"Sinewy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... went to work. He stripped blankets and hood from the wretched Bonfire, grabbed a bunch of straw in either hand and began to rub. It was no chamois polishing. It was a raking, scraping, rib-bending rub, applied with all the force in Hawkins's sinewy arms. It sent the sluggish blood pounding through every artery of Bonfire's congested system and it made the perspiration ooze from the red face ...
— Horses Nine - Stories of Harness and Saddle • Sewell Ford
... outlaw was a tall, sinewy, graceful man, then a little past thirty, singularly handsome, with clear-cut features, dark hair and fierce gray eyes which could, upon occasion, soften to tenderness. The hands which lifted the ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Jim's face was of the unmistakable negro type, and his skin of a hue so dark that it seemed impossible he could be the son of a white man (I afterward learned that his mother was a black of the deepest dye), but it was in their form and general bearing. They had the same closely-knit and sinewy frame, the same erect, elastic step, the same rare blending of good-natured ease and dignity—to which I have already alluded as characteristic of the Colonel—and in the wild burst of passion that accompanied ...
— Among the Pines - or, South in Secession Time • James R. Gilmore
... of rescuers reached Bryan's Station on the afternoon of the day the Indians had left. The men thus gathered were the very pick of the Kentucky pioneers; sinewy veterans of border strife, skilled hunters and woodsmen, long wonted to every kind of hardship and danger. They were men of the most dauntless courage, but unruly and impatient of all control. ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... was ineffectual for their purpose. A throng of far more resolute and more sinewy people swept them aside, and seized every vacant place on the top of the vehicle. Only with much struggle did they obtain places within. In an ordinary mood, Nancy would have resented this hustling of her person by the profane public; as it was, she half enjoyed the ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... eye over the sleeping group,—for when the firing had ceased the whole party had again sought their repose,— and he could not help admiring the athletic and sinewy limbs that lay scattered around the gloomy vault, in every posture that ease or whim dictated. From the stout frames of the men, his glance was directed to the stack of firearms, from whose glittering tubes and polished bayonets strong rays of light were reflected, even in that dark apartment. ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... was executed much more easily than I had anticipated. We caught Manuel sound asleep, and LeVere had sinewy hands at his throat before the fellow could grasp a weapon, or even clearly comprehend the nature of the attack. The narrowness of the stateroom prevented my taking much part in the affair, but the mulatto needed no help, as he dragged the cursing Spaniard from his bunk to the deck and throttled ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... well-beaten ground and one huge cedar tree. Sounds came from the near houses, but around the tree itself the more privileged sat in solemn conclave. Food and wine were going the round, for the Maulai kohammedans have no taboos in eating and drinking. Fazir Khan sat smoking next the tree trunk, a short, sinewy man with a square, Aryan face, clear-cut and cruel. His chiefs were around him, all men of the same type, showing curiously fair skins against their oiled black hair. A mullah sat cross-legged, his straggling beard in his lap, repeating some crazy charm to himself ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... considering the matter too trivial for argument, and watched his rupee fall with a tinkle upon the tin plate which the snake-charmer extended at the length of his sinewy arm. ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... deputation of fanatics, who, with a pathetic simplicity almost equal to his own pathetic tolerance, were urging upon this ruler of millions the policy of an insignificant score, and Brant listened to his patient, practical response of facts and logic, clothed in simple but sinewy English, up to the inevitable climax of humorous illustration, which the young brigadier could now see was necessary to relieve the grimness of his refusal. For the first time Brant felt the courage to address him, and resolved to wait until the ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... little straighter, or skimmed the turns a trifle more close; but neither could have put more of life and vim into the strokes. A large, thick-set youth was Harvey, strongly built, with arms bronzed and sinewy—clearly a youth who had lived much out of doors, and had developed in sun ...
— The Rival Campers Ashore - The Mystery of the Mill • Ruel Perley Smith
... under way, a young man in "whites" and a sun helmet, an agent of a trading company, went down the sea ladder by which I was leaning. He was smart, alert; his sleeves, rolled recklessly to his shoulders, showed sinewy, sunburnt arms; his helmet, I noted, was a military one. Perhaps I looked as I felt; that it was a pity to see so good a man go back to such a land, for he looked up at me from the swinging ladder and smiled understanding as though we had been ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... a laugh, and the old trainer took possession of the horse, and led him on, stopping every now and then to run his hand over his sinewy neck and forelegs, and grumbling to himself ...
— Bred In The Bone - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... quickly and mercifully puts an end to his fast-ebbing life. His canine teeth seem unusually large and formidable, and the dog bears the marks of them in many deep gashes upon his face and nose. His pelt is quickly stripped off, revealing his lean, sinewy form. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the approaching marriage of his sister Bell, to attend which he had hastened home; and knew, also, that some of the Cedar Creek household would be there. Sinewy athlete as Sam Holt was, he could not frame his lips to ask whether Linda might be one of them. But how often had he to put the question resolutely away during that and the next day's travelling? And what would have been his disappointment ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the present day is that skill at boxing or fisticuffs which was an absolute necessity in a time when their hand was against every man and every man's hand against them. Nearly all the male Romanies are possessed of a lithe, sinewy, active frame, combined with a quickness of hand and eye that gives them a considerable advantage over less alert antagonists of heavier build. They are not, as a rule, in a hurry to come to blows, for they know that in the event ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... rallied to resist assault, were three figures of men in the garb of the laboring class of my time. They were bareheaded, and their coarse-textured shirts, rolled above the elbow and open at the breast, showed the sinewy arms and chest. Before them, on the ground, lay a pair of shovels and a pickaxe. The central figure, with the right hand extended, palm outward, was pointing to the discarded tools. The arms of the other two were folded on their breasts. The faces were coarse and hard in outline and bristled ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... slumber the investigator may not pass with his common-sense rule and test. Sleep with softest touch locks all the gates of our physical senses and lulls to rest the conscious will—the disciplinarian of our waking thoughts. Then the spirit wrenches itself free from the sinewy arms of reason and like a winged courser spurns the firm green earth and speeds away upon wind and cloud, leaving neither trace nor footprint by which science may track its flight and bring us knowledge of the distant, ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... to display their biceps. Pierre's arms were hairy, somewhat lean but sinewy; Jean's were round and white and rosy, and the knot of muscles ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... dull, and good-natured, answering every call, with as much patience as Francis in Henry the Fourth, with his "Anon anon!" He could sit up night and day—neither age nor toil seemed to have made much impression on his sinewy and hardened frame; indeed, to use the common saying, he was considered by all to be a ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... fire out of deep sockets, with a far-away, reminiscent, kindly look in them. The lumberman's heavy skin-lined jacket and the overalls tucked into boots could not hide the athletic lines of the lithe muscular figure. Cameron looked at his hands with their long, sinewy fingers. "The hands of a gentleman," thought he. "What is his history? And where ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... flowers, the air, light, the stars, the happiness of going whithersoever the sinewy limbs of one-and-twenty chance to wish ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Ranger sympathetically, and his sinewy fingers twisted in the cushion of flesh they gripped. "I'll get you somethin' good for it ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine
... deg.470 And he too drew his sword; at once they rush'd Together, as two eagles on one prey Come rushing down together from the clouds, One from the east, one from the west; their shields Bash'd with a clang together, and a din. 475 Rose, such as that the sinewy woodcutters Make often in the forest's heart at morn, Of hewing axes, crashing trees—such blows Rustum and Sohrab on each other hail'd. And you would say that sun and stars took part 480 In that unnatural deg. conflict; for a cloud deg. deg.481 Grew suddenly in Heaven, and dark'd ...
— Matthew Arnold's Sohrab and Rustum and Other Poems • Matthew Arnold
... leaving Russia, which he detested. He gained his poor livelihood somehow by lessons. Lemm's exterior was not prepossessing. He was short and bent, with crooked shoulders, and contracted chest, with large flat feet, and bluish white nails on the gnarled bony fingers of his sinewy red hands. He had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, and compressed lips, which he was for ever twitching and biting; and this, together with his habitual taciturnity, produced an impression almost sinister. ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... only a devastator second only to Hongi, but was fated to live on into another era and to come into sharp and fatal collision with the early colonists. One result among others is that we have several portraits of him with both pen and pencil. Like Waharoa and Hongi he was small, spare and sinewy; an active man even after three-score years and ten. In repose his aquiline features were placid and his manners dignified. But in excitement, his small, keen, deep-sunken eyes glared like a wild beast's, and an overhanging upper ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... target against the chimney-piece or meandering, in feline form, along our neighbor's roof-tree—we go forth, with Snider and sunrise, to the forest fastness. Our companions throng, tall, bronzed, close-knit and sinewy, true children of the four-grooved, from frosty Caucasus, the Hartz, the Alps, the Dovrafjeld, the Grampians, the Himmalaya, the Adirondack, the Alleghany, the Nevada. The chamois, the ibex, the red deer, the Virginia deer, the wapiti, the gour, or the royal ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... full-brimmed, three-cornered hats, very flat and very wide-spreading, beneath which grinned their swarthy, tanned, and wrinkled faces, lighted by three pairs of twinkling eyes, were noticeably lean, sinewy, and vigorous, like men in whom sport had become a passion. All three were supplied with immense horns of Dampierre, wound with green worsted cords, leaving only the brass tubes visible; but they controlled their dogs by the eye and voice. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... full-blown rose, which distinguish the panther from all other species of felis. This terrible hostess lay tranquilly snoring, in an attitude as easy and graceful as that of a cat on the cushions of an ottoman. Her bloody paws, sinewy and well-armed, were stretched beyond her head, which lay upon them; and from her muzzle projected a few straight hairs called whiskers, which shimmered in the early light ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... meats that no portion designed to be cooked in a certain manner shall have wasteful appendages which that mode of cooking will spoil. The French soup-kettle stands ever ready to receive the bones, the thin fibrous flaps, the sinewy and gristly portions, which are so often included in our roasts or broilings, which fill our plates with unsightly debris, and finally make an amount of blank waste for which we pay our butcher the same price that we pay ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... moment both male and female stood together, stretching their bodies out to their full length, and lashing their flanks with their long sinewy tails. Then, uttering another prolonged roar, they bounded simultaneously forward, passing, at a single leap, over a space of full twenty feet. A second spring brought them upon the crest of the ridge, upon which they had scarce rested an instant, before the quick sharp crack of a rifle, ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... a long, cruel story!" he returned with a sigh; "a story I would tell to none but you." Again he paused, looking down as if collecting his thoughts, while the brown, bony, sinewy hand he laid on the table was tightly clenched. "You knew my father," he began, suddenly raising his dark suspicious eyes to her, "and therefore can understand what an exacting tyrant he could be to those who were in his power. As a mere ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... garnished the board. Nevertheless, just as the boy removed the trenchers and napkins, together with the large black-jack which we have already mentioned, and was one or two steps on his way to the door, the sinewy arm of the cavalier, which seemed to elongate itself on purpose, (as it extended far beyond the folds of the threadbare jacket,) arrested the progress of the retiring Ganymede, and seizing on the black-jack, conveyed ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... again the white place on the iron had become a dull red, and the face of the blacksmith was again in shadow. All Jasper could see was the body of Andy, and that was much better. Red light glinted on the sinewy arms and the swaying shoulders, and the hammer swayed and fell tirelessly. For fifteen years Jasper had consoled himself with the strength of the boy, smooth as silk and as durable; the light form which would not tire a horse, but swelled above the ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... sinewy strength of the Hungarian now stood him in good stead. He must either free himself, or perish there in the hideous carnage of a quarry. He seized with both hands, in a viselike grip, Ortog's enormous neck, and, at the same ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... eyebrows, and white hair. He was seated on a solitary chair in the centre of the hall; his dress consisting of a pair of white nankeen trousers and a white shirt, the sleeves of the latter tucked up to his shoulders, and exposing sinewy arms, covered with hair. By his side lay a basket of mangoes, and before his chair a large tub of water. As Newton entered, he had an opportunity of witnessing the most approved method of eating this exquisite fruit. The colonel had then one as large as a cassowary's egg, held ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... for installing Rama as regent of the kingdom. And all those great ministers were agreed that it was time to do so. And, O scion of Kuru's race, king Dasaratha was greatly pleased to behold his son,—that enhancer of Kausalya's delight—possessed of eyes that were red, and arms that were sinewy. And his steps were like those of a wild elephant. And he had long arms and high shoulders and black and curly hair. And he was valiant, and glowing with splendour, and not inferior to Indra himself in battle. And he was well-versed in holy writ and was equal to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem. No matter what rises or is uttered they sent the seed of the conception of it ... of them and by them stand the visible proofs of souls ... always of their fatherstuff must be begotten the sinewy races of bards. If there shall be love and content between the father and the son and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... sinewy hand on his shoulder, a hand protruding from a well tailored gray sleeve and lilac striped cuff, that caught Hamdi Bey by the epauleted shoulder and sent ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... took in the entire scene at a glance. Here were weapons in plenty! Here were sinewy ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... powers that were growing up in Europe. Pacific ideas prevailed. Spain ceased to make war in every direction, and husbanded her resources, and began to renew her native strength. The skeleton bequeathed by Philip II. became clothed with flesh, and sinewy. Could this policy have been continued for a generation, Spanish history might have been made to read differently from the melancholy text it now presents. But the process of rehabilitation was not allowed to go on. There had always been a strong party opposed to Lerma, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... in brown duck "fatigue slacks," the rolled-up sleeves of their "gray-back" shirts disclosing the fact that the sinewy forearms of both men were decorated with gay and fanciful specimens of the tattoo artist's genius. A third man, similarly habited, lay stretched out, apparently sleeping on one of the cots that were arranged around the room. Opening his eyes he greeted the newcomer with a lethargic ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... that he had gone with the king to Potsdam, had come to arrange the room; with a quick movement she seized the bed with her sinewy hands and threw it off. A wild cry was heard! a white skeleton figure rose from the bed, now lying in the middle of the chamber, and danced about the floor with doubled fists and wild curses. The girl uttered a shriek of terror and rushed from the room; ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... might suffer by their fire, and stooping down, whence he could distinctly see the pale gums and tongue, as his hounds grappled the neck of the animal, announced the death of Bruin, and the termination of the hunt. The hounds soon abandoned their inanimate victim, and its sinewy limbs relaxing, the devoted cur rolled ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... Bergstein's discharge the gang at the lower shanty struck. The bar-room at Morrison's became packed. Little else was talked of but the injustice of the owner of Big Shanty. Later in the day a delegation of awkward, sinewy men came upon his veranda. They were for the most part sober. It might be said they were the soberest. Le Boeuf was among them. Men of the sea and men of the woods air their grievances in the same way—a spokesman ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... guard. Like many small men, he was very powerful, as his broad shoulders and sinewy arms would have made evident to a teacher of gymnastics. He clearly understood that this opponent was in deadly earnest, and he put out all the strength which he possessed. The result was that his large-framed antagonist went down once more, striking his head with ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger
... the vermin,—in short, do all the shining deeds of the young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... distinguished for his acute and sinewy mind; but he had, too, a strong feeling for art in all its expressions, and it was his gift of imagination,—the ability to forecast the enemy's strategy and then strike his weakest point,—that ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... whispered, "tomorrow, at this time, you will be Madame Montlivet." She did not stir, and I laid my hand on her shoulder where it rose slim and sinewy as a boy's from the low neck of her squaw's dress. I bent lower. "You strange woman," I went on, marveling at her calm. "You strange woman, with the justice of a man and the tempers of a child. Have you a woman's heart, I wonder? I do not talk to ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... the rider was thin, tall, and slender, but remarkably athletic, bony, and sinewy; like one who had all his life followed those violent exercises which prevent the human form from increasing in bulk, while they harden and confirm by habit its muscular powers. His face, sharp-featured, sun-burnt, and freckled, ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... we were beset and rent by an infinity of passions; but where every man must play the part of lover. That passion alone, I said, is universal; it set wise Solomon a-jigging in criminal byways, and sinewy Hercules himself was no stranger to its inquietudes and joys. And I cried aloud with the Roman, Parce precor! and afterward upon high Heaven to make me a ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... voluminous folds peeped the shrivelled and astute countenance of a Castilian peasant. He looked at the ungainly figure, which reminded one of the black poplar among trees; he observed the shrewd eyes that shone from beneath the wide brim of the old velvet hat; the sinewy brown hand that grasped a green switch, and the broad foot that, with every movement, made the iron ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... Was it one of those strange appeals which cross the dreams of disquieted minds? No, he heard it still, that reverberating cry,—which had entered at his ears and remained in his brain,—thrilling him to the tips of his sinewy fingers. Certainly, somebody had cried out, and called: "Ulrich!" There was somebody there, near the house, there could be no doubt of that, and he opened the door and shouted: "Is it you, Gaspard?" with all ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... with a view of arousing him, I tapped one sinewy hand as it gripped the wheel, and even ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
... man, very old, though hale and sinewy. "The Lord help us!" he soliloquised in an undertone as he relieved ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the pace: he lifted his great hairy sinewy hand, brought it down heavily on Jules' shoulder, and in a changed voice, harsh, rough, ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... the neck of the womb we must understand the channel that lies between the above-mentioned knobs and the inner bone of the womb, which receives the penis like a sheath, and so that it may be more easily dilated by the pleasure of procreation, the substance is sinewy and a little spongy. There are several folds or pleats in this cavity, made by tunicles, which are wrinkled like a full blown rose. In virgins they appear plainly, but in women who are used to copulation they ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... piece of sinewy yew, and a string. It was used at first for the chase, and the archer had to take instant aim. It was drawn to the ear, and it was a most deadly weapon when a strong arm had been trained to draw it. Its arrow could pick off a soldier at the top of ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards
... for the captain. With a look of fury on his face, he dashed toward Harry, and there is no doubt that our hero was in serious danger. He paled slightly, for he knew he was no match for the tall, sinewy captain, and was half regretting his independence when he felt himself drawn forcibly to one side, and in his place stood the mate, sternly eyeing ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... spreading chestnut tree The village smithy stands; The smith, a mighty man is he, With large and sinewy hands; And the muscles of his brawny arms Are strong ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... the workman, with his superb hand, brown and sinewy, yet elegant and shapely as a duchess's, and the fingers almost as taper, and his black eye that glowed like a coal over the model, which grew under his masterly strokes, now hard, now light: the enchanting girl who sat to him, ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... flourishing in their green boxes! There he had spent the best years of his childhood. The little boys who in those days used to be hiding behind the wide portal, waiting for a chance to play with the son of the powerful don Ramon Brull, were now the grown men, the sinewy orchard workers, who had been parading from the station to his house, waving their arms, and shouting vivas for their ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... quickness of his action, Lal Lu reposed inertly within the passionate restraint of his sinewy arms, but the next instant, transformed into an indignant goddess, struggled, with surprising strength, from his clasp and held the mortified prince in chafing repulse by the chaste challenge ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... with scorn. She threw her arms about him and sought to draw his head down near hers. He pushed her from him with sinewy hands, sprang as from a pestilence, and was lost in the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... party, a lean, wide-shouldered, sinewy youth, blue silk kerchief knotted loosely around his neck, broke in with a gesture that swept the sky. "Funny about all them buzzards. What ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... sunken eyes, hollow cheeks and temples, long, claw-like hands. Oh, those poor, weak, nerveless hands used to seem to me more pitiful than all; and when I remembered all they had achieved and how they had lost their firm, sinewy proportions, their strong grasp, my heart swelled with pity and with passionate devotion. Often I felt as if I could have held these cold hands to my heart for warmth, and given of my own warm blood to ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers
... also will for a third. The work, indeed, is a positive, and we think it will prove a permanent addition to our already opulent inheritance of Shakespearian criticism. It is weighty throughout with fresh, yet sober and well-considered thought, expressed in tight and sinewy English,—every part being highly elaborate, but nothing over-labored. The author discusses a large number of topics, all in "a manly style, fitted to manly ears," but is particularly full and instructive ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... neither beautiful, stylish, nor neat. Yet they were considered modest and attractive. The men were more striking in appearance and character. Of medium stature and powerful mold, with black hair, fine teeth, and piercing eyes; with well-formed, agile, and sinewy limbs; sober, brave, trustworthy, and endowed with many other primitive virtues as well, the Corsican was everywhere sought as a soldier, and could be found in all the armies of ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Monck stretched forth a sinewy arm and slowly closed his fist under the other man's eyes. "You will do it—yes," he said. "I hold ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... in its place another so kind and amicable as to prove he not only was aware of the benefit he had received, but that he was deeply grateful for it. He drew near to Mrs. Willoughby, took her still white and soft hand in his own sinewy and dark fingers, then dropped the blanket that he had thrown carelessly across his body, from a shoulder, and laid it on a mark left by the disease, by way of pointing to her good work. He smiled, as this ...
— Wyandotte • James Fenimore Cooper
... plied by sinewy arms drove the canoes up the stream. A lake {301} was passed, which later was called Lake Pepin, in honor of one of a party of their countrymen whom they met a short time afterward.[2] On the nineteenth day after their capture, ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... his bearing is quite observable. "We are now reckoning; we know not yet who is in debt. I have no pay; but here is my body." Perhaps, in that unconspicuous frame, and through that humble garb, the sinewy nerves and muscles of steel, the compact and concentrated forces, that were the marvel of his times, and finally cost him his life, were apparent in his movements and attitudes. It may be, that the sufferings and exposures of his previous life had left upon his swarthy features a stamp of care ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... come, boy!" The foreman's joy was almost like that of a big dog at sight of his master. "By the great horned toad, I knew it!" With his sinewy hands he tore the blanket into strips as easily as though the wool had been paper. ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... . . the sinewy strength and originality of single lines and paragraphs; the frequent curiosa felicitas of his ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... the east, and four to the west! Arrowy shots at the Umpire's chest! Placid the sinewy batsman beams— How easy it seems! ...
— More Cricket Songs • Norman Gale
... seated himself, and received into his the sinewy hands of the Crusader, who made the acknowledgment of his homage, and was then guided off by Count Baldwin, who walked with the stranger to the ships, and then, apparently well pleased at seeing him in the course of going on board, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... back with pride at his column. Like most of the regiments at that period of the war it was small, three hundred sinewy well-mounted young men, who had endured every kind of hardship and who could endure the like again. All of them were wrapped in heavy overcoats over their uniforms, and they rode the best of horses, animals that Colonel Winchester ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Apollo of the desert. His only clothing was a ragged sheep-skin, bound with a leathern girdle. His long black locks, unshorn from childhood, waved and glistened in the sun; a rich dark down on cheek and chin showed the spring of healthful manhood; his hard hands and sinewy sunburnt limbs told of labour and endurance; his flashing eyes and beetling brow, of daring, fancy, passion, thought, which had no sphere of action in such a place. What did his glorious young humanity ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... common eye, though his size was above the average. He was a little over six feet in height, and moderately broad in the shoulder; he did not appear to be stout, but, on the other hand, he was certainly not thin; his small head was supported by a strong and sinewy neck; his broad muscular hands appeared to possess a peculiar skill in breaking walnuts without the assistance of the ordinary cracker, and, seeing him in profile, one could not help remarking the extraordinary breadth of his sleeves, and the unusual thickness of his chest. He was one of ...
— The Upper Berth • Francis Marion Crawford
... black and uncombed as any of the crew. She had not a three-weeks' beard, but her hair began to grow faster; the roses in her cheek were in flower under the soot. Her hair curled and waved about her neck, her eyes shone and were limpid, her roses bloomed unawares; she grew sinewy and healthy in the kind forest airs. She worked very hard, ate very little, was as often beaten as not. All this made for health; in addition, she nursed a gentle thought in her heart, which probably accounted for as ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... them, and they certainly astonished the table d'hote. It (the table d'hote) never realized before what it was to be fully appreciated. An evening of cigars, wine, and billiards followed; and then they stretched their tough and sinewy workmen's legs between the whitest of silken sheets, spread over the springiest of hair mattresses, on the brightest of brass bedsteads. There we leave them to such dreams as their surroundings invited, to turn our attention to four bachelor ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the Irons family and Solomon went to Albany by bateaux with the Hares. It was a delightful trip in good autumn weather in which Colonel Hare has acknowledged that both he and his wife acquired a deep respect "for these sinewy, wise, upright Americans, some of whom are as well learned, I should say, as most men you ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... Still she was a beautiful and a grand object, perhaps more so at that moment than at any other; for her vast and naked spars, her well-supported masts, and all the ingenious and complicated hamper of the machine, gave her a resemblance to some sinewy and gigantic gladiator, pacing the arena, in waiting for the conflict that ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... disarming the sinewy warrior, Hay-uta explained his wish to show him such consideration as to win his friendship. That being done, probably some way would open by which he could be used ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Driscoll rose among the crags, the dark tufts curling stubbornly on his bared head. He looked a sinewy, toughened Ajax. But he only spoiled it. For, raising his arms, he stretched himself, stretched long and luxuriously. His very animal revelling in the huge elongation of cramped limbs was exasperating. Next he clapped the slouch on his head, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... farmer growled, eying the group distrustfully with his small gray eyes under pent-house brows. He was short of stature, sinewy, and grizzled as to head ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... he must change his plans, but dare waste no time. If they were to escape it must be accomplished now, shadowed by darkness, while those savage watchers were safely beyond sound. His lean jaws set with fierce determination, and he grimly hitched his belt forward, one sinewy hand fingering the revolver. He would have to trust to that weapon entirely for defense; he could not carry both the ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... the dog-days came, and I saw my river tawny, sinewy, gaunt—a half-starved lion. The long dry bars were like the protruding ribs of the beast when the prey is scarce, and the ropy main current was like the lean, terrible muscles of ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... followers was a young mulatto whom he called "Tomas." Very tall and slight of figure was he, yet sinewy and strong, with corded muscles twining under the brown skin of his lean young limbs. He wore a loose shirt, open at the throat, with sleeves uprolled to the shoulder; and his short, full trousers reached barely to ...
— Margaret Tudor - A Romance of Old St. Augustine • Annie T. Colcock
... Hotel Saint Ange now stood close to Senator Burton and his companion. Her voluble tongue was stilled for once: she was twisting a corner of her blue check apron round and round in her strong, sinewy-looking fingers. ...
— The End of Her Honeymoon • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... on its roots, strong in the hips, square in the back, with the hands of a cartman and an honesty as sound as her unblemished virtue. Neither the warts which adorned her martial visage, nor the red-brick tints of her skin, nor the sinewy arms, nor the ragged garments of la Grande Nanon, dismayed the cooper, who was at that time still of an age when the heart shudders. He fed, shod, and clothed the poor girl, gave her wages, and put her to work without treating her too roughly. Seeing herself ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... Baron Conrad in his expeditions and adventures a short, deep-chested, broad-shouldered man, with sinewy arms so long that when he stood his hands hung ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... by a bath and clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic absence of a corset. Her face and hands, however—a face thin, long, and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy—gripped and held his fancy. He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but this girl's chin was firmer and more delicately, though more aggressively, rounded. Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive, ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... woodland nymphs I pray, And Mars, the guardian of the Thracian plain, With favouring grace the omen to allay, And bless the dreadful vision. Then again A third tall shaft I grasp, with sinewy strain And firm knees pressed against the sandy ground; When O! shall tongue make utterance or refrain? Forth from below a dismal, groaning sound Heaves, and a piteous voice ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... bedroom he undressed slowly and afterward stood for a long time under the shower, rubbing himself down with the care of an athlete, thumbing the soreness of the wild ride out of the lean, sinewy muscles, for his was a made strength built up in the gymnasium and used on the wrestling mat, the cinder path, and the football field. Drying himself with a rough towel that whipped the pink into his skin, ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... look on God and live. Jehovah is seen as a glory behind the cloud of smoke shrouded by winged cherubim. From one side of the cloud comes a mighty hand meeting with power the force of Assyria. From the other side, a lithe and sinewy hand thwarts the subtlety of Egypt. But Jehovah ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... not far thence; So were I under shelter now with him! Nor hook nor talon then should scare me more."—. "Too long we suffer," Libicocco cried, Then, darting forth a prong, seiz'd on his arm, And mangled bore away the sinewy part. Him Draghinazzo by his thighs beneath Would next have caught, whence angrily their chief, Turning on all sides round, with threat'ning brow Restrain'd them. When their strife a little ceas'd, Of him, who yet was gazing ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... proportions. The decay of nearly two thousand years has left its venerable impress upon those walls. Here Roman generals proudly strode, encased in brass and steel, and the clatter of their arms resounded through these arches. In these mouldering, crumbling tubs of stone, they laved their sinewy limbs. But where are those fierce warriors now? In what employments have their turbulent spirits been engaged, while generation after generation has passed on earth, in the enactment of the comedies and the tragedies of life? Did their ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... on the march of death, Tongue-fighters, tough of talk and sinewy speech, Else nerveless, from no crew of such faint folk Whose tongues are stouter than their hands come I To bid not you to battle; let them strike Whose swords are sharper than your keen-tongued wail, And ye, ...
— Erechtheus - A Tragedy (New Edition) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... are absolutely useless against the impenetrable stoicism of an Asiatic and that only personal regard and obligation on their part will produce results. In striking contrast to the Japanese, small and sinewy, any two of them weighing no more than one Russian, quiet, taciturn, genial and abstemious, were the children of the "Little White Father." The Russians were an aggressive, big, well set up, heavy type of men, by no means teetotalers, talkative, with overbearing swagger, always posing, talking ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... * It is pitiable to find these unhappy Africans, whose clumsy frames are no match for the sinewy and agile white American, thus led on to be destroyed by a merciless enemy. Should the war proceed in this manner, it is possible that the massacre of Africans may not be confined to actual conflict in the field. Hitherto the ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... pitying drop spoke of affections long subdued, but not entirely extinct in the breast of him who had but few tears to bestow. Soon, however, his glassy eyes were fixed, and as Bermudo raised mechanically his long sinewy fingers to his burning forehead, his countenance became the index of a mind engaged in scenes far away. It was a deep though momentary abstraction, for as Caneri gazed in amazement, the renegade awoke from ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... sinewy, active, and powerful. Three stained eagle feathers were fastened on his crown in the long black hair, and his hunting shirt, leggings, and moccasins were bright with different colored beads and fringes. In the red sash which passed around ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... When Sam cried out for war His potent hand spread many a coat of tar, That sinewy hand the feathers scattered o'er Till Tories' jackets made their bellies sore. Say, for whose sake has Time, that Barber gruff, O'er his wise noddle shook his powder puff? Was the task hard to hear the sage's noise? Perhaps the awful sound had frightened boys; But we, the ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back into the velvet-lined arm-chair with ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... becoming a demi-god, is bidden in the celestial halls to perform three test-acts of prowess. He is to drain the drinking-horn of Thor. Then he must run a race with a courser so fleet that he fairly spurns the ground under his flying footsteps. Then he must wrestle with a toothless old woman, whose sinewy hands, as wiry as eagle claws in the grapple, make his very flesh to quiver. He is victorious in them all. But as the crown of success is placed upon his temples, he discovers for the first time that he has had for his antagonist the three greatest ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... seems out of place, for Mere Marianne wears her man's short tarpaulin coat cinched about her waist with a thin tarred rope. Her sinewy legs, bare to the knees, are tightly incased in a pair of ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... this vessel stood two men, looking out over the water to where the purple Apennines arose over the Italian coast, where the grand figure of Vesuvius towered conspicuous, its smoke cloud floating like a pennon in the air. One of these men was tall, broad-shouldered, sinewy, with strong square head, massive forehead, firm chin, and eyes which held in their expression at once gentleness and determination; no very rare compound in the opinion of some, for there are those who think that the strongest ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... of Kentuckians that entered the Indiana woods in 1816, and the boy, when he had learned to hew out a forest home, betook himself, in 1830, to Sangamon county, Illinois. He represents the pioneer of the period; but his ax sank deeper than other men's, and the plaster cast of his great sinewy hand, at Washington, embodies the training of these frontier railsplitters, in the days when Fort Dearborn, on the site of Chicago, was but a military outpost in a desolate country. While the hard woods of Illinois were being entered, the pioneer movement passed also into the Missouri Valley. The ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... among the branches and standing or fallen trunks. Besides all this, the voyageur performs the part of bridge, or jetty, on the arrival of the canoe at its place of rest, the gentlemen passengers being carried on shore on the backs of these good-humoured and sinewy fellows. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... gaze Calcutta paraded its congress of peoples—a comprehensive collection of specimens of every tribe in Hindustan and of nearly every other race in the world besides: red-bearded Delhi Pathans, towering Sikhs, lean sinewy Rajputs with bound jaws, swart agile Bhils, Tommies in their scarlet tunics, Japanese and Chinese in their distinctive dress, short and sturdy Gurkhas, yellow Saddhus, Jats stalking proudly, brawling knots of sailormen from the Port, sleek Mahrattas, polluted Sansis, Punjabis, Bengalis, ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... the rains, and warmed by the sun. In the spring he swam in rivers, lay on sheltered hillsides watching the cattle grazing in the fields and the white clouds floating across the sky, and constantly his legs became harder and his body more flat and sinewy. Once he slept for a night in a straw stack at the edge of a woods and in the morning was awakened by a farmer's ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... amazement. He was a dirty-looking man, young and sinewy, with long and oily hair and threadbare clothes, shiny and unctuous. His eyes were red and furtive, and he had a trick of passing his hand over his mouth while he spoke. His mates stood around him, listening rather studiedly to the ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... I had read something which I ought not, for he touched my shoulder with his hand and made me aware, by a slight movement, that I must withdraw from the table. Not sure whether the movement was meant for a caress or a command, I kissed the large, sinewy hand ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... him to everything, that he may not be a Sir Paris, a carpet-knight,[774-6] but a sinewy, hardy, ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... the lad to look out, for the war had recommenced in the next tree, the jaguar having ceased to pass its paws over its head, and assumed a crouching position, with its powerful hind legs drawn beneath it and its sinewy loins contracted, as if preparing to ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... irresistibly seductive air. Their features are regular; eyes black or deep gentian blue; complexion pale; movements and attitudes impressed with a stamp of rare distinction. Even the great-grandmothers have a certain austere dignity—sinewy, indestructible old witches, with tawny hide and eyes that glow ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... no longer. A quick, nervous tread, a rustling of the boughs, and as the hunter rose to his feet his elder brother emerged from the undergrowth, taller than he as they stood together on the margin of the lick, more active, sinewy, alert. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... large black Tom. I never saw a larger cat, nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose. It was a long, sinewy- looking animal. It had a calm, contented air ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... Daniel Boone. As it was, she felt no less foreign than she looked, for the strangeness of the land and of the people still possessed her so that her native shyness had sunk to depths that were painful. She had a new ordeal before her now, for in her sinewy little hands were a paper bag, a first reader, and a spelling-book, and she was on her way to school. Beneath her the white turnpike wound around the hill and down into a little hollow, and on the crest of the next low hill was a little frame house with a belfry ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... their sport. With all his strength, Harold drew the fierce brute toward him, circling his neck tightly with his left arm, and pressed the sharp blade against his throat. The hot blood gushed out over his hand, but he drove the weapon deeper, slitting the sinewy flesh to the right and left, till the dog ceased to struggle. Then Harold flung the huge carcass from him, and struck out, breathless as he was, for the schooner. It was time, for already his pursuers were ...
— Fort Lafayette or, Love and Secession • Benjamin Wood
... their treasure. This being accomplished they would torture and murder the traders in mere wantonness. The savages had a very salutary caution of rifles which could throw a bullet twice as far as the strongest bow and the most sinewy ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... lower jaw, with blood-stained foam dripping from his champing jaws, and blood from numerous wounds streaking his great hairy hide, he presented a most formidable spectacle as he approached me with his body bent and crouching ready to spring, and his long, sinewy arms outstretched, the great hands opening and closing, as though eager to clutch my throat. We were now within half a dozen yards of each other, and as though by mutual consent we each halted at the same instant, glaring into each ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... Proud, at the Court of Elizabeth, was flattering in the extreme. The courtiers stared and smiled at his bareheaded body-guard, with their crocus-dyed vests, short jackets, and shaggy cloaks. But the broad-bladed battle-axe, and the sinewy arm which wielded it, inspired admiration for all the uncouth costume. The haughty indifference with which the Prince of Ulster treated every one about the Court, except the Queen, gave a keener edge to the satirical comments which were ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... her might, I 1 The Queen of soft delight Still ranges onward with triumphant sway. What she from Kronos' son And strong Poseidon won, And Pluto, King of Night, I durst not say. But who, to earn this bride, Came forth in sinewy pride To strive, or e'er the nuptial might be known With fearless heart I tell What heroes wrestled well, With showering blows, and ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... quick, burning tropical sun, shooting above the eastern horizon as suddenly as the volcanic cone had been lifted above the fog. This hot sun burned away the mists in a few minutes and there, stretching below us, in all its oriental beauty was the sinewy, voluptuous form of the silver sand ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... of more vegetables, the bones of meat used in the family, the pieces of meat that come from table on the plates, and rice, Scotch barley, or oatmeal, there will be some gallons of useful soup saved. The bits of meat should only be warmed in the soup, and remain whole; the bones and sinewy parts should be boiled till they yield their nourishment. If the fragments are ready to put into the boiler as soon as the meat is served, it will save lighting the fire, and a second cooking. Take ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... nothing but garden-tools in methodic piles (to screen them from rain), and seats where, especially on summer nights, a King might have wished to sit and smoke, and call it his. Such a Bauergut (Copyhold) had Gretchen given her veteran; whose sinewy arms, and long-disused gardening talent, had made it ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... hair and fired. Without waiting to see the result of his shot—so well did he trust his unerring aim—he climbed down the steep bank and brushing aside the vines entered the cave. A stalwart Indian lay in the entrance with his face pressed down on the vines. He still clutched in his sinewy fingers the buckhorn mouthpiece with which he had made the calls that had resulted in ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... together, would the snake Relax his suffocating grasp, and scourge The wind with his wild writhings; for, to break That chain of torment, the vast bird would shake The strength of his unconquerable wings As in despair, and with his sinewy neck Dissolve in sudden shock those linked rings, Then soar—as swift as smoke ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... of Chinese like pebbles rattling over stones and falling into water flowed from the singsong lips of Chuan Kai. The waiter went away and came back with a broad-shouldered Chinaman whose sleeves were rolled up, revealing sinewy yellow muscles. Campbell and Bassett guessed that he came from the kitchen where he had been cutting meat, for his hands were red and the apron he wore was stained. Chuan Kai spoke to these two hench-men at some length; they replied in guttural ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... horse and foot, And ere it totters rush upon the bridge." Urged in their swiftest gallop to the front Dashed the light horse across the sounding plain; And suddenly, as storm in summer, flew A cloud of javelins forth, by sinewy arms Hurled at the foe; the guard is put to flight, And conquering Caesar, seizing on the bridge, Compels the enemy to keep the walls. Now do the mighty engines, soon to hurl Gigantic stones, press ...
— Pharsalia; Dramatic Episodes of the Civil Wars • Lucan
... his cigar. His eyes narrowed and glittered. The muscles along his brown cheeks set hard and tense. He leaned closer to Duane, laid sinewy, pressing fingers upon ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... short that it looked as if it had been docked at the placket, with a jacket of the same, and the sleeves of her under-garment hanging about it. She appeared to be about forty years of age and was strong, hale, sinewy, and ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... land a sort of holiday spirit pervaded it. The work was a work of grim destruction, but it was done in the main with good temper. The sun shone, the men led a free and hardy life, growing daily more brown and sinewy, and at the end of the march of nearly three hundred miles, far from being worn out, they were more fit and strong than ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... his head. Then with one quick jerk he burst the rope and went into "Red" like a thunderbolt. Before that crashing impact of bone and muscle that had triumphed on many a football field, the startled outlaw hit the floor with a tremendous thump, while Bert's sinewy ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... flower amidst a weedy world, Where art thou now? In deepest forest shade? Or onward, where the sumach stands array'd In autumn splendor, its alluring form Fruited, yet odious with the hidden worm? Or, farther, by some still sequester'd lake, Loon-haunted, where the sinewy panthers slake Their noon-day thirst, and never voice is heard Joyous of singing waters, breeze or bird, Save their wild wailings.—[A halloo without.] 'Tis Tecumseh calls! Oh Iena! If dead, where'er thou art— Thy saddest grave will be this ruin'd ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... the setting of his short black hair and pointed beard. His nose was perhaps a little large for his face, and the unusual brilliancy of his eyes gave him an expression of restless energy; there was something noble in the shaping of his high square forehead and in the turn of his sinewy throat. His hands were broad and brown, but nervous and well knit, with straight long fingers and squarely cut nails. Many women said Don Giovanni was the handsomest man in Rome; others said he was too dark or too thin, and that his face was hard and his features ugly. There was a great ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... not our soil calling for the energetic efforts of his sinewy arms? Can we, in fact, live without him? But while we want his labor he wants our lands, our capital, our industry, our influence in the commerce and ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... except in certain parts which the Creator has made solely of flesh, as for example, the tongue. Had the combination of solid bone and thick flesh been consistent with acute perceptions, the Creator would have given man a sinewy and fleshy head, and then he would have lived twice as long. But our creators were of opinion that a shorter life which was better was preferable to a longer which was worse, and therefore they covered the head with thin bone, and placed ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... stayed watching the water, and sometimes with rapid gesture as though he plucked it out, he removed with his sinewy fingers the tear which had formed in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... object lying beyond" (our eyes mechanically followed his), "so still on the water?" and he indicated it with the pipe he held in one sinewy hand—for the native courtesy of the man had involuntarily proffered us the homage of removing it from his lips, when we ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... save that of any woman. Whatever judgment is passed upon Jack, this should not be forgotten. And Miss Tavish; to whom did she fly in this peril? To the gallant Major? No. To the cool and imperturbable Mavick, who was as strong and sinewy as he was cool? No. She ran without hesitation to Van Dam, and clung to him, recognizing instinctively, with the woman's feeling, the same quality that Jack had. There are such men, who may have no great gifts, but who will ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... her eyes, and smiled on him as the weeping infant returns the earnest and tender regard of its mother. The effect of that glance on Jacopo was so powerful that his sinewy frame shook, until the wondering Carmelite heard the clanking of ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... and young Bastow was soon over. The young fellow was lithe and sinewy, but he was no match for the constable, who, indeed, had almost overpowered him before he was aware what ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... hear that," said Hardy, looking up the ragged street a little wistfully. "I kind of lose track of things down here, knocking around from place to place." He seated himself wearily on the edge of the sidewalk and drummed with his sinewy white hands against a boot leg. "But it's a great life, sure," he observed, half to himself. "And by the way, Mr. Ware," he continued, "if it's all the same to you I wish you wouldn't say anything to your foreman about my past life. Not that there is anything disgraceful about it, but ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... as an Etruscan cameo; his limbs were elastic and moulded into the supple finish of one whose life has not been set upon level roads. At a speculative distance he appeared a straight specimen of a Burgundian youth—sinewy, clean-formed, and graceful, though slender to gauntness; and it was only on nearer contact that one marvelled to see the soul die out of him, as a face set in the shadow of leafage resolves itself into some ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... face? From women's eyes this doctrine I derive: They are the ground, the books, the academes, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, universal plodding poisons up The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long-during action tires The sinewy vigour of the traveller. Now, for not looking on a woman's face, You have in that forsworn the use of eyes, And study too, the causer of your vow; For where is author in the world Teaches such beauty as a woman's eye? Learning is but an adjunct to ourself, And where we are our learning ...
— Love's Labour's Lost • William Shakespeare [Craig, Oxford edition]
... had picked him for the All-America team. He could do his hundred in just a little worse than ten seconds. But after all he was a product of training and of the gymnasiums. Macdonald was what nature and a long line of fighting Highland ancestors had made him. His sinewy, knotted strength, his massive build, the breadth of shoulder and depth of chest—mushing on long snow trails was the gymnasium that had contributed ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... literature of all ages; Bunyan the prose writer is a poor, self-taught laborer who reads his Bible with difficulty, stumbling over the hard passages. Milton writes for the cultivated classes, in harmonious verse adorned with classic figures; Bunyan speaks for common men in sinewy prose, and makes his meaning clear by homely illustrations drawn from daily life. Milton is a solitary and austere figure, admirable but not lovable; Bunyan is like a familiar acquaintance, ruddy-faced, clear-eyed, who wins us by his sympathy, his friendliness, his good sense and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... measured him from head to foot; but the sight of the sinewy young Spaniard did not reassure him. His own muscles were somewhat flabby, and by no means fit for a struggle with this ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... race—men whom nature seemed to have conceived as a counterpart to the eagle, the master-piece of the winged creation. Keen-eyed, strongly-knit though small-boned, bereft of every fibre of superfluous flesh on their sinewy limbs, with bold brown faces and sharply-cut features, suggesting the king of birds not merely by the aquiline nose, they had also the eagle's courage, thirst for blood, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... right hand, and he put his rather large and sinewy brown hand into it. The small hand folded itself upon his in a curious way—feeble and fierce at the same time, it seemed—and held him. The hand was warm, almost hot, and soft, and dry as a fire is dry—so dry that it hisses angrily if ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Tintoretto could have evoked the fiend in his 'Temptation of Christ.' It is an indescribable hermaphroditic genius, the genius of carnal fascination, with outspread downy rose-plumed wings, and flaming bracelets on the full but sinewy arms, who kneels and lifts aloft great stones, smiling entreatingly to the sad, grey Christ seated beneath a rugged pent-house of the desert. No one again but Tintoretto could have dashed the hot lights of that fiery sunset in such quivering ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... instanced in the contrast between the hunting Indians of the prairies, and the piscatory Indians of the sea-coast. The former, continually on horseback scouring the plains, gaining their food by hardy exercise, and subsisting chiefly on flesh, are generally tall, sinewy, meagre, but well formed, and of bold and fierce deportment: the latter, lounging about the river banks, or squatting and curved up in their canoes, are generally low in stature, ill-shaped, with crooked legs, thick ankles, and broad flat feet. They ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... opened upon them such a shower of poisoned arrows as the Spaniards had never encountered before. The touch of one of these arrows, breaking the skin, caused immediate and intense agony, and almost certain death. The sinewy arms of the Indians could throw these sharp-pointed weapons with almost the precision and force of a bullet, and with far greater rapidity than the Spaniards could load and fire ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... evils of an excessive specialising which the very progress of knowledge in all departments seems to make inevitable. I do not need to speak, either, of the flow, and sometimes the torrent, of eloquence ever at his command, nor of the lithe and sinewy force of his extraordinarily nimble, as well as massive, mind; nor need I say more than one word about the remarkable combination of qualities so generally held and seen to be incompatible, which put into one personality a genius for dry arithmetical figures and a genius for enthusiasm ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... a pretty sight. His muscular arms and legs were all a-sprawl and his head hung back at a strange angle to his body, so that his fiery red beard pointed upwards, exposing all the thick sinewy throat beneath it. His eyes were half open and looked bleared and unhealthy, while his thick lips puffed out with a whistling sound at every expiration. His dirty brown coat was thrown open, and out of one ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... magnanimous resignation to the duties of his office was the captain's signal of readiness. He knew exactly the method of fighting which Angelo must adopt, and he saw that his adversary was supple, and sinewy, and very keen of eye. But, what can well compensate for even one additional inch of steel? A superior weapon wielded by a trained wrist in perfect coolness means victory, by every reasonable reckoning. In the present instance, it meant nothing other than an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... And make them keep their caves. To common language, the word is now completely obsolete. When the polite landsman first hears it from the gaunt Nantucketer, he is apt to set it down as one of the whaleman's self-derived savageries. Much the same is it with many other sinewy Saxonisms of this sort, which emigrated to New-England rocks with the noble brawn of the old English emigrants in the time of the Commonwealth. Thus, some of the best and furthest-descended English words —the etymological Howards and Percys —are now democratised, nay, plebeianised ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... trader, from Edinburgh, entered the port of Stettin. Among the few passengers was a tall young Scotch lad, Fergus Drummond by name. Though scarcely sixteen, he stood five feet ten in height; and it was evident, from his broad shoulders and sinewy appearance, that his strength was in full proportion to his height. His father had fallen at Culloden, ten years before. The glens had been harried by Cumberland's soldiers, and the estates confiscated. His mother had fled ...
— With Frederick the Great - A Story of the Seven Years' War • G. A. Henty
... he examined with the most incomparable patience. A snuff-colored wig sat awry on his head, and a snuff-colored coat, ornamented with large horn buttons, drooped ungracefully from his high, stooping shoulders. His neckcloth was white, but twisted, soiled, and tied carelessly around his thin, sinewy throat. His legs were cased in gray lamb's-wool stockings, over which his small-clothes were fastened at the knees with small silver buckles. His face was not originally cast in such a repulsive mould, but commerce with the world, and a succession of stinging disappointments ...
— May Brooke • Anna H. Dorsey
... hastened toward their graves by this old man's caresses; he had crushed them with his bony chest, drunk the sap of their life with these thick lips of his which were scarlet yet from the clotted blood of the women, who died in the embraces of his long sinewy arms. And now, awaiting death, which was already somewhere beside him, he counts his sins, judges others, and perhaps judges himself, ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... harmonizes with the tales that are told. It is an informal club of coastwise skippers and the old energy begins to show itself once more. They move with a brisker gait than when times were so hard and they went begging for charters at any terms. A sinewy patriarch stumps to a window, flourishes his arm at an ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... night, and once more that magnificent piece of machinery worked without a jar. Old Jack moved over the prairie with long, easy strides. It seemed to Ned that he could never grow weary. He patted the sinewy and powerful neck. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... former was of a short, thick-set powerful frame, in which, by a happy ordering of nature, a little confirmed perhaps by long habit, the strength was principally seated about the broad and brawny shoulders, and strong sinewy arms, as if, in the construction of the man, the inferior members had been considered of little other use than to transfer the superior to the different situations in which the former were to display their energies. His head ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... keenest edge of battle, Or gives the sword commission to destroy; Who blasts, or bids the martial laurel bloom— Emasculated, then, most manly might; Or, though the might remains, it nought avails: Then wither'd weakness foils the sinewy arm Of man's meridian and high-hearted power: Our naval thunders, and our tented fields With travel'd banners fanning southern climes, What do they? This; and more what can they do? When heap'd the measure of a kingdom's ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young |
