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Scraggy   Listen
adjective
Scraggy  adj.  (compar. scragger; superl. scraggiest)  
1.
Rough with irregular points; scragged. "A scraggy rock."
2.
Lean and rough; scragged. "His sinewy, scraggy neck."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Scraggy" Quotes from Famous Books



... definite arrangement of lines is much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape—a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture—a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch of earth ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... covered in every direction with little hills of sand, like haycocks, with scraggy bunches of sea-weed sticking out of the tops of them; and Davy was wondering how they came to be there, when he caught sight of a man walking along the edge of the water, and now and then stopping and gazing earnestly out to sea. As the man drew nearer, Davy saw that he was dressed ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl

... Around it the mountain is glowing in the summer sun, and appears soft and green. A gauze of shimmering blue mantles the crest, darkens in the coves, and becomes quite black in the gorges. The rugged rocks and scraggy trees, if there be any, are at this distance invisible, and nothing is seen but what delights the eye and ...
— The Citizen-Soldier - or, Memoirs of a Volunteer • John Beatty

... been looking away from me. As I finished speaking he turned his face slowly toward me, first the profile, which looked as if cut rapidly with a sharp knife out of ivory, then the full face, with its eyes set so deeply under the scraggy brows, its mouth grimly humorous. He looked somewhat sardonic and decidedly selfish. Well I knew what that expression meant. He had the kindest heart I had ever known, but it never interfered with a most self-indulgent nature. Many times I had begged him to be considerate of some girl who I ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... frown was Ripton's answer. Adrian matched the innocent youths, and knew that there was talking under the table. "See," thought he, "this boy has tasted his first scraggy morsel of life today, and already he talks like an old stager, and has, if I mistake not, been acting too. My respected chief," he apostrophized Sir Austin, "combustibles are only the more dangerous for ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... continued Shag, taking a swinging lick at his scraggy hide with his rough tongue, "in those days, when I was a Smooth Horn, I led a Herd that caused the sweet-grass plain to tremble like water when we galloped over it. We were as locusts—that many; and when crossing a coulee I've turned with pride on the opposite ...
— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser

... of the man on watch at this point was just at the left oblique from the other men, say about ten paces, and very near to a tree which stood apart from the rest of the forest, a scraggy pine of second growth, not very tall, but thick and heavy, with, its limbs starting from the trunk as low as eight feet from the ground. I stood near this tree, within reach of it by a leap. Our nearest vedette ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... baron-bailie quarrelled away about some point of pedigree as they sat, a towsy, unkempt pair, in a dusty corner of the byre, with beards of a most scraggy nature grown upon their chins. Their uncouthness gave a scruple of foppishness to M'I ver, and sent him seeking a razor in the widow's house. He found the late husband's, and shaved himself trimly, while Stewart ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro

... saw that we were running down a kind of alley-way, with a row of very mean little two-storey houses on the one side, and on the other, a kind of waste ground strewn with broken bottles, broken iron pans, broken earthenware and other refuse, interspersed with tufts of long scraggy grass, which looked the more wretched because the sinking sun was ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... rebellious feelings that we watched the German flag fluttering in the breezes. I did not mind the coloured one quite so much, but it was almost more than I could stand to see the pale yellow flag, framing the treacherous scraggy black eagle, flying over my head. In one part of the camp there was just room for a game of tennis. Several classes were formed for learning languages, and indulging in "physical jerks" (culture), though I'm ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight

... her, and Mr Hinks, his scraggy neck at full length, awaited her reply with a look of the most ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing

... possibly more. He looked older and at the same time younger. His shaven chin and lips were sternly cut. His face was thin, his nose arched and fine, his skin and hair neutral in tint. The only colouring about him was in his eyes. They were very blue and deeply set under rather scraggy brows. Magdalena noted that they had a peculiarly penetrating regard, and that they did not smile with the lips. The latter, when not smiling, looked grim and forbidding, and there was a deep line on either side of the mouth. Her memory turned to Colonel Belmont, and the night she had studied ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... and, as she seemed to wish to be alone, Groar did not bother her, but kept a strict lookout all the time. And in the morning she called him to look at something, and this something was a soft, helpless, little, baby giraffe, with delicate limbs and small body, a funny, scraggy, long neck and small head, with the very same sort of gentle, pathetic eyes ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin

... to throw a glance at a woman who had just entered the restaurant—a divesting glance that caused Romarin to redden to his crown and drop his eyes. "I was going to say that you may think as little of my history as I do of yours. Supple woman that; when the rather scraggy blonde does take it into her head to be a devil she's the worst ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions

... corporal took a sudden change for the worse. Even the golden sunlight streaming through the window seemed unable to warm that withered frame. The doctor came and shook his head in silence. All day the man lay with only his puffing blue lips and the twitching of his scraggy neck to show that he still held the breath of life. Norah and Sergeant Macdonald had sat by him in the afternoon, but he had shown no consciousness of their presence. He lay peacefully, his eyes half closed, his hands under his cheek, as one who is ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... under the load of his fifty years and be a boy again? What a pity it is that we must age and die in our wrinkles, leaving nothing better to gaze upon than a shrunken face, colorless of bloom and written all over with the scraggy record of our griefs, our errors, and our pains! Why cannot death charm back the boyish vigor and girlish grace to our faces, when, with the invisible and fatal gesture, he sweeps his hand swiftly ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... savage fighting of the whole war took place there, owing to the struggle of the enemy to retain a footing on that splendid line of observation, the Lorette Ridge. The Arras-Bethune Road, known as the Route de Bethune, and bordered by a few scraggy trees, ran through the sector more or less from North to South—about a mile behind the front line, and two miles in front of Mont St. Eloy. The forward area was a scene of desolation—trenches and wire, shell-holes everywhere, ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman

... rising on Orange River Camp. Our tents are pitched on the slopes of white sand, soft and deep, into which you sink at every step, that stretch down to the river, dotted with a few scraggy thorn-trees. There are men round me, sleeping about on the sand, rolled in their dark brown blankets, like corpses laid out, covered from head to foot, with the tight folds drawn over their feet and over their heads. A few bestir themselves, roll, and stretch, and draw back ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps

... high road, where people are passing—or at Stornham, where the servants would overhear and Rosalie be thrown into hysterics. You will NOT run screaming across the marsh, because I should run screaming after you, and we should both look silly. Here is a rather scraggy tree. Will you sit on the ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... through woods, and they are all a blaze of red in every shade, from the brightest fieriest crimson to a dark purple, that is, all except those which are green or yellow. The mixture is much prettier than all one colour would be, and by contrast with the dark scraggy-looking pines, it does not look the least gaudy. Well, I'm going to shut up and do some reading. So good bye for the present, and best love to everyone under the sun when it ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn

... those who belonged to the gang. Soldiers were allowed about a pound of meat a day. This would have been luxury if the meat had been good, and if they had had anything else to eat with it. But a pound of bad beef, or of scraggy horse-flesh, or some times even of flabby salt cod-fish, with a quarter of a pound of bread, and nothing else but a little Indian corn, is not a good ration for an army. The Canadians were worse off still. In the spring the bread ration ...
— The Passing of New France - A Chronicle of Montcalm • William Wood

... the opposite page are those you should have, and if you get two of each, you will find them useful in all sorts of places. When you buy them, see that they are elastic and firm, that they come naturally and easily to a good point, without any scraggy hairs. Test them by moistening them, and then pressing the point on the thumb-nail. They should bend evenly through the whole length of the hair. Reject any which seem "weak in the back." If it lays flat toward ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... developing into an orchard and deteriorating into a scraggy plantation, ended in a low wall that was at about the level of the sea-wall and separated from it by a water-course and a strip of very green meadow. Audrey glanced instinctively back at the house to see if anybody was ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett

... grass, and then it was covered with the daintiest dishes that any one could desire, and there was wine, and mead, and cake. And now she became brisk and well again, and grew so rosy, and plump, and fair that the Queen and her scraggy daughter turned blue and white with vexation at it. The Queen could not imagine how her step-daughter could look so well on such bad food, so she ordered one of her handmaidens to follow her into the wood and watch her, and see how it was, for she thought that some of the servants ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various

... three hundred are said to have arrived. Standing on the streets, waiting for cars, lost in wandering about the streets searching for homes, the negroes presented a helpless group. The search for homes carried them into the most undesirable sections. Here the scraggy edges of society met. The traditional attitude of unionists toward negroes began to assert itself. Fear that such large numbers would weaken present and subsequent demands aroused considerable opposition to their presence. Meetings were held, exciting ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott

... they swept over the open space and plunged into the wilderness of rocks and scraggy brush beyond. One look the patrol leader gave, after they found themselves in the shelter of the ...
— Boy Scouts on Hudson Bay - The Disappearing Fleet • G. Harvey Ralphson

... professedly held for the worship of the Divine, by the Representative of Christ on earth, he had watched with sickening soul all the tawdry ceremonial so far removed from the simplicity of Christ's commands,—he had stared dully, till his brows ached, at the poor, feeble, scraggy old man with the pale, withered face and dark eyes, who was chosen to represent a "Manifestation of the Deity" to his idolatrous followers;—and as he thought of all the poverty, sorrow, pain, perplexity, and bewilderment of the ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... good Mrs. Winslow Orry," said the smiling eyes of Mrs. Dagon to that lady. "How doubly scraggy you look in that worn-out old sea-green satin!" said the smiling ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis

... and milk for dinner from an old Scotch woman who pointed out the direction of Loch Katrine, six miles distant; there was no road, nor, indeed, a solitary dwelling between. The hills were bare of trees, covered with scraggy bushes and rough heath, which in some places was so thick we could scarcely drag our feet through. Added to this, the ground was covered with a kind of moss that retained the moisture like a sponge; so that our boots ere long became thoroughly soaked. Several considerable streams were ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... well. What do we do with ailing vegetables? Dr. Warren, my honored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, including half of an old orchard. A few years afterwards I saw the trees on his side of the fence looking in good health, while those on the other side were scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this change was brought about? By watering them with Fowler's solution? By digging in calomel freely about their roots? Not at all; but by loosening the soil round them, and supplying them with the right kind ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... There is no an object, not a circumstance, in visible Nature which does not heighten the contrast. In England there is the luxuriant foliage, the fragrant blossom, the gay flower; in Canada, black twigs—bare, scraggy, and altogether wretched—thrust their repulsive forms forth into the bleak air—there, the soft rain-shower falls; here, the fierce snow-squall, or maddening sleet!—there, the field is traversed by the cheerful plough; here, it is covered ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille

... of bed and thud-thudded across the room on her heels to shut the window she glanced out into the quiet street. Her city eyes, untrained to nature's hints, failed to notice that the scraggy, smoke-dwarfed oak that sprang, somehow, miraculously, from the mangey little dirt-plot in front of the building had developed surprising things all over its scrawny branches overnight. But she did see that the front windows of ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... viewed the scraggy specimens in the menageries and zoological gardens would scarcely suspect the activity and power of running possessed by them. The body is covered with such an abundance of hair that it looks larger ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... been only the scraggy little tree she had taken care of, the battered old toys, the torn dolls and the little pets she had played with and loved so well, the bird and the wild creatures she had fed and chattered to, and a little bit of ivy and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... traversed, as has been said, the wooded hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees, against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his own steps only, ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... leisure for admiring the scenery; the light native cart, or ekka, consisting of a somewhat small body screened by a wide white hood, and capable of holding far more luggage than would at first sight seem possible, and drawn by a scraggy-looking but much enduring little horse tied up by a wild and complicated system of harness (chiefly consisting of bits of old rope) between a ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... chair was surrounded by a compact wall of laughing young faces, and thirty pairs of eyes stared at her from head to foot, back again from foot to head. Her black skirt was so short that it was like a flounce, and nothing more; from chest to back there was no more width than could be covered by the scraggy little arm, the feet dangled half- way to the floor, and the hands waved about, emphasising every ...
— Pixie O'Shaughnessy • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... to an animal, and were left undisturbed on their chosen range. Two hours' ride brought the boys to the forks of the Beaver, and by the middle of the forenoon the south branch of the creek was traced to its source among the sand dunes. If not inviting, the section proved interesting, with its scraggy plum brush, its unnumbered hills, and its many depressions, scalloped out of the sandy soil by the action of winds. Coveys of wild quail were encountered, prairie chicken took wing on every hand, and near the noon hour a monster gray wolf arose from a sunny siesta on the summit ...
— Wells Brothers • Andy Adams

... upon their heads, the perspiration streaming down their faces from the combined effects of the sun and their load. The last of the party was a stout man, apparently some five-and-forty years of age, dressed in a jacket and breeches of coarse brown cloth, and seated sideways on a scraggy mule, in such a position that his back was to the guard-house as he passed it. On the opposite side of the animal hung a pannier, containing cabbages and other vegetables; the unsold residue of the rider's stock in trade. The peasant's legs, naked below the knee, were tanned by the sun to ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various

... walls, the internal economy, the high amenity, the general aesthetic and social appeal, of which still hangs in its wealth before me. Dr. McElroy, uplifting tight-closed eyes, strange long-drawn accents and gaunt scraggy chin, squirming and swaying and cushion-thumping in his only a shade more chastely adorned temple, is distinct enough too—just as we enjoyed this bleak intensity the more, to my personal vision, through the vague ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... over countless flows and beds of lava, much disintegrated, and almost entirely of the kind called pahoehoe. Countless pit craters extend over the whole mountain, all of them covered outside, and a few inside, with scraggy vegetation. The edges are often very ragged and picturesque. The depth varies from 300 to 700 feet, and the diameter from 700 to 1,200. The walls of some are of a smooth grey stone, the bottoms flat, and ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... ought," said Meldon. "I need scarcely say I don't agree with him. But that's not the point. As a matter of fact, so far from being hanged or incurring any kind of odium, his system is quite the most popular there is at present. London is full of young men in large, round spectacles, and scraggy women who haven't succeeded in getting married—the leaders of modern thought, you'll observe, Major—every one of whom is deeply attached to Nietzsche. You can't, without labelling yourself a hopeless reactionary, fly right in the face of cultured society ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham

... the hill had been so impetuous and the horse was now running so madly under the whip that there was no such thing as checking him. With a crash of splintering wood he drove breast-on against the gate, throwing up his bony head at the end of his scraggy neck. At the crash the woman screamed and covered her eyes. But the outfit was too much of a catapult to be stopped. Through the gate it went, and the wagon roared away through the bridge, the driver yelling ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day

... a man, a stranger, riding towards the house and she stood to await his approach. He belonged to what is rather indiscriminately known in that section of the State as the "piney-woods" genus. A rawboned fellow, lank and long of leg; as ungroomed with his scraggy yellow hair and beard as the scrubby little Texas pony which he rode. His big soft felt hat had done unreasonable service as a head-piece; and the "store clothes" that hung upon his lean person could never in their remotest freshness have ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... but its general aspect is precisely what it was when we were last there. The snow-ball and the sweet-briar are in their old places, each side of the humble porch; the white blossoms have fallen from the scraggy branches of the snow-ball, this first week in June; the fresh pink buds are opening on the fragrant young shoots of the sweet-briar. There is our friend, Miss Patsey, wearing a sun-bonnet, at work in the garden; and if you look through the open door of ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper

... situated in a deep mountain hollow, finely overlooking a large extent of cultivation. The people grow sweet potatoes, manioc—out of which tapioca is made—beans, and the holcus. Not one chicken could be purchased for love or money, and, besides grain, only a lean, scraggy specimen of a goat, a long time ago imported form ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... weak—still!" said he, "but not so bad—you're no scraggy sylph, thank heaven! Hermione—look at me!" But she turned and hid her face against him, for his clasp was close about her still. So he stooped and kissed her hair, her glowing cheek, her soft white neck, and, in that instant—wonder of wonders—her arms were around him, strong, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... time she would hear the tavern-keeper's geese going at the back of the huts to her kitchen-garden, and she would run out of the hut with a long stick and spend half an hour screaming shrilly by her cabbages, which were as gaunt and scraggy as herself; at another time she fancied that a crow had designs on her chickens, and she rushed to attack it wi th loud words of abuse. She was cross and grumbling from morning till night. And often she raised such ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... its hollows on almost every side, rises a low hill, with a species of table land on the top, scattered over with large thorns and scraggy oaks that cast their shadows over the pale buff bents of the short soft grass of the gravelly soil. Looking southward is a low, irregular, old-fashioned house, with two tall gable ends like eyebrows, and the lesser gable of a porch between them, all covered with large chequers of black timber, ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... To see them looking scraggy and sick, you will be thrown into despair by the miscarriage of some plan, which ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller

... miles east of Mesa del Nayarit the descent toward the pueblo of Jesus Maria begins. The valley appears broad and hilly, and the vegetation assumes the aspect of the Hot Country. Specially noticeable were the usual thickets of thorny, dry, and scraggy trees, seen even on the edge of the mesa. They are called guisachi, and in the vernacular of the common man the word has been utilised to designate a sharper. A man who "hooks on," as, for instance, a tricky lawyer, is called a guisachero. It is the counterpart of the "lawyer palm" ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... until his scraggy whiskers almost touched my cheek, looking straight into my eyes with keen, intent ...
— The Sign of Silence • William Le Queux

... Gasped a wheezing old peasant, Half stifled with asthma. (His nose pinched and shrivelled Like that of a dead man, His eyes bright and sunken, His hands like a rake— Stiffened, scraggy, and bony, 120 His legs long and narrow Like spokes of a wheel, A ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov

... impatience, and every minute or so out went his head and beard bidding the driver to hasten and hasten; and the driver, crouched there in his little penthouse, rumbled out fierce arr-e-ees, and prodding forth a blue-sleeved arm beneath his blanket, lashed the scraggy mules into a gallop. ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne

... by a crowd after a display of fireworks. Gnarled, misshapen trees were scattered here and there; dwarf elms with gray trunks covered with yellow, leprous-like spots and stripped of branches to a point higher than a man's head; scraggy oaks, eaten by caterpillars so that their leaves were like lacework. The verdure was scant and sickly and entirely unshaded, the leaves above had a very unhealthy look; the stunted, ragged, parched foliage made only faint green ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt

... gone, the wood thinned and the beeches failed, and they came to a country, still waste, of little low hills, stony for the more part, beset with scraggy thorn-bushes, and here and there some other berry-tree sown by the birds. Then said Roger: "Now I deem us well out of the peril of them of the Burg, who if they follow the chase as far as the sundering ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris

... Islands. Monmouth and Grafton Isles are very Hilly, with many of those steep inhabited Precipi[c]es on them, that I shall describe particularly. The two small Islands are flat and even; only the Bashee Island hath one steep scraggy Hill, but Goat Island is all flat and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various

... stretching out his arm in that fashion towards the northwest. Palm, well stretched out, measuring 250 miles; and the crossway 100. There are still beavers in Schlesien; the Katzbach River has gold grains in it, a kind of Pactolus not now worth working; and in the scraggy lonesome pine-woods, grimy individuals, with kindled mounds of pine-branches and smoke carefully kept down by sods, are sweating out a substance which they inform you is ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... Quai d'Orsay, and W. gave rendezvous to Comte de Pontecoulant and some of the sporting men of the cabinet, in the courtyard. There were also several stablemen, all much interested in the idea of taming the fiery steeds of the desert. The first look was disappointing. They were thin, scraggy animals, apparently all legs and manes. Long tails they had, and small heads, but anything so tame and sluggish in their movements could hardly be imagined. One could scarcely get them to canter around the courtyard. We were all rather disgusted, as sometimes one sees pretty little Arab horses in ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington

... aspect of affairs. In addition to having to spend the evening by himself, the cook sent him a very moderate dinner, smoked soup, sodden fish, scraggy cutlets, and sour pudding. Mr. Plummey, too, seemed to have put all the company bottle-ends together for him. This would not do. If Sponge could have satisfied himself that his host would not be better in a day or two, he would have thought seriously of leaving; but as he ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... little wax-like hands relax their hold. She did not say anything, but obeyed him in spite of the terror that this exercise caused her; and she was so pitifully light in weight that she did not even fully stretch the ropes, being like one of those poor scraggy little birds which fall from a young tree without as ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola

... drawled one of the men,—a weird, withered fellow with a scraggy beard and a reflective ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd

... spring-time is the cause of the grass of a field growing very slowly, remaining scraggy and puny, flowering and fruiting ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin

... course went along the top of a range of hills lying parallel with the Lake. A great part of yesterday was on the same range. It is a thousand feet above the water, and is covered with trees rather scraggy. At sunset the red glare on the surface made the water look like a sea of reddish gold; it seemed so near that many went off to drink, but were three or four hours in doing so. One cannot see the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... and miserable, with a few scraggy trees bowing low, like all trees of Sistan, towards the S.S.E., owing to the severe, N.N.W. winds. Here instead of the everlasting domes, flat roofs were again visible—wood being, no doubt, available ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor

... everything. There wasn't a gentleman in the country had better outbuildings of all sorts. It was a real tip-top place, good enough for the Governor himself if he came to live up the country. All the old fencing had been knocked down, and new railings and everything put up. Some of the scraggy trees had been cleared away, and all the dead wood burned. I never thought the old place could have showed out the way it did. But money can do a lot. It ain't everything in this world. But there's precious little it won't get you, ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... sign of the mill was a straggling group of small frame houses, built of unpainted pine lumber. The barren soil, which would not have supported a firm lawn, was dotted with scraggy bunches of wiregrass. In the open doorways, through which the flies swarmed in and out, grown men, some old, some still in the prime of life, were lounging, pipe in mouth, while old women pottered about the yards, or pushed back their ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt

... or if he did his words failed to reach M. Zola. The reins were jerked, the scraggy night-horse broke into a spasmodic trot turned out of the station, and pulled up in front of the caravansary which an eminent butcher has done so ...
— With Zola in England • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... lady was for dying like Mary, Queen of Scots (to whom she fancied she bore a resemblance in beauty), and, stroking her scraggy neck, said, "They will find Isabel of Castlewood is equal to her fate." Her gentlewoman, Victoire, persuaded her that her prudent course was, as she could not fly, to receive the troops as though she suspected nothing, and that her chamber was the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray

... his own mind had sensed the change, there came the spatter of Archies by the dozen and the menacing roar of machine guns, sheltered here and there over the scraggy plain within the pill-boxes that have of late been substituted for the vanishing trench lines. Artillery bombardments by the Allies have so devastated certain regions that trenches have become impossible; hence ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry

... thin. His dry, sallow skin showed signs of wrinkling; a thick fold lay under each eye, and at each end of his upper lip. There were no prominent cheek-bones or almond-shaped eyes, which are so distinctively seen in most of the Mongolian race. Under the scraggy mustache we could distinguish a rather benevolent though determined mouth; while his small, keen eyes, which were somewhat sunken, gave forth a flash that was perhaps but a flickering ember of the fire they once contained. The left eye, which ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... dried fruits; at their doors, flitches of fat bacon, cut and dusty. The meat with which the butchers' shops overflowed was not from show-beasts, as Ned could see, but the cheaper flesh of over-travelled cattle, ancient oxen, ewes too aged for bearing; all these lean scraggy flabby-fleshed carcasses surrounded and blackened by buzzing swarms of flies that invaded the foot-path outside in clouds. The draperies had tickets, proclaiming unparalleled bargains, on every piece; the whole stock seemed displayed outside and in the doorway. ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... to stretch out one of her scraggy hands, which was worn and thin at the fingertips, and pricked with the sharp ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan

... painted plaster had peeled off, and was lying about in clods; fowls and cats had so taken possession of the out- buildings, that I couldn't help thinking of the fairy tales, and eyeing them with suspicion, as transformed retainers, waiting to be changed back again. One old Tom in particular: a scraggy brute, with a hungry green eye (a poor relation, in reality, I am inclined to think): came prowling round and round me, as if he half believed, for the moment, that I might be the hero come to marry the lady, and set all to-rights; ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... Toronto Camp near Brandhoek, where it enjoyed its full share of the evening's excitement from Hun bombing planes. On September 7th, the battalion went by train to Ypres as far as the Asylum, and from there filed cautiously by platoons through the town, past the ever famous Cloth Hall, whose scraggy skeleton could be only dimly discerned in the darkness, and through the Menin Gate. A short distance along the Menin Road, and then we turned off and eventually got on "J" track—the interminable length of duck boards ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson

... found our warbler, the head of a family, hard at work as any sparrow, feeding a beloved, but somewhat scraggy looking, youngster, the feeble likeness of himself. There, too, we found the little brown mamma, the same, as we suppose, whose nest-building we had watched with so much interest. She also had a youngster ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller

... think he looks scraggy in that long-tailed coat, shocks of taggy hair and a collar big enough to fit Old Harpeth?" I ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... her fourteen years, and very slender—"scraggy," Jim was wont to say, with the cheerful frankness of brothers. Norah bore the epithet meekly—she held the view that it was better to be dead than fat. There was something boyish in the straight, slim figure in the blue linen ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... doors were besieged by a mob of shabby fellows, (illotum vulgus,) who were at length quieted after two or three had been somewhat roughly handled (gladio jugulati). The speaker was the well-known Mark Tully, Eq.,—the subject Old Age. Mr. T. has a lean and scraggy person, with a very unpleasant excrescence upon his nasal feature, from which his nickname of CHICK-PEA (Cicero) is said by some to be derived. As a lecturer is public property, we may remark, that his outer garment ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... were the men: busy at this moment with hurling wooden balls along the alley, at the further end of which a hollow-eyed scraggy youth, in shirt and rough linen trousers, was employed in propping up again the fallen nine-pins. Squire John Boatfield had ridden over from Eastry, Sir Timothy Harrison had come in his aunt's coach, and young Squire Pyncheon with his ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy

... my way steadily upward in a straight line through a dense undergrowth of mountain laurel, until the trees began to have a scraggy and infernal look, as if contending with frost goblins, and at length I reached the summit, just as the sun was setting. Several acres here had been cleared, and were covered with rocks and stumps, and there was a rude observatory in the middle which overlooked the woods. I had one ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... has been got up there, are daily speeding forward to add themselves:—such a swarm of hornets, as darkens the very daylight for you. Vain to scourge them down, to burn them off by blaze of gunpowder: they fly fast; but are straightway back again. They lurk in these bushy wildernesses, scraggy woods: no foraging possible, unless whole regiments are sent out to do it; you cannot get a letter safely carried for them. They are an unspeakable contemptible grief to the earnest leader of men.—Let us proceed, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... of the scraggy part of a neck of mutton. Cut the meat from the bones, and cut off all the fat. Then cut meat into small pieces and put into soup pot with one large slice of turnip, two of carrot, one onion and a stalk of celery, all cut fine, ...
— Miss Parloa's New Cook Book • Maria Parloa

... scraggy neck which he held in the fork of his hand. They were, by this time, ringed about by spectators, but the thief was not less expert with crowds than with pockets. He was no sooner loose than he seemed to merge into the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon

... around, and there was a white bear, very large but very lean and scraggy, which had sneaked up behind the sailors, and now had clutched one of them, whom he very speedily killed and commenced to eat, while the ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... to-day. I have had a wash in a thimbleful of water, and shaved, and feel another man. They gave us an hour of stables, but the horses certainly needed it, as they never get groomed now, and are a shaggy, scraggy-looking lot. I'm glad to say mine are quite free from galls and sore backs. As one never sees their backs by daylight, it is interesting to get a good look at them at last. They are very liable to sore backs (partly owing to the weight of the military saddle), if there is ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... tables long ago salvaged from the Bolton wreck. And since Mrs. Deacon Whittle's dream parlor, with its marble-tops and plush-upholstered furniture, had become a solid reality, other parlors burgeoned forth in multi-colored magnificence. Scraggy old shrubs were trimmed; grass was cut in unkempt dooryards; flowers were planted—and all because of the lavish display of such improvements at Bolton House, as "that queer Orr girl" persisted in calling it; thereby flying in the face of public opinion and local prejudice in a way which soured the ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... add, especially for packing, are of nearly as great importance as the goodness of the animal who carries them. English saddlers never, I believe, can be induced to stuff a saddle sufficiently; because they have no opportunity of seeing the miserable, scraggy condition of a travelled horse's back, to which it is destined to fit. But an English saddle, restuffed at a bush frontier ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton

... get almost the entire root. I have three particular points in this; good root, a stem without any blemish, and a rapid growing tree. This is seldom to be got where most people recommend trees to be taken from—isolated ones on the outside of the woods; they are generally scraggy and stunted; and to get their roots you would have to follow along way to get at the fibers on their points, without which they will have a hard struggle to live. Another point recommended is to plant so that ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... he found himself so closely pursued that he seemed to have no resource but to turn and dash his coat into the dog's face. That gave him an instant's reprieve; then Lion was upon him again; and he had just time to leap to the low limb of a scraggy oak-tree, and swing his lower limbs free from the ground, when the fierce eyes and red tongue were ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge

... spread that Miss Sophie was starving herself to death to get some luckless relative out of jail for Christmas,—a rumor which enveloped her scraggy little figure with a kind of halo to the neighbors when she appeared on ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore

... below gave place gradually to a wilderness—ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths—the desolation surrounding the Fronts of yesterday ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... wide. Although there are not less miles than he said, he did not say they were English miles, which are only one-fourth the length of Dutch miles, of fifteen to a degree. The southwest point, which only has been and is still cultivated, is barren, scraggy, and sandy, growing plenty of wild onions, a weed not easily eradicated. On this point three or four houses are standing, built by the Swedes, a little Lutheran church made of logs,[202] and the remains of the large block-house, which served them in place of a fortress, ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... swarms in a year, it seemed to me—we'd tin-kettle 'em, and throw water on 'em, to make 'em believe the biggest thunderstorm was coming to drown the oldest inhabitant; and, if they didn't get the start of us and rise, they'd settle on a branch—generally on one of the scraggy fruit trees. It was rough on the bees—come to think of it; their instinct told them it was going to be fine, and the noise and water told them it was raining. They must have thought that nature was mad, drunk, or gone ratty, or the ...
— On the Track • Henry Lawson

... by the butler with a flourish, and he stood back holding it wide for Max to enter, looking very thin and scraggy, in a glossy new evening suit, with tight patent leather boots, handkerchief in one hand, new white gloves ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn

... a score of permanent families, a host of merry, sturdy children, a number of idle young men, and only one girl—Lucy Bostil. But the village always had transient inhabitants—friendly Utes and Navajos in to trade, and sheep-herders with a scraggy, woolly flock, and travelers of the strange religious sect identified with Utah going on into the wilderness. Then there were always riders passing to and fro, and sometimes unknown ones regarded with caution. Horse-thieves sometimes boldly rode in, ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... protested with apologies they couldn't understand how the mistake arose: but Schomberg when I dropped in later to get some tiffin, though surprised to see me, was perfectly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end of a long narrow table, facing his wife—a scraggy little woman, with long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three Chinamen in white jackets loafed with napkins in their ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... symbolism began to seem deceptive. Under the stress of the moment the only vision to which she could attain was that of the Misses Rodman begging for the pitiful job of teaching Italian in a young ladies' school. She remembered them vaguely—tall, scraggy, permanently girlish in dress and manner, and looking their true fifty only about the neck and eyes. With their mother they lived in a pretty villa on the Poggio Imperiale, and had called on her occasionally when she passed through Florence. The knowledge of ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King

... Frankfurt" on the Oder, whence they reconnoitred "the field of Kunersdorf, a scraggy village where Fritz received his worst defeat," they reached the Prussian capital on the last evening of the month. From the British Hotel, Unter den Linden, we have, ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... Jane solely with this view; and, indeed, it was highly improbable that he should have done so on any other consideration. Sarah Jane was certainly not a handsome girl. Her neck was scraggy, her arms lean, and her lips thin; and she resembled neither her father nor her mother. Her light brown, sandy hair, which always looked as though it were too thin and too short to adapt itself to any feminine usage, was also not of her family; but her disposition was a compound of ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope

... the arroyo came a sharp clatter of hoofs. He whirled, with his rifle at his shoulder. Over the barrel he saw a scraggy pony loping down into the wash along the trail of the burro. The pony's rider was armed with a rifle. Lennon took quick aim—only to drop the muzzle of his weapon. The rider had flung up a gauntleted hand, palm outward. A musical feminine hail ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet

... preponderates—the long visage, the dull eyes, the crooked legs—it is impossible to perceive any grace in such a wretched animal. I can't help thinking that if it had been a young girl you had brought me—say, a sleeping nymph—full of youth and beauty, 'twould have been a vast improvement on the scraggy jeanie contained in this box. But clear away, Bristles, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... the most remarkable live stock in the Landes are the sheep. Such a melancholy careworn flock! poor relations of the plump Southdown that grazes on fat Sussex wolds. Long-legged, scraggy-necked, anxious-eyed, the sheep of the Landes bear eloquent testimony to the penury of the place and the difficulty of making both ends meet—which in their case implies the burrowing of the nose in tufts of sand-girt grass. To abide among such sheep through the long day should be enough ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy

... he seemed to be in the last straits. He held doggedly on, in spite of cold and tempest and disease. His own frail body broke down, and for the first time the shadow of depression fell on the British camps when they no longer saw the red head and lean and scraggy body of their general moving amongst them. For a week, between August 22 and August 29, he lay apparently a dying man, his face, with its curious angles, white with pain and haggard with disease. But he struggled out again, and framed yet new plans of attack. ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett

... tell at what time the comet would pass the meridian, I stationed myself at the telescope in the meridian-room by 10 P.M., and watched for the comet to cross. As it approached the meridian, I saw that it would go behind a scraggy apple-tree. I sent for the watchman, Mr. Crumb, to come with a saw, and cut off the upper limbs. He came back with an axe, and chopped away vigorously; but as one limb after another fell, and I said, 'I need more, cut away,' he said, ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell

... said the old woman, becoming suddenly grave, and laying her thin scraggy hand on the man's arm; "why do you ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne

... not run with milk; nor in the spring-time do they pave them with fresh eggs. Yet, in spite of this, nowhere in all America will you find more patrician-like houses; parks and gardens more opulent, than in New Bedford. Whence came they? how planted upon this once scraggy scoria of a country? Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the .. Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... fighters, half-civilized, half-savage, and almost entirely supported by the subsidies they receive. Nearly all of the able-bodied men are under arms. A few, who are too old or too young to fight, remain at home and look after the cattle and the scraggy gardens upon the gravelly hillsides. The women are as hardy and as enduring as the men and are taught to handle the rifle. The British authorities are confident of the loyalty of the Afridis and believe ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis

... a few weeks after, Mrs. Pepper and Polly were busy in the kitchen. Phronsie was out in the "orchard," as the one scraggy apple-tree was called by courtesy, singing her rag doll to sleep under its sheltering branches. But "Baby" was cross and wouldn't go to sleep, and Phronsie was on the point of giving up, and returning to the house, when a strain of music made her pause with dolly in her apron. There she stood with ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney

... work to do. When I came back the gallon jar was empty, and he lay as you see him, with the board in front of him with this sorry device." She raised up a panel which was leaning against the wall, and showed a rude painting of a scraggy and angular fowl, with very long legs and ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... interrupted the beautiful rhythm of his stride. At the far end of the clearing, snuggled between two great pines that reached high into the blue, his squatty cabin showed red-brown against the precipitous shoulder of Bear Top peak, covered thick with brush and scraggy timber whipped incessantly by the wind that blew over the ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower

... cobbling and let the weeds grow in his garden, while he moodily watched his melons as they withered away. Soon he came to idle about them in the evening, too, until, one bright moonlight night, as he was grieving over the wretched, scraggy vines, he heard a tiny, silvery voice quite near ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various

... formerly levelled for a bowling-green, and was kept clear of shrubs or flower-beds. Beyond was a smooth, rather rapid slope towards a quiet river, beyond which there rose again a beautiful green field, crowned above by a thick wood, ending at the top in some scraggy pine-trees, with scanty dark foliage at the top of their rude russet arms. Fine trees stood out here and there upon the slope of the field; and Captain Merrifield's fine sleeked cows were licking each other, or ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ashen-white your eyebrows, there, and lashes, Precocious hags! The world's but dust and ashes. Wrinkles and crowsfeet next must have their turn (To limn them in let toilette artists learn), Then make each belle bald, scraggy-necked and toothless, Grey hair alone won't make Society youthless. Let belles turn beldams if they find it jolly. But they might ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various

... native populace much more interesting. The great mass consists of Konkani Moslems, with dark features and scraggy beards. They were clad in chintz turbans, resembling the Parsee headgear, and in long cotton coats, with shoes turned up at the toes, and short drawers or pyjamas. There were also Persians, with a totally different type of face, and clothed in quite a different way, mainly in white ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... then, there is other Processioning, scraggy Discoursing, and—this is our Feast of the Etre Supreme; our new Religion, better or worse, is come!—Look at it one moment, O Reader, not two. The Shabbiest page of Human Annals: or is there, that thou wottest of, one shabbier? Mumbo-Jumbo of the African woods to me seems venerable beside ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... she was to-day without a servant; she must needs descend into the kitchen herself and answer the summons. When the nether regions were illumined and the door thrown open, Lilian beheld a familiar figure, that of a scraggy and wretchedly clad woman with a moaning infant ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... construction of the houses and the rustic simplicity of its inhabitants. The few streets that run between the straggling lines of sheds and sod-covered huts scattered over the rocks are narrow and tortuous, winding up steep, stony precipices, and into deep, boggy hollows; around rugged points, and over scraggy mounds of gravel and grit. The public edifices, consisting of two or three small churches and the amtman's residence, are little better than martin-boxes. For some reason best known to the people in these Northern climes, they paint their houses black, except where the ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... us regularly twice a year: once in summer for the Muckle Friday, when the performers were gay and stout, and even the horses had flesh on their bones; and again in the "back-end" of the year, when cold and hunger had taken the blood from their faces, and the scraggy dogs that whined at their side were lashed for licking the paint off the caravans. While the storm-stead show was in the vicinity the villages suffered from an invasion of these dogs. Nothing told more truly the dreadful tale of the showman's life in winter. Sam'l ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie

... this situation was the more desirable because of all the parts above it being bleak and dreary. Round the shoulders of the upland, like the arch of a great arm-chair, ran a barren scraggy ridge, whereupon no tree could stand upright, no cow be certain of her own tail, and scarcely a crow breast the violent air by stooping ragged pinions, so furious was the rush of wind when any power awoke the clouds; or sometimes, when the air ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... 31st January, 1872.—Through scraggy bush, then open forest with short grass, over a broad rill and on good path to village ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... Rogomme, Mademoiselle Saltarelli's mother, who entertained him in the French language in a dark parlour smelling of onions. And oh! issuing from the adjoining dining-room (where was a dingy vision of a feast and pewter pots upon a darkling tablecloth), could that lean, scraggy, old, beetle-browed yellow face, who cried, "Ou es tu donc, maman?" with such a shrill nasal voice—could that elderly vixen be that blooming and divine Saltarelli? Clive drew her picture as she was, and a likeness of Madame Rogomme, her ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray

... that, mark ye, Noll, not because I owe him close on ten thousand. I used to owe a rascal named Blayton quite as much, and every time he came whining round here I either wanted to kick him out or did it. Heigh-ho! I'm in the very devil of a mess but I'll cheat scraggy-neck yet. I'll reform outright, Noll. I'll never touch a card again as ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough

... said Sartello, leaving the scraggy laurel behind which he had concealed himself. "What cheer brings thou from Rome, my gallant lad'? Certes, thy look is loftier and manlier now, ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray

... but at last someone managed to shoot one and brought it to England, so then he had to be believed. The one here in the Museum has spread his wings, and the length from end to end is larger than the tallest man. The hideous vultures near have scraggy necks, with a ruff round them. The vultures never kill animals for their own food, but live on the refuse that is left by other animals or men. The eagle is like the lion among the animals, and the vulture is like the jackal, who ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... could take that rotten tree along with us," murmured Morvyth, pointing to a decayed old stump that stood upright with two withered boughs like scraggy arms outstretched ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil

... sat down to handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages fluently a perfect gentleman he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud, there is no question about it—old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture the reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I will wait for another election. And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen, I will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend him, I shall be glad to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... estimated value of her share. It was in order to fill up the void thus created in his finances that he had espoused the half-million represented by Constance—an ugly creature, as he himself bitterly acknowledged, coarse male as he was. Truth to tell, she was so thin, so scraggy, that before consenting to make her his wife he had often called her "that bag of bones." But, on the other hand, thanks to his marriage with her, all his losses were made good in five or six years' time; the business of the works even doubled, and great prosperity set in. And Mathieu, ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... is stone blind, and as scraggy as a scarecrow, so there's not much driving to be had out of him. Fancy if the aristocratic Power, or some other Saint Winifred's fellow saw us! Why, it would supply Henderson with jokes for six weeks," said Kenrick, getting up and touching ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... very dark against a yellow line of sky. Marian continued her way thoughtfully toward the garden, turned off before she reached the gate and climbed a ladder which leaned against the side of the old brick wall. From the ladder one could reach a long limb of a scraggy apple tree upon which hung early apples nearly ripe. Marian went up the ladder very carefully, taking care not to catch her frock upon a nail or a projecting twig as she crept along the stout limb to settle herself in a crotch of the tree. From this spot she could see ...
— Little Maid Marian • Amy E. Blanchard

... but oftener silent, we jogged on till about three o'clock in the afternoon, when suddenly, as we were skirting a patch of scraggy woodland, a troop of six armed men emerged from it, and, wheeling about, came directly towards us. A glance was enough to tell us that they were soldiers or mounted policemen, scouring the country in search of recruits, or, in other words, of deserters, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... angel clad in dirt. Why other wild things should be delicately clean, the birds, the fishes she lived on, and she be bred amidst running sores and vermin, was one of the mysteries I pondered over when we took to our canoes. For such a pair of eyes, for those exquisite features, some scraggy denizen of Vanity Fair would have given a king's ransom. Yet here was a thing of beauty, dropped by a vile freak of Nature into an appalling environment of filth and ignorance; a creature destined, no doubt, to spring into mature womanhood, and lapse, in time, into ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... cheerful outlook. Nothing was to be seen but the high board alley fence with a broken chicken-coop leaning against it, the weather-beaten old stable, and a scraggy, dripping peach-tree. The yard was full of puddles, and still the rain splashed on. The sight ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston

... wearing a new ring and carrying a great happiness in her heart, went often to see how the cottage was progressing and how the trees were growing. For the hill-slope was covered with the gray-green of young olive trees, the dense, dark foliage of young oranges, and the stunted, scraggy boughs of the Japanese persimmon. His fruit ranch promised well, the day for their bridal was set, and they ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly

... the situation a Bushman mounted on a scraggy pony and seated on a sheepskin saddle came riding along. We hailed him and asked him where he was off to. He told us he belonged to a party of half a dozen Boers, who, hidden just over the hill, had ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar

... a camp of magnificent distances, restful to the eyes but distressful to the feet. The soil was rich loam, and at no remote date had been mostly under cultivation. There were several pretty clumps of dhoum palms, and a few scraggy mimosa by the river's margin. Of tree-shade for the troops there was practically none. Much of the thorny bush had been cut to form a zereba. In fact, there were two zerebas, the British division having ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh

... Traveller's Delight the ground dipped down into a hollow, which, even in daylight, was completely screened from the view of any one within the house or about the yard by a great clump or patch of scraggy furze bushes. In this secluded spot there stood a lime-kiln, one of those built somewhat like a low circular tower, with gaping mouth and open roof; but for many a day the kiln had not been used—not since the present ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur

... comic effect. The skin was yellow, but stretched so firm and hard on the cheek bones that the sallowness did not look unhealthy. The man wore an old suit of blue jeans and his pantaloons did not meet his coarse unblacked shoes by six inches. His scraggy throat was adorned with a ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... recollections was pressing her face against the window-panes when the first snow began to fall on the scraggy cedars in the yard; and as she began to sing softly to herself one of the ancient ditties of the children of the poor, "Old Woman, picking Geese," she would dream of the magical flowers which they told her bloomed ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen

... the parlor, in which the remains of their breakfast was standing, and which was still filled with cigar smoke. For some time he stood there waiting. Then a scraggy woman slipped through the door of the next room with ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann

... fell—full of big stones, and with here and there a patch of yellow sandy gravel lying in corners and crevices, wound its way through country which was equally rocky, but with just enough soil above the rock to sparsely nourish the gnarled, scraggy gums which waged with the spear-grass a constant ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott

... the borders of T., and that there they could look around.... But Nejdanov would not calm down, and at the same time his face bore a sad, almost despairing, expression. Their horse was an energetic, round little thing, with a clipped mane on its scraggy neck. It tugged at the reins, and its strong little legs flew as fast as they could, just as if it were conscious of bearing important people to the scene of action. Just before they reached the village, ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... troop of babies!' he yelled. 'Ain't you goin' into the fight? Can't you lick a blamed Yankee?' And, bless your soul! those scraggy fellows stood stock still ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow

... And so the scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous

... string. The old man was startled to see him, but said he was glad he had come, as he had been anxious about him and had wanted to talk to him. Morgan noticed that he seemed a little excited. His face, too, seemed a trifle more worn and lined than usual behind his spectacles, and his beard had a scraggy appearance. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... thing was seen stirring, save troops of blue-jays which went scolding from tree to tree before the settlers as they proceeded to the conference. Here and there, also, was a half-famished, yellow, or black and yellow dog, with small head and long scraggy hair, skulking about the fields and among the wigwams of the Indians in search ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins



Words linked to "Scraggy" :   jaggy, uneven, weedy, skinny, boney



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