a courtier, or fine gentleman. The form, valued perhaps as the type of abundance and luxury, is esteemed so essential, that where nature has not bestowed, and the most ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... abruptly with a calculated embarrassment of manner, and his roving eye sought the floor, while an apologetic smile dwelt for a moment on his misshapen lips. Once or twice during this opening speech an amused expression flitted across Dain's face, soon to give way, however, to an appearance of grave concern. On Lakamba's brow a heavy frown had settled, and his lips moved angrily as he listened to his Prime Minister's oratory. ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad
... to her feet, her nose still pressed flat against the window-pane as she studied the huge, misshapen figure already on the wide veranda. The footman who had ushered in the guests of the evening was at that moment occupied in fastening up a strand of evergreen which had fallen close above a gas-jet; the President was at the furthest corner of the great parlor engaged in an animated discussion ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown
... important that our knowledge should be as full and complete as we can make it. Partial knowledge nearly always leads us into error. A traveler, as he passed through a large and thick wood, saw a part of a huge oak which appeared misshapen, and almost seemed to spoil the scenery. "If," said he, "I was the owner of this forest, I would cut down that tree." But when he had ascended the hill, and taken a full view of the forest, this same tree appeared the most beautiful part of the landscape. "How erroneously," said he, "I have ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... human; his features were coarse, and strangely discordant and disjointed from each other. His lips were thick, and the tone of his voice broad and unmodulated. His legs were of equal size from one end to the other, and his feet misshapen and clumsy. He had nothing spiteful or malicious in his disposition, but he was a total stranger to tenderness; he could not feel for those refinements in others, of which he had no experience in himself. He was an expert boxer: his inclination ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... a queer sort of misshapen creature, who balanced on a pair of very long spindle-legs a huge trunk, as round as the body of a spider and furnished with immense arms. A bony face and a low, small stubborn forehead pointed to ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... surgical treatment that had followed upon it, had greatly altered the face. The nose, once fine and delicate, was now coarse and misshapen. A wound had permanently distorted the mouth, producing a strange, sneering expression. The whole of the right side of the face was puffy and heavy-looking, and drawn down towards the chin. It was also at present discoloured. For as Lady Holme lay under ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... was the upper camp of the Bostonians. They had profited by a hole in the rocks, and chopped away the stunted scrubs to enlarge it into a snug artificial abyss. It was snug, and so to the eye is a cell at Sing-Sing. If they were very misshapen Bostonians, they may have succeeded in lying there comfortably. I looked down ten feet into the rough chasm, and I saw, Corpo di ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... that the sites still support only a scant herbaceous cover, with broomsedge and povertygrass predominating, and with no evidence of native woody species encroaching on the areas. The few surviving Asiatic chestnut seedlings were sickly looking, multi-stemmed, misshapen trees, heavily infected with twig blight and chestnut blight, and severely damaged by winter injury. But despite these heavy losses, a few plantations succeeded at least in part, and from these limited areas, together with an appraisal of the situations ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... trees stunted and poor ones vastly overgrown according to nature's law which provides for the survival of the fittest. This was the law too, which was to be applied to Peter. Would he grow straight and true in this foreign soil or gnarled and misshapen like the cedars and the maples that he saw? Yes. He would ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... English Government. He lived at Hen Cross, Nottingham, when Byron was staying in that city, partly with Mrs. Parkyns, partly at Mr. Gill's, in St. James's Lane, to be attended by a man named Lavender, "trussmaker to the general hospital", who had some local reputation for the treatment of misshapen limbs. Lavender, in 1814 ('Nottingham Directory' for 1814), appears as a "surgeon". Rogers, who read parts of Virgil and Cicero with Byron, represents him as, for his age, a fair scholar. He was often, during his lessons, in violent pain, from the position in which his ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... time. When she came back again she bore in her arms a bundle, large, knobby and misshapen. It was wrapped in newspapers which had cracked away here and there over the end of a rib; but it was enclosed in a network of strings that crossed and ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... day's automobile run from Paris we found an establishment answering to the plans and specifications. It was shoved jam-up against the road, as is the French custom; and it was surrounded by a high, broken wall, on which all manner of excrescences in the shape of tiny dormers and misshapen little towers hung, like Texas ticks on the ears of a quarantined steer. Within the wall the numerous ruins that made up the inn were thrown together any fashion, some facing one way, some facing the other way, and some facing all ways ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... their own, which gave an opportunity to the teacher to point out difficulties and defects. Had this part of domestic economy been taught in schools, our land would not be so defaced with awkward, misshapen, inconvenient, and, at the same time, needlessly expensive houses, as ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... crawling over a nursery floor might so have laughed if playfully chased by its nurse. But this misshapen hulk of humanity did not possess even the wisdom of a child. He only laughed and crawled faster, looking back with an expression of mischievous ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... as day to the mind all that has before been vague, imperfect, and indistinct. It is like the touch of lightning on an electric chain, link after link starts up till we see the illumined whole. We have said Nigel had never heard the particulars of the tradition; but he looked on that misshapen plank, and in an instant a tale of blood and terror weaved itself in his mind; in that room the deed, whatever it was, had been done, and from that plank the sanguine evidence of murder had been with difficulty erased. ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... mute inquiring way from side to side of the pail that contains them. Looked at closely with an attentive eye, the complex moving mass gradually resolves itself into two parts: one a ruddy seaweed with long streaming fronds; the other, a strangely misshapen and dishevelled pipe-fish, exactly imitating the weed itself in form and colour. When removed from the water, this queer pipe-fish proves in general outline somewhat to resemble the well-known hippocampus or sea-horse of the aquariums, whose dried remains, in a mummified state, form a standing ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... loq.—"My last term at F., I was expecting a box of 'goodies' from home. So when the message came, 'An express-package for you, Miss Fanny!' I invited all my specials to come and assist at the opening. Instead of the expected box, there appeared a misshapen-bundle, done up in yellow wrapping-paper. Four such dejected-looking damsels were never seen before as we, standing around the ugly old ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... drinking, dimmed and half obliterated. Beneath were legends and proverbs, printed in quaint, old-German characters; while across one end, like a frieze, ran a ledge carven with gargoyles, rude and misshapen. On the ledge were beer mugs of every size and description, with queer tops and crooked handles. Above, suspended from the ceiling by chains, hung a huge Fass; and from the throats of the gargoyles, dragon and devil alike, dripped the beer, turned ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... children clung despairingly together and prevented the maintenance of any regular order. Around them, the spectators closely pressing, with morbid curiosity, discussing with loud approval the value of whatever of strength or beauty met their eyes, and occasionally greeting some undersized and misshapen victim with jeers of derision. And closing up the straggling line, more soldiers, marching in well-formed ranks, poising aloft myrtle-decked lances, and, while interchanging salutations with the eddying crowd, singing in measured cadence ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and fierce-eyed, surrounded by the misshapen Spirits of the Mines, sat upon a block of pure silver, with a pile of shining gold ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott |
