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More "Matted" Quotes from Famous Books



... balustrades, and verandahs are hidden by jessamine or passion-flowers, or the gorgeous flame-like Bougainvillea. Many of the dwellings straggle over the ground without an upper story, and have very deep verandahs, through which I caught glimpses of cool, shady rooms, with matted floors. Some look as if they had been transported from the old-fashioned villages of the Connecticut Valley, with their clap-board fronts painted white and jalousies painted green; but then the deep verandah in which families lead an open-air ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... is also a grass of considerable merit when it suits the soil; it affects a dry situation, and in some such places it is the principal herbage; but I have cultivated this by itself for seed in tolerably good land, and after some time I found it matted so much by its creeping roots as to become quite unproductive both of herbage and seed. Care should therefore be taken that only a proper portion of this be introduced. The seeds of this and Poa trivialis are the same in bulk, and probably ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... once force so extensive a front through the tough and powerful branches of the dense kittar. For about half a minute they were absolutely checked, and they bored forward with all their might in their determination to open a road through the matted thorns: the elastic boughs, bent from their position, sprang back with dangerous force, and would have fractured the skull of any one who came within their sweep. A very large elephant was on the left flank, and for an instant this turned obliquely to the left; I quickly seized the ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker

... shores were wooded to the water's edge: a giant forest, unbroken, dense and tall, flourishing from its own immemorial decay, matted with wild grape vine, choked with brush, wild as when the Creator made it; untouched, since then. It was as remote—as lost to mankind—as it was beautiful. The hum and turmoil of the civilized world was like the memory of a dream in this tranquil region, where untrammeled nature had ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne

... advance would be easiest, had halted, amazed; then prepared to defend the positions they had won with all the stubbornness possible. In the black recesses of Belleau Wood the Germans had established nest after nest of machine guns. There in the jungle of matted underbrush, of vines, of heavy foliage, they had placed themselves in positions they believed impregnable. And this meant that unless they could be routed, unless they could be thrown back, the breaking of the attack ...
— Our Navy in the War • Lawrence Perry

... clothes were in rags—torn to pieces by the thrusts of the sharp-pointed bamboos, to which they had daily been subjected—the bad food, the cramped position, and the misery which they suffered had worn both lads to skeletons; their hair was matted with filth, their faces begrimed with dirt. Percy was so weak that he felt he could not stand. Fothergill, being three years older, was less exhausted, but he knew that he, too, could not support his sufferings for many days longer. Their ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... fine locks are matted, no raiment has he For the wood, save a girdle of bark from the tree; And of all his gay splendour, you nought may behold, Save his bow and his quiver, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... screened, built at the entrances to dugouts burrowed from the trench-walls. Over these fires soldiers in flat caps and belted greatcoats were cooking their evening meal. I had expected to see unkempt men wearing sheepskin caps, men with flat noses and matted beards, but instead I found clean-shaven, splendidly set-up giants, with the pink skins that come from perfect cleanliness and perfect health. Following the direction of the arrows on signs printed ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell

... houses, mostly unpainted, with their first stories all open to the street, and thin strips of roofing sloping above each shop-front, like awnings, back to the miniature balconies of paper-screened second stories. You begin to understand the common plan of the tiny shops, with their matted floors well raised above the street level, and the general perpendicular arrangement of sign-lettering, whether undulating on drapery or glimmering on gilded and lacquered signboards. You observe that the same rich dark blue which dominates in popular costume rules also in shop ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... stretched upon the bed; his face was violet rather than red; his eyes were swelled; his mouth was wide open. The roaring which escaped from the deep cavities of his chest made the glass of the windows vibrate. To those developed and clearly defined muscles starting from his face, to his hair matted with sweat, to the energetic heaving of his chin and shoulders, it was impossible to refuse a certain degree of admiration. Strength carried to this point is semi-divine. The Herculean legs and feet ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... might have ranged the island a month, and if they had not known there was such a thing, and looked on purpose for it, they would not have found it; for the trees stood so thick and so close, and grew so fast matted into one another, that nothing but cutting them down first, could discover the place, except the two narrow entrances where they went in and out, could be found, which was not very easy. One of them ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe

... was their steel, 'tis bloody now, their guns are filled with gore; Through scattered ranks and severed files and trampled flags they tore. The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, scattered, fled; The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain and far away passed on that hideous wrack, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes the Irish stand—the field ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... were wedded. He saw with her eyes. Everywhere he saw her eyes, her tranquil eyes, in the depths of which there burned an ardent fire; he saw them in the fair, mutilated faces of the antique statues and in the riddle of their silent gaze: he saw them in the sky of Rome, lovely laughing around the matted crests of the cypress-trees and through the fingers of the lecci, black, shining, riddled ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland

... remember these, Deep in winter reveries? Berried brier and thistle-bloom, And milkweed with its dense perfume; Slender vervain towering up In a many-branched cup, Like a candlestick, each spire Kindled with a violet fire; Matted creepers and wild cherries, Purple-bunched elderberries, And on scanty plots of sod Groves of ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman

... his destination his stolid face was grimy from his long ride and the dust of the blue Alsatian mountains mingled with the dust of devastated France upon his khaki uniform (which was proper and fitting) and his rebellious hair was streaky and matted and sprawled down ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... lounged the watch, when not otherwise employed, looking into the red heat of the fire, till their eyes felt scorched in their heads. Their tawny features, now all begrimed with smoke and sweat, their matted beards, and the contrasting barbaric brilliancy of their teeth, all these were strangely revealed in the capricious emblazonings of the works. As they .. narrated to each other their unholy adventures, their ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

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

... Without any lingering spring, the cold grayness of long, tense winter gives place to a radiant sun-burst of warm, yellow light. The uplands have long since been blown bare of snow by the March winds, and through the tangle of matted turf shoot myriad purple cups of the prairie anemone, while the russet grass takes on emerald tints. One day the last blizzard may be sweeping a white trail of stormy majesty across the prairie; the ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut

... sleeping rooms, and the attics, with curious dormer windows, still higher. We come down again to the first floor. A long matted passage runs from one end of the house to the other. It sinks half a step where the newer portion is joined on. This part, containing in all four rooms, two here and two below, was built ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various

... respite from the steep climb, and the way led in a winding course through a matted, storm-wrenched forest of stunted trees. Even up to this elevation the desert reached with its gaunt hand. The clouds overspreading the sky, hiding the sun, made a welcome change. The pack-train rested, and Stewart and Madeline waited for the party to come ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey

... my knees and striving to rise found I might not, and glaring wildly up saw we were come 'neath Bartlemy's cursed pimento tree. Then she, loosing herself from my fainting arms, bent down to push the matted hair from my eyes, to support my failing strength in tender arms, and to lower my ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol

... rolling like balls of mahogany into the little dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of their matted, green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest, now made ripe in their high places and sent back to ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen

... resemble the cockle shell, but are much longer, many of them being three or four inches long; the others are of the shape of periwinkles, but six times as large. Both sorts are scattered over the plain, which is completely matted with grass. The soil is a dark rich alluvial, and judging from the cracks and holes, some of which are of considerable depth, they are splendid plains, but not a drop of surface water could we see upon them, nor a single bird to ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart

... to work, and filling their baskets with the sulphur, carry it out and throw it into large heaps of a conical shape. These mounds are covered over with moist clay, some openings being left for the escape of smoke; the bottom is then ignited, and the matted sulphur flows out through grooves into pans, where it congeals in solid masses. The passages to the mines are so narrow, that persons can with difficulty pass each other; they then expand into high vaults, the roofs of which are ornamented ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston

... his feet are encased in boots that have once been jaunty; his hat is as rakish as it is battered; his face wears that dull reddish hue, common to fair complexions that have been long exposed to sun and wind; his hair and beard, somewhat matted, somewhat disordered, may have borne some tinge of auburn or yellow once, but they too, have, unmistakeably, battled with the sun, and have come out a light hay color. As Constance looks at him, she, mentally, confesses that he is certainly the ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... which crimsoned with painful humiliation while she read. Philip was not now the trim and dainty stripling first introduced to the reader. He had outgrown his faded suit of funereal mourning; his long-neglected hair hung elf-like and matted down his cheeks; there was a gloomy look in his bright dark eyes. Poverty never betrays itself more than in the features and form of Pride. It was evident that his spirit endured, rather than accommodated itself ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... child-like in his dependence on me. I am the prop which holds up the last shreds of his self-respect. If I left him, he would drift lower and lower, I know it. Sometimes I pass some awful creature staggering along the sidewalks. He is dirty and uncared for. Long matted hair falls across his bleared and sunken eyes. I say to myself: 'But for you, Penelope Wells, that might be Julian.' And this gives me courage to take up my burden ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett

... peak of his shoulders as he sent forth the hunting cry to summon his loyal band. An hour later Cripp and Peg were with him, the three of them swinging west along the divide toward the rough mass of the main range of hills. Morning found them climbing through a matted jungle of ...
— The Yellow Horde • Hal G. Evarts

... we both saw him. Over the rocks, in the crevice of which the candle burned, there was thrust out an evil yellow face, a terrible animal face, all seamed and scored with vile passions. Foul with mire, with a bristling beard, and hung with matted hair, it might well have belonged to one of those old savages who dwelt in the burrows on the hillsides. The light beneath him was reflected in his small, cunning eyes which peered fiercely to right and left through the darkness like a crafty and savage animal who has heard ...
— The Hound of the Baskervilles • A. Conan Doyle

... Unless wigs of long hair are to be worn, the boys wearing the feathered head-dresses should be careful to see that their lack of long hair is concealed from view. Often the Indian braves wore their long matted locks braided; and black cheesecloth cut into strips and then braided and fastened to a tight black cap will make a splendid wig of this sort—the braids of hair should hang in front of the ears. The Indian braves should ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay

... into which the men possessed with devils used to go and howl, and rend themselves, in the old days of Jerusalem. We had to traverse thirty miles of this Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing nothing but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped to the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep. At the end of that distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch, in a common ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... him alone in his small lodgings in the Grande Rue, reading a yellow-covered French novel by the light of a German student-lamp. The room was simply furnished with a table, a divan, three or four stiff, straight-backed chairs, and a bookcase. But on the matted floor and divan there were two or three fine Sine carpets; a couple of trophies of splendidly ornamented weapons adorned the wall; by his side, upon a small eight-sided table inlaid with tortoise-shell and mother-of-pearl, stood a silver salver with an empty coffee-cup of ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford

... before we passed the frontier. There began to meet us, a little way in advance of Deutsch Altenburg, troops of those Torpindas, whom, in the ignorance of our hearts, we had, in Bohemia, mistaken for gipseys. There they were, with their hosen and coarse cloaks, their broad sombrero hats, and matted locks, trudging along, in bands of twelve or fourteen, and looking up with a glance of half cunning, half curiosity, from beneath their shaggy eyebrows. By-and-by came herds of cattle, quite different, both in colour and form, from any which we had previously encountered; ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig

... stood back, shaking and shuddering in every limb, while the murderer poured out the whisky; and again that liquor turned to snakes, and they crawled around the glass, and on the bar, and hissed, writhed, and squirmed. Then in one instant they all coiled about each other, and matted themselves into one snake, with a hundred heads; and from every head glittering eyes gleamed, and forked tongues hissed at me. I rushed from the saloon, and started, I did not know or care where, so that I might ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... his black doublet, booted, unbelted, with his felt hat beside him, lay the king, overcome by sleep and fatigue. They advanced, and Athos, who was the first to enter, gazed a moment in silence on that pale and noble face, framed in its long and now untidy, matted hair, the blue veins showing through the transparent temples, his eyes ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... falling back to the wall. And through the archway came two servitors in black habits, carrying between them on a huge platter of silver a black bull's head, ghastly and ominous even in death, with staring eyeballs and matted ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett

... root as soon as their extremity touches the ground, and appear like shrouds and stays supporting the mainmast of a line-of-battle ship; while others, sending out parallel, oblique, horizontal and perpendicular shoots in all directions, put you in mind of what travellers call a matted forest. Oftentimes a tree, above a hundred feet high, uprooted by the whirlwind, is stopped in its fall by these amazing cables of nature, and hence it is that you account for the phenomenon of seeing trees ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton

... was sitting on the banks of a stream bewailing her wretched lot, when she suddenly caught sight of herself in the water. Her hair and part of her face was quite concealed by the ass's head, which was drawn right over like a hood, and the filthy matted skin covered her whole body. It was the first time she had seen herself as other people saw her, and she was filled with shame at the spectacle. Then she threw off her disguise and jumped into the water, plunging in again and again, till she shone like ivory. When ...
— The Grey Fairy Book • Various

... the trail of Little Turtle and followed it to the scene of the massacre on Cow Creek, arriving there only two hours after the savages had finished their devilish work. Dead men were lying about in the short buffalo-grass which had been stained and matted by their flowing blood, and the agonized posture of their bodies told far more forcibly than any language the tortures which had come before a welcome death. All had been scalped; all had been mutilated in that nameless manner which seems to delight the brutal ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... makes his daily rounds in regular beaten pathways; and the trapper, knowing this peculiarity, turns it to advantage. This is a common habit with many animals; and these "runways" are easily detected by the matted leaves and grass and the broken twigs. Over such a beaten track ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson

... enough he was prevented in the simplest manner possible from carrying them into effect. He went crashing through the bushes as has already been related, and found himself on the edge of what was nothing more or less than a blind creek. The sides were covered with matted brushwood and were as slippery as glass. His momentum was such that he could not stop himself in time, and he went head over heels down the side of the gully, and spun on to the boulder-covered bottom like ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... when out sprang the bird from beside them, doubtless thinking she was the subject of observation instead of the rose-purple flowers that swung but a foot or two above her. But we never should have seen her had she kept her place. She had found a rent in the matted carpet of dry leaves and pine needles that covered the ground, and into this had insinuated her nest, the leaves and needles forming a canopy above it, sloping to the south and west, the source of the more ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... whole neighborhood. No one stirred, and the architect once more addressed himself to blessed sleep, feeling that morning must soon put an end to his tribulations. How long he slept he had no means of knowing. It was still dark when he awoke: dark but not still. A distant footfall tinkled on the matted floor, followed by another and another in rapid, measured succession. Could there be a cat or a dog in the room? He could see nothing. The moon was gone and the room was dark as Egypt. Possibly some animal escaped from a traveling menagerie had ...
— The House that Jill Built - after Jack's had proved a failure • E. C. Gardner

... was an old man whose long white hair lay in matted locks upon his shoulders, and whose beard fell far below his girdle. The skin of his face was like grey parchment, and his deep-set eyes glowed strangely in ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... her and was mute. Ere the setting of the moon they journeyed on with her; and continued so three days and nights through the defiles and ravines and matted growths of the mountains. On the fourth dawn they were on the summit of a lofty mountain-rise; below them the sun, shooting a current of gold across leagues of sea. Then he that had spoken with Bhanavar said, 'A ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... light barely making visible the strange, grotesque shapes of rocks, trees and men. Before us was a narrow opening, devoid of vegetation, a sterile patch of stone and sand, and beyond this a fringe of trees, matted with underbrush below so as to make good screen, but sufficiently thinned out above, so that, from our elevation, we could look through the interlaced branches across the cleared space where the timber had been chopped away to the palisades of ...
— Beyond the Frontier • Randall Parrish

... pervades the air And binds the brain—a dense oppression, such As tawny tigers feel in matted shades, Vexing their blood and making apt for ravage. Beneath the stars the roofy desert spreads Vacant as Libya. All is hushed near by. Yet fitfully from far breaks a mixed surf Of muffled sound, the Atheist roar of riot. Yonder, where parching Sirius set in drought, ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville

... of the thirty minutes he had spent on the ground floor had been devoted to improving his appearance. His black curly hair, usually as shining as satin, was rough, matted, dirty. Across his left cheek the sinister cut still ran, raw, angry-looking, freshly ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan

... shade of wonder Falling upon his features, I would guess, Of one that wanders out of blessedness! Julio! raise thee!—By the holy mass! I wot not of the fearless one would pass Thy wizard shadow. Where the raven hair Was shorn before, in many a matted layer It lieth now; and on a rock beside The sea, like merman at the ebb of tide, Feasting his wondrous vision on Decay, So art thou gazing ...
— The Death-Wake - or Lunacy; a Necromaunt in Three Chimeras • Thomas T Stoddart

... form of pubescence composed of matted, woolly hair: in Diptera applied to a covering of short, flattened, more or less recumbent, scale-like hair which merges gradually ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith

... bend of the road and began to climb the hill. Halfway up, as Joab had stated, they found their man. He lay beside the papaw bushes, among the loose stones, and he lay very still. One arm was doubled under him. His head was thrown back, and his brown hair was matted with blood. ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... and trousers he had lent him, that Edmond reappeared before the captain of the lugger, who had made him tell his story over and over again before he could believe him, or recognize in the neat and trim sailor the man with thick and matted beard, hair tangled with seaweed, and body soaking in seabrine, whom he had picked up naked and nearly drowned. Attracted by his prepossessing appearance, he renewed his offers of an engagement to Dantes; but Dantes, who ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... Then he ran his hand through his somewhat matted hair. "Mind now, I can't give you this ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele

... lucky ourselves, for this wrenching free of the boat had torn loose the long imbedded roots of the giant snag, and the plowing current getting under the vast flat back of matted roots, now slowly forced it, grinding and shuddering, down from the toe of the bar. With a sullen roll it settled down into new lines as it reached the deeper water. Then the hiss of the water among the branches ceased. Rolling and swaying, we were going with the current, fully afloat on ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... His position, together with his torn and disarranged garments, had destroyed all semblance to human form save where a great limb protruded. His visage was terribly disfigured by the effects of drink, besides being partly concealed by his matted hair. ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne

... brighter. She raised herself up to look towards the door;—the first object which met her eye, was a most horrible form, standing at a little distance from her bedside. Its appearance was tall and robust, wrapped in a tattered white robe, spotted with blood. The hair of its head was matted with clotted gore. A deep wound appeared to have pierced its breast, from which fresh blood flowed down its garment. Its pale face was gashed and gory! its eyes fixed, glazed, and glaring;—its lips open, its teeth set, and in its ...
— Alonzo and Melissa - The Unfeeling Father • Daniel Jackson, Jr.

... matted-together patch of earth fully thirty yards long and half as wide, a veritable island with bushes still in their places, floating steadily seaward, and helping to explain the muddiness of the water and the shallowness of the ocean far out and to ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... their leathers came leaping and straining beside the horses in their effort not to be dragged off their feet. One was a tall, gaunt, yellow-haired man, the other short and swarthy, but both so crusted with dirt, so matted and tangled and ragged, that they were more like beasts of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and red marks to the picture the dead man had been painting. He saw the figure of a boy in a seaman's jersey and long sea-boots dripping with water. The face of the boy was pale and swollen. The mouth hung down hideously. The hair was matted with moisture. Only the eyes were beautiful, for they looked upward with a rapt and ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... cried the bold Yankee, combing out his matted locks hastily with his fingers, and sitting up in what he conceived to be a proper position. "Here you are, sir. I'm your man; fix me off slick. Only think! Big Waller in a book—a ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... sitting in the midst of his beautiful companions. When the barge touched the shore, he was taken away from those companions of his forever, and was delivered over to a band of priests, exchanging the company of beautiful women for men clothed in black mantles, with long hair matted with blood—their ears also were mangled. These conducted him to the steps of the pyramid, and he was driven up amidst a crowd of priests, with drums beating and trumpets blowing. As he went up he broke ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell

... shoots out of the green matted heather, Preparing her hoods of snow: She was idle, and slept till the sunshiny weather: Oh, children ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various

... fell into his private room a man in the filthiest rags, with a greasy squash hat still askew on his head, and a shabby green shade shoved up from one of his eyes, both of which were glaring like a tiger's. The rest of his face was almost undiscoverable, being masked with a matted beard and whiskers through which the nose could barely thrust itself, and further buried in a squalid red scarf or handkerchief. Mr Usher prided himself on having seen most of the roughest specimens in the State, but he ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... ground. I had no sooner entered the reeds a few yards, to cut some of the longest, but (being about knee-deep in the water and mud, and every step raising my feet very high to keep them clear of the roots, which were matted together) I thought I had trod upon a trunk of one of the trees, of which, as I said, there was such plenty thereabouts; and raising my other foot to get that also upon the tree, as I fancied it, I found it move along ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock

... was not; for, on the opposite side of the fire, there sat with folded arms a wrinkled hideous figure, with deeply sunk and bloodshot eyes, and an immensely long cadaverous face, shadowed by jagged and matted locks of coarse black hair. He wore a kind of tunic of a dull bluish colour, which, the baron observed, on regarding it attentively, was clasped or ornamented down the front with coffin handles. His legs, too, were ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens

... a seaman, drawing water from the spring which had brought his former companions to the island. As he came in sight, the man turned his head, and stood for an instant spell-bound by the unexpected vision of a human being on that island, whose matted locks and tattered garments spoke the extreme of misery. There was only one hope for the sad wild boy—it was in flight—and turning, he ran swiftly back; but the path was strewn with rocks, and, in his haste, he stumbled and ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh

... the ungathered rice he lay, His sickle in his hand; His breast was bare, his matted hair Was buried in the sand. Again, in the mist and shadow of sleep, ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... day had fanned the bigotry—already at a white heat—of the Parisian populace. Tignonville turned sick as he listened, and would fain have closed his ears. But for his life he dared not. And presently a cripple in a beggar's garb, a dwarfish, filthy creature with matted hair, twitched his sleeve, and offered ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman

... allow no one to make the child's last toilet but herself. For this ceremony she needed no lace or satin, no gilt or mock jewelry. She washed the little form free of all earth's stain, combed loose the bright brown hair, matted with the sweat of suffering, and dressed her for the last—the last time, in one of the pretty white linen nightgowns she had made for her darling ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... and butternut-colored trousers repaired to the point of picturesqueness, his head surmounted by a limp, light-brown felt hat, frayed away at the top, so that his yellowish hair grew out of it like some nameless fern out of a pot. His tawny hair was long and tangled, matted now many years past the possibility of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... which had been staggering among the rocks near them, had fallen. They rushed to it. Vivian! She was trying to drag herself forward. Her hair, streaming down in a sodden mass, was matted with blood. Her pallid face was blood-smeared. Her neck and throat were a welter of crimson horror. Beside her on the ground lay a strange-looking apparatus of grids and wires—a metal belt—a skeleton helmet.... She was gripping it with a blood-smeared ...
— The World Beyond • Raymond King Cummings

... colour by the sun; his ribs stood out like the ribs of a basket, and the lumps on his knees and elbows, where he was used to track on all fours, gave his shrunken limbs the look of knotted grass-stems. But his eye, under his matted forelock, was cool and quiet, for Bagheera was his adviser in this time of trouble, and told him to go quietly, hunt slowly, and never, on any account, ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling

... grotesqueness of aspect which too often the hapless victims of violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of drunkenness, which was further simulated by their tumbled and disordered hair matted by coagulated blood, which, however, had lost its sanguine color. He thought only of the unsuspecting girl sitting in the lonely coach, and hurriedly dragged them further into the bushes. In doing this he discovered a loaded revolver and a flask of spirits ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... utensils, and brushing rudely against people in the dark. "Thrice," asserted the Rev. Samuel, "I have been pushed by an invisible power, once against the corner of my desk in the study, a second time against the door of the matted chamber, a third time against the right side of the ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce

... while our pistols and knives were stuck in our belts. We went on for two days pretty easily. I shall never forget the appearance of some people we met, who had come overland from the western states of America,—their haggard eyes, long matted hair, shrunk forms, and tattered clothes, which hung on them like loose rags fluttering in the wind. They were the remnants of a large party, the greater number of whom with their horses and cattle had died on the way, from the hardships they had to encounter. The latter part of the road, they said, ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... God-created world for the first time. A gang of stone masons went past him on the pavement, and all of them were reflected in his inner vision with an exaggerated vividness and brilliance of colour, just as though on the frosted glass of a camera obscura. The foreman, with a red beard, matted to one side, and with blue austere eyes; and a tremendous young fellow, whose left eye was swollen, and who had a spot of a dark-blue colour spreading from the forehead to the cheekbone and from the nose to the temple; and a young boy with a naive, country face, with a gaping ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... unnatural appearance to that feature. The man's frame was bony and powerful; the loose sheepskin jacket he wore was thrown open, and through the imperfectly fastened shirt-front, it might be seen that his breast was covered with a thick felt of matted hair. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... and sat down on one of the crazy chairs before the toilet-table. Her maid at once came forward and took off her wig, and her own beautiful brown hair appeared, pressed and matted close to her head in a ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... three children already before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore his shirt open at the neck, and several buttons lower, in ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... their camp, which she and Lite and Lee had been hunting through all the previous installments of the story. It was great stuff,—that ride Jean made in the blizzard,—and that scene where, with numbed fingers and snow matted in her dangling braid, she held up the rustlers and marched them out of the hills, and met Lite coming in search ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower

... prairies, and in the misty rain that fell and fell they seemed to melt afar into a gray and cheerless ocean. The sodden grass was matted now and unkempt. Lifeless lakes filled the depressions, and through them we waded mile after mile ankle-deep. There was a little cavalcade mounted on the tiny French ponies, and sometimes I rode with these; but oftenest Cowan or Tom would fling me; drum and all, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... he had no hat on his head, and his curly hair was tossed lightly by the evening breeze. As he moved further from the road, the back of his head was more directly exposed, presenting a most ghastly sight. The thick brown locks were matted together in a mass of gore, and large drops of blood slowly trickled down upon his coat; the whole back of the skull seemed to be crushed in, while the deadly pallor of his face gave him ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton

... behind him penetrated even the jungle growth as a faint luminosity. Presently he writhed to a position in which he could strike a match. A thick, matted mass of climbing vines swung from the upper branches not a yard from his fingertips. Bell cursed again, frantically, and clutched at it wildly. Presently his absurd kickings set him to swaying. He redoubled his efforts and increased the arc in which he swung. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... fingers to touch them, for she could almost feel their deep yellow through her finger-tips. It was like taking counsel of them, and they, like all nature, were wise. Cypress and acacia and palm stood about like strong comforters; help came from the tangled vines upon the garden wall, from the matted periwinkle on the ground at her feet, and the sweet late roses blossoming ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood

... rabbit is intelligent and very handsome. These need regular grooming and great care, or their long coat gets matted and frowsy. Belgian hares are big, powerful animals, rather apt to be uncertain in temper, but they have beautiful glossy coats and are enterprising and amusing. The lop-eared rabbit is a stately beast and less brisk than his prick-eared ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... fellow. Any way, I'll give five pounds for the pair," and to my horror, and before I could stay him, he took out five sovereigns, and "skidded" them along the matted floor towards the chief, a particularly irascible young ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke

... the doorway, and he was probably the most disreputable-looking officer who had ever worn the blue-and-silver uniform of the Service. His nose was bloody and swollen to twice its normal size. Both eyes were blackened, and his hair, matted with blood, was plastered in ragged swirls ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... the mountain regions of Luzon, Panay, Negros, and some smaller islands. They are dark, some of them being as black as African negroes. Their general appearance resembles that of the Alfoor Papuan of New Guinea. They have curly matted hair, like Astrakhan fur. The men cover only their loins, and the women dress from the waist to the knees. They are a spiritless and cowardly race. They would not deliberately face white men in anything like equal numbers ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... Allah?" "Yes," he said, "I should. Can I?" "Are you very sorry for the times you have been naughty and said bad words?" "Yes," he said; "if I get well, I will be better and kinder to grandmother." I parted his thick, matted hair, and, kneeling, I baptized him from the flask of water I always carried about at my side. "What is that?" asked the old woman, after a minute's silence. "It is a blessing," I answered, "and may do him good." I remained with him ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins

... same time a tall, heavy man came into the light, and approached the two. Johel was powerfully built, but he looked broken down and troubled. His jacket, without sleeves, was dirty and ragged, his bare feet cut and bruised, the fiery red hair matted, and the mouth swollen. There was something defiant in his looks, and yet he seemed as if he could not look anybody straight in the face. He went near the table to take a pinch of onion to season the bread he was ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko

... spear in hand, shook their matted hair and could not take it in at once. Yet they and their boys and girls had already learned to trust Wilfrid, and soon began to love the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... a pillar, with one knee bent. Over it was stretched the corpse of a girl, with the face horribly decomposed. The dull and flagging winds of the vault moved her dank and matted hair. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... and eight Douglas firs. The accumulation of duff, mostly needles, averaged eight inches deep, and, with the exception of one bunch of kinnikinick, there was neither grass nor weed, and only tiny, thinly scattered sun-gold reached the brown matted floor." ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills

... depressed so that trains may pass below the level of the highways. In order to protect the banks from erosion, the sloping sides of this roadway have been planted with trailing rose-bushes and other vines which have thickly matted roots. These serve a double purpose in preventing landslides and washouts on the tracks, and in adding greatly to the attractiveness of the scenery ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory

... we arrived at the end of the garden, and plunged into a narrow and dark lane that led out of the town. This passage we followed till we came out upon a deserted nook immediately under the walls of Moorshedabad, which were here much damaged, and matted with ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward

... she was unafraid of this big-bodied, black-browed men with the hairy-matted hands and fingers. She held ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... would melt them all away. I have not tasted such fruit—no! not even in Hampshire—since I was a boy; and to boys, I fancy, all fruit is good. I remember eating sloes and crabs with a relish. Do you remember the matted-up currant bushes, Margaret, at the corner of the west-wall ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... wild boars may have been prowling about in the woods and tangled thickets that covered this ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the northward horizon. This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will soon follow in the pathway of ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... foul abuse and swearing; her tender blue eyes grew watery and blear, and the peach-color on her cheeks fled from its old habitation, and crowded up into her nose, where, with a number of pimples, it stuck fast. Add to this a dirty, draggle-tailed chintz; long, matted hair, wandering into her eyes, and over her lean shoulders, which were once so snowy, and you have the picture of drunkenness and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... chin digging into Marcus's shoulder, the dentist heaved and tugged. His face was flaming, his huge shock of yellow hair fell over his forehead, matted with sweat. Marcus began to yield despite his frantic efforts. One shoulder was down, now the other began to go; gradually, gradually it was forced over. The little audience held its breath in the suspense of the moment. Selina broke the silence, ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... us in the artificial darkness; and there were snakes too, ugly spotted things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. But on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods." But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... bowls varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a gradual evolution of human culture. The lower strata in these great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees, sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir—which ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... side of it was the sage's abode. It was a rude hut, formed of stumps of trees and matted twigs, to secure him from the inclemency of the weather; only through small apertures crossed with rushes, the wind entered in wild murmurs, modulated by these obstructions. A clear spring broke out of ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft

... tolerantly. Patricia had come within the last two weeks to believe that she was neglected, if not positively ill-treated, by her husband; and she had no earthly objection to Mr. Charteris thinking likewise. Her face expressed patient resignation now, as they walked under the close-matted foliage of the beech-trees, which made a pleasant, sun-flecked gloom ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... complained. Mrs. Brenner came close to him and laid her hand on his wet, matted hair. "Tobey's a bad boy," she scolded. "You mustn't go out in the wet like this. ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... Merlin was technologically; Ghu, except to Thorans, was a Federation-wide joke. But he'd known a couple of Thorans at the University, funny little fellows, with faces like terriers, their bodies covered with matted black hair. They believed in Ghu the way he believed in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Ghu was with them every moment of their lives. Take away their belief in Ghu, and they would ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... hedges: for she wanted to gather flowers for a garland she designed to wear, and which was also to be blue and yellow. Towards evening she came home with her apron filled with all manner of flowers; but her hair was quite wet, and hung all matted about her shoulders. (My God, my God, was everything to come together to destroy me, wretched man that I am!) I asked, therefore, where she had been that her hair was so wet and matted; whereupon she answered that she had gathered flowers round ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold

... as he silently confronted the sooty object in the blanket and skewer (in sober truth it wore nothing else), with the matted hair and the staring eyes. Further, Mr. Traveller thought, as the eye surveyed him with a very obvious curiosity in ascertaining the effect they produced, "Vanity, vanity, ...
— Tom Tiddler's Ground • Charles Dickens

... huddled close up to the face of the mother, who when she realized their terrible fate had evidently raised it to her lips to imprint upon its lips the last kiss it was to receive in this world. The sight forced many a stout heart to shed tears. The limp bodies, with matted hair, some with holes in their heads, eyes knocked out and all bespattered with ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker

... touched his face, and showed her Travis: haggard, hollow-eyed, soaked with ditch-water, and matted with mud, looking as if he had been dragged bodily through the ditch-bank, like thread through a piece ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... from the warm sand in which it was buried. Or I crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously frightened; I held on with both hands, and shook my head, exulting in the tumult around me, equally ready to laugh ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various

... left followed by a servant with a couple of sporting dogs in leash. ULFHEIM is in shooting costume, with high boots and a felt hat with a feather in it. He is a long, lank, sinewy personage, with matted hair and beard, and a loud voice. His appearance gives no precise clue to his age, but he is no ...
— When We Dead Awaken • Henrik Ibsen

... left the dark recess in which he slept. He could be heard coughing, gasping and tossing about in this hole. In order to see him, to give his medicine and to apply cupping-glasses they had to-bring a candle to the entrance. Then one could see his narrow head with his long matted beard underneath a thick lacework of spiders' webs, which hung and floated when stirred by the air. And the hands of the sick man seemed ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... the blood-matted hair. She lifted the head aloft, and the bracelets on her brown, bare arms fell to her shoulders, making strange music. Her face pressed ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard

... with enthusiasm, as she pointed to the rushing torrent that, through matted trees and cragged ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... in any convenient position for the batcher or "striker-up" to deal with. If the reader could watch the above operation of separating the heads of jute into suitable sizes, it would perhaps be much easier to understand the process of unravelling an apparently matted and crossed mass of fibre. As the loosened head emerges from the bale-opener, Figs. 8 or 9, it is placed over the operative's arm with the ends of the head hanging, and by a sort of intuition acquired by great ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour

... fertility, but simply because the society of the natives would be intolerable to civilized noses. They are the filthiest people in the whole world. Words cannot convey an idea of their disgusting nature. They have long hair matted together with red clay and palm oil. This composition has a most outrageous smell, and with it they smear their faces and bodies. They are, generally speaking, a stout, athletic, well made race of people, and particularly harmless in their ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... ivy, weed and wall-flower grown, Matted and mass'd together; hillocks heap'd On what were chambers, arch crushed, column strewn In fragments; choked-up vaults, and frescoes steep'd In subterranean damps, where the owl peep'd ...
— Barbara's Heritage - Young Americans Among the Old Italian Masters • Deristhe L. Hoyt

... Not so this dismal moss: it does not appear to grow, or to have root, or even clinging fibre of any sort, by which it attaches itself to the bark or stem. It hangs in dark gray, drooping masses from the boughs, swinging in every breeze like matted, grizzled hair. I have seen a naked cypress with its straggling arms all hung with this banner of death, looking like a gigantic tree of monstrous cobwebs,—the most funereal spectacle ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... was only saved from falling by the close neighbourhood of the wall, on which he came with a shock that for the moment well-nigh stunned him. Meanwhile Darrell had gained the hearth, and snatched from it a large log half-burning. Jasper, recovering himself, dashed the long matted hair from his eyes, and, seeing undismayed the formidable weapon with which he was menaced, cowered for a second ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... wandering along the edge of the lake in the cold brilliant sunshine, or in the more mysterious depths of the forest, listening to the silence or watching the drops of light fall through the matted treetops, felt more at peace with the world than she had done since her fatal embarkation on the political sea. She put the memory of Harriet Walker, insistent at first, impatiently aside, and in a day or two that shadow crept back ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton

... the over-crowding orange-boughs, straggled old Italy as well—but not in Boccaccio's velvet: a row of ragged and livid contadini, some simply stupid in their squalor, but some downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and terribly ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... from its grandeur and variety. Beginning among quiet rice-fields and brown agricultural villages at an altitude of 5,000 feet, the track, usually bad and sometimes steep and perilous, passes through flower-gemmed alpine meadows, along dark gorges above the booming and rushing Sind, through woods matted with the sweet white jasmine, the lower hem of the pine and deodar forests which ascend the mountains to a considerable altitude, past rifts giving glimpses of dazzling snow-peaks, over grassy slopes dotted ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)

... lane A window pane Gleams 'mid the trees through night and rain. The weeds are dense Through which a fence Of pickets rambles, none sees whence, Before a porch, all indistinct of line, O'er-grown and matted with wistaria-vine. ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein

... clad the field with white, 40 Here a rough shaggy rock the clouds did pierce, From which a torrent rush'd with rapid force; Here mountain-woods diffused a dusky shade; Here flocks and herds in flowery valleys play'd, While o'er the matted grass the liquid crystal stray'd. In this sweet place there dwelt a cheerful pair, Though bent beneath the weight of many a year; Who, wisely flying public noise and strife, In this obscure retreat had pass'd their life; The husband Industry was call'd, Frugality the wife. 50 With ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside

... half-hour our ardor was a little dampened. But we soon set to work in earnest and began to beat a little bottom lying between two hills, through which ran a ditch, thickly grown up with bushes and briers. The dead swamp-grass was very heavy in the narrow little bottom along the sides, and was matted in tufts. The dogs were scattered, and prowling around singly or in couples; and only one of the pointers and Snip were really on the ditch. Snip showed signs of great industry, and went bobbing backward and forward through a patch of heavy matted grass. In any other dog this ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page

... Irving as Shylock; there were the Jewish married women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on her head a cushion of green that hung below her shoulders; there were Greek priests with matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turkish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, who looked through them with horror, or envy, at the English, Scotch, and American nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, sleet, and sun, wearing men's hobnailed boots, men's blouses, ...
— With the French in France and Salonika • Richard Harding Davis

... shifting hillocks of sand, we were in the midst of tropical vegetation. Trees not only bore their own natural burdens, but were borne down with creepers, vines, and parasitic plants; forming one strange mass of foliage of very many distinct kinds matted together and mingled into one. Plantations of vanilla, of coffee, of cocoa, or of sugar-cane, nowhere approached our road; nor were the cocoa-nut, the banana, and the plantain, so familiar in all tropical climates, often visible. Upon the whole route ...
— Mexico and its Religion • Robert A. Wilson

... ascaris vermicularis, thread, pin, or seat-worm, is round, very slender, and about half an inch in length. The habitation of this species is the rectum, and they are often found matted together in the excrement. They are very active, even after ejection, and have been known to cause great local irritation by entering the vagina and urethra. Their presence is an occasional cause of ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... followed this advice with the exception of one man, a coarse savage-looking fellow, with a huge black beard and matted locks, who called himself Bradling, though there was ground for doubting whether that was the name by which he had been at first known in the world. This man pulled out an enormous brandy-flask, and with ...
— Digging for Gold - Adventures in California • R.M. Ballantyne

... have some, and she, considering them as mere wild flowers, said I might have as many as I liked. She might have thought I wanted simply the blossoms, but the next morning I went over to my house with a basket filled with great matted masses of the plants taken up with the roots and plenty of earth around them, and after twenty minutes' work in my own bed of pinks, I had taken out all the old plants and filled their places with fresh, luxuriant masses of buds ...
— The Magic Egg and Other Stories • Frank Stockton

... is indeed, "a wild spot, covered with the primitive forest and seamed by a deep and tortuous ravine, where the St. Charles foams, white as a snow drift, over the black ledges, and where the sunshine struggles through matted boughs of the pine and the fir, to bask for brief moments on the mossy rocks, or flash on the hurrying waters.... Here, to this day, the tourist finds the remnants of a lost people, harmless weavers of baskets and ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... advance to the rail and remain till their place was wanted by others, and that the last should not return to their seats till the service was concluded. Mr. Charlecote had for many years been always the first parishioner to walk slowly up the matted aisle, and kneel beside the wall, under the cumbrous old tables of Commandments. There, on this day, he knelt as usual, and harvest labours tending to thin the number of communicants, the same who came up first remained to the end, joined their voices in the ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... he looked. His clothes were nearly gone, his hair was tossed and matted, his eyes bloodshot, his big hands like pieces of raw meat, his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... at his funereal, black garments which clung to him with the closeness of a shroud,—at his long, untrimmed beard and snow-white hair that fell in disordered, matted locks below his shoulders,—at his majestic form which in spite of cords and feathers he held firmly erect in an attitude of fearless and composed dignity. There was something supernaturally grand ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli

... seemed to be emptied of all its resources, a tide of reserve energy swelled, under the impulse of which the exhausted youth untwisted the grip of the iron hand, flung off the heavy body, mounted upon it, crowded the great head with its matted hair and staring eyes down into the dust, seized the stone with his right hand, raised it, ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss

... taken from me!' This, and more, he said in his rage. Ghastly horror took possession of me, as I beheld his features, streaming even yet with blood, and the ruthless hands, and the round space deprived of the eye, and his limbs, and his beard matted with human blood. Death was before my eyes, {and} yet that was the least of my woes. I imagined that[20] now he was about to seize hold of me, and that now he was on the very point of swallowing my vitals within ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... She watched, expecting every moment to see him roll over, a corpse, but knowing from past experiences that he would recover somehow. His recoveries always seemed to her like miracles, and she watched the long pallid face crushed under a shock of dark matted hair, a dirty nightshirt, a pair of thin legs; but for the moment the grandeur of human suffering covered him, lifting him beyond the pale of loving or loathing, investing and clothing him in the pity of tragic things. The room, too, seemed transfigured. The ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... frozen deserts, only a thousand infantry and horsemen still under arms, nine cannon, and twenty thousand miserable wretches covered with rags, with downcast looks, hollow eyes, earthy and livid complexions, long beards matted with the frost; some disputing in silence the narrow passage of the bridge, which, in spite of their small number was not sufficient to the eagerness of their flight; others fleeing dispersed over the asperities of the river, labouring ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur

... the women have often heard. May we come in? Oh yes, come in! But with us in comes an old fakeer of a specially villainous type. His body is plastered all over with mud; he has nothing on but mud. His hair is matted and powdered with ashes, his face is daubed with vermilion and yellow, his wicked old eyes squint viciously, and he shows all his teeth, crimson with betel, and snarls his various wants. The women say ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... Was it possible that he had been unconscious for more than six hours? He had left Jean on the mountain top soon after nightfall—it was not later than nine o'clock when he had seen Meleese. Seven hours! Again he lifted his hands to his head. His hair was stiff and matted with blood. It had congealed thickly on his cheek and neck and had soaked the top of his coat. He had bled a great deal, so much that he wondered he was alive, and yet during those hours his captors had ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... stone-wall to sound his call in the spring. This persistence exposes the quail to hardship when the ground is covered with snow, and the fruit of the skunk-cabbage and all the berries and grain are inaccessible. He takes refuge at such times in the smilax-thickets, whose dense, matted covering leaves an open feeding-ground below. But a snowy winter always tells upon their numbers in any neighborhood. Whole coveys are said to have been found dead, frozen stiff, under the bush where they had huddled together for warmth; and even before this extremity, their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various

... stormily, without shame, without any attempt to check or conceal his emotion. As in the tarantella he had given himself up utterly to joy, so now he gave himself up utterly to something that seemed like despair. He cried loudly. His whole body shook. The sea-water ran down from his matted hair and mingled with the tears that ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens

... my place better than that," was the reply, and forthwith Mrs. Evans, who, beneath a somewhat stern exterior, possessed a really good heart, took Wikkey under her wing, administered warmth and restoratives, washed the grimy little form, cropped and scrubbed the matted locks, and soon the boy, dreamily conscious and wondrously happy, was lying before a blazing fire, clean and fair to look on, enveloped in one of Mrs. Evans' own night-dresses. Then the question arose, where was Wikkey to pass the night, followed by a whispered dialogue and emphatic "Nothing ...
— Wikkey - A Scrap • YAM

... from heavy timber on the mountains that had been burned over years and years before, until nothing was left but limbless trunks of dead trees—firs and pines—that had fallen from time to time until the ground was matted with huge logs from five to eight feet in diameter. These could not be chopped with axes nor sawed by any ordinary means, therefore we had to burn them into suitable lengths, and drag the sections to either side of the roadway with from four to ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan

... into each of these rooms in succession, and brushed out the heavy, wet sand from the berths. The rotten quilts and blankets fell with the sand in matted masses to the floor. In each room was a seaman's chest. Two of these were covered deeply; the other two but lightly: the latter were unlocked, and he opened the lids. Only some old clothes appeared, however, and these ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille

... in the large dark room, with the soft matted floor, and the windows high up near the carved timbered ceiling, the single lamp, burning in rum, casting a dim gleam over the well-known furniture, by which her mother had striven to give an English appearance to the room. It was very dreary, and she would ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge

... ghastly pale, he tottered forward with tremulous steps. His eyes had an unearthly luster, his cheeks a burning flush, and his neglected hair and long beard were matted in a ...
— The Martyr of the Catacombs - A Tale of Ancient Rome • Anonymous

... Cross. Sudden upon his knees, Heart-pierced, as though he saw that Head thorn-pierced, Fell that wild chief, and was baptised to God; And, lifting up his great strong hands, while still The waters streamed adown his matted locks, He cried, "Alas, my master, and my sire! I sinned a mighty sin; for in my heart Fixed was my purpose, soon as thou hadst knelt, To slay thee with my sword. Therefore judge thou What ERIC I must pay to quit my ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere

... first rising from the burning brakes, lodged among the tree-tops; then, meeting the humid night-air in the matted leaves, descended slowly. Dick found himself nearly smothered when he had partly recovered from the spell-bound wonder of the demoniac fete. The ground under his feet felt gratefully cool. He bent down, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan

... have often heard. May we come in? Oh yes, come in! But with us in comes an old fakeer of a specially villainous type. His body is plastered all over with mud; he has nothing on but mud. His hair is matted and powdered with ashes, his face is daubed with vermilion and yellow, his wicked old eyes squint viciously, and he shows all his teeth, crimson with betel, and snarls his various wants. The women say "Chee!" Then he rolls in the dust, and squirms, and wriggles, and howls; and he pours out such unclean ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael

... said, and put a caressing hand on his matted mane. "Oh, he's wild, but he knows me! Bern, can he ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... turned over the corpse, and thrusting his hand into the inner breast-pocket, dragged out a roll of MSS., matted closely together and stained by the winter's rains. A further search eventuated in finding a roll of small gold coin, a set of derringer pistols, a rusted double-edged dirk, and a pair of silver-mounted spectacles. Hastily covering over the body with ...
— The Case of Summerfield • William Henry Rhodes

... favour of a Vine, Which grew where suns most genial shine, And formed a thick and matted bower Which might have turned a summer shower, Was saved by ruinous assault. The hunters thought their dogs at fault, And called them off. In danger now no more The Stag, a thankless wretch and vile, Began to browse his benefactress o'er. The hunters ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various

... There was a matted hall sunk a foot below the threshold, and to Rose, accustomed to the delicate order of Nelson Lodge with its slim, shining, old furniture, its polished brass and gleaming silver, the comfortable carelessness of this place, with a man's cap on the hall table, a group of ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... Behind him, from the road, came a man's voice, suddenly, singing a rollicking drinking-song. The singer brought up beside Nicanor, a black-haired man in a soiled leather jerkin and cap of shining brass, with a matted beard and narrow eyes, and a great leaf-shaped sword swinging at his thigh. This one hailed him ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... way, the man had come by a wicked blow upon the head. It was the cause, I suspected, of his swoon, and stertorous breathing. Dried blood was plastered on the boards about his head, and his thick, dark hair was clotted and matted with the ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer

... Brimming and bright and large: then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles— Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foil'd circuitous wanderer:—till at last The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power

... which he had not yet removed at entrance, gave an additional gloom to his dark features, which, wasted by sorrow and marked by the ghastly look communicated by long illness, added to a countenance naturally somewhat stern and wild, a fierce and even savage expression. The matted and disheveled locks of hair which escaped from under his hat, together with his fixt and unmoved posture, made his head more resemble that of a marble bust than that of a living man. He said not a single word, and there was a deep silence in the company for more ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various

... has been taken from me!' This, and more, he said in his rage. Ghastly horror took possession of me, as I beheld his features, streaming even yet with blood, and the ruthless hands, and the round space deprived of the eye, and his limbs, and his beard matted with human blood. Death was before my eyes, {and} yet that was the least of my woes. I imagined that[20] now he was about to seize hold of me, and that now he was on the very point of swallowing my vitals within his own; in my mind was fixed the impress of that time ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso

... there would come a change. Where the threads had lain hopelessly matted, appeared some semblance of order, as though the Weaver had come. Then, as they became separate groups, a faint glow of green dawned above them, not so much colour as the promise of colour, not so much design ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... Acre in their progress towards the British Museum, to which national establishment they had cards of admission, the two friends were intercepted in their way by a concourse at a coach-maker's shop, fronting which stood a chariot carefully matted round the body, firmly sewed together, and the wheels enveloped in hay-bands, preparatory to its being sent into the country. Scarcely had these precautionary measures of safety been completed, when a shrill cry, as if by a child inside the vehicle, was heard, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... The matted thistles, bending to the gale, Now clothe those meadows once with verdure gay; Amidst the windings of that lonely vale The ...
— Oriental Literature - The Literature of Arabia • Anonymous

... new life. His heaven, Kailas, is in the Himalayas according to popular belief. He carries the moon on his forehead, and from the central one of his three eyes the lightning flashes forth. He has a necklace of skulls, and snakes are intertwined round his waist and arms. And he has long matted hair (jata), from which the Ganges flows. It seems likely that the matted locks of the god represent the snow on the Himalayas, as the snow is in reality the source of the Ganges; the snow falling through the air and covering the peaks of the mountains might ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell

... watched, expecting every moment to see him roll over, a corpse, but knowing from past experiences that he would recover somehow. His recoveries always seemed to her like miracles, and she watched the long pallid face crushed under a shock of dark matted hair, a dirty nightshirt, a pair of thin legs; but for the moment the grandeur of human suffering covered him, lifting him beyond the pale of loving or loathing, investing and clothing him in the pity of tragic things. The room, too, ...
— A Mummer's Wife • George Moore

... surface presented itself. Having started to run, they ran on and on and on. The boy and girl followed, their horses stumbling blindly over the ridges between which the corn was growing. The grayish brown sod, through which the matted white roots of the grass showed plainly, lay in fine lines down the long field, their irregular edges causing horses and cattle to go down on their knees frequently as they ran. But though the cattle sometimes fell, they were as quickly up and pushed blindly ahead, neither knowing nor caring ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... costume Otto had procured for him, which was that of a laborer about the quays; and, as he was a man who did perfectly whatever he attempted to do, he had succeeded in rendering himself unrecognizable. His hair and beard were rough and matted; his hands were soiled and grimed with dirt; he was really the abject wretch whose rags ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau

... Brothers spend the afternoon in exploring the country a-head for 7 miles. After crossing the river, the course lay through flooded country (the marks on the trees being in some cases five feet high, covered with box, and vine scrub, and the water, grasses, and rushes being matted together with mud and rubbish,) to a large stream with broad sandy bed, divided into three channels, altogether about 600 yards wide, but with little water in them. The banks and islands were covered with vine scrub, and lined with ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine

... grabbed the dog at last and pulled him off. They laughed as they set the Arab on his feet and gave him back his gun; and they laughed at him with Christian and mannerly good grace when he spat at them in awful frenzy until the spittle matted in his beard. And, being gentlemen after a fashion quite their own, ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy

... chief difference being in the bill which is shorted. They have been found breeding on the same islands with the preceding species. Their single white egg is laid in crevices in the cliffs. Size 2.40 x 1.30. Data.—Sanak Is., Alaska, June 25, 1890. Nest in a hollow under a bunch of rank matted grass. Many ancient Burrelets breeding on the same ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed

... atmosphere of love, and suspicion, and jealousy that was stifling her, into the hall, up the shallow staircase to the long matted passage which ran the length of the house, the bed-rooms opening on to it on either side. Madelon paced it rapidly for some minutes, then opened a door at the end, and entered the nursery. Nothing stifling here; a large, cool, airy room, with white blinds drawn down, subduing the ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter

... medicine man of fierce aspect, who sat by himself under a rough tent, muttering charms and incantations, and waiting for Allah to send victims. This wonder-worker had piercing eyes, that seemed to examine the back of your head, long matted hair and a beard to match. He wore a white djellaba and a pair of new slippers, and was probably more dangerous than any disease he ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... before he took her in marriage. He was a railroad engineer who drove a switch engine in the yards. He was as short as she was tall ... a diminutive man, but virile ... with a deep, hoarse voice resonant like a foghorn. The little man had an enormous chest matted with dense, black hair. It would almost have made a whole head of hair for an average man. One could always see this hair because he was proud of its possession, thought it denoted virility and strength, and wore his ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... in the vast tundra regions of Northern Siberia the frozen soil had dissolved into a bottomless slough, from whose depths uprose prehistoric mammoths, their long hair matted with mud, and their curved tusks of ivory gleaming like trumpets over the field of their resurrection. The dispatch concluded with a heart-rending account of the loss of a large party of ivory hunters, who, having ventured ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... asked me to drink coffee at his house close by, and there I 'sat in the gate'—i.e., in a large sort of den raised 2 feet from the ground and matted, to the left of the gate. A crowd of Copts collected and squatted about, and we were joined by the mason who was repairing the church, a fine, burly, rough-bearded old Mussulman, who told how the Sheykh buried in the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon

... the man was changed beyond all recognition. Caste-mark, stomach, slate-colored continuations, and unctuous speech were all gone. I looked at a withered skeleton, turban-less and almost naked, with long matted hair and deep-set codfish-eyes. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... position he had occupied, when, months ago, he had beckoned me to remain, he sat there, dead in his chair. His clothing hung about him in that sharply angular fashion in which garments cling to a corpse. Long, thin locks were matted above his brow, awesomely disarranged. But the pose of his head, drooped a little forward, suggested a melancholy ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... gregarious habit. Here at Owl's Head, for instance, might be seen in one place a rock thickly matted with the common polypody; in another a patch of the maiden-hair; in still another a plenty of the Christmas fern, or a smaller group of one of the beech ferns (Phegopteris polypodioides or Phegopteris Dryopteris). Our grape-ferns or moonworts, on the other hand, covet ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... not speaking to her—speaking to himself, and giving rein to all the rankling rage at wrong that wrong had nurtured in him since his boyhood. She knelt still by the chair, her eyes following him as he raged up and down the matted floor. She pitied him more than ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy

... he may safely view us through the folding doors, and note down our several positions around the board. At the head of the table presides, with much dignity, Mrs. Bourne; at the end opposite, sits Mr. Bourne—both of the glossiest jet; the thick matted hair of Mr. B. slightly frosted with age. He has an affable, open countenance, in which the radiance of an amiable spirit, and the lustre of a sprightly intellect, happily commingle, and illuminate the sable covering. On either hand of Mr. B. we sit, occupying the posts of honor. On the ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... candle-light he stood, a flaw in the decorous fittings of the apartment. His face was a sickly white, covered almost to the eyes with a stubble the shade of a red Irish setter's coat. Phillips's comb had failed to control the pale brown hair, long matted and conformed to the contour of a constantly worn hat. His eyes were full of a hopeless, tricky defiance like that seen in a cur's that is cornered by his tormentors. His shabby coat was buttoned high, but a quarter inch of redeeming collar showed above it. His ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry

... and ravines, there was not much difficulty in approaching from the leeward; for, though the sense of smell in the buffalo is very acute, they do not see well at a distance through their overhanging frontlets of coarse and matted hair. If, as was generally the case, they were out in the open, rolling prairie, the stalking was far more difficult. Every hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt

... sort of work. I kept close to M'bo, and when we got to the shore, the rest of the wanderers being collected, we said "chances are there's a village round here"; and started to find it. After a gay time in a rock-encumbered forest, growing in a tangled, matted way on a rough hillside, at an angle of 45 degrees, M'bo sighted the gleam of fires through the tree stems away to the left, and we bore down on it, listening to its drum. Viewed through the bars of the tree stems the scene was very picturesque. The village was just a collection of ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... and mantle had gone; her under-garments were torn to shreds, leaving exposed the slender body which leaned sideways like a tree which had been struck by lightning. Her matted hair fell far below her waist; it made a frame to the horrible face, one side of which was as that of an old, old hag, and the other, grimed with dirt, flecked with foam, was yet as lovely as ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest

... occurred which brings her character into high relief. A dying Arab boy was brought to her to be treated for rheumatic fever. She says, "I saw that death was near.... 'Would you like to see Allah?' I said, taking hold of his cold hand.... I parted his thick, matted hair, and kneeling, I baptised him from the flask of water I always carried at my side. 'What is that?' asked his grandmother after a minute's silence. 'It is a blessing,' I answered, 'and may do him good!'" [244] The ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... what she herself doubted it. When she had once made up her mind in the negative, no foolish attempt of mine could overpersuade her—could make her trust our weight on it a hair's-breadth. In a bog the greenest spots are the most dangerous, and Zoe knew it: the matted roots might be afloat on a fathomless depth of water. Backed by my uncle, she soon taught me to be as much afraid of those green spots as she was herself. I had learned to trust ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald

... were carried up the steps and past the neighbors, who stood by watching for their own, Rebecca's mother saw her youngest boy lying unconscious with his face white as death and his hair matted with blood that oozed from a wound in his neck. She almost fainted, but Rebecca held her firm, saying, 'Mother, now is the time to brace up and take care of Newell that ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... blankets from the head of the man in the upper bunk. The boyish sleeping face was flushed. Dark matted hair clung to the damp forehead and there was a sickening odor of vile liquor in the air. A long moment the trader looked to see if Harlan would open his eyes. Then with a contemptuous laugh he flung the blanket over the lean ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... Captivity started, and shot a glance at the dark visage before him, but the glance read nothing. The upper part of the countenance of the African was half concealed by masses of dark matted hair, and the lower by his uncouth robes. A flashing eye was its only characteristic, which darted forth like lightning out of a ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli

... rags—torn to pieces by the thrusts of the sharp-pointed bamboos, to which they had daily been subjected—the bad food, the cramped position, and the misery which they suffered had worn both lads to skeletons; their hair was matted with filth, their faces begrimed with dirt. Percy was so weak that he felt he could not stand. Fothergill, being three years older, was less exhausted, but he knew that he, too, could not support his sufferings for many days longer. Their bodies were covered with sores, and try ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty

... viverrina, Bennett), which is rather abundant in these parts, generally taking up its quarters in low, swampy jungle, where it often carries off calves, for which the leopard (F. leopardus, Linn.), undeservedly gets credit. Lately, a couple of months ago, a pair of them at night broke into a matted house, and went off with a brace of ewes, which had half-a-dozen lambs between them, born only a short time before their mothers met with their bloody end. I have caught this species in traps, and when let loose in an indigo vat with a miscellaneous pack of dogs, they have invariably ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale

... loitered a moment in the doorway, looking out into the night. Before him stretched the river; so near was it that he could hear the musical lappings of its waters among the tall grasses that bordered the stream. From the ground, matted thickly with pine needles, rose a warm, sun-scorched fragrance ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett

... ribbon through the valley and across the hills; the air was still, and full of the pungent fragrance of burning brush, and yellow leaves rustled about her feet. The faded grass had been beaten down by the rain, and was matted above the graves; here and there a frosted weed stood straight and thin against the low soft sky; some late golden-rod blazed along the edge of the meadow among the purple asters, and a single stalk of cardinal flowers flashed out beside the lichen-covered ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... all together in the open boats and roared together for pity and release. Then, for the first time, I was able to see how cruelly Czerny's gun had dealt with them in the darkness of the night. It was horrible to see the bloody limbs, the open wounds, the matted hair, the gaping faces of these creatures of a desperado's mad ambition. The boats themselves were splintered and hacked as though heavy hatches had beaten them. I could wonder no longer that they called the ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... the Germans had fortified their position in Belleau Woods which they had previously occupied. In the black recesses of this woods they established nest after nest of machine guns and in the jungle of matted underbrush, of vines, of heavy foliage they had placed themselves in a position they believed impregnable. The battle of Chateau Thierry was not rendered secure until the Germans were driven from Belleau Woods. And so for the next three weeks the battle of Belleau Woods raged. ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... his head; not from fear of contagion, however. And his eyes were drawn to the window in spite of his resolute will. He looked once, and looked again, then checked his horse. On the bed lay a girl in the middle stages of the disease, her eyes glittering with delirium, her black hair matted and wet. She was evidently alone. Estenega spurred his horse and galloped around to the back of the hut. In the kitchen, the only other room, huddled an old crone, brown and gnarled like an old apple. She was sleeping; by her side was a bottle of aguardiente. Estenega ...
— The Doomswoman - An Historical Romance of Old California • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... long, rank grass, thick and soft and falling in billows, was always wet until midday. The gravel walks were bordered with great lilac-bushes, mock-orange, and bridal-wreath. Back of the house was a neglected rose garden, surrounded by a low stone wall over which the long suckers trailed and matted. They had wound their pink, thorny tentacles, layer upon layer, about the lock and the hinges of the rusty iron gate. Even the porches of the house, and the very windows, were damp and heavy with growth: wistaria, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... present Mrs. Hichens was to be established in the tent, very comfortably matted as to the floor and furnished with all necessary appointments of a satisfying quality and wealthy appearance. Men of high rank must do all things with a certain pomp and circumstance, otherwise the ignorant ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... little to the left of the spot where this shocking disaster occurred, a small clump of whitethorn trees, so closely matted together, that it was impossible to see through them. We all, therefore, ran round as if by instinct, to watch the tumbling body of poor Raymond, when what was our surprise to see a powerful young man, about eight or ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... flat, nor are their lips thick; their teeth are white and even, and their hair naturally long and black, it is however universally cropped short; in general it is straight, but sometimes it has a slight curl; we saw none that was not matted and filthy, though without oil or grease, and to our great astonishment free from lice. Their beards were of the same colour with their hair, and bushy and thick: They are not however suffered to grow long. A man whom we had seen one day with his beard ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... of bowls, spoons, buckets, piggins or cans, matted-baskets, and perhaps a Russian kettle or pot. All these utensils are very neatly made, and well formed; and yet we saw no other tools among them but the knife and the hatchet, that is, a small flat piece of iron, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr

... nearly overlooked the lower rim of his cap. A sort of dubious leer was its predominant expression, heightened ever and anon by a broad laugh, the eldritch shout of which first announced itself to the ear of the pilgrim. Matted and shaggy, the twisted locks hung wildly about his brow, whilst a short and frizzled beard served as a scanty covering to his chin. A "Sheffield whittle" stuck in his baldric; and in a pouch was deposited the remnant of a magnificent pasty. From oft and over replenishment ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... on my hands and knees, and threaded my way through the long grasses and matted boughs as noiselessly as I could. The two old hands watched me. When I emerged several yards off, much to their surprise, Colebrook turned to Doolittle. "Might answer," he said curtly. "Major says, 'Choose your own men.' Anyhow, if they ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... pushed forward, dripping wet, drenched to the skin with the recent shower, and stumbling every now and then as their feet became entangled in the long matted grass; now swerving to the right to avoid a clump of bush, then to the left for the same purpose; but ever keeping one particular star, low down on the horizon, as nearly straight ahead as possible. Though the rest of the party felt themselves utterly ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood

... desert and the desert received him with the breath of the hissing wind and the ardour of the glowing sun. Again he sat on the stone with matted beard uplifted; and two black holes, where the eyes had once been, looked dull and horrible at the sky. In the distance the Holy City surged and roared restlessly, but near him all was deserted and still. ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... at Saint Cloud Wherein John's picture of her grew To be a Salon masterpiece— Till the rain fell that would not cease. Through one long alley how they raced!— 'Twas gold and brown, and all a waste Of matted leaves, moss-interlaced. Shades of mad queens and hunter-kings And thorn-sharp feet of dryad-things Were company to their wanderings; Then rain and darkness on them drew. The rich folks' motors honked and flew. They hailed an old cab, heaven for two; The bright Champs-Elysees ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... which the trees threw their broad balancing sprays, and long nameless weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with diamond drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine in the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent shrew of a housewife, after ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke

... deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegetation, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life- forms that rooted in death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ...
— The Red One • Jack London

... soon after the time of blossoming. Prepare soil, as previously directed. Loosen the earth from the pot, by passing a knife around the sides. Turn the plant upside down, and remove the pot. Then remove all the matted fibres at the bottom, and all the earth, except that which adheres to the roots. From woody plants, like roses, shake off all the earth. Take the new pot, and put a piece of broken earthen-ware over the hole at the bottom; and then, ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... the prominent person among the native population of this territory. Major Harris describes him well. The bronzed and sunburnt visage, surrounded by long matted locks of raven hair; the slender but wiry and active frame, and the energetic gait and manner, proclaimed the untamable descendant of Ishmael. He nimbly mounts the crupper of his now unladen dromedary, and at a trot moves down the bazar. A checked kerchief round his brows, and a kilt of dark ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various

... smaller pieces, they are placed in any convenient position for the batcher or "striker-up" to deal with. If the reader could watch the above operation of separating the heads of jute into suitable sizes, it would perhaps be much easier to understand the process of unravelling an apparently matted and crossed mass of fibre. As the loosened head emerges from the bale-opener, Figs. 8 or 9, it is placed over the operative's arm with the ends of the head hanging, and by a sort of intuition acquired by great experience, ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour

... weeds, Which for that service had been husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame,— Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, with ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... no good. They would not undo the queer things they had done to the house. They were spiteful and mean, and not to be trusted. The house remained without trees and vines, a scowling, ugly thing. The garden had no shrubs; the seeded grass was matted down and yellow, like hay, and there were bald places where the ...
— A Melody in Silver • Keene Abbott

... boyish, lumbering haste, clumping fearlessly with his great yellow clogs through pool and mire. He wore brown corduroys, a dingy shirt, and a red handkerchief tied loosely round his neck. A tattered old straw hat was tilted back upon his shock of coarse, matted, brown hair. His sleeves were turned up to the elbows, and his arms and face were both tanned and roughened until his skin looked like the bark of some young sapling. As he looked up at the sound of the steps, his face ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... off with his arms and legs, knelt up in bed, and looked blankly at his wife. The timid light of the lamp illuminated his hirsute, pock-marked countenance and glided over his rough matted hair. ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... bottoms Rank with withered blue-joint grass, With its broken stems entangled In a matted jungle mass; Then across the higher prairie, Searching out a shorter way, To the creek that joined the river Where Mac crossed and got away; Then the twinge of bitter sorrow As he neared his journey's end, And ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker

... she chose, Alicia could not avoid passing Lindsay's room, for her own lay beyond it. In the seven o'clock half light of a February evening, in the middle of the week, she went along the matted upper hall on tiptoe, and stumbled over a veiled form squatted in the native way, near his door, profoundly asleep. "Ayah!" she exclaimed, but the face that looked confusedly up at her was white, whiter than common, Captain Filbert's face. ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... full of mud, waiting tensely to chastise the next sleek head that dared show itself above the cathedral fence. She wore a boy's shirt and a ragged brown skirt that flapped about her sturdy bare legs. Her matted hair was bound in two disheveled braids around her head and secured with a piece of shoe-string. Her dirty round face was lighted up by a pair of dancing blue eyes, in which just now blazed ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice

... dilapidated-looking affair, and the man who drove was well in keeping with his vehicle. He was clad in tattered garments, surmounted by an old sack, fastened together round his shoulders with a wooden skewer. His hair was coarse and matted, looking as if a comb had never made acquaintance with it, his face unmistakably emaciated, in spite of the dark hue it wore from ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various

... there came to the Bagree camp a mysterious message. A yogi, his hair matted with filth till it stood twisted and writhed on his head like the serpent tresses of Medusa, his lean skeleton ash-daubed body clothed in yellow, on his forehead the crescent of Eklinga, in his hand ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... her hurry after them and so they threw down the comb. This time a forest appeared, a dark and dusky forest in which the roots were interwoven, the branches matted together, and the tree-tops touching each other. The witch tried very hard to pass through, but in vain, and so, very, ...
— Folk Tales from the Russian • Various

... were about to take. Only a few yards further on I found myself sinking in a floating quagmire, from which I extricated myself with much difficulty but just in time for as I discovered afterwards by probing with a pole, the water beneath the matted reeds was deep. That night I questioned the guides upon the subject, but without result, for they pretended to have seen nothing and not to understand what I meant. Of neither of these incidents have I any explanation to offer, except that once contracted, it is as difficult to be ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... hour hand pointed to four. Was it possible that he had been unconscious for more than six hours? He had left Jean on the mountain top soon after nightfall—it was not later than nine o'clock when he had seen Meleese. Seven hours! Again he lifted his hands to his head. His hair was stiff and matted with blood. It had congealed thickly on his cheek and neck and had soaked the top of his coat. He had bled a great deal, so much that he wondered he was alive, and yet during those hours his captors had given him no assistance, had not even ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... to the thought of his capture alive and death at the stake. A search now began for the trail of the Indians, as they had evidently left before our approach. But while this was going on, some of the men found the boy under a bank, shielded from sight by over-hanging earth and matted roots. When pulled out he was more dead than alive, his long bath in the ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson

... situation, so it is near a stream border, the better the cassiope loves it. Yet I have not found it on the polished glacier slips, but where the country rock cleaves and splinters in the high windy headlands that the wild sheep frequents, hordes and hordes of the white bells swing over matted, mossy foliage. On Oppapago, which is also called Sheep Mountain, one finds not far from the beds of cassiope the ice-worn, stony hollows where the big-horns cradle ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... the dead were possible, (and that possibility I could not deny,) this was such an apparition. A hue, yellowish and livid; bones, uncovered with flesh; eyes, ghastly, hollow, woe-begone, and fixed in an agony of wonder upon me; and locks, matted and negligent, constituted the image which I now beheld. My belief of somewhat preternatural in this appearance was confirmed by recollection of resemblances between these features and those of one who was dead. In this shape and visage, shadowy and death-like as they were, the lineaments ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... ground in the great cemetery, but a giant capable of guiding and driving these prodigious monsters. His height was above twelve feet. His head, as big as the head of a buffalo, was lost in a mane of matted hair. It was indeed a huge mane, like those which belonged to the elephants of the earlier ages ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne

... with a violent knocking at the door. The old ruffian appeared with a sputtering lamp which might have belonged to a cave man, and a head of matted grey hair which suggested the same origin. He was old and suspicious, but at Lewis's bidding he hobbled forth and pointed out ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan

... on a scanty ration of one biscuit and a slice of bacon per day. Here the count's exceeding hardihood stood them in good stead; so weakened were his companions that it was only by constant encouragement he got them along, and when forcing their way through the matted scrub, he often threw himself bodily on it, breaking a bath through for his weakened followers by the sheer weight of his body. They reached Western Port in a most wretched condition, having subsisted latterly on nothing but ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... which the men possessed with devils used to go and howl, and rend themselves, in the old days of Jerusalem. We had to traverse thirty miles of this Campagna; and for two-and-twenty we went on and on, seeing nothing but now and then a lonely house, or a villainous-looking shepherd: with matted hair all over his face, and himself wrapped to the chin in a frowsy brown mantle, tending his sheep. At the end of that distance, we stopped to refresh the horses, and to get some lunch, in a common malaria-shaken, despondent ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens

... with buckskin shirt and long, matted, sunburnt hair, rode back to our wagon and talked with father. The signal was given, and the head wagons of the train began to deploy in a circle. The ground favoured the evolution, and, from long practice, it was accomplished without ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... man had lived there with this face that he had loved. A faint flush still lingered on the fair cheeks, the laughing lips were still red. Only at one spot, above her temple, the wavy hair lay matted underneath a clot ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... out of an opposite window, with matted hair hanging over a begrimed and shrivelled countenance, made answer. "No one," she said, in her peculiar dialect, which the worthy man scarcely comprehended, "lived there or had done so for years:" but Brown knew better; and while he was asserting the fact, a girl put her head out of ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... in the sky behind him penetrated even the jungle growth as a faint luminosity. Presently he writhed to a position in which he could strike a match. A thick, matted mass of climbing vines swung from the upper branches not a yard from his fingertips. Bell cursed again, frantically, and clutched at it wildly. Presently his absurd kickings set him to swaying. He redoubled his efforts and increased ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various

... from one of those hewn paddles would dash out a man's brains. The most ferocious of all pirates for once preferred to run away and live to fight another day. His boat denied him, he whirled about to plunge through the tall, matted grass. He was running in the direction of the dry knoll ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... consummation of the ceremony. As the sad procession wound up the sides of the pyramid, the unhappy victim threw away his gay chaplets of flowers and broke in pieces his musical instruments. ... On the summit he was received by six priests, whose long and matted locks flowed in disorder over their sable robes, covered with hieroglyphic scrolls of mystic import. They led him to the sacrificial stone, a huge block of jasper, with its upper surface somewhat convex. On this the victim was stretched. Five priests secured his ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson

... prostrate victims of many a summer tempest: now we were winding around dark "bays" of sweet-gum and magnolia; now skirting circular ponds of delicate young cypress; now crossing narrow "branches" sunk deep in impenetrable "hummocks" of close-crowded oak and ash and maple, thick-matted with vines and undergrowth; now pausing to gather orchis and pitcher-plants and sun-kisses and andromeda; now fording the broad bend of Peter's Creek where it flows, sapphire in the sunshine, out from the moss-draped live-oaks between high banks of red and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... on board that ill-conditioned sloop now glared over her rail, their eyes fixed upon the goodly company in the little boat, their horrid hair and beards stained and matted—it would have been hard to tell ...
— Kate Bonnet - The Romance of a Pirate's Daughter • Frank R. Stockton

... neglected to have Jan's hair clipped. Maybe she told the servants to have it cut. Now, the long fur heated and worried the dog constantly and the fleas nearly drove him mad. Day and night, he bit and scratched, tearing out tufts of matted hair until raw, bleeding spots made his body a mass of sores. Each day he grew more savage. He hated every one now; the monks who had sold him, Mr. Pixley who had taken him from the Hospice, Miss Elizabeth who had deserted him, and the servants who ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker

... stems, and on the budding tops of the lime-trees. The bushes are decked with catkins. The boughs of the chestnut glisten with pointed reddish buds. Fresh green patches are springing up amid the yellow matted grass of ...
— Maxim Gorki • Hans Ostwald

... the looking-glass at each end of the rooms were matted over with flowers, and from the top streamed down long feathery vines which ended in little bunches of red roses that swung loose before the glass, and left another vine there. Over the doors and windows ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... a glance to tell us that he was near to death from starvation or some illness. His head rested on a pillow of skins, and he was rolled partly in blankets, which were pushed off enough to show his tattered and travel-worn clothing. His cheeks were deeply sunken, his gray hair was long and matted, and his tangled beard reached nearly to ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon

... covered with dark, lurid stains, hung so loosely upon him, that his attenuated form bore witness, even as the white cheek and haggard eye, to the intense mental torture of the last fortnight. His fair hair lay damp and matted on his pale forehead; but still there was that in his whole bearing which, while it breathed of suffering, contradicted every thought of guilt. He looked round him steadily and calmly, lowered his head a moment in respectful ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar

... first long street, certain forms he did meet, But scarce might behold their faces; From matted elf-locks eyes stared like an ox, ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge

... interview. A natural delicacy prevented 'Lena from objecting to the delay, and, as calmly as possible, she watched Mrs. Aldergrass while she put the room to rights, and then patiently submitted to the arranging of her curls, which during her illness had become matted and tangled. Before eight everything was in readiness, and soon after, worn out by her own exertions, 'Lena ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes

... leaped out of its trenches and tore across the intervening ground between its trenches and the rocks of a near-by eminence which a force of Magyars had made into a position. Haggard from pain and starvation, their hair long and matted, some still in ragged uniforms, but most of them in the sheepskin coats of peasants, their eyes bloodshot with rage, they formed not a pleasant picture to the intrenched Huns. The rifle fire from the eminence leaped to a climax; the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)

... a cross, he cannot be a man-wolf,' said the child, as a man with the snow heavy on his long, ragged beard, and on the matted hair, that fell over his shoulders and nearly to his waist, and dropping from the tattered cloak that but half-covered his withered brown body, came in and looked from face to face with mild, ecstatic eyes. Standing some way from the fire, and with eyes that had rested at last ...
— The Secret Rose • W. B. Yeats

... eastern extremity of the island, however, was a small, densely-wooded peninsula, with a thicket of underbrush so closely matted as nearly to prevent the possibility of seeing across it, so long as the leaves remained on the branches. Near the narrow neck that connected this acre with the rest of the island, a small blockhouse had been erected, with ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... violence are apt to assume. He saw no agony in the vacant eyes of the two men lying on their backs in apparently the complacent abandonment of drunkenness, which was further simulated by their tumbled and disordered hair matted by coagulated blood, which, however, had lost its sanguine color. He thought only of the unsuspecting girl sitting in the lonely coach, and hurriedly dragged them further into the bushes. In doing this he discovered a loaded ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... to catch hold of them, but my knees failed and let me down upon the beach. And after that I remember only having coats flung over me, and being carried off out of the wind, and laid in warmest blankets before a fire. I was numb with the cold, my hair was matted with the salt, and my flesh white and shrivelled, but they forced liquor into my mouth, and so I lay in drowsy content till utter weariness bound me ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... year," she said. As she spoke, she dropped it with a cry, and a little mouse sprang from the skirts, and whisked away into some corner. We found that the little animal had made its abode in the heavy woollen, of which three or four thicknesses had been eaten through, and then matted together into the softest of nests. This contained, moreover, a small family of mouselets, who certainly had not taken part in any midnight masquerade. The secret seemed more remote than ever, for I knew that there was no other Portuguese family in the town, and there was no confounding ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... very slowly on his side. Kate made an attempt to examine his shoulder. She was not used to the sight of blood. The clotted and matted clothing awed and sickened her. Even the hay was blood-soaked, but she stuck to her efforts. Supplementing the rude efforts of McAlpin and Kitchen to give him first aid, she cut away, with Laramie's knife, the bullet-torn coat and shirt and tried to get the wound ready ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman

... road, save here, In truth, you covet to be slain by me. Nor when I chase or woo my lady dear, Let any think I bear with company." And — "What more could he say, sir cavalier," (Orlando cried to Sacripant) "if we Were known for the two basest whores that pull And reel from spindle-staff the matted wool?" ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto

... wild and dreary plain, Strewn with plots of thickest jungle, Matted with the gory stain. There the murder-mouthed artillery, In the deadly ambuscade, Wrought the thunder of its treachery On ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... dressed, as I was, in a union suit, and his face and hands, like mine, were stained a butternut brown. His hair was long and matted and two weeks' stubble of ...
— Frenzied Fiction • Stephen Leacock

... window from which she could see any one that came down from the woods at the back of the house; and after a time she saw a shortish man, fair-haired and blue-eyed, walk stealthily down to her. He was a miserable-looking fellow, with a pinched white face, matted hair and new-grown beard, and dressed only in a shirt and a pair of light-blue soldier's trousers. She smuggled him quickly into the house and locked the door; and when after a quarter of an hour the door opened again, ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue

... much enthusiasm, that's it,' said Dennis, looking with great admiration at the uncombed head, matted beard, and torn hands and face of the wild figure before him; 'you're such a devil of a fellow. You hurt yourself a hundred times more than you need, because you will be foremost in everything, and will do more ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens

... poured out the whisky; and again that liquor turned to snakes, and they crawled around the glass, and on the bar, and hissed, writhed, and squirmed. Then in one instant they all coiled about each other, and matted themselves into one snake, with a hundred heads; and from every head glittering eyes gleamed, and forked tongues hissed at me. I rushed from the saloon, and started, I did not know or care where, so that I might escape my ...
— Fifteen Years in Hell • Luther Benson

... inhabited by the Thayers was a regular Italian villa. It had not been at all in order that suited English notions of comfort, or American either, when they moved in; but they had painted and matted and furnished, and filled the rooms with pretty things, pictures and statues and vases and flowers; till it looked now quite beautiful and festive. Its situation was perfect. The house stood high, on the shore overlooking the sea, with a full view of Vesuvius, and it was surrounded ...
— The End of a Coil • Susan Warner

... was no longer able to stand before him, and thinking it was himself that had done the deed, he tossed up his head and snorted in triumph. At this moment, the matted hair was thrown back from his eyes, and the dust having somewhat settled away, he sighted me, where I stood reloading my gun. I fancied he would take off before I could finish, and I made all the haste in my power—so much so that I dropped the box of caps at my feet. I had taken ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... which he walked had become by ages of use a deep, narrow trench, its walls topped on either side by impenetrable thicket and dense-growing trees closely interwoven with thick-stemmed creepers and lesser vines inextricably matted into two solid ramparts of vegetation. Tarzan had almost reached the point where the trail debouched upon the open river bottom when he saw a family of lions approaching along the path from the direction of the river. The ape-man counted seven—a male and two lionesses, full grown, and four young ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Eden too. The waters of the Deluge might have left it but a week before; so choked with slime and matted growth was the hideous ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... some matted grass from about the roots of a laburnum-tree, whose dark leaves were lighted by golden loops of blossoms, "Thirty-eight years ago," he said, "your mother and I planted this; we had just come home from our wedding journey, and she had brought this slip from her mother's ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... 'tis bloody now, their guns are filled with gore; Through scattered ranks and severed files and trampled flags they tore. The English strove with desperate strength, paused, rallied, scattered, fled; The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain and far away passed on that hideous wrack, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes the Irish stand—the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... speed and fury on that dangerous coast the treacherous tide came in. There was not a moment to spare, and as he flew back to the small shelter of the pebbly cove, the water was already gliding close to him, and stretching its arms like a hungry medusa round the seaweed-matted lumps of scattered rock over ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... circumstance had happened which favoured Batman's party in no small degree. The men left at Indented Head were surprised one morning to see an extremely tall figure advancing towards them. His hair was thickly matted; his skin was brown, but not black, like that of the natives; he was almost naked, and he carried the ordinary arms of the aborigines. This was William Buckley, the only survivor of the three convicts who had escaped from Governor Collins's expedition. ...
— History of Australia and New Zealand - From 1606 to 1890 • Alexander Sutherland

... cathedral square brought Gottlieb on his legs to the window. It was a company of horsemen sparkling in harness. One trumpeter rode at the side of the troop, and in front a standard-bearer, matted down the chest with ochre beard, displayed aloft to the good citizens of Cologne, three brown hawks, with birds in their beaks, on an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... clambered up the opposing steep emerging from an entanglement of jungle on a high and open ridge which commanded an unimpeded view to the west—a scene of theatrical clarity with a single theatrical smear. From a hollow far below slothful smoke filtered through the matted, sombre, dew-bespangled foliage, rose a few feet, and drifted abruptly, dissolving from diaphanous blue to nothingness. The resonant whooping of a swamp pheasant, antiphonal to a bell-voiced, crimson-crowned ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... the beard very emphatically shook a matted head, now relieved of the stolen helmet, and observed that the quicker they were the better it would be. He was as taciturn a bushranger as he had been a bishop, but Stingaree was perfectly right. Even these few words would have destroyed ...
— Stingaree • E. W. (Ernest William) Hornung

... yards from the road, in which I found portions of the skeletons of many bodies,—skulls, bones, and matted hair,—most of which, on examination, I concluded to be those of men. Three hundred and fifty yards further on another assembly of human remains was found, which, by all appearance, had been left to decay upon the surface; skulls and bones, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... interdigitate, interlink. twine, entwine, weave, inweave[obs3], twist, wreathe; anastomose[Med], inosculate[obs3], dovetail, splice, link; lace, tat. mat, plait, plat, braid, felt, twill; tangle, entangle, ravel; net, knot; dishevel, raddle[obs3]. Adj. crossing &c. v.; crossed, matted &c, v. transverse. cross, cruciform, crucial; retiform[obs3], reticular, reticulated; areolar[obs3], cancellated[obs3], grated, barred, streaked; textile; crossbarred[obs3], cruciate[obs3], palmiped[obs3], secant; web-footed. Adv. cross, thwart, athwart, transversely; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... sit down to dinner, and he came in steaming hot. He had chased out of sight a cow that had poked into the cultivation. Joe mostly went about with green bushes in his hat, to keep his head cool, and a few gum-leaves were now sticking in his moist and matted hair. ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd

... whom the Hawaiians long imputed the wonder-work of their volcanic mountains. When there is unusual commotion in Kilauea myriads of thread-like filaments float in the air and fall upon the cliffs, making deposits much resembling matted hair. A single filament over fifteen inches long was picked up on a Hilo veranda, having sailed in the air a distance of fifty miles. This is the famous Pele's Hair, being the glass-like product of volcanic fires. It resembles Prince Rupert's Drops, ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... things, which hissed at us, and put out their double tongues, and then coiled themselves away in the dim recesses of the forest. But on we went, climbing with difficulty over prostrate firs, or breaking through matted juniper, and still the spring was not, though we were "far away in the woods." But still we climbed on, through swamp and jungle, till we tore our dresses to pieces, and our hats got pulled off in a tree and some of our hair with them; but at last we reached the spring. It was such a scene ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird

... precipices after climbing above the sand-pit, from which you could jump into the soft sand, and then slide and roll down to the bottom. Once I jumped upon a little promontory high above the slope, and it gave way, and I slid down on about a ton of matted root and ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn

... Booverman. He had already teed his ball for the second hole, which was poised on a rolling hill one hundred and thirty-five yards away. It is considered rather easy as golf-holes go. The only dangers are a matted wilderness of long grass in front of the tee, the certainty of landing out of bounds on the slightest slice, or of rolling down hill into a soggy substance on a pull. Also there is a tree to be hit and a sand-pit to ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... growth? Hopeless, he knew when these monsters could crash their way through while the men were impeded at every step. The mottled, orange-green stalks, as he watched them, seemed to move. He dashed the sweat from his face—his hair hung matted on his forehead—and passed a grimy hand across his eyes. Plainly, one of those stalks ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various

... a formidable-looking adversary. In the moonlight certain signs of puffiness, of dissipation, did not show, save for rolls of fat about shoulders and paunch. He was powerfully built, his chest matted with black hair, his forearms rough with it. Taller than Mormon, he had all the advantage of reach. He ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn

... courtesy as a white. His hunting-shirt and leggings were of deer skin, well grimed and greasy, with leather fringes at the seams of leg and sleeve. For all the summer heat, he wore a cap fashioned of raccoon-skin with the fur on; and for this great cap his iron-gray hair, matted and unkempt, served as a fringe to keep the other tasselings in countenance. The hunting-shirt was belted at the waist, and in the belt was thrust a sheathless knife huge enough to serve a butcher's ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde

... He was as still, as grotesque, as evil-looking as the tortured idols of the Chinese; like theirs his eyes were beadlike, expressionless, dull; such are the eyes of dead seal. His face was brown and cracked like old leather, and was covered with a crust of dirt; his gray-streaked hair was matted and straggled over his face; it teemed with lice. He held his knotty hands motionless over the flame of his lamp. His nails were long and curled like sharp talons. As Maisanguaq saw him he ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre

... a vine stretches across a shop-front and hangs ripe clusters of grapes through the reeds. In the patterning of grape-shadows a very old donkey, tethered to a stone-post, dozes under a pack-saddle that is never taken off; and near by, in a matted niche, sits a very old man in white. This is the chief of the Guild of "morocco" workers of Marrakech, the most accomplished craftsman in Morocco in the preparing and using of the skins to which the city gives its name. Of these sleek moroccos, ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton

... craggy, and the forest trees and underwood so matted together, that in four days they only advanced about thirty miles, and they now began to suffer from hunger. They also met with many rapid foaming streams, to cross some of which they had to stop and ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park

... beside him, lay the king, overcome by sleep and fatigue. They advanced, and Athos, who was the first to enter, gazed a moment in silence on that pale and noble face, framed in its long and now untidy, matted hair, the blue veins showing through the transparent temples, his eyes seemingly swollen ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... was buried. Or I crouched on the beach at full moon, wondering, wondering, between the two splendors of the sky and the sea. Or I ran out to meet the incoming storm, my face full in the wind, my being a-tingle with an awesome delight to the tips of my fog-matted locks flying behind; and stood clinging to some stake or upturned boat, shaken by the roar and rumble of the waves. So clinging, I pretended that I was in danger, and was deliciously frightened; I held on with both hands, and shook my head, exulting in the tumult around me, equally ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... in a state of uneasy slumber until daylight, when he was awakened by the noise of boats coming alongside, and loud talking on deck. All that had passed did not immediately rush into his mind; but his arm tied up with the bandage, and his hair matted, and his face stiff with the coagulated blood, soon brought to his recollection the communication of Judy Malony, that he had been impressed. The 'tween decks of the cutter appeared deserted, unless indeed there were people in the hammocks slung over his head; and Newton, anxious ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... thorns, and matted underwood I force my way; now climb, and now descend O'er rocks, or bare or mossy, with wild foot Crushing the purple whorts;[1] while oft unseen, Hurrying along the drifted forest-leaves, The scared ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons

... rows upon the barn floors, one, a boy apparently not more than sixteen years of age, attracted the notice of one of the company, a surgeon. The lad looked more like a delicate girl than a soldier; his hair fell from his fair forehead in long flaxen curls upon his pillow of straw, some of them matted with blood; his cheek was rosy, and his soft white hand told of a youth spent amid more tender scenes than those of the camp. A piece of linen laid across his face covered a ghastly wound where a ball had passed through his face, and had torn both ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens

... piers. He seemed to be in a most distressed and nervous condition, for he peered about him with an evident alarm, which was pitiful to witness. As he turned his face about I saw it was haggard with fear and sorrow, or remorse; his hair was matted, and beads of sweat were thick upon ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease

... The cart was a dilapidated-looking affair, and the man who drove was well in keeping with his vehicle. He was clad in tattered garments, surmounted by an old sack, fastened together round his shoulders with a wooden skewer. His hair was coarse and matted, looking as if a comb had never made acquaintance with it, his face unmistakably emaciated, in spite of the dark hue it wore ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various

... do what I can," said Tinker, and he measured with thoughtful eye the silken mass, tangled and matted by ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... exclaimed, his look wandering, his uncovered hair matted, "if a half-starved soldier can have a morsel of food just to take in his hands and ride on with—" and before he could finish servants had ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable

... brown and gray of the earth color. The wine-colored trillium with its huge spotted leaves, the slender white dog-tooth violets, the rose-pink arbutus, the blue star myrtle and the crimson oak buds, were matted into a vast robe that was gorgeously oriental, while a perfume that was surely more delicious than any ever wafted from the gardens of Arabia floated past us in gusts through which the gray car sped ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess

... distance between the ledges was great we assisted our ascent by tufts of grass firmly rooted in the luxuriant moss that grew abundantly about the water-courses. On reaching the summit, I found that the fall was supplied from a stream winding through rugged chasms and thickly-matted clusters of plants and trees, among which the pandanus bore a conspicuous appearance and gave a picturesque richness to the place. While admiring the wildness of the scene, Mr. Montgomery joined me; we did not however succeed in following the stream for more than a hundred yards, for ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King

... a smaller ship than ours—a light wooden frame, which supported movable matting screens or curtains, taking the place of our wooden cabins. The matted dounga looked as though it might be chilly, particularly if a strong wind came to play among the rather draughty-looking mats which were all that our poor friend had between her ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne

... clearing, which had been made by the axes of the Iroquois in preparing their breastwork of defence. Champlain gazed upon the scene before him with wondering eyes. In front was a circular barricade, composed of trunks of trees, boughs, and matted twigs, behind which the Iroquois stood like tigers at bay. In the edge of the forest around were clustered their yelling foes, screaming shrill defiance, yet afraid to attack, for they had already been driven back with severe loss. Their hope now lay in their white allies, and when ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... these little creatures shouted and gesticulated with glee. It was the surest sign of high spring. "Boloo!" they cried. "Baayah. Boloo!" They were the children of the men folk, the smoke of whose encampment rose from the knoll at the river's bend. Wild-eyed youngsters they were, with matted hair and little broad-nosed impish faces, covered (as some children are covered even nowadays) with a delicate down of hair. They were narrow in the loins and long in the arms. And their ears had ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... halted. Two wretched peasants whose wrists had been tied to their leathers came leaping and straining beside the horses in their effort not to be dragged off their feet. One was a tall, gaunt, yellow-haired man, the other short and swarthy, but both so crusted with dirt, so matted and tangled and ragged, that they were more like beasts of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Indian drifting, knife in hand, His frail boat moored to a floating isle—thick-matted With large-leaved [and] low-creeping melon-plants And the dark cucumber. He reaps and stows them, drifting, drifting: round him, Round his green harvest-plot, flow the cool lake-waves, The mountains ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... were dirty and wore their hair straggling down over their crafty, black eyes. They burlesqued womanhood in a way that stirred always a smoldering resentment against them. This particular squaw had nothing to commend her to his notice. She had a dirty red bandanna tied over her dirty, matted hair and under her grimy double chin. A grimy gray blanket was draped closely over her squat shoulders and formed a pouch behind, wherein the plump form of a papoose was cradled, a little red cap pulled down over ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... from a tomahawk disfigured his head; the woolly hair was matted with blood. But there remained still something of the ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed

... strap off and threw it beside the gun. Then drew one foot up and unfastened a large spur attached to his moccasined heel. He wore a ragged otter-skin cap, the animal's tail hanging down on one side. This he took off too, showing his thick red hair, damp and matted from the heat of the fur. With a knotted hand he pushed back the locks pressed down on his forehead. The skin there was untanned and lay like a white band above the darkness of his face, thin, edged with a fringe of red beard and with blue eyes set high above prominent ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... place to which men would come for no legitimate purpose; a place which the hounded bear and deer had avoided even when hard driven, and inviting only to copperhead, skunk, and fox. About it lay "laurel-hells" thick-matted and gnarled, briars that were like entanglements of barbed wire, and woods so black of recess that bats flew through their corridors of pine at midday. But these men had cut, and used familiarly, tortuous and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... bare downs of Salamanca. From no part of the Federal position did the view extend for more than a few hundred yards. Wherever the eye turned rose the dark and impenetrable screen of close-growing trees, interlaced with wild vines and matted undergrowth, and seamed with rough roads, perfectly passable for troops, with which his enemies were far better acquainted than himself. Had Stoneman's cavalry been present, the squadrons, posted far out upon the flanks, ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson

... man, who seemed to shake the ground as he trod. His face was devoid of speculation, and his dull blue eyes looked from under heavy and unamiable brows. His hair was matted, and his mode of dressing his big limbs showed that he was careless of opinion. He was called Hob's Tommy because the villagers had a fancy for regarding sons as the personal property of the father, and thus a man called Thomas, who happened to be the son of a man ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... us down a matted passage and showed us at the end into a great library, all lined with bookcases and busts upon the top of them, where the squire and Dr. Livesey sat, pipe in hand, on either side of a ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the water about four feet below. He did not stand quite on the edge, but fell upon his knees a couple of yards away, wringing his hands, moaning and weeping, and staring through his watery eyes at a fine, long crevice just discernible under the matted grass, and curving outward on either hand toward ...
— Old Creole Days • George Washington Cable

... small company of acrobats from the Sus, and a medicine man of fierce aspect, who sat by himself under a rough tent, muttering charms and incantations, and waiting for Allah to send victims. This wonder-worker had piercing eyes, that seemed to examine the back of your head, long matted hair and a beard to match. He wore a white djellaba and a pair of new slippers, and was probably more dangerous than any disease ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan

... eating—or rather making believe to eat their make-believe breakfast—a singular noise was heard near by, to which at first they paid no particular attention, thinking it was the wind whistling through the matted branches of the thicket, if they thought of it at all; but presently it grew louder, and they could not imagine what it proceeded from. It was a sort of hissing sound, at once shrill and hoarse, quite ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier

... path was exceedingly difficult to traverse, leading chiefly among low trees and over the sharp stones that had rolled from the river,—now close by the noisy stream, which babbled and foamed as if it had gone mad,—now creeping on our knees through bushes, matted with thick, twining vines,—now wading across an open morass,—now in mimosa woods, or slipping in and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various

... them, but my knees failed and let me down upon the beach. And after that I remember only having coats flung over me, and being carried off out of the wind, and laid in warmest blankets before a fire. I was numb with the cold, my hair was matted with the salt, and my flesh white and shrivelled, but they forced liquor into my mouth, and so I lay in drowsy content till utter weariness bound me ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an AEson-like rejuvenation; for, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... face, which is painted VIVIDLY WHITE, evidently for some purpose; and thirdly, the fact that the kind of dress worn over the bodies exactly resembles that described by De Gonneville as worn by the women of the Southern Indies, made of some kind of matted material, sometimes also of skins, or of feathers, girt above the haunches and reaching to the knee. (Fig. ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc

... less frequent from the crowd Was heard the burst of laughter loud For still, as squire and archer stared On that dark face and matted beard Their glee and game declined. All gazed at length in silence drear, Unbroke, save when in comrade's ear Some yeoman, wondering in his fear, Thus whispered forth his mind:- "Saint Mary! saw'st thou e'er such sight? How pale his cheek, his eye how ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... hair clipped. Maybe she told the servants to have it cut. Now, the long fur heated and worried the dog constantly and the fleas nearly drove him mad. Day and night, he bit and scratched, tearing out tufts of matted hair until raw, bleeding spots made his body a mass of sores. Each day he grew more savage. He hated every one now; the monks who had sold him, Mr. Pixley who had taken him from the Hospice, Miss Elizabeth who had deserted him, and the servants who ...
— Prince Jan, St. Bernard • Forrestine C. Hooker

... became conscious of something as distinct as a physical shock as he met the impact of an electrical nervous energy. It passed, and he found himself half smiling down on this little, white-faced man with the matted hair and ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... and looked at me sulkily from under his matted and tangled hair. "You are not of his company?" he said ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman

... other's arms, a little unsteadily at first. Rudstock had a black eye and a cut on his ear, the blood from which had stained his collar and matted his beard. Wilderton's coat was torn, his forehead bruised, his cheek swollen, and he had a pain in his back which prevented him from walking very upright. They did not speak, but in an archway did what they could with pins and handkerchiefs, and by turning up Rudstock's ...
— Tatterdemalion • John Galsworthy

... of sea-weeds on to the paper it will be found necessary to cut away, with a sharp, fine-pointed scissors, many superfluous stems and branches, as otherwise the sea-weed when pressed will present a matted appearance, and much of ...
— Harper's Young People, October 26, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... a dreary scene, they go, Where wild Altama murmurs to their woe, Far different these from all that charmed before, The various terrors of that distant shore; Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling; Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crown'd, Where the dark scorpion gathers death around, Where at each step the stranger fears ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean

... "I am not." She rubbed Excalibur's matted head affectionately. "But I have arranged for the dear man's future. He is going to visit friends in ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay

... to the top of the hill, and stood on the very brink of the deep toilsome railroad cut all fringed with matted grass and young pines, that had but lately sprung there. Up and down the track, as far as they could see on either side the steel rails glittered on into gradual dimness. There were patches of the field before them, white with bursting ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin

... was touched. The spectacle was enough to melt the prejudice of any adversary. Lord Cecil's knees trembled; his hand shook as if in a chill. Mud-covered, water-soaked, and bruised, their clothes rent in many places, their hats gone and their hair matted, their legs wobbly, the trio certainly inspired pity, not mirth ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... loosely fastened round the waist, remaining open or closed above as the case might be. The children, notwithstanding the inclement temperature, were in the cool and airy costume common to the rising generation in the East. The men were dressed exactly like the women; their matted hair and beard, flat noses, and wide eyes, generally bloodshot, giving them a disgusting appearance. Both sexes wore a sort of woollen gaiter, open at the calf, the protruding muscle of which looked as if nothing could have confined ...
— A Journey to Katmandu • Laurence Oliphant

... the animal origin of man we have got to follow man back, not only till we find him a naked savage like the Fuegians as Darwin describes them,—naked, bedaubed with paint, with matted hair and looks wild and distrustful,—but we cannot stop there, we must follow him back till he becomes a troglodyte, a cave-dweller, contending with the cave bear, the cave lion, and the hyena for the possession of this rude shelter; back still, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... woman raised her head, which was covered with tangled locks and matted hair, and ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton

... away," Blake repeated. But the Countess recovered herself and with a little gesture bade him go on. He told his story haltingly, clinging to the Colonel to prevent himself from falling, his matted head rolling weakly from side to side. When he had finished a furious clamor broke forth from the men, the women, and the children. Neri commanded them ...
— The Net • Rex Beach

... and began to beat a little bottom lying between two hills, through which ran a ditch, thickly grown up with bushes and briers. The dead swamp-grass was very heavy in the narrow little bottom along the sides, and was matted in tufts. The dogs were scattered, and prowling around singly or in couples; and only one of the pointers and Snip were really on the ditch. Snip showed signs of great industry, and went bobbing backward ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page

... entered the main apartments in order to inquire for Veronica, had passed through the long outer hall with its red walls, its matted floor and its great table covered with green baize, to the antechamber within, where, with some ostentation, as Bosio had always thought, Gregorio had hung up the escutcheon with the quartered arms of Macomer and Serra, flanked ...
— Taquisara • F. Marion Crawford

... head in soak now. Her hair is just matted together hard as a board. That's what comes of vanity," said Felicity, than whom no ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... part," she laughed. "I suppose I do, too. My hair is matted hopelessly; the curliness makes it worse. My face, too, is rapidly hardening under this sun. If only I had a few more clothes—" She stopped and looked at him. "I feel the need of them," ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades

... previously healthy tissues, it is quite unnecessary to disarticulate, a better result being attained by simply sawing the foot across in the line of the articulation; and again, where we have to operate for disease, the tissues are so matted, and the bones so soft, that complete removal of the metatarsus is much easier than it appears when practising on ...
— A Manual of the Operations of Surgery - For the Use of Senior Students, House Surgeons, and Junior Practitioners • Joseph Bell

... blear, and the peach-color on her cheeks fled from its old habitation, and crowded up into her nose, where, with a number of pimples, it stuck fast. Add to this a dirty, draggle-tailed chintz; long, matted hair, wandering into her eyes, and over her lean shoulders, which were once so snowy, and you have the picture of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... illuminated with the gaudy tassels of mesquite blossoms; gray coffee-berry bushes clumped up against the sides of ridges, and in every sheltered place the long grass waved its last-year's banners, while the fresh green of tender growth matted the open ground like a lawn. Baby rabbits, feeding along their runways in the grass, sat up at his approach or hopped innocently into the shadow of the sheltering cat-claws; jack-rabbits with black-tipped ears galloped madly ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... he had so difficult a part to sustain, it may not be amiss to follow Christian after his brief conversation with him. On re-entering the house, which he did by a circuitous passage, leading from a distant alley, and through several courts, Christian hastened to a low matted apartment, in which Bridgenorth sat alone, reading the Bible by the light of a small brazen lamp, with the ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... sleep when Christine and her brother entered the chamber. Her face turned still more pale when she saw him, flushed, and became pale again. There were leaden hollows round his eyes, and his hair was matted with perspiration. Yet he was handsome—and helpless. Her eyes filled with tears. She turned her head away from her brother and went softly to the window, but not before she had touched the pale hand that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... persuasive like Arthur Weldon. He had fewer English words at his command than most human beings, and even those did not come to him readily. In his pulpit he sought for them and struggled with them until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... begins to fall off of itself; and if removed too soon, it is liable to be attacked by worms. Lean geese furnish more than those that are fat, and the down is more valuable. Neither the feathers nor the down of geese which have been dead some time are fit for use: they generally smell bad, and become matted. None but what is plucked from living geese, or which have just been killed, ought to be exhibited for sale; and in this case the down should be plucked soon, or before the geese are ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... aren't dead, and maternal love can conquer death. Didn't you know that? Come, my child, I'll repay where I have been to blame. I'll rock you to sleep on my knees. I'll wash you clean from the... (She omits the word she cannot bring herself to utter) of hate and sin. I'll comb your hair, matted with the sweat of fear; and air a pure white sheet for you at the fire of a home—a home you've never had, you who've known no peace, you homeless one, son of Hagar, the serving woman, born of a slave, ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... and through, and the piazzas were so arranged that there was not a single apartment in it into which the sun could not look, through one window or another, once at least in the twenty-four hours. The floors were tiled, ingrained, oiled, matted,—everything but carpeted, except that of the state drawing-room; and there the Wilton had a covering over it, removed, as I afterwards found, only on occasions of state. The whole atmosphere seemed full of health, purity, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various

... was undisturbed. His head had slipped from the folded newspaper, and the straggling, unkempt hair was matted with the foxtails and burrs of the dry grass on which it lay. He was not a pretty sight. His mouth was open, disclosing a gap in the upper row where several teeth at some time had been knocked out. He breathed stertorously, at times grunting and ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London

... of the doorway, and he was probably the most disreputable-looking officer who had ever worn the blue-and-silver uniform of the Service. His nose was bloody and swollen to twice its normal size. Both eyes were blackened, and his hair, matted with blood, was plastered in ragged swirls across ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various

... Nagasaki. These were dressed like the rickshaw-men. They wore tight trousers, short jackets and straw sandals. They were sitting, wearied, on the sides of the barge, wiping black faces with black towels. Their hair was long, lank and matted. Their hands were bruised and ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... we shall talk no more about it now. Sit beside me here upon the bank, and look at the peace and the beauty of all this scene." Under the shadow of the bank, with its matted growth of trees, the water was a pure myrtle green; midway in the expanse it was purple, and beyond, in the last faint light of the sun, it was an exquisite violet. The sand at their feet alternated ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins

... man, with bull neck, broad shoulders, deep chest, low brow, flat nose, square chin, and small black eyes, in which there lay a mingled expression of ferocity and cunning. His very swarthy complexion, heavy black beard, and thick, matted, coal-black hair, together with his black eyes, were sufficiently marked to make him worthy of the name of "Black Bill." Altogether, he looked like a perfect type of perfect ruffianism; and Obed involuntarily felt a cold shudder pass over him as he thought of Zillah falling into the ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... stream, laid both hands on a sturdy branch which drooped above the house-boat, and swung himself light as a feather to the after deck The door of the rear room, which served the inmates as a kitchen, was unsecured and open. He passed through, pistol in hand, and trod the matted floor stealthily, drawn and guided by the tiny beam of light which issued from the interstice between it and the doorway. With the motion of the boat the door beat idly and noiselessly to and fro, so that the beam was cut off at regular ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray

... lake above it in one of the great valleys (Valle del Yeso) of the Cordillera: it is a mountain of detritus, which has puzzled me. If you have any further opportunities, do look for scores on steep faces of rock; and here and there remove turf or matted parts to have a look. Again I beg, do not give up Geology:—I wish you had Agassiz's work and plates on Glaciers. (501/4. "Etudes sur les Glaciers." L. Agassiz, Neuchatel, 1840.) I am extremely sorry that the Rajah, ill luck to him, has ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... horns and tail, settled anywhere that a sufficiently broad surface presented itself. Having started to run, they ran on and on and on. The boy and girl followed, their horses stumbling blindly over the ridges between which the corn was growing. The grayish brown sod, through which the matted white roots of the grass showed plainly, lay in fine lines down the long field, their irregular edges causing horses and cattle to go down on their knees frequently as they ran. But though the cattle sometimes fell, they were as quickly up and pushed blindly ahead, ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger

... a matted maze, Hand firm as iron, eyes all ablaze; Bystanders timidly, breathlessly gaze, As o'er the keno board boldly ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... marshy and thickly-wooded glen, known by the name of Wiley's Swamp. A few rough logs, laid side by side, served for a bridge over this stream. On that side of the road where the brook entered the wood, a group of oaks and chestnuts, matted thick with wild grape-vines, threw a cavernous gloom over it. To pass this bridge was the severest trial. It was at this identical spot that the unfortunate Andre was captured, and under the covert of those chestnuts ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... conspicuous, dressed for the chase, red roses in her hair, as Otto, in the first months of marriage, had directed. He pointed to it without a word; she raised her eyebrows in silence; and they passed still forward into a matted corridor where four doors opened. One led to Otto's bedroom; one was the private door to Seraphina's. And here, for the first time, Otto left her hand, and stepping forward, shot ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... over a stove, was a shriveled old Jew in a greasy flannel gown. He was very ugly and his matted red hair hung down over his villainous face. In a corner stood a clothes-horse on which hung hundreds of silk handkerchiefs, and four or five boys, as dirty and oddly dressed as the one who had brought Oliver, sat about a table smoking pipes ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives

... far ahead, a minute blur vanishing through files of trees. Fanny turned to the right, mounting an abrupt slope thickly wooded toward the crown. A late moon, past full, shed an unsteady light through interlaced boughs, matted grape vines, creepers flung from tree to tree; it shone on a hurrying rill, a bright thread drawn through the brush. Fanny Gilkan jumped lightly from bank to bank. She made her way with lithe ease through apparently unbroken tangles. It was Fanny ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... and two the other is the best. Better have land so well covered with clean sand, that very few weeds will grow and no cultivation be needed. Then set vines one foot apart and very soon the whole ground will be perfectly matted and will need very little care for years. For two or three years pull out the weeds by hand, and the ground will be covered ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden

... a little child, and he had never seen aught in her face but a heavy misery. There she was sitting as he had first known her, with her eyes bleared and her knees shaking, and with the dust of the courtyard and the husks of the corn in her matted hair. He went to her and spoke to her, and he asked her to take the place of the king ...
— The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles • Padraic Colum

... 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame,— Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles, and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, with tempting clusters hung, 20 A virgin ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson

... phosphatic variety the irritation is much less marked and may even be altogether absent. With the pultaceous deposit in the bladder there is incontinence of urine, which dribbles away continually and keeps the hair on the inner side of the thighs matted with soft magma. In all cases alike the calculus may be felt by the examination of the bladder with the oiled hand in the rectum. The pear-shaped outline of the bladder can be felt beneath, and within it the solid, oval body. It is most easily recognized if the organ ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture

... London have come to a mournful conclusion. The bulls refused to take part, and the principal combatant instead of being all Matted O'er with the blood of his taurine victims, has been sent to prison for trying to Pick a ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 9, May 28, 1870 • Various

... who does not behold A Venus, rising from the sea of tears, Up to her native, Earth-illuming spheres? Her hair, long matted, is a flow of gold Which even the Sun might wear and feel not cold; And, oh, her heavenly smile at doubts and fears, As when she, at all depths, raised to her ears, Shells of her Glory, murmuring, ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle

... chest, held tight in his clasped hands. He stared straight in front of him with wide, unblinking eyes. Of all the men in the group, he was the muddiest His clothes were caked with mud. His face was covered with mud. His hair was matted with mud. Also his clothes were the raggedest of all. The left leg of his trousers was rent from knee to waistband. The skin of his thigh shone white, strangely white compared to his face and hands, through the jagged tear. The sleeves of his tunic were torn. There was a hole in the back of ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham

... three feet on posts, approached by stairs; part walled, part trellised. Trophies of advertisement- photographs were hung up within for decoration. There was a table and a recess-bed, in which Mrs. Stevenson slept; while I camped on the matted floor with Johnnie, Mrs. Johnnie, her sister, and the devil's own regiment of cockroaches. Hither was summoned an old witch, who looked the part to horror. The lamp was set on the floor; the crone squatted on the threshold, a green palm-branch in her hand, the light striking full on her aged ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ivy, weed and wallflower, grown, Matted and massed together, hillocks heap'd On what were chambers, arch crush'd, column strown In fragments, choked up vaults, and frescoes steep'd In subterranean damps, where the owl peep'd, Deeming it midnight; Temples, baths, or halls— Pronounce who can: for all that Learning reap'd From her ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... the girl found herself staring down with horror-stricken eyes at the body of a man stretched out on the further side of the boulders. Motionless he lay there, a long length of brown chaps and torn, disordered shirt. His face was hidden in his crooked arms; the tumbled mass of brown hair was matted with ominous dark clots. But in that single, stricken second Mary Thorne ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames

... marsh lands or meadows, 140 acres of which have already been built upon. The marsh is about half a mile wide, and something like a mile and a half long, extending southward into Jersey City. The surface is a network of matted vegetation and roots perhaps five feet deep, and under that lies a mass of blue clay or river silt 100 feet or more in depth. The original tidal flow over these marsh lands has been obstructed by viaducts for ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various

... followed it to the scene of the massacre on Cow Creek, arriving there only two hours after the savages had finished their devilish work. Dead men were lying about in the short buffalo-grass which had been stained and matted by their flowing blood, and the agonized posture of their bodies told far more forcibly than any language the tortures which had come before a welcome death. All had been scalped; all had been mutilated in that nameless manner which seems to ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... perceive the object of their solicitude. Stretched at full length upon the grass, and perfectly motionless, lay the form of Wilford; his usually pale features wore the livid hue of death, and his 456 long black hair was soaked and matted with blood, which trickled slowly from a fearful contused wound towards the back of the head. His right shoulder, which was crushed out of all shape, appeared a confused mass of mud and gore, while his right—his pistol arm—lay bent in an unnatural direction, which showed ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... "my father came to me in a dream. You know he died when I was about twelve years old, and last night I saw him as he would have been if he had lived until now—something over sixty. His hair and beard were matted and there was the most awful expression in his eyes—it makes me shudder yet. He was in his grave clothes, dead and yet not dead. He was suffering—there was something he was trying to say to me; something he wanted to explain. We were out ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed

... pointed to four. Was it possible that he had been unconscious for more than six hours? He had left Jean on the mountain top soon after nightfall—it was not later than nine o'clock when he had seen Meleese. Seven hours! Again he lifted his hands to his head. His hair was stiff and matted with blood. It had congealed thickly on his cheek and neck and had soaked the top of his coat. He had bled a great deal, so much that he wondered he was alive, and yet during those hours his captors had given him no assistance, had not even bound ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood

... tried, with great success, planting them in rows alternately with other vegetables. When they are all together, the haulms in wet seasons grow so rankly that they become matted together; and then, as the air is excluded from the roots, it renders them liable to disease. We have tried cutting the haulm off to within a few inches of the ground; but this, the gardener said, proved detrimental to the roots. We afterwards tried a row of potatoes, then cabbages, ...
— Our Farm of Four Acres and the Money we Made by it • Miss Coulton

... made of the hair of the camel, goat, or sheep, or by a mixture of all these kinds. It is matted together by heavy and constant pounding, moistened with water, turned and beaten again and again until it becomes compact and solid. Sometimes the felts are decorated with colored threads and often the name of ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt

... my mother's grave. The weeds were already matted over it, and the tombstone was half hid among nettles. I cleared them away and they stung my hands; but I was heedless of the pain, for my heart ached too severely. I sat down on the grave, and read over and over again the epitaph on the stone. It was simple, but ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... feature. The man's frame was bony and powerful; the loose sheepskin jacket he wore was thrown open, and through the imperfectly fastened shirt-front, it might be seen that his breast was covered with a thick felt of matted hair. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... lichens, enclosed six generations of dead Burwells and their next of kin. A locked gate kept out trespassers. Long streamers of brier and wild berry bushes, purple and ashy with the mantling sap drawn upward by the March sunshine, were matted over the older graves; a spreading "honey-shuck" tree arose near the middle of the badly kept square, and smaller trees flourished here and there. An apple tree, flushed with blossoms, leaned over the wall above the place selected for ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... and will preserve to me no deeper-cut incidents, panorama, or sights to cheer my soul, than these at Chicoutimi and Ha-ha bay, and my days and nights up and down this fascinating savage river—the rounded mountains, some bare and gray, some dull red, some draped close all over with matted green verdure or vines—the ample, calm, eternal rocks everywhere—the long streaks of motley foam, a milk-white curd on the glistening breast of the stream—the little two-masted schooner, dingy yellow, with patch'd sails, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... and the sense of things growing and of food for hungry mouths being prepared, there was in her, even as a child, a hunger for the life of the spirit. In her dreams women, beautifully gowned and with rings on their hands, came to brush the wet, matted hair back from her forehead. Across the little wooden bridge before her eyes came wonderful men, women, and children. The children ran forward. They cried out to her. She thought of them as brothers and sisters who were to come to live in the farmhouse and who were to make ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... ground, though, she, poor soul, was not making the faintest struggle. Overwrought nature had at last peremptorily asserted herself, and she lay there in a dead swoon: her eyes circled by deep purple lines, that told of long, sleepless nights, her hair matted and damp round her forehead, her lips parted in a sharp curve that ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... excellent conduct!" Hearing these words, the descendant of Ikshwaku's race alighted from his excellent chariot and beheld Sita bathed in tears. And beholding that beautiful lady seated within her vehicle, afflicted with grief, besmeared with filth, with matted locks on head, and attired in dirty robes, Rama, afraid of the loss of his honour, said unto her, "Daughter of Videha, go withersover thou likest! Thou art now free! What should have been done by me, hath been done! ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... days alone here," said she, looking round upon the rather bare walls, the matted floor, the children's desks, and the single shelf which held ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau

... my hands and knees, and threaded my way through the long grasses and matted boughs as noiselessly as I could. The two old hands watched me. When I emerged several yards off, much to their surprise, Colebrook turned to Doolittle. "Might answer," he said curtly. "Major says, 'Choose your own men.' Anyhow, if they catch him, nobody's fault but his. Wants ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... arms. She was white and worn out with suffering and watching, but she would allow no one to make the child's last toilet but herself. For this ceremony she needed no lace or satin, no gilt or mock jewelry. She washed the little form free of all earth's stain, combed loose the bright brown hair, matted with the sweat of suffering, and dressed her for the last—the last time, in one of the pretty white linen nightgowns she had made for her darling but a few ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... Henri had placed Diana was matted, and had a large oaken bed with serge curtains, a table, and ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas

... their progress towards the British Museum, to which national establishment they had cards of admission, the two friends were intercepted in their way by a concourse at a coach-maker's shop, fronting which stood a chariot carefully matted round the body, firmly sewed together, and the wheels enveloped in hay-bands, preparatory to its being sent into the country. Scarcely had these precautionary measures of safety been completed, when a shrill cry, as if by a child inside the vehicle, was heard, loud and continuative, which, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... without loss on our side (principally arising from Tommy Dott's stout defence). We had two men killed, and we had altogether fourteen men wounded—some of them very severely. My friend Tommy Dott came on board a miserable object, his face and hair matted with blood; but when it was washed away, he proved to be not so much hurt as was supposed: the cut was severe, but the bones were not injured. He was very soon out of his hammock again, and his chief pleasure was to put his tongue in his cheek and make faces at the French lieutenant, ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat

... beavers had taken refuge in the pond, and its surface was heaving with the passing of many bodies beneath. Kazan came to the end of the dam. This was new. Instinctively he knew that it was the work of Broken Tooth and his tribe and for a few moments he tore fiercely at the matted sticks and limbs. Suddenly there was an upheaval of water close to the dam, fifty feet out from the bank, and Broken Tooth's big gray head appeared. For a tense half minute Broken Tooth and Kazan measured each other at that distance. Then Broken ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... but we saw another strong thing, where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular power before. A toadstool—that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night—had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its own bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed. Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose. But ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the other was no longer able to stand before him, and thinking it was himself that had done the deed, he tossed up his head and snorted in triumph. At this moment, the matted hair was thrown back from his eyes, and the dust having somewhat settled away, he sighted me, where I stood reloading my gun. I fancied he would take off before I could finish, and I made all the haste in my power—so much ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... speak. Twice I endeavored, but no sound came from my parched lips, and I think my eyes must have filled with tears, her dear face was so blurred and indistinct. She must have understood, for she drew my head down upon her shoulder, pressing back the matted hair with one hand. ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish

... thickly shaded and dappled with sunshine, ran along the ridge through the battlefield, and it was as pretty, peaceful, and romantic as a lovers' walk in a garden. Here and there, the tall grass along the path was pressed flat where a wounded man had lain. In one place, the grass was matted and dark red; nearby was a blood-stained hat marked with the initials "E. L." Here was the spot where the first victim of the fight fell. A passing soldier, who reluctantly gave his name as Blackford, bared his left ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... idle and out of repair; the pelican sails in solitude upon their waters, and the crocodile basks upon their shores; the thousands of acres which formerly produced rice for a dense population are now matted over by a thorny and impenetrable jungle. The wild buffalo, descendant from the ancient stock which tilled the ground of a great nation, now roams through a barren forest, which in olden times was a soil glistening ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... her eyes to rove about the shack. A slight movement in the corner attracted her attention. There, like a forlorn little lamb, a tight rag about her mouth, her curls matted and damp, crouched Elsie Waldstricker. Instantly, Tess recognized her and her heart pumped with joy. Surely, her prayer had been answered! Here was her opportunity! The child was suffering, she could see that, but ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White

... have undergone strange changes. My clothes hung about me as yellow rags, through whose rents showed the tanned skin. My hair grew long, and became matted together. I am told that even now my eyes have a strange brightness, a swift ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... Tricked out in proud disguise of cast-off weeds Which for that service had been husbanded, 10 By exhortation of my frugal Dame—[7] Motley accoutrement, of power to smile At thorns, and brakes, and brambles,—and, in truth, More ragged than need was! O'er pathless rocks, Through beds of matted fern, and tangled thickets, 15 Forcing my way, I came to one dear nook [8] Unvisited, where not a broken bough Drooped with its withered leaves, ungracious sign Of devastation; but the hazels rose Tall and erect, with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth

... life are somewhat different. Thus we may find cowslips (Primula veris) growing in a meadow, and primroses (P. vulgaris) in an adjoining wood, each in abundance, but not often intermingled. And for the same reason the old turf of a pasture or heath consists of a great variety of plants matted together, so much so that in a patch little more than a yard square Mr. Darwin found twenty distinct species, belonging to eighteen distinct genera and to eight natural orders, thus showing their extreme diversity of organisation. For the same reason a number ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... school-boys, that somewhere in the copse there is a black-snake hole, the abode of an enormous monster, upon whom no one, however, has ever happened to set eyes. Here, with but few exceptions, the graves are marked only by low mounds of turf, overrun with matted wild-blackberry vines, where the lightest footstep, crushing through the crumbling sod, destroys the labors of whole colonies of ants. But farther up the hillside, headstones and monuments stand so close together, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... off and the palm-branches sweeping across their eyes. In a short time, the whole cathedral presented the appearance of a forest of palm-trees, ( la Birnam wood) moved by a gentle wind; and under each tree a half-naked Indian, his rags clinging together with wonderful pertinacity; long, matted, dirty black hair both in men and women, bronze faces with mild unspeaking eyes, or all with one expression of eagerness to see the approach of the priests. Many of them had probably travelled a long way, and the palms were from ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... or captain, who drew up at some distance from us. Immediately after this, ten priests rushed out from a neighbouring temple. These men wore loose robes of white cotton, having their long hair clotted with blood, and all matted and twisted together. They bore vessels in their hands containing fire and aromatics, with which they fumigated us, and made us to understand by signs, that they would put us to death if we did not quit ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. III. • Robert Kerr

... before. As she looked about her, her mother stopped laughing and watched her face with a painful attention. Sylvia looked at the tall, dingy houses, the frowzy little shops, the swarms of dirty-nosed children, shrill-voiced, with matted hair, running and whooping in the street, at the slatternly women yelling unobeyed orders to them out of half-glimpsed, cheerless interiors, smelling of cabbage and dishwater. It was Sylvia's first sight of the life of city poor, and upon her face of disgust and revulsion her mother ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... or was it merely a subconscious recognition of the final passing of the bodily cold before the glowing warmth of the blaze? "And Soup Face," continued The Sky Pilot. A battered wreck half rose and extended a pudgy hand. Red whiskers, matted in little tangled wisps which suggested the dried ingredients of an infinite procession of semi-liquid refreshments, rioted ...
— The Oakdale Affair • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... now used as a staff but would later devour for lunch; bearers, under convoy of straight soldierly red-sashed Sudanese, transporting Government goods; wild-eyed staring shenzis from the forest, with matted hair and goatskin garments, looking ready to bolt aside at the slightest alarm; coveys of marvellous and giggling damsels, their fine-grained skin anointed and shining with red oil, strung with beads ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White

... juniper and rock-roses, that is where the lake side is for a little clear of the woods. He said to the boy that was with him, "I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will stay on it," meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not be able to go through it. So he took up "a pebble of cow-dung, and as soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music that ever was heard." They ran away, and ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats

... inweave^, twist, wreathe; anastomose [Med.], inosculate^, dovetail, splice, link; lace, tat. mat, plait, plat, braid, felt, twill; tangle, entangle, ravel; net, knot; dishevel, raddle^. Adj. crossing &c v.; crossed, matted &c, v.. transverse. cross, cruciform, crucial; retiform^, reticular, reticulated; areolar^, cancellated^, grated, barred, streaked; textile; crossbarred^, cruciate^, palmiped^, secant; web-footed. Adv. cross, thwart, athwart, transversely; at grade ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... to hear all the further trials we had to go through. We had three other rivers to ford before reaching the base of the next mountain; and, on essaying to climb this latter, we found it so steep and matted with rank vegetation that it was impossible to ascend it. Besides, the mosquitoes stung us almost to pieces on our going into the forest here; and, seeing that our route southwards was impracticable any longer, we bent our steps due west, following the track of the last river we had crossed ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson

... having formally received the bride from her mother, whose strength barely permitted her to rise and go through that part of the ceremony, proceeded to place the ring upon the finger of his wife, it fell, either from nervousness or accident upon the matted floor. Quick as thought, Waunangee, who had now his whole attention bent upon the passing scene, stooped, picked it up, and attempted to place it on the finger, still extended, ...
— Hardscrabble - The Fall of Chicago: A Tale of Indian Warfare • John Richardson

... are too bounteous, when I feel that itching, you shall asswage it Sir, before another: this only and Farewell Sir. Your Brother when the storm was most extream, told all about him, he left a will which lies close behind a Chimney in the matted Chamber: and so as well Sir, as you have made me able, ...
— The Scornful Lady • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... Dunn appeared, shouting, "Stop it! Stop it! She forged those letters. She broke her sister's heart. Stop it, I say!" Every person in the room seemed terror-stricken at the wild spectacle he presented. His face, wasted to a mere skeleton, was ghastly white, while his long yellow hair hung in matted locks about his brow, and a look of wild frenzy was in his eye, as darting toward the paralyzed Julia, he seized her as with a lion's grasp and shook ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes

... back to Jacopo the shirt and trousers he had lent him, that Edmond reappeared before the captain of the lugger, who had made him tell his story over and over again before he could believe him, or recognize in the neat and trim sailor the man with thick and matted beard, hair tangled with seaweed, and body soaking in seabrine, whom he had picked up naked and nearly drowned. Attracted by his prepossessing appearance, he renewed his offers of an engagement to Dantes; but Dantes, who had his own ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... sway in the wind—look at the silver spray Flung from the foam-sheet of the cataract Amid the broken rocks! Shall we stay here With the wild hawks? No, ere the hot noon come Dive we down—safe! See, this is our new retreat Walled in with a sloped mound of matted shrubs, Dark, tangled, old and green, still sloping down To a small pool whose waters lie asleep, Amid the trailing boughs turned water-plants: And tall trees overarch to keep us in, Breaking the sunbeams into emerald ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke









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