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More "Gaunt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with such a Poor Law, that the hand-loom weavers did not die of starvation by the thousand? If we enter a cotton mill we shall see why. Within these gaunt walls, which are illumined at night by sputtering gas-light, the factory children work, earning twice as much as their parents, who were too old and too respectable ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... corner of the room, on a low divan, was sitting a strange-looking personage. A gaunt, elderly man clothed in a very dingy Greek himation, with shaggy grey hair, and an enormous beard that tumbled far down his breast. This personage was Pisander, Valeria's "house-philosopher," who was expected to be ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... body-mass to disappear; so that Proudhon would seem to have some biological basis for his demand for the per capita division of the fortunes of millionaires. And yet, rid the fat-cell of the weight of his sordid gains, gaunt him down, as it were, like a hound for the wolf-trail, and he becomes at once an active and aggressive member of the binding-stuff group, ready for the repair of a wound or the barring out ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... intuition, rather than by deduction. The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage. I think I see him now. He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more gaunt and Don Quixote-like. He was quaintly dressed (according to the costume of that unconstrained period) in a brown fustian jacket and striped pantaloons. There was something of a roll, a lounge in his gait, not unlike his ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the case when visiting our gaunt House of Art. Even the policeman on duty has noticed this peculiarity, and smiles respectfully. The Professor has ceased to ridicule Egyptology; and his confidence in the resources and sufficiency of antiquity, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... even better than the first. It shows more vigor and freedom, the invention and the style of thought are richer, and the finish more exact. Both Don Quixote and Sancho are brought before us like such living realities, that at this moment the figures of the crazed, gaunt, and dignified knight, and of his round, selfish, and most amusing esquire, dwell bodied forth in the imagination of more, among all conditions of men throughout Christendom, than any other of the creations of human talent. In this work Cervantes ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... his pen, wrote in lines of light the annals of the chivalrous and heroic days of auld feudal Scotland. The nation then, for the first time, knew the character of its ancestors; for these were not spectres—not they, indeed,—nor phantoms of the brain, but gaunt flesh and blood, or glad and glorious;—base-born cottage churls of the olden time, because Scottish, became familiar to the love of the nation's heart, and so to its pride did the high born lineage of palace kings. ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... and develops himself with few restraints. Foreigners used to describe him as a lean, hungry, nervous animal, gaunt, inquisitive, inventive, restless, and certain to shrivel into physical inferiority in his dry and highly oxygenated atmosphere. This apprehension is not well founded. It is quieted by his achievements the continent over, his virile enterprises, his endurance in war and in the most ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... was certainly Mme. Vauquer, who reigned supreme over this hospital supported by voluntary contributions. For her, the little garden, which silence, and cold, and rain, and drought combined to make as dreary as an Asian steppe, was a pleasant shaded nook; the gaunt yellow house, the musty odors of a back shop had charms for her, and for her alone. Those cells belonged to her. She fed those convicts condemned to penal servitude for life, and her authority was recognized among them. ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... enclosed by Mrs. Gaunt, which bore the Censor's stamp, had come from Switzerland, and had been forwarded by favour of the ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... which covered the shallow water, and whose folded flowers dotted the surface, the white points alone visible. The uneasy question still stirred within me; and now, looking towards the northwest, where the sky yet glowed faintly with twilight, a long line of pines, gaunt and humanesque, as no tree but our northern white-pine is, was relieved in massy blackness against the golden gray, like a long procession of giants. They were in groups of two and three, with now and then an isolated one, stretching along the horizon, losing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... and animals are associated; very common are stories of children metamorphosed into birds and beasts. Turner has obtained several legends of this sort from the Eskimo of the Ungava district in Labrador. In one of these, wolves are the gaunt and hungry children of a woman who had not wherewithal to feed her numerous progeny, and so they were turned into ravening beasts of prey; in another the raven and the loon were children, whom their father sought to paint, and the loon's spots ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... frees a people makes his statue's place In Time's Valhalla sure. Lo! from his Neva's banks the Scythian Czar Stretches to thee his hand Who, with the pencil of the Northern star, Wrote freedom on his land. And he whose grave is holy by our calm And prairied Sangamon, From his gaunt hand shall drop the martyr's palm To greet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... recognized certain landmarks. It was a somber place now—its aspect weirdly changed since the first days of our coming. Then it had been a riot of summer-time, the cliffs a mat and tangle of green that had shut us in. On this dull December evening, with its vines and shrubs and gaunt trees bare, its pointed cedars and hemlocks the only green, its dark water swirling under overhanging rocks, it had become an entrance to Valhalla, the dim ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... soul was in sight, and even if there had been, though the powers of the press-gang officer were vested in him, he did not know a word of the Dutch or Kaffir tongues. He stood upon the fringe of the gaunt Karoo. On either hand stretched a waste of lone prairie—a solitude of gathering night. Out of its deepest shades rose masses of jet-black hill: the ragged outline of their crests bathed purple and grey in the last effort of ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Milan was the center of the military operations of the French, the Swiss, the Spaniards, and the Germans. No city suffered more cruelly, and in none were fanatical prophets received with greater superstition. In 1516 there appeared in Milan 'a layman, large of stature, gaunt, and beyond measure wild, without shoes, without shirt, bareheaded, with bristly hair and beard, and so thin that he seemed another Julian the hermit.' He lived on water and millet-seed, slept on the bare earth, refused alms of all sorts, and preached with wonderful authority. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... shocked, dazed, but conscious I remained unhurt. Then, with a crash, three horsemen leaped the low fence, riding recklessly toward us. I seemed to see the gray-clad figures through a strange mist, which gradually cleared as they came to a sharp halt. The one in advance was a gaunt, unshaven sergeant, lifting a hand in perfunctory salute, and glancing ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... gaunt individual at the next table, who apparently heard this last remark of Dick's. Turning towards our hero, he said, "May I inquire, young man, whether you are largely interested in ...
— Ragged Dick - Or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks • Horatio Alger
... reason in Rodney Harding's words, for as he turned from the little river he had come suddenly face to face with a thin gaunt-looking lad of about his own age, very shabbily dressed and almost ragged, who was gazing at him fiercely, and stood with one hand as if about to strike. Recovering himself on the instant, Rodney, obeying his first impulse, began to loosen the bottom joint ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... of the earliest days in April, Abner, gaunt and tottering, went home to Flatfield. Leverett Whyland's own carriage took him to the station and Medora Giles's own hands arranged ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... and into the drawing-room marched the tall gaunt form of Sir Arthur, followed by Lovel and Mr. Oldbuck, the countenances of all ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... the throng into an ordered company; first went the music, and then a score of Face-of-god's warriors with drawn swords and uplifted spears; and then the flower-bedecked misery of the Runaways, men and women going together, gaunt, befouled, and hollow-eyed, with here and there a flushed cheek or gleaming eye, or tear-bedewed face, as the joy and triumph of the eve pierced through their wonted weariness of grief; then the rest of the ...
— The Roots of the Mountains • William Morris
... its grounds. Between the gate and the house he passed through a young plantation of larches and other firs for a quarter of a mile, and so came to an old wall with an iron gate in the middle of it, within which the old house, a gaunt meagre building—a bare house in fact, relieved only by four small turrets or bartizans, one at each corner—lifted its grey walls, pointed gables, and steep roof high into the pale blue air. He rode round the outer wall, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... office clerks came past, breathing upon their chilled fingers and munching penny rolls. Some of them are gaunt young fellows in ill-fitting suits, their tired eyes still fogged from sleep. Others are older men, stooped and tottering, with faces pale and drawn from long hours of office work and glancing nervously at their watches for ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... of the scenes of which he was himself an eye-witness, especially in the west. "The town of Westport," he tells us in one of his reports, "was itself a strange and fearful sight, like what we read of in beleaguered cities; its streets crowded with gaunt wanderers, sauntering to and fro with hopeless air and hunger-struck look—a mob of starved, almost naked women around the poor-house clamouring for soup-tickets. Our inn, the head-quarters of the road engineer and pay clerks, ...
— The Story Of Ireland • Emily Lawless
... afternoon the hunters returned with their spoil—three gaunt, fierce-looking wild pigs; and then after a meal had been cooked and eaten, the white man and woman bade each ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... their best Sunday clothes—she, in a plain large white cap which covered all but a line of grey hair, a black stuff gown reaching to neck and wrists, and small silk neckkerchief put on like a shawl; a thin, almost gaunt old woman, whom the years had not used tenderly, and who showed marks of their usage—but a resolute, high-couraged soul, who had met hard times in the face, and could meet them again if need were. She spoke in broad Berkshire, and was otherwise a homely body, but self-possessed and without a shade ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... a man dropped, heaving convulsively, and then another, and still another.... The grim, gaunt figure of Denham came out of the tree-fern forest, the queer small golden-metal trunchion in his hand. A fourth man dropped before the Ragged Men quite realized what had happened. The fourth man himself was armed—and a flashing slender body came plunging from the forest ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... a tall, gaunt man, in the dress of court maestro de capello. His lean face was proud and serious, his large mouth wore an expression of scorn, and his full-orbed, light-blue eyes had a glance of power which accorded well with his lofty stature. The ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... with worms! The sight inspired us with so much horror that even at the moment of writing this article we shudder from its effects. Those who have seen the others represent them to be in a similar condition." One after another, seven dark human forms were brought forth, gaunt and wild-eyed with famine and loaded with irons, having been found chained and tied in attitudes in which they had been kept so long that they were crippled ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... plain duty. The wife follows carrying a child, and a boy and girl in unaccustomed apparel walk by her side. They come out into Mortimer Street. There are no shops open; the sky over their heads is mud, the earth is mud under their feet, the muddy houses stretch in long rows, black, gaunt, uniform. The little party reach Hyde Park, also wrapped in impenetrable mud-grey. The man's face brightens for a moment as he says, "It is time to go back," and so they return, without the interchange of a word, unless perhaps they happen to see an omnibus horse fall down ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... doctor had said. Did they really know him? Some one along the road—a home-driving farmer—told me of an old Mr. Mills who had a five-acre orchard farther on. In a little while I came to his door and was confronted by a thin, gaunt, bespectacled woman, who called back to a ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... in with a hurried, unsteady step. The long, stooping figure was unkempt; was, in a sense, unjointed, as though some support had been withdrawn. The eyes were deep-sunk, the bones of the face were gaunt and bare; and from moment to moment the man swallowed quickly and ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... mostly composed of men in their working-clothes, with bare arms and gaunt, haggard faces. There were some women among them—wretched, half-starved creatures—who kept shrieking like furies all the time. As the regiment, still moving resolutely onward, approached within a few yards of them, there fell the first volley of stones, accompanied with hoots ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... always been, for she had kept house for her brother, the late laird, that the neighbours said she had half-starved herself, in order to keep up some little show of old hospitality. In truth, the poor lady was marvellously thin, and as sallow and gaunt as she was thin. Some old lady who had stood for her at the font, in the reign of Charles the Second, had, at her death, left her all her clothes, and these had been sent to Dymock's tower in several large chests. Mrs. Margaret was accordingly provided for, for life, with the ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... there was danger that they would be entirely cut off. If the possession of the water were lost, they must yield or starve; and they doubted whether the Prince would be able to organize a fleet. The gaunt spectre of Famine already rose before them with a menace which could not be misunderstood. In their misery they longed for the assaults of the Spaniards, that they might look in the face of a less formidable foe. They paraded the ramparts daily, with drums beating, colors ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... must be acknowledged, had a thoroughly countrified appearance. He was a genuine specimen of the Yankee,—a long, gaunt figure, somewhat stooping, and with a long aquiline nose. His dress ...
— Paul Prescott's Charge • Horatio Alger
... after his murder; while at the Cross in the churchyard the authorities of the City, and even our kings, often attended the public sermons, and in the same place the citizens once held their Folkmotes, riotous enough on many an occasion. Great men's tombs abounded in Old St. Paul's—John of Gaunt, Lord Bacon's father, Sir Philip Sydney, Donne, the poet, and Vandyke being very prominent among them. Fired by lightning in Elizabeth's reign, when the Cathedral had become a resort of newsmongers and a thoroughfare for porters and carriers, it was partly rebuilt in Charles ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of country stretches away in the distance, with some poor cabins here and there; the sun is setting behind the hill. It is the close of a hard day's work. The peasant is a short, thick-set man, old, and clothed in rags. The four horses that he urges forward are thin and gaunt; the ploughshare is buried in rough, unyielding soil. A single figure is joyous and alert in that scene of sweat and toil. It is a fantastic personage, a skeleton armed with a whip, who runs in the furrow beside the terrified ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... attention, however, soon flagged; in a few minutes I was a second time asleep, nor did I again awake till the morning was far advanced. At this eventful juncture, while casting my eyes round the room with all the voluptuous indolence of a jaded traveller, they suddenly chanced to fall on a gaunt, spectral figure, undressed, unwashed, unshaved, decked out in a red worsted night-cap, its left cheek swollen, as if with cold or tooth-ache, and seated bolt upright in the very next bed, scarce six inches off my nose. And this figure was——but I need ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... and careful, again. The guys on the trucks bedded down as best they could, among their gaunt equipment. Soon there were troubled snores from huddled figures that quivered with the motion of the vehicles. The mottled Moon rode high. Big tires whispered on damp concrete. Lights blinked past. The trucks curved around corners, ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... man—something easy and genial and quizzical and careless. He was the kind of person you LIKE to meet on the street; whose cheerful passing sends you on feeling indefinably a little gayer than you did. He was tall, thin—even gaunt, perhaps—and his face was long, rather pale, and shrewd and gentle; something in its oddity not unremindful of the late Sol Smith Russell. His hat was tilted back a little, the slightest bit to one side, and the sparse, brownish hair above his high forehead ...
— Beasley's Christmas Party • Booth Tarkington
... throughout a whole season all the swarms would alight on the lowest attainable bough—such as part of a currant-bush or espalier apple-tree; next year they would, with just the same unanimity, make straight off to the uppermost member of some tall, gaunt costard, or quarrenden, and there defy all invaders who did not come armed with ladders and ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... farther end of the beach faded into an uneven string of lights, soft and spectral as will-o'-the-wisps. Warmth rose from the sleeping earth; and a breeze blew in from the sea, making a strange metallic rustling, which to Japanese ears is the sweetest natural music, in the gaunt sloping pine-trees, whose height in the semi-darkness was exaggerated to ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and chicken house, and a frowzy attempt at a garden. A strawberry bed overgrown with weeds, a sickly cabbage lifting its head bravely; a gaunt row of currant bushes; another wandering, out-reaching row of raspberries; a broken fence; a stretch of soppy bog land to the right, and the farm trailed off into desolate neglect ending in a charming grove of thick trees that stood close down ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... assumed a rosy amethystine tint, like nothing earthly—like the mountains of a dream, perhaps. The buzzard had alighted in the top of a tree not far down the slope, a tree long ago lightning-scathed, but still rising, gaunt and scarred, above all the forest, and stretching dead stark arms to heaven. Somehow Rufe did not like the looks of it. He was aware of a revulsion of feeling, of the ebbing away of his merry ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)
... He was gaunt, without being tall, and his clothes hung loosely about him, as if he had fallen away in them since they were made. His face was almost the face of the caricature American: deep, slightly curved vertical lines enclosed his mouth in their parenthesis; a thin, ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the car limped up and stopped in the sandy road before the sagging gate, the trio saw that their refuge was a windowless and abandoned structure that looked as gaunt and ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... before his eyes rested steadily on the wolf-dog in the other cage. He went to the edge of his bars and sniffed. The wolf-dog thrust his gaunt muzzle toward him. He made Miki think of the huge wolf he had fought one day on the edge of the cliff, and instinctively he showed his fangs, and snarled. The wolf-dog snarled back. Henri Durant rubbed his hands exultantly, and ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... glanced in the direction indicated, and he saw a spare, gaunt man with a face strikingly white beside the red and bronze and dark skins of the men around him. It was a cadaverous face. The black mustache hung down; a heavy lock of black hair dropped down over the brow; deep-set, hollow, staring eyes looked out piercingly. ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... in the Harpeth Valley less than a year, and look at that. We've been here all our lives and they don't know who we are," whispered father, with the same pride shining in his eyes that shone upon the parson from the eyes of the gaunt prisoner, who rose and shook hands with Mr. Goodloe with the sheriff beside him, while the rough old judge from the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... you in the morning, And in the morning glow, You walked a way beside me To make me sad to go. Do you know me in the gloaming, Gaunt and dusty grey with roaming? Are you dumb because you know me not, Or dumb because you know? All for me? And not a question For the faded flowers gay That could take me from beside you For the ages of a day? They ...
— A Boy's Will • Robert Frost
... rags as if he were going to be crowned king in the city; with his head lifted as if he saw apocalyptic stars in heaven, and a gesture at which the towers might fall. This man was ragged beyond all that moving rag-heap; he was as gaunt as a gallows tree, and the thing he was uttering with arms held up to heaven was evidently a curse. The lady sent an inquiry by her German servant, whom also I can see in a vision, with his face of wood and his air of still trailing all the heraldic trappings of the Holy Roman Empire. This ambassador ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... moment the girl sat studying her father's weather-beaten features, the thin hair, the pale, shrewd eyes, the gaunt cheeks, the indomitable old-young mouth. Then a little shy smile flickered across her face ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... tombs of forgotten bishops and knights, we saw an immense slab of stone purporting to be the monument of Catherine Swineferd, wife of John of Gaunt; also, here was the shrine of the little Saint Hugh, that Christian child who was fabled to have been crucified by the Jews of Lincoln. The Cathedral is not particularly rich in monuments; for it suffered grievous outrage and dilapidation, both at the Reformation and in Cromwell's time. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... thought it; now I've caught you!" This from the sergeant, who had seen hard fighting against a savage foe in Africa and therefore was particularly bitter about the Bodlapoo affair. The welt of a scar on his gaunt, fever-yellowed cheek turned a deeper red as he seized Stransky by ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... position was equal in honor and dignity to that of Prophet or High Priest. He was a busy, hard-worked man, black haired and gaunt, small of stature and fiery eyed; he looked rather like an overworked department-store manager rather than like a prophet. He was finding his hands more full every day, both because of the extraordinary ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... from Riez, and 9 m. E. from Manosque, is Groulx, pop. 1400, a dirty village on a hill rising from the Verdon. On the top are the gaunt ruins of a castle built by the Knight-Templars. Less than m. from the village is the hotel and the bathing establishment. The rooms cost from 2 to 5 frs. Coffee in the morning, 60 cents. Breakfast and dinner, 7 frs. Service, fr. Or the lowest price per day, 10 frs., which is ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... master himself, by laughing at the master's Gallic representative. There stood a tailor with his books of patterns just imported from Paris,—that modern Prometheus, who makes a man what he is! Next to him a tall, gaunt fellow, in a coat covered with tarnished lace, a night-cap wig, and a large whip in his hands, comes to vouch for the pedigree and excellence of the three horses he intends to dispose of, out of pure love and amity for the buyer. By the window stood a thin starveling poet, ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... thirst or hunger had plainly not yet fallen upon Sile, or he would not have asked that question just then. It sounded so much like fourteen years old and recklessness that the great, gaunt man turned in his saddle and ...
— Two Arrows - A Story of Red and White • William O. Stoddard
... later, a pung or box-sleigh drew up at the poor-house door, from which was lifted a long, gaunt figure, carefully enveloped in blankets and cloaks. As he was taken from the sleigh, he feebly murmured a few words, to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... immediately before the king in procession. The Earls of Leicester once enjoyed this great dignity hereditarily; through them it descended to the De Montford family, until, on the attainder of the last Earl, it was granted by Henry III. to his younger son Edmund, by whom it became transmitted to John of Gaunt, and eventually to Henry IV. while Duke of Lancaster; since which period it has been prudently suffered ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... furnished room, Is an antidote to the wild night storm, Lamplight and firelight banish the gloom, No poverty stalks there with cold gaunt form. ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... old tree and must have guarded that sylvan spot for centuries. The gnarled and knotted trunk was scarred and seamed with the ravages of time. The upper part was dead. Long limbs extended skyward, gaunt and bare, like the masts of a storm beaten vessel. The lower branches were white and shining, relieved here and there by brown patches of bark which curled up like old parchment as they shelled away from the inner bark. The ground beneath the tree was carpeted with a velvety moss with little plots ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... Knight, during John of Gaunt's courtship with Blanch is supposed to be written on account of the ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... my way here I ran a risk of being violently used for his sake. As I was perambulating slowly the border of Loch Ness I met a tall, gaunt-looking man, who eyed me rather suspiciously, and stretched forth his hands in the attitude of one interrupting a stray sheep. I looked at the being in my turn, and began to be a little suspicious of his purpose, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... the oil of hill-side maledictions as of old), while others are emerging from the fiery furnaces beneath for fresh air, and wipe a hot dirty face with a still dirtier shirt sleeve, and in return for the nauseous exudation, lay on a fresh coat of blacking; tall, gaunt wretches, who pant for breath as they snuff the fresh breeze, like porpouses, and then dive again into the lower regions. They are neither seamen nor landsmen, good whips nor decent shots, their hair is not woolly enough for niggers, and their faces are too black for white men. They ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... In the midst of threescore goats whose feet had made the yellow cloud of dust was a man, tall, gaunt, dressed in the garb of the desert, and burned by the sun as black as ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore Meant ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... undulating, broken stretch of country, half-heath, half-covert, covering a square mile or so of land, houseless, solitary. In its midst rose a curiously shaped eminence or promontory, at the highest point of which some ruin or other lifted gaunt, shapeless walls against the moonlit sky. Far down beneath it, in a depression amongst the heath-clad undulations, a fire glowed red in the gloom. And on the further side of this solitude, amidst groves and plantations, the moonlight shone on the roofs and gables ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... was upon them, when he moved his head slightly and moaned. His rough clothes were in rags, and the black, bruised flesh of his feet showed through the remnants of his moccasins. His body was thin and gaunt, without flesh-pads or muscles, while the bones seemed ready to break through the tight-stretched skin. As Corliss felt his pulse, his eyes fluttered open ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... back, and left the cap'n waiting for him in the path. There he stood before her, the gaunt, big shape she had watched and brooded over so many years. Something seemed to be moving in his brain, and he gave ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... stress deepening to absolute wretchedness and pain, which is the colour of so much human life in modern London. One vivid contrast hung in his mind symbolical. On the one hand were the coalies of the Westbourne Park yards, on strike and gaunt and hungry, children begging in the black slush, and starving loungers outside a soup kitchen; and on the other, Westbourne Grove, two streets further, a blazing array of crowded shops, a stirring traffic of cabs and carriages, and such a spate of spending that a tired student in leaky boots ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... strange, unsabbatical procession; a company of grim and tight-lipped citizens marching, rifles over shoulder toward the Bay. At their head was William Spofford. Midway of the parade were a dozen rough-appearing fellows, manacled and guarded. Among these Inez recognized Sam Roberts, gaunt and bearded leader of the hoodlum band known as The Hounds or Regulars. From Little Chili, further to the north and west, rose clouds of smoke; now and then ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... was drawn up they sailed off against the enemy; and so they fought and subdued the islands lying between Denmark and the East; and as they advanced thence, met some ships of the Ruthenian fleet. Frode thought it shameful to attack such a handful, but Erik said: "We must seek food from the gaunt and lean. He who falls shall seldom fatten, nor has that man the power to bite whom the huge sack has devoured." By this warning he cured the king of all shame about making an assault, and presently induced him to attack a small number with a throng; ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... reader to imagine. The sufferings of the Dissenters were awfully severe at this time. Had it been a year later, we might have guessed it to have referred to the sufferings of that pious, excellent woman, Elizabeth Gaunt, who was burnt, October 23, 1685. She was a Baptist, and cruelly martyred. Penn, the Quaker, saw her die. 'She laid the straw about her for burning her speedily, and behaved herself in such a manner that all the spectators ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... went across country, avoiding roads and houses like poison. The land was very low and flat and the dykes very numerous, sometimes whole fields being practically inundated. The only things that tended to relieve the monotony were the solitary gaunt willow trees, most of them mere shells of their former selves, which stood out from the misty darkness, black and threatening, like ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... the company did Sardou's big drama of "Thermidor" for the first time on any stage, with another one of the casts for which Charles Frohman was beginning to become famous. It included a thin, gaunt Englishman whose name in the bill was simply J. F. Robertson, and who had just come from an engagement with John Hare in London. Subsequently the J. F. in his name came to be known as Johnston Forbes, because the man was ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... lad, that unkindness should work a change so sad in any one. 'Twas a mystery.... The room was cold. 'Twas ghostly, too—with Death hovering there invisible. Youth is mystified and appalled by the gaunt Thing. I shivered. Within, the gale sighed and moaned and sadly whispered; 'twas blowing in a melancholy way—foreboding some inevitable catastrophe. Set on a low ledge of the cliff, the cottage ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... thrill as a theatre thronged at appeal of an actor's appalled agitation, Fainter with fear of the fires of the future than pale with the promise of pride in the past; Flushed with the famishing fulness of fever that reddens with radiance of rathe recreation, Gaunt as the ghastliest of glimpses that gleam through the gloom of the gloaming when ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... used to arise from the gilded censers. "Marriage, citoyennes, is the greatest error of ancient humanity. To be married is to be a slave. Will you be slaves?"—"No, no!" cried all the female part of the audience, and the orator, a tall gaunt woman with a nose like the beak of a hawk, and a jaundice-coloured complexion, flattered by such universal applause, continued, "Marriage, therefore, cannot be tolerated any longer in a free city. It ought to be considered a crime, and suppressed by ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... morning they went off and stayed till the afternoon of the next day; they ran the fox all day and all night, the hounds baying at every jump, the cur-dog silent and tenacious. When the trio returned, they came dragging themselves along, stiff, footsore, gaunt, and hungry. For a day or two afterward they lay about the kennels, seeming to dread nothing so much as the having to move. The stolen hunt was their "spree," their "bender," and of course they must take time to ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... noon, and the silvery sagebrush was shimmering beneath the direct rays of the sun, when he rode his lathered horse out of a cottonwood grove to gaze, from the edge of a deep draw, at Wade's ranch buildings. That very morning a gaunt, gray timber-wolf had peered forth at almost the same point; and despite Moran's bulk, there was a hint of a weird likeness between man and beast in the furtive suspicious survey they made of the ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... the first break of dawn the Induna in command of the Umcityu looked up from beneath the shelter of the black shield with which he had covered his body, and through the thick mist he saw a great man standing before him, clothed only in a moocha, a gaunt wild-eyed man who held a rough club in his hand. When he was spoken to, the man made no answer; he only leaned upon his club looking from left to right along the ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... Inn grew daily more irksome. There he would sit, in mute despair, drumming the table with his fingers, and biting the quill, whose use he so bitterly contemned. Of winter afternoons he would stare through the leaded window-panes at the gaunt, leafless trees, on whose summits swayed the cawing rooks, until servitude seemed intolerable, and he prayed for the voice of the bearward that summoned him to Southwark. And when the chained bear, the familiar monkey on his back, followed the shrill bagpipe along the curious street, Briscoe felt ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... more successful; so that, in addition to being starved, there was every possibility of our being reduced to nakedness. This was no pleasant prospect, running out of tropical latitudes towards England, in the month of January. In the course of six weeks, such a ragged, woebegone, gaunt, and famished gang of reefers was never before huddled together in one of his Majesty's vessels of war. The shifts we were obliged to have recourse to were quite amusing, to all but the shiftmakers. The only good hat, and wearable uniform coat, went round ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... suggested that Dr. Craven should first have been asked if he consented to dismiss the charge, and this brought that gentleman to his feet. A more complete antithesis to Dr. See cannot be imagined. He is tall, gaunt, with full beard and mustache, short, bristling hair, that stands upright in a row from the centre of his forehead to the crown of his head. He said that at the request of Dr. McIllvaine and another respected member of the Presbytery ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... And then her ear caught the rumble and the tramp of the approaching battalion. Presently transport rolled by, and squads of men, haggard in the grey light, bending double under their packs, staggered along to their billets. And then came a rusty crew, among whom she recognized McPhail's tall gaunt figure. She stood by the gateway, bareheaded, in her black dress and blue apron, defying the sharp morning air, and watched them pass through. She saw Mo Shendish, his eyes on the heels of the man in front. She recognized nearly all. But the man she ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... ninepence a day, according to the cost of provisions, was allowed him. On this generous basis he was nourished for a hundred years or more, till one day early in the nineteenth century some half-score of gaunt, hungry wretches, cooped up for eight weary weeks in an East-coast press-room during the rigours of a severe winter, made the startling discovery that the time-honoured allowance was insufficient to keep soul and body together. They accordingly addressed a petition to the Admiralty, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... he returned to Baree. The dog scented him before the crunch of his footsteps could be heard in the snow, and when he came out from the thick spruce and balsam into the little open, Baree was stretched out flat on his belly, his gaunt gray muzzle resting on the snow between his forepaws. He made no movement as David drew near, except that curious shivers ran through his body, and his throat twitched. Thoreau would have analyzed that impassive posture as one of waiting and watchful treachery; David ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... brazen sword and gold fibula and torque; and after the savant has rammed many skulls with sawdust, measuring their capacity, and has adorned them with some obscure label, and has tabulated and arranged the implements and decorations of flint and metal in the glazed cases of the cold gaunt museum, the imagination, unsatisfied and revolted, shrinks back from all that he has done. Still we continue to inquire, receiving from him no adequate response, Who were those ancient chieftains and warriors for whom an affectionate people raised those strange tombs? What ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... The gaunt man sat up in his chair and by what mesmeric magic it happened I know not, but before my eyes grew the living image of the gross, shapeless creature who had put me to bed in wringing ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... write no more that satisfy me. To blossom into rhyme on the sparkling pleasures of life, you must be under the influence of those pleasures, and I am at present quite removed from them—surrounded by gaunt realities of ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... her downstairs in his own arms on the first day it was allowed? Hadn't they seen him helping her with her lessons, at night,—solving her complex problems in his head while she struggled over columns of figures, and waiting at the end of that tortuous road with a smile on his gaunt face, and the right answer, to prove hers right or wrong? But in languages, Sir Peter was left at the post. Her master in French was astonished until he learned her mother's name,—by accident, for it was rarely ...
— Old Valentines - A Love Story • Munson Aldrich Havens
... and gaunt, Our shadows reach across the street; Like giant sprites they seem to haunt The ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... seen him or heard him spoken of, or I should not have encouraged myself with this hope. At my first glimpse of his tall, gaunt figure, hard features, and brisk impatient movements, I knew that my wit and equanimity would be put to their full test in ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... to address his men, but could only cry: "Remember The Alamo"; how old Rusk could say not even that, but choked with a sob at the first word, and waved his hand toward the enemy; how the solitary fife struck up, "Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you?" while those seven hundred gaunt, starved, ragged phantoms, burning with rage at the thought of their comrades foully slain, deployed on the open prairie and charged the unsuspecting Mexican army. It was over in half an hour—the enemy annihilated, 630 killed, 200 wounded, ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... too many places in the Plays where this happens. Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... my alley. It was mine by right of long acquaintance. We were neighbors for twenty years. Yet I never knew why it was called Cat Alley. There was the usual number of cats, gaunt and voracious, which foraged in its ash-barrels; but beyond the family of three-legged cats, that presented its own problem of heredity,—the kittens took it from the mother, who had lost one leg under the wheels of a dray,—there was nothing specially remarkable about them. It was ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... that's what I want. I want to make property that won't employ me feed me," said the tall gaunt man who, trained in the cleaner and more wholesome poverty of the frontier, might have been a Lincoln ...
— Marching Men • Sherwood Anderson
... the arrival of the hard-bitted, Indian-fighting regiments of Tennessee who were toiling through the swamps with their brigadiers, Coffee and Carroll. The foremost of them reached New Orleans on the very day that the British were landing on the river bank. Gaunt, unshorn, untamed were these rough-and-tumble warriors who feared neither God nor man but were glad to fight and die with Andrew Jackson. In coonskin caps, buckskin shirts, fringed leggings, they swaggered ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... across the hall toward the throne—arrived at the dais, they halted, wheeled about, saluted, and parted asunder in two compact lines, thus displaying in their midst the bound and manacled figure of a tall, gaunt, wild-looking old man, with eyes that burned like bright flames beneath the cavernous shadow of his bent and shelving brows,—a man whose aspect was so grand, and withal so terrible, that an involuntary murmur of mingled admiration and affright ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... lacked strength to wave it off. The one thing wholly or greatly admirable in this play is the exposition of the somewhat pitiful but not unpitiable character of King Richard. Among the scenes devoted to this exposition I of course include the whole of the death- scene of Gaunt, as well the part which precedes as the part which follows the actual appearance of his nephew on the stage; and into these scenes the intrusion of rhyme is rare and brief. They are written almost wholly in pure and fluent rather than vigorous or various blank verse; though I cannot discern ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... of raisins he had bought at Johnstown. He came out of the heights and dropped down into Glenn Crossing in the gloom of the second evening. But raisins are meager support for such a bulk as that of Bull Hunter. It was a gaunt-faced giant who looked in at the door of the shop where the blacksmith was working late. The mechanic looked up with a start at the deep voice of the stranger, but he managed to stammer forth his tidings. ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... laughter and of song as it rippled from the lips of others. Every description that has come down to us lays stress on the sunshine that played about his lofty forehead and open countenance. The days came when, though still in the heyday of early manhood, his handsome figure was gaunt and wasted; his fine face furrowed with suffering and care; his virile strength exhausted by ceaseless toil, wearisome journeyings, and exacting ministries of many kinds. But, emaciated and worn, his face never for a moment lost its radiance. He greeted ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... presided over his childhood and represented the sex to his youth, the Aunt Lizzie, widowed and frugal and spare, who had brought him up; the Janet Wilson, who had washed and mended him from babyhood, good gaunt creature half-servant and half-friend—the mature respectable women and impossible blowsy girls of the Dumfriesshire village whence he came. With such as these relations, actual or imagined, could ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... dashed so closely upon the flank of the enemy that his horse's neck was drenched with the spouting blood of the wounded soldiers. Then reining back his snorting steed to reload, he dealt a second death upon the ranks with his never-failing bullet. The tall, gaunt form of the assailant, his grey locks floating on the breeze, and the color of his steed, soon distinguished him from the other Americans, and the regulars gave him the name of 'Death on the pale horse.' A dozen bullets whizzed by his head, when he made the ...
— The Yankee Tea-party - Or, Boston in 1773 • Henry C. Watson
... circle rise, Gaunt Wonder, panic-struck, and pale, Impatient Hope, and dread Surmise, ...
— Poems • Matilda Betham
... at Reading, in the Benedictine abbey founded by him there, the ruins of which may still be seen; and, in this same abbey, great John of Gaunt was married ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... forecastings ceased. He had come upon some boys who were throwing stones at the dust-grimed windows of an unused foundry shed. Along the roof of the big, gaunt building, dilapidated and deserted, was a vast line of lights that had long been a target for every boy who could pick up a pebble. Glass lay in splinters on the slope of sheet-iron below the sashes, and one could look in through yawning holes at silent, shadowy spaces that had ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... ungainly man; unadorned, apparently uncultivated, showing the awkwardness of self-conscious rusticity. His dress that night before a New York audience was the most unbecoming that a fiend's ingenuity could have devised for a tall, gaunt man—a black frock coat, ill-setting and too short for him in the body, skirt, and arms—a rolling collar, low-down, disclosing his long thin, shrivelled throat uncovered and exposed. No man in all New ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... her gaunt face with a start, and cried fiercely, "Begone with you! Begone!" and then bent it again upon her hands, muttering, "There are plenty of hedges and ditches too good for your lot, without their coming to worrit us ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... two on foot, the woman as unfriendly of face as the man. And Swan Carlson had not improved in this feature since Mackenzie parted from him in violence a few weeks before. His red hair was shorter now, his drooping mustache longer, the points of it reaching two inches below his chin. He was gaunt of cheek, hollow of eyes, like a man who had gone hungry or suffered a sorrow that ate ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... Frost and the merry north winds had robbed the trees of the last of their foliage and they stood out grim and gaunt against the bleak November sky; when the last purple asters and the hardiest bright goldenrod had faded, Black Bruin felt the old winter drowsiness slowly stealing ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... was tall and fair, almost florid in complexion, remarkably well-preserved, with a splendid presence and figure. She had been one of the beauties of her day, and even now, in the sixth year of her widowhood, was accounted a remarkably handsome woman. Mr. Foley, her brother, was also tall, but gaunt and thin, with a pronounced stoop. His grey imperial gave him an almost foreign appearance. He had the forehead of a philosopher but the mouth of a humourist. His eyes, shrewd and penetrating—he wore no glasses although he was nearly sixty years of ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... grave as little as her bed'; a wish that Philip were not coming home with her; a wonder if the specksioneer really had killed a man, an idea which made her shudder; yet from the awful fascination about it, her imagination was compelled to dwell on the tall, gaunt figure, and try to recall the wan countenance; a hatred and desire of revenge on the press-gang, so vehement that it sadly militated against her intention of trying to be good; all these notions, and wonders, and fancies, were whirling about in Sylvia's brain, and ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... interesting than to note the different moods of these wounded men. One morning, crossing the camp at about 7 o'clock, I met a Canadian, a tall, gaunt man. I saw at once that he had just arrived from the front. The left sleeve of his tunic was cut away. The bandage round his forearm was soiled and stained. His face was unshaven and very dirty. His trousers were extraordinarily tattered and caked ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... crowded before him, causing emotion to swell his heart, he rose, and stood at the window, looking down into the little walled strip of garden, where the pear-tree, bare of leaves before its time, stood with gaunt branches in the slow-gathering mist of the autumn afternoon. The dog Balthasar, his tail curled tightly over a piebald, furry back, was walking at the farther end, sniffing at the plants, and at intervals placing his leg ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... manner which, though involving no more danger, furnishes a somewhat greater mental stimulation, and thence is better for everybody. I regret to say that I am gaining in weight. It was my hope to come back thin and gaunt and interesting-looking. Instead of which, you will likely be mad as a hornet to find me so sleek, while you at home have done all the thinning down. Truth to tell, if you compare our relative peace and war status, you are much more at war than ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... on the grass at the back of the grim, gaunt building, and she tried to collect the miserable, wandering thoughts which were forever haunting her—thoughts of Dominic and Blaisette. All at once, a musical whistle startled her, and Le Mierre himself came up the cliff, a fish basket slung over ...
— Where Deep Seas Moan • E. Gallienne-Robin
... And gladly the shroud would have yielded! The ghost had its clutch on the last iron rail Which the top of the watch-turret shielded. When the moon was obscured by the rush of a cloud, ONE! thunder'd the bell, and unswathed by a shroud, Down went the gaunt skeleton crashing! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... Darby had been felling trees, and walked up to the picket. He was halted and brought up where the fire-light could shine on him, and was roughly questioned—a tall young countryman, very pale and thin, with an old ragged slouched hat pulled over his eyes, and an old patched uniform on his gaunt frame. He did not seem at all disturbed by the pistols displayed around him, but seated himself at the fire and looked about in a dull ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... Garden of Gethsemane; and a dull laugh broke from her that she could not help. It was such a ridiculous apology for Gethsemane. There was not a corner in which one could possibly pray. Only these two iron seats, one each side of the gaunt gas lamp that glared down upon them. Even the withered shrubs were fenced off behind a railing. A ragged figure sprawled upon the bench opposite to her. It snored gently, and its breath came laden with the odour ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... paved streets rang under the beats of his horse's feet like music. Great mills and manufactories, with only a night- watchman's light in the lowest of their many stories, began to take the place of the gloomy farm-houses and gaunt trees that had startled him with their grotesque shapes. He had been driving nearly an hour, he calculated, and in that time the rain had changed to a wet snow, that fell heavily and clung to whatever it touched. He passed block after block of trim workmen's houses, ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... against the wall, looked at the dancers as they whirled around in the light of the flaring torches. For some moments no one noticed him. Then an Indian who had been lying with his chin on his hand, looking carefully over the gaunt figure of the stranger, sprang to his feet, and uttered the wild war-whoop. Immediately the dancing ceased and the men ran to and fro in confusion; but Clark, stepping forward, bade them be at their ease, but to remember that henceforth they danced ...
— Hero Tales From American History • Henry Cabot Lodge, and Theodore Roosevelt
... the front gate before the shop, where the rows of empty posts, from which the mills and vanes had all been removed, stood as gaunt reminders of the vanished summer. Major Grover refused Jed's invitation to come in and have ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Here came John Wycliffe, the great reformer, at the summons of the Archbishop of Canterbury, to answer for the publication of his new doctrines. Here, Henry of Bolingbroke prayed for his successful seizure of the throne, and here he also wept over the grave of his father, John of Gaunt. Sir Philip Sidney was buried here, and his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth's secretary; and there was a magnificent monument to Sir Christopher Hatton, Lord Chancellor, but these were all ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... the palace guards should receive all his food direct from the king's kitchen. One day, when Nur Mahomed's turn came to be on duty, he was just sitting down to a delicious stew that had been sent in from the palace, when one of those gaunt, hungry dogs, which, in eastern countries, run about the streets, poked his nose in at the open guard-room door, and looked at Nur Mahomed with mouth watering and nostrils working. The kind-hearted young man picked out a lump of meat, went to the door, ...
— The Brown Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... and heavy volumes of vapor are wreathing and unwreathing themselves around the gaunt forms of the everlasting rocks, like human reasonings, desires, and hopes around the ghastly realities of life and death; graceful, undulating, and sometimes gleaming out in silver or rosy wreaths. ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... quarrymen was lying by the wayside, with a rag of coarse cloth for all covering; and his body was disfigured by bitter marks of the biting cold and scorching heat. The bones of his shoulders and chest showed all but bare beneath the meagre flesh; and Despair looked out grim and gaunt from the black cavern ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... thing we are prone to forget. For myself, I confess not to see with those who deride the king, nor yet with those who think him statuesque, as if shaped, not out of flesh, but out of marble. He is not incredible, nor is he a shadow, stalking gaunt and battle-clad across the crags that fringe the Cornish sea. Not a few among us approximate perfection in character as blameless as Arthur's. I myself profess to have seen a King Arthur, and to have held high converse with him through many years. ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... one old Saxon monarch, confessor and saint, the holy Edward, round whose honoured body the whole of this great shrine has gradually risen. A singular erection once covered with mosaic work, but now bare and gaunt, ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... party was for Oregon from Missouri, six weeks on the road. They were a family, traveling alone, having dropped out of the company with which they had started. The man, a gaunt and grizzled creature, with long hair and ragged beard, was unyoking his oxen, while the woman bent over the fire which crackled beneath her hands. She was as lean as he, shapeless, saffron-skinned and wrinkled, but evidently younger than she looked. The brood of tow-headed children ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... attention to it than that of repeated mental objurgation: there stood the offender, looking up at her pitifully—ugly, disreputable, of breed unknown, one of the canaille! When the girl fell down, he darted at her, licked her cold face for a moment, then stretching out a long, gaunt neck, uttered from the depth of his hidebound frame the most melancholy appeal, not to Beenie, at whom he would not even look again, but to the open door. But, when Beenie, in whom, as in most of us, curiosity had the start of service, stooped, and, peering more closely into the face ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... were near by a flock of sheep Whose sad, gaunt looks bespoke the pasture bare, While they have left scarce strength enough to creep, From having lacked too long good food and care. Suppose that these were brought to pasture fair, The gate of which was opened wide to them. Would they wait for command to enter there? ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... something strange and unfamiliar about the river to-night. It had a voice, too, which allured and repelled him—a voice at the sound of which the grim despair within him stirred ominously at first, and then began slowly to rise up gaunt and terrible; began to move stealthily, but with ever-increasing swiftness through the ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... Manor, and its light was thrown upon faces bright with good-humored merriment, yet not without some touch of deeper and more earnest feeling. That party would of itself have made an interesting picture. There was Col. Donaldson, tall, gaunt, his figure slightly bent, yet evincing no feebleness, his curling snow-white locks, his broad bold forehead, and shaggy brows overhanging eyes beaming with kindness. Beside him sat Mrs. Donaldson, still beautiful in her green old age. Her face was usually pale, yet her clear ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... portray Richard as even more detestable than history and tradition had presented him. In Holinshed Richard is not accused of the murder of Gloster, whereas Shakespeare directly charges him with it, or rather makes Gaunt do so, and the accusation is not denied, much less disproved. At the close of the first act we are astonished by the revelation of Richard's devilish heartlessness. The King hearing that his uncle, John of Gaunt, is "grievous ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... den of thieves as well as of wolves. Men, young men too, had ridden in, high-hearted, proud of their trappings, horses, curls, and what not; none had ever seen them come out. They might be roaming there yet, grown old with roaming, and gaunt with the everlasting struggle to kill before they were killed: who could tell? Or they might have struck upon the vein of savage life; they might go roaring and loving and robbing with the beasts— why not? Morgraunt had swallowed them up; who could guess to what wild uses ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... will grow in thin soil. Just compare the delicate drooping boughs of birch—they could not have been more delicate if sketched with a pencil—compare these with the gaunt planes! ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... they do have to go, unless we all want to be Kaiserised—for I can assure you that the Monroe doctrine, whatever it is, is nothing to tie to, with Woodrow Wilson behind it. The Huns, Dr. dear, will never be brought to brook by notes. And now," concluded Susan, tucking Jims in the crook of her gaunt arms and marching downstairs, "having cried my cry and said my say I shall take a brace, and if I cannot look pleasant I will look as pleasant ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... its poor little glimpse of the sea. Although larger than the Cedars, it was noticeably smaller and meaner than any house on the promenade, and whereas the Cedars was detached, No. 59 was not even semi-detached, but one of a gaunt, tall row of stuccoed and single-fronted dwellings. It looked like a boarding-house (which the Cedars did not), and not all the style of George Cannon's suit and cane and manner, as he mounted the steps, nor the polish of his new brass-plate, could redeem it ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... sprites did not do—and the coloured terra-cotta bust called Niccolo da Uzzano, so like life as to be after a while disconcerting. The sensitiveness of the mouth can never have been excelled. The other originals include the gaunt John the Baptist with its curious little moustache, so far removed from the Amorino and so admirable a proof of the sculptor's vigilant thoughtfulness in all he did; the relief of the infant John, one of the most animated of the heads (the Baptist ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... hours passed on, as he threaded the streets of the proud old Swiss burgher city. He had known its every turn in brighter days, and, though the year of ninety-one was a brilliant Alpine season, and he was in the very flower of youth and manly promise, gaunt care walked as a viewless warder at ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... which she noted was built in the form of a square, when, happening to look into it, she saw something that for the moment caused her heart to stop beating and paralysed her with fear. It was a great gaunt cinnamon bear, which, seated on its haunches, was watching her with a look of comical surprise upon ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... doors troubles. Those within were still worse. His sound, strong horses perished one after another—till at last he had nothing left in his stables but one old gaunt mare called Blaessel. A distemper broke out amongst his horned stock, and before a month passed, destroyed every thing in his stalls, with the exception of an old goat and a gormandizing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... had perished in the flames. All day he had sat beside the smoking ruins, unable to weep, unable to think, unable almost to suffer, except dumbly, for as yet he could not understand it. But when the drums were heard they roused the tiger in him, and gaunt with sleeplessness and hunger he joined his countrymen and ranged like Ajax on the field. Every cry for quarter was in vain: to every such appeal he had but ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... unsympathetic temperament, and disposed to take sarcastic views of life, might perhaps wonder what possible object these two battered and weather-beaten old bodies proposed to themselves in this process,—whether Miss Roxy's gaunt black-straw helmet, which she had worn defiantly all winter, was likely to receive much lustre from being pressed over and trimmed with an old green ribbon which that energetic female had colored black by a domestic recipe; and whether Miss Roxy's ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which was again opening. Do what I would I could not repress a start, for, to my surprise, I saw my travelling companions enter with Miss Temple—Gertrude Forrest looking more charming and more beautiful than ever, and beside her Miss Staggles, tall, gaunt, and more forbidding than when ...
— Weapons of Mystery • Joseph Hocking
... I could see that it was desolate. Visible now that the water had gone down, the pillars supporting it rose gaunt and skeletal. Towers had fallen in, and the gleaming white was dimmed. It was a city of the dead, under an Earth leprous-looking with black spots where ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... having the price of corn kept artificially above a certain point, and further "protected" by a prohibitory tax upon foreign corn, all in order that the landlord might collect undiminished rentals from his farm lands. But, alas! there was no "protection" from starvation. Is it strange that gaunt famine was a frequent visitor in the land?—But men must starve ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... verging on friendship was ended by our close approach to the main road. We had been travelling, heedless of roads and tracks, across a champaign country, and the slope up to the top of Yarlet Bank now lay before us. I led the way, skulking behind such poor cover as the gaunt hedgerows provided, and, when only a hundred paces from the top, I asked her to crouch down, awaiting my signal to advance, while I crept forward on my hands and knees to the edge of the road which here climbed the ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... assailed him in the house of the Square du Roule when first he had heard of Jeanne's arrest. The open place facing the gate had transformed itself into the Place de la Revolution, the tall rough post that held a flickering oil lamp had become the gaunt arm of the guillotine, the feeble light of the lamp was the knife that gleamed with the reflection of ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... Sickness and failing strength found him with but little, and had left him penniless. An oppressive embargo upon the shipping business had been the first weight upon his head, and other misfortunes came in painful succession. Jacob and his wife were all alone, and gaunt poverty looked them coldly in ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... was down in a instant upon his knees with his gaunt hands outstretched. "Send me, sire! Me!" he cried. "I have never asked a favour of you, and never will again. But I am the man who could break this people. Send me with your message to the ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... tortoises that crawled slowly about, shaking their heads and nibbling at the young leaves. Yes, she must certainly come to the forest and play with him. He would give her his own little bed, and would watch outside the window till dawn, to see that the wild horned cattle did not harm her, nor the gaunt wolves creep too near the hut. And at dawn he would tap at the shutters and wake her, and they would go out and dance together all the day long. It was really not a bit lonely in the forest. Sometimes a Bishop rode through on his white mule, reading out of a painted book. Sometimes in their ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... aware of it, a feeling of despondency as to the fate of himself and his companions, had more than once occurred to me, which each day's delay much increased, and which this agreeable rencounter at once effectually removed. Poor fellow! gaunt misery had worn him to the bone; and I believe, that in any other part of the world, not myself alone, but Lieutenant Grey's most intimate friends, would have stared at him without the least approach to recognition. ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... on his way from Father M'Mahon's to the Mitre, was met in a lonely part of the road, near the priest's house, by a man of huge stature and savage appearance. He was literally in rags; and his long beard, gaunt features, and eyes that glared as if with remorse, distraction, or despair, absolutely constituted him an alarming as well as a painful spectacle. As he approached the stranger, with some obvious and urgent purpose, trailing after him a weapon that resembled the club of Hercules, ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... replied Kate, softly. (She had called him "Mr. Gaunt" in public till now.) "But money and lands do not always bring content. I think I was happier a minute ago than I feel ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... floated like colored vapor over the fields, glistening in the warm sunlight. Wild peacocks were seen feeding near the rails, but not in populous districts. In the early gray of the morning, more than once on the lonely plains, a tall, gaunt wolf was observed coolly watching the passing train, or loping swiftly away. Camels were seen in long strings, with their loads protruding on either side, slowly moving over the country roads; while an occasional elephant, ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... as though saturated with oil, their flickering blaze lighting up a weird scene; the gaunt, bare, white trees, ghosts of a departed forest, the miry ground strewn with eggs of all sizes, shapes and colors, and dead birds of many kinds, in amongst which writhed and twisted dirty-looking, repulsive water moccasins and brilliant ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... the afternoon the hunters returned with their spoil—three gaunt, fierce-looking wild pigs; and then after a meal had been cooked and eaten, the white man and woman bade each other good-bye for ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... once. Then Horace looked round. He saw a tall and very pale young man, neatly though poorly dressed in dark trousers and a thin loose black coat that might have been made of alpaca, and fitted badly. This man's face was gaunt and meagre, the features were pointed, the mouth was piteous. His eyes blazed with some terrible emotion, it seemed, and when Horace looked round a sudden patch of scarlet burned on his white and bony cheeks. Horace's attention was pinned by his appearance, which was at the same time ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Clarissa, don't be rude," came in a soft voice from behind the elderly lady, and Deck saw a dainty hand placed on one of the gaunt shoulders. ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... down near the friars, crossed myself, and cut a piece of bread from the loaf before me. The innkeeper and his wife, a gaunt, extraordinarily tall woman, served, running from table to table. The place was all heat and noise. Presently the soldiers, ending their meal, got up with clamor and surged from the court to their waiting horses. After them ran the innkeeper, appealing for pay. ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... a heavy silence; gaunt weeds through windows pry, And down the streets of Liang old ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... limped up and stopped in the sandy road before the sagging gate, the trio saw that their refuge was a windowless and abandoned structure that looked as gaunt and ghostly as ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... a huge gaunt man clad in shirt and jeans arose and confronted us. Our first impression was of a vast framework stiffened and shrunken into the peculiar petrifaction of age; our second, of a Jove-like wealth of iron-gray beard and hair; our third, of ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... her, and she turned her head. A gaunt dog, of no particular breed, had been following her stealthily, but at her movement he stopped short, apparently ready to take to flight at any indication of hostility on her part. He was by no means a handsome ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... hiss and to pant be hind him. A big viper came gliding. Its tongue dripping venom hung far out of its mouth, and its bright body shone against the withered leaves. Beside the snake pattered a wolf, a big, gaunt monster, who was ready to seize fast in his throat when the snake had twisted about his feet and bitten him in the heel. Sometimes they were both silent, as if to approach him unperceived, but they soon betrayed themselves by hissing and panting, and sometimes the wolf's ...
— Invisible Links • Selma Lagerlof
... authority I was subjected at the Metropolitan—the most austere tyrant that ever oppressed a traveler. That grim White Woman might have paired with the Ancient Mariner—she was so deep-voiced, and gaunt, and wan. On the few occasions when I ventured to summon her, she would "hold me with her glittering eye" till I quailed visibly beneath it, utterly scorning and rejecting some mild attempts at conciliation. I am certain she suspected me of meditating ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... she was taking a last long gaze, while her mother, in the utmost anxiety, was striving to make up her mind to draw her away, when suddenly a tall gaunt figure was among them—his face ghastly pale, and full of despair and ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... A gaunt hound came rushing from the underbrush beyond the house, and with hair bristling in anger, ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... in the Plays where this happens. Poor old dying John of Gaunt volleying second-rate puns at his own name, is a pathetic instance of it. "We may assume" that it is Bacon's fault, but the Stratford Shakespeare has to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "I fain would show Thee what thou hast not seen in the warm glow Of thy glad home. This blighted shore of mine No verdure hath, nor bloom, nor fruits that shine 'Mong drooping boughs. Far inland gloom lone peaks O'er blackened meads; or from their bare cones leaps Gaunt, crackling flame; or crawl like ashen veins The smouldering fires across the stricken plains. Deep in these yawning caves black shadows lie That shall be lifted never more. Come, I Enter! Know thou what treasure by the sea I gathered ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... May—we struggled slowly up the incline of snow, lying down from time to time to rest. A strange gaunt crew we must have looked, while, laden as we were, we dragged our weary feet over the dazzling plain, glaring round us with hungry eyes. Not that there was much use in glaring, for we could see nothing to eat. We did not accomplish more than seven miles that day. Just before sunset we ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... were the day of the mass meeting in Trafalgar Square. I was tall, and so thin and gaunt that, with my uniform and my arm in its sling, it was easy to get close to the front, straight under the speakers. And no sooner had I got there than I was seized with a restlessness, an uncontrollable desire to see my godfather—Kitchener. Only to ...
— Joy in the Morning • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... illustrating the great red ears that stood out at right angles above it. But Obed was only a boy. He was not expected to be more than clean and speechless; and, to tell the truth, Eben, being in the hobbledehoy stage of boyhood—gaunt, awkward, and self-sufficient—rather surpassed his small brother in unpleasant aspect and manner. But who would look at the boys when Dolly stood beside them, as she did now, tall and slender, with the free grace of an untrammelled figure, her small head erect, her eyes dark and soft as a deer's, ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... and silent and lonely the house looked, rising gaunt and dim in the uncertain light! Who would choose such a spot for a home? Surely only those whose deeds would not bear the light of day. And why that deadly silence and torpor in a house inhabited by human beings? It seemed unnatural and uncanny, and as a great white owl swept by on silent ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... began his exile, and of the better thoughts into which these gradually cleared. The first child's name expresses his father's discontent, and suggests the bitter contrast between Sinai and Egypt; the court and the sheepfold; the gloomy, verdureless, gaunt peaks of Sinai, blazing in the fierce sunshine, and the cool, luscious vegetation of Goshen, the land for cattle. The exile felt himself all out of joint with his surroundings, and so he called the little child that came to him 'Gershom,' which, according to one explanation, means 'banishment,' ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... skimpy pollard lilacs. The student whose state of mind is in the majority of cases created by his surroundings, ought in the place where he is studying to see facing him at every turn nothing but what is lofty, strong and elegant.... God preserve him from gaunt trees, broken windows, grey walls, and doors ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... the rest. Of them all, my favorite was Whittier. He had been present at my graduation from the theological school, and now he often attended our suffrage meetings. He was already an old man, nearing the end of his life; and I recall him as singularly tall and thin, almost gaunt, bending forward as he talked, and wearing an expression of great serenity and benignity. I once told Susan B. Anthony that if I needed help in a crowd of strangers that included her, I would immediately ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... The match flaring upon her wrinkled, copper-colored face and its gaunt features made her hideous. Poor little Fanny, who ventured to peep out at this moment, sobbed louder, and begged to go to her mother. The old woman puffed away at her pipe, fixing her gaze upon ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... intangible something which marked him out as a child of the same parents. The brother on whom Margot was now gazing was considerably the younger of the two, and might have been handsome, given a trifle more flesh and animation. As it was, he looked gaunt and livid, and his shoulders were rounded, as with much ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... tall and gaunt, with lean face, sunken eyes, white hair and beard, and a complexion between the hue of cinnamon and bronze. He, too, was unarmed. His costume was Hindostani; over the skull-cap a shawl was wound in great folds, forming a turban; his body garments were in the style of the Egyptian's, except that ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... a small boy, and I had always admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which is the most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed it thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of approval that gaunt and sombre facade, with its long straight windows, its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must perish. For sake of what they had sheltered, my heart deplored ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... dwelling, situated in the midst of smiling plantations, and Captain Copeland is well to do, and much respected by his neighbours. One summer evening, however, the Captain is disturbed at his supper, and his family frightened from their propriety, by the appearance of a tall gaunt Indian, who enters the room unannounced, and is recognised by a missionary there present as Tokeah, the miko or king of the Oconees, the principal tribe of the Creek Indians. This Tokeah is one of the most deadly and persevering enemies of the white men, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... crazed creature, known as Marguerite, "La Folle", stood before him, her long black hair streaming over her bare chest and gaunt arms, her eyes dilated, and glowing with the mingled light of ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... the hungry Hierarchy Devouring all the Squirearchy. Lollards Lollards in thirteen-seven arose 1307 Popish rituals to oppose; John Wycliffe gives to old and young The Bible in the vulgar tongue. With John of Gaunt's protection strong He dared to preach 'gainst cleric wrong; Precursor of the Reformation To ...
— A Humorous History of England • C. Harrison
... the wood-cutter, tall and gaunt and fierce-eyed, coming home with his fagots on his shoulder in the gloam of the evening, when the fireflies twinkled low among the marshes, saw Nicanor on the side of the hill against the sky, sitting with ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... York, he hoped that Ellas Droom—who knew too much—might refuse to go into the new territory with him, but the gaunt, old clerk took an unnatural and malevolent delight in clinging to his employer. He declined to give up his place in the office, and, although he hated James Bansemer, he came like an accusing shadow into the new offices near the Chicago ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... King David of Scotland and the King of Cyprus met at King Edward's grand entertainments. The later years of his life were spent by this great warrior-king in partial retirement from public affairs, and under the influence of his mistress, Alice Perrers, while John of Gaunt took a leading part in the government of the state. In 1376 Edward the Black Prince died, and the same year King Edward III. kept his last Christmas at Westminster, the festival being made memorable by all the nobles of the realm attending to swear fealty to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore— What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous bird of yore Meant in ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... of death, in the charnels of time, Where flit the gaunt spectres of passion and crime, There are triumphs untold, there are martyrs unsung, There are heroes yet silent to speak ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... the gaunt spectre of murder invades the cloistered calm of academic life. Yet such a strange and unwonted tragedy befell Harvard University in the year 1849, when John W. Webster, Professor of Chemistry, took the life of Dr. George Parkman, ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... days must come and go without distinction. Their fleeting beauty leaves them imperceptibly; they grow fat, they grow thin, wrinkled, and gaunt; the years pass and their life proceeds without change. They do not think, they do not live: they merely exist, and they die, and that is the end of it. I suppose they are as happy as any one else. After all, taking it from one point of view, it matters ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of my adventures. He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on hearing that ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was, that old Public Letter-Writer, more like a great, gaunt bird than a human being, with those spectacles of his, and his long, very sparse and very lanky fringe of a beard which fell from his cheeks and chin and down his chest for all the world like a crumpled grey ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... the door opened and into the room came a player, tall, lanky, with a pale, gaunt face, plastered over the forehead with damp wisps of straight, black hair. His deep-set, ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... friendship has not cured him of this. Being seized with a peculiar desire to learn conjuring, he had made the acquaintance of an eerie and supernatural young man, who instructed him in the Black Art: a gaunt Mephistophelian sort of individual, who our subject half thought was a changeling. Our subject has not quite got over the idea yet, though for practical social purposes he calls him Lucian Oldershaw. Our subject met Lucian Oldershaw. 'That night,' ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... unnumber'd scenes of woe, 50 What if the lion in his rage I meet!— Oft in the dust I view his printed feet: And, fearful! oft, when day's declining light Yields her pale empire to the mourner night, By hunger roused, he scours the groaning plain, 55 Gaunt wolves and sullen tigers in his train: Before them Death with shrieks directs their way, Fills the wild yell, and leads them to their prey. 'Sad was the hour, and luckless was the day, 'When first from Schiraz' walls I bent my ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... from Edward III., but a bar sinister marred their royal pedigree. John of Gaunt had three sons by Catherine Swynford before she became his wife. That marriage would, by canon law, have made legitimate the children, but the barons had, on a famous occasion, refused to assimilate in this respect the laws of England to the canons of ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... the thought of concealing it. He was therefore about to make the disagreeable confession, when the thoughts of the whole party were suddenly diverted to another channel, by the opening of the door and the entrance of one of those gaunt sons of the forest who were wont to hang on the skirts of civilisation, as it advanced to wrest from ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... stone among the hills, and of a mixture of brick and stone in the vale. Examples of cottages can be seen in the village of Great Habton. They are dated 1741 and 1784, and are much less picturesque than those of the seventeenth century, though village architecture had not then reached the gaunt ugliness of the ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... Arden, wait till I die. I feel it won't be long. What have I to live for but you and Rosy? And if you, my pride and joy, go away after what has happened, it will be worse than death," and a tempest of grief shook her gaunt frame. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of the 28th of August King Edward sat on the deck of his flagship listening to Sir John Chandos, who was singing while the minstrels played. Beside him stood his eldest son, the famous Black Prince, then twenty years of age, and his youngest son, John of Gaunt, then only ten. Suddenly the lookout called down from the tops: "Sire, I see one, two, three, four—I see so many, so help me God, I cannot count them." Then the King called for his helmet and for wine, with which he and his knights drank to each others' ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood
... from among the trees were two tall gaunt figures. They were blackened and tattered and bandaged; the hind-most one limped and had his head swathed in white, but the foremost one still carried himself as a Prince should do, for all that his left arm was in a sling and one side of ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... up, and her eye fell upon a letter lying on her bureau. Back she sank with a sigh, and lay staring at the ceiling—a gaunt, flat, sad-eyed creature, with wisps of gray hair half-covering her baldness, and a face furrowed with care ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of reaching Texas was a fearful one. Rivers that overran their banks, fever-stricken lowlands where gaunt faces peered out from moldering cabins, bottomless swamps where the mud oozed greasily and where the alligator could be seen slowly moving his repulsive form—all this stretched on for hundreds of miles to horrify and sicken the emigrants ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... sxtrumpligilo. Gas gaso. Gaseous gasa. Gash trancxadi. Gasometer gasometro. Gasp spiregi. Gastric stomaka. Gate pordego. Gather kolekti. Gather together kolekti. Gathering kolekto. Gaudy luksema. Gauge mezuri. Gaunt malgrasa. Gauntlet ferganto. Gauze gazo. Gawky mallerta. Gay, to be gaji. Gay gaja. Gaze rigardegi. Gazelle gazelo. Gazette gazeto. Gear (machinery) ilaro. Gehenna Geheno. Gelatine gelateno. Gem brilianto, ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... that, nor treble the sum," responded the gaunt, grizzled and threadbare Peter Goldthwaite. "The fact is, Mr. Brown, you must find another site for your brick block and be content to leave my estate with the present owner. Next summer I intend to put a splendid new mansion over the cellar ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... though he was esteemed to be, could not help being struck dumb by the unexpected sight of the gaunt foreigner. Indeed, having so long held supposed intercourse with familiar spirits, it is not improbable that he imagined that one of them had at last come, without waiting for a summons, to punish him because of his deceptive practices, for he turned ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... from a new press. Here, too, his whole bearing and conversation were so uniformly hopeful, hearty, and light-hearted, that they deceived all his associates into confidence that the new home had instilled new life into our friend's gaunt frame. ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... squinted at the sky line, which was jagged, and at his immediate surroundings, which were barren and lonely and soothing to his soul that hungered for these things. Great, gaunt "Joshua" trees stood in grotesque groups all up and down the narrow valley, hiding the way he had come from the way he would go. It was as if the desert had purposely dropped a curtain before his past and would show him none of his future. Whereat Casey ...
— The Trail of the White Mule • B. M. Bower
... and wise woman may give to timid merit, what support to uncertain virtue, what wings to noble aspirations." Chaucer was thus patronized by Philippa, queen of Edward III; by Anne of Bohemia, for whom he composed his "Legend of Good Women;" and most of all by Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt, whose courtship he celebrated allegorically in the "Parliament of Birds," whose epithalamium he sang in his "Dream," and whose death he lamented in his "Book of the Duchess." The beautiful and kindly ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... dead for aught I know, With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, 80 And shut eyes underneath the rusty mane; Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... same trick on me; and others, on catching sight of me, beat a retreat. Thus I perceived, that in the ranks of this class also deceivers existed. But these cheats were very pitiable creatures: all of them were but half-clad, poverty-stricken, gaunt, sickly men; they were the very people who really freeze to death, or hang themselves, as we learn from ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... houses on either side of the street were dilapidated and gaunt, let out for the most part in flats and tenements. Screaming children swarmed naked and entirely unconcerned upon every landing, and out on the verandas that gave publicity to the way of life in ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... stands out like a bastion from the imposing mass of the Cordillera, through the very heart of which runs the mysterious waterway we have just traversed. Two thousand feet or more below is a broad plain, bounded on the west by a range of gaunt and treeless hills ribbed with contorted rocks, which stretch north and south farther than the eye can reach. The plain is cultivated and inhabited. There are huts, fields, orchards, and streams, and about a league from the foot of the bastion is ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... "You wouldn't care much about seeing her again. She is a tall, gaunt, disagreeable looking woman; while Ida is fair, and sweet looking. I didn't fancy this Mrs. Hardwick when I first set eyes on her. Aunt Rachel was ...
— Timothy Crump's Ward - A Story of American Life • Horatio Alger
... a broken team crawled over the snow to the Moravian Mission, urged by two men gaunt from the trail, and blistered by the cold. From the sledge came shrieks and throaty mutterings, horrid gabblings of post-freezing madness and Dr. Forrest, lifting back the robe, found Orloff ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach
... A gaunt and relentless wolf, possessed Of a quite insatiable thirst, Once paused at a stream to drink and rest, And found that, bound on a similar quest, A lamb had ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... if it had been day he saw a man standing below in the deluge. It was not Mooie. It was not Kedsty. It was no one that he had ever seen. Even more like a ghost than a man was that apparition of the lightning flare. A great, gaunt giant of a ghost, bare-headed, with long, dripping hair and a long, storm-twisted beard. The picture shot to his brain with the swiftness of the lightning itself. It was like the sudden throwing of a cinema picture on a screen. ...
— The Valley of Silent Men • James Oliver Curwood
... from us, Virgil salutes him, and Theocritus; Catullus, mightiest-brained Lucretius, each Greets him, their brother, on the Stygian beach; Proudly a gaunt right hand doth Dante reach; Milton and Wordsworth bid him welcome home; Bright Keats to touch his raiment doth beseech; Coleridge, his locks aspersed with fairy foam, Calm Spenser, Chaucer suave, His equal friendship crave: And godlike spirits hail him guest, in speech Of Athens, Florence, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... tent, made of mud, thatched with furze, and consisted of a single room, on whose floor of beaten dung huddled a family of starving wretches—hollow-eyed, pale, gaunt, and almost naked; a round dozen of them. There were a man, bright and peaked with hunger; a poor drudge of a woman, worn to a rag before her time, with a dying child upon her empty breast; a grown son and seven children—all crouched there close together like pigs in a ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett
... and a very large one: for it required a good-sized quadruped of the kind to make an appropriate roadster for the ex-grenadier of the Imperial guard. It was not a very fat mule, however, but raw-boned and gaunt as a ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... French people are there already, preparing to be ill—(I never shall forget a dreadful sight I once had in the little dark, dirty, six-foot cabin of a Dover steamer. Four gaunt Frenchmen, but for their pantaloons, in the costume of Adam in Paradise, solemnly anointing themselves with some charm against sea-sickness!)—a few Frenchmen are there, but these, for the most part, and with a proper philosophy, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the sight of his long, gaunt figure, clad in a full suit of pink pajamas, dashing madly about the camp, would have excited the lads to uproarious merriment. But laughter was far from their ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in Montana • Frank Gee Patchin
... with no abatement while Madame, standing there in her gaunt Flemish graciousness, murmured names. "Mrs. Rankin—" Mrs. Rankin nodded insolently and turned away. "Miss Bartrum—" Miss Bartrum, the rather charming one, bowed, drawing the shadow of grave eyebrows over sweet eyes. "Dr. Donald McClane—" As he bowed the Commandant's stare arched up ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... take the liberty of calling this person, was so long a part of my life that I must pause to describe her. She was tall, rather gaunt, with high cheek-bones; her teeth were prominent and very white; her eyes were china-blue, and were always absolutely fixed, wide open, on the person she spoke to; her nose was inclined to be red at the tip. She had a kind, hearty, ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... an allegory even without the key; and they knew when a crisis had come, when they did not know what it was. And somehow they knew subconsciously that the whole tale had taken a new and terrible turn, when they saw the prince stand in the gap of the gaunt trees, in his robes of angry crimson and with his lowering face of bronze, bearing in his hand a new shape of death. They could not have named a reason, but the two swords seemed indeed to have become toy swords and the whole tale ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... hideously purple, when the short gasps were little dry sounds, speaking piteously of agony and suffocation, when still the relentless grip at his throat was unshaken, men began for the first time to guage the strength which lay in the great, gaunt ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... a quilt was thrown in a fantastic manner, under which appeared a long night-gown, from which thin bare legs protruded, with bare, gaunt, skeleton-like feet. ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille
... been cleared away to make room for the art of man, and art has not yet got beyond the inchoate unloveliness of bare utilitarianism. The beautiful woods have given place to a charred, stumpy, muddy waste, on which stand the gaunt, new frame-houses. Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what have we to do with sentimental rubbish? This is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... their theatre and laughing at their games—as Sallust and his friends, and their mistresses protested—crowned with flowers, with cups in their hands, against the new, hard, ascetic, pleasure-hating doctrine, whose gaunt disciples, lately passed over from the Asian shores of the Mediterranean, were for breaking the fair images of Venus, and flinging the altars ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... would be a tall, gaunt, swarthy, raw-boned, swearing man of the sea. He was a sleek, silent, modest little man, with delicate hands and features. He wished to be alone with the Doctor, and so I did not hear their talk. I know that he needed money and that Franklin, having no funds, provided ...
— In the Days of Poor Richard • Irving Bacheller
... saw that he must lose the marked bill after all. Regretfully he took it from his pocket. The woman had disappeared from the window, and now she came to the door and stood behind her husband. Wrapped in an old blanket, she made a gaunt figure, not unlike a squaw. As Orme walked up the two or three steps, she stretched her hand over her husband's shoulder and snatched the bill, examining ...
— The Girl and The Bill - An American Story of Mystery, Romance and Adventure • Bannister Merwin
... warm luxuriantly furnished room, Is an antidote to the wild night storm, Lamplight and firelight banish the gloom, No poverty stalks there with cold gaunt form. ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... himself again, strong, big, gaunt, powerful, his great wistful eyes had a gentle astonishment in them that there were no curses to rouse him and no blows to drive him; and his heart awakened to a mighty love, which never wavered once in its fidelity while ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... long been a custom of the Canipers to spend each warm Sunday evening in the heather, and there, if Daniel were not already with them, they would find him waiting, or they would watch for his gaunt, loose figure to come across the moor. This habit had begun when his father was alive, and the stern chapel-goer's anger must be dared before Daniel could appear with the light of a martyr on his brow. In those days, Zebedee, who was working under the old doctor, sometimes ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... he was standing in a long, low attic, amidst the whir and clatter of many looms. The meagre daylight peered in through the grated windows, and showed him the gaunt figures of the weavers bending over their cases. Pale, sickly-looking children were crouched on the huge crossbeams. As the shuttles dashed through the warp they lifted up the heavy battens, and when the shuttles stopped they let the battens fall and pressed the threads together. Their faces ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... bits of moral teaching, a lovely life, marred by tremendous mistakes about Himself and His own importance and His relation to men and to God; but you have got nothing left that is worth calling a gospel. You have the cross rising there, gaunt, black, solitary; but, unless on the other side of the river you have the Resurrection, no bridge will ever be thrown across the black gulf, and the Cross remains 'dead, being alone.' You must have a Resurrection ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... days in April, Abner, gaunt and tottering, went home to Flatfield. Leverett Whyland's own carriage took him to the station and Medora Giles's own hands arranged ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... was mostly short and easy—"bull's fell" heather as it was named. Tall cotton grass flaunted up suddenly through the slaty haze of the night of pursuit. The plant called "Honesty" with its flat, white seed vessels, gaunt and startling, swished past them, the dry pods crackling among their ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... grasping cactus and brush. Clumsy home-made leather shields covered the front of his forelegs and ran up well to his wide breast. What otherwise would have been muscular symmetry of limb was marred by many a scar and many a lump. He was lean, gaunt, worn, a huge machine of muscle and bone, beautiful only in head and mane, a weight-carrier, a horse strong and fierce like the desert that ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... living-room of the cabin, for at this season, at such an altitude, the shadows were always cold, and around the fire they gathered, each of the men with half a huge pie before him. They were such as one might expect that mountain region to produce, big, gaunt, hard-muscled. They had gone unshaven for so long that their faces were clothed not with an unsightly stubble but with strong, short beard that gave them a certain grim dignity and made their eyes seem sunken. They were opposite types, which ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... dug-outs were having their finishing touches, some to be used as dressing-stations for the wounded whom to-morrow might bring in, others for storing ammunition. In a nearby wood, where trees had been reduced to little more than gaunt trunks barren of leaf and twig, observation posts were built with many tons of branches hauled from the rear, and so artfully wired in place that the stricken giants seemed almost ready to live again. This work in itself constituted reason enough ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... Both men were gaunt and weakened by famine. They had just returned to camp from an unsuccessful hunt, and the latter, being first to return, had kindled the fire, and was about to put on the kettle when McKay ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... dreamer, however, I did not care to rise, but wondered only what would come next. My seat, after several strange tumbling motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and then I found that I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse—a skeleton horse almost, only he had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain, as if his joints were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the direction in which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... grow old so quickly nowadays," he said. "You are 57 years old, Roger. Ann is 53." He leaned back in his chair, his gaunt smile fading. "The Dictator has not been without opposition. You, his parents, opposed him at the very start, and he cast you off. People wiser than the crowds were able to rebuff his powerful personal ...
— Infinite Intruder • Alan Edward Nourse
... of the scattered mesquite growth Carmena edged off to the left, down a shallow wash that brought them around to the west side of a ridge. Under cover of the gaunt earth-rib of worn rock she headed north, straight for the ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... back again. There, into the flickering light of the lantern, a gaunt, huge creature leaped. Nan could see his head and shoulders now and then as he plunged on after the sleigh, and a wickeder looking beast, ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... there, gaunt in frame, famished of soul, driven by the torments of an ambition to see the right, to do it, it seemed to him as though the final burden had been heaped upon him, and that he must break under the weight on ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... now noon and the day Monday—Mrs. Y's washing will be out to dry. Observe her gaunt replica, cap-a-pie, as immodest as an advertisement! In her proper person she is prodigal if she unmask her beauty to the moon. And in company with this, is the woolen semblance of her plump husband. Neither of them is shap'd for sportive tricks: But look upon ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... little burg of Zell, where the people, in the time of their emperor's peril, came out with torches and bells, and the Host lifted up by their priest, and all prayed on their knees underneath the steep gaunt pile of limestone, that is the same to-day as it was then, whilst Kaiser Max is dust; it soars up on one side of this road, very steep and very majestic, having bare stone at its base, and being all along its summit crowned with ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... Anthony's best furniture, they were clean, new, and, in a blonde and sanitary way, not unattractive. Bounds had gone abroad to enlist in the British army, and in his place they tolerated rather than enjoyed the services of a gaunt, big-boned Irishwoman, whom Gloria loathed because she discussed the glories of Sinn Fein as she served breakfast. But they vowed they would have no more Japanese, and English servants were for the present hard to obtain. Like Bounds, the woman prepared only breakfast. ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... within the influences of the sun, and ever-changing shape. On another, when the turbulent Foehn is blowing, streamers of snow may be seen flying from the higher ridges against a pallid background of slaty cloud, while the gaunt ribs of the hills glisten below with fitful gleams of lurid light. At sunrise, one morning, stealthy and mysterious vapours clothe the mountains from their basement to the waist, while the peaks are glistening serenely in clear daylight. ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... corral for a flock of Angora goats. There was no gate for the passage of teams; the road ended there, and a rough sign nailed to a hingeless wicket warned the wayfarer to "Keep Out." On a rocky knob near this entrance a gaunt, hard-featured woman sat knitting. She measured the trespassers with a furtive, smouldering glance and clicked her needles with ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... and opening out of this same chamber, are dining-room, drawing-room, and divers bedrooms: each with a multiplicity of doors and windows. Up-stairs are divers other gaunt chambers, and a kitchen; and down-stairs is another kitchen, which, with all sorts of strange contrivances for burning charcoal, looks like an alchemical laboratory. There are also some half- dozen small ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... Hepsey was a tall, gaunt woman, bearing the tragedy of her race written in her face, with its melancholy eyes, subdued expression, and the pathetic patience of a wronged dumb animal. She received Christie with an air of resignation, and speedily bewildered her with an account of ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... the buildings, the people and the soldiery with deep interest. From the head of the main street,—Castle Avenue,—they could plainly see the royal palace, nearly a mile away. Its towers and turrets, gray and gaunt, ran up among the green tree-tops and were outlined plainly against the yellow hills. Countless houses studded the steep mountain slope, and many people were discerned walking and riding along the narrow, ledge-like streets which wound toward the summit, far up in the clouds. Clearly and ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... Sir John Richardson, "may be seen by the side of every stream, and a traveler can rarely pass the night in these wilds without hearing them howling around him."[1] These wolves burrow, and bring forth their young in earths with several outlets, like those of a fox. Sir John saw none with the gaunt appearance, the long jaw and tapering nose, long legs and slender feet, of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... course be distinguished from such a play on words as John of Gaunt makes with his own name in ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... with a start, rubbing her eyes. Gaunt and grey in the first dim light of morning, Aunt Matilda stood over her, ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... was just beginning to stir among the deepest layers of all, shut down suddenly with a snap, and he followed his companion over fields and down sweet-smelling lanes where the air was fragrant and cool, till they came to a large house, standing gaunt and lonely in the shadows at the edge of a wood. It was wrapped in utter stillness, with windows heavily draped in black, and the clerk, as he looked, felt such an overpowering wave of sadness invade him that his eyes began to burn and ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... days of unseasonable and depressing warmth, with lowering but not rainy sky, I woke this morning to find the land covered with a dense mist. There was no daybreak, and, till long after the due hour, no light save a pale, sad glimmer at the window; now, at mid-day, I begin dimly to descry gaunt shapes of trees, whilst a haunting drip, drip on the garden soil tells me that the vapour has begun to condense, and will pass in rain. But for my fire, I should be in indifferent spirits on such a day as this; the flame sings and leaps, and its red beauty is reflected ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
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