"Scraggy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lady was for dying like Mary, Queen of Scots (to whom she fancied she bore a resemblance in beauty), and, stroking her scraggy neck, said, "They will find Isabel of Castlewood is equal to her fate." Her gentlewoman, Victoire, persuaded her that her prudent course was, as she could not fly, to receive the troops as though she suspected nothing, and that her chamber ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... midst of Adrian's artificial French Lares and Penates, dimly seen, like spindle-shanked ghosts of chairs and tables, just consider the mind-shattering facts. Here was a man whose whole literary output was a few precious essays and a few scraggy poems, who had never schemed out a novel before, not even, as far as I am aware, a short story; who had never, in any way, tested his imaginative capacity, setting out, in insane self-conceit, to write, not merely a commercial work of fiction, but a novel which would ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... they couldn't understand how the mistake arose: but Schomberg when I dropped in later to get some tiffin, though surprised to see me, was perfectly ready with an explanation. I found him seated at the end of a long narrow table, facing his wife—a scraggy little woman, with long ringlets and a blue tooth, who smiled abroad stupidly and looked frightened when you spoke to her. Between them a waggling punkah fanned twenty cane-bottomed chairs and two rows of shiny plates. Three Chinamen in white jackets loafed with napkins ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... must be left untroubled when he had great work to do. When I came back the gallon jar was empty, and he lay as you see him, with the board in front of him with this sorry device." She raised up a panel which was leaning against the wall, and showed a rude painting of a scraggy and angular fowl, with very long legs ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... whether an author from below is better than one from above—whether it will be more eligible that the Muses should have several more stories to descend, when their nine ladyships are invoked so to do—and that the pen should be taken out of the scraggy hand of a gentleman in rags, and be placed in the plump gripe of a gentleman ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 479, March 5, 1831 • Various
... man was startled to see him, but said he was glad he had come, as he had been anxious about him and had wanted to talk to him. Morgan noticed that he seemed a little excited. His face, too, seemed a trifle more worn and lined than usual behind his spectacles, and his beard had a scraggy appearance. ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... of neglect many a mother's letters from her grown-up children could tell! A few scraggy lines, a few sentences now and then, hurriedly written and mailed—often to ease a troubled conscience—mere apologies for letters, which chill ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Roxton has some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in which they are the very antithesis to each other. He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy physique. As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of my narrative which I have left behind me in London. He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with great care in white drill suits and high brown mosquito-boots, and shaves at least ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Digression, to speak of the rest of these Islands. Monmouth and Grafton Isles are very Hilly, with many of those steep inhabited Precipi[c]es on them, that I shall describe particularly. The two small Islands are flat and even; only the Bashee Island hath one steep scraggy Hill, but Goat Island is ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898—Volume 39 of 55 • Various
... Scheffel doing at this Serpentaro in 1897? For I attended his funeral, which took place in the 'eighties. Can it be that his son, a scraggy youth in those days, inherited not only the father's name but his poetic mantle? Was it he who perpetrated those sententious lines? I like to think so. That "law of the ever-beautiful" does not smack of the old man, unless he was more disguised ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... slender pedestals. After about eight miles we arrived at a diminutive spring, which gave enough water for Andy to make bread and coffee with, but none for the stock. There we camped. A few armfuls of scraggy sage-brush furnished wood for a fire, but it was not enough to make our invalids comfortable, and the night was cold and raw. We did all we could for them and they ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... romantic spot and full of charm for the two little girls whose fancies pictured all sorts of possible things. The hollows, in the scraggy willows bending over the stream, might be the hiding-places of nymphs or fairies; yonder soft sward dotted with buttercups and daisies, might be the favorite spot for a midnight revel; among those rocks queer little gnomes might live. Florence was especially struck with it all. ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... much looser, and depends on the combination rather than the ingredients. It is in every one's experience that an accidental light, or even an accidental susceptibility, will impart to the meagrest landscape—a bare marsh, a scraggy hill-pasture—a charm of which the separate features, or the whole, at another time, give no hint. Often mere bareness, openness, absence of objects, will arouse a deeper feeling than the most famous scenes. We learn from such experiences that the difference between one patch ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... reaching the top, the way lies over countless flows and beds of lava, much disintegrated, and almost entirely of the kind called pahoehoe. Countless pit craters extend over the whole mountain, all of them covered outside, and a few inside, with scraggy vegetation. The edges are often very ragged and picturesque. The depth varies from 300 to 700 feet, and the diameter from 700 to 1,200. The walls of some are of a smooth grey stone, the bottoms flat, and very deep in sand, but others resemble the tufa cones of Mauna ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... root, a stem without any blemish, and a rapid growing tree. This is seldom to be got where most people recommend trees to be taken from—isolated ones on the outside of the woods; they are generally scraggy and stunted; and to get their roots you would have to follow along way to get at the fibers on their points, without which they will have a hard struggle to live. Another point recommended is to plant so that the tree will stand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... Jim neglected his cobbling and let the weeds grow in his garden, while he moodily watched his melons as they withered away. Soon he came to idle about them in the evening, too, until, one bright moonlight night, as he was grieving over the wretched, scraggy vines, he heard a tiny, silvery voice quite near him ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - No 1, Nov 1877 • Various
... men: busy at this moment with hurling wooden balls along the alley, at the further end of which a hollow-eyed scraggy youth, in shirt and rough linen trousers, was employed in propping up again the fallen nine-pins. Squire John Boatfield had ridden over from Eastry, Sir Timothy Harrison had come in his aunt's coach, and young Squire Pyncheon with ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... things on their picturesque side. Once as they were sauntering homeward by the brink of the turbid Eger, they came to a man lying on the grass with a pipe in his mouth, and lazily watching from under his fallen lids the cows grazing by the river-side, while in a field of scraggy wheat a file of women were reaping a belated harvest with sickles, bending wearily over to clutch the stems together and cut them with their hooked blades. "Ah, delightful!" March took off his hat as if to salute ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stone blind, and as scraggy as a scarecrow, so there's not much driving to be had out of him. Fancy if the aristocratic Power, or some other Saint Winifred's fellow saw us! Why, it would supply Henderson with jokes for six weeks," said Kenrick, getting up and touching the old pony with his ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... and the folds of their ears; fat, slow-footed she-elephants, with restless pinky-black calves only three or four feet high, running under their stomachs; young elephants with their tusks just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky, scraggy, old-maid elephants, with their hollow, anxious faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull-elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of by-gone fights, and the caked dirt of their solitary mud bath dropping from their shoulders; and there ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of granite are occasionally in sight towards the north, but the trees, though scraggy, close in the view. We left a village, called Mekosi, and goon came to a slaving party by a sand stream. They said that they had bought two slaves, but they had run away from them, and asked us to remain with them; more civil than inviting. We came on to Makochera, the principal ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... here, Joel," announced Polly, in her most determined tone. "Put him off on the grass in the orchard," as the one scraggy apple tree was called. "Now hurry, like a good boy, and then come and tell ...
— The Adventures of Joel Pepper • Margaret Sidney
... led us directly into the grove, where we were obliged to dismount, as the low, scraggy branches would not permit our riding beneath them. Securing our animals, we followed the trail on foot for some distance, when Jerry called my attention to a number of fresh ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world; ...
— The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century - Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February - 4th and 11th, 1884 • John Ruskin
... These blocks of Rumanian and Hungarian tenement districts, their fire-escapes hung with feather beds and old carpets, and looking like great overflowing waste-baskets, are scattered in among little bluff ledges, scraggy with walnut brush, some great rocks still unblasted, and several patches of Indian corn in sloping hillside empty lots—small, strange heights of old New York country, still unsubmerged by the wide tide ...
— Making Both Ends Meet • Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt
... small and miserable, with a few scraggy trees bowing low, like all trees of Sistan, towards the S.S.E., owing to the severe, N.N.W. winds. Here instead of the everlasting domes, flat roofs were again visible—wood being, no doubt, available close at hand. More curious, however, were actual gable roofs, the first I had noticed in Persia ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... DOES!" drawled one of the men,—a weird, withered fellow with a scraggy beard and a reflective turn ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... dreadfully ashamed of the way the Saskatchewan weather was behaving after all her boasting. She was thin at the best of times, but now she grew positively scraggy with the worry of it. I am afraid I took an unholy delight in teasing her, and abused the western weather even more ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... should be delicately clean, the birds, the fishes she lived on, and she be bred amidst running sores and vermin, was one of the mysteries I pondered over when we took to our canoes. For such a pair of eyes, for those exquisite features, some scraggy denizen of Vanity Fair would have given a king's ransom. Yet here was a thing of beauty, dropped by a vile freak of Nature into an appalling environment of filth and ignorance; a creature destined, no doubt, to spring into mature womanhood, and lapse, in time, into a counterpart of the bleared ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... a few weeks after, Mrs. Pepper and Polly were busy in the kitchen. Phronsie was out in the "orchard," as the one scraggy apple-tree was called by courtesy, singing her rag doll to sleep under its sheltering branches. But "Baby" was cross and wouldn't go to sleep, and Phronsie was on the point of giving up, and returning to the house, when a strain of music made her pause with dolly in ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... honored predecessor in this chair, bought a country-place, including half of an old orchard. A few years afterwards I saw the trees on his side of the fence looking in good health, while those on the other side were scraggy and miserable. How do you suppose this change was brought about? By watering them with Fowler's solution? By digging in calomel freely about their roots? Not at all; but by loosening the soil round them, and supplying them with the right kind ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... below gave place gradually to a wilderness—ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths—the desolation surrounding the Fronts ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... perceive any grace in such a wretched animal. I can't help thinking that if it had been a young girl you had brought me—say, a sleeping nymph—full of youth and beauty, 'twould have been a vast improvement on the scraggy jeanie contained in this box. But clear away, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... line from here," he said, "across the lake to that big, scraggy oak, every clear night the moon builds a bridge of molten gold, and once you walked it, my girl, and came straight to me, alone and unafraid; and you were gracious and lovely beyond anything a man ever dreamed of before. I'll ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... a light hand were beautifully indicated. But in the nook where Wych Hazel had stationed herself, there was no pretty little figure with her book on her lap; in its place, sharply and accurately given, was a scraggy, irregular shaped bush, with a few large leaves and knobby excrescences which looked like acorns, but an oak it was not, still less a tree. The topmost branch was crowned with Miss Kennedy's nodding hat, and upon ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner |
