"Bedraggled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his feet, he stood for an instant to catch his breath, wrung the grime from his ears with his stiff fingers, and then shaking the water from his shoulders as a dog would after a plunge, he passed his great arms once more under the bedraggled body of the unconscious man and started up the dune toward the House of Refuge, the water dripping from both their wet bodies. Only once did he pause, ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... diameter, are beaten off with poles just before the scales open, gathered in heaps of several bushels, and lightly scorched by burning a thin covering of brushwood over them. The resin, with which the cones are bedraggled, is thus burned off, the nuts slightly roasted, and the scales made to open. Then they are allowed to dry in the sun, after which the nuts are easily thrashed out and are ready to be stored away. They are about half an inch long by a quarter of an inch in diameter, pointed at the upper end, rounded ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... at seeing our old friend, the "geographical President," again; but we soon found that he reappeared only as the file-leader of a ragged regiment of kindred scarecrows,—nay, with others so battered and bedraggled, that they were scarce fit to be the camp-followers of the soldiery with whom Falstaff refused to march through Coventry. The sarcasms which Mr. Choate vents against the Anti-slavery sentiment of the country are so old as to be positively respectable,—we wish we could say that their vivacity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... favour," said the German captain, as we sat in the cabin of a U-boat which had just been added to the long line of bedraggled captives which stretched themselves for a mile or more in Harwich ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... wretched beach-combers, farm laborers, and impossible firemen, stokers, and stewards, a pitiable set, were about the waterfront all day, dirty, dressed in hot woolen clothes, bedraggled and as drunk as their money would allow. The ship was down to leave at three-thirty o'clock, but it was four when the last bag of copra was aboard. There were few passengers, and those who booked here were dismayed at the condition of the passageways, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... silhouetted against the grey sky. Each of the women held a baby close to her breast and bent over it as she advanced against the wind, that beat her gown tightly against her legs and blew it out behind in bellying folds. Yet beneath their uncouth and bedraggled garments they moved like mothers of a mighty race, tall, large-limbed, broad of hip, hiding generous breasts beneath the shawls—red, grey, and black—that covered their babes from the wind and rain. A few of the children struggled forward under ricketty umbrellas; but the mothers had their ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... at last, I rose, and skirting the Castle, I entered the town, dishevelled and bedraggled, yet caring nothing what spectacle I might afford. And presently a grim procession overtook me, and at sight of the black, cowled and visored figures that advanced in the lurid light of their wax torches, I fell on my knees there in the street, and so remained, my knees deep in the mud, ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... the butler, witnessed such an exhibition of undignified haste. Cleigh, Jane, and Dennison, all three of them started for the door at once, jostling. What they found was only a bedraggled messenger boy, ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... little Jane that had appeared like a specter in the kitchen door. She was as wet and bedraggled as a chicken caught in a shower. A little felt hat hung limp over her ears; her pigtail braid had lost its string and was unraveling at the end, and her torn, sodden shoes were ready to drop from her feet. She looked both curiously and apprehensively at Alida with her little blinking eyes, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... The bedraggled little prima donna nodded; the pout on the lips blossomed into a smile, and a look of infinite tenderness transformed the tired, dark little face. "It's up to the creche—that's where I'm going now. The ladies keeps ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... is being made recently anent the blood-bedraggled cow-boy of the wild West, that I rise as one man to say a few things, not in a dictatorial style, but regarding this so-called or so esteemed dry land pirate who, mounted on a little cow-pony and under the black ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... himself to Redfield, who mounted to the porch with the other guards, and the tattered and bedraggled Dylks in their midst. "What are you doing with this ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... exercises to correct at home, presented a dejected figure, tired out and three-fourths beaten. So the Miss Dyers thought as they rolled past her in their carriage, and debated whether they should not stop to pick her up and save her walking the rest of the road. But she was such a fright, positively bedraggled with mud enough to soil the cushions, and she could speak of nothing now save the Deweshurst Girls' Day School and her duties there. It was too tiresome to be borne with. Poor Bell was not clever, she was one-idea'd and slow at work like Ned, and she had also his conscientiousness. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... destruction to follow upon their outpouring. Meantime, with late September, the leaves began to hustle early to earth under great winds. Rain fell at times, but not heavily at first, and a thirsty world drank open-mouthed through deep sun-cracks in field and moor and dried-up marsh. But bedraggled autumn's robes were soon washed colorless; the heath turned pallid before it faded to sere brown; rotten banks of decaying leaves rose high under the hedges. There was no dry, crisp whirl of gold on the wind, but a sodden condition gradually overspread the land. The earth grew drunken ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... a sandwich without the mustard, a joke without the point. What pleasure could there be in a dry picnic? Ladies never appear to such excellent advantage, never are so utterly bewitching, as when, with light summer dresses bedraggled and dirty, they cling helplessly to their protectors, or run in frantic haste to some place of shelter—for it is only when a woman (or a gentle bovine) runs, that the poetry of motion is fully realized. Then the gentlemen! Under what circumstances are ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... stood on the solid stone doorstep of Master Benjamin Hardy, important ship owner, merchant and financier. The whimsical fancy that so often turned his troubles and hardships into little things seized Robert again. He adjusted carefully his somewhat bedraggled clothing, set the sword and pistols in his belt at a rakish slant, put the pack on the step beside him, and, lifting the heavy brass knocker, struck loudly. He heard presently the sound of footsteps inside, ...
— The Shadow of the North - A Story of Old New York and a Lost Campaign • Joseph A. Altsheler
... gazed at it intently when she had shaken some of the dew from the frills and folds of her rather bedraggled skirt. ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... in that portion of the McHurdie Biography devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are bedraggled. And out of the inexplicable tangle of the mesh of life come dark threads from God knows where and colour the woof of it gray and dreary. Ah for the days of the large white plumes—for the days ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... looking longingly at the banks which seemed to glide rapidly to the rear. Then their queer craft was swept into a side current and grounded, while the raccoons lost no time in wading to shore. On the bank they cleaned and smoothed their bedraggled fur until it was once more dry and fluffy; then, without a backward glance, each hurried away, Ringtail to his home tree, where he arrived just as the rosy fingers of dawn appeared in the east. The warmth of his snug hollow felt very grateful after his ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... had increased from five or six to twelve or fourteen hours, and the light had increased and grubs were easier to find. By April, the starlings no longer appeared to be the same species as the poor, rusty, bedraggled wretches we had been accustomed to see; they are now lively, happy birds with a splendid gloss on their feathers and beaks as bright a yellow as the blackbird's. Finally, in April they left us, not going in a body, but flock by flock, day after day, ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... to the brink of the low bluff, from which the rescuer had plunged. He had already seized the child (there was an eddy here under the bank) and was striking out for the shore. Nan saw his wet face, with the bedraggled ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... it's putting off the presents!" sighed one of the oldest of Avrillia's children; then, as she looked at the poor little gentle, bedraggled Teacup, with her consanguineous handle, she felt ashamed of herself, and hid behind her ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... over her, and the story of the discovery had been repeated more than once, she was taken upstairs by Esther, and washed and changed, so that by the time Miss Ashe returned, instead of the bedraggled, dirty little maiden of an hour before, she saw only a perfectly neat and spotless one, and had no suspicion of all that had taken place during ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... surrounded a patch of garden-ground to the rear, one corner of it grotesquely adorned with a bower all bedraggled with rains, yet with the red berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage like grapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door. Its arch, ponderous, deep-moulded, hung a scowling eyebrow over the black and studded oak, and over ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; they kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor, bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a queen! Home and the heart of her husband—there lay her woman's kingdom, her realm, her God-given province. She had had the ordering of it, none other: she had married a good man. Glad or sorry, that kingdom was as her rule made it; ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... seventy-ton schooner with paraffin auxiliary, and it ran, when there was no head wind, between four and five knots an hour. It was a bedraggled object; it had been painted white a very long time ago, but it was now dirty, dingy, and mottled. It smelt strongly of paraffin and of the copra which was its usual cargo. They were within a hundred feet of the reef now and the captain told the steersman to run ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... made possible a common level on which we could stand. We discussed the storm, the prospect of its clearing, the number of unfortunates in the adjacent Bois who were soaked to the skin, especially the poor little bicycle-girls in their cotton bloomers, now collapsed and bedraggled. We talked of the great six-day cross-country bicycle-race, and how the winner, tired out, had wabbled over the Bridge that same morning, with the whole pack behind him, having won by less than five ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... still survived in the market-place as the judges rode in. Streamers hung in the sunshine, rather bedraggled after so long, from the roof and pillars of the Guildhall, and a great smoke-blackened patch between the conduit and the cross marked where the ox had been roasted. There was a deal of loyal cheering as the procession went by; for these splendid personages on horseback stood to ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... the side of the schooner, followed by a scrambling noise, made me turn round. The dripping, bedraggled figure of a man in a sleeping-suit mounted the rope ladder that hung over the side, and paused, grasping the rail. I had withdrawn my gaze so suddenly from the glow of the light in the cabin that for several moments the intruder ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... Joel," he now told the bedraggled boy who had just been downed, after dragging two of his most determined opponents several yards. "The ball still belongs to your side. Another yard, my lad, and you would have made a clean touchdown. A few weeks of hard practice like this and you boys, unless I miss ...
— Jack Winters' Gridiron Chums • Mark Overton
... of lamps. Desperately determined not to risk another struggle for the lift, I tried to find the staircase. At last, after endless enquiries and—it seemed—going back five steps for every three I had gone forward, I reached the toy department. Breathless, bedraggled, hot and exhausted, I clutched the arm of the first saleswoman I saw. "Des ballons, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... no reply, and the stranger, opening the gate, came into the yard. She looked weary, rather bedraggled, yet hurried: her air was predominantly one of anxiety. "I'll give you a quarter for that cat," she said. "I want an all-white cat, but this one's only got that one gray spot over its eye, and I don't believe there's an all-white ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... yet broken when the 'watch' of the ship Vulcan, lying becalmed off the —— coast, was roused by a peculiar noise aft. Going to the spot he was surprised to find a much-bedraggled monkey rubbing itself on a pile of sail-cloth. The creature had evidently swum or drifted a long distance, and was now endeavouring to restore circulation. Jerry, being a humane man, got it some biscuit, and a saucer of grog, and waited developments. ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... with combless chickens, begging for a grain of wheat; with large butterflies, unable to use their wings because they had sold all their lovely colors; with tailless peacocks, ashamed to show themselves; and with bedraggled pheasants, scuttling away hurriedly, grieving for their bright feathers of gold and silver, lost to ...
— The Adventures of Pinocchio • C. Collodi—Pseudonym of Carlo Lorenzini
... there is hope in that. Surely few situations could be more exasperating than this of forced inactivity when every day and indeed one hour counts. To be here watching the mottled wet green walls of our tent, the glistening wet bamboos, the bedraggled sopping socks and loose articles dangling in the middle, the saddened countenances of my companions—to hear the everlasting patter of the falling snow and the ceaseless rattle of the fluttering canvas—to feel the wet clinging dampness of clothes and ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... he hated her, with her smooth politeness, after a night when she had been unbearable and human by turns. He hated her bedraggled hair and tired face. Then he could have wept, so deeply did he desire to pull her head down on his shoulder and smooth the wrinkles of weariness out of her dear face, the dearer because they had endured the weariness together. ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... there were so many of those Rain Elves," said a bedraggled-looking flower. "I shall never wish for them to stay all ...
— Sandman's Goodnight Stories • Abbie Phillips Walker
... confiscation of all his property, as well as capture on the high seas. There was no winning cause to lure him, merely thirteen little newly-born republics struggling for a principle, fighting for democracy—a weak, bedraggled, and dispirited democracy, a democracy half-clad and poverty stricken, a barefooted, half-naked democracy that was very nearly ...
— The Spirit of Lafayette • James Mott Hallowell
... careless rejoinder and the janitor went down the hall, brushing the marble dado with his bedraggled ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... the astonishment of the Chief and his men when upon approaching the fire by creeping up they discovered that those about it were the eight scouts, and even recognized in the bedraggled figure of the last member none other than the wretched culprit, ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... skirt was bedraggled, a rent showed in the sleeve of her blouse, her riding boots were shabby, and the fingers were out of her worn gauntlets. Her hat was white with the dust of the corral, her hair dishevelled and her face, still damp with perspiration, ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... which the sparse bunches of grasses grew like reeds in a great marshy lake. We splashed along with the water over our ankles. The channels made by the game trails offered natural conduits, and wherever there was the least grade they had become rushing brooks. We found the safari very bedraggled. Billy had made a mound of valuables, atop which she perched, her waterproof cape spread as wide as possible, a good deal like a brooding hen. We set out for the meeting-point on the Kedong. In half an hour we had there found a bit of higher ground ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... Scorched, wearied and bedraggled, the remains of the storming party clambered out of the ditch as best they could, clutching at the friendly hands held down to them, and so limped their way back amid the taunts and howls of their enemies. A long pile of smoldering cinders was all that remained of their bridge, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the years of peace from 1871 to 1914 considerable social changes. How far they are effective in all nations and in all classes it is very difficult for a contemporary to judge. It may be that the social structure of the decorative upper fringe or of the bedraggled hem of society is much the same as it was before communication was easy and transit rapid. But the central body of European society is certainly changed; and, after all, between the scum and the dregs is ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... having a very loud voice he soon let them know his mind. At which the birds resolved to try again, and, do you know, last year they very nearly succeeded. For it rained hard all Midsummer Day, and when the birds came down to the brook they were so bedraggled, and benumbed, and cold, and unhappy, that they had nothing to say for themselves, but splashed about in silence, and everything would have happened just right had not a rook, chancing to pass over, accidentally ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... water I saw the reflection of myself, and the sight made me more hopeless than ever. I saw in the water a tall, wild-looking youth, with bare head, save for a mass of unkempt hair; a face all scratched and bruised, and made to look savage and repulsive by vindictiveness; the clothes were dirty, bedraggled and torn, while the riding boots were ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... Where are you?" Rather indefinitely the first speaker answers, "Here! Help! Help!" Another crashing through the underbrush, followed by a second splash, and presently, after a short pause, there enters upon the stage a tall, much bedraggled Englishman, bearing in his arms the motionless body of an extremely good-looking girl. Both of them are very wet, and a trail of water marks their progress across the scene. Reaching the clearing, the Englishman methodically deposits the girl on the ground, backs away a foot or so, and notices ...
— The Noble Lord - A Comedy in One Act • Percival Wilde
... so much pride, one would suppose they would desire to see their children able to support themselves. But it is just the reverse; the poorer folk are, the less they seem to care to try to do something. 'You come home if you don't like it;' and stay about the hovel in slatternly idleness, tails bedraggled and torn, thin boots out at the toes and down at the heels, half starved on potatoes and weak tea—stay till you fall into disgrace, and lose the only thing you possess in the world—your birthright, your character. Strange advice it was for ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... and bedraggled and shabby-looking troop; and still, as always, Joan was the freshest of us all, in both body and spirits. We had averaged above thirteen leagues a night, by tortuous and wretched roads. It was a remarkable march, and shows ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... especially Page himself. A day or two after the sinking the Ambassador went to Euston Station, at an early hour in the morning, to receive the American survivors. The hundred or more men and women who shambled from the train made a listless and bedraggled gathering. Their grotesque clothes, torn and unkempt—for practically none had had the opportunity of obtaining a change of dress—their expressionless faces, their lustreless eyes, their uncertain and bewildered walk, faintly reflected ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family. Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something between reproach and urgency. Why had he brought them here? What next did he propose to do? ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... way into the presidential mansion. The door slammed shut. Moira, his granddaughter, regarded the president with sympathy. He looked bedraggled and crushed. He mopped his forehead. He did not raise his eyes to her. It was bad enough to be president of a planetary government that couldn't even pay his salary, so there were patches in his breeches that Moira must have noticed. It was worse that the colony ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of dry grass and a few old bamboos. As it could be replaced in an hour, and the material lay all around, we fired the hut, which soon, blazed up, throwing a weird lurid glow on bank and stream, and disclosing far on the other bank our weary nags and shivering syces, looking very bedraggled and forlorn indeed. The leaping and crackling of the flames, and the genial warmth, invigorated us a little, and while I stayed behind to feed the fire, the others recrossed to bring the ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... faith. On Ford the influence is different; although equal, perhaps, in genius to Webster, surpassing him even in intense tragic passion, he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies like a wild beast at bay and cheating them of their revenge ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... roused his mother, who stared in drowsy astonishment at the bedraggled apparition on ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... the time they fancied themselves doing it of their own accord. The cow was by no means very nice in choosing her path; so that sometimes they had to scramble over rocks, or wade through mud and mire, and all in a terribly bedraggled condition, and tired to death, and very hungry, into the bargain. What a weary ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... unclaimed 'washings' of many years—hundreds of waiters' aprons and cooks' caps, worn hotel towels and napkins, ragged shirts and collars—not a thing worth the lumber in the box, except as old linen for the hospitals. There was a great deal of bedraggled finery, than which nothing could have been less appropriate, when nine out of every ten women who applied for clothes, wanted plain black in which to mourn for their dead. And the hats and bonnets ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... at that inn, so near to insensibility I was when I fell against its door. I have a dim memory of having exchanged a few words with a sleepy, stolid host; of being glad of the darkness of the night, for it prevented him from noticing my wet, frozen, begrimed, bedraggled, half-dead condition; of my bargaining for the sole occupancy of a room; of his leading me up a winding stairway to a chamber; of my plunging from the threshold to the bed as soon as the door was opened. I slept for several hours. When I ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... the poor creature look with her pale and tear-stained face, her reddened eyes and disheveled hair; and her rich and elegant white evening dress with its ample skirts and lace flounces bedraggled and bedabbled with all the filth of the ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... managed to win free, crawling out near where a smaller stream joined the river. There he lay panting, face down upon the moss. And there they found him, water dripping from his bedraggled finery, the Ana stroking his muddied hair. Thrala cried out with concern and pillowed his head on her knees while Dandtan examined ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... of the gaunt, bedraggled figure that craved admittance, the landlord would have shut the door again, fearing that he had to do with some wild bandit from the hills. But Garnache thrust his foot ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... drizzly, bedraggled Paris into a land of sunshine and gentle breezes; from the bare sullen lands of the Champagne, into a country where flowers grew by the side of the railway, and that in February; to a semi-tropic land, fragrant with flowers, to white beaches ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... light. But he hates darkness as he does death; and falsehood more than either. He has painted a noble human creature simply in clear daylight; not in rapture, nor yet in agony. He is dressed neither in a rainbow, nor bedraggled with blood. You are neither to be alarmed nor entertained by anything that is likely to happen to him. You are not to be improved by the piety of his expression, nor disgusted by its truculence. But there is more true mastery of light and shade, if your eye is subtle enough to see it, in the ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... a feeling of disappointment in that first trench. I don't know what I expected to see, but what I did see was just a long, crooked ditch with a low step running along one side, and with sandbags on top. Here and there was a muddy, bedraggled Tommy half asleep, nursing a dirty and muddy rifle on "sentry go." Everything was very quiet at the moment—no rifles popping, as I had expected, no bullets flying, and, as it happened, absolutely no shelling in the ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... nervous tension. The skin was puffed out under his sunken eyes, and its sallowness had paled to a leaden white against which his irregular eyebrows and long reddish moustache were relieved with a saturnine effect. His appearance, in short, presented an odd mixture of the bedraggled and ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... The rest of the morning they pored over manuscripts, sorting notes, and making corrections, she happy in having even a tiny share in his great work, and he finding her enthusiasm and interest a welcome condiment to stir his jaded appetite for his task. Meanwhile, a bedraggled little rose languished unnoticed beneath the manuscript of "The History of Norman Influence ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... with bedraggled skirt, reddened eyes and a fat, motherly face timidly approached. She ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... drizzling rain, each packing a five-gallon can of gasoline and some provisions, we set out for the Ferry; and it was a sorry, bedraggled trio that limped up to camp eight hours later. We did little more than creep the last five miles. And all for a spiteful little engine that might ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... had fallen short of his printed promise. The hurricane had come by night, and with one fell swash had made an irretrievable sop of everything. The circus trailed away its bedraggled magnificence, and the ring was cleared ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... speech, but continued his superior look, breaking it with a very genuine shock of surprise when his old mother tottered in at the front door. She was still the disconsolate creature of the day before, bedraggled, sad-eyed, feeble, very aged, and still she carried her bucket and the bundle of rags with which she had ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... his scouts around him, at the request of the old minister. They were rather a sorry looking group, though just as full of a desire to assist as ever. The fine new uniforms were bedraggled with mud and water. Several had holes burned in their coats, and that of Jack ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... honeysuckle covering the wide porch, from which the slow rain dropped ceaselessly upon the pebble-paving below, could not give—steepy slopes, hedge-divided into small fields, some green and dotted with red cattle, others crowded with shocks of bedraggled and drooping corn, which looked ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... A bedraggled old rooster. [Old rooster has almost the force of a compound word. Bedraggled modifies the ...
— The Century Handbook of Writing • Garland Greever
... shoulders. With the heavy garment in her hands she stepped from her path toward the sleeper and noticed for the first time an utterly disreputable-looking dog lying beside him in the weeds. The dog's long hair was bedraggled to the color of the mud he curled in, and as he opened his eyes without raising his head, Gertrude hesitated; but his tail spoke a kindly greeting. He knew no harm was meant and he watched unconcernedly while, determined not to recede from her impulse, Gertrude stepped hastily to the sleeper's ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... passed from behind the screen of trees and came into the clearing before the terrace, and unto the waiting glances of Ashburn and his daughter was revealed a curiously bedraggled and ill-assorted pair. The one riding slightly in advance looked like a Puritan of the meaner sort, in his battered steeple-hat and cloak of rusty black. The other was closely wrapped in a red mantle, uptilted behind by a sword of prodigious length, and ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... more watery appearance; in the distance arose the dreary, gloomy, melancholy forest-trees; while all around was a thin, fine drizzle, which enveloped us, saturating and soaking us with watery vapor. We all became limp and bedraggled, in soul as well as body. The most determined buoyancy of spirit could not withstand the influence of that drizzle, and, one by one, we all ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... experience been larger he might have spared himself that sensitiveness. For the hotel was one of those great caravansaries popular with the returning miner. It received him and his gold dust in his worn-out and bedraggled working clothes, and returned him the next day as a well-dressed citizen on Montgomery Street. It was hard indeed to recognize the unshaven, unwashed, and unkempt "arrival" one met on the principal staircase at night in the scrupulously neat ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... solvent. About half a minute under the pump formed the solution of this problem. A wet and skinny-looking cat, her elegance departed, streaked back to the wood shed and her offspring, while a sober and bedraggled little bear trotted behind his captors to Mr. ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... indescribably fresh and grateful. A closer inspection will probably dissipate this impression; it will be squalid and dirty, the river-stone paving of its street will be deep in the accumulation of filth, dirty Indian children will swarm in them with mangy dogs and bedraggled ducks, the gay frescoes of its walls will peel in ragged patches, revealing the 'dobe of their base, and the tile roofs will be cracked and broken. But from the heights at this distance and in ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... making of soup, the frying of potatoes, and the selection of elastic cheeses. He showed, with pardonable pride, a visitors' book in which was written "Leopold, Prince of Great Britain and Ireland." His Royal Highness came here one rainy day in 1876, riding on a mule, and escorted by a bedraggled suite. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... he spied a crowd by the side of the road. An old woman was gesticulating with her stick, while the street boys mocked and laughed around her. It was Granny Moan. The good old granny whom Sylvestre had so tenderly loved—her dress torn and bedraggled—had now become one of those poor old women, almost fallen back in second childhood, who are followed and ridiculed along their roads. ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... shining row, and questioned her face in the glass. The tears were on it still, but that hardly mattered on a face that smiled so hard. But she did wipe away the drops with her apron, and then hurried into the kitchen to meet her visitor. Mrs. John C. was bedraggled from loss of sleep, and defeat ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... sash coiled tightly round his waist, moved with difficulty among the crowded tables. A woman at a table in the corner, with dead white skin and drugged staring eyes, kept laughing hoarsely, leaning her head, in a hat with bedraggled white plumes, against the wall. There was a constant jingle of plates and glasses, and an oily fume of food and women's clothes ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... the narrow, white-walled circle of the storm a little world of ice and writhing space. The Shining Light was gripped: her foremast was snapped, her sails hanging stiff and frozen; she was listed, bedraggled, incrusted with ice—drifted high with snow. 'Twas the end of the craft: I knew it. And I went below to my uncle and the fool, sad at heart because of this death, but wishing very much, indeed, for my breakfast. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... the court-martial that investigated the escape, not with flying colors, but with bedraggled feathers. The cut on his head had proved so slight as to arouse suspicion that it might have been self-inflicted. Still the motive for this did not seem adequate, and the upshot of the inquiry was that Rabig was confined a few days in ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... traveling without litter or cavalcade, several days of wandering slowly passed. Few people they met, and those, for the most part, various types of vagabonds and nomads; some wild and savage, roaming like beasts from place to place; others, harmless, mere bedraggled birds of passage. In this latter class were the vagrant-entertainers, with dancing rooster or singing dog, who stopped at every peasant's door. To the shrill piping of the flageolet, these merry stragglers added a step of their own, and won a crust for themselves, a ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, was crushed and hung askew over one ear; nevertheless, Miss Pringle conveyed at once and definitely an impression of unassailable respectability and ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... and ran in every direction, searching all hallways and side streets for blocks around, but nothing rewarded their endeavors, and it was a bedraggled and exasperated quartette that finally came together again to compare notes ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... grasping the shaggy hide of Lottie, who yelled most furiously, was Anna Jeffrey, half blinded with mud, and bitterly denouncing American drivers and Yankee roads! To gather themselves together was not an easy matter, but the ten pieces were at last all told, and then, holding up her skirts, bedraggled with dew, Madam Conway resumed her seat in the wagon, which was this time driven in safety to her door. Giving orders for her numerous boxes to be safely bestowed, she hastened forward and ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... no sooner been put out, the claim bare as the day I first saw it—save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the smell of smoke—when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We were ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... more at Roxford Castle. For after my heavy gloom and dark despair, even the smallest hope was mountain size and promised sure release. And so I waited; confident and strong. Last evening near sundown the Abbot Aldam came; and as I saw him, all bedraggled, cross the courtyard on foot and unattended, I felt that my deliverance was near. No one of his rank and station would travel so, except his life were jeopardized, and I cried out in joy at his undoing. Then I sent ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... landing is the last picture, but one, I have to present of childhood days, ere I hasten, over the period that brought us all into our twenties and to strange, eventful times. The one remaining sketch is of an unkempt, bedraggled figure that I saw at the back hall door of the Faringfields one snowy night a week later, when, for some reason or other, I was out late in our back garden. This person, instead of knocking at the door, very cautiously tried it to see if it would open, and, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... possession of a tiny girl eight years old. This fashionable young person boasted also a European hat of coarse white straw stiffly trimmed with blue ribbon and blue ostrich tips. That the feathers had a wofully limp, depressed, and bedraggled appearance; that the ribbon was obviously cotton; and the straw of the coarsest weave, in no wise detracted from the glorious knowledge that it was a hat, a real hat such as the Americanas themselves were wearing. Sustained by this fact the young lady, who, in addition to the shoes ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... travelled over the picturesque figure on the bed, noting everything—the shoeless foot, the stockings wet to some inches above the small ankles, the mud-stained skirt, the bedraggled cloak saturated for quite a foot of its length. Her hair had lost its comb and had fallen about her shoulders. Mrs. Fenton frowned as she saw ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... instant they were heroic, this line of dishevelled, bedraggled pleasure-seekers. They were all looking Death in the face, and the closer they looked the less they feared him. They were conscious rather of a feeling of curiosity, together with the nervous tingling ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the confused impressions that crowded Nan's memory after the wild night on Music Mountain, the most vivid was that of a noticeably light-stepping and not ungraceful fat man advancing, hat in hand, to greet her as she stood with de Spain, weary and bedraggled in ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tear-stained young ladies at dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They evinced no curiosity about this disheveled creature who had flung herself ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... came through the undergrowth and they were pushing a figure before them. It was that of a man in a bedraggled and torn red uniform, his hands tied behind him, and all the color gone from his face. Powerful as was his self-control, Tayoga uttered a low cry of surprise. It was the young Englishman, Grosvenor, a prisoner of the hostile warriors, and ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... did not reach, the morning frost still glistened like a coating of sugar. On the mossy carpet, the sparrows, thin with the privations of winter, trotted back and forth like children, shaking their bedraggled feathers. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... proved unfavourable, and we returned in open boats, also with open umbrellas; a generally drenched and bedraggled appearance, and nothing to cheer us on the physical plane except a quantity of iced coffee which had been ordered in anticipation ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... great as to prevent strong expressions of disgust. Little wonder, for if a fiend could embody itself in a woman, this demented creature would leave nothing for the imagination. Her dress was wet, torn, and bedraggled; her long black hair hung dishevelled around a white, bloated face, from which her eyes gleamed with a fierceness like that ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... he came upon a group of people standing around something that lay on the pavement. It was an old woman, a tattered, bedraggled creature with a pinched and pallid face. "Is it an accident?" a gentleman was saying, and somebody answered, "No, sir, she's gorn off in a faint." "Why doesn't some one take her to the hospital?" said the gentleman, and then, like the Levite, ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... turn in early when a faint cry sounded outside the circle of tents. Immediately, every one turned out, hoping it was the foragers back. Rushing in the direction of the sound, the men returned, accompanying a bedraggled old man with a gray beard, after whom limped a train of spiritless, wolfish dogs attached to ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... At its last prolonged note the sharp crack of an old three-inch rifle echoed the report from Alcatraz, and from the invisible, mist-shrouded top of the staff the dripping folds of the storm-flag came flapping down in view, limp and bedraggled, and the guard sprang again to attention as a burly, red-faced, hearty-looking soldier, with a captain's insignia in loop and braid on the sleeves of his overcoat, broke a way through the group of lookers-on ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... Friday afternoon. When Maggie came home at half-past six her mother lay asleep amidst the wreck of chairs and a table. Fragments of various household utensils were scattered about the floor. She had vented some phase of drunken fury upon the lambrequin. It lay in a bedraggled ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... then I'll go without you." Teddy started away, whereupon the Fat Woman wailed to him to come back, at the same time struggling to her feet, bedraggled and wet, her hair full of sand and her ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... back in the cabin with Gregson, but he took a wash in the river and combed his hair with his fingers. When he returned, there was a transformation in Jeanne. Her beautiful hair was done up in shining coils. She had changed her bedraggled skirt for another of soft, yellow buckskin. At her throat she wore a fluffy mass of crimson stuff which seemed to reflect a richer rose-flush in her cheeks. A curious thought came to Philip as he looked at her. Like a flash the memory of a certain night came to him—when ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood
... went the four bedraggled ones. The twins saw them coming, and, grave-eyed and solemn, ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... to owe it to ye, Hank! Mebbe I'll pay it some day when you git han'somer 'n you are now!" laughed Captain Ephraim dryly. He gave a piercing whistle through his teeth. Straightway Toby, sadly bedraggled, came limping up to him. The Pup let go of his dead enemy, and lifted his head to eye his master inquiringly. His whole front was ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... man in evening dress the worse for misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven jowls; and his ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... shorter than common; less, however, with a view to show a pretty foot and ankle than to leave the nether limbs at liberty to go through with certain extravagant efforts which the Savoyards were unmercifully exacting from his natural agility. He wore a Spanish hat, decorated with a few bedraggled feathers, a white cockade, and a wooden sword. In addition to the latter, he carried in his hand ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... beds, with tender promises not to forget them, she took a hasty breakfast and stepped into the carriage waiting at the door. The sleepy waiters stared, a friendly housemaid nodded, and Miss Walker, the hearty English lady who did her ten miles a day, cried out, as she tramped by, blooming and bedraggled: ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... The same evening, the bedraggled and footsore soldiers waded the Fishkill[55] where the bridge had been, but was now destroyed, and bivouacked on the heights of Saratoga.[56] Too weary even to light fires, to dry their clothing, or ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake
... Hall, I saw the King, the Dukes, and all their attendants go forth in the rain to the City, and it bedraggled many a fine suit of clothes. I was forced to walk all the morning in White Hall, not knowing how to get out because of the rain. Met with Mr. Cooling, my Lord Chamberlain's secretary, who took me to dinner among the gentlemen waiters, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and then loped off at a calf's gallop. The carcass lay on his path. He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffling rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog's bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dogsniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody! Here ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... dark man with keen eyes who had seen her disappearing through her door of a Sunday night when all these gay, bedraggled birds were at liberty and the fun ran high. "Great Scott!" the man had said, and Margaret had heard him demand of Jack that she be recalled. She obeyed, and the man was introduced, also the other members of ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
