"Scarecrow" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... did, all who beheld him without knowing who he was. With this measured pace and in this guise he advanced to kneel before the duke, who, with the others, awaited him standing. The duke, however, would not on any account allow him to speak until he had risen. The prodigious scarecrow obeyed, and standing up, removed the veil from his face and disclosed the most enormous, the longest, the whitest and the thickest beard that human eyes had ever beheld until that moment, and then fetching up a grave, sonorous voice from the depths of ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... lot of 'artless canny-bals?"—"Don't take your shirt off for a word, shipmate," called out Belfast, jumping up in front, fiery, menacing, and friendly at the same time.—"Is that 'ere bloke blind?" asked the indomitable scarecrow, looking right and left with affected surprise. "Can't 'ee see I ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... in a cornfield. His empty coat served well for a scarecrow. A wisp of straw stuck out through a hole ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... who has taken the moral and social features of Walsh's delusions from the commiserating point of view, which makes ridicule out of place, has been obliged to treat Walsh as Scott's Alan Fairford treated his client Peter Peebles; namely, keep the scarecrow out of court while the case was argued. My plan requires me to bring him in: and when he comes in at the door, pity and sympathy fly out at the window. Let the reader remember that he was not an ignoramus in mathematics: he might have won his spurs if he could have first served ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... genius—the Franc-Archer de Bagnolet. The francs-archers of Charles VII.—a rural militia—were not beloved of the people; the miles gloriosus of Bagnolet village, boasting largely of his valour, encounters a stuffed scarecrow, twisting to the wind; his alarms, humiliations, and final triumph are rendered in a monologue which expounds the action of the piece with ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... Bamberger resented it—he's a resentful sort of man anyway. He thought she'd marry me as soon as he got the divorce. Well, she didn't. She married old Alvah Moon, who was the only man she ever cared for. The Lord knows how it was, but that wicked old scarecrow made all the women love him, to his dying day. I had a high regard for Mrs. Bamberger, and I suppose she was right to marry him if she liked him. Well, she married him in too much of a hurry, and the child that was born abroad was Bamberger's and not his, and when he found it out ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford
... too, and daws Flock hither to advance their caws, And, with a sudden courage armed, Devour the foe who once alarmed— In life and death a fair deceit: Nor strong to harm nor good to eat. King bogey of the scarecrow host, When known the least affrighting most, Though light his hand (his mind was dark) He left on ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... l'Education du dauphin; OEuvres completes (1828), t. xvii. pp. 541, 545.] Bossuet had good grounds for speaking so. Louis XII. himself said, in 1511, to the ambassador of Spain, that "this pretended council was only a scarecrow which he had no idea of employing save for the purpose of bringing the pope to reason." Amidst these vain attempts at ecclesiastical influence the war was continued with passionateness on the part of Julius II., with hesitation on the part ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... viceroy in the street, and no man stands more upon't that he is the king's officer. His jurisdiction extends to the next stocks, where he has commission for the heels only, and sets the rest of the body at liberty. He is a scarecrow to that ale-house, where he drinks not his morning draught, and apprehends a drunkard for not standing in the king's name. Beggars fear him more than the justice, and as much as the whip-stock, whom he delivers over to his subordinate magistrates, the bridewell-man and the beadle. He is a ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various
... reprieve. What do you think a fellow is—a scarecrow? All hat and clothes and no feeling, no inside, no brain to make fancies for himself? No!" he went on violently. "Never in his life will he go again into that ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... practical wisdom. It is astonishing what unteachable, untamable creatures men are. They learn wisdom about all the little matters of daily life by experience, but they do not seem to do so about the higher. Even a sparrow comes to understand a scarecrow after a time or two, and any rat in a hole will learn the trick of a trap. But you can trick men over and over again with the same inducement, and, even whilst the hook is sticking in their jaws, the ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of them,—to a man, turned and regarded me. I was painfully aware of my likeness to a scarecrow. A laugh went up at my appearance,—a laugh that was not lessened or softened by the dead man stretched and grinning on the deck before us; a laugh that was as rough and harsh and frank as the sea itself; that arose out of coarse ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... a heavy travelling rug and Dora a handbag of which she said that it contained the accumulated rubbish of 10 years. Aunt Alma's appearance was enough to give one fits, a tweed dress kilted up so high that one saw her brown stockings as she walked, and a hat like a scarecrow's. When I think how awfully well dressed Mother always was, and how nice she always looked; of course Mother was at least 20 years younger than Aunt Alma, but even if Mother had lived to be 80 she would never have looked like that. Thank goodness, on the way from the station we did ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl
... manoeuvres of an international band of the dealers in military supplies and by their all-powerful newspapers, when it shall be thoroughly comprehended that these dealers and these newspapers have played with rumors of war as with a scarecrow, for the purpose of keeping up a general condition of disquiet favorable to their sinister operations, then, too late, alas! there will be a revulsion of public opinion to sustain finally those men, like our friends, who ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... burrow would not even draw in his head at his approach; the rooks about Scaurnose never took to their wings until he was within a yard or two of them: the laird, in his half acted utterance, indicated that they took him for a scarecrow and therefore were not afraid of him. Even Mrs Catanach's cur had never offered him a bite in return for a caress. He could make a bird's nest, of any sort common in the neighbourhood, so as deceive the most cunning of the nest ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and, to her imagination, it looked the personification of the rascality of the village she had so come to love. Look at it. Its trunk, naked as the supports of a scarecrow, suggesting mighty strength, indolence and poverty. There, above, its ragged garments—unwholesome, dirty, like the garments of some tramping, villainous, degraded loafer. And yet, with it all, the old tree looked ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... gathering that a ghost appeared—a lank, saffron ghost, ragged as a scarecrow—wearing a foolish smile and the cape of a cavalryman's overcoat with no coat beneath it. The apparition was a youth of about twenty, with a downy beard all over his face, and countenance well mellowed with coal-soot, as though he had ridden ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... and heat will take all the curl out of yours and then you'll look like a scarecrow," ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... he said; "Casimir has never rightly liked me since. And had the Black Riders caught me, over to his dogs I should have gone without so much as a belt upon me. He would have kept them without food for a week on purpose to make a clean job of my poor scarecrow pickings." ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... watching the reflected stars peer up and shatter in a hundred splinters with every wash of the dark tide, he could not so instantaneously decide as to whether he should make this confession or not. "What business is it of Maurice's?" he said to himself. "Does he think every one that looks at his scarecrow of a daughter—" But there he had need to acknowledge to himself his injustice to Miss Frarnie, a modest maiden who had more cause to complain of him than he of her, since he had done his best to please her, and her only fault lay in being pleased so easily. ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... more than I can say," the other replied. "He's evidently a white man, and I fancy an Englishman. At home we should call him a scarecrow. He turned up from across the Ford just now, and tumbled down in the middle of the stream like a shot rabbit. Never saw such a thing before. He's not a pretty sight, ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... the hydra of Theramenes, the great sea-serpent of the Constitutionnel, which the shareholders have had the kindness to impute to it, the dragon of the Apocalypse, the Tarask, the Dree, the Gra-ouili, a scarecrow. Aided by a Ruggieri of his own, M. Bonaparte lit up this pasteboard monster with red Bengal fire, and said to the scared voter: "There is no possible choice except this or myself: choose!" He said: "Choose between beauty and the beast; the beast is communism; ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... Charles in reality. Further, they said that he was no count at all, but the son of their old bishop, Heinsberg. They went so far as to suspend the effigy on a gallows and then riddled it with arrows and left it dangling like a scarecrow in sight of ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... equally minute and exact; because she is also a scourge and a blight. I shall say no more of her, nor expose what Chaucer has left hidden; let the young reader study what he has said of her: it is useful as a scarecrow. There are of such characters born too many for the ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... that with such parsimony of movement Savka was as poor as a mouse and lived worse than any homeless outcast. As time went on, I suppose he accumulated arrears of taxes and, young and sturdy as he was, he was sent by the commune to do an old man's job—to be watchman and scarecrow in the kitchen gardens. However much they laughed at him for his premature senility he did not object to it. This position, quiet and convenient for motionless contemplation, exactly fitted ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Thrusting a stake into the ground, he placed his hat on it, and strolled unconcernedly away. Then, as though he had changed his mind, he walked round the clump, in ever narrowing circles, gradually closing on his prey. Meanwhile, the hare, her attention wholly diverted by the improvised scarecrow, remained motionless, baffled by the artifice. Suddenly she felt the touch of the man's hand. The poacher had thrown himself down on the tuft, hoping to clutch the hare before she could move. But in endeavouring ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... train. My father's head went up. So did mine. And our horses raised their weary heads, scented the air with long-drawn snorts, and for the nonce pulled willingly. The horses of the outriders quickened their pace. And as for the herd of scarecrow oxen, it broke into a forthright gallop. It was almost ludicrous. The poor brutes were so clumsy in their weakness and haste. They were galloping skeletons draped in mangy hide, and they out-distanced the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... attained of late, has advanced so far upon certain lines that it has been hardly possible to proceed further in those directions without entering upon the forbidden field. Therefore, the old signboards against trespassing have been taken down. For "mesmerism," that verbal scarecrow, has been substituted "hypnotism," which word has had a wonderfully legitimatizing effect; while "animal magnetism," that once flouted idea, has been proven to be an existent fact by methods as accurate as those adopted by Faraday or ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, July 1887 - Volume 1, Number 6 • Various
... wrested the revolver from her. I fired pointblank, I fired again (the Colt's did not fail); they swept by, hooting, jostling; they thudded on; and rising I screeched and waved, as bizarre, no doubt, as any animated scarecrow. ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... pesky thing on your head, making you look so like a scarecrow, do you?" he said gently, as with a jerk he broke the strings and then threw the discarded cap ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... of muddy ale was first of all a brilliant soldier, then a brilliant lawyer, then a brilliant historian. His doctor's degree—he was Doctor of Laws—was gained by fair hard work. Think of that, and then look at my picture of the sodden, filthy scarecrow! Yes; that man began my education, and had I only gone straight on I should not be loafing about The Chequers. You ask how he could have anything to do with my education? Well, long ago I was a little bookworm, ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... I shot the head off a scarecrow he had put up in the cherry tree when I was hiding around a corner to keep out of his sight. All the Springvale boys learned how to ride and shoot and to do both at once, although we never had any shooting to ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... you'll get your feet all cut, but you can muddy your shoes,' which she did, I pumpin' on 'em, so that the dust in the back yard would stick. Then we starts off across the country, and, upon my word, I was pretty nigh ashamed to be seen walkin' with such a little scarecrow. When I bought the tickets at the station she asked me how much they was, and put it down in her book. When we got into the cars the people all looked hard at her, and I reckon they thought some kind of a home had been burnt down, ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton
... Although it was early in February, we saw the negroes at work in the fields, 'listing' the ground—a process of breaking up the soil with hoes—while here and there a solitary palmetto stood, like a scarecrow, as if to warn away all invaders. We soon reached 'Camp Saxton,' which we found pleasantly situated near a large and magnificent grove of live oaks, just at the bend of the river, where a fine view is given of the winding stream, the harbor of Port Royal, and the low-lying islands ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... on the second course. The servants, and even that scarecrow woman in the feather boa had accepted him as good coin; there was no reason why they should not go on accepting him for a while. For the matter of that, there was no reason why they should not go on ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... up my mind to-day after seein' yon scarecrow we met at Buckna cross roads, Robbie John aither mends himself or ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... more brightly than usual, and he would ask her how she knew that—reminding her that he was not always at home. This was Ivan's stereotyped mode of teasing his wife, and every time he employed it he was called an "old scarecrow," or ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... takes all this care to hide its nest and its eggs from observation, it is sometimes just as careless and builds in strange places, where it is almost sure to be noticed. It will boldly make its nest in the hat of a scarecrow, which is intended to frighten birds away. A little while ago, according to the newspapers, one of these birds built its nest and hatched its eggs in the pocket of a child's old waistcoat which had been thrown aside as useless. Other birds often display the same boldness ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... town ought to buy 'im an' put 'im up on top of the cou't-house as a scarecrow foh the cholera," said some ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... I don't know why they should. They are but scarecrow, lean-visaged, miserable associates, and so they arrive in a body to keep each other in countenance. I had been but a few weeks in our present miserable abode, and had fully recovered my health, though I think that I was a little crazed with the prints, and the subjects of them, over ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... I your scarecrow," she said. "Give you to me the brown pennies that you will pay ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... help being rather short with him, but he appeared not to mind it. We went the nearest way, without conversing much upon the road; and he was so humble in respect of those scarecrow gloves, that he was still putting them on, and seemed to have made no advance in that labour, when we got to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... these addresses without finding expressions of opinion upon political questions, or any reflection of what was taking place in public life at the time! Happy candidates! whose political capital was all sugar and plums; and who, haunted by no dread of that old scarecrow of a printed address with a long string of opinions bound to come home to roost, looking out in judgment upon you in faded but still terribly legible printer's ink from every dead wall—at least, had only to get past that rough batch of compliments, "the tempest of rotten ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... [33] This scarecrow is probably a talisman. In the Saharah, according to Richardson, the skull of an ass averts ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... rear. We might have been sworn comrades to Falstaff's ragged regiment. Little skill as we boasted in other points of husbandry, every mother's son of us would have served admirably to stick up for a scarecrow. And the worst of the matter was, that the first energetic movement essential to one downright stroke of real labor was sure to put a finish to these poor habiliments. So we gradually flung them all aside, and took to honest homespun and linsey-woolsey, as preferable, on the whole, to the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... healthy barbarism, beneficent in its action, that thinks scorn of eyeglasses and spectacles, and leads him to denounce quadruple vision, as, indeed, all departure from the simplicities of physical perfection. A human scarecrow he abhors, and will follow such an one through six streets to express his disapprobation. Extremes of size? whether of tallness or shortness? offend him equally. Whitman was not kinder to "the average man." Nor is the small boy's ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... moment, sir," said Jopp, who, standing hands-pocketed at the street corner till the sun had faded the shoulders of his coat to scarecrow green, had regularly watched Henchard in the market-place, measured him, and learnt him, by virtue of the power which the still man has in his stillness of knowing the busy one better than he knows himself. Jopp too, had had a convenient experience; he was the only one in Casterbridge besides Henchard ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... hiding in a thick-set hedge. The face might be anywhere; he might move suddenly in any direction; he was prepared, as it were, to move forward, sideways, or backwards according as the wind decided or the road appeared—a sort of universal scarecrow of ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... moment he had waved a delirious adieu to the quickly disappearing camel. His dress coat, trousers, white waistcoat, shirt, undergarments, socks and shoes, lay upon the sand arranged by the disordered mind in the fantastic design of a scarecrow. ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... communes with the silent snow, In hunger and cold and misery I wandered to and fro. But the Lord took pity on my pain, and He led me to the sea, And some ice-bound whalers heard my moan, and they fed and sheltered me. They fed the feeble scarecrow thing that stumbled out of the wild With the ravaged face of a mask of death and the wandering wits of a child— A craven, cowering bag of bones that once had been a man. They tended me and they brought me back to the world, and ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... had the most outlandish rig on a fellow ever saw!" exclaimed Luke. "I think he must have borrowed it from some scarecrow." ...
— Dave Porter At Bear Camp - The Wild Man of Mirror Lake • Edward Stratemeyer
... was a poet—weak enough, but capable of endless delight. The time had been when now and then he read a good book and dreamed noble dreams. Even yet the stuff of which such dreams are made, fluttered in particoloured rags about his life; and colour is colour even on a scarecrow. ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... at them both, wiping the mire from his face as he did so. He was certainly a scarecrow figure after his submersion in the mud; gut Nan did not feel like laughing at him. The escape ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... that he has a rooted objection to anything that isn't rags in the way of clothes. He entirely declined to take me across the river till I had rolled up my lace cloak and put it in a bush. And he won't really be friends with me again till we have both got back to the scarecrow garments we ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not want the dude to think me a scarecrow," she said to herself; "though who cares what he thinks? I did not favor his coming, and they know it. I told them they would have him on their hands for life, and Bessie actually said they might have a worse thing. ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... French statesmanship—engineered by men who, though nominal Christians or Catholics, discarded God in affairs of state, and attempted to rule without God in the world, except to use Him (pardon the expression) as a sort of scarecrow for the 'lower orders'—resulted in gradually drying up those intermediary institutions which had served at once to develop a manly civic life and to protect private liberty, and in reabsorbing and concentrating all power ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... would spoil the charm to tell it. She looked funny sitting up there on the top rail, and staring at the crows till her eyes watered. She didn't look like a 'charmer.' She looked ever so much more like a scarecrow!" ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... true love being obstructed, without attempting a remedy. She had a peculiar favour for Markham herself; and, moreover, he was, according to her phrase, as handsome and personable a young man as was in Oxfordshire; and this Scottish scarecrow was no more to be compared to him than chalk was to cheese. And yet she allowed that Master Girnigy had a wonderfully well-oiled tongue, and that such gallants were not to be despised. What was ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... slowly wheeled and charged across the sky. Phelan scanned the heavens with an experienced weather eye, then began to look for a possible shelter from the coming shower. On either side, the fields stretched away in undulating lines, with no sign of a habitation in sight. A dejected old scarecrow, and a tumble-down shed in the distance were the only objects ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... wigs (one considerably less worn than the other), and of his two hats (the better of which would not have greatly disfigured an old clothesman, whilst the worse would have been of service to a professional scarecrow), Lord Kenyon took jealous care. The inferior wig was always worn with the better hat, and the more dilapidated hat with the superior wig; and it was noticed that when he appeared in court with the shabbier wig he never removed his chapeau; whereas, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... done. I had laughed over the idea till I thought I could do it without laughing. But in this I failed; and the whole audience, Methodist preachers and all, got into such a laugh that I lost half my speech. But the books were put out of sight, and thus ended the scarecrow business. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working—clothes, Joe was a well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes, he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else. Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion he emerged from his room, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... you, no beggar-woman seeks for rags among the rubbish with more care than such a fabricator of rogues, from trifling, crooked, disjointed, misplaced, misprinted, and concealed facts and information, acknowledged or denied, endeavours at length to patch up a scarecrow, by means of which he may at least hang his victim in effigy; and the poor devil may thank Heaven if he is in a condition to ...
— Egmont - A Tragedy In Five Acts • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... cloister after all, for to a Paris nunnery she was consigned when her Cardinal uncle had set eyes on her. "Let her have a year or two there," was his verdict, "and, who knows, she may blossom into a beauty yet. At any rate she can put on flesh and not be the scarecrow she is." And thus, while her more favoured sisters were revelling in the gaieties of Court life, Marie was sent to tell her beads and to spend Spartan days ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... invites a stranger to vie a repartee with it. But what insolent familiar durst have mated Thomas Coventry?—whose person was a quadrate, his step massy and elephantine, his face square as the lion's, his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column, the scarecrow of his inferiors, the brow-beater of equals and superiors, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, for they fled his insufferable presence, as they would have shunned an Elisha bear. His ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... a dry day, if possible, sufficiently long after rainy weather to have the leaves free of water,—otherwise they will spout it on to you, and make you the wettest and muddiest scarecrow ever seen off a farm,—then strip all the outer leaves from the head but the two last rows, which are needed to protect it. This may be readily done by drawing in these two rows toward the head with the left hand, while a blow is struck against the remaining leaves with the fist of the ...
— Cabbages and Cauliflowers: How to Grow Them • James John Howard Gregory
... a story out of a scarecrow, giving it odd attributes. From different points of view, it should appear to change,—now an old man, now an old woman,—a gunner, a ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... retorted he of the wistful countenance, "that Guy Fawkes, that poor, fluttering, annual scarecrow of straw and rags, is an ill-used gentleman. I would give something to see him sitting pale and emaciated, surrounded by his matches and his barrels of gunpowder, and expecting the moment that was to transport him to Paradise for his heroic self-devotion; ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... there we found the interloper to be a scarecrow from a neighboring field, ingeniously arranged so ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... too, would soon be in the same condition, and have no more time to enjoy life and its pleasures. The Romans imitated this custom by sending the larva, a statuette in the form of a skeleton, to make the round of the revellers. The Greek love of beauty converted this ugly scarecrow ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... pleaded Gurney, "you scarecrow creatures don't know how horrid sore the process o' comin' down is. An' one gets so cold, too. It's just like taking ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... Aunt Peggy was dead! She who had been a kind of scarecrow in life, how terrible was the thought of her now! The severest threat to an unruly child was, "I will give you to Aunt Peggy, and let her keep you." But to think of Aunt Peggy in connection with ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... General eyed him, and saw his great spirit shining through this man. The more he looked, the less could the scarecrow veil the hero ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... triumph in his eye. But the triumph was checked as his glance fell upon a gibbet near him to the right, on the round point of hill which is a landmark to the wide vale of Belvoir. Pressed as he was for time, Dick immediately struck out of the road, and approached the spot where it stood. Two scarecrow objects, covered with rags and rusty links of chains, depended from the tree. A night crow screaming around the carcases added to the hideous effect of the scene. Nothing but the living highwayman and his skeleton brethren was visible upon the solitary spot. Around ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... twinkle! But—there was no Mr. Balm of Gilead in this or any world. It was a dreary hall she stood in, with varnished brown paper pretending to be oak panels, a long-armed hatrack that would have made an ideal scarecrow, and ghosts of past dinners floating up from ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... frying-pan by the handle, and began vigorously beating on it with the stick. He did not mind the noise now since he was helping to make it. Meanwhile old Jacob began flinging his arms and legs about in all directions, looking like a scarecrow made to tumble about by means of springs and wires. He pounded the clay floor with his ponderous old boots until the room was filled with a cloud of dust; then in his excitement he kicked over chairs, pots, kettles, and whatever came in his way, while he kept on revolving ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... like a monk, with a throne for wages, Stripped like the iron-souled Hindu sages, Draped like a statue, in strings like a scarecrow, His helmet-hat an old tin pan, But worn in the love of the heart of man, More sane than the helm of Tamerlane, Hairy Ainu, wild man of Borneo, Robinson Crusoe—Johnny Appleseed; And the robin might have said, "Sowing, he goes to the far, new West, With the ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... of human life. A lean and threadbare scarecrow flapped his ragged coat-sleeves in the wind that swept across the barren garden patch farther up the slope,—this was the nearest approach to human life that came within the range of vision. And as if to invite jovial companionship, ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... too bad," said the rabbit. "Then I will have to keep on searching by myself," so he did, and the crow flew away to look for a cornfield that had no scarecrow in ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... melancholy to trace a noble thought from stage to stage of its profanation; to see it transferred from the first illustrious wearer to his lacqueys, turned, and turned again, and at last hung on a scarecrow. Petrarch has really suffered much from this cause. Yet that he should have so suffered is a sufficient proof that his excellences were not of the highest order. A line may be stolen; but the pervading spirit of a great poet is not to be surreptitiously ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... winding through gravel pits whirled towards the Eureka this shouting of "Joe." It was the howl of a wolf for the shepherds, who bolted at once towards the bush: it was the yell of bull-dogs for the fossikers who floundered among the deep holes, and thus dodged the hounds: it was a scarecrow for the miners, who now scrambled down to the deep, and left a licensed mate or two at the windlass. By this time, a regiment of troopers, in full gallop, had besieged the whole Eureka, and the ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... she said to herself "what birds may come to gether worms an' golachs (beetles) aboot the boody craw (scarecrow), Sanny Grame!" ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... scarecrow that all these children desert me so suddenly!" exclaimed Miss Laura, looking helplessly about and lifting her skirts the higher to avoid the dirty suds which somebody was ...
— A Sunny Little Lass • Evelyn Raymond
... were afraid of those straw-stuffed dummies, with their hats tipped over their faces, or upon one side, and their empty sleeves flapping in the winds that swept through the valley. But old Mr. Crow was too wise to be fooled so easily. He would scratch up the corn at the very feet of a scarecrow—and ...
— The Tale of Old Mr. Crow • Arthur Scott Bailey
... of the two species, it was the old Jewish peddlers who suffered the more and made the less profit on the average. For the despised three-hatted scarecrow of Christian caricature, who shambled along snuffling "Old clo'," had a strenuous inner life, which might possibly have vied in intensity, elevation, and even sense of humor, with that of the best of the jeerers on the highway. To Moses, "travelling" meant straying forlornly in ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... expected to get down in the usual way. When we did I heard them saying to each other, 'Well, I thought we would come down overboard, in a lump—sticks and all—blame me if I didn't.' 'That's what I was thinking to myself,' would answer wearily another battered and bandaged scarecrow. And, mind, these were men without the drilled-in habit of obedience. To an onlooker they would be a lot of profane scallywags without a redeeming point. What made them do it—what made them obey me when I, thinking ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... following list makes no pretence to completeness; 'martext', 'carrytale', 'pleaseman', 'sneakcup', 'mumblenews', 'wantwit', 'lackbrain', 'lackbeard', 'lacklove', 'ticklebrain', 'cutpurse', 'cutthroat', 'crackhemp', 'breedbate', 'swinge-buckler', 'pickpurse', 'pickthank', 'picklock', 'scarecrow', 'breakvow', 'breakpromise', 'makepeace'—this last and 'telltruth' (Fuller) being the only ones in the whole collection wherein reprobation or contempt is not implied. Nor is the list exhausted yet; there are further ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... reply, and soon bidding good-by to his friends, he was on his way to the city. On reaching home he found his mother and sister in a state of great anxiety concerning "the odious old scarecrow's corncake daughter," as Gertrude styled Fanny. Her first question, after asking about Kate, was, "Well, Frank, tell me, did you propose ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... from the wicked little charmers. If the flower assimilated their dead bodies as the pitcher plant, for example, does those of its victims, the fly's fate would seem less cruel. To be killed by slow torture and dangled like a scarecrow simply for pilfering a drop of nectar is surely an execution of ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... countenance, extraordinarily pinched through the temples, with minute restless black eyes. The latter were the only mobile feature of his slouching indolent pose, his sullen regard. He might have been a scarecrow, David thought, but ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Flora, "you may as well be quiet. Whatever you may like, I am not going to have the Newdigate prizeman shown as brother to a scarecrow. I knew what you would come to, without me to take care of you. Look at ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... called "A Check." A country lout is sitting on a fence-rail shouting, and the hunt comes up. "Seen the fox, my boy?" asks the huntsman. "No, I ain't!" replies the lad. "Then what are you hollarin' for?" "Because," answers the scarecrow, "because I'm paid for it." This picture was a valuable introduction, procured through a friend who forwarded his drawing, for it brought him an invitation to illustrate "Romford's Hounds" and "Hawbuck Grange," as well ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... you take me for? A scarecrow, to keep people away from the house? That fine husband of yours, I'll have you know, is my husband's brother. You expect me to shut the door in his face and spit fire at him when he comes around? But, after all, what ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... for Martin learned that five years before, Captain Dabney had salvaged Little Billy off the beach at Suva, a dreadful scarecrow of a man, and Ruth's nursing, and the clean sea life, had built a new William Corcoran. But the appetite for the drink was uneradicable, and the genial hunchback's life was a series of losing battles ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... tell me?' asked Mab, 'that that big burly scarecrow, about to mend a gigantic quill with a blunt ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... parliament member, a justice of peace, At home a poor scarecrow, at London an asse, If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, Then Lucy is lowsie, whatever befall it. He thinks himself great; Yet an asse in his state, We allow by his ears but with asses to mate, If Lucy is ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... Pebble Bay, Golfing or to bathe and boat— Should you see a loaded shay, In the shafts a scarecrow goat, Tell him that you hope (with me) Pan will shortly set him free, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 18th, 1920 • Various
... be a pity for my father to have you hung as a scarecrow," said Mark mockingly. "I don't like to see such things about. What do you say to going down to ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... scarecrow!" said Yozhov, convincingly and pitifully, with a shrug of the shoulder. "Is there anything in that? Why, I am anyway half dead already from ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the collar of his overcoat. "Yes, call me that. Do: I like to hear it. You frighten me a little, but I expect I frighten you more. I'm always a scarecrow after I sing a long part like that—so high, too." She absently pulled out the handkerchief that protruded from his breast pocket and began to wipe the black paint off her eyebrows and lashes. "I can't take you in much to-night, but I must see you for a little while." She pushed ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... to a great extent with Thompson's aspirations. Thompson, however, holds the true Socialist sentiment of aversion to Malthus. He denies energetically what he takes to be the Malthusian doctrine: that increased comfort will always produce increased numbers.[462] This has been the 'grand scarecrow to frighten away all attempts at social improvement.' Thompson accordingly asserts that increased comfort always causes increased prudence ultimately; and looks forward to a stationary state in which the births will just balance the deaths. I need not inquire here which theory ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... a notable lawyer, and who knows but that a scrap of his mantle may not have descended upon me! Now to answer your question right away—you will admit that pretty often your aunt is dressed like a last year's scarecrow; that she is drowsy, stupefied, and generally inaccessible. At another time she is real smart and vivacious, and puts other women in the shade. Then suddenly she disappears, shuts herself up along with Lily ayah, and not a soul may approach her—no, not even ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... fellow, Syomushka! Other people will laugh and tell a story and sing a song, but you—there is no making you out. You sit like a scarecrow in the garden and roll your eyes at the fire. You can't say anything properly . . . when you speak you seem frightened. I dare say you are fifty, but you have less sense than a child. Aren't you sorry that ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... said the man; "and when Master Captain Purlrose finds who's come, he will be surprised. We'll hang him for a scarecrow at once, of course?" ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... bed for fear I'd miss something. But when I went 'Back to the Land,' did it take me long to fall in love with the forests and the green fields? It took me a week. I go to bed now the same day I get up, and I've passed on my high hat and frock coat to a scarecrow. And I'll bet you when those bears once scent the wild woods they'll stampede for them like Croker going ...
— The Nature Faker • Richard Harding Davis
... Polichinelle!" said a comely matron, whose robe his obtrusive and angular elbows cruelly discomposed. "But how could one expect gallantry from such a scarecrow!" ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... lackey stirred from his bed upon hearing who it was that had arrived impressed the host not a little, but not half so much as it impressed him presently to observe the deference with which this great Monsieur Rabecque of Paris confronted the scarecrow below stairs when he ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... inordinately thin, the man's clothes seemed simply to hang from his shoulders. His hair, of a curious rusty gray, seemed to stick out from under the faded straw hat, and his whole appearance suggested nothing so much as a scarecrow. ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... town-meeting was convened straightway To set a price upon the guilty heads Of these marauders, who, in lieu of pay, Levied black-mail upon the garden-beds And cornfields, and beheld without dismay The awful scarecrow, with his fluttering shreds,— The skeleton that waited at their feast, Whereby their sinful pleasure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... beckoned the bearers to follow him, and led the way into the temple. Mounting a platform eight or ten feet high, he advanced to an ugly scarecrow of an idol, slapped it, kicked it, and toppled it to the ground. Then, with vast labor and much joyful shouting, the ponderous form of Father Higgins was hoisted aloft, and installed in the seat of the dethroned deity. ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... was born in Crown Office Row, in his exquisite way has sketched the benchers of the Temple whom he had seen pacing the terrace in his youth. Jekyll, with the roguish eye, and Thomas Coventry, of the elephantine step, the scarecrow of inferiors, the browbeater of equals, who made a solitude of children wherever he came, who took snuff by palmfuls, diving for it under the mighty flap of his old-fashioned red waistcoat. In the gentle Samuel ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... you want to make an invalid scarecrow of yourself before your time, it's not my business. Only don't come to me ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... seems unreal, that an incident so insignificant should scatter us and send us into flight like sparrows at whom a scarecrow has been shaken! But is this the first time that students have gone to prison for the sake of liberty? Where are those who have died, those who have been shot? Would you ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... national law. Now a Democratic Congress refused to submit a national suffrage amendment because the platform did not ask for it! She concluded: "No, gentlemen, you can not answer us by shaking in our faces that tatterdemalion of a State's rights scarecrow.... It is a travesty upon our reasoning faculties to suppose that we can not put two and two together. It is underestimating our strength and our financial resources to suppose that we can not place these plain facts in the hands of 15,000,000 ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... "My, but that scarecrow 'as got 'em bad!" said Ortheris. "Seems like if 'e comes any furder we'll 'ave to argify ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling |
