"Wiry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the culmination of this scene was apparently the least agitated, and the first to recover his self-possession. Gently loosening Helen's arms from around him, Bernard Maddison walked steadily toward the door, and confronted his visitors. One was his fellow-passenger from London, the other a tall, wiry-looking man, who was standing with his hat under his arm, and his hands in the pocket of a long ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... roamed at their leisure about the city. They saw a bull fight, a spectacle that speedily disgusted them, and witnessed the driving into the stock-yards of a huge herd of cattle rounded up by wild and savage-looking gauchos on wiry ponies. ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... which case he meant to interview him. Nor was he disappointed, for sauntering in the same direction and chewing gum, with his cap on the back of his head and his hands in his pockets, was a tall, wiry fellow, whom Jack instantly spotted as Tom Walker, the bully, who was to ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... band of youths, arrayed in coloured shirts, white linen breeches, and yellow boots, and wearing little coloured caps, jauntily set upon their heads, were careering wildly hither and thither on swift and wiry ponies. They were waving in the air long sticks, fitted with a cross block of wood at the end, and were pursuing a wooden ball. Many were the collisions, the crashes, and the falls. On every side men and ponies ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... the wild, their rifles under arm or over the shoulder. Squire Boone, who has done with Quakerdom and is leading all that he holds dear out to larger horizons, is ahead of the line, as we picture him, ready to meet first whatever danger may assail his tribe. He is a strong wiry man of rather small stature, with ruddy complexion, red hair, and gray eyes. Somewhere in the line, together, we think, are the mother and son who have herded cattle and companioned each other through long months in the cabin on the frontier. We do not think of this woman as riding ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... hand Astro suddenly grabbed for Roger's neck, but the wiry cadet dashed along the slidewalk out of reach and the big Venusian rumbled after him. ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... the beautiful towns and villages on this beautiful road, disappears when they are entered, for many of them are very miserable. The streets are narrow, dark, and dirty; the inhabitants lean and squalid; and the withered old women, with their wiry grey hair twisted up into a knot on the top of the head, like a pad to carry loads on, are so intensely ugly, both along the Riviera, and in Genoa, too, that, seen straggling about in dim doorways with their ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... dark or light in spots. Now and again a trumpet rang out its distant note of defiance; now and again some portion of the line seemed to manoeuvre or change front, as if to tempt attack, while from time to time a flurry of horsemen—dark-skinned riders, bending low upon the necks of wiry little steeds and urging them with shrill, barbarous cries—swept almost up to the ditch, and brandished their darts, making obscene gestures and shouting words that brought the blood to the faces of the garrison, though they understood not ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... the heavy night dews still lie glittering on the grass, when the cobwebs seem strung with pearls, and faint lines of soft fleecy mist lie in the hollows by the watercourses; long ere the hot, fiery sun has left his crimson bed behind the cold grey horizon, we are out on our favourite horse, the wiry, long-limbed syce or groom trotting along behind us. The mehter or dog-keeper is also in attendance with a couple of greyhounds in leash, and a motley pack of wicked little terriers frisking and ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... been so unlucky as to come across that old rip, Josepha would still be mine; for I, you know, should never have placed her on the stage. She would have lived obscure, well conducted, and mine. Oh! if you could but have seen her eight years ago, slight and wiry, with the golden skin of an Andalusian, as they say, black hair as shiny as satin, an eye that flashed lightning under long brown lashes, the style of a duchess in every movement, the modesty of a dependent, decent grace, and the pretty ways of a wild fawn. And by that Hulot's doing ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... been home, about three weeks, when a dashing young Englishman took the Capital by storm. One of those tall, lean, wiry-looking fellows with clothes so well-fitting that a pocket-full of bank-notes would have utterly destroyed the desired effect. He wore very long and very pointed shoes, and a peculiar little hat, made of hideous tweed, with flaps tied over the low crown with fluttering ribbons. He carried ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... with a long cadaverous face, very strongly pronounced features and small sinister eyes, over which the level brows almost met across the sharp bridge of nose. His close black garb buttoned to the chin, outlined his wiry angular limbs with an almost painful distinctness, and the lean right hand which he placed across his breast as he bowed profoundly to the King, looked more like the shrunken hand of a corpse than that of a living man. The ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... raked him with keen eyes that missed not a detail. He was certain that he had never seen the man before, yet he knew at once that the trim, wiry figure, so clean of build and so gallant of bearing, could belong only to Wolf Leroy, the most ruthless outlaw of the Southwest. It was written in his jaunty insolence, in the flashing eyes. He was a handsome fellow, white-toothed, black-haired, lithely ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... fair-haired, grey-eyed, stern-faced, with thin nostrils, that quivered like those of a well-bred horse, narrow-flanked, broad-chested, though somewhat slight of limb and body, for he was but young, and had scarcely come to a man's weight, but lithe and wiry as a tiger. Piet taller and more massive, for he had the age of him by five years, with round Kaffir eyes, black and cruel, coarse black hair that grew low upon his brow, full red lips, the lower drooping so that the large white teeth and a line of gums could be seen ...
— Swallow • H. Rider Haggard
... neither tall nor short, five feet eight and a half to be exact, with the well-knit frame and springy step of a young man who had been an athlete from his boyhood. He was slim, but wiry, and carried his head with a half-defiant backward slant which told of pluck and breed. His face was tanned brown, in spite of his City hours, but his hair and slight moustache were flaxen, and his ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... was there, a stripling on a small and weedy beast, He was something like a racehorse undersized, With a touch of Timor pony — three parts thoroughbred at least — And such as are by mountain horsemen prized. He was hard and tough and wiry — just the sort that won't say die — There was courage in his quick impatient tread; And he bore the badge of gameness in his bright and fiery eye, And the proud and ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... small stature he was, and thinly built, but evidently one who could endure a great deal before parting with life. He had all the subtle wiry look of the carnivora, as well as their disposition. The eyes, as already observed, obliqued strongly downwards. The balls were not globe-shaped, but rather obtuse cones, of which the pupil was the apex. Both ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... mysterious BACON to explore Metallic veins, and part the dross from ore; With sylvan coal in whirling mills combine 240 The crystal'd nitre, and the sulphurous mine; Through wiry nets the black diffusion strain, And close an airy ocean in a grain.— Pent in dark chambers of cylindric brass Slumbers in grim repose the sooty mass; 245 Lit by the brilliant spark, from grain to grain Runs the quick fire ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... bought for him a little, wiry bay cayuse, and both he and Stella had taught him to ride, and Dick could now throw a rope with reasonable ...
— Ted Strong's Motor Car • Edward C. Taylor
... a man about thirty years of age, spare built, but wiry as an Indian. He had black hair and eyes; he was not educated, but was naturally a bright man; was brave as a lion; could ride like a Comanche; was a splendid shot, and had been West; took up a gold ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... youth, handsome, dark, smiling, offered to bet with him on the result of the races. Collie declined, but gained his point. He learned the Mexican's choice for first place, a lean, wiry buckskin with a goat head and a wicked eye, but with wonderful flanks and withers. Collie meditated. As a result he placed something like fifty dollars in bets with various ranchers, naming the Mexican horse for first place. Word went round ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... looked at him. Who can he be? Tall, broad-shouldered, wiry; his eyes restless, so that she could not see them rightly; besides, she was standing quite close to him, just where he had suddenly appeared before her with his dog and ...
— The Bridal March; One Day • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... Maud, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows, was kneeling beside the tub scrubbing a little wiry-haired yellow puppy, who ...
— Polly's Senior Year at Boarding School • Dorothy Whitehill
... was a grand, rolling upland of a country that they had fled to; cool, summer weather all the year round, and no mosquitoes. Hospitable smoke curled from a dozen chimneys; shepherds galloped up on wiry horses and away again; scarlet passion-vines poured over roofs and verandas like cataracts of glory; and there was incessant laughter and chatter of children ...
— The Spread Eagle and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris
... half-breed, ready to shoot in case a weapon was drawn. But McFann merely made a headlong dive for Lowell's legs, and there was a rough-and-tumble fight about the camp-fire which was settled only when the agent managed to get a lock on his wiry opponent which pinned McFann's back to ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... and Bob Temple were chums, a little under 18 years of age each. It was their bitterest regret that they had been too young to take any part in the World War some years before. Frank was dark, curly-haired, of medium height and slim, but strong and wiry. Bob was fair and sleepy-eyed, a fraction under six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds. A third chum and the leader of the trio was Jack Hampton, 19 years of age. He had gone to New Mexico several months before with ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... wiry, active man, by name Jackson, a native, colonially convicted, very clever among horses, a capital light-weight boxer, and in running superb, a pupil and PROTEGE of the immortal "flying pieman," (May ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... malevolence, came a clatter from beyond the house, and a chorus of familiar yells and the spiteful snapping of pistols. It was our boys—thirty of the biggest-hearted, bravest fellows that ever wore spurs, and, as they came thundering down to us, I could make out the bent, wiry figure of old Perry Potter in the lead, yelling and shooting wickeder than any one else in ...
— The Range Dwellers • B. M. Bower
... tide went down, not outraging the calm days by unworthy bustle or impatience. The woods on the neighboring shore were alive with pigeons, which were moving south, looking for mast, but now, like ourselves, spending their noon in the shade. We could hear the slight, wiry, winnowing sound of their wings as they changed their roosts from time to time, and their gentle and tremulous cooing. They sojourned with us during the noontide, greater travellers far than we. You may frequently discover a single pair ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... I have the water boiling back there, and was just about to make some coffee. You will drink a cup with me. And how is la belle dame? Always handsome! always healthy! always contented!" She took Edna's hand between her strong wiry fingers, holding it loosely without warmth, and executing a sort of double theme upon the back ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... thicket, and the whole world, and you with it, seems breaking into blossom,—why, then you know what light is and can do. The very wind there by day is bright, now faint, now stinging, and makes a low, wiry music through the loose sprays, as if they were tense harp-strings. Nothing startles; all is like a grand composition utterly wrought out. What a blessing it is that the blacks have been imported there,—their swarthiness is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... and had even written to his widowed mother, who lived alone in a Dorsetshire village, asking her advice about the girl. Gladys was disturbed in her solitude by Miss Peck, who came to the door in rather an excited and officious manner. She was a little, wiry spinster, past middle life, eccentric, but kind-hearted. She had bestowed a great deal of gratuitous and genuine kindness on her lodgers, though knowing very well that she would not likely get any return but gratitude for it; but times were hard with her ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... we know where you have been," said a small fellow, who wore a yellow chevron on his arm. He had a thin moustache and a sharp nose, and rode a wiry, dull sorrel horse. "You may just as well tell us all about it. We know you've been to see 'em, and we are going to make you ...
— Two Little Confederates • Thomas Nelson Page
... was introduced to the mail-carrier who was to be his guide. He was a thin, wiry man, named Givens. In age, Calhoun put him down at about forty. The few days during which Calhoun was with Givens gave him a very high opinion of the guide's bravery and sagacity. Givens related many of his hairbreadth escapes during their journey, and seemed to treat them as ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... of the wounds at the same time, over half an hour elapsing between the first and the last. Up to receiving the last wound he had declined to leave the firing-line, but by that time he had lost so much blood that he had to be sent to the rear. The man's wiry toughness was as notable as ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... A small, wiry, middle-aged man, with an honest, lantern-jawed face, entered the living room bearing a breakfast tray. After one glance, keeping his eyes cast ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... Mr. Sheep," said Richard, handing her half a dozen long black wiry hairs. "And he's old and cross and has been known to butt people. I don't think he'd hurt you, ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... Warrick farm, five er six mild, anyhow, from wher' the mill stood. Great stout fellers, they was; and little Jake, the father of 'em, wasn't no man at all—not much bigger'n you, I rickon. Le' me see, now:—Ther was Tomps Burk, Wade Elwood, and Joe and Ben Carter, and Wesley Morris, John Coke—wiry little cuss, he was, afore he got his leg sawed off—and Ezry, and—Well, I don't jist mind all the boys—'s a long time ago, and I never was much of a hand far names.—Now, some folks'll hear a name and never fergit ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... this to the noble lords, who had for years scented in Caesar's existence and prosperity destruction to their own oligarchic rule of almost the known world. But when Cato, the most violent anti-Caesarian of them all, a sharp, wiry man with angular features, and keen black ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... interesting camp in more ways than one. The vaqueiros with their wives and families were housed on the two sides of the field in which our tents were pitched. On one side was a big, whitewashed, tile-roofed house in which the foreman dwelt—an olive- skinned, slightly built, wiry man, with an olive-skinned wife and eight as pretty, fair-haired children as one could wish to see. He usually went barefoot, and his manners were not merely good but distinguished. Corrals and outbuildings were ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... absurdities of inconvenience is the greatest I ever met with. It is scarcely large enough for a small sheep to enter. Every person entering a garden must not only stoop but crawl through the gate. It is fortunate there are no lusty people here, all being bony and wiry like the Arabs. Not being dependant on rain, the gardens only suffer from the locusts, and now and then a blighting wind. In the Spring of this year these insect marauders passed over the oasis and ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... wiry, fibrous man—full of energy, wide awake,—tenacious, keenly perceptive; could pass his sharp eye round you in a second and tell your age, weight, and habits; could nearly look round a corner and say how many people were in the next street; has a touch of shrewd, sudden-working ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... his sitting-room with the effect of a small explosion, excitement in every line of her brown old face and wiry little figure. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... uniform was the only dark spot at the board, but his big onyx eyes made up for it. He was fraternising effusively with the Captain of the Lushkar team, who was wondering how many of Dirkovitch's Cossacks his own dark wiry down-country-men could account for in a fair charge. But one does not speak of these ...
— Soldier Stories • Rudyard Kipling
... of the firm consisted in the collection of house-rents, frequently entailing visits from tenants and questions of repairs. A certain Mr. Smith, a wiry little grey-headed man, with a keen face and a decisive manner, looked after this branch; and the gusto with which he did it was one of Henry's earliest and most instructive amazements. House-repairs were quite evidently his poetry, and he never seemed so happy ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... islands scattered over the tropical ocean, especially, to which might well be given Herman Melville's name, "Las Encantadas," the Enchanted Islands. These islands, usually volcanic, have no vegetation but cactuses or wiry bushes with strange names; no inhabitants but insects and reptiles—lizards, spiders, snakes,—with vast tortoises which seem of immemorial age, and are coated with seaweed and the slime of the ocean. If there ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... and died, and no wonder, since the soil was a hard white clay resembling china clay. But although trees refused to grow there it was always clothed in a vegetation of its own; all the hardiest weeds were there, and covered the entire barren area to the depth of a man's knees. These weeds had thin wiry stalks and small sickly leaves and flowers, and would die each summer long before their time. This barren piece of ground had a great attraction for me as a small boy, and I visited it daily and would roam about it among the miserable half-dead weeds ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... entirely back there at the creek crossing, and if there weren't Indians all round us, nothing would have fetched them along. There goes Davies, coddling 'em again, damn it! That man would spoil any troop——Mr. Davies!" he called, and a gaunt, wiry fellow, with a stiff beard sprouting on his thin, haggard face, turned away from a bedraggled trooper who had thrown himself in utter abandonment among the dripping sage brush at the side of the trail, and came to his ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... bank, just a little way below the great falls of Roaring River. Here he abandoned the old road that was so seldom traveled since lumbering operations had been stopped in that district, owing to the removal of available pine and spruce. At a word from him the dogs sat down in their traces, their wiry coats giving out a thin vapor, and he went down the path to the log building. The door was closed and he had already noted that no film of smoke came from the stove-pipe. While it was evident that Ennis was not at home Stefan knocked ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... like the good looks of others. He looked well bred, but to look that is as common in a certain class as it is rare in another. He had the spare, wiry figure, tall and lightly built, square in the shoulders, and thin in the flank; he had the clear weather-beaten complexion, the clean, nervous, capable hand, and the self-effacing manner, which we associate with myriads of well-born, machine-trained, perfectly ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... aspect. His pants were stuffed in the legs of his long boots, and he wore a kind of hunting frock, which reached nearly to his knees. He was lean and lank, but, annealed in the hardships of backwoods life, he was wiry and sinewy. He was about fifty years old, though his gray hair and beard alone appeared to betray his age. He was from the south; a fine specimen of the real Kentucky hunter—"half horse and ...
— Field and Forest - The Fortunes of a Farmer • Oliver Optic
... morning early Geoffrey proceeded with the two men who had been selected to accompany him to his usual look-out. Both were active, wiry men, and entered fully into the spirit of the undertaking when Geoffrey explained its nature to them. They looked out of the dormer-window at the sharp roof slanting away in front of them and up ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty
... parents, he had come over to the States, and had become a naturalised citizen, such characters being known in that region as Conches. Hot sand and sea air had burned his countenance to a mahogany tint. He was small and wiry. His costume consisted of a broad-brimmed hat, a coarse blue cloth jacket worn above a jersey, while his nether man was clothed in leather gaiters reaching to the thighs, and strong boots, so that he was prepared for service either afloat or ashore. He carried a rusty rifle, with a powder-horn ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... to the north, sometimes to the south, in the hopes of discovering the smallest puddle. At last we had to halt to rest the weary cattle, though we could find no water, and without it they showed no inclination to crop the hard, wiry grass. We therefore remained but a short time, and once more pushed forward. As evening approached we began to feel very anxious, for without water the oxen ould scarcely perform their next day's journey. The sun, ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... that Tom saw him approaching, he felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came near. He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy, sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, were rather unprepossessing items, it is to be confessed; his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco, the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 1865, he writes: "Though the intellectual man had greatly grown meantime, few persons would recognize the hearty, blithesome, genial, and wiry Abraham Lincoln of earlier days in the sixteenth President of the United States, with his stooping figure, dull eyes, careworn face, and languid frame. The old clear laugh never came back; the even temper was sometimes disturbed; and his natural charity for all was often ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... loved dogs dearly. In his novels and poetical works his knowledge of them and his regard often appear. He loved them, from the stately deerhound to the wiry terrier. He was quite up to the ways of their education. Dandie Dinmont, in "Guy Mannering," speaking of his terriers, says, "I had them a' regularly entered, first wi' rottens, then wi' stots and weasels, and then wi' the tods and brocks, and now they fear naething that ever comes wi' a hairy ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces when the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers; the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,—"the white man's foot," as the Indians called it,—the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call "knot-grass" and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;—all these plants, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... a wiry little boy, thin and brown, with dark hair that grew in a point on the nape of his neck, and hazel eyes set rather deeply under straight, sulky-looking brows. The lower part of his face was small and pointed for the breadth across forehead and cheek bones, and, with his outstanding ears, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... dwellings he became a thing[gy] Restless and worn, and stern and wearisome, Drooped as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing, To whom the boundless air alone were home: Then came his fit again, which to o'ercome, As eagerly the barred-up bird will beat His breast and beak against his wiry dome Till the blood tinge his plumage—so the heat Of his impeded Soul would through his ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... his Cyclops-like limbs sprawling down upon the floor. Scarred and brutish, indeed, was his face, one ear missing, the other beaten flat by boxing gloves; but Democrates had a distinct feeling that under his battered visage and wiry black hair lurked greater penetration of human motive and more ability to play therewith than the chance observer might allow. The Athenian deliberately ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and obviously savage temper. The latter—well, it is not easy to say what were his chief characteristics, so firmly did he control the features of a fine countenance in which the tiger-like blue eyes alone seemed untamable. He was not much above the middle height; but his compact frame was wiry and ...
— The Madman and the Pirate • R.M. Ballantyne
... was the corpse of a thin-faced tall wiry man, somewhat foxy of aspect, lying on a ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... in some wonder. He was a short, wiry man, and arrayed in a close-fitting costume resembling that of the circus athlete ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... of the first houses built in the foothills. My great-grandfather was really the first settler in these parts and originally located his cabin where the mill now stands. 'Little Bill Thompson,' he was called, for he was a small, wiry man—very different from grandfather, who in his prime was a powerful man of over six feet. Little Bill Hill and Little Bill Creek were named after this pioneer great-grandsire, who was quite successful raising flocks ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... her little play box, and returned with the knife. It was almost as large as the Chintz Imp, but he possessed so much wiry strength in his thin arms and backbone that he was able to clamber up the chimney ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... eager, dark man, with too much "way." He dressed in black and rusty iron grey; had jet-black beads for eyes, a scrubby little black chin, wiry black hair striking out from his head in prongs like hair-pins, and a complexion that was very dingy by nature, or very dirty by art, or a compound of both. He had dirty hands, and dirty, broken nails, and looked as if he had been ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... them is an old woman I took across in my felucca to pleasure my girl's brother—she tended him once when he chopped through his foot near her hut just on the edge of the hills. Seventy years, or nearly, and tough and wiry yet, and can help neatly with a boat. And money laid by, too, but is she idle? Never. She spins her hemp and weaves osiers into baskets and changes them for goats' hams. That with polenta keeps her all winter—and well, too. She is very close. The money, no one ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... at the end of May when he arrived in St. Louis, and he was met at the train there by his old river instructor and friend, Horace Bixby—as fresh, wiry, and capable as he had ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to the Refinery, the visitors were committed to a little wiry old man, called Jimmy, who first showed them a grewsome monster, own cousin to him who threw oil from Tarr Farm to Plummer. This one was called an air-pump, and, with his attendant steam-engine, inhabited a house by himself. His ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... feudalism, carry a charm with them. They are symbolic, definitive; they bestow a personality on the wearer, which satisfies the mind, by enabling it instantly to classify him, to connect him with a thousand stories and associations; and to my young mind, the wiry, shrewd, honest, grim old serving-man seemed the incarnation of all the wonders of Newmarket, and the hunting-kennel, and the steeple-chase, of which I had read, with alternate admiration and contempt, in the newspapers. He ushered me in with a good breeding which surprised me;—without ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... noticed the sameness of the faces about him. A short wiry man sprang at him, and with a broken sword, stabbed him in the left shoulder. Alexis caught him by the throat with his right hand, and the man gave a choking screech as he lifted him clear off ...
— The Boy Allies with the Cossacks - Or, A Wild Dash over the Carpathians • Clair W. Hayes
... the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and wiry man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to see the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true, but the cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet this was Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who knew every goat-trail ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... several times on a wiry, jerking little fellow, whom he recognized as Jean La Marche, the fiddler, a censitaire of the manor of Tilly. He was a well-known character, and had drawn a large circle of the crowd ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... few or many muscles, if moderate care and patience be exercised on the part of the examiner. This form of chorea is almost always a disease of childhood. So-called post-hemiplegic chorea is, in the opinion of both Hammond and Gray, simply athetosis. The silly, dancing, posturing, wiry movements, and the facial distortion observed in Huntington's chorea would hardly be mistaken by a careful observer for athetosis. The two diseases, however, are somewhat alike. Paralysis agitans (shaking ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... corner of the room a large evergreen tree, sparkling with candles and tinsel stars, was hung with bags of pink and white tarletan and festoons of puffy popcorn. Near it sat an old man playing the violin; and his whole wiry self seemed to quiver with joy to the tune of his merry "Money Musk." In the center of the room two gray-haired men were dancing an old-time jig, bobbing, bowing, and twisting about in a gleeful attempt to outdo each other. Watching them were three old women and another old man, eating ice ...
— Across the Years • Eleanor H. Porter
... tall and wiry, and 'peared like a young man what had parstured 'mongst wild oats. He seemed cut out for a gintleman, but run to seed too quick and turned out nigh kin to a dead beat. One-half of him was hanssum, 'minded me ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... at the wiry, well-knit, upright figure, and at the fresh, elderly, but virile face, with its sombre eyes and its snowy hair, thought once again of the ancient saw which she had quoted to herself the night before, only to dismiss it finally from her mind. This man was no fool, nor ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... ideas of discipline are based on cast iron rules, espies the laggard and administers a sharp rebuke. A squad of marines dash from the "barracks" below and line up at the secondary battery guns on the forecastle. Some of the marines are hatless and coatless, and one wiry little private shambles along on one foot. He stumbles against a hatch-coaming and kicks his shoe ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... numerous atajos, in charge of their arrieros. We observe the mules, small, smooth, light-limbed, and vicious. We glance at the heavy alparejas and bright worsted apishamores. We notice the tight wiry mustangs, ridden by the arrieros; the high-peaked saddles and hair bridles; the swarth faces and pointed beards of the riders; the huge spurs that tinkle at every step; the exclamations, "Hola, mula! malraya! vaya!" We notice all these, and they tell us we are journeying ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... forty-six years of age, tall, lean, wiry, had been a farmer all his life. His wife had died three years before, and a year later, he had lost his farm through an imperfect title. Understanding machinery and being a fair carpenter, he then came to the city, with $200 in his pocket, joined the Carpenter's Union, and tried to make a living ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... overtook a man who was reading as he walked, a second book being held under his arm. It was a young workman of three- or four-and-twenty, tall, of wiry frame, square-shouldered, upright. Grail grasped his shoulder ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... to hold up for public acceptance and guidance. Without doubt, the most thoroughly ludicrous scene I ever witnessed was furnished by a 'woman's rights' meeting,' which I looked in upon one night in New York, as I returned from Europe. The speaker was a raw- boned, wiry, angular, short-haired, lemon-visaged female of very certain age; with a hand like a bronze gauntlet, and a voice as distracting as the shrill squeak of a cracked cornet-a-piston. Over the wrongs and grievances of her ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... same plan, formed of two leaves, stiff and strong, soldered at their bases. Sometimes the pillager meets prickles that sting him, as in the roses and briers; and if he is a little fellow he is sure to regard him with intense disgust, a bristly guard of wiry hair—hence the commonness of that kind of fortification. Against enemies of larger growth a tree or shrub will often aim sharp thorns—another piece of masquerade, for thorns are but branches checked in growth, and frowning with a barb ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... rode with them over the wild marshes of Solway moss to the Bridge of Gretna, where they formed into two lines, and between them Patsy passed into England. Patsy looked out and kissed her hand to them. They were all sitting still on their wiry little beasts except Stair, who had dismounted, and stood uncovered till the carriage, with its two flanking riders, had passed into the distance. Stair got blown a kiss all to himself, but if he saw it he took no notice, and so was left standing pensive ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... trench life with the vividness of personal experience, I must mention my first trench in Flanders in winter when, with other correspondents, I saw the real thing under the guidance of the commanding officer of that particular section, a slight, wiry man who wore the ribbon of the Victoria Cross won in another war for helping to "save the guns." He made seeing trenches in the mud seem a pleasure trip. He was the kind who would walk up to his ball as if he knew how to play golf, send out a clean, fair, ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... mystic chamber, which seemed a fitting laboratory for a necromancer, when I was startled at beholding a human countenance staring at me from a dusky corner. It was that of a small, shrivelled old man with thin cheeks, bright eyes, and gray, wiry, projecting eyebrows. I at first doubted whether it were not a mummy curiously preserved, but it moved, and I saw that it was alive. It was another of these black-cloaked old men, and, as I regarded his quaint physiognomy, his obsolete garb, and the hideous and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... apparently unarmed; his arm was lean but wiry, and his hands dry, but of an aristocratic whiteness and delicacy, and he leaned on the shoulder of an officer, who, with his hand on his sword, had watched the scenes in the Buytenhof with eager curiosity, very natural in a military man, ...
— The Black Tulip • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... Justice Destourbet, having strong, wiry limbs, ascended cheerily the steep mountain-path. His tall, spare figure, always in advance of his companion, was visible through the tender green of the young oaks, clothed in a brown coat, a black cravat, and a very high hat, which the justice, who loved correctness ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... bone-white arms, along with waving, ribbonlike appendages less easy to define. The thing was reared half up along the hall door, inspecting its surface with these members; then suddenly it flung itself around and flashed over to the outer lock door. Three arms shot out; wiry fingers caught the three spin-locks simultaneously, began to ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... locality, has long been celebrated for its greyhounds, which are known to be large and wiry-coated. They are probably types of the early Celtic greyhounds, which, yielding to the influences of a colder climate than that they came from, became coated with a thick and wiry hair. In Ireland, as being milder in its climate, the frame ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... reappeared, mounted on a fine, wiry pony, and leading on either side a tough little animal, saddled and bridled and ready ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... kindly, and who had such bright, deep, quiet brown eyes. Margaret, standing in the doorway, scrutinised the three, and felt a sinking at the heart. Basil Montfort was a tall boy for his age, slender and wiry, with tow-coloured hair that stood straight on end, thin lips that curled up at the corners with a suggestion of malice, and piercing gray eyes, which he had a trick of screwing up till they were ...
— Margaret Montfort • Laura E. Richards
... with the swell mob. Sergeant Mith, a smooth-faced man with a fresh bright complexion, and a strange air of simplicity, is a dab at housebreakers. Sergeant Fendall, a light- haired, well-spoken, polite person, is a prodigious hand at pursuing private inquiries of a delicate nature. Straw, a little wiry Sergeant of meek demeanour and strong sense, would knock at a door and ask a series of questions in any mild character you choose to prescribe to him, from a charity-boy upwards, and seem as innocent as an infant. They are, one and all, respectable-looking ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... hear, although she was clutching her nephew's arm hard, and the veins in her thin temples and her throat were swelling purple. When he had entered she had sprung at him. "Did you hear about it? I want to know if you knew about it," said she, grasping his arm with her wiry fingers, as if she were trying to ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... a few moments, the red-headed man, a wiry little fellow, went forward till he came to where an old pine had recently fallen across the track. There he kicked off his snow-shoes, picked them up, ran along the trunk, jumped into the snow from among the branches, put on his snow-shoes, and started northwestward. His ...
— Old Man Savarin and Other Stories • Edward William Thomson
... thing off, his fingers closing on wiry fur as he caught and squeezed. The thing went limp, and suddenly melted in his hands. He heard it splash as it struck the damp ground at ...
— The Dark Door • Alan Edward Nourse
... nights without water. Started at 7 o'clock, same course, 315 degrees, through scrub and a light sandy soil. At four miles got to the rise, which is a scrubby sand-hill. From this I can see nothing, the scrub being so thick; it is of a nasty, tough, wiry description, and has torn our hands and saddle-bags to pieces. I got up a tree to look over the top of this scrub, which is about twelve feet high, and I could see our course for a long distance; it appears to be the same terrible scrub, with no sign of any creeks. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... very characteristic nose—it was a combative nose, and a decided pug. So was the nose on the window-pane. Plunger's hair, too, was peculiar to Plunger. It was wiry, stubborn hair, with a tuft in front which resembled the comb of a turkey-cock. The same peculiarity was seen in the head on the window. And Plunger's eyebrows had a way of mounting to his head, as though they were anxious to get on terms of friendship with ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... she lives still,—scarce older to appearance than twenty years before,—prim, wiry, active,—proof against all ailments, it would seem. It is hard to conceive of her as yielding to the great conqueror. If the tongue and an inflexibility of temper were the weapons, she would whip Death from her chamber at the last. It seems like amiability almost to hear such ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... Summer 'tis a blithesome sight to see, 120 As, step by step, with measured swing, they pass, The wide-ranked mowers wading to the knee, Their sharp scythes panting through the wiry grass; Then, stretched beneath a rick's shade in a ring, Their nooning take, while one begins to sing A stave that droops and dies 'neath the close sky ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... strong; he was wiry. He was never sick, was always good-natured, never a bully, always a friend of the weak, the small and the unprotected. He must have been a funny-looking boy. His skin was sallow, and his hair was ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... was history in his face—distinct chapters of it; his brow was not that blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in his forehead; it had been traced in the course of a month or two by past troubles. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair; it had been brought by the illness in Rome, when he had wished each night that he might never wake again. This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin, they had resulted from those months of despondency when all ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... nature, he would certainly have found himself going round the house a second time. He seemed so anxious to be asked questions, too, that James felt he must be on his guard. He began to suffer from his exertions, for, though wiry enough for a man of his long build, he was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... steps toward her flew a figure which, as Patty afterward described it, seemed like a wild Indian! A slight, wiry figure, rather tall and very awkward, and possessed of a nervous force that expressed itself ...
— Patty and Azalea • Carolyn Wells
... way to get home. Each of the passengers, I among the number, had a good Winchester rifle, with plenty of ammunition. The coach was a crude rattle-trap, noisy and rough, but strong and well adapted to the journey. It was drawn by four horses of the country, small but wiry. We had long reaches between changes. The stations for meals had means of defense, and the food set before us was substantial, mainly buffalo beef, chickens and bread. A good appetite (always a sure thing on the plains) was the best sauce ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... the knock at the door a singular young man stood at the threshold. He was short, wiry, and very dark. His nose was long and complacently tilted at the end. His eyes were small and very black. His mouth was a wide, uncertain slit. In his hand he carried a light cane and a silk hat of the flat-brimmed French type. ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... come, and the grass, which grew scarcely ankle-deep on the great levels, was once more white and dry, but in the hollows that had held the melting snow it stood waist-high, scented with peppermint, harsh and wiry, and Winston had set out with every man he had to harvest it. Already a line of loaded wagons crawled slowly across the prairie, and men and horses moved half-seen amid the dust that whirled about another sloo. Out of ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... A slim, wiry youth in high-heeled boots came out of the house with Brad Charlton just as the buggy stopped at the porch of the horse ranch. He ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... and the ground at the edge of the precipice had given way with him; it showed a recent founder of a few inches. Then he clutched at a branch of broom as he fell; but it slipped through his fingers, cutting them; for there was blood on the wiry stem. I knelt by the side of the cliff and craned my head over. I scarcely dared to look. In spite of the birds, my heart ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen
... palm in his own two hands and bent over it. He was not weeping and he was not talking, but he stood with his head lowered until only the wiry black hair was visible, and in his throat rose guttural and incoherent ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... clearing, two wiry little Florida ponies, tethered with rawhide ropes, browsed upon ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... genuine liking. There was a quality very winning in the youthful East-sider and now that the chance for betterment had come his way Steve felt sure that the boy would make good. There was a lot of pluck and grit in that wiry little frame; a lot of honesty too, Stephen reflected, with a blush. He was not at all sure but that in the matter of fearlessness and moral courage the New York lad had the lead of him. Certainly he was not one who shrank from ...
— Steve and the Steam Engine • Sara Ware Bassett
... said a thin, wiry, iron-jawed man, who wore a huge sombrero and leather breeches, "I'm Bill Buckhorn, o' 'Rapahoe, an' thet's a place whar we don't 'low no critter like this yere Black Harry ter go waltzin' round more then sixteen brief second by ther clock. We ketches ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... rather an odd article to be used on such a night. Then Jim came face to face with the man who carried the lantern, and saw who he was—Deacon Amos Whittle. To Jim's mind, the man resembled a fox, skulking along the road, although Deacon Amos Whittle was not predatory. He was a small, thin, wiry man with a queer swirl of ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... year, a jade of a charming creature must needs send me out for a piece of ice to put in her wine. It was evening and a hard frost. I shall never forget the cold, cutting, dreary, dead look of every thing out of doors, with a wind through the wiry trees, and the snow on the ground, contrasted with the sudden return to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... Superintendent—who made a perfect chaperon—and herself. It had seemed, somehow, almost providential that they should be thrown together. Yes, Rose-Marie remembered how she had been attracted to Dr. Blanchard at the very first—how she had found nothing wanting in his wiry strength, his broad shoulders, his ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... plain people. Yet in the end, it was the plain people, those who neither labored with their hands nor lived by the labor of others—it was the plain people who vanquished him. Vanquished him and tried to protect him. But could not. A smallish man, hard and wiry, he neither saved himself nor saved others. He had one fetish, power. And one pride, his line. The Cardews were iron masters. Howard would be an iron ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the word as though he had been a member of Monsieur Crapeau's class in French elementary sounds, and with a start which seemed to shake every fibre in his wiry frame. ...
— Watch and Wait - or The Young Fugitives • Oliver Optic
... went dead over the Piazza, to the obelisks, I so close on his traces that I could not have missed him if I had chosen for murder. It was like coursing a hare, for hare-like in his pains, he began to scream—not very loudly; a wretched, wrung and wiry appeal, like some bad woman's, was all he could muster. Between the obelisks he fell on his knees, and when I reached him was praying, "Sancta Mater! Diva Mater! Ab hostium incidiis libera me!" I saw a head at a window, a head in a night-cap—a man's. Over it peeped another—a woman's. But I knew ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... a tall, thin boy of fifteen, wiry and strong, and with a face as smooth and pink-and-white as a girl's. That he was so girlish looking was a sore subject with the boy, and whenever any unwise boy called him "Girly" instead of "Curly" it started ...
— Ruth Fielding in Moving Pictures - Or Helping The Dormitory Fund • Alice Emerson
... convulsively under his hands, which he laid on her paternally. His straggly, wiry moustache brushed her forehead in a good-night kiss. She closed the door, and went away from it to the middle of the room before she allowed herself a tired-out sort ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... of this scarce commodity upon me in their hospitality, and kept up a bonfire all night. They mounted their wiry ponies and performed feats of horsemanship, in one of which all the animals threw themselves on their hind legs in a circle when a man in the centre clapped his hands; and they crowded my tent to see my sketches, and were not satisfied till I executed some daubs ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... well; he was still a wiry athletic man, and his step as elastic and springy as ever. The constant exercise he had been in the habit of taking had preserved his health and condition, and these in their turn had enabled him to maintain his cheerfulness and humour. The lines in his ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... tall, thin man, his hair gray, shading a majestic forehead, and but slightly wrinkled with the summers of over sixty years; his eyes were partly closed, but when preaching they glowed with animation, and were brightened by the tears that dimmed them; his long, wiry fingers were interlocked and raised towards his breast in the attitude of deep contemplation. The rough soutane and leather belt, the beads and missionary cross partly hid in his breast, declared him to be a follower of St. Ignatius. In the hallowed austerity of his whole appearance, ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... tossing the pebbles, recumbent on one elbow. His long sinewy legs were incased in slick jean trousers of stovepipe lines and stiffness. He wore no coat. A faded blue shirt covered his barrel of a body, and his slouch hat was off, exposing long, light, wiry hair and a freckled neck. His lean jaws were covered by a two weeks' growth of beard. About him drooped hazels and alders. From one end to the other Ripley Creek was beautiful; there was no lovelier ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... was a very heavily built man, with a bullet-shaped head, and a square resolute jaw, partially cloaked by a short sparse beard of coarse wiry hair. His voice and his laugh were both loud and boisterous, and he usually affected an air of open, noisy good-fellowship, which was but little in keeping with his character. When he saw Imam Bakar approaching him, with the slow and solemn tread of one who believes himself to ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... the dinner table or seeing her straight, wiry body astride a horse riding beside him through the parks, it seemed to Sam unbelievable that a childless womanhood was ever to be her portion, and more than once he had an inclination to venture again upon an effort for the success of their hopes. ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times—who had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of the feudal spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been totally unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... were mounted on swift, wiry horses. Their long hunting shirts were girded with bead-worked belts. Some wore caps made of mink or of coonskins, with the tails hanging down behind; others had soft hats, in each of which was fastened either a sprig of ...
— Hero Stories from American History - For Elementary Schools • Albert F. Blaisdell
... halting in the utmost anxiety, was able to see as it drove past the stile (near which he now stood) that it contained only the servant and not Eldred; further, he made out that Eldred was following on foot. From behind the tall hedge by the stile leading into the road he watched the thin wiry figure pass quickly by with the parcel beneath its arm, and feeling in its pockets. Just as he passed the stile something fell out of a pocket upon the grass, but with so little sound that Eldred was not conscious ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary - Part 2: More Ghost Stories • Montague Rhodes James
... general, born at Cambrai, "a wiry, elastic, unwearied man ... creature," as he boasted in his old age, "of God and his own sword ... on the whole, one of Heaven's Swiss"; took when already grey to the Revolution and fought on its behalf; gained the battles of Valmy and Jemmapes; conquered Belgium, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... shearing after he was an old man; he drove the "rig" of say eighteen feet from side to side, and never lifted his hand till he had a sheaf. He used a long sickle, and drew the corn to him. I cannot describe his method properly. He was a tall, thin, wiry man, with very long arms. My father used to tell how my grandfather sent two men and two women to give George Bruce a day's shearing, and how George came with a little girl (who did little or nothing but make bands for her master), and how ...
— Cattle and Cattle-breeders • William M'Combie
... that two uncommonly strong old squaws had him by the hair, three half-grown boys were clinging to his legs, and a powerful warrior laid hold of his right shoulder. He deemed it wisest in such a position to yield as quickly and gracefully as he could, in the hope that the two wiry old women would be detached speedily from his hair. This object was achieved as soon as the Sioux saw that he did not resist, and the vigilant Pine Tree stood before him, watching with an expression that Dick feared ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... private secretary went down and was admitted under the gallery on the left, to listen, with great content, while John Bright, with astonishing force, caught and shook and tossed Roebuck, as a big mastiff shakes a wiry, ill-conditioned, toothless, bad-tempered Yorkshire terrier. The private secretary felt an artistic sympathy with Roebuck, for, from time to time, by way of practice, Bright in a friendly way was apt to shake him too, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... morning, after a long night march, they had sought such shade as the burning rocks might afford, scooping up the tepid water from the natural tanks at the bottom of the canon and thanking Providence it was not alkali. The lieutenant commanding, a tall, wiry, keen-faced young fellow, had made the rounds of his camp at sunset, carefully picking up and scrutinizing the feet of his horses and sending the farrier to tack on here and there a starting shoe. Gaunt and sunburned were his short-coupled California ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... and curly wigs, as like as two puppy dogs of the same breed. They were only known apart by their intimate friends, and were always together, romping, laughing, snarling, squabbling, huffing and helping each other against the world. Each of them owned a wiry terrier, and in their relations to each other the two dogs (who were marvellously alike) closely followed ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... gave no symptoms of joy at this warm greeting; but, screwing his wiry frame out of the captain's caresses, his eye flashed like a spark of fire quickly up and down and all around the apartment, as if making a mental inventory of the furniture, and not omitting his tall companion, from the crown of his head to the toes of his straw slippers, when he quietly ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... they would follow him to the hills. They were as keen on the trail as Yaquis and as relentless as wolves. Their horses, raw-hide tough, could stand a forced ride that would kill an ordinary horse. And Ramon's wiry little cayuse, though willing to go on until he dropped, could not last ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... when you broiled it yourself on a forked stick Frontispiece Laura took the new cousin up to her room 26 Cutting the wiry brown stems in the fern-filled glade. 140 "I'm getting dinner all by ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... His wiry figure disappeared through the door a moment later, and Gilbert was alone. He asked himself whether the Queen had meant to insult him, and he could not believe it. But presently, as he remembered all that had happened, it ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford |
