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Unkempt   /ənkˈɛmpt/   Listen
Unkempt

adjective
1.
Not neatly combed.
2.
Not properly maintained or cared for.  "Native vistas and unkempt rambling paths" , "An ukempt appearance"



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"Unkempt" Quotes from Famous Books



... best. The flavor, as every one knows, is sweet and pleasant. It is the bark of the tree that gives it the name of shagbark, for it separates into long, ragged strips several inches wide which generally hold to the trunk at the middle and give it an unkempt, shaggy appearance. ...
— On the Trail - An Outdoor Book for Girls • Lina Beard and Adelia Belle Beard

... "T'other" was a ragged, unkempt creature, with nothing very pleasant in his face. The Spaniard was wrapped in a serape; he had bushy white whiskers; long white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he wore green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was talking in a low voice; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... iron-like shoes that sloshed about her lean ankles at every step. Her figure, shapeless and waistless, was garbed in a rough man's shirt and in a ragged flannel petticoat that had once been red. But it was her face, wrinkled, withered and weather- beaten, surrounded by an aureole of unkempt and straggling wisps of greyish hair, that caught and held me. Neither drifted hair nor serried wrinkles could hide the splendid dome of a forehead, high and broad without verging in the slightest ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... leaving a fringe of wild things to border his domains, but as a general thing such inelegancies are suppressed, and the roadside is ordered with the same precision as are the lands on the other side of the wall. Those pleasant little friendships with unkempt nature are not so frequent as we find them further on. However, while there is little "delight in disorder" there are many beautiful places belonging to those favored with an abundance of this world's goods. Such names as Gen. John C. Fremont, ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine

... railway lines and past unkempt hedges of Duranta in full bloom towards the group of residences reserved for officials of the Railway, each within its own garden and bounded by barbed wire as a ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... it all is to me," said Mrs. O'Shanaghgan, "I must take you in hand myself. But I do wish your Uncle George would invite you over to stay with them at The Laurels. It will do Terence a wonderful lot of good; but you want it more, you are so unkempt and undignified. You would be a fairly nice-looking girl if any justice was done to you; but really the other day, when I saw you with that terrible young person Bridget Murphy, it gave my heart quite a pang. You scarcely looked a lady, you were laughing ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade

... chin enfolding. See how the purple hue of youth and health Glows in each cheek; how the sharp wind brings pearls From every eye, brightening those dimmed with study, And waste of midnight oil, o'er classic page Long poring. Boreas in merry mood Plays with each unkempt lock, and vainly strives To make a football of the Freshman's beaver, Or the sage Sophomore's indented felt. Behold the foremost, with deliberate stride And slow, approach the chapel, tree-embowered, Entering composedly ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various

... such surroundings, and especially to see the little god hampered by the clumsy garments of mortals. They are old and ragged, the cast-off finery such as is picked up by street gamins. The child's hair is tossed about his head in unkempt locks, and altogether he looks the ...
— Sir Joshua Reynolds - A Collection of Fifteen Pictures and a Portrait of the - Painter with Introduction and Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... occupation while I was talking to him. He was constructing a camp-table and benches of some packing-boxes he had procured from the post trader. He was a tall, well-proportioned man, of dark complexion and regular features, with black, unkempt hair and restless brown eyes. He was clothed in a faded and stained butternut suit of flannel, consisting of a loose frock and baggy trousers, the legs of the trousers being tucked into the tops of road-worn ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... lacking in robustness, I was one. The adventures related in the literature of the Wild West were remote from my nature but, at least, they opened doors of escape. I liked better some American detective stories which were traversed from time to time by unkempt fierce and beautiful girls. Though there was nothing wrong in these stories and though their intention was sometimes literary they were circulated secretly at school. One day when Father Butler was hearing the four pages ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce

... I, sweating, sick, and hot, And there the shadowed waters fresh Lean up to embrace the naked flesh. 'Temperamentvoll' German Jews Drink beer around; and 'there' the dews Are soft beneath a morn of gold. Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads towards Haslingfield and Coton Where ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various

... and the king's gaze rested on a strange figure framed in the entry. The man was of middle height, spare and slight and lean; his thin, eager face was bronzed with the suns and winds of a generation, and lined with the stern ciphers of malign experiences. His dark, straight hair was long and unkempt; the finer lines of his cheeks and chin were blurred with the uncropped growth of a week-old beard; his eyes were bright and quick; his glance restless and comprehensive. A cunning reader of features would ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy

... comfortless the room, so was Miss Sophie's lonely life. She rented these four walls from an unkempt little Creole woman, whose progeny seemed like the promised offspring of Abraham,—multitudinous. The flickering life in the pale little body she scarcely kept there by the unceasing toil of a pair of bony hands, stitching, ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore

... he said, shaking his unkempt head, "this won't do, you know. Orders are to keep off. And," he added, in a bantering tone, "I'm here to enforce them. Allons! En ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... coulee that wound tortuously through the breaks. Long Bill stood in his doorway and eyed the pair sullenly as they drew rein and climbed stiffly from the saddles. Alice glanced with disgust into the sallow face with its unkempt, straggling beard, and involuntarily recoiled as her eyes met the leer with which he regarded her as Endicott ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx

... of the West was a siren song in the ears of these waiting companies. The blood of pioneers urged them forward. Their forefathers had moved from the old countries across the seas, from the elm-shaded towns of New England, from the unkempt villages that advanced into the virgin lands by the Great Lakes, from the peace and plenty of the splendid South. Year by year they had pushed the frontier westward, pricked onward by a ceaseless unrest, "the old land hunger" ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... these things, in a quiet, unexcited way, as if discussing some abstraction of the schools, not murder, was too wan and wasted, too shrunken and despairing, to afford a guess as to what manner of man he might have been, and too unkempt and ragged for any inference concerning his rank, having neither jacket, cap, nor shoes, matted hair and beard, torn shirt and ragged trousers: but his look of resolved patience, and an occasional smile while he talked, sadder than tears, made Drake's stout ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various

... had gone into billets in the surrounding villages, and were behaving splendidly. The people took to them very kindly, and the men themselves looked so clean and happy that it was difficult to realize that they were the same unkempt, dirty individuals who had been seen not so long before wading through the mud and filth of ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith

... abandonment there of the decencies of living. The thin dwarfed children kicked and tumbled with naked limbs on the ground; many women leaned half-dressed and much unbuttoned from ground floor windows, or came out into the passage-ways slatternly. In one court two unkempt vile-tongued women of the town wrangled and abused each other to the amusement of the neighborhood, where the working poor were huddled together with those who live by shame. The children played close by ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... the reporter said. On the night that I had spoken at the Queen's Hall meeting I had been quite self-possessed. I pursued the narrative and smiled slightly at a description of the Russian—"a loosely-built, bearded giant, unkempt in appearance, and with huge square hands and pale Mongolian eyes which roll like those of a maniac." That was certainly unfair, unless the reporter had seen him at the restaurant when Sarakoff drank the champagne. ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne

... anyone who ever smelt it forget the sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the Sole. And it was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with earthen floor, walls decorated by a modern-primitive fresco of the padrone holding a plate of maccheroni ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... cried a haggard, unkempt little man, pushing his way to the front and catching hold of Ezra's sleeve to ensure his attention. "Did ye say it would send the price o' claims down? You didn't say that, did you? Why, in course, it stands to reason that what happened ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... now tied to his chair by rheumatism. One thing alone gives colour to the Jagos' belief; the Thatcher who had sent for him could not abide the sight of him. The Jago children, who snatched a fearful joy by stealing after dark into the unkempt garden and peering through the uncurtained lattice windows, reported that as the pair sat at table with the black bottle between them, the Thatcher's eyes would be drawn to fix themselves on the other's with a stealthy shrinking ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... seeing Meyrick at intervals, because, though he is not really a typical Don at all, he is exactly the sort of figure which would be selected as typical nowadays. The days of the absent-minded, unkempt, slatternly, spectacled, owlish Don are over, and one has instead a brisk professional man, fond of business and ordered knowledge, who is not in the least a man of the world, but a curious variety of it, a man of a small ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... and are crowded to overflowing with a dense population of lodgers. Peeps into their interiors reveal dirty, poorly furnished rooms, and large families, pigging squalidly together at meal times, while unkempt men and slatternly women lean from open windows, and scold in French, or chatter with crowds of ragged and bare-legged children, playing in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various

... doll off to the one unkempt corner of Mr. Battershall's garden, where in the shadow of a stone dovecot, ruinated and long disused, a rustic bench stood deep in nettles. On this she perched herself, and sat with legs dangling while she discoursed with ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... white face was seamed with lines of trouble, the hanging pouches under the closed eyes were leaden in colour, the loose mouth drooped dolorously at the corners, the rolling chins were unshaven. Collar and shirt bore the grime of a long journey, and the hair bristled unkempt from the well-shaped head. It was a sorely-stricken man ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Before them, on the ground, lay a pair of shovels and a pickaxe. The central figure, with the right hand extended, palm outward, was pointing to the discarded tools. The arms of the other two were folded on their breasts. The faces were coarse and hard in outline and bristled with unkempt beards. Their expression was one of dogged defiance, and their gaze was fixed with such scowling intensity upon the void space before them that I involuntarily glanced behind me to see what they were looking at. There were two women also in the group, as coarse of dress and features ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy

... goes on Perpetua, this time rather angrily. "They said you were so clever that you always looked unkempt. That?" thoughtfully, "means that you didn't brush your hair enough. Never mind, I'll brush it ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford

... up and shook the sand from her unkempt skirt, although the action seemed unnecessary, then grinned at the girls in the most ...
— The Girl Scouts at Sea Crest - The Wig Wag Rescue • Lillian Garis

... head, abnormal and top-heavy, and its only excuse for being was the huge bull-throat which supported it. It had been cast in a mould of elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental. The hair, rank of growth, thick and unkempt, matted itself here and there into curious splotches of gray; and again, grinning at age, twisted itself into curling locks of lustreless black—locks of unusual thickness, like crooked fingers, heavy and solid. The shaggy whiskers, almost bare in places, and in others massing ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... of the whole two millions cannot read or write. The schools are the poorest. The school houses are built of logs; a hole is cut for the window; the ground serves for a floor, slabs for seats, and the teacher is strictly in keeping with all. Bare-footed, hair unkempt, snuff stick in her mouth, scarcely able to read herself, she is the example—the ideal toward which her ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. 43, No. 8, August, 1889 • Various

... upon her upper deck, and gazed at the levers, in response to his touch on which the craft had cleft the waves, reversed, or turned like a thing of life. "'Twas a pretty toy," he mused, "and many hours of joy have I had as I floated through life on board of her." As he moped along he beheld two unkempt Italians having a piano-organ and a violin. The music was not fine, but it touched a chord in Ayrault's breast, for he had waltzed with Sylvia to that air, and it made his heart ache. "Oh, the acuteness ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... beautiful as Italy or Ireland, and it isn't as tidy as England. If you keep away from the big manufacturing towns and their outskirts you may go by motor or railway through shire after shire in England and never see anything unkempt, down-at-the-heel, out-at-elbows, or ill-cared-for; no broken-down fences or stone walls; no heaps of rubbish or felled trees by the wayside; no ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... dive at the dirty, unkempt creature, jerked her into the warm hall, and calling over her shoulder to the organ-grinder on the walk, "Go on playing, old man, she'll be back pretty soon!" she slammed the door shut, pushed the child into a chair by the glowing grate, and turned to Allee with the command, ...
— The Lilac Lady • Ruth Alberta Brown

... his eyes, even at this late day, and both see and hear it all again—even as he can see the unbroken row of dingy dwellings that lined his way back from Quadrant Mews to Frognall Street corner: all drab and unkempt, all sporting in their fan-lights the legend and ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... hide somewhere for the night, and get away in the morning, perhaps on board some tramp steamer bound for Buenos Ayres, or on a junk weighing anchor for Hayti or Java, or some other distant place. Vague memories of books he had read when a boy came back to him as he ran through the unkempt wilds of the Regent's Park. He saw himself a stowaway hidden in a hold, alone with rats and ships' biscuits. He saw himself working his way out before the mast, sent aloft in hurricanes on pitch-black nights, ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... gone to swell the ranks of the rioters; another half—slatternly women and unkempt children—swarmed in the single street and gazed upward at the heights. Every ledge about the threatened buildings was black with men, men furious with hate and mad with liquor, men needing only determined and resolute leaders to go in and ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King

... beautiful country, always climbing; passing at first occasional groups of unpainted pine houses which gave way, as they penetrated farther into the hills, to rough log cabins, growing fewer and farther apart. These had a bare, singularly unkempt look; and although many of them were so old as to be tumbledown, they did not fit, somehow, into their surroundings. It was as if nature had never yet accepted man and his works, still tolerated him under protest, a ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... Ah! they are all away working in the fields. Old Mademoiselle Masson, peering through the one pane of glass that is left in her window, sees us, and hobbles to the door to give us the information. She beams upon us, an unkempt yet gracious figure, and when she talks her false teeth move slightly up and down. She will run and call her sister who is up on the hill, and she will tell Madame Riflet as she goes. The news will spread. The news always spreads. Already the ...
— Where the Sabots Clatter Again • Katherine Shortall

... looking up at him. He was old and unkempt. Out at elbows, too. And the bottoms of his baggy trousers hung in dusty shreds. But his lined and bearded face was kind! "I—I haven't been so very ...
— The Poor Little Rich Girl • Eleanor Gates

... common-place crept in upon them—how, for instance, their conversation had a way of turning to personality and jesting. Corydon was sensitive to external things, and she kept him aware of the fact that his trousers were frayed and his hair unkempt, and that other ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... New York and Boston. Of those who enter and leave at way-stations, the men are clad in that yellow, homespun material known as "butternut." The casual observer inclines to the opinion that there are no good bathing-places where these men reside. They are inquisitive, ignorant, unkempt, but generally civil. The women are the reverse of attractive, and are usually uncivil and ignorant. The majority are addicted to smoking, and generally make use of a cob-pipe. Unless objection is made by some passenger, ...
— Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field • Thomas W. Knox

... man," thought the sexton; and he was frightened. He opened the doors carefully and stood back, peering into the darkness. Out past him rushed the figure of a man in tattered, scanty clothes, with unkempt hair and white, wild face. The sexton did not know that he had ever seen him before, but he looked long after him, wondering at ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant

... to that place. On their way they stopped at a pool and they bent over to see themselves mirrored in it, and they saw themselves with dusty and unkempt hair, with large and knotted hands, with troubled eyes, and ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... "The unkempt tribe of stable retainers who began to gather round me and my rough vehicle in the gloom, with their evil-smelling sheepskins and their resigned, battered visages, were not calculated to reassure me. Yet when the door opened, there stood a smart chasseur and a solemn major-domo who might ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various

... immaculate fatigue-uniform, his calm superciliousness, his obvious air of belonging to a superior class, were galling to Trent beyond measure. He himself felt the difference—he realised his ignorance, his unkempt and uncared-for appearance. Perhaps, as the two men walked side by side, some faint foreshadowing of the future showed to Trent another and a larger world where they two would once more walk side by side, the outward differences between them lessened, the smouldering ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... at Wallingford barns, and rode out to Cowles' Farms. At the gate I halted and looked in over the wide lawns. It seemed to me I noted a change in them as in myself. The grass was unkempt, the flower beds showed little attention. The very seats upon the distant gallery seemed unfamiliar, as though arranged by some careless hand. I opened the gate for myself, rode up to the old stoop and dismounted, ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... blood, he was handsome, but not of European beauty. His face white—not of a Northern whiteness; his eyes protruding somewhat, and rolling in their grief. Those eyes had seen the Orient sun, and his beak was the eagle's. His lips were full. The beard, curling round them, was unkempt and tawny. The locks were of a deep, deep coppery red. The hands, swart and powerful, accustomed to the rough grasp of the wares in which he dealt, seemed unused to the flimsy artifices of the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and convince yourself," suggested Clymer tartly, and the deputy marshal, dropping on one knee, did so. Detecting no heart-beat, the officer passed his hand over the dead man's unshaven chin and across his forehead, brushing back the unkempt hair. Under his none too gentle touch the wig slipped back, revealing to his astonished gaze a head of ...
— The Red Seal • Natalie Sumner Lincoln

... from a stream. An Indian arrow found the heart of another. The sun, fatigue, fevers, bruises, and the endless racking of limbs and brains, reduced the spirits and strength of the men. They became gaunt, hollow-eyed, tattered, unshorn, uncombed, unkempt, yet they toiled on, silent—save when they cursed and railed at fate—dogged, fiercely purposeful, resolved to die rather than turn back. Song and jest were rarely heard in any boat; haggard fellows tugged at the oars, or lay dreamily watching the sail as it ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan

... like a man on his own soil again, as more of the townsfolk came about—extraordinary people, Bridget thought. Loose-limbed bush-riders, really trim, some of them, in clean breeches and with a scarlet handkerchief doing duty as a belt, unkempt old men, a Unionist Labour organiser addressing a knot of station-hands out of work—even a Chinaman—a Chinky, McKeith called him, who, it appeared kept a nondescript store. That was in the days before the Commonwealth and the battle ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... the two men. Turning, they saw a stout, ill-looking fellow, with unkempt hair and beard, peering in at them from ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton

... against a square-cut jaw and beneath a prominent nose; a pair of keen blue eyes looked out from beneath a tousled mass of crinkled hair. He wore neither hat nor cap; his attire was a carelessly put on Norfolk suit of brown tweed; he looked half-unkempt, half-groomed. But knotted at the collar of his flannel shirt were the colours of one of the most famous and exclusive cricket clubs in the world, and everybody knew that in his day their wearer had been a mighty figure in the ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher

... of the owners of the adjoining property, for if they are real-estate men there is a probability of their putting up houses built to sell. Non-resident owner may be expected to allow their vacant lots to remain unkempt and to object to ...
— The Complete Home • Various

... was to have jumped into the boat with a rope's-end, as she came alongside, taking a turn anywhere for the moment; but as, with main-topsail aback, we crept slowly down upon the poor, forlorn-looking waif, a gaunt, unkempt scarecrow suddenly upreared itself in the stern-sheets and, uttering queer, gibbering sounds the while, scrambled forward into the eyes of the boat, with movements that somehow were equally suggestive of the very opposite qualities of agility ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood

... him, and again and again his deep voice rang out like a trumpet-call before sign was made from within that it had been heard. At length, above the parapet of the tower appeared a stunted figure with head unkempt, as grotesque almost as any of the gargoyles beneath, and an owlish face peered at them from one of the crenels of the battlement, and demanded, in surly, croaking tones their business. Instantly the ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini

... Canadians, the loose-limbed dashing Australians, fireblooded and keen, the dark New Zealanders, with a Maori touch here and there in their features, the gallant men of Tasmania, the gentlemen troopers of India and Ceylon, and everywhere the wild South African irregulars with their bandoliers and unkempt wiry horses, Rimington's men with the racoon bands, Roberts's Horse with the black plumes, some with pink puggarees, some with birdseye, but all of the same type, hard, rugged, and alert. The man who ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... bed-ridden people to hobble along on their sticks and crutches; others led the smaller children, or carried the gaily-painted chests containing the holiday clothes of the family; while the boys dragged along the rough unkempt horses, and the few cows and oxen they had been able to drive in from ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry

... that firm chin of his, on which the erstwhile stubble had now grown into a straggling, unkempt beard—and it plagued him not a little, for a close observer might have discovered that it was of a lighter colour at the roots. His hair, too, was beginning to lose its glossy blackness. It was ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... Her condition seemed as serious as when Sophy had arrived from England, ten months previously, she found the patient propped up among her pillows, weak, apathetic, and terribly wasted. She looked dreadfully ill and her whole appearance was unkempt and strange. ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... was a tall man, with gray, unkempt hair, and long, wizened face. He wore a black suit of clothes, of ancient cut, and a stock which had literally ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... the marble stairs, showing cracks and a green, mossy growth under each shallow step. There was a heavy fragrance of datura flowers, sickly sweet, that mingled with a scent of moss and mouldy, unkempt growing things, touching the imagination like ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... Farrel cried, and reached for the horse's unkempt mane. With the ease of long practice, he swung aboard the horse and, at the touch of his heels, Panchito bounded away. Far down the mesa he raced, Farrel guiding him with his knees; then back and over the six-foot corral-fence with something of the airy freedom of a bird. ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne

... entered. All carried pikes. Between them and the men already in the hut an eager conversation took place. Harry felt far from easy. The aspect of the men was wild in the extreme. Their hair was long and unkempt, and fell in straggling masses over their shoulders. Presently one, who appeared to be the leader, approached Harry, who had now risen to his feet, and crossed himself on the forehead and breast. Harry understood by the action that he inquired ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty

... unconvincing hero for a play with ostensibly, a strong moral theme. His basic character is presented as that of an honest uncomplicated soldier; in his first appearance(2.1), he has already been slighted by the Dons, and presents an unkempt appearance and rails against the 'pied-winged butterflies' of the effete court who put appearance before patriotic duty. Nevertheless, subterfuge seems to come too readily to him as we see in 2.2 when he makes a false offer to assassinate the King to ...
— The Noble Spanish Soldier • Thomas Dekker

... better?" exclaimed the beggar in a great rage. "'Cause I'm poor and they're rich? Look at them now!" he said, pointing to the two corpses with his hooked stick, as he stood trembling and ragged, with the water dripping from him, and his battered hat, his matted beard, his long unkempt hair, making him look terribly dirty and miserable. "We're all equal ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... beef upon the table, was rushing back for the duck, accompanied by two of the young Walronds who were assisting with the vegetables. The maid, recoiling, sat down with a bump on one of the wooden chairs, and the Walrond girls, a merry, good-looking, unkempt crew (no boy had put in an appearance in all that family), burst into screams of laughter. Anthony apologised profusely; the maid, ejaculating that she didn't mind, not she, jumped up and ran for the duck; and the Reverend Septimus, a very different Septimus to him whom we met a month or so ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard

... section-gang on a railroad. From the roadbed of a railway to the bedside of a man about to die was indeed a change which might have taxed the adaptability of a more versatile being. But coarse as he was, this unkempt novice did not abuse his charge—except in so far as his inability to interpret or anticipate wants contributed to the sick man's distress. My own attendant, realizing that the patient was suffering for the want of ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... ironing in the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy all over the house—the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett

... drover, a wild unkempt man with a great red beard wagging on his broad chest, and fierce blue eyes that seldom winked, and it seemed to me that his dogs—for two deep-chested, lean-flanked black collies slunk at his heel—it seemed to me that they kent his mind before he spoke a word, for they ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars

... sleep, terrified with what had gone by and what was yet to come, unshaven and unkempt, the men gathered on ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... at the sky. Before I could reach him, however, he got upon his legs and, crossing unsteadily to the tree I have mentioned, leaned there, and I saw there was much blood upon his face which he essayed to wipe away with the cuff of his coat. Now, upon his whole person, from the crown of his unkempt head down to his broken, dusty boots, there yet clung that air of jaunty, devil-may-care rakishness which I had seen, and pitied in ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... keen disappointment constrained them. Here was no figure of romance and delight. No miniature Galatea half hewn out of the block of humanity, waiting for the chisel of a composite Pygmalion. Here was only a grubby, little unkempt child, like all other ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... dinner; still, she plodded on. From the time she had left Troublous Times Castle she had not encountered an individual, but now, as she stepped forward, a man suddenly arose from his lair in the grass and confronted her. He was a black-eyed, unkempt, uncouth-looking person, and any other girl would have been very much afraid of him. He put his arms akimbo, a disagreeable smile crossed his face, and he instantly placed himself in such a position as completely to bar ...
— Polly - A New-Fashioned Girl • L. T. Meade

... on the threshold, a man of middle age, with white drawn face and scrubby beard. His clothes were in rags, his hair unkempt, and his light grey ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs

... about as much like a Royalist as I in my present disheveled condition looked like a member of the French Cabinet.... If I denied my guilt I felt certain of a bullet in my heart from such an ugly, unkempt mob.... Glancing at my apparel I looked fit to be one of their number, so I said courageously: 'I am PROUD to say that I am the ringleader who engineered the ...
— Rescuing the Czar - Two authentic Diaries arranged and translated • James P. Smythe

... arms entwined crossed on the grass before them, at the edge of the shadow from their tree. The sunlight fell cruelly on their pale, squashed, unkempt young faces. "We're an ugly lot!" said old Jolyon suddenly. "It amazes me to see ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... wife and son, we saw often and on the whole liked, but the Whitwells who lived on the farm above us were a constant source of comedy to my father. Old Port, as he was called, was a mild-mannered man who would have made very little impression on the community, but for his wife, a large and rather unkempt person, who assumed such man-like freedom of speech that my father was never without an amusing story ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... there Masonic symbols are exhibited between the windows in a similar location. Jewish faces of the least prepossessing type look askance into eyes which they recognize as both unfamiliar and observant. Women, unkempt and slouchy, or else arrayed in dubious finery, brush against one. At intervals fast growing greater the remains of an extinct domesticity and privacy still show themselves in the shape of old-fashioned brick or wooden houses ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... from the Nore. We drove this afternoon to * a most lovely place. The mansion there is now shut up and dismantled, but the park and the grounds are very beautiful, with a beauty rather enhanced than diminished by the somewhat unkempt luxuriance of the vegetation. We passed a now well-grown tree planted by the Prince of Wales * * * * * * and drove over many miles of excellent road made by * * * * * * * * employs * * * * * * * ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert

... better describes the American hinterland. Here we have no idle spying by a stranger, but a full-length representation by one who knows the thing he describes intimately, and is himself a part of it. Almost every mile of the road travelled has been Dreiser's own road in life. He knew those unkempt Indiana towns in boyhood; he wandered in the Indiana woods; he came to Toledo, Cleveland, Buffalo as a young man; all the roots of his existence are out there. And so he does his chronicle con amore, with many a sentimental ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken

... pass the boundary of Washington city to be fairly in the country, and ten minutes' walk in the country brings one to real primitive woods. The town has not yet overflowed its limits like the great Northern commercial capitals, and Nature, wild and unkempt, comes up to its very threshold, and even in many places ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... light-house, on the extreme point, looking out over the ceaseless roll of the Atlantic. I used to like to go down there and fraternize with the blue-fishers, or the annual squads of sea-bass takers. Sometimes, along Montauk peninsula, (it is some 15 miles long, and good grazing,) met the strange, unkempt, half-barbarous herdsmen, at that time living there entirely aloof from society or civilization, in charge, on those rich pasturages, of vast droves of horses, kine or sheep, own'd by farmers of the eastern towns. Sometimes, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... how battered and dingy it was. The former owner had had it painted at one time, but the paint was almost worn off. The front fencing wanted new pales in many places, and the half acre's space of grass between the verandah and the road was wholly unkempt. It certainly did not look like the abode of a family of any pretensions. It formed, indeed, such a contrast to any house he would have lived in, even had painting and fencing to be done with his own hand, that he felt a sort of wrath rising in him at Miss ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... neighbor boys, Bill Symonds, was riding furiously down the hill. The boy turned quickly about in the seat as if he had not seen Bill and tried to hurry the horses. What did Bill want, anyway? It was like him to blunder along when he wasn't wanted! His big, greasy face shaded by the long hair falling unkempt over his forehead had always made the boy dislike Bill. He ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... the waterways of streets which converged into the broad lagoon before the palace, boats began arriving. Boats crowded with slaans. Disheveled, unkempt men and women with primitive weapons of steel and wire brandished aloft. They surged into the lagoon. A murderous, frenzied mob—thoughtless of itself, suicidal to attack us, yet daring ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings

... pitiful life-conditions which surrounded children a century and a half ago. Often the lot of the children of the poor, who then constituted the great bulk of all children, was little less than slavery. Wretchedly poor, dirty, unkempt, hard-worked, beaten about, knowing strong drink early, illiterate, often vicious—their lot was a sad one. For the children of the poor there were few, if any, educational opportunities. Writing on the subject ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY

... for all answer, they were put into the strong house, and there they lie, chained to a log, at this minute. Pity it is and shame, I hold, for I am a Dane myself; and pity, too, that such a bonny lass should go to an unkempt Welshman like this, instead of a tight smart Viking's ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... cheerfully, addressing a slouchy, unkempt woman who sat in front of the fire with her elbows resting on her knees and a dingy cob pipe between her teeth, "punch up the blaze an' dish up a supper while I read my letter an' see what's ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon

... house than he rushed at them, and would have scattered them far and wide in a twinkling if the demure dimples of my little ally had not come into play and distracted his attention so completely as to make him forget the throng of unkempt hoodlums who seemed bound to invade his master's property. She was looking for Mr. Moore's house, she told him. Did he know Mr. Moore, and his house which was somewhere near? Not his new, great, big house, where the horrible things ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... stands to-day. If the visitor goes to Fulneck now he can hardly fail to be struck by its beauty. He is sure to admire its long gravel terrace, its neat parterres, its orchards and gardens, and, above all, its long line of plain stately buildings facing the southern sun. But then the slope was wild and unkempt, covered over with briars and brambles. Along the crown were a few small cottages. At one end, called Bankhouse, resided the Gussenbauers. >From there the view across the valley was splendid. The estate was known as Falneck. The idea ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... Pete now called me "Le-loo," which I understand is Chinook for wolf and I took so much pride in my promotion that I would not have changed clothes with the Prince of Wales; I gloried in my wild, unkempt appearance! ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard

... his own clothes, boots (veld-schoen), and harness, he looks on actual farm-work as a menial pursuit. He was, and is, wont to pass whole days in the saddle, but, to an English eye, his horses seem unkempt and often ill-used. The magnificent herds of game which wandered over South Africa sixty years ago tempted him to become a keen sportsman, but he has never shown much 'sporting instinct,' and the Boer is responsible for the wanton destruction of the African fauna. The unsophisticated Boer ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke

... his attention. The boat was not unoccupied—there was some one in it lying straight across the seats, with face turned upwards to the sky—and, walking noiselessly to a better post of observation, Errington's heart beat with some excitement as he recognized the long, fair, unkempt locks, and eccentric attire of the strange personage who had confronted him in the cave—the crazy little man who had called himself "Sigurd." There he was, beyond a doubt, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. Asleep or dead? He might have ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli

... with a gasping sound as he listened for his wolves. He was a giant of a man. A monster, Philip thought. It is probable that the elusive glow of the night added to his size as he stood there. About his shoulders fell a mass of unkempt hair that looked like seaweed. His beard was short and thick, and for a flash Philip saw the starlight in his eyes—eyes that were shining like the eyes of a cat. In that same moment he saw the face. It was a terrible, ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood

... again at the number, and when he realized that he had made no mistake, his knees turned to gelatine, and he stood staring, fascinated, numbed. His eyes wandered blankly from the crumbling ticket-booth to the unkempt lobby and back to the lurid billing—the current attraction was a seven-reel thriller entitled "What He Least Expected," but Henry missed the parallel. With trembling fingers he produced a cigarette, but in his daze he blew out two matches in succession. He crushed ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... bush comes the unkempt figure of a man. A familiar figure, but so changed as to be hardly recognizable. His clothes are rent and scored by the horny branches. His feet crush noisily over the pine-cones in moccasins that have rotted ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... Kusis; beside him Tulpe, his wife, a graceful young woman of about five-and-twenty, and her husband's little daughter by a former wife. This child was named Kinie, a merry-faced, laughing-voiced sprite, ten years of age, with long, wavy, and somewhat unkempt hair hanging down ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke

... down the slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet boards of the Estate Agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes and acacias run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the notice—"To be ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... the mother, Mrs Crich, with her eldest son Gerald. She was a queer unkempt figure, in spite of the attempts that had obviously been made to bring her into line for the day. Her face was pale, yellowish, with a clear, transparent skin, she leaned forward rather, her features ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... purposes—soap was an unheard-of luxury—while a towel was unknown. Under these circumstances it was impossible to keep clean. Shaving was another pleasure which we were denied, and I may say that the prisoners residing in the salubrious neighbourhood of the condemned cells had the most unkempt and ragged appearance it is possible to conceive. When the man had finished his task he marched to the opposite end of the line, his place being immediately taken by the next man, and so on until the work was completed, which usually involved about ...
— Sixteen Months in Four German Prisons - Wesel, Sennelager, Klingelputz, Ruhleben • Henry Charles Mahoney

... cut out in the country, and brought into town tied up in bundles like fagots; suitable enough for those stalwart men who drag them along so leisurely, but burdensome for the hands of the wretched little waifs, who, tattered and unkempt, make a pretence of keeping the crossings clean; who first sweep, and then hold out a small palm for the penny, dodging the horses' hoofs, and just escaping by a hair's breadth the wheels of truck or omnibus in their attempts to ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous

... was clean shaven, dark, and strong; thick hair, straight yet bushy, was slightly unkempt; it was streaked with grey; and an unexpected mobility when he smiled ran over the features that he seemed to hold rigid by deliberate effort. The man was cut to no quite common measure. Henriot jumped to an intuitive conclusion: "He's not ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood

... the poop, saw men on the Champion waving arms and pointing a megaphone his way. He could not hear, nor could he hope to from the bow, yet he ran forward. As he reached the forecastle steps, an unkempt figure came in over the bow—a big, rawboned man in dripping rags, with blood streaming from arms and legs, with a red, round, and sorrowful face bordered by long, matted, gray hair-with the gleam of incipient insanity in the eyes. He sprang off the forecastle ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various

... them fully. This helped him to keep them in a state of revolt. Their no less unkempt friends, who did not go to school, also found something to complain about—if not against their parents, then against the police, indeed against anything that occurred to them. But their complaints did not contain quite that poison and steadiness which ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... the interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, opposite the cathedral, watching its pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt by sitting there in his fine great cafe, unkempt, in such clothes, like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends. I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and he was kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that drink ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... the few odd pieces of furniture carried away from the old home so long shared in common between the father and son. When the young man entered, the stranger was still unconscious, his white hair falling in disorder over his brow and his unkempt beard almost totally concealing ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... defined; and they saw no more deer, but here and there were inclosures where wheat and barley were growing, and black timbered farm-houses began to show themselves at intervals. Herd boys, as rough and unkempt as their charges, could be seen looking after little tawny cows, black-faced sheep, or spotted pigs, with curs which barked fiercely at poor weary Spring, even as their masters were more disposed to throw stones than to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... hill we run to hear the harper... But what a harper! Not like the hoary minstrels of the picture-books. A swarthy, sturdy, unkempt vagabond, with black bold eyes under scowling black brows. More like a bricklayer than a ...
— Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things • Lafcadio Hearn

... first time it occurred to him to look at his clothes, which were muddy from his tumble in the ditch. And no doubt his face and hands were dirty also, and his hair unkempt, and his aspect unprepossessing enough for an applicant for labor. At any rate it was clear that this was not the part of the town to seek it in; so he went back ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair

... there ran into Pitt, alone, toiling with a wooden spade upon an irrigation channel. A pair of cotton drawers, loose and ragged, clothed him from waist to knee; above and below he was naked, save for a broad hat of plaited straw that sheltered his unkempt golden head from the rays of the tropical sun. At sight of him Nuttall returned thanks aloud to his Maker. Pitt stared at him, and the shipwright poured out his dismal news in a dismal tone. The sum of it was that he must have ten pounds from Blood that very morning ...
— Captain Blood • Rafael Sabatini

... some time later. A natural hot spring might be the base of the luxury, but man's labor had piped the water into stone-slab tubs and provided soap and towels. To sit and soak was a delight he had forgotten. He shampooed his unkempt head vigorously and allowed himself to forget all worries, wallowing in the sheer joy of ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton

... house he discovered that Rude Boreas could be as keen a sharpshooter as any in the rifle-pits around Richmond. A hard walk up-hill for a quarter of an hour brought him to the brow of the cliff on which stood the forlorn and wind-swept house where John Manning lay. An unkempt and hideous old crone as black as night opened the door for him. He left in the hall his hat and overcoat and a little square box he had brought in his hand; and then he followed the ebony hag up-stairs to Colonel Manning's room. Here at the door she ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... gates for the old native beggar who had crouched at the entrance on the previous afternoon. He was not there, but a little way further she met him hobbling along to take up his post for the day. From the folds of his chuddah his unkempt beard wagged entreaty at the carriage as it passed. Impulsively, because of the gladness that was so new to her lonely heart, she leaned from the window ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... remember what it was that she had started to do, when the sharp staccato step of a mule drew her attention to a rider who stopped at the gate. It was her neighbor, Tolliver—a gaunt, yellow-faced white man, ragged, rough, and unkempt; one of the poor whites who had struggled up and failed. He spent no courtesy on the "nigger" teacher, but sat in his saddle and called her to the gate, and ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois

... and sad,—is always full of grumbling,—is badly clad and badly shod,—is never seen out of his house on Sundays till about midday, when he appears in his shirt-sleeves, his face unwashed, his hair unkempt, his eyes bleared and bloodshot,—his children left to run about the gutters, with no one apparently to care for them,—is always at his last coin, except on Saturday night, and then he has a long score of borrowings to repay,—belongs ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... alive with trout. Kit Carson was the first white man to look down upon its beautiful valleys. Others soon followed: Joel Estes, for whom the Park was eventually named; "Rocky Mountain Jim," a two-gun man, living alone with his dogs, looking like a bearded, unkempt pirate, taciturn, yet not without charm, as later events proved, unmolesting and unmolested, enveloped in a haze of respected mystery. There was also that noted lady globe-trotter, Miss Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman of undoubted refinement, highly ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills

... so unlike Sebastian's usual method, so far from his lax comprehension of a father's duty, that Barlasch paused and looked at him with suspicion. With the back of his hand he pushed up the unkempt hair which obscured his eyes. This unusual display of parental anxiety ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman

... picturesque though unkempt appearance. Jack was eating a slice of bread and jam; Dick had Babs—somewhat in a soiled condition from watering the garden—on his back; Charlie, the incorrigible, with a tear in his knickers and a brimless ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... morning by some one who shook him gently but persistently, and at last he sat up, looking around in the dim light for the person who had dragged him back from peace to a battle-mad world. He saw an unkempt, bearded man in a French uniform, one sleeve stained with blood, and he ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler

... the exception of the editor of the Times, ever dreamed that there was anything out of the common in the shaggy, unkempt head upon which poor Bogg used to "do his little time," until a young English doctor came to practise at Geebung. One night the doctor and the manager of the local bank and one or two others wandered into the bar of the Diggers' Arms, where Bogg ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... a policeman out of livery. Sirdeller himself, in the clear light which streamed through the large window, seemed more aged and shrunken than ever. His eyes were deep set. No tinge of color was visible in his cheeks. His chin protruded, his shaggy gray eyebrows gave him an unkempt appearance. He wore a black velvet gown, a strangely cut black morning coat and trousers, felt slippers, and his hands were clasped upon a stout ash walking-stick. He eyed the newcomers keenly ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... unkempt and sour, had managed to sleep off some of the effects of the liquor he had poured into himself the night before. True to his word, he had traveled by wagon. The treasurer of the circus had seen to it that he was tossed like a bundle of rags into ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... showed through the roof where the rough-hewn shingles had split or weathered. A strip of bacon hung upon one side of the cupboard, and upon the other a haunch of venison. Ellen detested the Mexican woman because she was dirty. The inside of the cabin presented the same unkempt appearance usual to it after Ellen had been away for a few days. Whatever Ellen had lost during the retrogression of the Jorths, she had kept her habits of cleanliness, and straightway upon her return she set ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... by curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not quite lost ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour

... cable roads, and on either side of the rails grass grows through the cobbles. The earlier structures on the level were put together in haste. For the most part they remained essentially unchanged until they fell with a crash. True, they had become stained by time, unkempt, dwarfed by new neighbors, but nobody desired to efface them. Away from the business section houses appeared on the various hills, perched precariously near the brink; houses reached by long flights and grown over with roses. The bathing ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... let go of the squabbling children to lift the fretting baby from her weary arms, and followed her into the unkempt room, which made almost the sole scene in ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... marched down the slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet boards of the estate agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes, and acacias run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the notice: ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... Humphrey had gone outside for a breath of fresh air. He looked ten years older than he had done a few days back, when he had come whistling through the forest track, expecting to see the children bounding forth to meet him. His eyes were sunken, his face was pale and haggard, his dress was unkempt and ragged. There were no clever fingers now to patch tattered raiment, and keep things ...
— French and English - A Story of the Struggle in America • Evelyn Everett-Green

... a strange and terrifying appearance. The unkempt hair that covered his face and through which his keen eyes glowed like fire, gave him an unusual and formidable aspect. In one hand he held the ugly-looking jemmy he had taken from the burglar, and the new clothes he ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon

... was most unusual and in some ways most embarrassing, also. Those nine men were rough and unkempt, but they were splendid horsemen—that I knew intuitively—and to have one of their number select my very own horse above all others to speak of with unstinted praise, was something to be proud of, but to have my own self calmly and complacently disposed of with the horse—"put ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... was the best they could expect to find for the little rent they were able to pay. Situated in one of the cheapest parts of Harlem, the flat was in a row of tenement-like buildings, facing a street always filled with noisy, unkempt children. The corridors and staircases were gaudily decorated and the narrow halls and small rooms, shut off from proper light and air, gave one a sense of suffocation. The furnishings were of the scantiest. Jimmie ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow

... Ragged, dirty, and unkempt; untrained in all the pretty graces of refinement; deprived of all the fostering care of the home, how can the children of the street afford the artist any subjects for his canvas? Because, in spite of ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll

... just ahead, strode a giant of a man, followed by a red-faced, unkempt, familiar figure—the man in charge of the renting office. The giant ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.

... was waked by a horrible nightmare, which had recurred several times in her dreams, even before her connection with Vronsky. A little old man with unkempt beard was doing something bent down over some iron, muttering meaningless French words, and she, as she always did in this nightmare (it was what made the horror of it), felt that this peasant was taking no notice of her, but was doing something horrible with the iron— over her. And she waked up ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... worn considerably, and the uppers were just beginning to gape at the crack across the top; but the clothes were neat and clean, and his boots were brushed. His hair was of the straw-coloured variety, with a tendency to red, but it was not tousled or unkempt, but neatly combed; while his little cap was not on straight but pushed back carelessly, just showing a pair of clear but dark-blue Irish eyes and a ...
— Irish Ned - The Winnipeg Newsy • Samuel Fea

... joined them, and they stood talking together upon the state of affairs in Spain, and of the advance of the Spanish army on Madrid, which was then just taking place. As they did so two very ragged, unkempt Spanish boys, shoeless and wretched-looking, limped up, and began to beg. General Hill shook his head, and the Spaniard impatiently ...
— The Young Buglers • G.A. Henty

... the aspect—from which virtue had so often derived its encouragement and wrongdoing its reproof? Was this the figure the ladies of Troy had been wont to follow with all but idolatrous gaze? Nay, who was this man—unshaven, unkempt, unbewigged, smeared with mud from head to foot, and from scalp to jaw with commingling bloodstains? The Major groaned incredulous, horrified; gazed, shuddered, ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... iniquitous that such changes should come about and that merry girls should grow into sluts and slovens, and ardent young husbands should degenerate into unkempt bullies, and houses meant for happiness should decay, and marriage ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas

... art is blended with nature in such a way that neither of them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic. I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading novels,—nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump that green railing ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... rambling building having no more architectural pretensions than an ordinary Chinese inn. As the king's brother, who makes his home there, was away, I saw nothing more of the place than the great courtyard filled with mangy, half-starved dogs and unkempt men. Not far off is one of the great attractions of the place, at least to the natives,—a hot sulphur spring. To the disappointment of my Tibetan guide I declined to visit it, preferring a leisurely cold lunch on the bank ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall

... for him to clip back and get a seat in the front row. But he would not hear of it, and the way he refused reminded me of his old stubborn independence; all I got was a promise that he would have a bite with me after the performance. And so I left him in the frosty dusk, ill-clad and unkempt, with the new-lit lamp over the pit door shining down upon the haggard mask that had once been the eager, memorable ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... the pigeon lofts all spoke of neglect and want of money to put them straight, a want caused by the fall in the price of cinchona, a misfortune which had involved many a fair estate and reduced it to the desolate and unkempt condition exemplified by the one now visited. But even unkempt and uncared for, what a picture it made! It was the realisation of a poetic death—the victim smothered by roses beside the singing waters of a brook. It was a long time before any one came, and the two visitors ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser



Words linked to "Unkempt" :   untidy, uncombed



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