"Gnarled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... blue-green, something never seen by day. Every line shone bright, graceful, curved, rounded, and all thrown with sharp relief against the sky. How magical, exquisitely delicate and fanciful! The great trunks were soft serrated brown, and the gnarled branches stood out in perfect proportions. All works of art ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... Strand, hard by Bedford Street; the time, that restful hour of the afternoon when they of the gnarled faces and the bright clothing gather together in groups to tell each other ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... only a heap of rubbish, overgrown with rank weeds and vines, marked the spot where she had spent so many happy hours. The glowing yellow chestnut leaves dropped down at her feet, and the oaks tossed their gnarled arms as if welcoming the wanderer whose head they had shaded in infancy, and, stifling a moan, the orphan ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... his present memory. Does a surprising piece of good fortune accrue to any one, splendid riches, a commanding position, a peerless friendship? It is the reward of virtuous deeds done in an earlier life. Every flower blighted or diseased, every shrub gnarled, awry, and blasted, every brute ugly and maimed, every man deformed, wretched, or despised, is reaping in these hard conditions of being, as contrasted with the fate of the favored and perfect specimens of the kind, the fruit of sin in a foregone existence. When the Hindu ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... be a good and pious papist, madam, like her sweet mother; but never a nun. I look to her as the staff and comfort of my declining years. Thou wilt not abandon thy father, wilt thou, little one, when thou shalt be tall and strong as a bulrush, and he shall be bent and gnarled with age, like the old medlar on the lawn at the Manor? Thou wilt be his rod and staff, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... smell, flowed down to the shore of the bay. The olive trees were of immense size, and I can well believe, as Fra Carlo informed us, that they were probably planted by the Roman colonists, established there by Titus. The gnarled, veteran boles still send forth vigorous and blossoming boughs. There were all manner of lovely lights and shades chequered over the turf and the winding path we rode. At last we reached the foot of an ascent, steeper than ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... door of the Casa Lesca swung in, admitting Lawrence to a damp stone-flagged room. At the farther end it opened on a little cortile, where gnarled rose-bushes were in bloom. A broken Venus, presiding over a dusty fountain, made the centre of the cortile, and there a strapping girl from the campagna was busy trimming the stalks of a bunch of roses. ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... crept through this queer tunnel for a long time and then I felt that we were ascending gradually and that the air was growing purer. In a few moments more, we emerged from another narrow crevice hidden under the gnarled roots of a live-oak. Moss, lichen and fern covered this opening so completely that no one would have dreamed there was an entrance there to a ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... that, Makes all the difference. If you hadn't children, I'ld find it in my heart to pity you, Granted you'ld let me. I don't understand! I've seen you stripped. I've seen your children stripped. You've never seen me naked; but you can guess The misstitched, gnarled, and crooked thing I am. Now, do you understand? I may have words. But you, man, do you never burn with pride That you've begotten those six limber bodies, Firm flesh, and supple sinew, and lithe limb— Six nimble lads, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... her lap was an infant. Three bare-footed children, as if hatching eggs, sat motionless on the edge of a peat fire, which appeared to be almost touching their naked toes; above the embers was demurely hanging a black pot. Opposite sat, like a bit of gnarled oak, the withered grandmother. The furniture was composed of a dingy-coloured wooden wardrobe, with a few plates on the top, and one bed close to the fire. There was no chimney but the door, on the threshold of which stood, looking exceedingly unhappy, ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... the afternoon of the same Sunday, and they were sauntering up Fifth Avenue, and admiring the wide old double houses at the lower end; at one corner they got a distinct pleasure out of the gnarled elbows that a pollarded wistaria leaned upon the top of a garden wall—for its convenience in looking into the street, he said. The line of these comfortable dwellings, once so fashionable, was continually broken by the facades of shops; and March professed himself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... exhibiting considerable diversity in general appearance, trunk sometimes dissolving into branches like the American elm, and sometimes continuous to the top. The finest specimens in open land are characterized by a rather short, massive trunk, with stout, horizontal, far-reaching limbs, conspicuously gnarled and twisted in old age, forming a wide-spreading, open head of striking grandeur, the diameter at the base of which is sometimes two or three times the ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... death was in the villa. Two days before, Frau von Buelow, the last of the Humboldts, had been carried forth, to rest beside her husband and children, her father William, and her uncle Alexander von Humboldt. The gnarled and twisted stem of a venerable ivy clasps with two arms one of the most majestic of the tall trees before the house, one branch bearing large leaves of a tender green, the other small and beautifully outlined leaves of dark maroon exquisitely veined. Beds bordered with box are bright ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton
... is clear and fresh; whence the name of the stream, The Sweet Waters of Asia. On its south side there is a prairie-like stretch, narrow, but green and besprent with an orchard of sycamores old and gnarled, and now much frequented on Mohammedan Sundays by ladies of the harems, who contrive to make it very gay. No doubt the modest river, and the grass and great trees were just as attractive ages before the first Amurath, with an army at his heels, halted there ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors and doors, of the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it; and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... hobbles unsteadily from his little shade beside the outhouse into the warm kitchen, leaning heavily on the arm of his niece. He looks up on hearing my voice, and extends a gnarled and tobacco-stained hand. He sinks fumblingly into a chair. It is then that I see that Uncle ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States, From Interviews with Former Slaves - Virginia Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... that which, brown and glistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development was simply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews around his back and shoulders were like ivy tentacles wreathing some gnarled oak. ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... white-robed slave knelt by the curling thread of smoke and nursed the flickering flame with his breath, while his circle of hungry masters pelted him with woolly beech-nuts and cursed his slowness. There, a dozen yards to the left, the meal was nearly over; between the gnarled trunks the fire shone like a red eye; and bursts of merriment and snatches of boisterous song marked ...
— The Ward of King Canute • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... disinclined for action. The boys lay about on the grass, sleepily happy. Norah climbed into a tree, where the gnarled boughs made a natural arm-chair, and the Hermit propped his back against a rock and smoked a short black pipe with an air of perfect enjoyment. It was just hot enough to make one drowsy. Bees droned lazily, and from some shady gully the shrill note of a cricket ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... search of work are persecuted as vagrants by the civil guards. Arson becomes the last retort of despair. At night the standing grain burns mysteriously or the country house of an absent landlord, and from the parched hills where gnarled almond-trees grow, groups of half starved men watch ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... plane's speeding body the gnarled, bomb-torn terrain of Nevada hurtled by. A rather sad frown creased Lance's prematurely old brow as he glimpsed it. Thousands of lives had been thrown into that ground; the hot, tumbled waste was doused with freely-sacrificed blood, the blood of whole regiments of America's heroic ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... an old stump, don't you see?' exclaimed Louis. I looked again and saw that what he said was true; a gnarled tree stump, some twisted branches, a deceiving white vapour, and perhaps, too, our own vivid imaginations, these were the elements which had given birth to ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... integrity and sense to oppose the largesses of corn; and he forfeited his popularity by trying to close the public granaries before the practice had passed into a system. He seemed as if made of a block of hard Roman oak, gnarled and knotted, but sound in all its fibres. His professional merit continued to recommend him. At the age of forty he became praetor, and was sent to Spain, where he left a mark again by the successful severity by which he cleared the province of banditti. He was a man neither given himself to talking ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... her hand to Hi, and together they entered the woods, trudging wearily on toward the place where, between the distant trees they could see the western sky. Their tired little feet stumbled on, tripping over fallen twigs, and gnarled roots of the great trees. Prue was crying now and Hi, anxious to keep up, at least a semblance of the big boy and protector, made desperate efforts to swallow the lump in his throat which was growing larger every moment. Prue ...
— Randy and Her Friends • Amy Brooks
... will grow into 'a tower of strength that stands four-square to every wind.' Rooted in God, thou shalt be unmoved by 'the loud winds when they call'; or if still the tremulous leaves are huddled together before the blast, and the swaying branches creak and groan, the bole will stand firm and the gnarled roots will not part from their anchorage, though the storm-giant drag at them with a hundred hands. The spirit of holiness will be ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... from the wall A sluice with blacken'd waters slept; And o'er it many, round and small, The cluster'd marish-mosses crept. Hard by, a poplar shook alway, All silver-green with gnarled bark; For leagues, no other tree did dark The level waste, the rounding gray. She only said, "My life is dreary— He cometh not," she said; She said, "I am aweary, weary, I would that I ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... we look at anything, however simple, the deeper it penetrates into our being until it becomes a part of us. In time we learn to know the tree that shades our porch, but years elapse before we are on friendly terms, and a lifetime is spent before the gnarled giant admits us to intimate companionship. Trees are filled with reserve; when denuded of their neighbors, they stand in melancholy solitude until the leaves fall for the last time, until their branches wither, and their ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... Diamond and Slim are tipped at head and foot with charming banks and willowed sand, and each center is clothed in a luxurious forest, rimmed by a gravelly beach piled high with drift and gnarled roots: the whole, with startling clearness, inversely reflected in the mirrored flood. Wabash Island, opposite the mouth of the great tributary, is an insular woodland ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... great contempt for coloured people. They were on the whole infinitely more interesting than the Irish. I knew nothing of the world, nothing of the Orient, and here was an Oriental microcosm. The old serang, or bo'sun, was a gnarled and knotted and withered Malay, who took rather a fancy to me. Sometimes I sat in his berth and smoked a pipe with him. At other times I deciphered the wooden tallies for the sails in the sail-locker, for though he talked something which ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... crept continually up the valley, and their feathery foliage, so merry in its movement and so yellow and joyous in its color, seemed peculiarly precious under that somber sky. There were sycamores and copper beeches; gnarled apple-trees, too old to bear; and fall pear-trees, hung with a sharp, hard fruit in October; all with a leafage singularly rich and luxuriant, and peculiarly vivid in color. The oaks about the house had been old trees when my great-grandfather ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... the window. What was there to count? There was only a bare, dreary yard to be seen, and the blank side of the brick house twenty feet away. An old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots, climbed half way up the brick wall. The cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... hat!"—and he threw it up as high as he could into the air. The celestial bodies which he invoked did not receive the present dispatched to them; but, as in the case of Sir Henry Lee's scabbard, an old gnarled oak became a second time the receptacle of a waif and stray of loyal enthusiasm. Wildrake looked rather foolish at the circumstance, and his friend took the opportunity ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... they hold his volumes with a Hidden Hand—and fewer still love him, for at heart he was a Prussian. He was, indeed, slain in our affections by Frederick the Great. His shrine at Chelsea is no longer visited. It is all for the best, because in any case he wrote only a gnarled and involved bastard stuff of partly Teutonic origin. While this appeal was being made to me, I watched the face of a cat, which got up and stretched itself during the discourse, with some hope; but that animal looked as though it were thinking of its drowned ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... with frost underfoot. The apples have been taken from the trees by the pickers. They have been put in barrels and shipped to the cities where they will be eaten in apartments that are filled with books, magazines, furniture, and people. On the trees are only a few gnarled apples that the pickers have rejected. They look like the knuckles of Doctor Reefy's hands. One nibbles at them and they are delicious. Into a little round place at the side of the apple has been gathered all of its sweetness. ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... were a pleasant experience, the one-man perambulators; and the costume of the rickshaw-runners was delightful, and their gnarled, indefatigable legs. With their tight trunk-hose of a coarse dark-blue material and short coat to match like an Eton jacket and with their large, round mushroom hats, they were like figures from the crowd ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... luck would have it, no one was injured, not even Hosea, but the incident made me think more highly of our new acquaintance. As he started off down the village street, his long stringy figure and strange gnarled visage, with my father's silver-braided hat cocked over his eye, attracted rather more attention than I cared to see, considering the importance of the missives which he bore, and the certainty of their discovery should he be arrested as a masterless man. Fortunately, however, the curiosity ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... night. This garden was oblong in shape, with an alley of large poplars at the further end, tolerably tall forest trees in the corners, and an unshaded space in the centre, where could be seen a very large, solitary tree, then several fruit-trees, gnarled and bristling like bushes, beds of vegetables, a melon patch, whose glass frames sparkled in the moonlight, and an old well. Here and there stood stone benches which seemed black with moss. The alleys were bordered with gloomy and very erect ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... beating and pounding with their clubs and staves. A little farther, and they turned off to the left in the direction of an olive orchard enclosed by a stone wall in view from the road. Ben-Hur knew there was nothing in the place but old gnarled trees, the grass, and a trough hewn out of a rock for the treading of oil after the fashion of the country. While, yet more wonder-struck, he was thinking what could bring such a company at such an hour ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... of whatsoe'er Will, as thou think'st, content me; for no power Have I to ask, such pity' is at my heart." He thus resum'd; "So may he do for thee Freely what thou entreatest, as thou yet Be pleas'd, imprison'd Spirit! to declare, How in these gnarled joints the soul is tied; And whether any ever from such frame Be loosen'd, if thou canst, that also tell." Thereat the trunk breath'd hard, and the wind soon Chang'd into sounds articulate like these; Briefly ye shall be answer'd. When departs The fierce soul from the body, by ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... wrathful eyes; for he got into royal rages over some of his adversaries, and swore at them under his breath till he had conquered them, when he exulted, and marched off to the shed with an armful of gnarled oak-wood in triumph. He blistered his hands, tired his back, and dulled the axe, but it did him good, and he got more comfort out of the ugly roots than any one dreamed, for with each blow he worked off some of the pent-up power that would otherwise ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... washing the breakfast dishes and put a stick of wood into the broken old cook-stove that had served him and Frank for fifteen years and was feeling its age. Lorraine's breakfast was in the oven, keeping warm. Brit looked in, tested the heat with his gnarled hand to make sure that the sour-dough biscuits would not be dried to crusts, and closed the door upon them and the bacon and fried potatoes. Frank Johnson had the horses saddled and it was time to go, yet Brit lingered, ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... wood galloped Pharaoh, and into a stretch of age-old furze, or gorse, if you like, beyond. That showed strategy. The furze was a maze of a million spikes, and branches, and twisted, gnarled stems tough as wire-rope; a wonderful place, all honeycombed with ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... mumbling fast to himself and making slight, restless efforts to move. At last he grew quiet, and presently his half-open gnarled right hand came groping out over the covers. I took it in mine, and at once I felt it close on mine with a quick, convulsive strength. His hand was moist, his eyes saw nothing. I sat there thus for a long ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... she open? Doth she? Will she? So, as wondering we behold, Grows the picture to a sign. Pressed upon your soul and mine; For in every breast that liveth Is that strange, mysterious door;— The forsaken and betangled, Ivy-gnarled and weed-bejangled, Dusty, rusty, and forgotten;— There the pierced hand still knocketh, And with ever patient watching, With the sad eyes true and tender, With the glory-crowned hair,— Still ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... beyond the oasis, beyond the stars, to the moment when the first wind blew a particle of sand to find its mate, with which to multiply and form the desert, the birthplace and burial ground of so many; whilst gnarled hands playing with Life's shuttlecock drew a golden thread to a brown, proceeding to weave them in and out with the blood-red silk of the pomegranate, the orange of the setting sun, the silver of the rising moon, and the purples of the bougainvillaea, until ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... doddering old scavengers, plying their brooms among the great trees of the avenues, bore so strong a resemblance to the pixies who lurk in caves and woods, that we almost expected to see them vanish into some crevice in the gnarled roots of the trunks. Even the tiny acolytes trotting gravely in the funeral processions had their heads and shoulders shrouded in the prevailing ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... recent weeks. There were sharp hoof-prints of the animal he had caught, larger hoof-prints, vague pad-marks of various sizes, but nothing that looked human. The trail went under a charred tree trunk at a height that was not comfortable for a man, and the spacing of the steps around the gnarled roots of an old slump did not ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... limbs are yet strong, in the chase which marks him for his victim, but grows desperate with rage and fear as the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old man ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... sitting on a great fallen log, quietly, calmly, with her back against an old gnarled branch that rose in a convenient way, and her head was thrown back and up as if she were seeing wonderful visions somewhere among the green, and the blue and white above. It was as if she had reached a higher plane where earthly annoyances do not come, and felt it good to ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... some while; howbeit, the light yet aglow and my patience waning, I stole forward, keeping ever in the shadows, and, ascending the terrace, came where grew ivy, very thick and gnarled, overspreading this wing of the house. Groping amid the leaves I found that I sought—a stout staple deep-driven between the bricks with above this another and yet other again, the which formed a sort of ladder whereby, as a boy, I had been wont to come and go by night ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... old man in a lane; So gnarled was he and full of pain That kindly Death was struck with pity— "Come you with me, Old man," said he, "I'll set you down ...
— Fires of Driftwood • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... lonelier than before. Then the sharp bark of a fox rang out from a neighboring hill. The breeze started up again and a limb of a tree that rubbed against its neighbor produced a wailing sound as of some one in distress. We could see fantastic shapes out among the gnarled tree trunks and ghostly forms appeared in the velvety shadows and vanished again among the trees. The moon rose out over the rim of the eastern hills and seemed almost to pause as if some Oriental Magic ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... to the beloved nectar of Munich, together with a huge onion. How they enjoy themselves! What splendid jokes they have! How they laugh and roar and sing! At one table sit four old fellows, playing cards. How full of character is each gnarled face. One is eager, quick, vehement. How his eyes dance! You can read his every thought upon his face. You know when he is going to dash down the king with a shout of triumph on the queen. His neighbour looks calm, slow, and ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... figure arrayed in the blue kirtle and scarlet bodice, on which the warm rays of the late sun fell with so much amorous tenderness. Poor little Lilla! A penknife would have made as much impression as her valorous blows produced on the inflexible, gnarled, knotty old stump she essayed to split in twain. Flushed and breathless with her efforts, she looked prettier than ever, and at last, baffled, she resigned her ax to Vincenzo, laughing gayly at her incapacity for wood-cutting, and daintily shaking her apron free from the ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... Abbey the monks were trooping in. Under the long green-paved avenues of gnarled oaks and of lichened beeches the white-robed brothers gathered to the sound. From the vine-yard and the vine-press, from the bouvary or ox-farm, from the marl-pits and salterns, even from the distant iron-works of Sowley ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... gray, with a faint moony sparkle, and out came the lovely carving of the rodent waves. All about, its sides were fretted in exquisite curves, and fantastic yet ever graceful knots and twists; as if a mass of gnarled and contorted roots, first washed of every roughness by some ethereal solvent, leaving only the soft lines of yet grotesque volutions, had been transformed into mingled silver and stone. Like a soldier crab that had found a shell to his mind, he gazed through the ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... the April sun smiles upon the meadow grass till it is very green and long enough to wave in the wind, and all amongst it the blue scilla flowers are like dewdrops reflecting the blue that hangs above the gnarled arms of the still leafless walnut trees. The cottage where Celeste lived was out from the village, among the meadows, and to the most hidden side of it young Fernand came on the eve of the day on which she must leave it for ever. Very far off the snow mountains had taken on their ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... unimportant habitation of some poor jungle-squatter, with beds of various vegetables and fruits growing around it, and guarded against the jungle's animals by what looked like a makeshift fence. The ground inside the fence had been cleared save for a few thick, dead stumps of oxi trees, gnarled and weather-beaten, which made the whole outlay look ...
— The Passing of Ku Sui • Anthony Gilmore
... of the valley, and a tiny creek, and then the rock cliff, it must be about as high as—about twice as tall as the trees that grow along the foot of it, and it's highest at the upper end, then there's a big tree standing alone almost in the middle of the valley, and the gnarled, scraggly trees that grow along the top of the rocks, and the valley must be as wide as from here to that clump of trees beyond my wood-pile—about a block, I guess. And there's the big crack in the cliff ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... man somehow involuntarily, imperceptibly even to himself, began to submit to that hidden, unseizable, exquisite witchery of femininity; which not infrequently lurks under the coarsest covering, in the harshest, most gnarled environment. The pupil dominated, the teacher obeyed. Through the qualities of a primitive, but on the other hand a fresh, deep, and original soul, Liubka was inclined not to obey the method of another, but to seek out her ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... pure democracy was only a developed state from the earlier hereditary nobility. The Goddess of Liberty is ideally a creature of beautiful form, but really her face is scarred and worn, her figure gnarled and warped with time, and her garments besprinkled with blood. The selfishness of man, the struggle for survival, and the momentum of governmental machinery, have prevented the exercise of ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... through which the creature had been driven at full speed by his furious master, might easily see, that in more than a dozen of places the horse and rider had been within a few inches of destruction. One bough of a gnarled and stunted oak-tree, which stretched across the road, seemed in particular to have opposed an almost fatal barrier to the horseman's career. In striking his head against this impediment, the force of the blow had been ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... hall. The portieres parted. The immediate effect on Farnum of the great figure that filled the doorway was one of masterful authority. A massive head crested a figure of extraordinary power. Gray as a mediaeval castle, age had not yet touched his gnarled strength. The keen steady eyes, the close straight lips, the shaggy eyebrows heavy and overhanging, gave accent to the rugged force of this grim freebooter who had reversed the law of nature which decrees that railroads shall follow civilization. Scorning the established rule of progress, ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... to his very skin. And again, he remembered the Thursday walks. They started at two o'clock for some verdant nook about three miles from Plassans. Often they sought a meadow on the banks of the Viorne, where the gnarled willows steeped their leaves in the stream. But he saw nothing—neither the big yellow flowers in the meadow, nor the swallows sipping as they flew by, with wings lightly touching the surface of the little river. Till ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... I see, just beyond, the torii leading to a great Shinto temple, a particularly odd small shrine, and feel impelled by curiosity to examine it. Leaning against its closed doors are many short gnarled sticks in a row, miniature clubs. Irreverently removing these, and opening the little doors, Akira bids me look within. I see only a mask—the mask of a goblin, a Tengu, grotesque beyond description, with an enormous nose—so ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... late season, it was still warm enough to dine outside, and when Patty saw the scene in the garden she thought Paris was fairyland indeed. Though called a garden, it was really a stone- paved court, but all round its edge on two sides were large old trees with gnarled and twisted trunks and thick foliage of glossy green. Under the trees were flower-beds full of blossoming plants, and in the branches of the trees themselves were hung vari-coloured globes of electric lights about the size of an orange. The effect of these brilliant spheres in the dark trees was ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... her mother's room on her slow progress upstairs, moved to sudden pity for the frail life now wearing to its close. If that were life she did not want it, with its drab days and futile effort, its incessant deprivations, its hands, gnarled with work that got nowhere, its ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... young Frenchman had quite as great a sense of noblesse oblige as his bride. He bowed to the black woman as though she was the highest lady in the land and accepted the parcel, tied clumsily with baby ribbon by the gnarled fingers of Mammy Rose. ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... during their life, to their juices or dust, and not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking it all the while, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... had chosen for the pic-nic was on one of the lower spurs of that great mountain of The Maiden's Peak, which bounds the vale of Gwynnant to the south. Above, a wilderness of gnarled volcanic dykes, and purple heather ledges; below, broken into glens, in which still linger pale green ashwoods, relics of that great primaeval forest in which, in Bess's days, great Leicester used to rouse the hart with hound ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... turned from their natural channels, and thus made to wash out impassable gulfs. Every bridge had disappeared, and all the surrounding timber rendered useless for constructing more; while, for mile after mile, one continued mass of gnarled and crooked trees, here pitched together in seemingly inextricable tangles, and there piled mountains high, had been felled into the road, which even now had scarcely been made passable by the toiling thousands ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... hoy't out Will, wi' sair advice; [urged] They hecht him some fine braw ane; [promised][measured with It chanced the stack he faddom'd thrice[16] outstretched arms] Was timmer-propt for thrawin': [against leaning over] He taks a swirlie auld moss-oak [gnarled] For some black gruesome carlin; [beldam] An' loot a winze, an' drew a stroke, [uttered a curse] Till skin in blypes cam haurlin' [shreds, peeling] Aff's nieves that night. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... located well in on the point, and Walter steered to land some distance out from it. A few strokes of the paddle sent the light canoe gliding in amongst the mangrove bushes that fringed the shore. Climbing out upon the curious gnarled roots, Walter pulled the canoe far enough in to effectually screen it from sight. Next he examined his pistols to see that they were properly loaded, and with a parting word of cheer for his chum, he made his way slowly and cautiously over ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... sheep, but I knowed his greaser had tried to shoot my dog, and I told him so! And I told him furthermore that the first sheep or sheepman that p'inted his head down the Pocket trail would stop lead; and every one tharafter, as long as I could draw a bead. And by Gawd, I mean it!" He struck his gnarled fist upon the table till every tin plate jumped, and his fiery eyes burned savagely as he ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... its head with a loose rein, as if defying method, law, order and construction! Why, merely to walk through some of the tropical houses at Kew gives one a sort of lawless feeling! If I stay long among the queer gnarled plants—all spiky and speckled and hairy; squatting, plump and ungainly on the ground, or spreading huge knotted arms far overhead, as if reaching out for things they never visibly attain—I always emerge into the ordinary ...
— The Upas Tree - A Christmas Story for all the Year • Florence L. Barclay
... commonwealth had grown out of a petty feudal organism, like an oak from an acorn in a crevice, gnarled and distorted, though wide-spreading and vigorous. It seemed perilous to deal radically with such a polity, and an almost timid conservatism on the part of its guardians in such an age ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... to the water's edge, the gallahs and cockatoos rose with gorgeous sunrise effect: a floating gray-and-pink cloud, backed by sunlit flashing white. Direct to the forest trees they floated and, settling there in their myriads, as by a miracle the gaunt, gnarled old giants of the bush all over blossomed with garlands of grey, and pink, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... possibly on account of its coldness in winter and for the reason that it is open to the incursions of warlike hunting tribes. Sage brush and greasewood grow abundantly near the villages, and these curious gnarled and twisted shrubs furnish the principal fuel of ...
— A Study of Pueblo Architecture: Tusayan and Cibola • Victor Mindeleff and Cosmos Mindeleff
... front doorstep and looked about her, drawing a long breath of delight that seemed tinged with pain. Everything was very much the same; the square garden was as charming bodge-podge of fruit and flowers, and goose-berry bushes and tiger lilies, a gnarled old apple tree sticking up here and there, and a thick cherry copse at the foot. Behind was a row of pointed firs, coming out darkly against the swimming pink sunset sky, not looking a day older than they had looked twenty years ago, when Nancy had been a young girl walking and dreaming in their ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... lost once for all every hope of 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. His grey hair hung in tufts on his low brow; like ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... under this oak," said Ned, pointing to a huge old tree, whose gnarled limbs covered a wide space ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... too, as they swung with his walk, and then remembered that the professional eye had already noted them and laid their lines away for some suggestive use. As he looked, Marshby stopped in his approach, caught by the singularity of a gnarled tree limb. It awoke in him a cognizance of nature's processes, and his face lighted with the ...
— Different Girls • Various
... kisses at the gate, Than to the town-worn man the breezy stir Of mountain winds on rugged pathless heights: His long-pent soul drinks in the deep delights That Nature hath in store. The sun-kissed bay Gleams thro' the grand old gnarled gum-tree boughs Like burnished brass; the strong-winged bird of prey Sweeps by, upon his lonely vengeful way — While over all, like breath of holy vows, The sweet airs blow, and the high-vaulted sky Looks down in pity this fair Summer day On all ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... bitter; it was like beginning a new life with a new identity, though Clayton suffered less than he anticipated. He had become interested from the first. There was nothing in the pretty glen, when he came, but a mountaineer's cabin and a few gnarled old apple-trees, the roots of which checked the musical flow of a little stream. Then the air was filled with the tense ring of hammer and saw, the mellow echoes of axes, and the shouts of ox-drivers from the forests, indignant groans from the mountains, and a little town sprang ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... directly or indirectly might produce petroleum. In due season he invited Uncle Jap to dine with him at the Paloma Hotel, in San Lorenzo. The old man, with the hayseed in his hair, and the stains of bitumen upon his gnarled hands, ate and drank of the best, seeing a glorified vision of his Lily crowned with diamonds at last. The vision faded somewhat when Nathaniel began to talk dollars and cents. Even to Uncle Jap, ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell
... Amon, an aged man long past his ninetieth birthday, squatted on a mat at Pharaoh's left hand. A pair of bright eyes, shaded by bushy white brows, glittered in his brown face—seamed and wrinkled like the bark of a gnarled oaklike gay flowers amid withered leaves, forming a strange contrast to his lean, bowed, and ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... walled inclosure above the stables at Shaws, once used as a milking-yard, and just now a veritable posy of daisies, buttercups, rich green grass, and apple-blossom. For in it there are six or seven gnarled and lichen-grown old apple-trees, whose fruit is of small account, but whose bloom is a gift sent straight from heaven to gladden the hearts of men and beasts, birds and bees. The big double doors in the ivy-grown flint wall of this inclosure ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... Dorchester, looking out over Boston Bay. It takes its name from the stiff black savins with which it is covered, and which contrive to find nourishment and support in the rock to which they cling. Some of these trees show their great age by their gnarled and knotted trunks and boughs. Black and impassive they stand, alike in the brightest summer or the grayest winter, sighing restlessly in the breeze, but wailing piteously when the sea-winds sweep over the hill. Partway up the little rocky eminence stands an old house, now fast falling ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... actuality, had already come. In some recent studies into the career of that man, I have encountered many startling confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a shapely tree—symmetric in all its parts—under whose sheltering boughs this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and mankind the refuge ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... men thunder As Ioue himselfe do's, Ioue would neuer be quiet, For euery pelting petty Officer Would vse his heauen for thunder; Nothing but thunder: Mercifull heauen, Thou rather with thy sharpe and sulpherous bolt Splits the vn-wedgable and gnarled Oke, Then the soft Mertill: But man, proud man, Drest in a little briefe authoritie, Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd, (His glassie Essence) like an angry Ape Plaies such phantastique tricks before high heauen, As makes the Angels weepe: who ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... wished to build a new house, they had taken up a few stones to make a foundation; the street was a series of pitfalls filled with mud and filth, including miniature ponds of manure-coloured water. The surface appeared impassable; the projecting water-spouts from the low roofs stuck out like the gnarled boughs of trees. Here was a pretty mess!—all because Georgi's wife was in town. It was impossible for anything larger than a perambulator to turn, and as the springs yielded to the uneven ground, the van bumped against the walls of the houses and threatened destruction. "Halt!" was the only ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... this sunshiny morning in his old armchair of bent hickory, between his knees a cane on the head of which his gnarled hands rested, Captain Ira Ball was the true retired mariner of the old school. His ruddy face was freshly shaven, his scant, silvery hair well smoothed; everything was neat and trig about him, including his glazed, narrow-brimmed hat, his blue pilot-cloth coat, pleated shirt front ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... precise locality where you were so pleased? Why not mention the exact hedge, the particular meadow? Because no two persons look at the same thing with the same eyes. To me this spot may be attractive, to you another; a third thinks yonder gnarled oak the most artistic. Nor could I guarantee that every one should see the same things under the same conditions of season, time, or weather. How could I arrange for you next autumn to see the sprays of the horse-chestnut, scarlet from frost, reflected in the dark water of the brook? There ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... and would not listen to overtures for explanation. It was arranged that the meeting should be in Missouri, opposite Alton. They proceeded to the place selected, but friends interfered, and there was no duel. There is little doubt that the man who had swung a beetle and driven iron wedges into gnarled hickory logs could have cleft the skull of his antagonist, but he had no such intention. He repeatedly said to the friends of Shields that in writing the first article he had no thought of anything personal. The Auditor's ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... doings has to grow, like those contorted pines on the slopes of the Alps, in many storms, with heavy weights of snow on its branches, and beaten about by tempests from every quarter of the heavens; and so it gets gnarled and knotted and very unlike the symmetrical beauty that we dreamed would adorn it. We begin with saying: 'Come! Let us build a tower whose top shall reach to heaven'; and we are contented at last, if we have put up some little tumble-down shed where we can get ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... End—and 'om I persuaded to insure you in the Popular Thrifty—would 'ave 'ad a bit o' money comin' in 'andy for 'er Michaelmas rent, an' one or two other people would be a penny o' th' right side, likewise." He paused, and shading his bleared eyes under his gnarled hand, looked steadfastly at two huddled, motionless, grimy figures, lying in the charred grass beside the pathway. "Dang my old eyes!" he cried. "'Tis George an' Alfred—Alfred an' George—snatched away i' their drink an' neither of ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Darby wore a wig designed for a larger man, and that the visage beneath was gnarled and weather-beaten, marked with the signs of a stubborn and ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... miles over the grass plain, and the next four through a belt of forest trees, with rank grass and underwood, abounding in game of all kinds, and infested by tigers. Bullocks are often taken by them, but men seldom. The sal (alias sakhoo) trees are here stunted, gnarled, and ugly, while in the Tarae forest they are straight, lofty, and beautiful. The reason is, that beyond the forest their leaves are stripped off and sold for plates. They are carried to distant towns, and stored ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... mentioned it at dinner to his neighbour, Mrs. Engel, to whom the persons were known. Later in his room, face to face with the facts which it signified, he had an intolerable hour. He had extinguished his candle, and sat, partially undressed, in a mood of singular blankness by the fire of gnarled olive logs, which had smouldered down into one dull, red mass; and Eve's face was imaged there to his sick fancy as he had seen it last in Dick's studio in the vague light of an October evening, and yet with a certain new shadow, half sad and half ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... them, those Scotch firs. I delight in their forms, from James the First's gnarled giants up in Bramshill Park—the only place in England where a painter can learn what Scotch firs are—down to the little green pyramids which stand up out of the heather, triumphant over tyranny, and the strange woes of an untoward youth. Seven years on an average ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... up a flash which threw into relief the narrator's gnarled red face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the dark leather armchair, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and in the shaded lamp-light it ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... chasm are lined with cultivation, descending in successive stages. Sorrento is thus built on three deep ravines. All these hollows contain gardens, crowded with masses of trees overhanging each other. Nut-trees, already lively with sap, project their white branches like gnarled fingers; everything else is green; winter lays no hand on this eternal spring. The thick lustrous leaf of the orange-tree rises from amid the foliage of the olive, and its golden apples glisten in the sun by thousands, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... going to be a doctor!" cried the old sailor, rubbing his nose with a great gnarled finger. "You, who might be an admiral and command a squadron: ...
— Syd Belton - The Boy who would not go to Sea • George Manville Fenn
... planks; whatever he wanted from the cabin that thing he sent for. He ate in the same open air; that is, his two only meals, — breakfast and dinner: supper he never touched; nor reaped his beard; which darkly grew all gnarled, as unearthed roots of trees blown over, which still grow idly on at naked base, though perished in the upper verdure. But though his whole life was now become one watch on deck; and though the Parsee's mystic ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... wanting. Age is one of the prime elements of natural beauty; but among us the love of what is new so predominates, that we have known the largest oak in a county to be cut down by the selectmen to make room for a shanty schoolhouse, simply because the tree was of "no account," being hollow and gnarled, and otherwise delightfully picturesque. Our people are singularly dead also to the value of beauty in public architecture; and while they clear away a tree which the seasons have been two centuries in building, they will put up with as little ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... this April morning, its faint perfumes exhaling; Brilliant shines the sun, so crisp, so bright, so freshening; Pearl-like gleam and sparkle the dew-drops on the rose, While grey and gnarled olives droop like giants ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... met Carlyle I tried to enlist his sympathy and aid. He sat pensive for a while and then said that it seemed to him "a goose-quest." I replied, "You have always a phrase for everything, Tom, but always the wrong one." He covered his face, and presently, peering at me through his gnarled fingers, said "Mon, ye're recht." I discussed the problem with Renan, with Emerson, with Disraeli, also with Cetewayo—poor Cetewayo, best and bravest of men, but intellectually a Professor, like the rest of them. It was borne in on me that if I were to win to the ...
— A Christmas Garland • Max Beerbohm
... harmony, binding every atom in each planet to the great centre of all attraction, is ten thousand times ten thousand times more powerful. We say the bright lightning is mighty; so it is when it rends the gnarled oak into splinters, or splits solid battlements into fragments; but it is not half so powerful as the gentle light that comes so softly from the skies that we do not feel it, that travels at an inconceivable ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... side was still under a faint daylight, in other words, they passed down a midnight between two gloamings. The features of the town had a keen interest for Elizabeth's mother, now that the human side came to the fore. As soon as they had wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... threw a disdainful glance at the chevalier, then pointed at an enormous trunk of a mahogany tree with gnarled roots which formed the rustic bench upon which ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... down, lashing her tail from side to side, and keeping those sly, emerald-like eyes of hers watchfully fixed on Sah-luma, who merely laughed at her fierce antics. Leaning against one of the dark, gnarled trees, he tapped his sandaled foot with some impatience on the marble pavement, while Theos, standing close beside him, wondered whether the mysterious Lysia ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... be equal, if not superior, to any in Europe for ship-building. The white oak is the best found in the Canadian settlements, and is in high repute. Another description is called the scrubby oak—it resembles the British gnarled oak, and is remarkably hard and durable. The birch[173] tribe is very numerous: the bark is much used by the Indians in making canoes,[174] baskets, and roofings; the wood is of a useful quality, and the sap, when extracted in the spring, produces by fermentation a pleasant but weak wine. ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... humming led my eyes to a group of beehives (always dear to me because of the Miel du Chamounix and our happy, sweet-toothed boyhood!) and near a border of poppies, marigold and hardy mignonette a great hound lay, vigilant beside a large, shallow basket, shaded by a gnarled wistaria clump. The basket was filled with something white, and as we stood in the door, a woman dressed in trailing white, with knots of rich blue here and there, came through a green gate in the side hedge and moved with a rich, swooping step toward ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... a school life are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient. In truth, it was a dream-like and spirit-soothing place, that venerable old town. At this moment, in fancy, I feel the refreshing chilliness of its deeply-shadowed avenues, inhale the fragrance of ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... front yard, and ducks, geese, turkeys and hens all moving about over the green turf. There was the barn and the outbuildings and the long low hen-house where he had so often robbed the hens' nests. Then the scene shifted slightly and the dreamer saw the orchard at the back of the farmhouse with its gnarled and twisted trees and the row of little white houses in the shade near by. "Hum, hum, zip—hum," went the bees flying in from their long quest afield in search of the heart secret of the floral world. But whether it was the droning of bees or the hum of many voices that ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... Liberty which we are all trying to plant will, of course, not grow as we will, but as God and Nature will. Some branches will be exuberant through too great wealth of sunshine,—others gnarled and awry through too great fury of storms. We need find no fault with any growth, but we may admire some branches and prize some fruits more than others. Some grafts set by noblest hands have often blossomed in bad temper and borne fruit bitter and sour. Some fruitage has been ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... court is quiet and stately, and notably carries out its spirit, with the gray-green of foliage plants and eucalyptus trees and the gnarled stems of gray old olive trees. In its vistas from any angle or point of view, the Court is ...
— The Architecture and Landscape Gardening of the Exposition • Louis Christian Mullgardt
... the bare hill-top where gnarled may-trees, dropping spent blossom, were pink-tinted as if the colours of the sunsets they had known had run into their whiteness. Hazel sat down on the hilltop and saw the sleek farm-horses far below feeding with their shadows, swifts ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... scattered over the plains and surrounded by a belt of tall beeches, look, from a distance, like little woods. On closer view, after lowering the worm-eaten wooden bars, you imagine yourself in an immense garden, for all the ancient apple-trees, as gnarled as the peasants themselves, are in bloom. The sweet scent of their blossoms mingles with the heavy smell of the earth and the penetrating odor of the stables. It is noon. The family is eating under the shade of a pear tree planted in front of the door; father, mother, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... was broken. Marcel promptly became the man of action. He pointed at the gnarled and broken head of a stunted tree growing at the very edge of the canyon, with its battered crest reaching out at a perilous angle ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... head and looked at his comrade, a little gnarled fellow, like the bleached root of a tree. He ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... on his boots with the assistance of his wife, and looking at himself once more in the looking-glass, the schoolmaster took his gnarled stick and set off for the dinner. Just before the factory manager's house, where the festivity was to take place, he had a little mishap. He was taken with a violent fit of coughing . . . . He was so ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... friendly labour; The Eagle clutched her prey without reply, And as she flapped her vasty wings to fly, Struck down our orator and stilled him— The wonder is she hadn't killed him. The Beetle soon, of sweet revenge in quest Flew to the old, gnarled mountain oak, Which proudly bore that haughty Eagle's nest. And while the bird was gone, Her eggs, her cherished eggs, he broke, Not sparing one. Returning from her flight, the Eagle's cry Of rage and bitter anguish filled the sky, But, by excess of passion blind, Her enemy she failed ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... person, consulting his silver watch, and casting a look of mingled commiseration and envy upon the giant, locked in the arms of the two women, who hardly reached to the second button of his coat. Isaac caught the glance, and started to tear himself away. But his mother laid her gnarled hand gently upon his arm, and led ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... forever in its turbid depths the thronging spectres, to wash away in its yellow flood all stains and color of the past. And now he was leaping from boulder to boulder, from blackened stump to stump, from gnarled bush to bush, caught for a moment and withheld by clinging vines, or plunging downward into dusty hollows, until, rolling, dropping, sliding, and stumbling, he reached the river-bank, whereon he fell, rose, staggered forward, and fell again with outstretched arms ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... I'm a bear," cried Joel, now well up in the midst of the gnarled branches. "I'm goin' to climb trees, and do everything I want ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... come and chat every afternoon beside the invalid's bed. Helpless though he was, the jovial Toine still provided them with amusement. He would have made the devil himself laugh. Three men were regular in their attendance at the bedside: Celestin Maloisel, a tall, thin fellow, somewhat gnarled, like the trunk of an apple-tree; Prosper Horslaville, a withered little man with a ferret nose, cunning as a fox; and Cesaire Paumelle, who never spoke, but who enjoyed Toine's society ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... convinced that it is the most essential. It is but recently that any of us have approximated to a right appreciation of the value of pure air. But look for a moment at one of those great forest trees; and then reflect that all that knotted and gnarled bulk has been mainly formed out of air. We, in our gross conceptions, were wont to think that the fatness of the earth was the tree's chief source of nourishment. But it is not so. In some cases this is ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... a peculiar way, and immediately from behind a Persian tapestry embroidered with flowers, there appeared four monsters, swarthy, clad in robes diagonally striped, which left visible arms muscled and gnarled as trunks of oaks. Their thick pouting lips, the gold rings which they wore through the partition of their nostrils, their great teeth sharp as the fangs of wolves, the expression of stupid servility on their faces, rendered ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier |
