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More "Rakish" Quotes from Famous Books



... the upper end of the second room (for there were two, one opening from the other) stood a blackened, broken-nosed, plaster bust of Voltaire, upon the summit of whose august wig some irreverent customer had perched a particularly rakish-looking hat. Just in front of this alcove and below the bust stood a marble-topped table, at one end of which two young men were playing dominoes to the accompaniment of the ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards

... ourselves. Oh, holy poker! it's cruel the difference between us. Here's my forehead low and bumpy, and my little nose, scarcely any of it, and what there is turned right up to the sky; and my wide mouth, and my little eyes, and my hair just standing straight up as rakish as you please. And look at you, with your elegant features and your—oh, but it's genteel you are!—and I love you, Nora alannah; I love you, and am not ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade

... at a smart walk; the rigid straddle of his legs, the turned-out feet, the stiff back, the rakish slant of the sombrero above the square, motionless set of the shoulders ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... old-fashioned sailing sloop which then still performed duty on our more distant stations as a swan does a goose, her sailing powers far exceeding those of the fastest of them, whilst Williams' metamorphosis of her only had the effect of imparting to her an extremely rakish and wicked appearance. ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood

... had visited with his father a few years before. But M. Rubempre was bent on business, and the delightful scenery was an old story to him. They took a boat at a pier, and for an hour a negro pulled them about the harbor. There were quite a number of steamers in the port, long, low, and rakish craft, built expressly for speed, and some of them must have been knocked to pieces by the blockaders before the lapse of many weeks, though a considerable proportion of them succeeded in delivering their cargoes at ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic

... His complexion was of a ruddy brown, and his hair, entirely innocent of a comb, was decorated with divers feathery tokens of his last night's rest. A cap with the front torn off, jauntily set on one side of his head, gave him a rakish and wide-awake air, his clothes were patched and torn in several places, and his shoes were already in an advanced stage of decay. As he approached the fence he took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and commenced to ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... her trunks were tiny garments—garments pink-ribboned, blue-ribboned, things embroidered and scalloped and hemstitched and hand-made and lacy. She went looking less grandmotherly than ever in her smart, blue tailor suit, her rakish hat, her quietly correct gloves, and slim shoes and softly becoming jabot. Her husband had got her a compartment, had laden her down with books, magazines, fruit, flowers, candy. Five minutes before the train pulled out, Emma looked ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber

... afternoon (I was painting the sunset glow) just as Loretta reached the edge of the quay on her way home, a young fellow, in white duck with a sash of dark red silk binding and hanging from his waist and a rakish straw hat tipped over his handsome face, shot his gondola alongside mine and leaned over to whisper something in Luigi's ear. And that was why the girl in her long black shawl stopped, and why Luigi immediately changed gondolas and made for the ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith

... latter, land-locked save where lost in the distant ocean; the former skirted by the great Babylon of America on one side, and the lovely wooded banks of Hoboken on the other. The lofty western hills formed a sharp yet graceful bend in the stream, round which a fleet of small craft, with rakish hulls and snowy sails, were stealing quietly and softly, like black swans with white wings; the stillness and repose were only broken by the occasional trumpet blast of some giant high-pressure steamer, as she dashed past them with lightning speed. Suddenly a floating ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... sports a motor-car, a rakish little craft, built long and low, with racing lines, and a green complexion, and a nose that cuts through the air like the prow of a swift boat through water. Von Gerhard had promised me a spin in it on the first mild day. Sunday turned out to be unexpectedly ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... have often since thanked Heaven that they filled up that pathless ocean in order to build an iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the plank—even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost promontory, near ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised. There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid. An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of the verses, and the painful recurrence ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... became a hat the moment she put it on; it had an appearance and an air; and now the dark surface lent itself all to contrast with her light, soft-hued hair and clear, delicate skin. It was still further improved, when, having removed it again, she set it on at a rakish artillery angle. Possibly, if hers had been the dark, nut-brown beauty, she would have seen that she looked best lurking beneath its sombre shade, and therefore have turned the rim down some way to even increase the shade; but Janet fitted that which was frank, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart

... devil may you be?" he inquired, and a brown eye, rakish and roving in its glance, played briskly over the Parisian, whilst Garnache himself returned the compliment, and calmly surveyed this florid gentleman of middle height with the ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... Glass very high. Mounted at the gate with Mr. H. Horse skittish, and wants exercise. Arrive at the old house. All the provisions bespoke by some rakish fellow-commoner in the next room, who had been on a scheme to Newmarket. Could get nothing but mutton-chops off the worst end. Port very new. Agree to try ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson

... a large boat and thoroughly seaworthy. Indeed her owner had made a voyage in her to the Mediterranean, but she was built for speed also, and decidedly rakish in cut. ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells

... with his policy of improving on his father's rakish Muse was the frequent endorsement of the beautiful and harmless practice of kissing. The kiss is mentioned some forty-eight times in the present work, and in the nine hundred untranslated Rubaiyat, two hundred and ten more kisses occur, making a grand total of two hundred and fifty-eight Omaric ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin

... are long and well-furnished birds, as they always fly better, and lay more eggs than the short thick-set variety: they should have rakish-looking heads, with long bills, chrome yellow tinged with green in the case of the drake, and dull brown fringed with bright orange in the case of the duck. The eyes should be set high in the head, and the head itself appear to be ...
— Wild Ducks - How to Rear and Shoot Them • W. Coape Oates

... the chief of the Staffs, and called Bickerstaff, quasi Biggerstaff; as much as to say, the Great Staff, or Staff of Staffs; and that it has applied itself to Astronomy with great success, after the example of our aforesaid forefather. The descendants from Longstaff, the second son, were a rakish, disorderly sort of people, and rambled from one place to another, till, in the time of Harry the Second, they settled in Kent, and were called Long-Tails, from the long tails which were sent them as a punishment for the murder of Thomas-a-Becket, as the legends say. They have been always sought ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele

... energetic Shirley reappear, pushing open the doors of the garage, which was connected with the stable. He hurried to the deserted taxicab, where he seemed busied for several minutes, the glow of his pocket lamp shooting out now and then. Through the door of the garage a long, rakish-looking racing car was being pushed out by Jim and his sleepy groom. There was a cheery shout from the taxi, and Helene heard a ripping sound. Shirley reappeared, ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... must do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were crushed by the crowd behind. In the van of the right-hand wing, brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a permanent rakish angle. He caught sight of me—trumpeted like a siren in the Channel fog—and came at me with raised ears and trunk outstretched. I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle of his own. I felt the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... contemporary social novel. We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions, serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster flirting and the ordinary ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... I saw a policeman standing at the top of the Gut. Up he looked; down he looked; Seacombe was orderly. Stepping as if to arrest a malefactor, he marched down the Gut.... Where was the policeman? A battered billycock and a rakish pipe looked round the corner, then withdrew. The battered billycock knew where the policeman was. The price of a glass, and billycock would have ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... blouses, tied around the waist with ropes, or fastened with leather belts; others, long blue coats, reaching nearly to their feet; and all, or nearly all, had caps on their heads, and great heavy boots reaching up to their knees, in which their pantaloons were thrust, giving them a rakish and ruffianly appearance. A few sat in their shirt-sleeves; and, judging by the color of their shirts, as well as their skins, did not reckon soap among the luxuries of life. Several of these savage-looking Mujiks were smoking some abominable weed, intended, perhaps, for tobacco, but very much ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... straight lines of a straight skirt, that no further conjectures should be rendered necessary. This lady had a highbred air of singular distinction, accentuated by a tremendously knowing look. She was at once elegant and rakish; the gamin in her was obviously the touch of caviare to season the woman of fashion. The mixture made an extraordinarily attractive ensemble. As she jumped to the ground, throwing her reins to a groom, her jump was a master-stroke; it landed her squarely on her feet; ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... top-hat a rakish tilt, the old gentleman ambled indoors, satisfied that he had dropped a guarded hint in a pleasant ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... for it is either a mask to deceive others, or a mist to deceive ourselves. A man that is clothed with negatives, thus argues: I am not such a drunkard as my landlord, such a thief as my tenant, such a rakish fellow, or a highwayman; No! I live a sober, regular, retired life: I am a good man, I go to church; God, I thank thee. Now, through a mans boasts of his virtue in contradiction to the vices mentioned, yet a ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... the place, and at scores of other gentlemen under whose protection they were walking here and there; and she thought that her gentleman was handsomer and grander looking than any other gent in the place. Of course there were votaries of pleasure of all ranks there—rakish young surgeons, fast young clerks and commercialists, occasional dandies of the guard regiments, and the rest. Old Lord Colchicum was there in attendance upon Mademoiselle Caracoline, who had been riding in the ring; and who talked her native French very loud, and used idiomatic expressions ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... milliner from Los Angeles invited me to join his party. We had seen him at various places along our way, so that it was not entirely out of a clear sky. He was wall-eyed—if that is the opposite of cross-eyed—which gave him so decidedly rakish a look that it was some time before I could persuade my conservative relatives that it would be safe for me to accept the invitation, but as the party numbered ten, mostly female, they finally gave me their blessing. ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane

... will find it all right; but whatever it is, try to cut the whole matter off entirely. Make love to her yourself, Percy, if that is what she wants - you know you have always been rather good at that sort of thing"; and she smiled at her own astonishing wordly wisdom, feeling almost rakish at having framed such ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page

... lover, Frank Hallett. Once, in a riding-party, 'she had moodily watched his (Hallett's) square, determined bushman's back as he jogged along in front of her, and compared it with Blake's easy, graceful, rather rakish, bearing. Why was Frank so stolid, ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne

... man, master and owner of his own rakish-looking little black-hulled craft, that, rumor was wont to say, was not averse to a bit of slaving, if she found herself in far seas, with a likely run ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... knuckles into her eyes the White Linen Nurse turned back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up rakish and bruised as a prizefighter's. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously from its arm-hole, and along the edge of the vivid little purple skirt the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless yards and yards and yards of ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... he pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck. Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anaemic in appearance, he wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in his cheek ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... ye Mauchline belles, Ye're safer at your spinning-wheel; Such witching books are baited hooks For rakish rooks, like Rob Mossgiel. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... was a Mr. Rumbald, a maltster (which was all I thought him then), who frequented the Mitre tavern, without Aldgate, where I went one day, dressed in one of my sober country suits, wearing my hat at a somewhat rakish cock, that I might seem to be a simple fellow ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... what was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful attitude, and try to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... after a week's absence from London. He had been to Little Barlingford, and had spent his brief holiday among old friends and acquaintance. The weather had not been in favour of that driving hither and thither in dog-carts, or riding rakish horses long distances to beat up old companions, which is accounted pleasure on such occasions. The blustrous winds of an unusually bitter March had buffeted Mr. Sheldon in the streets of his native town, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... alone; the rector remained below in the library. She found her father well propped up with pillows, and his skull-cap, with the long white tassel, was drawn down over one eye, giving him a curious leer. The rakish angle of the cap, with the piercing eyes beneath, the hawk-like beak, and the shriveled old mouth, puckered into a sardonic smile, made him an almost comic figure. Trimmer stood at attention by the head of the bed like a sentinel. His humility and deference ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley

... and the blue ribbons and the Captain himself, all in this state of violent excitement; and down they bore at once upon the ancient mariner, as if he were a regular bluff-bowed old East Indiaman, full of golden ingots, and they were clipper-built, copper-fastened, rakish ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes

... figure that was still more unfamiliar. Judson backed away and stared again, muttering to himself. If he had not traced Hallock almost to the door of Flemister's quarters, there might have been room for the thin edge of the doubt wedge. The unfamiliar pose and the rakish tilt of the soft hat were not among the chief clerk's remembered characteristics; but making due allowance for the distortion of the magnified facial outline, ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... procession scarlet robes and hoods." This imposing dress, in perfect harmony with the dignity of the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... distance, dipping down a hill to the creek that broke the stretch toward Guests. It was not often that motors of any distinction saw fit to travel into Bloomfield; the pike was not good enough. But this approaching car seemed to be one of some distinction—was long and rather rakish, had a deep sound to the exhaust as it started up the hill toward him. Idly he watched it. There were two passengers, a man and a woman, slouched well down in the seats. What could they be doing in the heat of the afternoon ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... thick, square wisp of white hairs hung from his chin; its waggling gave additional point to his deep utterance; and his general contempt for mankind with its activities and moralities was expressed in the rakish set of his big soft hat of black felt with a large rim, which he ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with his successes. The young and pretty Duchess ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... Redoubt, or some other point of the changing front that the Hun was about to lose. And as they left, the men were mostly silent; though they looked debonair enough with their swinging quickstep and easy carriage, and their frying-pan hats set at all sorts of rakish angles. Their officers would nod, glance enviously at the apple-trees and tents in our pleasant little orchard, and pass on to the front of the Front, and all that this implied in the way of mud, vermin, sudden death, suspense, and damnable discomfort. And returning to the orchard we offered ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... high-road's gaiety. From the old grey valise carried the previous day by Blanquette she had produced much property finery. A black velveteen jacket resplendent with pearl-buttons, velveteen knee-breeches tied with ribbons at the knees, and a rakish Alpine hat with a feather adorned my master's person. His own disreputable heavy boots and a pair of grey worsted stockings may not have formed a fastidious finish to the costume; but in my eyes he looked magnificent. Towards the transfiguration of Blanquette a Pandora box could not have ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke

... just when you did," he remarked solemnly, "I should have been devoured by sharks. Already I had noticed a black fin circling about the island—I mean a LEAN, black fin,—or is it a low, rakish, black fin? No; that's a craft,—a low, rakish, black craft. It was ...
— The Voyage of the Hoppergrass • Edmund Lester Pearson

... may have been the cat who left it, there. HE is as full of the old Nick as he can be stuffed, Mrs. Dr. dear. A manse cat should at least LOOK respectable, in my opinion, whatever he really is. But I never saw such a rakish-looking beast. And he walks along the ridgepole of the manse almost every evening at sunset, Mrs. Dr. dear, and waves his tail, and ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... derision and contempt. It had flat runners! And it curved far up in front! And it was built on a skeleton framework! What Bobby wanted, if he were to join the coasting world at all, was a long, low, solid, rakish-built affair with round "spring runners." Even "three-quarters" would not do ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White

... had first set eyes upon it. There were more automobiles; four of them altogether. At the wheel of each sat a soldier driver in grey uniform, and with a cloth covered helmet. Each car was of the same type, a long rakish grey body, low to the ground. As he neared the house an officer wearing a long, grey coat came out, accompanied by two or three younger men. He turned to speak to them, then got into one of the cars, which immediately ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine

... of a fish, was quite full, sweeping round under her counter in a semicircle. Then it was that I understood why her counter was so abnormally long; it was not merely a fancy on the part of her designer, intended to give her a smart, rakish appearance, it was for the purpose of giving her, despite the fulness of her run, a clean, easy delivery. Yes, as I looked at her critically, studying her lines from every possible point of view, I could believe that she would prove a quite extraordinary sailer; for there was nothing ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... Ted made out a long rakish-looking craft that had come up out of the southwest. When it was reported to Officer Cleary and he had looked critically at the vessel for some time he declared finally that it was a destroyer, but yet too far off to hazard any guess as to ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll

... deep. Evidently she had dressed hastily that morning. Her khaki-flannel shirt, belted loosely with green leather and worn like a Russian blouse, lay open at the throat. Her mass of dark hair was tucked under a green tam o' shanter perched at an unconsciously rakish angle. Unframed by her hair her face had a piquant, boyish look, and her wide-set hazel eyes seemed larger than usual. There was a ghost of a golden freckle or two on the bridge of her straight little nose. From her green tam to her stout leather boots Harlan could find no evidence of a single feminine ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... off her coat, but she wore a green hat with a gold ornament that suited her to perfection, set on her dark head at rakish angle. ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood

... figure, with enormous glasses framing round blue eyes, shadowed by a hat that was almost an exact counterpart of the shabby one Miss Gray had hung each morning for the past three winters on her peg in the dressing-room. But there was something about the rakish tilt of the hat that was in such strange contrast to the severe spectacles and the thin, frosty nose, that it gave the snowlady the appearance of staggering ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... yesterday that there was a very 'highfalutin' gintleman' in the camp the night before last. He came there in a long, rakish automobile. Uncle Mac said that 'he parted his whiskers in the middle, so he did,' and that 'he looked like a governor or somethin' of the sort.' I was just wondering if that detective of yours has anything to do with that camp, and if these strange visitors are ...
— Charred Wood • Myles Muredach

... her, her hat was set at a new and rakish angle, and she had lost too many hair-pins, but to Henry she had never looked ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall

... tone and character. Mr. Abraham Mollett was perhaps some thirty years of age, or rather more. He was a very smart man, with a profusion of dark, much-oiled hair, with dark, copious mustachoes—and mustachoes being then not common as they are now, added to his otherwise rakish, vulgar appearance—with various rings on his not well-washed hands, with a frilled front to his not lately washed shirt, with a velvet collar to his coat, and patent-leather boots ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... anxiously. Although we were not seen, Timbo and Leo could not resist an impulse to stand up and wave towards the stranger. She was standing steadily to the southward, gradually edging in towards the land. Our hopes increased of cutting her off. We made her out to be a large topsail schooner—a rakish-looking craft. Nearer and nearer she drew. Still she came on so fast that we began to fear that we should not get sufficiently to the westward to be seen, for though we could make her out clearly, and could ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... out who it was that her former pretended lover had been recommended to, and she found means to have it insinuated to her by a woman-friend, that he was not only rakish and wicked, but, in short, that he had a particular illness, and went so far as to produce letters from him to a quack-doctor, for directions to him how to take his medicines, and afterwards a receipt for money for the cure; though both the letters and ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... had he failed to subdue. That was Teddy, a rakish sorrel that had never yet been ridden. Many had tried it, but none had stuck to the saddle to the finish; and some had been carried from the ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine

... his left eye almost hidden by the rakish cock of his hat, one hand tucked away under the skirts of his plum-coloured coat, the other supporting the stem of a long clay pipe, at which he was pulling thoughtfully. The pipe and he were all but inseparable; ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... Dick had fallen heir to the establishment of an elderly uncle, who had furnished the place some time in the nineties and when he grew too decrepit to keep his foothold in New York had retired to the country, leaving Dick in possession. Even if Dick had been a conspicuously rakish young gentleman, which he was not, the traditional dignity of his surroundings would have certainly protected him from incongruous indiscretion ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley

... likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the gown—"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was her ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... her, intent on some joke or other, by way of revenging the blow; but with a furious glance she reminded him that her mistress was looking on. This seemed to trouble him but little, for he replied with a rakish wink, as much as to say that no woman, not even a lady, disliked a little fun. To be sure, when folks are sweethearting, other people always like to ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... fighters ever bled as did the English when the greedy hands of Spain were clutching at their shores. The light ships hung near the Spaniards at a distance and did not board until spars were down and the great rakish hulls were part helpless. Then—with a wild cheer—the little galleons—often two at a time—would grapple with the enemy and board—cutlasses swinging, pistols spitting, and hand-spikes hewing a way through the struggling, yellow-faced ruffians of ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... is as liable to sail at ten o'clock, or possibly to-morrow afternoon; and although bound for Iloilo or Cebu, you can not be at all sure what her destination really is. She may return after a month from a long rambling cruise among the southern isles. The Spanish mariners, in rakish Tam o'Shanter caps, lounge at the entrance to the warehouse, or the office of the Compania Maritima, dreamily smoking cigarettes, sometimes imperiously ordering the laborers to "sigue, hombre!" (get along!) a warning that the Filipino has grown too ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... from the secret agent who tracks a criminal and flirts at the same time with the prostitutes, to the counter-spy employed by the proxenets to watch the secret agent. It is here that the criminal world acquires its rakish manners, but its weakness for women and alcohol cause it to fall early into the traps of the secret police. It is here also, as well as in the salons of high-class proxenetism, that we meet with those indefinable individuals who are to-day secret agents of the government, to-morrow ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... first observed stopped near the horses' heads and peered intently at her from beneath a broad and rakish hat. He was tall and appeared to be more respectably clad than his fellows, although there was not one who looked as though he possessed a complete outfit ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... hair, which in its piled-up and metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical pale complexion—very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper left corner ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... unpleasing and surely unnecessary brevity; thus her figure was too short for her breadth, and her skirts too short for her figure; her jacket was too short over her hips, and her gloves too short over her wrists; her hair was too short on her neck and her veil too short over her nose. Yet the rakish hat settled, and the fobs and seals shaken out, she appeared mentally fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... foot-soldiers moving like a procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery, just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in Austria for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being trained for ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... promised. He is short; wears gold rimmed glasses; a Southern Colonel's Mustache and Goatee—and capitals are need to describe the style! He had his comical-serious little countenance topped off with a soft felt hat worn at the most rakish angle. He can't carry a tune, and really is not musical. His adopted daughter with whom he lives is rated ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: The Ohio Narratives • Works Projects Administration

... mandates. Farther out, and tugging fretfully in the yellow current, were the aliens of the blue seas, high-hulled, their tracery of masts and spars shimmering in the heat: a full-rigged ocean packet from Spain, a barque and brigantine from the West Indies, a rakish slaver from Africa with her water-line dry, discharged but yesterday of a teeming horror of freight. I looked again upon the familiar rows of trees which shaded the gravelled promenades where Nick had first ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... fire, his hands buried deep in his trouser pockets, his chin sunk upon his breast, his eyes fixed upon the glowing embers. For half an hour he was silent and still. Then, with the gesture of a man who has taken his decision, he sprang to his feet and passed into his bedroom. A little later a rakish young workman with a goatee beard and a swagger lit his clay pipe at the lamp before descending into the street. "I'll be back some time, Watson," said he, and vanished into the night. I understood that he had opened his campaign against Charles Augustus Milverton; but I little dreamed the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... but what 'e's bought two since 'e bought that one—a soft felt, and a cowboy what he never wore but once or twice because it wasn't becomin'. You'll 'ave noticed, miss, that 'e 'ad one o' them fyces what don't look well in nothink rakish—a real gentleman's fyce ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... evening, after parting from his patron, he ran right into the arms of a pair of merry fellows, who announced their playful purpose to detain him. Both wore their fezzes at a rakish angle, both had a rosary dangling fashionably from the left hand, both talked and laughed uproariously—secure in their employment by a foreign tourist agency from the disgust of the Muslim population, whose scowls ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall

... Van Gieson slept with his fathers, and the tavern remained shut up, waiting for a claimant, for the next heir was Yan Yost Vanderscamp, and he had not been heard of for years. At length, one day, a boat was seen pulling for the shore, from a long, black, rakish-looking schooner, that lay at anchor in the bay. The boat's crew seemed worthy of the craft from which they debarked. Never had such a set of noisy, roistering, swaggering varlets landed in peaceful Communipaw. They were outlandish in garb and demeanor, ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... librarian to open one of the bottles and pour its contents into the two tumblers of thick and rather dusty glass that Jellybrand's kept for its moments of conviviality. Malkiel the Second lifted the goblet to the window and eyed the beaded nectar with an air of almost rakish anticipation. ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... nimble grooms; young girls, extravagantly veiled, made room in comfortable touring-cars for feminine guests whose extravagant veils were yet to be unpacked; slim young men in leather trappings, caps adorned with elaborate masks or goggles, manipulated rakish steering-gears; preoccupied machinists were fussing with valve and radiator or were cranking up; and, through the jolly tumult, the melancholy bell of the locomotive sounded, and the long train moved out through the September sunshine ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers

... his hat at a comfortable but rakish angle. He looked like a music-hall humourist. A couple ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... "I guess her feet will never be lifted altogether from the ground till they are turned up in their last rest. But I wouldn't try, Josiah Allen, to imitate that roarin' and rakish set if I wuz in your place, you a member ...
— Samantha at the St. Louis Exposition • Marietta Holley

... of which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called Fresh Butter, in his gay yellow jacket, looking ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... finding the trail home again. There were active, clean-built, precise Frenchmen, with small hands and feet, and a peculiarly trim way of wearing their rough garments; typical native-born American lumber-jacks powerful in frame, rakish in air, reckless in manner; big blonde Scandinavians and Swedes, strong men at the sawing; an Indian or so, strangely in contrast to the rest; and a variety of Irishmen, Englishmen, and Canadians. These men tramped in without ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White

... a stranger in a small town always attracts public attention, and many were curious about the rakish-looking man who had now for some time occupied a ...
— Driven From Home - Carl Crawford's Experience • Horatio Alger

... Flash was a man of style When he first began unpacking the pile Of the dollars and dimes Whose jingling chimes Had clinked to the tune of his father's smile; And he strewed his wealth with such lavish hand, His rakish ways were the talk of the land, And gossipers wise Sat winking their eyes (A certain foreboding of ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... steed that looked like Sunday afternoon, with brand-new reins and bit, and in a suit that fit him to perfection, with gleaming spurs and shining buttons, the rakish and indomitable Pancho, his long-lost friend, returned to greet him. He could scarcely believe it. For since that memorable night when he had left them, to return to the interior of Mexico, never a word had he had from him. Meantime, the great happiness had ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne

... inquiry to ascertain to what nation the people belonged who had been guilty of the act. All he could learn with regard to the latter point was, that on the day following that on which it occurred, a pilot boat and several fishing vessels had fallen in with a large schooner of a very rakish appearance, under French colours, steering a course apparently with the intention of running between Shetland ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... southward, not four miles from us, two vessels becalmed like ourselves. One, a large barque, somewhat the nearest to us, was clearly an English merchantman; the other, a low, black schooner, had the wicked, rakish appearance of a Spanish slaver. The look-out from the foretopmast-head gave notice at the same time that he could see two boats pulling from one vessel to the other. The captain and all the officers were ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... following the company came: the corpse was put into a velvet hearse; and eighteen mourning coaches, filled with company, attended. When they were just ready to move, the lord Jefferies, son of the lord chancellor Jefferies, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, asked whose funeral it was; and, being told Mr. Dryden's, he said, 'What, shall Dryden, the greatest honour and ornament of the nation, be buried after this private manner! No, gentlemen, let all that loved Mr. Dryden, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... it presided high up in the easterly air like an emblem of the feudal system. On the platform within, Mr. Horace Pendyce's first footman and second groom in long livery coats with silver buttons, their appearance slightly relieved by the rakish cock of their top-hats, awaited the arrival ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... thousand hairpins next time," she said angrily, as she fastened the coils to the best of her ability, and straightened the rakish hat. "You had better see that your hair is safe, Mollie, before you have your turn. I am going to sit down on the grass and jeer at you for a change. It's so easy to be superior when ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... was, I couldn't help laughing at the pen-and-ink sketch which accompanied it—a sketch of the duke, with crowned head, and breast covered with decorations, smiling fatuously from within a rakish ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field

... temporary, but none the less does the consciousness deeply, deeply depress me. My nose is of a lively scarlet, which the warmth of the room is quickly deepening into a lowering purple. My quick passage through the air has set my hat a little awry, giving me a falsely rakish air, and the wind has loosened my hair—not into a picturesque and comely disorder, but into mere untidiness. And, meanwhile, how admirably small and cool her nose looks! What rest and composure in her whole pose! ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... you see in department stores. She's costumed cheap but gaudy in a wrinkled, tango-colored dress that she must have picked off some Grand street bargain counter late last spring. The ninety-nine-cent soup-plate lid cocked over one ear adds a rakish touch that almost puts her ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford

... startled, and he looked much more distressed than rejoiced as he lumbered from his table to grasp the outstretched hand of a classmate. The opera-hat of this Mr. Richard Giddings was cocked at a rakish angle, his blue eye twinkled good cheer and youthful hilarity, and his aspect was ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... you know, when they look down at the prima donna, painted, and smiling, and decked with flowers,—they don't think if she has a husband who ill-uses her, or a child dying at home. She has come there to make them sport. Well, there came an old lord,—a man of sixty or seventy,—who has led a wild rakish life all these years, and now he thinks 'tis time to settle down, and he wants me to help him to make people think he's become respectable. And they say I shall marry him. Phoebe, they say I must,—there is to be no help for it. And I can't bear him ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... say exactly—just something." She placed her hand over a rakish green paradise plume to see if its elimination ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... of Mr. Edward Wright, better known under the abbreviated title of "Ned," and without the prefatory "Mr." That one social quality, without which a seat at Ned Wright's festive board cannot be compassed, is Felony. A little rakish-looking green ticket was circulated a few days previously among the members of Mr. Wright's former fraternity, bidding them to a "Great Supper" in St. John's Chapel, Penrose Street (late West Street), Walworth, got up under the auspices of the South-East London Mission. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... slashed dolman trimmed at throat, wrists and edges with fur; his breeches were buff; his boots finished at the top with a yellow cord forming a heart-shaped knot in front; at his heels trailed the most dainty and rakish of sabres, light, graceful, curved almost like ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers

... skirts (I presume I might at that date have said crinoline), a deputation of ouvriers suddenly appeared. Lady Sligo described them exactly as they are to be seen in Gavarni's wonderful drawings in The Illustrated London News of 1848—strange beings with long beards and rakish caps, sometimes of liberty and sometimes of less pronounced cut, with belts round their trousers through which their shirts were pulled, and heavy, strange- looking muskets in their hands. The queer crowd who surged round the carriage ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... sympathy with the serpent's shape. When any other animal barters away his legs he buys either fins or wings with them; this is a generally-understood law, invariably respected. But the snake goes in for extravagance in ribs and vertebrae; an eccentric, rakish, and improper proceeding; part of an irregular and raffish life. Nothing can carry within it affection, or even respect, for an animal whose tail begins nowhere in particular, unless it is at the neck; even if any creature may esteem it an ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... to write '59 without first getting it '58, that Dr. Sevier, as one morning he approached his office, noticed with some grim amusement, standing among the brokers and speculators of Carondelet street, the baker, Reisen. He was earnestly conversing with and bending over a small, alert fellow, in a rakish beaver and very smart coat, with the blue flowers of modesty bunched saucily ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable

... his sojourn at Plessis-les-Tours king Louis, not wishing to hold his drinking-bouts and give vent to his rakish propensities in his chateau, out of respect to her Majesty (a kingly delicacy which his successors have not possessed) became enamoured of a lady named Nicole Beaupertuys, who was, to tell the truth, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... see our Sarah grown rakish?" asked Blue Bonnet,—and then dodged the pillow sent ...
— Blue Bonnet's Ranch Party • C. E. Jacobs

... Chicken—now a gamecock of hostile aspect—emerged from the house with unsteady steps. He had drawn upon the absent ranchman's equipment to replace his own ragged attire. He wore a suit of coarse brown ducking, the coat being a sort of rakish bolero, jaunty to a degree. Boots he had donned, and spurs that whirred with every lurching step. Buckled around him was a belt full of cartridges with a big six-shooter in each of ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry

... were very evidently unaffected by the grim fancies of the evening. They were not laughing certainly, and when they spoke it was in whispers, but the younger man hummed a music-hall tune under his breath. There was something rakish, not to say reckless, in the way the elder sat his mount. They went carefully, though, taking every possible precaution against making needless noise. Once the horse of the elder man stumbled and set a stone rolling down ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... He doffed his rakish-looking kepi and bowed low before Iris. Perhaps the white misery in her face touched him more deeply than he had counted on. Be that as it may, a note of genuine sympathy vibrated in ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy

... a schooner of about eighty tons, clean-cut about the bows, and with a long overhang at the stern that would give her a rakish, yacht-like air, except for the evidences of her trade, with which her deck is piled. Her hull is of the cutter model, sharp and deep, affording ample storage room. She has a cabin aft, and a roomy forecastle, though such are the democratic conditions of the fishing trade that part ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot

... Clergy of Sion-College, and all other Conventions, should read Prayers before them. For then those that are afraid of stretching their Mouths, and spoiling their soft Voice, will learn to Read with Clearness, Loudness, and Strength. Others that affect a rakish negligent Air by folding their Arms, and lolling on their Book, will be taught a decent Behaviour, and comely Erection of Body. Those that Read so fast as if impatient of their Work, may learn to speak deliberately. There is another sort of Persons whom ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... the murderer and his victim were removed, and comparative quiet prevailed. I was seated in an obscure corner of the bar-room, wondering how I should get through the night, when I was unceremoniously accosted by a lad of about my own age. He was a rakish looking youth, quite handsome withal, dressed in the height of fashion, and was smoking a cigar with great vigor and apparent relish. It will be seen hereafter that I have reason to remember this individual ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson

... to his mouth and surreptitiously removed a chew of tobacco almost fresh. With some effort he pulled his feet closer together, and he lifted his old Stetson and reset it at a consciously rakish angle. He glanced at the car, behind it and in front, coming back to the depressed male individual before him. "Yes, ma'am, I'll get you out, all right. Sure, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... whom I know has four different pipes and each serves a special purpose. When he wants to write a humorous article, he says to his wife, 'Where is my funny pipe?' and she hands him a long-handled affair with a weichsel-wood bowl and a cherry stem that has a kind of rakish, good-natured curve to it. Then he sits down and grinds out copy that will make an Englishman laugh at first sight. A big, dumpy brier, with a shorter stem and a celluloid end, is responsible for general descriptive work, sporting news, etc., ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... a leaping wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend's rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden

... handsome, with a face full of character, the strong lines and features of which were further accentuated by his silvery hair. He was a smart old gentleman, too, well and scrupulously attired and groomed, and his blue bird's-eye necktie, worn at a rakish angle, gave him the air of something of a sporting man rather than of a follower of Thespis. His fellow members of the Oliver company seemed to pay him great attention, and at various points of the proceedings whispered questions to him as to an ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher

... or a Titian madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... leave Oxford men a FREEMAN for their boat. Among the crowd of oarsmen proud no name will fame shout louder Than his who sits at Number Two, the straight and upright CROWDER. Then RAIKES rows bow, and we must allow that with all the weight that's aft The bow-oar gives a rakish air to the bows o' the dark-blue craft. This is the crew, who've donned dark blue, and no stouter team of Oxon Has ploughed the waves of old Father Thames, or owned a ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling

... one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred Burton, an inoffensive-looking young man ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... jumped out and ran back. They saw Dr. Stanley come out on the porch from his study. He was in his house gown and wore a little black cap to cover his bald spot. It was a little on one side and gave the good clergyman a decidedly rakish appearance. ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... said the other, 'she's the very thing; she's a rakish-looking craft, and will do admirably. Any repair we want, a few days will effect; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... of a narrow coppice-bordered lane into a wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses. A certain rakish air about these oncoming road- craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring that one's taste in childhood would have insisted on before it had been schooled ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... swell, was in his window with his setter, Spot; his legs, clad in bags with tremendous checks and glossy boots, hung outward. On the veranda were Hinkle and Ben Willing, the latter in a stovepipe hat; others wore stovepipes set at a rakish angle on one ear. They were all irrepressibly gay, calling from roof to ground, each begging the photographer to focus on his ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... plate-glass window was not even cracked. And behind the window a little mannikin, one of the familiar images that wear clothes to tempt the purchaser, stood erect. A French soldier had crept in and raised the stiff arm of the mannikin to the salute, pushed back the hat to a rakish angle. The mannikin seemed alive and more than alive, the embodiment of the spirit of the place. Facing northward toward the German guns it seemed to respond to them with a "morituri salutamus." "The last civilian in Verdun," ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds

... middle and filled at both ends. Picturesque he was and always would be, but his present costume scarce fitted the presence of a lady. Yet of this he gave no sign. He was leaning back in a morris chair, rakish, debonair, and at his ease. Evidently, he had been giving appreciative ear to the music, and more appreciative eye to ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine

... It was the same dark beast with a large white tag to his brush. Now the secret was out and Mr. Tebrick could see his rival before him. Here was the real father of his godchildren, who could be certain of their taking after him, and leading over again his wild and rakish life. Mr. Tebrick stared for a long time at the handsome rogue, who glanced back at him with distrust and watchfulness patent in his face, but not without defiance too, and it seemed to Mr. Tebrick as if there was also a touch ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett

... been left as a neglected waste for weeds and brambles to flourish undisturbed. An old scarecrow still stood knee-deep in the tangled green, left there after the field had been abandoned, to drop slowly to pieces in the wind and rain. The grotesque figure, with its outstretched arms and hat set at a rakish angle, looked familiar for some incomprehensible reason. As Oliver clung to the wall, squinted through the leaves, and wondered why that should be, the mystery was suddenly solved. The door of the house opened with a squeak of rusty hinges and somebody came out on the ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... and they all looked interesting and hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention more than anything else in the room, and for some reason instantly made him wish he ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... speaking to my niece," replied Aunt Jane with unutterable dignity from her corner. Her small features had all but disappeared in her swollen face, and her hair had slipped down at a rakish angle over one eye. But, of course, being Aunt Jane, she must choose this moment ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... the company being assembled, the corpse was put into a velvet hearse, attended by eighteen mourning coaches. When they were just ready to move, lord Jefferys, son of lord chancellor Jeffreys, a name dedicated to infamy, with some of his rakish companions riding by, asked whose funeral it was; and being told it was Mr. Dryden's, he protested he should not be buried in that private manner, that he would himself, with the lady Elizabeth's leave, have the honour of the interment, and would bestow a thousand ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... sweetness of pastoral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony, the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia preparing herself for the arduous task of converting a rakish lover by studying the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the great ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn's amours and Dr Burdock's verses, and Mr Burchell with his "Fudge," have caused as much harmless mirth as has ever ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... athletic, with heavy mustache and imperial, just beginning to turn gray, with deep-set eyes under bushy brows, and a keen, shrewd face, rather deeply lined. There was a look of dissipation there, a shade of shabbiness about his clothes, a rakish cut to the entire personality that had caused Folsom to glance distrustfully at him more than once the previous afternoon, and to meet with coldness the tentatives permissible in fellow travelers. The stranger's ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King

... a squint at pony, to see whether that cat would jump or no, but the cropt ears, the stump of a tail, the rakish look of the horse, didn't jist altogether convene to the taste or the sanctified habits of the preacher. The word no, hung on his lips, like a wormy apple, jist ready to drop the fust shake; but before it let go, the great strength, ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... steamed off at her best speed in the direction of the approaching steamer, which appeared to be fast, and to be of that peculiarly rakish class of vessels of which there were so many engaged in the business of blockade running. She was examined by the officers with their glasses; but they were unable to make her out. Her ensign was set on a stern pole; but they ...
— On The Blockade - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray Afloat • Oliver Optic

... at night, they drove through its picturesque streets in broad daylight. Both Royson and the captain were delighted with the lines of the Aphrodite when they saw her in the spacious dock. Her tapering bows and rakish build gave her an appearance of greater size than her tonnage warranted. Royson was sailor enough to perceive that her masts and spars were intended for use, and, when he reached her deck, to which much scrubbing and vigorous holy-stoning had given the color of ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy

... Whatever was following her also took a slower gait. She cast a furtive look over her shoulder and gave a horrified gasp as her eyes squarely encountered two other eyes, which were fixed upon her own in an insulting leer from beneath the rim of a rakish felt hat which was worn tilted on the side of a very unprepossessing head. The eyes, bad as they were, proved the best feature in a thoroughly vicious face, and for the first time in her life Nan felt frightened—chokingly ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... then let us procure some rakish fellows, and after we have made them sufficiently drunk, and given them a good sum of money, let us order them to go and debauch this virgin, promising them, if they do it, a ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... Boer town most of the piety is knocked out of a man. You stare at the houses, and they stare back at you dumbly. There is nothing pretentious or rakish about any of them; no matter how riotous a man's imagination might be, he could never conjure up a "wink" from a Boer house, though I have seen houses in other parts of the world that seemed to "cock an eye" at a passing traveller and invite ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... as she put on her berry cap and pulled it over at a rakish angle. She had spent a very profitable afternoon laughing at herself. At first the laughter had been a little too grim, but before long the grimness had disappeared and only a good-natured ridicule was left. It is good to be able to laugh at yourself once in a while, but Janet was glad ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill

... it very well. But we thought that you had left your rakish Manners and your youthful ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers, a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor, finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... returned home, looking as dirty and rakish as he possibly could. Lars Peter had to help him out of the cart, he could hardly stand on his legs. But he was not at loss for words. Lars Peter was silent at his insolence and dragged him into the barn, where he at once ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo

... pocket, with narrow enquiries, each Saturday night. But worst of all to know that because he was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he had no heart—no heart that he could offer where he laid it; but there it must lie, and be trodden on in silence, while rakish-looking popinjays—But this reflection stopped him, for it was too bitter to be thought out, and fetched down his quivering hand upon his axe. Enough that these things did not tend to a healthy condition of mind, or the proper worship of the British Constitution. ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... the sprightly little old gentleman. With his brisk air, natty eye-glasses, cane and gloves, and other items of dress in the most correct taste, he was quite the old beau. His white hair was crispy, brushed back, and his snowy mustache had rather a rakish effect. ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... nearly half the registered births are illegitimate, to say nothing of the illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say that scarcely ten out of a hundred are chaste, while, as rakish young Swedes have coolly informed me, many girls of respectable parentage, belonging to the middle class, are not much better. The men, of course, are much worse than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive debauchery. Here, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... its green shade set at a rakish angle, stood upon a spacious writing-table, strewn with closely written sheets of foolscap, pens, pencils, pipes, and books of reference, half a dozen of these last being piled on the floor, close to the writer's chair. It was the table of a man who leaves his work reluctantly, leaves ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... of not a little interest, concerning Sir John Holt, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, 1709, should be given in this connection. He was extremely wild in his youth, and being once engaged with some of his rakish friends in a trip into the country, in which they had spent all their money, it was agreed they should try their fortune separately. Holt arrived at an inn at the end of a straggling village, ordered his horse to be taken care of, bespoke a supper and a bed. ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... The knot adjusted to his satisfaction, he knelt and drew a large box from beneath the bed. From the box he took an immaculate and exceedingly wide-brimmed Stetson with an exceedingly high crown. He dented the crown until the hat had that rakish appearance dear to the heart of the cowboy. Then he took the foot-square looking-glass from the wall and studied the effect at various and more or less unsatisfactory angles. Again he knelt—after depositing the hat on the bed—and emerged with a pair of gorgeous leather ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... Buford was a fair-sized, ocean-going steamer. The Francisco Reyes was a dirty old tub with pretensions to the contrary; and the General Blanco—well, metaphorically speaking, the General Blanco was a coal scuttle. She was a supercilious-looking craft, sitting at a rakish angle, her engines being aft. She had a freeboard of six or seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you could go ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... fashionable forehead, she had, like a native woman, arranged her hair in two long braids. Her hat, no longer the flat straw or the flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man's cavalry hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which confined it at one side. Long, heavy-hooped earrings such as women at that time wore, and which heretofore I had never known her to employ, she now disported. Brown as her face was now becoming, one might indeed, at a little distance, have suspected her to be rather ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... the greatest navigators and the most enterprising tradesmen, and were, in times gone by, the greatest pirates as well. In fact, the harbor master at Makassar told us that the crews of many of the rakish looking sailing craft which were anchored in close proximity to the Negros were reformed buccaneers. Certainly they looked it. They may have reformed, but that did not prevent Captain Galvez from doubling the deck-watch at night ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell

... Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least, richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie, arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had been selected for the night. As they were bowling along one of the principal streets, Elsie noticed a building ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... A rakish little stern-wheel steamer lay in the stream, bound for Pittsburg, and sorely was Miselle tempted to take passage down the Alleghany in her; but lingering memories of home and the long-suffering Caleb at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... turned to the window, and through the grey curtain of crepuscule recognised the rakish topsail schooner that had excited Molly's admiration some days before. He gazed forth upon it a ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... act. All he could learn with regard to the latter point was, that on the day following that on which it occurred, a pilot boat and several fishing vessels had fallen in with a large schooner of a very rakish appearance, under French colours, steering a course apparently with the intention of running between Shetland ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... up, shook it once or twice, and deliberately inserted it between his lips. And there he sat, round-eyed, silent, the end of the thermometer protruding at a rakish angle from the corner of his mouth. And he grew ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers

... Bowman's house in Kent, and is retiring thither for six weeks: I tell her she has lived so rakish a life, that she is obliged to go and take up. I hope you don't know any more of it, and that Major Montagu is not to cross the country to her. There—I think you can't commend me for this letter; it shall not ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... life! Western slang flowed freely from his lips. The blazing sun, which already had cracked the unpainted shingles on his roof, had bleached the crude blue of his jumper and overalls. His sombrero might have belonged to a veteran cowboy. Jim wore it with a rakish list to port, and round his neck fluttered a small, white silk handkerchief. He looked askance at our English breeches and saddles. Then he said pleasantly, "I've taken ...
— Bunch Grass - A Chronicle of Life on a Cattle Ranch • Horace Annesley Vachell

... a burning glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac

... through it are kitchen middens and pits of old sweat-houses. By the south corner, where the campoodie stood, is a single shrub of "hoopee" (Lycium andersonii), maintaining itself hardly among alien shrubs, and near by, three low rakish trees of hackberry, so far from home that no prying of mine has been able to find another in any canon east or west. But the berries of both were food for the Paiutes, eagerly sought and traded for as far south as Shoshone ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... up the machine I stretches my neck around and takes a look at this wayside group. Three little girls are huddled panicky around this young party who wears a brown velvet tam at such a rakish angle on top of her wavy brown hair. And cuddled up in her left arm she's holdin' a chubby youngster whose face is ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford

... if they only knew what they did for them. The Doctor was so used to being well dressed, that he never asked why. That his wig always sat straight and even around his ample forehead, not facetiously poked to one side, nor assuming rakish airs, unsuited to clerical dignity, was entirely owing to Mrs. Katy Scudder. That his best broadcloth coat was not illustrated with shreds and patches, fluff and dust, and hanging in ungainly folds, was owing to the same. That his long silk stockings never had a treacherous ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... Pasages, and the brig steamed out, still with the British colours at her peak Whilst the Carlist privateer was motionless in fancied security—there was some want of prudence or vigilance there, surely—the gun-brig crept down and overhauled her before alarm could be given, and the rakish schooner-yacht, the skimmer of the seas, had the humiliation of falling a prey to a wretched slow boat that she could laugh at with steam up in the open sea. The arrest was made in the usual manner, and the captors behaved with the customary naval courtesy. They were ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea

... of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors—sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;—the neat, rakish, revenue steamer "Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft—and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... It was a very different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred Burton, ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... lane into a wider road that sloped steadily upward in a long stretch of hill Elaine saw, coming toward her at no great distance, a string of yellow-painted vans, drawn for the most part by skewbald or speckled horses. A certain rakish air about these oncoming road- craft proclaimed them as belonging to a travelling wild-beast show, decked out in the rich primitive colouring that one's taste in childhood would have insisted on before it had been schooled in the artistic value ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki

... roads in the hands of the amateur they are worse than useless; and even experts have great difficulty in running week in and week out without serious breaks and delays. To use a slang phrase, "They will not stand the racket." However "stunning" they look on asphalt and macadam with their low, rakish bodies, resplendent in red and polished brass, on country roads they are very frequently failures. A thirty horse-power foreign machine costing ten or twelve thousand dollars, accompanied by one ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... a thick haze surrounded the ship, and the chase was lost sight of. The rain fell in torrents, and the ship was going seven knots through the water. On the clearing up of the fog, the chase was again visible. The sun broke forth, and the rakish-looking brigantine appeared to have carried on all sail during the squall. They could see, under her sails, the low black hull pitching up and down; and, approaching within range, one of the forecastle ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various

... over the stones joltingly, along a fairly well-lighted street. All the shops fast asleep, with their eyelids closed, that is, their shutters up, all except one establishment, garishly lighted and of defiantly rakish, appearance, with the words Cafe Chantant written up in jets of gas; and within this Cafe, as we jolt along, I espy a dame du comptoir, a weary waiter, and two or three second-class, flashy-looking customers, drinking, smoking, perhaps arguing, at all events, gesticulating, which, with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various

... something unpleasant, but of course consented with a great show of rejoicing. Accordingly the next evening, after sunset, Abdulla came, accompanied by several other grey-beards and by his nephew. That young man—of a very rakish and dissipated appearance—affected the greatest indifference as to the whole of the proceedings. When the torch-bearers had grouped themselves below the steps, and the visitors had seated themselves on various ...
— Almayer's Folly - A Story of an Eastern River • Joseph Conrad

... in the testiness of being so rudely roused, had pushed his nightcap very much on one side of his bald head. This gave him a rakish eccentric air which, now that he had leisure to observe it, charmed Mr Swiveller exceedingly; therefore, by way of propitiation, he expressed his hope that the gentleman was going to get up, and further that he would never do so ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... instead of fining away toward the stern-post like the tail of a fish, was quite full, sweeping round under her counter in a semicircle. Then it was that I understood why her counter was so abnormally long; it was not merely a fancy on the part of her designer, intended to give her a smart, rakish appearance, it was for the purpose of giving her, despite the fulness of her run, a clean, easy delivery. Yes, as I looked at her critically, studying her lines from every possible point of view, I could believe that she would prove a quite extraordinary ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood

... express his boiling emotions, he saw Popova standing shamefaced in the doorway. Was it really Popova? The tutor wore a traveling-suit with large British checks, a blue four-in-hand, and, instead of a fez, a rakish cap with a peak in front. As he edged into the room the young women attendants filed timidly behind him. Horror upon horrors! They were in shirt-waists, with skirts that came tightly about the hips, and every one of them wore a chip hat, and not ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade

... black-and-white silk blouse. The blouse was buttoned wrong, and it did not meet the skirt in the back; and she had quite overlooked her neckgear, but of that she was pleasantly unconscious, also of the fact that there was a large black smooch beside her nose, giving her both a rakish and a ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... Joe, that's enough!" exclaimed the Old Un, fanning himself with his rakish hat. "Jest bend down and flick the dust off me shoes with your wipe, like a good lad, will ye? That's the worst o' these 'ere patent leathers; they looks well, but they sure ketches th' dust, Joe, they ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol

... pathless ocean in order to build an iron foundry upon the spot. Suppose they had excavated for a cellar! Why during the time that Capt. Kidd, Lafitte and I infested the coast thereabout, sailing three "low, black-hulled schooners with long rakish masts," I forced hundreds of merchant seamen to walk the plank—even helpless women and children. Unless the sharks devoured them, their bones are yet about three feet under the floor of that iron foundry. Under the lee of the Northernmost promontory, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison

... subject-matter. From Congreve to Sheridan they were so sterile in spite of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Moliere's single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith's was the only ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... the dignity of the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... no gainsaying the likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the gown—"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was her first ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... moving like a procession of ants erect; and beyond, on the dim plain, a field battery, just replenished to war footing, was toiling with tired beasts and untried pieces. Mowbray thought of the human meat being herded in Austria for those great rakish guns, as the infantry below was being trained for ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... trump. She got herself over the side of the bed in short order. Too late, alas! Hat Tyler's had been a Parthian shot. The ship was out of the house altogether by then, and the roof had settled back over its joists at a rakish angle. The whole after part of the house was mashed into a neat concavity which would have made a perfect mold for the Minnie Williams' stern, and the Minnie Williams was in the stream again, with not ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... score of steps and stopped again. Sure enough, there she sat at the steering-wheel of a long, rakish touring-car, the slump of her shoulders vaguely hinting at despair and perhaps a stalled engine. His grin widened joyously. He touched his horse with his one spur, assumed an expression of vast indifference, and ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... Bathurst, or his present presentment, is a medium sized man, attired in garments that have once been elegant, but are now frayed, threadbare, travel worn; 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 ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch

... and he looked much more distressed than rejoiced as he lumbered from his table to grasp the outstretched hand of a classmate. The opera-hat of this Mr. Richard Giddings was cocked at a rakish angle, his blue eye twinkled good cheer and youthful hilarity, and ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)

... does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man and ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton

... out and ran back. They saw Dr. Stanley come out on the porch from his study. He was in his house gown and wore a little black cap to cover his bald spot. It was a little on one side and gave the good clergyman a decidedly rakish appearance. ...
— The Campfire Girls of Roselawn - A Strange Message from the Air • Margaret Penrose

... days of his sojourn at Plessis-les-Tours king Louis, not wishing to hold his drinking-bouts and give vent to his rakish propensities in his chateau, out of respect to her Majesty (a kingly delicacy which his successors have not possessed) became enamoured of a lady named Nicole Beaupertuys, who was, to tell the truth, wife of a citizen of the town. The husband he sent into Ponent, ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac

... (1749-1806) was the most prominent. Fox had been taught to gamble by his father and took to it readily. Cards and horse-racing kept him in constant bankruptcy; many of his nights were spent in debauchery and his mornings in bed; and his close association with the rakish heir to the throne was the scandal of London. In spite of his eloquence and ability, the loose manner of his life militated against the success of Fox as a reformer. His friends knew him to be a free-hearted, impulsive ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... her skirts too short for her figure; her jacket was too short over her hips, and her gloves too short over her wrists; her hair was too short on her neck and her veil too short over her nose. Yet the rakish hat settled, and the fobs and seals shaken out, she appeared mentally fresh and charming, and the rich cadences of her cultivated voice gave Ringfield pleasure, slightly recalling Miss Clairville's accents, and he was happy in experiencing for the first time in his life ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison

... men. His hair curled in little rings of iron gray all over his round bullet head. As for his countenance, it was strongly marked, deeply pitted with the small-pox. For the rest, there was a fierce little squint out of one eye; the nose had a rakish twist to one side; while his large mouth, and great white teeth, looked absolutely sharkish when he laughed. In a word, no one, after getting a fair look at him, would ever think of improving the shape of ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville

... These swift rolling carriages with their handsome women, these well-dressed men on foot, and splendidly mounted, all did their part toward lifting him out of his gloom. He settled his hat on his head with a rakish slant and his walk became a strut, he courted observation; he would have been grateful for a word, even a jest at ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... his hat, jerked the brim at a rakish angle over his eyes—and he sprawled himself out on a chair. He heard the Tocsin's voice at the front door, and a man's voice, low and guarded, answer her. Then the door closed, and their steps approached the room. It was rather curious, that—a visit from the Magpie! What could ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... burned only in the corridors and the restaurant— asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess; ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... that under the full-bottomed wig and gorgeous black-and-gold robes of the dignified figure on the Woolsack lay the volatile personality of "F. E." He played his new part nobly. A trifling error in the setting of his three-cornered hat, whose rakish cock was for the moment reminiscent of the "Galloper," was quickly corrected on the advice of one of the Lords Commissioners at his side; and by the time the faithful Commons were admitted to hear the Commission read ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 12, 1919 • Various

... a straight line from one corner of his mouth to another. His eyes were half hidden beneath shaggy brows. Across one cheek showed the red welt of an old sabre wound. There was a military air about him from his head to his feet; from the rakish angle to which his hat tumbled, to his square shoulders, braced far back even when the rest of his body fell limp, and to his feet which he moved as though avoiding the swing of a scabbard. A military cape slipped askew from his shoulders. All these details were indelibly traced in Wilson's mind ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... character, the strong lines and features of which were further accentuated by his silvery hair. He was a smart old gentleman, too, well and scrupulously attired and groomed, and his blue bird's-eye necktie, worn at a rakish angle, gave him the air of something of a sporting man rather than of a follower of Thespis. His fellow members of the Oliver company seemed to pay him great attention, and at various points of the proceedings whispered questions to him ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher

... than pokey, it was shabby; and the view from the window, of chimney pots and slate roofs, wholly uninspiring. Nevertheless, Sir John had the look of a man who was enjoying himself. He seemed years younger, and the arrangement of his tie and hair were almost rakish. He stamped his ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... had a bit of lunch, and I left a pipe behind. As there was nothing doing I pushed on past the column, waiting for a moment to watch some infantry draw a large wood, and arrived with the cavalry at Gandeln, a rakish old town at the bottom of an absurdly steep hill. Huggie passed me with a message. Returning he told me that the road ahead ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... ship was coming along at the moment, still some five hours' flight out from the system. She was a small ship with lean, rakish lines, a hot little speedster, gliding placidly through subspace just now, her ...
— The Star Hyacinths • James H. Schmitz

... nice, awful things that such a place would be good for. Spurring our jaded fancy with bits from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, we got on famously for a while with a pirates' den. We had a long, low, rakish ship lying in the river just off the tunnel's mouth; black-bearded ruffians, with knives between their teeth, stealing ashore and disappearing within the dark underground passage; the great stone table down there heaped with Spanish gold; good Jamaica rum pouring ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins

... his resuscitated friend down stairs. The velveteen waistcoat exhibited an ample shirt-front, and had pockets with flaps like the coat. The dominie's own blue and yellow silk handkerchief was tied in a sailor's knot round a rakish collar, that compromised between a turn-down and a stand-up; and his nether garments began with the dark and light blue broad-striped trousers and ended in a large pair of felt slippers, admirable ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... walked toward the house, ceremonious beyond naturalness in acting out the spirit summoned by a woman steeped in the essences of high-flown books. "The trumpet," she said when they heard Margaret's dinner horn, and not even Tom, who could have recalled many a rakish bout of a Saturday night and many an unholy laugh in church of a Sunday, dared to smile at her. "You've caught me all right, auntie, and I'm strutting like a bantam cock in the ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read

... I, naturally feeling rakish after this, "I will tell you. Miss Pray had a brood of chickens come off unseasonably to-day, who desired particularly and above all things, having taken a general outlook on life, not to live. Under Miss Fray's directions I have been amusing myself with trying ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... palatable to the most skeptical Bishop in all the Oecumenical Council, and of which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... who stood in the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual. His clothes barely hung together on his lank frame; he was barefoot and hatless; a great mop of black hair topped his shrewd, rugged face; coal-black eyes snapped and twinkled beneath shaggy brows and a delighted, knowing grin spread ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... most of the piety is knocked out of a man. You stare at the houses, and they stare back at you dumbly. There is nothing pretentious or rakish about any of them; no matter how riotous a man's imagination might be, he could never conjure up a "wink" from a Boer house, though I have seen houses in other parts of the world that seemed to "cock an eye" at a passing traveller and invite him to ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales

... do you honour before your fashionable friends?... And I say to you, have no fear. If my gowns are truly what I think they are, I shall conduct without a tremour—particularly if your Lana be there, and that careless, rakish friend ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers

... Smivvle whistled softly, took off the curly-brimmed hat, looked at it, and put it on again at a more rakish angle than ever. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... lamp, its green shade set at a rakish angle, stood upon a spacious writing-table, strewn with closely written sheets of foolscap, pens, pencils, pipes, and books of reference, half a dozen of these last being piled on the floor, close to the writer's chair. It was the table of a man who leaves ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... the company came: the corpse was put into a velvet hearse; and eighteen mourning coaches, filled with company, attended. When they were just ready to move, the lord Jefferies, son of the lord chancellor Jefferies, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, asked whose funeral it was; and, being told Mr. Dryden's, he said, 'What, shall Dryden, the greatest honour and ornament of the nation, be buried after this private manner! No, gentlemen, let all that loved Mr. Dryden, and honour his memory, ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... shoulder his mimic gun to the delight of the spectators, and proceed to march to battle to the time of the drum. Honor knew the routine perfectly. Meanwhile his expression of sleepy indifference under the rakish khaki cap as he blinked and chewed the nuts offered by the public, was human in its comprehension. When the crowd grew pressing, Honor left with her party, hearing for some distance the man's monotonous sing-song voice urging Johorun to ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... conjures up a vision of all that is brilliant, rakish, and bibulous in the expiring days of the seventeenth century! It is easy to picture him, as he stands near the congenial bar of the tavern, entranced by the liquid tones and marvellous expression of Nance's youthful voice. He has a whimsical, good-humoured ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins

... reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers, a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor, finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay of the ballet, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... brown-paper parcel to be carried under the arm; and, having paid for his bedroom, he went out at about eight o'clock, walking boldly through the streets—just as Mr. Dale of Rodchurch, dressed in blue serge and not in his best black coat—Mr. Dale dressed for the holidays, with a rakish go-as-you-please soft hat instead of the ceremonious hard-brimmed bowler, and not too proud to carry his bag ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell

... and quartermaster felt very much like prisoners, though they had no evidence that the Killbright was a ship-of-war, except that she had hoisted the Confederate flag, and fired upon the Bellevite. But the rakish-looking steamer continued on her course, while the Bellevite had not moved since the first broadside. She had already made a mile, and the shots from her enemy did not seem to ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... blue eyes, shadowed by a hat that was almost an exact counterpart of the shabby one Miss Gray had hung each morning for the past three winters on her peg in the dressing-room. But there was something about the rakish tilt of the hat that was in such strange contrast to the severe spectacles and the thin, frosty nose, that it gave the snowlady the appearance of staggering and made her ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... the great cities the army of the degraded swarm. Here is the loose-lipped rakish wit, who tells stories in the common lodging-house kitchen. He has a certain brilliancy about him which lasts until the glassy gleam comes over his eyes, and then he becomes merely blasphemous and offensive. He might ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman

... Gieson slept with his fathers, and the tavern remained shut up, waiting for a claimant, for the next heir was Yan Yost Vanderscamp, and he had not been heard of for years. At length, one day, a boat was seen pulling for the shore, from a long, black, rakish-looking schooner, that lay at anchor in the bay. The boat's crew seemed worthy of the craft from which they debarked. Never had such a set of noisy, roistering, swaggering varlets landed in peaceful Communipaw. They were outlandish in garb and demeanor, and were headed ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving

... only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie

... matter what outrage he had committed. His complexion was of a ruddy brown, and his hair, entirely innocent of a comb, was decorated with divers feathery tokens of his last night's rest. A cap with the front torn off, jauntily set on one side of his head, gave him a rakish and wide-awake air, his clothes were patched and torn in several places, and his shoes were already in an advanced stage of decay. As he approached the fence he took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and commenced ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... piled-up and metal-knotted savagery called to mind African queens despite her typical pale complexion—very little ultraviolet gets through the dust. From the inside corner of her right eye socket a narrow radiation scar ran up between her eyebrows and across her forehead at a rakish angle until it disappeared under a sweep of hair at the upper ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber

... Frenchman?' asked Slivers, pouring himself out some liquor, and winking at her in a rakish manner ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... decked with flowers,—they don't think if she has a husband who ill-uses her, or a child dying at home. She has come there to make them sport. Well, there came an old lord,—a man of sixty or seventy,—who has led a wild rakish life all these years, and now he thinks 'tis time to settle down, and he wants me to help him to make people think he's become respectable. And they say I shall marry him. Phoebe, they say I must,—there is to be no help for it. And ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... tier upon tier of it, piled high upon the wharves, and merchant vessels, chiefly under the British flag, loading with it. Here and there in the crowded harbor might be seen a long, low, rakish-looking lead-colored steamer with short masts, and a convex forecastle deck extending nearly as far aft as the waist, and placed there to enable the steamer to be forced through and not over a heavy head sea. These were the genuine blockade-runners, ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson

... bloody chase—the cors de chasse of the legendary Roland and knights of the Nibelungen. Humble civilians grew fonder of the habit of donning their military or hunting uniforms and big marching boots, and sticking cock's feathers in their hats at rakish angles, recalling the war of 1870 or reviving dreams of the sporting Tyrol. They drank daily more pints of beer and swallowed the hot-headed Rhine wines as if thus renewing their blood in that of their fiery ancestors. Meals mounted to seven or eight a day, for it was proper ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry

... morning. Her khaki-flannel shirt, belted loosely with green leather and worn like a Russian blouse, lay open at the throat. Her mass of dark hair was tucked under a green tam o' shanter perched at an unconsciously rakish angle. Unframed by her hair her face had a piquant, boyish look, and her wide-set hazel eyes seemed larger than usual. There was a ghost of a golden freckle or two on the bridge of her straight little nose. From her green tam ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... reformer Merle awaited the calamity he had predicted, while Wilbur surrendered anew to infatuation for this intrepid soul that would dare any crime, while Ben Blunt rocked on spread feet, the glowing pennygrab cocked at a rakish angle, while, in short, vice was crowned and virtue abased, there rang upon the still air the other name of Ben Blunt in cold and fateful emphasis. The group stiffened with terror. Again the name sounded along those ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... do, some of them screaming as they crashed into it breast on and were crushed by the crowd behind. In the van of the right-hand wing, brushing the rock with his shoulder, charged an enormous bull with tusks so large that the heavier had weighed down his head to a permanent rakish angle. He caught sight of me—trumpeted like a siren in the Channel fog—and came at me with raised ears and trunk outstretched. I heard shooting to the left, and more shots from the forest, where the very active ghost or madman was keeping up a battle of his own. I felt the fear, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy

... pipes and each serves a special purpose. When he wants to write a humorous article, he says to his wife, 'Where is my funny pipe?' and she hands him a long-handled affair with a weichsel-wood bowl and a cherry stem that has a kind of rakish, good-natured curve to it. Then he sits down and grinds out copy that will make an Englishman laugh at first sight. A big, dumpy brier, with a shorter stem and a celluloid end, is responsible for general descriptive work, sporting news, etc., while a trim little meerschaum with a carved bowl engenders ...
— Said the Observer • Louis J. Stellman

... between us. Here's my forehead low and bumpy, and my little nose, scarcely any of it, and what there is turned right up to the sky; and my wide mouth, and my little eyes, and my hair just standing straight up as rakish as you please. And look at you, with your elegant features and your—oh, but it's genteel you are!—and I love you, Nora alannah; I love you, and am not a ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade

... approaching in the distance, dipping down a hill to the creek that broke the stretch toward Guests. It was not often that motors of any distinction saw fit to travel into Bloomfield; the pike was not good enough. But this approaching car seemed to be one of some distinction—was long and rather rakish, had a deep sound to the exhaust as it started up the hill toward him. Idly he watched it. There were two passengers, a man and a woman, slouched well down in the seats. What could they be doing in the heat of the afternoon with the top down and in all that blazing ...
— Stubble • George Looms

... took the young man, whose name I discovered to be Paul Clayton, for a run on the car to Bridlington. Bindo drove, and I sat upon the step. The racing-body gave the "forty" a rakish appearance, and each time we went up and down the Esplanade, or across the Valley Bridge, we created considerable interest. After lunch we went on to Hornsea, and returned to ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux

... his eager glance swept the river's widening reach. Vessels were there in abundance, odd, unwieldy, blunt-bowed craft with huge, rakish, tawny sails; long strings of flat barges, pyramidal mounds of coal on each, lashed to another and convoyed by panting tugs; steam cargo boats, battered, worn, rusted sore through their age-old paint; a steel ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... very still and unresisting, her hand to her lips, uttering no word, scarcely breathing. He waited. He gave her time. After a little while her fingers strayed to the crown of her limp, rakish panama. They found the single hat-pin and drew it out. He smiled as he pushed the hat away and then pressed her dark little head against his breast. Her ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon

... old sombrero at a rakish angle, his eyes bright with enthusiasm supplied by that which he designated as a morning "bracer," and his long gray locks bobbed in the breeze as he swayed in the saddle and droned his cheerful epic of ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan

... Man ought to mend his Manners, Sir, that pretends to a Place at Court; but the Queen's mightily oblig'd to some People.—Has a Gentleman an impudent rakish Footman, not meaning my self, Sir, that wears his Linen, fingers his Money, and lies with his Mistress;—You Dog, you shall serve the Queen.—Has a Tradesman a Fop Prentice, that airs out his Horses, and heats his Wife, or an old Puritan a graceless Son, that runs to the Play-House instead ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... away from where I sit to pour out tea. Her face was kind, but inquisitive, with that brown liver-look round the eyes and a large rakish hat. She comes often, having heard of him through the padre, to see a Canadian whom she doesn't know and who ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold

... presiding genius of the kitchen, stood at one end of the room. Her large and portly person was clothed in a gay cotton print of many colors; and upon her head was twisted a bright silk handkerchief, with a most rakish-looking bow which reposed over her left ear. The Verplanck slaves, some twelve of them, were augmented in numbers by those of the Ludlow, De Lancey, and De Peyster families, and half filled the spacious kitchen us they stood back in rows, courtesying and bowing, ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln

... shaded lamp in a far corner clashed with the first glimmer of dawn; and in the dimness Evelyn's face showed pale and indistinct, save for two dusky semicircles where her lashes rested on her cheek. Desmond saw all this, because at night the shade was discarded, though the rakish bandage still eclipsed his right eye. He lay lapped in a pleasant sense of the unreality of outward things, and his wife—dimly seen and motionless—had the air of ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... a long slender ship of extremely low freeboard, rakish rigged as a single-master, both sails and oars being used as a means of propulsion; two small cannon were mounted forward, and a round dozen arquebuses were also carried. The total company and passengers of the three ships ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole

... these acquaintances was a Mr. Rumbald, a maltster (which was all I thought him then), who frequented the Mitre tavern, without Aldgate, where I went one day, dressed in one of my sober country suits, wearing my hat at a somewhat rakish cock, that I might seem to be a ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... abounds in abbreviated words, suppressed s's, unlisped z's, and s-sounding c's. After singing the 'Candelita,' a favourite Cuban ditty, Juana discourses upon her master Don Gabriel's objections to 'lo mocito,' as she calls them, and describes their rakish habits. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... setter, Spot; his legs, clad in bags with tremendous checks and glossy boots, hung outward. On the veranda were Hinkle and Ben Willing, the latter in a stovepipe hat; others wore stovepipes set at a rakish angle on one ear. They were all irrepressibly gay, calling from roof to ground, each begging the photographer to focus ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer

... looked the part, this short-legged, long-armed, heavy-podded gent with the greasy old derby tilted rakish over one ear. Such a hard face he has, a reg'lar low-brow map, and a neck like a choppin'-block. His stubby legs are sprung out at the knees, and his arms have a ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford

... as the huge mast dipped slowly backward, triangular sail and all, until it lay nearly flat on the deck. The boat slipped under the bridge with room to spare. On the other side, the mast slowly went up to its normal rakish position again, the sail filled, and wind and current bore the boat steadily down ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... that interested her keenly. She hurried to the dressing room and in a moment emerged looking strangely unlike the Josie her friends knew. Her sandy hair was completely covered by a henna wig, bobbed and crimped. Her sedate sailor hat was cocked at a rakish angle and draped with a much-ornamented veil, and mirabile dictu! a lipstick had been freely and relentlessly applied to her honest mouth and her cheeks were touched up with a paint of purplish hue. Her sober Norfolk jacket was as much disguised as its wearer ...
— Mary Louise and Josie O'Gorman • Emma Speed Sampson

... yellow hair, and she couldn't possibly have behaved so badly. I have often heard my parents say significantly that they had no trouble with Kate! Before she was four, she was dancing a hornpipe in a sailor's jumper, a rakish little hat, and a diminutive pair of white ducks! Those ducks, marked "Kate Terry," were kept by mother for years as a precious relic, and are, I hope, still in the ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... the yard and then looking up, gasped. Perched like a rakish derby hat on the arm of the towering pump windmill was the slop cauldron. "Well I'll be...." Hetty ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael

... pile of newspapers, while she drones out in a hoarse voice, "'ERALD, third 'dition, one penny!" until the ear wearies of the constant repetition. Cabs rattle incessantly along the street; here, a fast-looking hansom, with a rakish horse, bearing some gilded youth to his Club—there, a dingy-looking vehicle, drawn by a lank quadruped, which staggers blindly down the street. Alternating with these, carriages dash along with their well-groomed horses, and within, ...
— The Mystery of a Hansom Cab • Fergus Hume

... girls—sisters, sweethearts, pals of one or other of the players—some dancing, some playing the piano or singing, and in addition the landlord and his wife, a slattern pair usually, about whose past and present lives Peter seemed always to know much. He had seduced them all apparently into a kind of rakish camaraderie which was literally amazing to behold. It thrilled, fascinated, at times frightened me, so thin and inadequate and inefficient seemed my own point of view and appetite for life. He was vigorous, charitable, pagan, ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... bin a sailor, only ez a driver on the Wabash Kanal, it is possible my nautikle terms may not be altogether correct. But it makes no difference in the interior uv Kentucky.) She is strivin to make her harbor, and is workin manfully. Close behind her is the long, low, rakish skooner Dimocrisy, with all sale set, a tryin her best to overtake her and board her. For a time it seemed ez tho she wood be successful, but alas! she is fallin astern, and every minnit the distance between em ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... native woman, arranged her hair in two long braids. Her hat, no longer the flat straw or the flaring, rose-laden bonnet of the city, was now simply a man's cavalry hat, and almost her only mark of coquetry was the rakish cockade which confined it at one side. Long, heavy-hooped earrings such as women at that time wore, and which heretofore I had never known her to employ, she now disported. Brown as her face was now becoming, one might indeed, at a little distance, have suspected her to be rather a ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough

... the window, and through the grey curtain of crepuscule recognised the rakish topsail schooner that had excited Molly's admiration some days before. He gazed forth upon it a few ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... motor-car, a rakish little craft, built long and low, with racing lines, and a green complexion, and a nose that cuts through the air like the prow of a swift boat through water. Von Gerhard had promised me a spin in it on the first mild day. Sunday ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... man, ye're a deevil!" he told himself, giving his hat a rakish cock. "Ye're a deevil wi' the ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors

... upon Sassy, outlined against the small square window beyond and roosted comfortably with her beak toward the manger, all unconscious of her nearing doom. The little girl was certain that it was she, for there was no mistaking the rakish lop of the serrated comb, or the once white under-feathers soiled ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... the roadstead from the Esplanade is very striking, and is generally alive with shipping of all kinds and nations, from the smart and trim British man-of-war to the grimy collier, and from the rakish Malay prahu to the clumsy junk laden with produce from China. These latter are, however, fast dying out, and most of the larger Chinese ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt

... coming towards them, and between them a bedraggled M'lama, her skirt all awry, her fine hat at a rakish angle, stepped defiantly. ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace

... his father a few years before. But M. Rubempre was bent on business, and the delightful scenery was an old story to him. They took a boat at a pier, and for an hour a negro pulled them about the harbor. There were quite a number of steamers in the port, long, low, and rakish craft, built expressly for speed, and some of them must have been knocked to pieces by the blockaders before the lapse of many weeks, though a considerable proportion of them succeeded in delivering their cargoes at Wilmington ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic

... handed Lynch his cap and disappeared without a word. Lynch stared mournfully at it. The emblem was crushed and the cap looked rather worn and useless. He put it on his head, where it assumed the rakish tilt of a hobo's favorite tam-o'-shanter, and said: "I hope you're not thinking of ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett

... all at once, sitting against the roots of an aged banyan tree. A few yards away an ape sat on his haunches and eyed her curiously. A little farther off Rajah browsed in a clump of weeds, the howdah at a rakish angle, like the cocked hat of a bully. Kathlyn stared at her hands. There were no burns there; she passed a hand over her face; there was no smart or sting. A dream; she had dreamed it; a fantasy due to her light-headed ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... off instantly at a smart walk; the rigid straddle of his legs, the turned-out feet, the stiff back, the rakish slant of the sombrero above the square, motionless set of the shoulders expressing ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... the walls of the Nuns' House, and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies home. It was soon done, and the gate of the Nuns' House closed ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens

... moments, to be sure, when a line of gleaming snow-caps visible through the interstices of a tract of starveling trees would arrest his attention; yet the more moving and dramatic interest of some chance utterance in his immediate vicinity, was sure to recall him to a delighted contemplation of a rakish sombrero or of a doubtfully "diamond" scarf-pin. When, at last, the stage reached the edge of the sort of basin in which the camp lies, and began the descent of the last declivity, he could scarcely contain himself for sheer joy. What, to him, were the glories of the encircling ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... gasp above her muffler, declare that she was choking, and fan herself with her muff. Choking or not, the eyes of the companions brightened as they looked at her, for the scarlet tam-o'-shanter was set at a rakish angle on the dark little head, and Peggy the invalid seemed to have made way for the Peggy of old, with dimpling cheeks and the light of ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... in, his left eye almost hidden by the rakish cock of his hat, one hand tucked away under the skirts of his plum-coloured coat, the other supporting the stem of a long clay pipe, at which he was pulling thoughtfully. The pipe and he were all but inseparable; indeed, the year before in London he had ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini

... replace the voluminous baggy ones of a Patan, and a blue shot-with-gold-thread Rajput turban. He shoved the Patan turban with its conical fez in his saddle-bags, and wound the many yards of blue material in a rakish criss-cross about his shapely head, running a fold or two beneath his chin. The Patan sheepskin coat was left with ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... madonna. She came down and lay among great black and gold satin cushions, and lit a scented cigarette and opened a new French novel. Black and gold was her new scheme for her drawing-room; she had had it done this spring. It had a sort of opulent and rakish violence which suited her ripe magnificence, her splendid flesh tints, her brown eyes and corn-gold hair. Against it she looked like Messalina, and Gilbert like rather a decadent and cynical pope. The note of the room ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay

... that has a touch beyond any English rendering of "the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge" paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw an aging marin. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. They wear open dickies, which expose the neck, full, hard, well-rounded. The older troops, ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason

... policeman standing at the top of the Gut. Up he looked; down he looked; Seacombe was orderly. Stepping as if to arrest a malefactor, he marched down the Gut.... Where was the policeman? A battered billycock and a rakish pipe looked round the corner, then withdrew. The battered billycock knew where the policeman was. The price of a glass, and billycock would have ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... coloured part in life's performance, and happy for hours if he should have chanced to brush against a millionaire. Reality was his romance; he gloried to be thus engaged: he wallowed in his business. Suppose a man to dig up a galleon on the Coromandel coast, his rakish schooner keeping the while an offing under easy sail, and he, by the blaze of a great fire of wreckwood, to measure ingots by the bucketful on the uproarious beach; such an one might realise a greater material spoil; he should have no ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past, must have been observed ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... a hand to his mouth and surreptitiously removed a chew of tobacco almost fresh. With some effort he pulled his feet closer together, and he lifted his old Stetson and reset it at a consciously rakish angle. He glanced at the car, behind it and in front, coming back to the depressed male individual before him. "Yes, ma'am, I'll get you out, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... little rules are tyrannously enforced on those who may think them silly, what is to become of the pirate? Where, if people like Beattie and Sims had always had their way, would be those rollicking tales of the jolly Spanish Main, and men walking the plank into the big blue sea, and long, low, rakish craft putting in to Indian harbours with a cargo of men and women all hung from the yard-arm? A melancholy has come over the spirit of Big-Admiral von Tirpitz in the years he has spent in the marshes between the Elbe and Kiel, and in that melancholy he sees romance crushed; ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany

... Although we were not seen, Timbo and Leo could not resist an impulse to stand up and wave towards the stranger. She was standing steadily to the southward, gradually edging in towards the land. Our hopes increased of cutting her off. We made her out to be a large topsail schooner—a rakish-looking craft. Nearer and nearer she drew. Still she came on so fast that we began to fear that we should not get sufficiently to the westward to be seen, for though we could make her out clearly, and could now see her hull, we were so low in the water, that unless those on board were keeping ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston

... man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying to find a key while a girl was laughing at him. As I left the house I could see in the dusk, a little down the street, the girl standing at her gate. The street was empty and silent. At the end of it ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson

... following, the company being assembled, the corpse was put into a velvet hearse, attended by eighteen mourning coaches. When they were just ready to move, lord Jefferys, son of lord chancellor Jeffreys, a name dedicated to infamy, with some of his rakish companions riding by, asked whose funeral it was; and being told it was Mr. Dryden's, he protested he should not be buried in that private manner, that he would himself, with the lady Elizabeth's leave, have the honour ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... water way broadened out until it became quite a mile wide, forming as snug a little harbour as one need wish to see. And in this harbour, perfectly concealed from all prying eyes which might happen to pass up or down the river, lay a brig, a brigantine, and a schooner, three as rakish-looking craft as could well be met with. Their appearance alone was almost sufficient to condemn them; but a huge barracoon standing in a cleared space close at hand, and a crowd of blacks huddled together on the adjacent ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood

... place, and at scores of other gentlemen under whose protection they were walking here and there; and she thought that her gentleman was handsomer and grander looking than any other gent in the place. Of course there were votaries of pleasure of all ranks there—rakish young surgeons, fast young clerks and commercialists, occasional dandies of the guard regiments, and the rest. Old Lord Colchicum was there in attendance upon Mademoiselle Caracoline, who had been riding in the ring; and who talked her native French very loud, and used idiomatic expressions ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... in velveteen; he had a rakish way of smoking a cigarette between his songs that was worth money in itself; he underlined his comic points, so that the dullest numskull in Castel-le-Gachis had a notion when to laugh; and he handled his guitar ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was in my hopelessly corrupted thirties before ever I saw a copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least, richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie, arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had been selected ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... Saltash airily. "But I doubt if I live to a rakish old age. I'm a man that likes taking chances, and those who dice with the high gods are bound to throw a blank some day." For a moment the mockery died down in his eyes, and he looked more nearly serious than Bunny had ever ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... her knuckles into her eyes the White Linen Nurse turned back to the Little Girl. Under the torn, twisted sable cap one little eye was hidden completely, but the other eye loomed up rakish and bruised as a prizefighter's. One sable sleeve was wrenched disastrously from its arm-hole, and along the edge of the vivid little purple skirt the ill-favored white ruffles seemed to have raveled out into hopeless yards and yards and ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... in all my life," stated Lois Daggett, straightening her hat which had assumed a rakish angle over one ear. "I should think you'd be afraid to drive such a horse, Abby. What in creation would have happened to you if I hadn't been ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley

... refused to admit Tavistock. But at half-past nine he entered, tall, lean, lithe, sharp of face, shrewd of eye, rakish of mustache; by Dumont's direction he closed and locked the door. "Why!" he exclaimed, "you don't look much of a sick man. You're thin, but your color's not bad and your eyes are clear. And down-town ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... interesting and hard-used. One of the brothers had been to a party the night before, and on coming home had put his dress-tie about the neck of a little plaster bust of Byron that stood on the mantel. This head, with the tie at a rakish angle, drew Claude's attention more than anything else in the room, and for some reason instantly made him wish he ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... the walk, his spurs jingling. In spite of his years the little officer carried himself jauntily, his wide hat tilted at a rakish angle. Just ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine

... question he became aware of something very unusual in his wife's appearance. Alma was pallid and shaking; her small felt hat had got out of position, and her hair was disordered, giving her a wild, rakish aspect. He saw, too, that the horse dripped with sweat; that it glared, panted, trembled, and could not for a moment ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... And then, whistling a rakish air, but with a nameless terror in his heart, Emil Einstein hied himself off to Magdal's ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... aspect, under a gray March sky, when Mr. Sheldon returned to it after a week's absence from London. He had been to Little Barlingford, and had spent his brief holiday among old friends and acquaintance. The weather had not been in favour of that driving hither and thither in dog-carts, or riding rakish horses long distances to beat up old companions, which is accounted pleasure on such occasions. The blustrous winds of an unusually bitter March had buffeted Mr. Sheldon in the streets of his native town, ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... while he pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck. Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anaemic in appearance, he wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in his ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... kept farther out at sea. Sometimes a scattered flock remained in sight for the greater part of a forenoon. With their long, sharp wings and their outstretched necks,—like loons, but with a different flight,—they were rakish-looking customers. Sometimes from a great height, sometimes from a lower, sometimes at an incline, and sometimes vertically, they plunged into the water, and after an absence of some seconds, as it seemed, came up and rested upon the surface. ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey

... it will much import, Whence spring their scenes, from common life or Court; Whether they seek applause by smile or tear, To draw a Lying Valet, [12] or a Lear, [13] A sage, or rakish youngster wild from school, A wandering Peregrine, or plain John Bull; All persons please when Nature's voice prevails, Scottish or Irish, born in ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... set to work to cut out and make up a hunting-shirt of dressed deer-skin, gayly fringed at the shoulders, with leggings of the same, fringed from hip to heel. He then made me a rakish raccoon-cap, with a flaunting tail to it; mounted me on his best horse; and I may say, without vanity, that I was one of the smartest fellows that figured on that occasion at the Pigeon ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... of stature and very pretty. A shrapnel helmet was set at a rakish angle over her golden-brown hair, and she wore the uniform ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... ambassador's strut; still, his dignity had a touch of the theatrical. Though his features were handsome and imposing, his hat, from beneath which thick black curls stood out, was perhaps tilted a little too much over the right ear, and belied his gravity by a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive and half closed, looked ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... them two old cut-ups wink at each other rakish and slap their knees. All of which ain't so illuminatin'. But they keep on, mentionin' Koster Bial's and the Cork Room, until I can patch together quite a sketch of Mrs. Tupper's ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford

... a long, rakish-looking craft, was cruising quite close to the shore, and presently some of those on board noticed Fred's call for aid. The motor of the craft was shut off, and the boat drifted up ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield

... evidently unaffected by the grim fancies of the evening. They were not laughing certainly, and when they spoke it was in whispers, but the younger man hummed a music-hall tune under his breath. There was something rakish, not to say reckless, in the way the elder sat his mount. They went carefully, though, taking every possible precaution against making needless noise. Once the horse of the elder man stumbled and set a stone rolling down a declivity. Both men reined in instantly and listened until the echoes ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh

... cannot escape from you inspires you with no haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with his successes. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... don't know but what 'e's bought two since 'e bought that one—a soft felt, and a cowboy what he never wore but once or twice because it wasn't becomin'. You'll 'ave noticed, miss, that 'e 'ad one o' them fyces what don't look well in nothink rakish—a real gentleman's fyce ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... had first observed stopped near the horses' heads and peered intently at her from beneath a broad and rakish hat. He was tall and appeared to be more respectably clad than his fellows, although there was not one who looked as though he possessed a complete outfit ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... pushing open the doors of the garage, which was connected with the stable. He hurried to the deserted taxicab, where he seemed busied for several minutes, the glow of his pocket lamp shooting out now and then. Through the door of the garage a long, rakish-looking racing car was being pushed out by Jim and his sleepy groom. There was a cheery shout from the taxi, and Helene heard a ripping sound. Shirley reappeared, carrying ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... head peering from the blackness was uncanny. The shaft of light struck straight across the peaked chin and twisted mouth. The snow had made him a cap which covered his horns and which gave him the look of a rakish ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey

... native town, discovers her basket flung up against a pillar, like wreckage from a storm, and settles herself down upon it with a sigh of relief. She remains unmoved amid the turmoil, save when a passing gun-case tips her bonnet to one side, giving her a very rakish air, and a good-natured retriever on a neighbouring box is so much taken with her appearance that he offers her a friendly caress. Restless people—who remember that their train ought to have left half an hour ago, and cannot realise ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... and kind of you to say so, mum," Snac answered, setting his hat a little more on one side, and bending both knees with a rakish swagger. "You can tell the governor as I called, mother. The pony's as genuine a bit of blood as is to be found in Heydon Hay. The p'ints of a hoss and a dog is a thing as every child thinks he knows about, but bless your heart theer's nothing i' the world as is half so difficult t' understand, ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray

... point of the changing front that the Hun was about to lose. And as they left, the men were mostly silent; though they looked debonair enough with their swinging quickstep and easy carriage, and their frying-pan hats set at all sorts of rakish angles. Their officers would nod, glance enviously at the apple-trees and tents in our pleasant little orchard, and pass on to the front of the Front, and all that this implied in the way of mud, vermin, sudden ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... little figure to him that she was to the other soldiers. But she was none the less welcome for that, after the monotony of the day, and Roderigo as she came nearer straightened up self-consciously and tilted his black patent leather hat with its rakish cluster of cock feathers a little more ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent

... the corridors and the restaurant— asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese, semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow rakish dinginess; since nothing was ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance

... of ten minutes past seven, the rakish recklessness of a quarter past, the drooping weariness of twenty-five minutes past, must have been ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy

... put it on; it had an appearance and an air; and now the dark surface lent itself all to contrast with her light, soft-hued hair and clear, delicate skin. It was still further improved, when, having removed it again, she set it on at a rakish artillery angle. Possibly, if hers had been the dark, nut-brown beauty, she would have seen that she looked best lurking beneath its sombre shade, and therefore have turned the rim down some way to even increase the shade; but Janet fitted that which was frank, ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart

... banner of the great North German empire, and the Italian and the Spanish colors—sometimes, of an afternoon, the whole scene enliven'd by a fleet of yachts, in a half calm, lazily returning from a race down at Gloucester;—the neat, rakish, revenue steamer "Hamilton" in mid-stream, with her perpendicular stripes flaunting aft—and, turning the eyes north, the long ribands of fleecy-white steam, or dingy-black smoke, stretching far, fan-shaped, slanting diagonally across from the Kensington ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... us procure some rakish fellows, and after we have made them sufficiently drunk, and given them a good sum of money, let us order them to go and debauch this virgin, promising them, if they do ...
— The Forbidden Gospels and Epistles, Complete • Archbishop Wake

... of the chance,' replied the stranger, gazing at Fred Archer with much interest. Fred was a good looking young man, genteelly dressed, but with a dissipated, rakish air. ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn

... pulled at a scarlet handkerchief about his neck. Adams noticed that though he was stunted and anaemic in appearance, he wore his shabby overcoat with an almost rakish swagger. His mouth was filled with chewing-gum which he rolled aside in ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... great was Odo's wonder, when the door reopened, to discover, among the party it admitted, his old acquaintance of Vercelli, the Count of Castelrovinato. The latter, whose dress and person had been refurbished, and who now wore an air of rakish prosperity, greeted him with evident pleasure, and, while their entertainer was engaged in seating the ladies of the company, gave him a brief account of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... who it was that her former pretended lover had been recommended to, and she found means to have it insinuated to her by a woman-friend, that he was not only rakish and wicked, but, in short, that he had a particular illness, and went so far as to produce letters from him to a quack-doctor, for directions to him how to take his medicines, and afterwards a receipt for money for the cure; though both the letters and receipt also, as afterwards ...
— The Complete English Tradesman (1839 ed.) • Daniel Defoe

... discerned the quarry—a very rakish-looking motor cutter, painted black, and speeding seaward ahead of them. He quivered ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... breast, his eyes fixed upon the glowing embers. For half an hour he was silent and still. Then, with the gesture of a man who has taken his decision, he sprang to his feet and passed into his bedroom. A little later a rakish young workman with a goatee beard and a swagger lit his clay pipe at the lamp before descending into the street. "I'll be back some time, Watson," said he, and vanished into the night. I understood that he had opened his campaign against Charles ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle

... looked eagerly at the approaching craft, upon the bow of which a dark-skinned man leaned carelessly against the wire-stays. He noticed that the man was tall and straight. Upon his head a gaudy red cap rested with a rakish air. His eyes were upon the Lang dock as he stood with folded arms and waited for the boat to nose up to ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

... of their wit that they did not achieve between them the output of Moliere's single lifetime; and they were all (not without reason) ashamed of their profession, and preferred to be regarded as mere men of fashion with a rakish hobby. Goldsmith's was the only saved ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... at the newcomer. He was a stout fellow; not over tall, nor over big; swarthy, with prominent features. The plume of his bonnet was broken, but he wore it in a rakish fashion; and altogether he swaggered with so dare-devil an air, clinking his spurs and swinging out his long sword recklessly, that it was no wonder three or four of the nearest fellows gave ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman

... stood in the middle of the freight-car, looking down in wonder at the fugitives, was a tall vagabond of the most picturesque type. No ragamuffin was ever so tattered and torn as this rakish individual. His clothes barely hung together on his lank frame; he was barefoot and hatless; a great mop of black hair topped his shrewd, rugged face; coal-black eyes snapped and twinkled beneath shaggy brows and a delighted, knowing grin spread slowly over his rather boyish countenance. He was ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... to say exactly—just something." She placed her hand over a rakish green paradise plume to see if its elimination would be ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut

... to be complimented on the cut of my coat, to be asked the address of my tailor, and to hear the rakish sit of my hat admired. I now began to think I should hear a contention between the lords of the ocean, as to who should have me as a sample middy on their quarter-decks; and I was even framing an excuse to my father's friend ...
— Frank Mildmay • Captain Frederick Marryat

... almost becalmed, or her sails flapping about in every direction with the eddying winds. We steered for her, and were very soon in the same situation, not more than a quarter of a mile from her. The quarter-boat was lowered down, and I proceeded to board her; but as she was large and rakish, O'Brien desired me to be careful, and if there was the least show of resistance to return. As I pulled up to her bows they hailed me in French, and desired me to keep off, or they would fire. This was quite sufficient; and, in obedience to ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat

... was a fair-sized, ocean-going steamer. The Francisco Reyes was a dirty old tub with pretensions to the contrary; and the General Blanco—well, metaphorically speaking, the General Blanco was a coal scuttle. She was a supercilious-looking craft, sitting at a rakish angle, her engines being aft. She had a freeboard of six or seven feet, and possessed neither cabin nor staterooms, the space between the superstructure and the rail being about three feet wide. You could stay there, or, if you did not incommode the engineer, you ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee

... cabin wore an unwonted and a rakish air. The stools seemed to have tried to dance the lancers and have fallen out about the figure. Two were overturned. The unwashed dishes were tossed helter-skelter. A tipsy Christmas tree leaned in drunken fashion against the wall, and under its boughs lay ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... and lighter atmosphere of the contemporary social novel. We have left behind the theoretic enthusiast, perplexed by the contrast between the semi-barbarism of the country and the old-fashioned apathy of its rulers; we have no more descriptions, serious or sarcastic, of rakish subalterns and disorderly regiments under ancient, incapable colonels; we are introduced to a reformed Anglo-India, full of hard-working, efficient officers, civil and military, and sufficiently decorous, except where hill-stations foster flirting and the ordinary dissipation ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... placed for his convenience, and resumed the inspection of a number of reports. He had a gaunt, tight-lipped face framed in luxuriant whiskers, a severely moral aspect oddly contradicted by trousers of tremendous sporting plaid, a waistcoat of green buckskin cassimere, while his silk hat held a rakish, forward angle. The Constable and Sheriff punctuated their converse by prodigious and dexterous spitting into a dangerously far receptacle, and the clerks and police murmured together. The Mayor, finally glancing at a watch enamelled, Jasper Penny saw, with a fay of the ballet, spoke to the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... cheered by seeing the energetic Shirley reappear, pushing open the doors of the garage, which was connected with the stable. He hurried to the deserted taxicab, where he seemed busied for several minutes, the glow of his pocket lamp shooting out now and then. Through the door of the garage a long, rakish-looking racing car was being pushed out by Jim and his sleepy groom. There was a cheery shout from the taxi, and Helene heard a ripping sound. Shirley reappeared, carrying an ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... consciousness deeply, deeply depress me. My nose is of a lively scarlet, which the warmth of the room is quickly deepening into a lowering purple. My quick passage through the air has set my hat a little awry, giving me a falsely rakish air, and the wind has loosened my hair—not into a picturesque and comely disorder, but into mere untidiness. And, meanwhile, how admirably small and cool her nose looks! What rest and composure in her whole pose! What a neat refinement in the disposition of ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton

... hand to his mouth and surreptitiously removed a chew of tobacco almost fresh. With some effort he pulled his feet closer together, and he lifted his old Stetson and reset it at a consciously rakish angle. He glanced at the car, behind it and in front, coming back to the depressed male individual before him. "Yes, ma'am, I'll get you out, ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... was going on at first, and was, therefore, extremely surprised at noticing George hurriedly smooth out his trousers, ruffle up his hair, and stick his cap on in a rakish manner at the back of his head, and then, assuming an expression of mingled affability and sadness, sit down in a graceful attitude, and try to hide ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... were shaven; a thick, square wisp of white hairs hung from his chin; its waggling gave additional point to his deep utterance; and his general contempt for mankind with its activities and moralities was expressed in the rakish set of his big soft hat of black felt with a large rim, which he kept always ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad

... letters. The room was worse than pokey, it was shabby; and the view from the window, of chimney pots and slate roofs, wholly uninspiring. Nevertheless, Sir John had the look of a man who was enjoying himself. He seemed years younger, and the arrangement of his tie and hair were almost rakish. He stamped his last ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... heartily. She was smartly dressed in a wine-colored velveteen, the over-short skirt of which barely reached to the tops of her freshly whitened spats. Her wide hat was tipped to a rakish angle. She was young (twenty-eight or thirty at most, but she looked less) and distinctly pretty. Her features were regular, her face oval, if too thin—with the thinness of one who is underfed. And this appearance of being poorly nourished showed in her skin, which was pallid, except ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates

... the rakish hat from her own head, crammed it down hard over the orange-wreathed brow and gave her strange ...
— Exit Betty • Grace Livingston Hill

... first set eyes upon it. There were more automobiles; four of them altogether. At the wheel of each sat a soldier driver in grey uniform, and with a cloth covered helmet. Each car was of the same type, a long rakish grey body, low to the ground. As he neared the house an officer wearing a long, grey coat came out, accompanied by two or three younger men. He turned to speak to them, then got into one of the cars, which immediately drove ...
— The Boy Scouts In Russia • John Blaine

... was a long slender ship of extremely low freeboard, rakish rigged as a single-master, both sails and oars being used as a means of propulsion; two small cannon were mounted forward, and a round dozen arquebuses were also carried. The total company and passengers of the three ships were only 110 ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole

... wonder, for manse parlours are no places for dead rats. To be sure it may have been the cat who left it, there. HE is as full of the old Nick as he can be stuffed, Mrs. Dr. dear. A manse cat should at least LOOK respectable, in my opinion, whatever he really is. But I never saw such a rakish-looking beast. And he walks along the ridgepole of the manse almost every evening at sunset, Mrs. Dr. dear, and waves his tail, ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... stood to one side and the horse—well, moved. Robin gazed down at his mother with the faint hint of an almost shy smile, Dion saluted her with his whip, and the glorious day was fairly begun. Traveling with a sort of rakish deliberation the dogcart skirted the velvet lawn of the Green Court and disappeared from sight ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... young men was Harry Tuttle, the clerk in the confectionery and fancy goods store, a young man whose father had once sent him for a term to a neighbouring seminary, as a result of which classical experience he still retained a certain jaunty student air verging on the rakish, that was admired by the girls and envied by ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy

... flatly refused to admit Tavistock. But at half-past nine he entered, tall, lean, lithe, sharp of face, shrewd of eye, rakish of mustache; by Dumont's direction he closed and locked the door. "Why!" he exclaimed, "you don't look much of a sick man. You're thin, but your color's not bad and your eyes are clear. And down-town they have ...
— The Cost • David Graham Phillips

... window and looked out at the whole panorama of the school that ran beneath him, from the long, rakish lines of the Upper, by Memorial Hall, to the chapel and the circle of Houses that ended at the rear with the Dickinson. Below, boys were streaking across the green depths like water-bugs over limpid surfaces, ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson

... which be might justly say: Whosoever dare think that he ever tasted a better schema, or ever dreamed in his deepest consciousness that a better could be made, let him be anathema maranatha! A most rakish looking wooden button, noiselessly stealthly and sly, gave entrance to this treasury of dainties; and then what a rare array of disintegrated meals intoxicated the vision! There was the Athlete of the Dairy, commonly called Fresh Butter, in his gay yellow jacket, looking ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various

... eyes were suddenly attracted by a large galley, with three masts—looking most rakish with its snow-white sail, its tapering spars, its large red streamer, and its low, long, and gracefully sweeping hull, which was painted jet black. On its deck were six pieces of brass ordnance; and stands of fire-arms were ranged round the ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... 'e bought the last one. No; I don't know but what 'e's bought two since 'e bought that one—a soft felt, and a cowboy what he never wore but once or twice because it wasn't becomin'. You'll 'ave noticed, miss, that 'e 'ad one o' them fyces what don't look well in nothink rakish—a real gentleman's fyce ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King

... and lumber waggons, which had borne in the crowds of farmers from the country. The hotel was thronged with sturdy red-faced farm lads, looking hot and uncomfortable in their unaccustomed Sunday suits, gorgeous in their rainbow ties, and rakish with their hats set at all angles upon their elaborately brushed heads. Older men, too, bearded and staid, moved with silent and self-respecting dignity through the crowds, gazing with quiet and ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor

... went on board the brig Sarah Jane. Though of so unwarlike a name, she was a large rakish craft, evidently very fast, with square yards and taunt masts, well fitted for a blockade-runner or any work of that description; and her skipper, a dark, big-whiskered fellow, looked the man fit to command her. He and the colonel shook hands as if they had before been acquainted, ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston

... Colonel, who had been trying to look young and rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that "Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that ...
— The Belfry • May Sinclair

... examining it with the deliciously foolish bewilderment of the accomplished clown. After one or two failures, brilliantly improvised, he fixed it firmly on his head. The huge gauntlet, with its limp five fingers dangling over his left ear, became a rakish kepi with a five-pointed flap. Max—I mean Prosper Panne—wore it with an "air impayable." Out of his round, soft, putty-coloured face he made fifteen other faces in rapid succession, all incomparably absurd. He lit a cigarette and held ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair

... long and well-furnished birds, as they always fly better, and lay more eggs than the short thick-set variety: they should have rakish-looking heads, with long bills, chrome yellow tinged with green in the case of the drake, and dull brown fringed with bright orange in the case of the duck. The eyes should be set high in the head, and the head itself appear to be ...
— Wild Ducks - How to Rear and Shoot Them • W. Coape Oates

... the ungrateful top. It was of burnished copper. A rebellious lock was then blowing in the wind, and there was a wide, rakish crown of rice-white straw. There was also a soft skin of creamy satin, lips blood red, a velvet patch near a dimple, and two gray eyes that danced behind the hat's filmy curtain. An ungrateful ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... acquaintances was a Mr. Rumbald, a maltster (which was all I thought him then), who frequented the Mitre tavern, without Aldgate, where I went one day, dressed in one of my sober country suits, wearing my hat at a somewhat rakish cock, that I might seem to be a simple fellow ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson

... it, no matter what outrage he had committed. His complexion was of a ruddy brown, and his hair, entirely innocent of a comb, was decorated with divers feathery tokens of his last night's rest. A cap with the front torn off, jauntily set on one side of his head, gave him a rakish and wide-awake air, his clothes were patched and torn in several places, and his shoes were already in an advanced stage of decay. As he approached the fence he took a piece of chalk from his pocket, and commenced to sketch ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb

... hat, who was soon enough at his ease to lie flat upon the ferry gunwale, his cheeks supported by his hands, and talk to W—— and the Doctor as if they were old friends. He was a dealer in nitroglycerin cartridges, he said, and pointed to a long, rakish-looking skiff hard by, which bore a red flag at its prow. "Ye see that? Thet there red flag? Well, thet's the law on us glysereen fellers—over five hundred poun's, two flags; un'er five hundred, one flag. I've two hundred and fifty, I have. I tell yer th' steamboats steer ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites

... 275: Carte suggests that Lord Cobham might have been one of Henry's [supposed] rakish companions. But such a supposition as would stain his memory with debauchery, is altogether at variance with his character. Carte has no doubt of the reality of Cobham's ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler

... not without a certain knowledge of human nature, particularly Skippy-nature, so without further interest he proceeded to disrobe, flipping the five-dollar bill on the table with a rakish gesture and saying carelessly: ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... illegitimate, to say nothing of the illegitimate children born in wedlock. Of the servant-girls, shop-girls, and seamstresses in the city, it is very safe to say that scarcely ten out of a hundred are chaste, while, as rakish young Swedes have coolly informed me, many girls of respectable parentage, belonging to the middle class, are not much better. The men, of course, are much worse than the women, and even in Paris one sees fewer physical signs of excessive ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor

... light of the candle we surveyed each other, and we were objects for mirth. Hotchkiss was taking off his sodden shoes and preparing to make himself comfortable, while I hung my muddy raincoat over the ghost in the corner. Thus habited, he presented a rakish but distinctly ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... sprightly little old gentleman. With his brisk air, natty eye-glasses, cane and gloves, and other items of dress in the most correct taste, he was quite the old beau. His white hair was crispy, brushed back, and his snowy mustache had rather a rakish effect. ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy

... would shoulder his mimic gun to the delight of the spectators, and proceed to march to battle to the time of the drum. Honor knew the routine perfectly. Meanwhile his expression of sleepy indifference under the rakish khaki cap as he blinked and chewed the nuts offered by the public, was human in its comprehension. When the crowd grew pressing, Honor left with her party, hearing for some distance the man's monotonous sing-song voice urging Johorun to dance for her reward, failing ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... silver bars across his left shoulder showed that he was a lord-in-waiting. He was a handsome man, with clear-cut features, somewhat rakish from late hours and dissipation, but not the less interesting on that account. But his natural advantages were so over-run with the affectation of the Court that you did not see the man at all, being absorbed by the studied gesture to display the jewelled ring, and the peculiarly low tone ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies

... no doubt about it," said the master. "Observe the rakish cut of her sails; one can almost smell the niggers on ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston

... then lovely home of the Fitzgibbons, on the banks of the river, and just on leaving the old town of Limerick, I arrived at a rather long and steep hill, at the foot of which a jarvey was trying to induce his horse, a long, rakish, Irish-built bay, to go up. The horse absolutely refused to do so, and each time the old jarvey flogged him he exhibited very considerable agility in every direction except up the hill. I rode up to ...
— The Chronicles of a Gay Gordon • Jose Maria Gordon

... them, her glance fell upon Sassy, outlined against the small square window beyond and roosted comfortably with her beak toward the manger, all unconscious of her nearing doom. The little girl was certain that it was she, for there was no mistaking the rakish lop of the serrated comb, or the once white under-feathers ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates

... About one o'clock, a rakish-looking schooner made her appearance, which, from her manoeuvres, such as frequently altering her course, as if she wished to avoid us, we suspected to be a slave-vessel; we, therefore, made full sail in chase, and ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... something bigger than this low, black, rakish craft if you are going to be a pirate in the South Seas," ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt

... the office of those who wore them, degenerated towards the fifteenth century. So much was this the case, that an order of Francis I. forbad the judges from wearing pink "slashed hose" or other "rakish garments." ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix

... with flowers,—they don't think if she has a husband who ill-uses her, or a child dying at home. She has come there to make them sport. Well, there came an old lord,—a man of sixty or seventy,—who has led a wild rakish life all these years, and now he thinks 'tis time to settle down, and he wants me to help him to make people think he's become respectable. And they say I shall marry him. Phoebe, they say I must,—there is to be no ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt

... London, Tom thought, as he sat upon the box, and looked about him. Such a coachman, and such a guard, never could have existed between Salisbury and any other place. The coach was none of your steady-going, yokel coaches, but a swaggering, rakish, dissipated London coach; up all night, and lying by all day, and leading a devil of a life. It cared no more for Salisbury than if it had been a hamlet. It rattled noisily through the best streets, defied the Cathedral, took the worst corners sharpest, ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... Sion-College, and all other Conventions, should read Prayers before them. For then those that are afraid of stretching their Mouths, and spoiling their soft Voice, will learn to Read with Clearness, Loudness, and Strength. Others that affect a rakish negligent Air by folding their Arms, and lolling on their Book, will be taught a decent Behaviour, and comely Erection of Body. Those that Read so fast as if impatient of their Work, may learn to speak deliberately. There is another sort of Persons whom I call ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... round-eyed spectacles from her nest up there, and watches every one that goes by. I wonder what mischief she is hatching now? Do you know she has nearly ruined your character in town? She says you have a rakish look, because you carry a cane, and your hair curls. Your gloves, also, are a shade too light for a strictly ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... we moved along the bank of the river, we saw the white tops of wagons on the horizon. It was some hours before we met them, when they proved to be a train of clumsy ox-wagons, quite different from the rakish vehicles of the Santa Fe traders, and loaded with government stores for the troops. They all stopped, and the drivers gathered around us in a crowd. I thought that the whole frontier might have been ransacked in vain to furnish ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester

... have the honour of trussing you. Now, observe, I have left several of the points untied, of set purpose; and if it please you to let a small portion of your shirt be seen betwixt your doublet and the band of your upper stock, it will have so much the more rakish effect, and will attract you respect in Alsatia, where linen is something scarce. Now, I tie some of the points carefully asquint, for your ruffianly gallant never appears ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... visited with his father a few years before. But M. Rubempre was bent on business, and the delightful scenery was an old story to him. They took a boat at a pier, and for an hour a negro pulled them about the harbor. There were quite a number of steamers in the port, long, low, and rakish craft, built expressly for speed, and some of them must have been knocked to pieces by the blockaders before the lapse of many weeks, though a considerable proportion of them succeeded in delivering their cargoes at Wilmington or ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic

... hands of the amateur they are worse than useless; and even experts have great difficulty in running week in and week out without serious breaks and delays. To use a slang phrase, "They will not stand the racket." However "stunning" they look on asphalt and macadam with their low, rakish bodies, resplendent in red and polished brass, on country roads they are very frequently failures. A thirty horse-power foreign machine costing ten or twelve thousand dollars, accompanied by one or more ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy

... be obliged to anchor until daylight, I ordered the steam to be let down, and we were about making arrangements for getting up the propeller, when a sail was descried on the port bow, close hauled on the starboard tack. She soon proved to be a rakish-looking ship, evidently United States. Kept away from her from time to time as she passed towards our bow, and when we came near enough we showed her the United States colours. She replied with the same. I then fired a gun and hoisted our own colours (new flag). Instead of ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes

... her oldest black bombazine. A travel-crushed beaver bonnet was clapped tightly on her head. The black velvet band about her white hair had slipped down and now crossed her brow transversely a little above one bushy eyebrow, giving an inconceivably rakish appearance to her face. She held a small urchin, evidently from the Grassmarket or the Cowgate, firmly by the cuff of his ragged jacket. She was threatening him with ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett

... vessels of this design, being now in the position to contest every step that is made by Germany in this field. The type has also been embraced by the Russian military authorities. The Astra-Torres airship has a rakish appearance, and although the lines of the gas-bag are admitted to increase frictional resistance, this is regarded as a minor defect, especially when the many advantages of the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... gentlemen under whose protection they were walking here and there; and she thought that her gentleman was handsomer and grander looking than any other gent in the place. Of course there were votaries of pleasure of all ranks there—rakish young surgeons, fast young clerks and commercialists, occasional dandies of the guard regiments, and the rest. Old Lord Colchicum was there in attendance upon Mademoiselle Caracoline, who had been riding in the ring; and who talked her native French very ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray

... cold, quick air to which they emerged and Alonzo, daring to look at her, found that she had pulled the veil down over her face, the colour of which, in the keen wind, was like that of June roses seen through morning mists. At the curb a long, low, rakish black motor-car was in waiting, the driver a mere swaddled ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... noon, she is as liable to sail at ten o'clock, or possibly to-morrow afternoon; and although bound for Iloilo or Cebu, you can not be at all sure what her destination really is. She may return after a month from a long rambling cruise among the southern isles. The Spanish mariners, in rakish Tam o'Shanter caps, lounge at the entrance to the warehouse, or the office of the Compania Maritima, dreamily smoking cigarettes, sometimes imperiously ordering the laborers to "sigue, hombre!" (get along!) a warning that the Filipino ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert

... him. She appeared to be pretty, slender, elegant. I caught a rapid glimpse of blond hair, eyebrows of a darker shade, keen eyes, a bold expression of countenance, and a felt hat with blue feathers, set over one ear in rather too rakish a style. For the better understanding of what is about to follow, you should know that I was attired in a tourist's blouse stained with red ochre; besides, I must have had that haggard look and startled ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet

... door of his office opened and a young lady in a very stunning street dress, with a pretty little rakish hat and a tantalizing veil, stood a moment, hesitated, and then was about to turn back with an apology for intruding on what looked like ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve

... the likeness; even the rakish tilt of the jaunty felt hat, caused by the wind and that wild dash across country, was painstakingly reproduced. And the fanciful tucks on the sleeve of the gown—"and I didn't suppose he had deigned so much as a glance!" was ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower

... but I shall love to play chaperon, and Stevie and I shall have a lovely time out of it. I haven't been on a horse since Dorothy came; I hope I haven't grown too stout for my habit. What are you going to wear, Rob? The blue cloth? You are perfectly irresistible in that! Do wear that rakish-looking soft hat with the scarf; it's wonderfully becoming, if it isn't quite so correct; and I'm sure Richard Kendrick won't take us to any stupid fashionable hotel. He'll arrange an outdoor affair, I'm confident, with the Kendrick chef to prepare it and the Kendrick ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond

... Mr. Grossman soon began to throw out hints about the sly hypocrisy of Puritan Yankees, and other innuendoes obviously intended to annoy him. At last, one day, he drew the embroidered slipper from his pocket, and, with a rakish wink of his eye, said, "I reckon you have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... his delicate pale face A quizzical thin smile is showing, His cheeks are wrinkled like fine lace, His kind blue eyes are gay and glowing. He wears a brilliant-hued cravat, A suit to match his soft gray hair, A rakish stick, a knowing hat, A manner ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... pushed on towards Gandeln. On the way we had a bit of lunch, and I left a pipe behind. As there was nothing doing I pushed on past the column, waiting for a moment to watch some infantry draw a large wood, and arrived with the cavalry at Gandeln, a rakish old town at the bottom of an absurdly steep hill. Huggie passed me with a message. Returning he told me that the road ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson

... shoulders and was silent; but anon he asked again what I thought of a long, rakish-looking steamer lying some miles away on the starboard quarter, and when I had satisfied ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton

... rich man for over forty years, it is hard to walk under a poor man's hat." When we reached the Astor House a complete reaction had occurred. His collar was turned down, his head came out confident and aggressive, his hat had shifted to the back of his head and on a rakish angle. The hopeful citizen fairly shouted: "Mr. Depew, the world has always gone around, it always will go around." He managed with the aid of Commodore Vanderbilt to save his assets from sacrifice. In a few years they recovered normal value, ...
— My Memories of Eighty Years • Chauncey M. Depew

... all others. His coat may not have been cut by a west-end tailor, his hat may not have been a Lincoln Bennett, or his necktie the latest production of Burlington Arcade, but who could wear a tall white hat with a black band, with the least little rakish tilt, and a light grey frock coat with a rose in the buttonhole, with such an air and grace as he? He appreciated keenly all the good things that life can give and loved his fellow men. Pax vobiscum, kind, warm-hearted ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... up to his hat, jerked the brim at a rakish angle over his eyes—and he sprawled himself out on a chair. He heard the Tocsin's voice at the front door, and a man's voice, low and guarded, answer her. Then the door closed, and their steps approached the room. It was ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... little body always wore the most startling of costumes. A green paddock coat, well padded, a yellow walking stick in the thin fingers, a rakish hat, patent-leather boots, striped suits, silk shirts with handkerchiefs to match, a gold cigarette case, and a watch chain like a woman's, were a few of Gaylord's daily requisites. He lived at a club called The Hunters of Arcadia, where he paid an occasional stipend and ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley

... Federal ships were firing at the chase; but they might as well have spared their powder and shot, for they could not reach her into at least a quarter of a mile. The wind was still at the south-west, and already there were signs of fog. The rakish steamer had probably come from the Bermudas, where she must have obtained a skilful pilot, for without one she would have had no chances at all; and she stood boldly on her course as though she had nothing to fear ...
— A Victorious Union - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... as he spoke, and Martin took stock of him. He was a hunchback. He was seedily clad in a shiny black suit, but a modish green velvet hat, several sizes too small, perched precariously atop his very large head and gave him an oddly rakish appearance. But his face was pleasing—a wide grin, a snub nose, a pair of twinkling eyes beneath a broad, intelligent forehead. Martin immediately commenced to thaw as ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer

... Fifth Avenue tweeds did not fit quite so perfectly—the coat bunched a little at the shoulders, the trousers were drawn a little higher until they lost their "set." His hat was pulled still farther over his eyes, but at a more rakish angle, and his tie, tucked into his shirt bosom just below the collar, exposed blatantly a diamond shirt stud. But on Jimmie Dale's lips there was an ominous smile not wholly in keeping with the somewhat jaunty swagger he had assumed, ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... despair breaking out of all bounds, and becoming extravagant, which is not his turn. But he likes to live as well as the rest of his company, and, between ourselves, has fell into some of the finist and most rakish in England. He thinks 'tis for the honour of the family not to go back, and many a time calls for ortolans and champaign when he would as leaf dine with a stake and a mugg of beer. And in this kind of spirit I have no doubt from what he hath ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... who doubted whether his master was down, but thought he would see the gentleman if he would send in his name. Whereupon Tom handed in his card, and, in a few minutes a rakish-looking stable boy came round after his horse, and the butler appeared with his master's compliments, and a request that he would step into the breakfast-room. Tom followed this portly personage through the large handsome hall, on the walls of which hung a buff-coat ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... he became aware of something very unusual in his wife's appearance. Alma was pallid and shaking; her small felt hat had got out of position, and her hair was disordered, giving her a wild, rakish aspect. He saw, too, that the horse dripped with sweat; that it glared, panted, trembled, and could not for ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing

... of the German Theater stock company. He was tall and slender, and had large, handsome features. His coat was cut long over the shoulders and in at the waist to show his lines of strength and grace. He wore a pearl-gray soft hat with rakish brim, and it was set with suspicious carelessness upon bright blue, and seemed to blazon a fiery, sentimental nature. He strode along, intensely self-conscious, not in the way that causes awkwardness, but in the way that ...
— The Fortune Hunter • David Graham Phillips

... white flannel trousers girt round the waist with a red silk handkerchief, very gaudy moccasins, and a rakish Panama hat with a band of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... thirties before ever I saw a copy. Even then, it did not lack interest. And one passage, at least, richly rewarded a glance through its pages. It seems that Elsie, arriving from somewhere, reached some city in the late evening. Her father (a rakish, devil-may-care fellow who thought it was all right for Elsie to play the piano on Sunday) met her at the station and engaged a cabriolet to take her across town to whatever shelter had been selected ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... revivify it. Ancient French tragedy, red-heeled, patched, and be-periwigged, lies in the grave; and it is only the ghost of it that we see, which the fair Jewess has raised. There are classical comedies in verse, too, wherein the knavish valets, rakish heroes, stolid old guardians, and smart, free-spoken serving-women, discourse in Alexandrines, as loud as the Horaces or the Cid. An Englishman will seldom reconcile himself to the roulement of ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... Spanische?" asked a young woman from her own stall or stand very near, as she involuntarily arranged her hair and adjusted her waist- belt; for the rakish-looking reprobate, with the air of having been somewhere, was making towards them; and she was young enough to care how she looked when a man, who took notice, was near. Her own husband had been a horse-doctor, farmer, and sportsman of a kind, and she herself was now a farmer of a kind; and she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... as did the English when the greedy hands of Spain were clutching at their shores. The light ships hung near the Spaniards at a distance and did not board until spars were down and the great rakish hulls were part helpless. Then—with a wild cheer—the little galleons—often two at a time—would grapple with the enemy and board—cutlasses swinging, pistols spitting, and hand-spikes hewing a way through the struggling, yellow-faced ruffians of ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston

... and receive my vows at the altar, at the instant of her forgiving me, that I might not have time to relapse into my old prejudices! By my soul, Belford, this dear girl gives the lie to all our rakish maxims. There must be something more than a name in virtue!—I now see that there is!— Once subdued, always subdued—'Tis an egregious falsehood!—But, O Jack, she never was subdued. What have I obtained but an increase of shame and confusion!—While her glory has been ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... came sauntering up from the boat landing, his hat at a rakish angle, and trying to balance an oar-lock on his nose. He had an air of wandering aimlessly so that his arrival at the pavilion seemed quite a matter of chance. A morning song ...
— Tom Slade's Double Dare • Percy Keese Fitzhugh

... corpse was put into a velvet hearse; and eighteen mourning coaches, filled with company, attended. When they were just ready to move, the lord Jefferies, son of the lord chancellor Jefferies, with some of his rakish companions, coming by, asked whose funeral it was; and, being told Mr. Dryden's, he said, 'What, shall Dryden, the greatest honour and ornament of the nation, be buried after this private manner! No, gentlemen, let all that loved Mr. Dryden, and honour his memory, alight ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson

... a man of style When he first began unpacking the pile Of the dollars and dimes Whose jingling chimes Had clinked to the tune of his father's smile; And he strewed his wealth with such lavish hand, His rakish ways were the talk of the land, And gossipers wise Sat winking their eyes (A ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley

... hevin bin a sailor, only ez a driver on the Wabash Kanal, it is possible my nautikle terms may not be altogether correct. But it makes no difference in the interior uv Kentucky.) She is strivin to make her harbor, and is workin manfully. Close behind her is the long, low, rakish skooner Dimocrisy, with all sale set, a tryin her best to overtake her and board her. For a time it seemed ez tho she wood be successful, but alas! she is fallin astern, and every minnit the distance between em is a widenin, widenin, widenin, and at present ...
— "Swingin Round the Cirkle." • Petroleum V. Nasby

... the voluminous baggy ones of a Patan, and a blue shot-with-gold-thread Rajput turban. He shoved the Patan turban with its conical fez in his saddle-bags, and wound the many yards of blue material in a rakish criss-cross about his shapely head, running a fold or two beneath his chin. The Patan sheepskin coat was ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser

... a time, some three or four years previous to this, when a rakish fashion began to be introduced of wearing white-topped boots. It was a mere conceit of the wearers, such a fashion not existing beyond College,—except as it appeared in here and there an antiquated gentleman, a venerable ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall

... arm, to the baths. It was a very different Alfred Burton indeed who, an hour or two later, issued forth into the streets. Gone was the Cockney young man with the sandy moustache, the cheap silk hat worn at various angles to give himself a rakish air, the flashy clothes, cheap and pretentious, the assured, not to say bumptious air so sedulously copied from the deportment of his employer. Enter a new and completely transformed Alfred Burton, an inoffensive-looking young man in a neat gray suit, a lilac-colored ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... on his hat at a comfortable but rakish angle. He looked like a music-hall humourist. A couple of the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... two seats removed from Prince Ugo, while Savage was on the other side of the table, almost opposite Quentin. On Dickey's right sat the Duke Laselli, and next to that individual was the American millionaire. Directly across the broad table from Quentin was the tall rakish-looking Count ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... knelt and drew a large box from beneath the bed. From the box he took an immaculate and exceedingly wide-brimmed Stetson with an exceedingly high crown. He dented the crown until the hat had that rakish appearance dear to the heart of the cowboy. Then he took the foot-square looking-glass from the wall and studied the effect at various and more or less unsatisfactory angles. Again he knelt—after depositing the hat on the bed—and emerged with a ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs

... main companionway, was divided into three sections—a small lounging room, a wireless room, and the captain's cabin, over which stood the bridge and chart house. The single funnel rose between the captain's cabin and the wireless room, and had the rakish tilt of the racer. Wanderer II could upon occasion hit it up round twenty-one knots, for all her fifteen years. There was plenty of ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath

... vessel since we were out. She might give us some information respecting the Emu; or it was just possible that she might be the Emu herself. We stood on till we made her to be a low black brig, with a somewhat rakish appearance. This answered the description of the Emu. We had now to consider how to approach the stranger without exciting her suspicions. We first hoisted the Dutch ensign, and out flew, in return from her peak, the stars and stripes ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston

... wave. Joan was in the humor to profit by any arrangement that would break her bondage to sheep; Tim Sullivan had been bringing her up, unconsciously, but none the less effectively, to fit into this scheme for marrying her to his old friend's rakish son. When the day came for Joan to know of the arrangement, she would leap toward it as toward an ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden

... lithographic artist. On the plate which, in size and situation, took precedence of all the rest, I read, MR. TURVEYDROP. The door was open, and the hall was blocked up by a grand piano, a harp, and several other musical instruments in cases, all in progress of removal, and all looking rakish in the daylight. Miss Jellyby informed me that the academy had been lent, last night, for ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... than thirty years, when Chicago was a tiny village, Baltimore had become the third city in the United States: a city of wealthy merchants engaged in an extensive foreign trade; for in those days there was an American merchant marine, and the swift, rakish Baltimore clippers were known ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street

... or nonplussed; he was not even embarrassed by his immediate environment. In fact he turned it to his own advantage, for his hairs, duly watered and soaped down on to his cranium, lost their rakish look and gave him the appearance of a gentleman of perfect integrity, great intellect and no little financial stability. As between one man and another, he did not attempt to deny the truth of my assertion, gave me to understand, with a jovial ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 21st, 1917 • Various

... Judson backed away and stared again, muttering to himself. If he had not traced Hallock almost to the door of Flemister's quarters, there might have been room for the thin edge of the doubt wedge. The unfamiliar pose and the rakish tilt of the soft hat were not among the chief clerk's remembered characteristics; but making due allowance for the distortion of the magnified facial outline, the ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde

... mend his Manners, Sir, that pretends to a Place at Court; but the Queen's mightily oblig'd to some People.—Has a Gentleman an impudent rakish Footman, not meaning my self, Sir, that wears his Linen, fingers his Money, and lies with his Mistress;—You Dog, you shall serve the Queen.—Has a Tradesman a Fop Prentice, that airs out his Horses, and heats his Wife, or an old Puritan a ...
— The Fine Lady's Airs (1709) • Thomas Baker

... impregnable, strong, invincible, invulnerable, fortified; steadfast, faithful, true; permanent, durable; rapid, swift, fleet, quick, expeditious, speedy; unrestrained, dissolute, dissipated, rakish, wanton, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... burning glance at Crevel; but, like Dubois, who gave the Regent three kicks, she affected too much, and the rakish perfumer's thoughts jumped at such profligate suggestions, that he said to himself, "Does she want to turn the tables on Hulot?—Does she think me more attractive as a Mayor than as a National Guardsman? ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... quartermaster felt very much like prisoners, though they had no evidence that the Killbright was a ship-of-war, except that she had hoisted the Confederate flag, and fired upon the Bellevite. But the rakish-looking steamer continued on her course, while the Bellevite had not moved since the first broadside. She had already made a mile, and the shots from her enemy did not seem ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic

... vice: for it is either a mask to deceive others, or a mist to deceive ourselves. A man that is clothed with negatives, thus argues: I am not such a drunkard as my landlord, such a thief as my tenant, such a rakish fellow, or a highwayman; No! I live a sober, regular, retired life: I am a good man, I go to church; God, I thank thee. Now, through a mans boasts of his virtue in contradiction to the vices mentioned, yet a person ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe

... other? Far from it; but what cannot escape from you inspires you with no haste to obtain it. Josiana wanted to remain free, David to remain young. To have no tie until as late as possible appeared to him to be a prolongation of youth. Middle-aged young men abounded in those rakish times. They grew gray as young fops. The wig was an accomplice: later on, powder became the auxiliary. At fifty-five Lord Charles Gerrard, Baron Gerrard, one of the Gerrards of Bromley, filled London with ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo

... felt himself that night, as he confronted his brilliant image in the glass. A Scot of the Scots, kilted in vivid plaid, a rakish cap on his black hair, a tartan draped across his shoulder, short, heavy stockings clasping his legs and low shoes ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley

... other, 'she's the very thing; she's a rakish-looking craft, and will do admirably. Any repair we want, a few days will effect; ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... example of the species. She had been beating about on the outskirts of society without gaining an entrance into it until she was like a faded bouquet that had lost its freshness and perfume. In short, she was a tall, rakish looking craft, with ingeniously painted head-gear, carrying an immense amount of sail, and flying colors not recognized by good society in Bowling Green—at least not ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams

... men, which would come out plentifully, if they only knew what they did for them. The Doctor was so used to being well dressed, that he never asked why. That his wig always sat straight and even around his ample forehead, not facetiously poked to one side, nor assuming rakish airs, unsuited to clerical dignity, was entirely owing to Mrs. Katy Scudder. That his best broadcloth coat was not illustrated with shreds and patches, fluff and dust, and hanging in ungainly folds, was owing to the same. That ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various

... the Stars and Bars waved within a few rods of each other. Then great shipping-houses of Liverpool sent over agents, and established branch houses. Great warehouses and wharves were built Soon great ocean ships and steamers began unloading their cargoes at these wharves. Then swift, rakish schooners began to drop into the harbor, and after discharging heavy loads of cotton would take on cargoes of English goods, and slip out at nightfall to begin the stealthy dash past the watching ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... of the growing ill-feeling towards France was not confined to poor but harmless poetizing. The first open rupture took place at Savannah. In the port of that city were lying two long, rakish schooners flying the French tricolor. Their decks were crowded with men, whose rough actions and brutal countenances showed them to be no respecters of law or order. It did not need the rows of cannon protruding ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot

... nicknamed the ambassador's strut; still, his dignity had a touch of the theatrical. Though his features were handsome and imposing, his hat, from beneath which thick black curls stood out, was perhaps tilted a little too much over the right ear, and belied his gravity by a too rakish effect. His eyes, inattentive and half closed, looked ...
— Gambara • Honore de Balzac

... geometrically correct in their dimensions —so square and firm and exact that sections might be sliced off them like cheese, and doors and windows might be carved in them; but these French haystacks were devil-may-care haystacks wearing tufts on their polls like headdresses. The windmills had a rakish air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens were debonair and cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the better to enjoy the view and fluttering their ragged vestments in a most jaunty fashion. The land though looked ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb









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