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More "Ruffian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... attend to yours and mine, too. I'm not going to have that ruffian ogling you, I know ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... to a man? I rushed in, seized the ruffian by the throat, which loosened his hold upon the weaker party, and hurling him with all my force against the ground, broke his ugly skull upon the ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... and by this wealth will flow into your coffers down in San Francisco. Just now there is little disturbance, but it is bound to come. Several robberies and shootings have already taken place. There is one man whom I'd call an evil genius—a gambler, a handsome ruffian and a dead shot, so they tell me. It's rumored that he has a fancy for the little Burthen girl. Lord save her! Perhaps you know the rascal, for he hails, I understand, from San Francisco, one ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... see this ruffian at Halifax first, if you ask me." The angry color flushed his face again as he thought of the insult to which he had ...
— The Highgrader • William MacLeod Raine
... optimism. He had been at sea, and shipwrecked on several islands in the Pacific; he had passed a rainy season at Panama, and a yellow-fever season at Vera Cruz, and had been carried far into the interior of Peru by a tidal wave during an earthquake season; he was in the Border Ruffian War of Kansas, and he clung to California till prosperity deserted her after the completion of the Pacific road. Wherever he went, he carried or found adversity; but, with a heart fed on the metaphysics of Horace Greeley, and buoyed ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... for a moment—but he, as if also surprised, drew back; I felt quite sick with sudden terror—I really thought some ruffian had broke into the house, or ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... that also will convince of or make known sin; For by the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20). If thou dost call even nature itself, the light of Christ; That also doth shew, that sins are a shame, even those sins which some leap over (1Cor 11:14), and ruffian-like they will wear long hair, which nature itself forbiddeth, and is commended for the same by the apostle. The Spirit of Christ also will convince of sin. That, because these several things will convince of sin, therefore will they needs be the Spirit ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... interested professionally in seeing what it was like. He chased the flying scrap and overtook it. It was a leaf from some old history of Joan of Arc, and pictured the hard lot of the "maid" in the tower at Rouen, reviled and mistreated by her ruffian captors. There were some paragraphs of description, but the rest was ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... what seemed in the twilight a club, but which turned out eventually to be an umbrella, against the attacks of a tall, strapping fellow, in a rough frieze coat, who was endeavouring to wrest his weapon from him. A still more formidable adversary was, however, approaching in the shape of a second ruffian, who had armed himself with a thick stake out of the hedge, and was creeping cautiously up behind the shorter man, with 231the evident intention of knocking him on the head. I instantly determined to frustrate his benevolent design, nor was there much time to lose, if I wished my assistance ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... successfully. The path was steep, and numerous creepers of a tropical vegetation crossed it. In one of these the big Frenchman must have caught his foot; he stumbled, and before he could recover himself young Doull sprung like a tiger on his throat, and held him tight. The ruffian still attempted to retain ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... lay hid till he had heard all Nancy said; then he slipped out and ran as fast as his legs would carry him back to Fagin. The latter sent for Bill Sikes, knowing him to be the most brutal and bloodthirsty ruffian of all, and told ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... had been given to the Irish in these days, that they were bound to take what they could get. Lord Scroope and the Countess, had they known the priest's views on this matter, would have regarded him as an unscrupulous intriguing ruffian, prepared to destroy the happiness of a noble family by a wicked scheme. But his views of life, as judged from the other side, admitted of some excuse. As for a girl breaking her heart, he did not, perhaps, much believe in such a catastrophe. Of a sore heart a girl must ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... the ends knotted similarly about the waists of the man before me and the man behind me. Agathemer was made secure in a like fashion. When he lay down to sleep, after he had composed himself to rest, a blanket was spread over him and a burly ruffian lay down on either side of him, the edges of the blanket under them. I slept similarly guarded. On day marches Caburus kept Agathemer close to him; I was never out of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... fist in H. O.'s face, and H. O. was still holding on to the bottle we had brought out the methylated spirit in for the lamp, in case of anyone wanting tea, which they hadn't. 'If I was Jim,' said the second ruffian, for such indeed they were, when he had snatched the bottle from H. O. and smelt it, 'I'd chuck the whole show over the hedge, so I would, and you young gutter-snipes after it, ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... do an' thou hadst a bow and arrows, Guilford?" said John. "Shoot all the Papists," replied the child. "Thou bloodthirsty little ruffian!" cried Mr Underhill, yet laughing. "Nay," said John to him, "blame not the child: he doth but take mightily after a certain father of his, that I know." Whereat (said John) Mr Underhill laughed till the tears ran from ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... and earnest pleading, with such fear and distress in her lovely eyes, that I must have been more than human to resist taking her part. I was in a hot rage, as it was, and I did not hesitate an instant. I shot out with my right arm—a straight, hard blow from the shoulder that took the ruffian between the eyes. He reeled ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... electricity by rubbing), but is excited by the contemplation of evil. It is part of the marks of a good man that he kindles into wrath when he sees 'the oppressor's wrong.' If you went out hence to-night, and saw some drunken ruffian beating his wife or ill-using his child, would you not do well to be angry? And when nations have risen up, as our own nation did seventy years ago in a paroxysm of righteous indignation, and vowed that British soil should no more bear the devilish abomination ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... tongue in your head for a while," said the ruffian to himself, as he hastened towards ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... "You are a ruffian to treat me so," wept La Cibot, now released,—"me that would go through fire and water for you both! Ah! well, well, they say that that is the way with men—and true it is! There is my poor Cibot, he would not ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... and cruelly persecuted, and then to have him show the change of heart that one would expect in him in the circumstances, will be far more dramatic and gripping in the eyes of an intelligent audience than to have your hero "hurl the black-hearted ruffian to his doom" over a cliff a thousand ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... the tramp of heavy feet Is heard along the bloody street; Nearer and nearer yet they come With clanking arms and noiseless drum. Now whispered curses, low and deep, Around the holy temple creep; The gate is burst; a ruffian band Rush in and savagely demand, With brutal voice and oath profane, The ...
— The Universal Reciter - 81 Choice Pieces of Rare Poetical Gems • Various
... a lamentably scattered family. Another Scops owl, with one eye, lives in the eastern aviary, in Church's care. He is a charming, furious little ruffian (I am speaking of the owl, and not of Church), and perfectly ready to peck any living thing, quite irrespective of size. Where he lost his eye is a story of his own, for he was first met with but one. He sits on his perch with a furious ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... double-faced, deceitful gipsy!" I began. "Who would have thought you would be sitting, hand locked in hand, with a horrid fellow like the ruffian that was with you ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... little scarecrow out of a training-ship, for whom, because of the tender immaturity of his nerves, this display of German Ocean frightfulness was too much (before the year was out he developed into a sufficiently cheeky young ruffian), his desolate whimpering, I say, heard between the gusts of that black, savage night, was much more present to my mind and indeed to my senses than the green overcoat and the white cap of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... she was a woman of her word, and that an undrained cabbage would be the signal for the execution of her threat. From the first she had assumed despotic power over Wiggleswick, of whose influence with his master she had been absurdly jealous. But Wiggleswick, bent, hoary, deaf, crabbed, evil old ruffian that he was, like most ex-prisoners instinctively obeyed the word of command, and meekly accepted ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... ruffian fired his first shot with the revolver at his powerless victim. The captain winced slightly, and I saw the bullet had carried off part of one ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... tragic cheek is truly pale, And colder than the rude and ruffian air That howls into her ear a horrid tale Of storm and wreck, and uttermost despair, Saying, "Leander floats amid the surge, And those are dismal waves that sing ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... morality for which (it is affirmed) society is prepared to pay so horrible a price—what is it? A physical condition! A state of body, which any man can destroy! an "honour" which lies at the mercy of a ruffian! A woman raped is a woman "dishonoured." Are her "morals" then at the mercy of another person? Is "morality" not a state of mind or of will, a spiritual passion for purity, but a material, physical thing which is only hers as long as no one snatches ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... town. They say she's rich! Let's go and clean out her crib!" cried a ruffian who did not belong to Bill's party, but most likely held some ...
— Wild Bill's Last Trail • Ned Buntline
... marvellously nimble; although Jack made a dart after him pistol in hand, meaning to wreak summary vengeance upon him, the ruffian ...
— Jack Harkaway's Boy Tinker Among The Turks - Book Number Fifteen in the Jack Harkaway Series • Bracebridge Hemyng
... with that engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has no more music in its voice than a tin kettle; but what jollier sound is there on a late February morning than the splendid hubbub of a rookery when the slovenly nests are being built in the naked and swaying branches of the elms? ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... strange. Your house is grown a nuisance to its neighbours, Where twice in every week, if not more frequent, A motley crowd at midnight hour assembles; Whose ruffian-like attendants in the street, Alarm the peaceful, and disturb ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... President of the United States. You shan't do it!" bellowed the blackguard, shaking his fist at Mr. Garrison. But Mr. Garrison, with that extraordinary serenity of manner which was all his own, parleyed with the ruffian, as if he was no ruffian and had no mob at his back. "You ought not to interrupt us," he remonstrated with gentle dignity. "We go upon the principle of hearing everybody. If you wish to speak, I will keep order, and you shall be heard." ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... of course, for our men have swept it clear! Forward! How the ponies enjoy a gallop! But I didn't tell you what the miserable ruffian said." ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... contribute a few sous to the fund for making cannon. When I got there it was about 8.30. The venerable Blanqui was seated at a table on the tribune; before him were two assessors. One an unwholesome citizen, with long blond hair hanging down his back, the other a most truculent-looking ruffian. The hall was nearly full; many were in blouses, the rest in uniform; about one-fifth of the audience was composed of women, who either knitted, or nourished the infants, which they held in their arms. A citizen ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... partisan leader the world ever saw, unless it were the Irishman, Sarsfield. But not only was the light of genius extinguished then, and a heroic spirit lost to earth—as kindly and as noble a heart as was ever warmed by the constant presence of generous emotions was stilled by a ruffian's bullet. ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... was instantly plain. I had been entrapped for my watch and jewellery—like many another medical man in London has been before me; doctors being always an easy prey for thieves. The ruffian shamming illness sprang from his bed fully dressed, and at the same moment two other blackguards, who had been hidden in the room, flung themselves upon me ere I could realize ...
— The Seven Secrets • William Le Queux
... son of a butcher or of a day-labourer. Boxing and fisticuffs were entirely forbidden among students, so that there remained nothing to a young student who wanted to escape from the insults of a young ruffian, but to call him out. As soon as a challenge was given, all abuse ceased at once, and such was the power of public opinion at the universities that not another word of insult would be uttered. In this way much mischief is prevented. Besides, ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... it by a ligature. Younger drilled a hole in a man's jaw and implanted a tooth, and proved that it was not necessary to use a fresh tooth. Ottolengni mentions the case of a man who was struck by a ruffian and had his two central incisors knocked out. He searched for them, washed them in warm water, carefully washed the teeth-sockets, and gently placed the teeth back in their position, where they remained firmly attached. At the time of report, ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... brave old fellow, made one dash at the ruffian as he threatened dad; and, seizing him by the throat, dashed him ...
— Tom Finch's Monkey - and How he Dined with the Admiral • John C. Hutcheson
... one of the crew remaining on board, hastily belayed the clewline at the fife-rail, hauling it just taut enough to hold Bitts, without choking him to death. As the ruffian leaped into the boat, to which he had been assigned, Perth gave the order to shove off, and the runaways pulled with all their ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... when the door was opened and a drunken ruffian entered, I awoke from my troubled slumbers. "Hi, Dutchy, and have yez any tin?" he threatened. "Kind sir," I replied, "when I departed for the West I left all my wealth behind me." Verily, now I ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... robbery!" sniffed the young ruffian, now using that half-whining, half-sneering form of discourse peculiar alike to the vicious chevalier of Paris and his confrere of the provincial centres. Accent and slang alone distinguish between them; the argot, however, is practically ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... of heathery turf, with some red soil underneath but speak to her, or give her a cat to deal with, be it bigger than herself, and what an incarnation of affection, energy, and fury—what a fell unquenchable little ruffian. ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... existence of human governments. Denying to civil governments the right to use force, they easily deduce that family governments have no such right. They carry out the 'non-resistant' theory. To the first ruffian who would demand our purse or oust us from our house, they are to be unconditionally surrendered unless moral suasion be found sufficient to induce him to desist from his purpose. Our wives, our daughters, our sisters, our mothers, ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... leave the village—she, however, taking care to assure me in a whisper, that she would meet me on the following day in Syracuse. The lady was now conducted by the Committee through the mob to the sleigh. Not a word was spoken by a single ruffian in the crowd. All were silent until the driver put whip to his horse, when a general shout was sent up, as of complete and ...
— The American Prejudice Against Color - An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily The Nation Got - Into An Uproar. • William G. Allen
... neither," said Somers resolutely, as he discharged his pistol in the direction from which the voice of the grayback came; for he dared not take aim, lest the bullet of the ruffian should ...
— The Young Lieutenant - or, The Adventures of an Army Officer • Oliver Optic
... that made them peculiarly acceptable to me; but discipline is discipline, and must be maintained, at all hazards, even when a crew has been picked up in such irregular fashion as mine had been; and I was determined to at once impress upon this Irish ruffian the fact that I was skipper of the brig, and that I intended to exact from him the respect and deference of manner due to the position. So I ...
— The Castaways • Harry Collingwood
... swaggering ruffian," replied the pedlar; "it is of the other, who, for aught I know—But when go they? or wherefore ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... recognize his Duke with any real sympathy in the Angevin prince whom he saw moving along the border at the head of Brabancon mercenaries, in whose camp the old names of the Norman baronage were missing and Merchade, a Provencal ruffian, held supreme command. The purely military site that Richard selected for a new fortress with which he guarded the border showed his realization of the fact that Normandy could now only be held by force of ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... His brow darkened with anger. For a moment he lost even the superficial semblance of a gentleman, and showed himself a ruffian in ...
— Her Mother's Secret • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Officer, you are a disgrace to your coat! Arrest that man, I say. I would have had the Court cleared long ago, but that I hoped that you would have arrested the ruffian if I gave him a ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... extravagances." This man was notoriously foppish and extravagant. My answer pleased, and we soon got rid of him at the Palace of Chevreuse. But he thought to have despatched me, for he hired one Grandmaison, a ruffian, to assassinate me, who apprised me of his design. The first time I met M. d'Aumale, which was at the Duc d'Orleans's house, I did not fail to let him know it; but I told it him in a whisper, saying that I had too much ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... in 1889, and that was, "I cannot and will not allow threats of personal violence to deter me from the regular performance of my judicial duties at the times and places fixed by law. As a judge of the highest court of the country, I should be ashamed to look any man in the face if I allowed a ruffian, by threats against my person, to keep me from holding the ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... you thought it would be an easy matter, and no sin, to rob and murder a parson on his way home from dinner. You said to yourself, doubtless, "We'll waylay the fat parson (you irreverent knave), as he waddles home (you disparaging ruffian), half-seas-over, (you calumnious vagabond)." And with every dyslogistic term, which he supposed had been applied to himself, he inflicted a new bruise on his rolling and roaring antagonist. "Ah, rogue!" he ...
— Crotchet Castle • Thomas Love Peacock
... by a very small looking-glass, and a very large pincushion. Then the window—an unusually large window. Then a dark old picture, which the feeble candle dimly showed me. It was a picture of a fellow in a high Spanish hat, crowned with a plume of towering feathers. A swarthy, sinister ruffian, looking upward, shading his eyes with his hand, and looking intently upward—it might be at some tall gallows at which he was going to be hanged. At any rate, he had the appearance of ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... and legislators—titles self-assumed by men who have abolished all other titles; and who have disgraced and debased the former denomination, and under the latter have enjoined triple perjuries, and at last cannot fix on any code which should exact more forswearing. I own I am pleased that that ruffian pedant Condorcet's new constitution was too clumsy and unwieldy to go down the throats of those who have swallowed every thing else. I did but just cast my eyes on the beginning and end, and was so lucky as to observe the hypocrite's contradiction: ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... and I observed that a drawn knife glittered in one of his hands, while he grasped what appeared to be a piece of parchment in the other. His voice, when he spoke, was deep and sonorous. He said, "I am a murderer. I am a ruffian. I crouch when I walk. I step noiselessly. I know something of the Spanish Main. I can do the lost treasure business. I have charts. Am able-bodied and a good walker. Capable of haunting a large park." He looked toward me beseechingly, but before I could make a sign I was paralyzed by the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... pen of Homer (though they say he never used one), or even that of the worthy who wasted precious years in writing a Homer Burlesqued, what heroic exploits might not I immortalise! In every stupid serf and cunning ruffian there, there was a heart as brave as Ajax's own; but then they fought with sticks instead of lances, and hammered away on fustian jackets instead of brazen shields; and, therefore, poor fellows, they were beneath 'the dignity of poetry,' whatever that may mean. If one of your squeamish ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... mother with a laugh. "After the scene enacted in front of our windows the other day, when one of them had so much trouble, and suffered such awful pommelling from the drunken ruffian he took up, I am quite prepared to admit that policemen are ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... enlightened thought or beneficent action, who knew no other way to magnify his own importance than by suffocating the rights and insulting the self-respect of others. He had a protege in Argall, a disorderly ruffian who was made deputy-governor of the colony in 1617. His administration was that of a freebooter; but the feeble and dwindling colony had neither power nor spirit to do more than send a complaint to London. Lord Delaware had in the meantime sailed for Virginia, ...
— The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 • Julian Hawthorne
... of the lowly ruffian's presence, Swithin presently took it into his head that he was being guyed. He laid his whip-lash across the mares flank. The two chariots, however, by some unfortunate fatality continued abreast. Swithin's yellow, puffy face grew red; he raised his whip to lash the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... the ruffian skipper, "here take this and this and this!" and he distributed the contents of his revolver amongst the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... trouble with the drunken bully, slipped into the shadow of a house until he passed. As usual, there was no policeman visible, and Jentham went bellowing and storming through the quiet summer night like the dissolute ruffian he was. He was making for the country in the direction of the palace, and wondering if he intended to force his way into the house to threaten Dr Pendle, the chaplain followed immediately behind. But he was careful ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... signs of unconquered emotion he regrets, as weaknesses. He looks only for the calm purity of the human creature, in living conquests of its passions and of fate. That is idealism; but you cannot teach anyone else that preference. Take a man who likes to see and paint the gambler's rage; the hedge-ruffian's enjoyment; the debauched soldier's strife; the vicious woman's degradation;—take a man fed on the dusty picturesque of rags and guilt; talk to him of principles of beauty! make him draw what you will, how you will, he will leave the stain of himself on whatever he touches. You had ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... way a man had gone, I should have anticipated that, had such a difficulty happened to him, his first act would have been to knock the man down, and to call out for the police; and next, if he was worsted in the conflict, he would not have given the ruffian the information he asked, at whatever risk to himself. I think he would have let himself be killed first. I do not think that he ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... forgotten it. Regaining my full senses, I struck the man nearest me a blow that sent him sprawling in the dirt. A blade gleamed under the sickly light of the fish-oil lamp overhead, but a man crashed through from behind and caught the ruffian's sword-arm and flung him back ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... young man, "nothing can cure my grief; this day my dear mistress is to be sacrificed to a rich old ruffian of a husband who ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... the young man will come to himself; and let us hope that it will be a better and wiser self," said Mr. Carrington. "But what was it all about? What did that truculent young ruffian want with Rupert?" ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... a screw loose in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theatre, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth, and somewhat rasping voce di petto, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... in danger of being called upon to answer some false, some trumped-up accusation. A subscription list, nominally for a charitable purpose, for building a bridge, or repairing a road, is sent to him by a local magistrate, and woe be to him if he does not head it with a handsome sum. A ruffian may threaten to charge him with murder unless he will compromise instantly for Tls. 300; and the rich man generally prefers this course to proving his innocence at a cost of about Tls. 3000. He may be accused of some trivial disregard of prescribed ceremonies, giving ...
— Chinese Sketches • Herbert A. Giles
... tires burst now ... both of them.... But who, in the devil's name, can the ruffian be?... Just let me get hold of him, ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... offended. You thought I was a blackguardly ruffian who wanted to trap you into commanding a slaving craft for me, so that I could engage in that horrible trade of baying and selling my fellow-creatures; and you spoke out like a man. Here, shake hands, Captain Chubb. I honour you for your outspoken ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... weekdays, to slake his thirst for solitude amid the scenes of natural loveliness which immediately surround us. At every second step, he will find the growing charm dispelled by the voice and personal intrusion of some ruffian or party of carousing blackguards. He will seek privacy amid the densest foliage, all in vain. Here are the very nooks where the unwashed most abound—here are the temples most desecrate. With sickness of the heart the wanderer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... supposition of being heretical to thy creed, and yet how few truly adhere to the purity of thy precepts! How few are sincere in the expression of their adoration!—nay, how limited the number of those who really understand the essence of thy doctrine! The sanguinary ruffian considers himself as zealous in the service of honor, as the high minded and courageous man who has a sword to avenge the wrongs of his country, and a heart to sympathise with the picture of human misery. All are swayed by the magic word, Honor; for even those who affect ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... under mono-mania, but pure and gentle as the babe new-born—not satisfied with traducing honest Ben Burke as a most suspicious witness, probably a murderer—ay, the murderer himself, a mere riotous ruffian [Ben here chucked his cap at him, and thereby countenanced the charge], a mere scoundrel, not to say scamp, whom no one should believe upon his oath; he again, with all the semblance of sincerity, accused, however vainly, Roger Acton: and lastly, to the disgust and astonishment of the whole ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... "Thus, when the third ruffian rushed at me with a large sheath-knife, I knocked his hand aside quite neatly with the concussor and drove him out of range with a heavy blow of my left fist. But at this moment I observed Bamber frantically lugging something from his hip-pocket; something that was certainly not ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... this, Bob!" he cried in a choking voice. "You'll report nothing! You'd better not monkey with those fellows. That young Irish ruffian was improvising as he went along. And I'm awfully sorry, Bobby dear, but I'm afraid I've won my bet," he added, allowing his laughter to overcome him, "because—because—oh, Holy Maria, hold me up, I'm going to die!—because Big Scalper speaks a language ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... she had been treated. "Il n'y a pas de mal, mon ami," replied Madame de Fontanges. This was a Jesuitical sort of answer, and M. de Fontanges required further particulars. "Elle avait temporise" with the ruffian, with the faint hope of that assistance which had so opportunely and unexpectedly arrived. M. de Fontanges was satisfied with his wife's explanation; and such being the case, what passed between Jackson and Madame de Fontanges can be no concern of the reader's. ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... to feel? Shall Mercy's tears no longer flow? Shall ruffian threats of cord and steel, The dungeon's gloom, the assassin's blow, Turn back the spirit roused to save The Truth, our ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... from the sea, which speaks very well, and cries Pall so pleasantly, that made my Lord give it my Lady Paulina; but my Lady, her mother, do not like it. Home, and observe my man Will to walk with his cloak flung over his shoulder, like a Ruffian, which, whether it was that he might not be seen to walk along with the footboy, I know not, but I was vexed at it; and coming home, and after prayers, I did ask him where he learned that immodest garb, and he answered me that it was not immodest, or some such slight answer, ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... "Mark ruffian Violence, distain'd with crimes, Rousing elate in these degenerate times; View unsuspecting Innocence a prey, As guileful Fraud points out the erring way; While subtle Litigation's pliant tongue The life-blood equal sucks of Right ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... attempts to rescue his wife, who is being dragged away by one of the brigands in the background; he stretches out his arms towards, and looks upon her, but is kept from her by the strong arm of the ruffian at his side, who grasps him by the collar, and holds a bloody sword above his head; the brigand partially faces the audience; the officer stands in a side position; the wife is seen kneeling in the background, with hands clasped and eyes raised to a brigand, who grasps ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... such he was, and one, too, whose name will live for many a year in the ruffian histories of Madrid; I answered him in a speech of some length, in the dialect ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... and a comparatively low standard of morality, the consequences cannot be doubtful in the majority of cases. They gradually lose self-respect, cease to think of reformation or amendment, in time they come to envy the hardened stoicism and "gameness" of the practised ruffian, learn his language, imbibe his notions of life, and finally resolve, since character, self-respect, and all else that bind them to morality and virtue are lost, that they will compel society to make amends for the ruin it has brought upon them. ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... paused for a moment to look round on hearing the howl of his comrade, and as he did so Edgar's sword fell on his wrist with such force that hand and dagger both fell to the ground. The remaining ruffian, who was roughly endeavouring to stifle the shrieks of a young girl, seeing himself alone with two adversaries, also darted off and plunged into a narrow alley ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... Jones. Don't forget that low-browed ruffian, Bill Jones, the pirate of the piece," he replied, ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... to your mother about that drunken ruffian in the village, and his ill-treatment of his miserable children, I caught sight of the girl's eyes fixed on me, wide open, expressing wonder and pain. She had never, I feel sure, even heard of such things as I spoke about. I seemed to ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... Who was he, that he should suspect new outrage or guess he was about to be used in a game he did not understand? He would have stopped all work to beg for extra pay at the merest suggestion of such a thing; but as it was he raised both fists and lapsed into his own tongue to apostrophize the ruffian who dared jostle King. A Northerner who did not seem to understand Punjabi almost cost King his balance as he thrust broad shoulders between him ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... discourse as if no interruption had occurred. "Pray continue your story. I am dying to know what happened to checkmate that scoundrel of a mate as he was going to take another shot at you, thus defeating the design of the murdering ruffian." ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and told her that she was now at liberty to return to her home or go where she pleased. The joy expressed by the girl and by all who witnessed this scene was very great; for they had all considered him to be a mere ruffian, incapable of ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... a native of Connecticut, and in the opinion of his trading associates rather a ruffian. He was strongly suspected of having murdered an amiable Swiss fur trader named Wadin, and at a later date he actually did kill his ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... Lord ESHER pales When thinking of its crimson wales. His feelings will not stand the strain, Of dwelling on the ruffian's pain. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... passed this very moment by thy doors, And found them guarded by a troop of villains; "The sons of public rapine were destroying." They told me, by the sentence of the law They had commission to seize all thy fortune: Nay, more, Priuli's cruel band had signed it. Here stood a ruffian, with a horrid face, Lording it o'er a pile of massy plate, Tumbled into a heap for public sale: There was another making villainous jests At thy undoing: he had ta'en possession Of all thy ancient, most domestic ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy in Five Acts • Thomas Otway
... calamity consisted in condoling with the misfortunes of others, coming into the forum to read the list, and finding himself among the proscribed, cried out, "Woe is me, my Alban farm has informed against me." He had not gone far, before he was dispatched by a ruffian, ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... one of the 'young bloods' of Peru, and, being a cadet of a wealthy family, able to do much as he pleased. He was always a thorough ruffian, and the common people hated him like poison. His pranks, however, were hushed up by those in authority, until, for some offence more startling than usual, your father got him clapped in prison. The Dons howled finely, but ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... grain like a poor man, though I was a prince in my own country, just like Suwarora. Surely Suwarora could not permit this if he knew it; and if they would not suffice, I should have to stop here until called again by Suwarora. The ruffian, on hearing this, allowed the wires to lie in his hut, and said he was going away, but hoped, when he returned, I should have, as I had got no cloths, 20 wires, and 1000 necklaces of extra length, strung and all ready ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... that thou hadst left us altogether, Although I could not choose but fancy thee Skulking about the hill-tops, whence the glee Of thy blue laughter peeped at times, or rather Thy bashful awkwardness, as doubtful whether Thou shouldst be seen in such a company Of ugly runaways, unshapely heaps Of ruffian vapour, broken from restraint Of their slim prison in the ocean deeps. But yet I may not, chide: fall to thy books, Fall to immediately without complaint— There they are lying, hills and ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... asking questions? He had a fine flow of language, and his adjectives were very vigorous. He ended a string of abuse by a vicious backhander, which I failed to entirely avoid. The next few minutes were delicious. It was a straight left against a slogging ruffian. I emerged as you see me. Mr. Woodley went home in a cart. So ended my country trip, and it must be confessed that, however enjoyable, my day on the Surrey border has not been much ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to wait. Then she locked me up and set this idiot to watch. There are no windows to get out of from above, nothing but that skylight, so I finally forced the door at the foot of the stairs, and then again this. Here was that ruffian, armed with a cudgel, and—the rest ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... their execution two hours after they were taken; and when some one ventured a remonstrance he curtly replied, "Nous ne faisons pas de la legalite, nous faisons de la revolution." Some ruffian in the mob cried out the word "liberte," which reached Darboy's ears, and he said, "Do not profane the word of liberty; it belongs to us alone, because we die for it and for our faith." This sainted man was the first to be shot. He died ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... had received him kindly, and that she had promised to be married the next Sunday. This Katharine denied, saying she would rather see him hanged on Sunday, and reproached her father for wishing to wed her to such a mad-cap ruffian as Petruchio. Petruchio desired her father not to regard her angry words, for they had agreed she should seem reluctant before him, but that when they were alone he had found her very fond and loving; and he said to her: 'Give me your hand, Kate; I ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... quick work, M. Marston," said he, taking my hand. "As the ruffian in the school fable says, 'Hodie tibi, cras nihi'—twelve hours will probably make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... excellencies in the seclusion of his own study. The compliment to the Countess is rather awkwardly wedged in between descriptions of "gentle Spring" with her "shadowing roses" and "surly Winter" with his "ruffian blasts." It should have commenced ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... A certain hulking ruffian, with an Australian digger's beard, had turned up of late to disturb the tranquillity of the partners. He had been asking what they regarded as an exorbitant price for his silence in respect to the construction of that adit which has just been mentioned, and had been fobbed off from time ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... he whispered cheerily, "you look about the greatest ruffian I ever saw! These masks alone will down a nigger, if we meet one. But I'm glad I remembered to tell you not to shave. You'll pass for Whitechapel if the worst comes to the worst and you don't forget to talk the lingo. Better sulk like a mule if you're not sure of it, and leave ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... 'What a ruffian!'—(puff)—observed Mr. Waffles, taking his cigar from his mouth as he sat on the bench, dressed as a racket-player, looking on at the game, 'he shalln't ride roughshod ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... carried, but it must be the hall of some Venetian palace. Then, without movement, very slowly and stealthily I had a peep at the men who surrounded me. There was the gondolier, a swart, hard-faced, murderous ruffian, and beside him were three other men, one of them a little, twisted fellow with an air of authority and several keys in his hand, the other two tall young servants in a smart livery. As I listened to their talk I saw that the small man was the steward of the house, and that ...
— The Adventures of Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle
... imparted in an aside in Stephen's ear, are accused of ruining. Not a vestige of truth in it, I can safely say. History, would you be surprised to learn, proves up to the hilt Spain decayed when the inquisition hounded the jews out and England prospered when Cromwell, an uncommonly able ruffian who in other respects has much to answer for, imported them. Why? Because they are imbued with the proper spirit. They are practical and are proved to be so. I don't want to indulge in any because you know the standard ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... "Is that the cane you strike your wife with, you ruffian!" Belsize seized and tore him out of the saddle, flinging him screaming down on the pavement. The horse, rearing and making way for himself, galloped down the clattering street; a hundred people were round Sir Barnes in ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... disgraceful scene in a room full of ladies, but he, not I, provoked it and was the ruffian, as I'm sure he will be ready to confess ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... thus rendering Charlie impotent to obstruct him in any way the ruffian said nothing whatever. Now, however, standing off a minute, and looking at his victim with much satisfaction, ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Mountains - or Bessie King's Strange Adventure • Jane L. Stewart
... discipline, was among the worst. It was the first voyage he had made with Captain Tredeagle, to whom he had been recommended as a steady man. One of his mates, Tom Hulk,—well named, for he was a big hulking ruffian,—was quite as bad, and with several others ...
— The South Sea Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... of maintaining by argument the thesis they are maintaining, which is probably that two and two make five, they branch off and begin to adduce arguments which do not go to prove that, but to prove that the man who maintains that two and two make four is a fool, or even a ruffian. Some good men are subject to this infirmity—that if you differ from them on any point whatever, they regard the fact of your differing from them as proof, not merely that you are intellectually stupid, but ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... dealt forth punishment to that man, if he caught him within his grasp. Those who had hitherto known Morton in the island, could not recognise the man as he came forth on that day, thirsty after blood, and desirous to thrust himself into personal conflict with the wild ruffian who had injured him. The meek Presbyterian minister had been a preacher, preaching ways of peace, and living in accordance with his own doctrines. The world had been very quiet for him, and he had ...
— Aaron Trow • Anthony Trollope
... of party endorsement. You are no more sanguine today than were the men and women, myself included, in 1867, that those Free State men, who had given up every comfort which human beings prize for the sake of liberty, who had fought not only through the border ruffian warfare but through the four years of the rebellion, would vote freedom to the heroic women of Kansas. Where would you ever expect to find a majority more ready to grant to women equal rights than among those old Free State men? You have ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... gasped. "I'm past all surgery; but thank God I've given that ruffian what'll send him to hell before I get there! And you—you"—and here he made a frantic grab for the revolver that lay upon the floor, but Gleason kicked it away—"you, young hound, I meant to have wound you up before I got through. But I can jeer at you—God-forsaken ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... fires, and wrecks, Harangues and hailstorms, brawls and broken necks; Where half-fledged bards, on feeble pinions, seek An immortality of near a week; Where cruel eulogists the dead restore, In maudlin praise, to martyr them once more; Where ruffian slanderers wreak their coward spite, And need no venomed dagger while ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... advised him to enter the French service. In his younger days, my father had served extensively under many princes, and had found in every other military service a spirit of honor governing the conduct of the officers. Here only, and for the first time, he found ruffian manners and universal rapacity. He could not draw his sword in company with such men, nor in such a cause. But at length, under the pressure of necessity, he accepted (or rather bought with an immense bribe) the place of a commissary to the French ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... opening all the door, of which the ruffian wind made wrong by casting her figure in high relief—and yet a pardonable wrong—"father, you are quite wise to come home, before your dear nose is quite cut off.—Oh, I beg your pardon, sir; I never ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... watchfulness and care was, however, unavailing to prevent assaults. The most serious instance of this kind was the act of an Irish ruffian, who so far forgot the traditions and sufferings of his own people as to cast himself upon Drayton with a huge dirk and cut off a piece of his ear.[6] For a few moments all the horrors incident ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... falsehoods of the malignant slanderer who vilified Mr. De—ce-ce, and beg to offer that gentleman the only reparation in our power for having thus tampered with his unsullied name. We disbelieve the RUFFIAN and HIS STORY, and most sincerely regret that such a tale, or SUCH A WRITER, should ever have been brought forward to the ...
— Memoirs of Mr. Charles J. Yellowplush - The Yellowplush Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not used to that sort of work; and I was somewhat struck to observe that in some respects he was not unlike the fellow who was addressing me—that is to say, he had quite as hanging a face as his companion, though he wanted the other's breadth and squareness, and ruffian-like set of figure; but his forehead was low, and his eyes black and restless, and he was close-cropped, with some days' growth of beard, as was the case with the other. He was dressed in a bottle-green spencer ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... Mrs. Forrester. "An injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian. They take the place of the ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... have been that rascal's wife by this time. The priest was here. They would have been married as sure as you're born. You, ma'am, would have had to see this poor, trembling, broken-hearted, despairing girl torn from your arms, and bound by the marriage tie to a ruffian and a scoundrel whom she loathed. And now, ma'am, I save her from this. I have my priest too, ma'am. He ain't a Roman Catholic, it is true—he's an orthodox parson—but, at the same time, I ain't particular. Now I propose to avail myself this day of his invaluable ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... Determining, at all events, to sell your life dearly, you struggle frantically, hitting out right and left with arms and legs, and yelling lustily the while, and at last something gives way, and you find your head in the fresh air. Two feet off, you dimly observe a half-dressed ruffian, waiting to kill you, and you are preparing for a life-and-death struggle with him, when it begins to dawn ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... were staggered. They stared in helpless anger at the small shop, which had suddenly become the most important in their ken. Already they saw their families brought to the gutter by this hunchback ruffian, who hit them below the belt in the most ungentlemanly fashion in preference to starving. But the simple manoeuvre of cutting down the prices of his rivals was only a taste of the unerring instinct for business that was later to make him as much feared ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... put out, for I thought his bold glances would have made her angry. But my dear Flavia was a woman, and so—she was not put out. On the contrary, she thought young Rupert very handsome—as, beyond question, the ruffian was. ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... gate." They then advance to the Junior Warden (who represents JUBELA, one of the ruffians), who exclaims, "Who comes here?" [The room is dark, or the candidate hoodwinked.] The conductor answers, "Our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff." "Our Grand Master, Hiram Abiff!" exclaims the ruffian, "he is the very man I wanted to see (seizing the candidate by the throat at the same time, and jerking him about with violence); give me the Master Mason's word, or I'll take your life." The conductor replies, ...
— The Mysteries of Free Masonry - Containing All the Degrees of the Order Conferred in a Master's Lodge • William Morgan
... poor sailors were the only ones who did not enjoy the joke. Our service caps were also forbidden, and we had all sorts of headgear. I had a long scarf wipped round my head in turban fashion and was said to be the worst looking ruffian of ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... friends with the ruffian set to watch over me, and I plied him with wine until he fell on the grass and was unable to rise. I then dammed the stream, and climbed down its empty bed. It was difficult work, as the rocks were wet and the night was very dark. I was covered with bruises when I reached a platform of ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... plant. "Dolt! ass! inhuman brute! If I had the kicking of you—" here he recovered his silence; found pebbles to kick, and pursued them savagely up one path and down another. A mental flash-light showed him the ruffian who had wounded this bright creature; had led her on to love him, and then—either betrayed his brutal nature so that hers rose up in revolt, or—just as likely—that kind of man would do anything—gone off and left her. His picture revealed a smart-looking person with black ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... the court, some of them called out to her, and asked her where she was going with all that candy. She took no notice of them, for they spoke very rudely, and were no friends of hers. Among them was Johnny Grippen, whose acquaintance the reader made on the pier of South Boston bridge. This young ruffian led half a dozen others down the court in pursuit of her, for possibly they were not satisfied with the cavalier manner in ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... all this belonged to a dark, close-shaved ruffian, with silver rings and a yellow handkerchief, who scowled and prowled about her, and looked as if he was likely enough to beat her when they got home. But she hands up an ivory bowl for contributions amongst the young dandies on the roof of a neighbouring ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... The shorter ruffian was scratching right merrily among the dead leaves, making all the noise he could, so as to impress the prisoner with a sense of his perilous condition. While he worked he kept talking, half to himself, and no doubt uttering all sorts of terrible ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... de Roi was crowded, and I thought some of the people looked at me strangely, but this might have been mere fancy. Once, indeed, a man placed himself purposely in my path. It was the ruffian who had spoken to me in the inn, but, not desiring his company, I placed a finger on my lips to indicate silence, ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... upon either the prejudices of class, caste, wealth, or power. I protest in the name of a constituency whose early history was a sublime and persistent struggle against the prejudices of pampered and arrogant ruffianism at home, and the worse than ruffian spirit of the Administrations of Pierce and Buchanan, and the Democratic traitors who at that time constituted a majority of this House, and were engaged in preparing the nation for its harvest of blood. We must go back to the spirit and purposes ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... last in that form which he lived to complete, another fancy may be copied from which, though not otherwise worked out in the tale, the relation of Lizzie Hexam to her brother was taken. "A man, and his wife—or daughter—or niece. The man, a reprobate and ruffian; the woman (or girl) with good in her, and with compunctions. He believes nothing, and defies everything; yet has suspicions always, that she is 'praying against' his evil schemes, and making them go wrong. He is very much opposed to this, and is always ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... hugging the northern side, where the Lufu torrent adds its tribute to the waters, convinced me that the charms of Congo scenery had not been exaggerated. Yet the prospect had its element of sadness; the old ruffian, Gidi Mavunga, recounted how he had burned this place and broken that, where palm-clumps, grass-clearings, and plantations lying waste denoted the curse of Ham upon ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... sailing, and so, much against his will, he was forced to forego his vengeance until his return. But this was destined to be his last voyage. While at Rio Janeiro he became engaged in a fracas with the keeper of a low grogshop, when the latter, who was a desperate ruffian, snatched a knife from his girdle, and drove it into the heart of the unhappy captain, who fell back on the floor and expired without a groan. Thus terminated a misguided and ill-spent life. I should have been glad to report Ben Haley's reformation instead of his death, but for ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... men. A tall ruffian, copper-brown face damp with perspiration and body oil, grabbed him by the jacket and slammed him back against the lockers. As he shifted his weight to keep his footing someone drove a fist into his face. He started to raise his hands; and a hard flat object crashed against ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... the hut with Lillian, while the other boy remained long enough to loosen the rope around his waist, and bind the young ruffian securely. Then he placed him in a corner of the room. Locking the door behind him, Sandy joined Gilbert in the skiff, and together they paddled furiously out of the creek into ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... first impulse is to show fight. Naturally Leonard began to plunge and to double his fists. But he could not keep this up, for the man whose arm was round him quickly retired and stood a few paces off, looking wan and haggard, and very unlike a thief or ruffian. ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... respect to Louis Napoleon is stronger, and it tends more to unanimity every day. The Orleans confiscation has, I think, almost too much weight given to it. After his other crimes the mere robbery of a single family, ruffian-like as it is, is ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... at him as he sat, plump and rosy and complacent, puffing at his cigarette, and my heart warmed to the old ruffian. It was impossible to maintain an attitude of righteous iciness with him. I might loathe his mode of life, and hate him as a representative—and a leading representative—of one of the most contemptible trades on earth, but there ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... violently refused to be comforted. It is beside an awful aggravation of such afflictions, that the lady herself might have co-operated in the later stages of the tragedy with the purposes of the imperial ruffian. Lamia had been suffered to live, because as a living man he yielded up into the hands of his tormentor his whole capacity of suffering; no part of it escaped the hellish range of his enemy's eye. But this advantage for the torturer had also its weak and doubtful side. ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a Jehad in the Soudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe do its ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... "You ruffian—Posse!" he continued to call, alternately, first to one and then to the other; for his fear paralyzed all but his tongue. "You ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... the office pens; secretaries of ball-committees clamor to have the glories of their last dance more fully expounded; strange ladies rustle in and say:—"I want a hundred lady's cards printed at once, please," which is manifestly part of an Editor's duty; and every dissolute ruffian that ever tramped the Grand Trunk Road makes it his business to ask for employment as a proofreader. And, all the time, the telephone-bell is ringing madly, and Kings are being killed on the Continent, and Empires are saying—"You're another," and Mister ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... uneducated audience. In fact, it is probable that the majority of genuine French names belong to a later period; for, although the baron who accompanied the Conqueror would in many cases keep his old territorial designation, the minor ruffian would, as a rule, drop the name of the obscure hamlet from which he came and assume some surname more convenient in his new surroundings. Local names of Old French origin are usually taken from the provinces and larger towns which had a meaning for English ears. ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... adventurous. The excursion was indeed an adventure. I came across Broadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue, with its barbaric paving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth! Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them: jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicion that in a saloon shindy they might prove themselves ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... the lowest caste native had an immortal soul, and before God equal rights with him. Colonel Parsons was a man whose piety was so unaggressive, so good-humoured, so simple, that none could resist it; ribaldry and blasphemy were instinctively hushed in his presence, and even the most hardened ruffian ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... well in the front rank of the combatants, and was carrying himself right manfully, when he saw one of his countrymen slip and fall in a pool of blood, losing his sword as he fell. A burly black-bearded ruffian, whom he had been engaging, instantly set his foot on the prostrate body, and shortened his hanger to thrust him through; but Roger, who was engaged with another pirate, nimbly evaded the blow aimed at him, and, with one spring, like a young leopard, was on the would-be slayer, and, taking ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... brothers were said to be from western Missouri, and in early days were somewhat of the border ruffian order, and of course preferred to live on the frontier rather than in any well regulated society. As the country became settled and improved around them they moved on. A school house was an indication that the country was getting ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Sylvanus had a "tough" in his audience—an ill-bred ruffian who scoffed when he gave out his text, called "Three cheers for Ingersoll!" when he was half through with his discourse, and interjected imitations of the fife and big drum at the end of each paragraph. It may be said on his behalf that he had just come to camp, had never ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... impliques dans cette affaire. The brothers Desbouleaux were drowned by night in the Canale Orfano, pour ne point ebruiter l'affaire; and the instructions sent to the Admiral who was to drown Pierre were to fulfil his commission avec le moins de bruit possible. Accordingly that ruffian, and forty-five of his accomplices, were drowned at once sans bruit. Interrogatoire des Accuses, translated by Daru, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 559, July 28, 1832 • Various
... fisherman. The third son, Rocco, spent his time in street adventures, and on one occasion laid his hands on all the plate and portable property that he could carry off from his father's house. This young ruffian, less than twenty years of age, found a devoted friend in Monsignore Querro, a cousin of the family well placed at court, who assisted him in the burglary of the Cenci palace. Rocco was killed by Amilcare Orsini, ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... man, contradict him. If possible, insult him. But such a rule is one of the privileges of youth. I no longer live by rules. Yet there is one way in which you may possibly be insultable. It can be plausibly held that you are a venal ruffian, pouring forth great quantities of immediately saleable stuff, but altogether declining to lay up for yourself treasures in heaven. It may be that you cannot afford to do otherwise. Therefore I am quite ready to make a deal ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... they swept full on the astonished multitude; while at the same time, to cut the monster in two, the two companies charged in flank. Carpenter, striding several steps in advance, his face fairly blazing with excitement, dealt the first blow, stretching on the pavement a powerful ruffian, who was rushing on him with a huge club. For a few minutes nothing was heard but the heavy thud of clubs falling on human skulls, thick and fast as hailstones on windows. The mob, just before so ...
— The Great Riots of New York 1712 to 1873 • J.T. Headley
... restless fire precipitates on death. But, scarce observ'd, the knowing and the bold Fall in the gen'ral massacre of gold; Wide wasting pest! that rages unconfin'd, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind: For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws: Wealth heap'd on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys, The dangers gather as the treasures rise. Let Hist'ry tell where rival kings command, And dubious title shakes the madded land. When statutes glean the refuse of the sword, How much ...
— English Satires • Various
... to write about. This was not the true Brann at all. The man was clean-minded in his conversation. He thought cleanly. He lived cleanly as a gentleman should, though he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous ruffian, reveling in the slums. He was essentially a family man and a student who "scorned delights and lived laborious days." His regard for the purity of women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up to his own preachment on all ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... about Odysseus? It is absolutely out of keeping, and it puzzles commentators. In fact, here was a hero and there was a tale, and the tale was attracted into the cycle of the hero; the very last man to have behaved as Odysseus is made to do. {34} But Cronos was an odious ruffian. The world-wide tale of swallowing and disgorging the children was attracted to his too notorious name 'by grace of congruity.' Does Professor Tiele ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... our honored fellow-citizen Prince Cabano, containing two ladies, members of his family, was quietly entering the Park, a tall, powerful ruffian, apparently a stranger, with long yellow hair, reaching to his shoulders, suddenly grasped a valuable gold-mounted whip out of the hands of the driver, and, because he resisted the robbery, beat him across the face, inflicting very severe wounds. ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... and swore Spanish oaths with freedom and abandon. Their gig was by far the finest and smartest at the jetty, and woe betide the unwitting 'bow' who touched her glossy varnished side with his boat-hook. For him a wet swab was kept in readiness, and their stroke, a burly ruffian, was always willing to attend to the little affair if it went any farther. Our Captains came down in batches, as a rule, and there would be great clatter of oars and shipping of rowlocks as their ...
— The Brassbounder - A Tale of the Sea • David W. Bone
... he was with them in an instant. They were scuffling together so closely in the shade that he was afraid to use his sword point; but with the hilt he dealt a single blow full on the ruffian's cheek. It was enough; with a hideous shriek, the fellow rolled over at his feet, and Amyas set his foot on him, in act to ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... he was passing down one of those streets where even the police prefer to go in couples. Suddenly a door burst open and a poor drunken woman was kicked out into the street by a big ruffian with whom Ned was not acquainted. Not satisfied with what he had done, the rough proceeded to kick the woman, who ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... he said, must come to the help of civilization against barbarism. These dreadful outrages are happening thousands of miles away, but that makes them none the less real. Humanity is being attacked by a bully, a ruffian,—how can any man stay at home? Let no consideration of family life keep you from doing your duty. Every human being must give an account of himself to God. What did you do in the great day of testing? will be the question asked you in that great day ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... procession through the town to show the whole world what the people wanted! As for Wilson, it was good to hear the lusty shouts of the "Giovani Fiumani": "Down with Wilson! down with redskins!" Some of the demonstrators, after shouting that Wilson was a donkey, a horse, a ruffian, would acclaim the new suggestion, that their enemy was not Wilson at all but Rudolf of Austria, who was still alive. Another very good idea would be to have great posters made with Wilson's head crowned by a German helmet, and now, of course, the Hotel ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... honest 'gator hunters, working powerful hard for a mighty poor living," declared the ruffian. "An' you-alls, I reckon one guess will hit it, arter ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... Hawker, in unlaced gymnasium shoes, "leathers," and a brown sweater (warranted not to show the dirt), looked quite definably what he was, a Commercial Road ruffian; and his foreheadless face, greasy cow-lick "quiff" (or fringe), and truculent expression, inspired more disgust than confidence ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... and see—Ah!" yelled Vince, for the treacherous old ruffian had seized him by the chest and was dragging ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... a pood.... Well and good.... So you see I was taking the hay in the morning with a good will; I was interfering with no one. In an unlucky hour I see the village elder, Antip Syedelnikov, coming out of the tavern. 'Where are you taking it, you ruffian?' says he, and takes me ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Wilt thou, upon the high and giddy mast, Seal up the shipboy's eyes, and rock his brains, In cradle of the rude imperious surge; And in the visitation of the winds, Who take the ruffian billows by the top, Curling their monstrous heads, and hanging them With deafning clamour in the slippery clouds, That, with the hurry, death itself awakes— Canst thou, O partial sleep! give thy repose To the wet sea—boy in an ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... I'm at all displeased with you!' Miss Cynthia, she was what they call an Apache, or some such name—a Frenchified sort of cut-throat, I take it to be. A real sight she looked. You'd never have believed a pretty young lady like that could have made herself into such a ruffian. Nobody would ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... glitter'd high! Swift from his couch he sprung, and 'scap'd the blow; When from an unknown hand the arrows fly, That lay the ruffian, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... and that is well, for the American article answers almost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being a predatory ruffian who knows too much to work. 'Bad place to beg in after dark—on a farm—very—is Vermont. Gypsies pitch their camp by the river in the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe. They have the gypsy look and some of the old gypsy names, but say ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... a nation's eyes, And win a nation's love, Let not thy towering mind despise The village and the grove. No slander there shall wound thy fame, No ruffian take his deadly aim, No rival weave the secret snare: For Innocence, with angel smile, Simplicity, that knows not guile, And Love and ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... bring the trip to an end and separate me at once from the society of my brother (I'm afraid I cared much more about losing him than for the Turnours' loss of their Aigle) I was impelled to run down in my nightgown and mules to do battle single-handed with the ruffian; but suddenly, before I had quite decided, out went the light in the blue-curtained glass cage. In another instant the car door opened, and Jack ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... he sat writing at his desk in the Senate House, two men came up to him. One of these, a Senator and a slaveholder from South Carolina, of the name of Brooks, was armed with a heavy stick. This ruffian attacked Sumner from behind, felled him with a blow, and then beat him as he lay upon the floor, leaving him almost dead. For this grievous offence a small fine was imposed upon Brooks, and the amount ...
— The Story of Garfield - Farm-boy, Soldier, and President • William G. Rutherford
... situation, with a force that completely undid all she had said, by betraying the extent of her own apprehensions. Ann Sidley knelt near her young mistress, sometimes praying fervently, though in silence, and at other moments folding her beloved in her arms, as if to protect her from the ruffian grasp of the barbarians. The femme de chambre was sobbing in a state-room, while John Effingham leaned, with his arms folded against a bulk-head, a picture of stern submission rather than of despair. The whole party was now assembled, with the exception of the steward, whose lamentations throughout ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... is not that of a vulgar ruffian; it leads to views and considerations vitally and wholly distinct from those with which profligate knavery and brutal cruelty revolt and displease us in the literature of Newgate and the hulks. His crime does, in fact, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... added to the force and vividness with which Spenser wrote. In Ireland, he had before his eyes continually, the dreary world which the poet of knight errantry imagines. There men might in good truth travel long through wildernesses and "great woods" given over to the outlaw and the ruffian. There the avenger of wrong need seldom want for perilous adventure and the occasion for quelling the oppressor. There the armed and unrelenting hand of right was but too truly the only substitute for law. There might be found in ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... groping in the dark, without a single clew. All I know is that Coombs is a big ruffian, but too cowardly to commit murder. The Creole might, and I would n't trust Sallie with a knife on a dark night, but, in my judgment, there are others involved ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... you. To be sure: you gave me your word of honour you would. But as for that ruffian Bill Solly, I'll blow him ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... of a very few seconds. Now what was my chief doing? Seeing a row going on, he was dismounting; in fact, was half-way off his horse, only one foot in the stirrup, when the man made the rush at him. Finding me stuck to my saddle (for the ruffian's knife had gone through my coat and pinned me), and the fellow snapping my gun, which was pointed at him, he as coolly as possible put his gun over his horse's shoulder and shot the would-be murderer dead on the spot. Then turning to me he said quite calmly, 'I call ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... of the kind, Rutherford! Suppose they were to elect to office some wild and reckless demagog... take, for instance, that ruffian you were telling us about... down there on the Bowery... [HAGEN starts, and listens] and he were to defy the law and the courts? He is preaching just that to the mob... striving to rouse the elemental wild beast in them! And some day they will pour out ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... proceed By reasonable rules, and choose a breed For profit and increase, at any price: Of a sound stock, without defect or vice. But, in the daily matches that we make, The price is everything: for money's sake, Men marry: women are in marriage given The churl or ruffian, that in wealth has thriven, May match his offspring with the proudest race: Thus everything is mix'd, noble and base! If then in outward manner, form, and mind, You find us a degraded, motley kind, Wonder no more, my friend! the cause is plain, And to ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... didn't know him as I did; yet I was put out, for I thought his bold glances would have made her angry. But my dear Flavia was a woman, and so—she was not put out. On the contrary, she thought young Rupert very handsome—as, beyond question, the ruffian was. ...
— The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... The ruffian on the ground was a very powerful man, and the three boys had the greatest difficulty in holding him down; till Fullarton slipped a noose round one of his ankles and then, jumping on the bed, hauled upon it with all his strength—the admiral giving ...
— Held Fast For England - A Tale of the Siege of Gibraltar (1779-83) • G. A. Henty
... whom he described as "the three Graces, with another chucked in," and though a rough, dare-devil fellow, he was, with the exception of old Harry Terry, the only one of the lot that was not a hopeless drunkard and ruffian. By one of his wives, a native of Sikaiana or Stewart's Island, he had two children, both girls. They were then about eight and ten years of age respectively, and were, I often thought, the loveliest ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... with us when they delay a punishment,' says The Pilgrim's Scrip, or words to that effect. The heavens evidently love Benson, seeing that he gets his punishment on the spot. Master Ricky is a peppery young man. He gets it from the apt Gruffudh. I rather believe in race. What a noise that old ruffian makes! He'll require poulticing with The Pilgrim's Scrip. We shall have a message to-morrow, and a hubbub, and perhaps all go to town, which won't be bad for one who's been a prey to all the desires born of dulness. Benson howls: there's life in the old dog yet! He bays the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... without any peer in Christendom. Let us first conquer this infamous proconsul, this adversary of our Redeemer, and then we shall see. It may be that heaven will then permit me to detect this Comte de la Foret in some particularly abominable heresy. For this long-legged ruffian looks like a schismatic, and would singularly ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... subtler distinction? By the dead man, Andrew had never been loved or esteemed; memory supplied proof of this. The widow shrank from him. No obligation of any kind lay upon them to tolerate the London ruffian.—Enough; he should be ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... to say, an idiot. Fortunately the brain, though not tall, is wide. He has Firmness, Energy, and what we call Driving Power, very large. This is a very curious gentleman"—("Oughter be stuffed!" puts in a ruffian, and everybody laughs—even the Professor—confound him!—smiles indulgently.) "He likes to go everywhere, and see everything. He can sit down to a good dinner, and enjoy it." (Shouldn't have thought that a rare characteristic—but it delights the audience.) ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 24, 1887 • Various
... love of dress, I was most struck with the fineness of the voices and beauty of the intonations of both sexes. Every common ruffian-looking fellow, with a slouched hat, blanket cloak, dirty under-dress, and soiled leather leggins, appeared to me to be speaking elegant Spanish. It was a pleasure, simply to listen to the sound of the language, before I could attach any meaning to it. They have a ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... rapidly slipped in on deck through her open ports aft, and then made a furious charge forward, attacking the Spaniards in their rear. Our presence on board seemed to take them considerably by surprise. They wavered and hesitated, but, incited by a burly ruffian who forced his way through the crowd, rallied once more and attacked us hotly. This was exactly what we wanted. Our fellows, by Smellie's order, contented themselves with acting for the time being strictly ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... and, as such, is protected by all the laws of chivalry. Whatsoever his message, it is none of his. He is merely the mouthpiece of him who sent him." Then, turning to the herald, he said, "Tell the false knight, your master, on my part, that he is a foul ruffian, perjured to all the vows of knighthood; that this act of visiting upon a woman the enmity he bears her son, will bring upon him the execration of all men; and that the offer which he makes me is as foul and villainous as himself. Nevertheless, knowing his character, and believing ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... much work, I had preserved a tenderness for the memory of Joe, forasmuch as we had made the acquaintance of Roderick Random together, and had believed him to be no ruffian, but an ingenuous and engaging hero. Scorning to ask the boy left in the phaeton whether it was really Joe, and scorning even to read the brass plate on the door—so sure was I—I rang the bell and informed the servant maid that a stranger sought ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her—something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... sending large forces on all sides to the poor Tyrol. I cannot conceal from you that the enterprise which we are going to undertake, and to which Andreas Hofer invites us, is a dangerous one. Let me tell you that that miserable assassin and ruffian Lefebre, whom they call the Duke of Dantsic, is approaching from the north with twenty-five thousand men, and is already close to Innspruck. General Deroi, too, is coming; he intends to march through the whole Vintschgau, and force his way over the Gerlos Mountains ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... that every effort is made by the small traders of the interior to avoid these savage press-gangs. The poor wretches are not only subjected to annoying vassalage by ruffian princes, but the blockade of the forest often diverts them from the point they originally designed to reach,—forces them to towns or factories they had no intention of visiting,—and, by extreme delay, wastes their provisions and diminishes their frugal profits. It is surprising ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... o'er Morton Bridge, While smil'd the moon above Upon the ruffian and his prey— The hawk and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... "how dare you presume to answer me? How dare you stand there and look me in the face? If I called my servants and made them lash you outside the gates, I would only serve you right! You low-bred, impertinent ruffian, how dare you write to ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... one who had lorded it for long enough in the establishment of which he was the head must remain a mystery; but certain it was that the Doctor muttered presently to himself, "An overbearing young ruffian! A thoroughly good thrashing; ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... with Lillian, while the other boy remained long enough to loosen the rope around his waist, and bind the young ruffian securely. Then he placed him in a corner of the room. Locking the door behind him, Sandy joined Gilbert in the skiff, and together they paddled furiously out of ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... are two adventurers, called Reggie and Cora, who very recently passed at the Royal Palace Hotel for General Gastang and Countess de la Moray. There is the scoundrel Stephen Richford who tricked Beatrice Darryll into marrying him, and then there is also a ruffian called Dr. ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... crown could possibly have done. In a word, it was represented (Clennam called to mind, alone in the ticking parlour) that many people select their models, much as the painters, just now mentioned, select theirs; and that, whereas in the Royal Academy some evil old ruffian of a Dog-stealer will annually be found embodying all the cardinal virtues, on account of his eyelashes, or his chin, or his legs (thereby planting thorns of confusion in the breasts of the more observant students of nature), so, in the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... help it," he replied; "consistent or no, life's good enough for me. And so it should be for you, you ungrateful ruffian!" ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Geelong is far superior to Melbourne, the streets are better, and so is the society of the place; none of the ruffian gangs and drunken mobs as seen in Victoria's chief city. There are various, chapels, schools, markets, banks, and a small gaol. The harbour is sheltered, but not safe for strangers, as the shoals are numerous. Geelong is surrounded ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... a gambling den in New Orleans, and interfering to save a colored man from the drunken frenzy of a bully, came near being killed himself. Coming to the aid of a porter on a Mississippi steamboat, he again narrowly escaped being shot, striking a revolver from the hand of a ruffian just as his finger dropped on the trigger. He mixed with all classes and conditions of men and saw life in its roughest, most primal aspect But all these experiences helped him to that appreciation of human nature that has been of such, value and ...
— Russell H. Conwell • Agnes Rush Burr
... so?—that the owner of the hat you found was also the assailant of my high-born master. We were wrong. I have heard the story from His Serene Highness's own lips. He was passing down a dark street when a ruffian in a mask sprang out upon him. Doubtless he had been followed from the Casino, where he had been winning heavily. My high-born master was taken by surprise. He was felled. But before he lost consciousness ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... right, Seth Huntington!" exclaimed Claire, coming to Marion, and putting an arm, around her. "If there's any ruffian it's you, and I'm ashamed ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... raised, paused for a moment to look round on hearing the howl of his comrade, and as he did so Edgar's sword fell on his wrist with such force that hand and dagger both fell to the ground. The remaining ruffian, who was roughly endeavouring to stifle the shrieks of a young girl, seeing himself alone with two adversaries, also darted off and plunged into a narrow ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty
... A gang of desperate desperados, headed by the ruffianly ruffian whom they call The Baron, will be here to-night. I shall be hiding under the counter. Ten men and two dachshunds surround the house. If you betray me your licence will not be worth ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... felt the same throbbing impulse, off he went, and within an hour presented his petition to Mr. Turnbull, who received him in his usual kind way, which caused the redoubtable ruffian to melt into tears, and volubly to confess all his murderous intentions towards the man he now believed to be the only agency on earth that ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... went there, but was persuaded by his mother and terrified by the lengths to which the constitutional party was disposed to go. The Duke said the Government would be very foolish to interfere for Pedro, who was a ruffian, and for the constitution, which was odious, and that Pedro would never have more than the ground he stood on; talked of our foreign policy, his anxiety for peace, but of France as our 'natural enemy!' and of the importance of maintaining our influence in Spain, ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... it. He readjusted his picture of Uncle Arthur, and this time got him right,—the tall, not bad-looking man, clean-shaven and with more hair a great deal than he, Mr. Twist, had. He had thought of him as an old ruffian; he now perceived that he could be hardly more than middle-aged and that Aunt Alice, a lady for whom he felt an almost painful sympathy, had a lot more of Uncle Arthur to get through ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... destructive doctrines founded upon either the prejudices of class, caste, wealth, or power. I protest in the name of a constituency whose early history was a sublime and persistent struggle against the prejudices of pampered and arrogant ruffianism at home, and the worse than ruffian spirit of the Administrations of Pierce and Buchanan, and the Democratic traitors who at that time constituted a majority of this House, and were engaged in preparing the nation for its harvest of blood. We must go back ...
— History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States • Wiliam H. Barnes
... addressed, but no one was in sight. A moment later, however, Diether sprang up from a ditch, seized the frightened boy, and ran back toward the mill. The girl had but little time in which to decide on a course of action. If she barricaded herself in the mill, might not the ruffian slay the child? On the other hand, if she waited to meet him, she had no assurance that he would not kill them both. So she retired to the mill, locked the door, and awaited what fate had in store for her. In vain the robber threatened to kill the child and burn the mill over ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... across the bedroom, flung open the window, and looked out. How quiet and sweet and wholesome the garden looked in the moonlight, and it could not be more than thirty feet down. I clambered out upon the sill, but I hesitated to jump until I should have heard what passed between my saviour and the ruffian who pursued me. If she were ill-used, then at any risks I was determined to go back to her assistance. The thought had hardly flashed through my mind before he was at the door, pushing his way past her; but she threw her arms round him and tried ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... Lilian home to her lodgings in Margaret Terrace, a turning off Oakley Street, when a man knocked a woman down right in front of them. He was just the ordinary type of street ruffian—the whitewashed English labourer—and the woman, having without doubt been served by him in the same manner fifty times before, was probably well used to such treatment. But it was more than Shiel, who had spent so much of his life where they treat women differently, could ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... there was a screw loose in my intellects,—and that involved the probable loss of a boarder. A severe-looking person, who wears a Spanish cloak and a sad cheek, fluted by the passions of the melodrama, whom I understand to be the professional ruffian of the neighboring theater, alluded, with a certain lifting of the brow, drawing down of the corners of the mouth and somewhat rasping voce di petti, to Falstaff's nine men in buckram. Everybody looked up. I believe the old gentleman opposite was afraid I should seize the carving-knife; ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... together in the Whig cause, at a convention held in Springfield, I made a speech at the State House, which I think now, looking back at it from this point, was the very best I ever made in my life. While I was addressing the vast assembly some ruffian in the galleries flung at me a gross personal insult accompanied with a threat. Lincoln and Colonel Baker, who were both present and were warm personal and political friends of mine, anticipating that I might be attacked when I left the State House, came upon the stand a little while ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... cowpunchin' ruffian," exploded Smith angrily, reaching a large arm for Pan. "Now then.... What the hell? ... Boy, you've ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... prompt about what he should say aloud. He began to find more in this interview than he had expected. He was tickled at his host's flowery forms of speech, and after all rather sympathized with the suspicious old ruffian, yet it was not for him to fail in loyalty toward the "People of the Chain." Several of them he knew, as it happened, and they had delighted him with their wild yarns of surveying in Luristan. So he managed no more than to achieve an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... thou hadst a bow and arrows, Guilford?" said John. "Shoot all the Papists," replied the child. "Thou bloodthirsty little ruffian!" cried Mr Underhill, yet laughing. "Nay," said John to him, "blame not the child: he doth but take mightily after a certain father of his, that I know." Whereat (said John) Mr Underhill laughed till the tears ran from ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... descending towards him out of the western heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,—the Buddha. Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:— he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in the night, and opened all doors for their escape. Buddhist scriptures, probably, were among the books destroyed at ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the white-haired ruffian. It rendered me gloomy ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... work, M. Marston," said he, taking my hand. "As the ruffian in the school fable says, 'Hodie tibi, cras nihi'—twelve hours will probably make ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... Then I ordered him to wait where he was until it was dark enough for me to ride into the station without my dress being noticed. Now God in His wisdom has made the heart of the British Soldier, who is very often an unlicked ruffian, as soft as the heart of a little child, in order that he may believe in and follow his officers into tight and nasty places. He does not so readily come to believe in a "civilian," but, when he does, he believes implicitly and like ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... (half fed) well fed well read author ARTHUR round table tea cup (half full) divide cleave CLEVELAND City of Cleveland two twice (the heavy shell) mollusk unfamiliar word dictionary Johnson's JOHNSON son bad son (thievish bay) dishonest boy (back) Mac McKINLEY kill Czolgosz (zees) seize ruffian rough rider rouse ROOSEVELT ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... such a discharge certificate that I don't think he'll get another second-mate's place in a hurry! As for you, my young scamps, I don't think the skipper will be very hard on you; but, Teddy, you ought to have told me of the treatment you three poor beggars were receiving at that ruffian's hands all the voyage. Old Bill Summers, the boatswain, confirmed every word that Jones said, and ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... laughing, "if being a ruffian makes one a philosopher, Jean Jacques Rousseau deserves to be called the greatest philosopher in the world. Truly, Fortune is playing curious pranks with me to-day, and seems determined to lower my royal pride. Two refusals ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that he consorts first of all ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... her arms, and told her that she was now at liberty to return to her home or go where she pleased. The joy expressed by the girl and by all who witnessed this scene was very great; for they had all considered him to be a mere ruffian, incapable of anything ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... soul! ... thou art a most unmannerly ruffian!" he said pettishly, yet with a vacant smile,—"what question didst thou bawl unmusically in mine ear? Will I be drunk at sunrise? Aye! ... and at sunset too, Sir Malapert, if that will satisfy thee! Hast thou been grudged sufficient ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... for breath, and in tones that were woefully unlike to those of the bold, lion-like scout of former days, he told how he had fainted and fallen on the breast of his master, how he had lain all night on the battle-field among the dead and dying, how he had been stripped and left for dead by the ruffian followers of the camp, and how at last he had been found and rescued by one of the ambulance-wagons of ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... MRS BAR. You disobedient ruffian, careless wretch, That said your father lov'd me but too well? I'll think on't, when thou think'st I have forgot it: Who's with thee else?—How now, minion? you! With whom? with him!—Why, what ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... pardon, Mr. West," said she with twinkling eyes. "I suspected you of being a cold-blooded ruffian, when you proposed this duel; but I now see that you understand human nature better than the whole caboodle of us put together! Arthur, thank Mr. West for ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne
... liberal running away. Thus ended the war in Kansas. It seems impossible that Slavery should not make in this case a rather better fight, where all is at stake. But it is well to remember that no Border Ruffian of Secession can now threaten more loudly, swear more fiercely, or retreat more rapidly, than his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... the chief of Shere Subz in our favour by presents and fair words, might not the same means have been employed for the rescue of poor Stoddart? The only way to deal with a ruffian like him of Bokhara would have been by pitting against him ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... Montgomery, Queen Jeanne's ruffian Protestant general, tore through this Catholic valley in 1569, with his devastating mercenaries. It recovered heart, flowered afresh, and was swept again by enemies from a neighboring province. Often a winter storm will expose ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... prairie, covered with the short, tufted dull-green herbage since known as "buffalo grass." Wild turkeys clamored along every watercourse; deer were seen on all sides, buffalo were without number, sometimes in grazing droves, and sometimes dotting the endless plain as far as the eye could reach. Ruffian wolves, white and gray, eyed the travellers askance, keeping a safe distance by day, and howling about the camp all night. Of the antelope and the elk the journal makes no mention. Bourgmont chased a buffalo ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... him, felled him to the earth with a single blow, tore the dagger from his hand, and sprang to his feet again just in time to strike his new weapon full into the third pursuer's face. The man put his hand to his head, and recoiled against a fellow-ruffian, who was close on his heels. Philammon, flushed with victory, took advantage of the confusion, and before the worthy pair could recover, dealt them half a dozen blows which, luckily for them, came from an unpractised hand, or the young monk might have had more than one life to answer ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... entering, Petruchio told him his daughter had received him kindly, and that she had promised to be married the next Sunday. This Katherine denied, saying she would rather see him hanged on Sunday, and reproached her father for wishing to wed her to such a mad-cap ruffian as Petruchio. Petruchio desired her father not to regard her angry words, for they had agreed she should seem reluctant before him, but that when they were alone he had found her very fond and loving; and he said, "Give me your hand, Kate; I will go to Venice ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... utterance a fresh volley of stones and shots were fired, and fresh rush made for doors and windows. The sidelights of the front door had been shattered, and one burly ruffian thrust himself halfway in, but stuck, when a defender leveled a revolver at his head, and said to Mrs. Babbitt, who was then in command of the hall, while her husband defended the ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... on the ruins of his country, as soon as he had repeated his oaths of fidelity to Edward, he hastened to Thirlestane, to throw himself a second time at the feet of Lady Helen. Her ripened judgment confirmed her youthful dislike of his ruffian qualities, and again he ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... a coward and a blackguard, Andrew Jackson!" Vincent exclaimed, white with auger. "You are a disgrace to Virginia, you ruffian!" ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... man, oppressed with some secret sorrow. In fact, he knew himself to be a murderer. The case was this: Being in a county assembly, the uncle of Lady Helen insulted him, struck him down, and kicked him. Sir Edward rode home to send a challenge to the ruffian; but, meeting him on the road drunk, he murdered him, was tried for the crime, but was honorably acquitted. He wrote a statement of the case, and kept the papers connected with it in an iron chest. One day Wilford, his secretary, whose curiosity had been aroused, saw the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... accused, I am not drunk but hungry. When a man has eaten, he doesn't believe that another is starving. True, answered Dostoievsky, this poor chap was crazy with hunger. I shan't make a complaint. Nevertheless the ruffian was sentenced to a month's imprisonment. Dostoievsky gave him three roubles before he left. Now this kind man was, strange as it may seem, an anti-Semite. His diary revealed the fact after his death. In life he kept this prejudice ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... travellers in such a country should not be without the means of defence. It is quite true that arms may do you a bad turn, either by tempting you to a hasty display, or by being of so costly a character as to excite the cupidity of some ruffian. But it is just as true that any other thing you possess may do you the like ill turn among men who would shoot you for the value of your skin. The golden mean is to be armed usefully, but not showily; and, above all things, to be very discreet ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... us say that we translate the dialect of the English province into the language of our empire; but we still translate. Mercutio, on inspection, would turn out to be not a gentleman,—and indeed he is not; Juliet, to be a most extraordinary young person; Tybalt, a brute and ruffian, a type from the plantation; and the only man with whom we should feel at all at ease would be the County Paris, in whom we should all recognize a perfectly bred man. "What a man!" we should cry. "Why, he's ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... I believe thee, whether thy small headpiece be sound or cracked, my boy. But whether this scurvy ruffian be thy father or no, 'tis all one, he shall not have thee to beat thee and abuse, according to his threat, so thou prefer ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... am innocent, my lad. I did not use the axe. That ruffian struck me with the fork handle till my manhood revolted against it, and I knocked him down with my fist, ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn
... little eyes and weasel face bespoke him; he had come to know him as an insatiate gambler, the pitiful sort of gambler who is too much of a drunkard to be more than his opponent's dupe at cards. He had found him to be a brawler and very much of a ruffian. But though he did not close his eyes to these things they did not matter to him. For gratitude and a sense of loyalty were two of the strong silver threads that went to make up the mesh of Buck Thornton's nature, and it was ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... give the young ruffian's family the credit they deserve," she stated. "The whole connection despises his ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... enough of her own heart to judge of his, and to know that such violent affections and expressions, above all, such a sudden, heart-breaking manner of departure, were not the effects of love, nor even of humanity. She felt herself debased by a ruffian—yet still, having loved him when she thought him a far different character, the blackest proof of the deception could not cause a sentiment ...
— Nature and Art • Mrs. Inchbald
... be able to fold back the page of thick stamped paper, "well, if you want to play him a trick, tell him that the master can only see his clients between two and three in the morning; we shall see if he comes, the old ruffian!" ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac
... a resolute ruffian," said De Vaux, "who valued his own life as little as it deserved, and would troop to the gallows as merrily as if the hangman were his partner ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... the heath when my horses were startled by the sudden appearance of a man rushing from the side of the road. The boy, on perceiving him, instantly spurred his pony, and, by a sudden bound of our light vehicle, the ruffian missed his grasp at the front rein. We now proceeded at full speed, while the footpad ran endeavouring to overtake us. At length, my horses fortunately outrunning the perseverance of the assailant, we reached the first 'Magpie,' a small inn on the heath, in safety. ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... his first impulse is to show fight. Naturally Leonard began to plunge and to double his fists. But he could not keep this up, for the man whose arm was round him quickly retired and stood a few paces off, looking wan and haggard, and very unlike a thief or ruffian. ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... hand-to-hand conflict. But Grace felt her heart sink a little as she saw the round and rather pursy form of her natural protector walk away into the depths of a mirror at the forward end of the car, and so vanish. And in this same mirror she beheld, seated only two sections behind her, the scowling ruffian! ...
— A Border Ruffian - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... on seeing him, and being remarkably swift of foot, were soon out of his reach. Not so the poor woman with the child on her back: she could not escape; and at her the savage ruffian fired, killing both her and the infant with ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... to suppose that every effort is made by the small traders of the interior to avoid these savage press-gangs. The poor wretches are not only subjected to annoying vassalage by ruffian princes, but the blockade of the forest often diverts them from the point they originally designed to reach,—forces them to towns or factories they had no intention of visiting,—and, by extreme delay, wastes their provisions and diminishes ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... food) with a round face, shrewd laughing eyes, and cynical mouth, a typical peasant, and the poet of the revolution. He was passably shaved, his little yellow moustache was trimmed, he was wearing new leather breeches, and seemed altogether a more prosperous poet than the untidy ruffian I first met about a year or more ago before his satirical poems in Pravda and other revolutionary papers had reached the heights of popularity to which they have since attained. In the old days before the revolution ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... haunted him. Forms of a breathing, living reality emerged from darkness, built themselves up into compositions as luminously simple and single as a mathematical idea. He thought of the "Call of Matthew," of "Peter Crucified," of the "Lute players," of "Magdalen." He had the secret, that astonishing ruffian, he had the secret! And now Gombauld was after it, in hot pursuit. Yes, it would be something terrific, if only he ...
— Crome Yellow • Aldous Huxley
... spirits; the ruffian with whom I saw you struggling, has fled across the Heath; but his speed prevented my saving your property. Was your money, too, in the parcel with ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... were said to be from western Missouri, and in early days were somewhat of the border ruffian order, and of course preferred to live on the frontier rather than in any well regulated society. As the country became settled and improved around them they moved on. A school house was an indication that the country was getting too ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... Baroness, shaking her fist in Malipieri's face. "You reptile, you accursed ruffian, you false, black-hearted, lying ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... lips. Silent but watchful he eyed the half-breed's face. There was something very familiar about the thin cheeks, high cheek-bones, and about the great hooked nose. He was struggling hard to locate the man. At this moment the third ruffian approached with three horses. The other had been busy fixing a gag in Jake Bond's mouth. Jim Bowley saw the horses come up. And, in the now brilliant moonlight, he beheld and recognized a grand-looking golden chestnut. There was no ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... so particular as he. On Baker's Bottom, opposite the mouth of Yellow Creek, lived Joshua Baker, whose principal business was that of selling rum to the Indians. In the same settlement lived Daniel Greathouse—"a ruffian in human shape," and an enemy ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... the Dwarf,—"that cool-blooded, hardened, unrelenting ruffian,—that wretch, whose every thought is infected with crimes,—has thewes and sinews, limbs, strength, and activity enough, to compel a nobler animal than himself to carry him to the place where he is to perpetrate his wickedness; ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott
... he answered, with a satanic grin. She sought to escape by him with the loud cry that Dennis heard, but the ruffian planted his big grimy hand in the delicate frill of her night-robe where it clasped her throat, and with a coarse laugh said: ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... at Stirling, at dawn. While the mercenaries are quarreling and singing at the close of a night of debauch, the sentinels introduce Ellen and the minstrel Allan-bane—who are come in search of Douglas. Ellen awes the ruffian soldiery by her grace and liberality, and is at length conducted to a more seemly waiting place, until she may obtain audience with the King. While Allan-bane, in the cell of Sir Roderick, sings to the dying chieftain ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... vengeance wreaked by a villainous Neapolitan street loafer upon a woman who has played him false—a vengeance which takes the form of ruining her son by drink and play, and of attempting to seduce her daughter. In the end this egregious ruffian is murdered in the street by the mother of his two victims, just in time to prevent his being knifed by the members of a secret society whom he had betrayed to justice. The music is not without dramatic vigour, and it has plenty of melody of a rough and ready kind. There ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild
... little lull in the work of blood, for in December all eyes had been turned to the spectacle of the trial of the king. From the 10th of August he had remained a close prisoner in the Temple, watched and insulted by his ruffian guards, and passing the time in the midst of his family with a serenity of mind, a calmness, and tranquility which went far to redeem the blunders he had made during the preceding three years. The following is the account written by the princess royal in her journal of ...
— In the Reign of Terror - The Adventures of a Westminster Boy • G. A. Henty
... the past there are tones of the reader's voice that still linger in my ears! I seem to hear once more the agonized quick utterance of poor Nancy, as she pleads for life, and the dread stillness after the ruffian's cruel blows have fallen on her upturned face. Again comes back to me the break in Bob Cratchit's voice, as he speaks of the death of Tiny Tim. As of old I listen to poor little Chops, the dwarf, declaring, very piteously, that his "fashionable friends" ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... gang committing all sorts of atrocities in Galway, has made the place too hot for him at last, and is reported to have made his way down to the south coast, somewhere in this direction; and we are ordered to keep a sharp lookout for him. He is an unmitigated ruffian, and a desperate one. He has shot several constables who have tried to capture him, and as he has three or four men with him nearly as bad as himself I expect we shall have some trouble with him. There has been a reward of a hundred pounds for his capture ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... the woman's sake. If the license of men were not restrained by some sort of barrier it would break all bounds. Now I, had I chosen, could have taken the woman I loved to myself; it needed but a little skilful persuasion on my part, for her husband was a drink-sodden ruffian..." ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli
... family to a place of safety. Dalbos, the only city beadle who was a protestant, was dragged from his home and led to prison. His niece threw herself on the neck of one of them and begged for mercy; the ruffian dashed her to the ground. His sister was driven away by the mob; and he being shot, his body remained a long time exposed to the ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... not allow any dissoluteness like dancing, dice or cards, nor shall he receive any one suspected of being a debauche or ruffian. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... to set 'em sideways. If it was possible, the blamed printers could do it, you bet. When I was writing leaders on the Saxville Citizen years ago there was a ruffian up in the composing-room who used to set whole paragraphs of my best editorials in em quads, and when I kicked,—Hello, isn't ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon
... Behoves it us to labour for the realm. I never saw but Humphrey Duke of Gloster Did bear him like a noble gentleman. Oft have I seen the haughty cardinal, More like a soldier than a man o' the church, As stout and proud as he were lord of all, Swear like a ruffian and demean himself Unlike the ruler of a commonweal.— Warwick my son, the comfort of my age, Thy deeds, thy plainness, and thy housekeeping, Hath won the greatest favour of the commons, Excepting none but good Duke Humphrey;— And, brother York, ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... good-humouredly willing to acknowledge his partner's superiority, and in that case the girl's doom is a cruel one. She may marry a gross, stupid lout, who begins by yawning away his time in leisure hours, and ends by going out to meet companions of his own sort. By and by comes the time when the ruffian grows aggressive, and then the proud girl has to bear brutalities which rack her very soul. Steadily the work of degradation goes on, and at last the brutal man becomes a capricious bully, while the refined lady ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... must be in virtue of some agreement with the Christians, and in that case he wished people to believe him. He saw this, too, from his face; hence in one moment, without showing doubt or astonishment, he raised his eyes and exclaimed,—"That was a faith-breaking ruffian! But I warned thee, lord, not to trust him; my teachings bounded from his head as do peas when thrown against a wall. In all Hades there are not torments enough for him. He who cannot be honest must be a rogue; what is more difficult ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... a very easy man, but would work you hard and never allow you any chance night or day; he was a farmer, about fifty, stout, full face, a real country ruffian; member of no church, a great drinker and gambler; will sell a slave as quick as any other slave-holder. He had a great deal of cash, but did not rank high in society. His wife was very severe; hated a colored man to have any comfort in the world. ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... as he was to preserve peace, could not but look with alarm upon the movements which now threatened the States of the empire. It was necessary to present a barrier to the inroads of such a ruffian. He accordingly assembled a diet at Frankfort and demanded succors to oppose the threatened invasion on the north. He raised an army, entered into an alliance with the defeated and prostrate, yet still struggling Poles, and was just commencing his march, when he was seized with sudden ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... the landlord, genially pointing out the black-bearded ruffian, "and the young lawyer feller hez git a jedgment ag'in him. He's got spunk, but I reckon Hump'll t'ar the innards out'n him ef he stands thar a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... was now the poor boys of the castle looked over the wall, And they saw that ruffian, ould Cromwell, a-feeding on powder and ball, And the fellow that married his daughter, a-chawing grape-shot in his jaw, 'Twas bowld I-ray-ton they called him, ...
— Story of Chester Lawrence • Nephi Anderson
... cease to feel? Shall Mercy's tears no longer flow? Shall ruffian threats of cord and steel— The dungeon's gloom—th' assassin's blow, Turn back the spirit roused to save The ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... sons of France, awake to glory! Hark! hark! what myriads bid you rise! Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary, Behold their tears and hear their cries! Shall hateful tyrants, mischief breeding, With hireling hosts, a ruffian band, Affright and desolate the land, While peace and ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... love letters are among the best on record. He has a wild sense of humor, which enables him to laugh at himself as well as at everybody else. In the eyes of the English visitor now about to be admitted to his presence he may be an outrageous ruffian. In fact he actually is an outrageous ruffian, in no matter whose eyes; but the visitor will find out, as everyone else sooner or later fends out, that he is a man to be reckoned with even by those who are not intimidated by his temper, bodily ...
— Great Catherine • George Bernard Shaw
... this to be made ready MacQueen hummed a snatch of a popular song. It happened to be a love ditty. Boone ground his teeth and glared at him, which appeared to amuse the other ruffian immensely. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... our very feet," he exclaimed at last, "to be held up by this scurvy pock-marked ruffian, I swear 'I like it not.' No news from your duck-shooting friend either. It is a slow-moving world, and the Bird of Time has either lost his wings, or been captured as a specimen on behalf of the ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... fierce, cruel faces glaring at him eye to eye, and his own desperate efforts to drive and kill. It all abides in fevered memory not unlike those pictures of horror coming of a dark night when lightning leaps from the black void. I mind the first man to reach me, a burly ruffian, whose shining spear-point missed my throat by so narrow a margin it tasted blood ere my rifle-stock crushed the side of his head and sent him backward, a reeling corpse into the mass at his heels. Then all was confusion, a riot of leaping figures, frantic shouting, and clanging weapons, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... to change to the 17 with that horrible old ruffian Daniels, and Smutty Kelly to go ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... of so-called 'sport,' the Badger used to be captured and put into a cage ready to be tormented; at the cruel will of every ruffian who might chose to risk his dog against the sharp teeth ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 14th, 1891 • Various
... I only 'ope it won't get you into trouble, for if the p'leece go lookin' for a burglar, or murderer, or desprit ruffian, where you 'appen to be, they're sure to run you in. The only think I would point out, sir, if I may be so free, is that your 'ands an' face is ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... abhorred! The grieving housewives eye it; heaped and blent, Earth's boons are spoiled and spent, And waste to nothingness; and O alas, Young maids, forlorn ye pass— Fresh horror at your hearts—beneath the power Of those who crop the flower! Ye own the ruffian ravisher for lord, And night brings rites abhorred! Woe, woe for you! upon your grief and pain There comes a fouler stain. [Enter, on one side, THE SPY; on the other, ETEOCLES and ...
— Suppliant Maidens and Other Plays • AEschylus
... him that he knew himself no coward. He must punish the rascal somehow—he owed it to society to punish him; but at present he did not see how, and the first thing was to have the first word with Florimel; he must see her before she saw the ruffian. He rode as hard as he dared to Curzon Street, sent his groom to the stables, telling him he should want the horses again before lunch, had a hot bath, of which he stood in dire need, and some brandy with his ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... Macdonald at court as an incorrigible rebel, as a ruffian inured to bloodshed and rapine, who would never be obedient to the laws of his country, nor live peaceably under any sovereign. He observed, that he had paid no regard to the proclamation, and proposed that ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... touching in the way in which the kind creature flung her all into his lap, saluting him with a hearty embrace at the same time, and wishing that it were a thousand billion billion times more, so that her darling Howard might enjoy it, that the man would have been a ruffian indeed could he have found it in his heart to be angry with her; and so he kissed her in return, and patted her on the shining ringlets, and then counted over the notes with rather a disconsolate air, and ended ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... across the temple, and attempts to rescue his wife, who is being dragged away by one of the brigands in the background; he stretches out his arms towards, and looks upon her, but is kept from her by the strong arm of the ruffian at his side, who grasps him by the collar, and holds a bloody sword above his head; the brigand partially faces the audience; the officer stands in a side position; the wife is seen kneeling in the background, with hands clasped and eyes raised to a brigand, who grasps her ...
— Home Pastimes; or Tableaux Vivants • James H. Head
... she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the white-haired ruffian. It rendered ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... Some faces are like this. He was a degenerate of the worst type; for he was a man who had slowly receded from a life of refinement, and mental retrogression finds painful expression on such a face. A ruffian from birth bears less outward trace, for his type ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... authorizing the trial and punishment of persons guilty of murder and other crimes in certain savage and disturbed countries, amongst which were specified New Zealand, Otaheite, and Honduras. Two others, in 1823 and 1828, gave the Australian courts jurisdiction over Whites in New Zealand. One White ruffian was actually arrested in New Zealand, taken back to Sydney, and executed. But this act of vigour did not come till the end of 1837. Then the crime punished was not one of the atrocities which for thirty years had made New Zealand a by-word. ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... The Indians, resenting this treatment, informed the Spaniards of the state of the French settlement, when Pedro de Menendez, who was engaged in the colonisation of the West Indies, landed on the coast, some miles south of the River Saint John, at the head of a large band of ruffian troops. Guided by a party of the treacherous Indians, he and his band made their way through the forests, and fell suddenly, sword in hand, on the almost defenceless colonists. Not a human being who could be overtaken was allowed to escape; ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... Jews should have been trying to murder such a man Lysias does not seem to have considered. But when he heard the courteous, respectful Greek speech of the Apostle he saw at once that he had got no uncultured ruffian to deal with, and in answer to Paul's request and explanation gave him leave to speak. That has been thought an improbability. But strong men recognise each other, and the brave Roman was struck with something in the tone and bearing of the brave Jew which ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... away into distance Tudor smiled again grimly, ironically. "Yes, you young ruffian," he said. "It's given your nerves a nasty jolt, and serves you jolly well right! I never saw any fellow in such a mortal funk before, and—from your somewhat rash remark—I gather that it's not the first lesson ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... Petruchio told him his daughter had received him kindly, and that she had promised to be married the next Sunday. This Katharine denied, saying she would rather see him hanged on Sunday, and reproached her father for wishing to wed her to such a mad-cap ruffian as Petruchio. Petruchio desired her father not to regard her angry words, for they had agreed she should seem reluctant before him, but that when they were alone he had found her very fond and loving; and he said to her, "Give me your hand, Kate; I will go ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles Lamb and Mary Lamb
... in the mood they were in, worth as much as the dirt under their feet, no more. At that instant, not six feet behind their backs, Captain McCullagh—the same who afterward became Chief—turned the corner with his precinct detective. I gathered all my strength and gave the ruffian's hand a mighty twist that turned the knife aside. I ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... Gambouge, "thou art an inexorable ruffian, Troisboules; but I will give thee all I am worth." And here he produced a billet of five hundred francs. "Look," said he, "this money is all I own; it is the payment of two years' lodging. To raise it, I have toiled for many months; and, failing, I have been ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... determined. John was absent; Sarah, seeing the troopers gallop toward the house, poured a prayer over her babe, as it lay asleep in the crib, and fled in terror, hoping that sweet infancy would appeal to their hearts. A ruffian rushed in, and grasping the babe, shouted, "The nurse is not far away." He made it scream, to bring the mother back. She heard its pitiful cry; her heart was breaking, yet she was utterly powerless. She might expose herself, but she could not help the infant. They carried it away. She was almost ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... the prosecution of a love affair with the wife of a Trasteverine fisherman. The third son, Rocco, spent his time in street adventures, and on one occasion laid his hands on all the plate and portable property that he could carry off from his father's house. This young ruffian, less than twenty years of age, found a devoted friend in Monsignore Querro, a cousin of the family well placed at court, who assisted him in the burglary of the Cenci palace. Rocco was killed by Amilcare Orsini, a bastard of the Count ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... weeks thereafter, Nan never saw a rough-looking man approach the house on the outskirts of Pine Camp, without fearing that here was coming a ruffian bent on ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... more limited than the kingdom of Kippen, had stabbed a lady at a masked ball a few months previously, for a consideration of sixty-five duros. Still, it would be unfair to infer from that example that every Malagueno was a mercenary ruffian, Senor Heredia related to me an anecdote of a poor man who had found a purse with value in it to the amount of thirty thousand reals, and had given it up without mention of recompense. But a city where the wine-shops had nine doors, and potato-gin was dispensed at a peseta the bottle, ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... is a man of taste and of some fortune,' he said, 'not the sort of man to send a stupid peasant to guard the woman he loves. So I am not content to believe, with Mr. Sears, that the servant is a boor. I believe him, instead, to be a very clever ruffian. I believe him to be the protector of his master's honor, or, let us say, of his master's property, whether that property be silver plate or the woman his master loves. Last night, after Lord Arthur had gone away, the servant ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... thy wings." That mercy which we see in the complex arrangements of the animal creation, extending down to the minutest portions of their frames—that same Divine mercy it is which we are bid to imitate. He whose soul burns with indignation against the brutal ruffian who misuses the poor, helpless, suffering horse, or dog, or ass, or bird, or worm, shares for the moment that Divine companion wrath which burns against the oppressors of the weak and defenceless everywhere. He who puts forth his hand ...
— Voices for the Speechless • Abraham Firth
... before they're properly under weigh; but if they speaks of wot I wants to know, I'll keep quiet. Well, sir, to my surprise, the Arab—he speaks in bad English, whereby I came to suppose the other was an Englishman, but, if he is, the climate must have spoiled him badly, for I never did see such a ruffian to look at. But he only laughed, and didn't speak, so I couldn't be sure. Well, to come to the pint, sir, the Arab said he'd got hold of two shipwrecked Englishmen, whom he meant to put on board of his dhow, at that time lyin' up a river not three miles off, and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's, or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured, and continuous. A great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having done a single murder; and for a couple of years see its own children murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring no ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... I am part owner, and has therefore no need to serve an evil cause. He was born in New Orleans of Northern parents, spent two years in the School of Mines in Paris, and until this wretched war broke out has lived for some years among mining camps and in the ruffian life of the far West. It is a fair chance which side turns up, the ways of the salon, the accuracy of the man of science, or the savagery of the Rockies. ...
— A Diplomatic Adventure • S. Weir Mitchell
... undeniable diplomacy had not permitted him to comprehend. Austria was like the thief who set himself up as umpire to settle between two knaves of his own cloth, and, while he gave advice to both, was securing to himself the very plunder which gave rise to the dispute. Nicholas, John Bull said, was a ruffian of the go-ahead school; but, of the three ruffians, which shall we choose? history may be the teacher! Ruffians, however, may do good at times, in which sense Nicholas was entitled to more consideration than Mister Bull, in his frenzy, was willing to accord. Thus saying, the General ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... he imagined, had taken shelter there; we kept snug in our places, and enjoyed his mistake. He had not been long there, when he was suddenly seized from behind; 'I shall have you now,' said he, and turned about. 'Shall you so, master?' answered the ruffian, who had laid hold of him; 'we shall make you play at another sort of game by and by.'"—At these words Harley started with a convulsive sort of motion, and grasping Edwards's sword, drew it half out of the scabbard, with a look of the most frantic wildness. Edwards gently replaced it in ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... hearts* to despoil the gentle, trusting creatures of their treasure, or do any thing to strip them of their native robe of virtue? Curst be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastity! Thou wretch! thou ruffian! forbear; nor venture to provoke heaven's fiercest vengeance." I know not any comment that can be made seriously on this curious passage, and I could produce many similar ones; and some, so very sentimental, ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... little man that used to talk Latin and fetch our bowls? How tall thou art grown! I protest I should have known thee anywhere. And so you have turned ruffian and fighter; and wanted to measure swords with Mohun, did you? I protest that Mohun said at the Guard dinner yesterday, where there was a pretty company of us, that the young fellow wanted to fight him, and was the ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... beggar. It was however to small purpose that Keating attempted, in the midst of that fearful anarchy, to uphold the supremacy of the law. Priests and military chiefs appeared on the bench for the purpose of overawing the judge and countenancing the robbers. One ruffian escaped because no prosecutor dared to appear. Another declared that he had armed himself in conformity to the orders of his spiritual guide, and to the example of many persons of higher station than himself, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... are you no maiden.—Leonato, I am sorry you must hear: Upon my honour, Myself, my brother, and this grieved count, Did see her, hear her, at that hour last night, Talk with a ruffian at her chamber-window; Who hath, indeed, most like a liberal villain, Confess'd the vile encounters they have had A ...
— Much Ado About Nothing • William Shakespeare [Knight edition]
... [This ruffian hath botch'd up] I fancy it is only a coarse expression for made up, as a bad taylor is called a botcher. and to ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... himself at once," returned the ruffian, "he'll not escape by refusing to do so; we'll search every corner ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a Jehad in the Soudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the most ruffian-like and least scrupulous of the crew were employed in the pressgangs, for they often had very brutal work to perform. The men into whose hands I had fallen were as bad as any I had ever met. They seized me with the greatest ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... scheme had served in other American frigates, where the privilege of having theatricals was allowed to the crew. What was their chagrin, then, when, upon making an application to the Captain, in a Peruvian harbour, for permission to present the much-admired drama of "The Ruffian Boy," under the Captain's personal patronage, that dignitary assured them that there were already enough ruffian boys on board, without conjuring up any more from ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... frightened, not at what had been said, for she did not understand it, but terrified by the ruffian expression that was plainly legible in ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... to Timar that his own career was finished. This ruffian Krisstyan could expose the foundation of his wealth, and how could he live discredited ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... should have anticipated that, had such a difficulty happened to him, his first act would have been to knock the man down, and to call out for the police; and next, if he was worsted in the conflict, he would not have given the ruffian the information he asked, at whatever risk to himself. I think he would have let himself be killed first. I do not think that he would have told ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... I'll attend to yours and mine, too. I'm not going to have that ruffian ogling you, I know ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... the enraged young lord of Kingsland, "how dare you presume to answer me? How dare you stand there and look me in the face? If I called my servants and made them lash you outside the gates, I would only serve you right! You low-bred, impertinent ruffian, how dare you write to ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... in some more courtly scene, To maids and youths in robes of state! I am a woman poor and mean, And therefore is my soul elate; War is a ruffian all with guilt defiled, That from the aged father tears ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... Jason smiled. By this time I had grown accustomed to the darkness, the face and figure of the man in the bed had become discernible. Power, I remember thinking, chooses odd houses for itself. Here was no overbearing, full-blooded ward ruffian brimming with vitality, but a thin, sallow little man in a cotton night-shirt, with iron-grey hair and a wiry moustache; he might have been an overworked clerk behind a dry-goods counter; and yet somehow, now that I had talked to him, I realized that he never could have been. Those extraordinary ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... see a ruffian, and had found a boor; but she was to be convinced that the ruffian existed in him. Notice came up to the castle of a convoy of waggons, and all was excitement. Men-at-arms were mustered, horses led down the Eagle's Ladder, and an ambush prepared in the woods. The autumn rains were ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... easy and somewhat swaggering bearing,—a good many roughs, with here and there a ruffian. Several, as they approached, swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength, the sledges with which they had been tapping at the bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several wielded ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... received your foolish and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel; and what I cannot do for myself, the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat, by the menaces of a ruffian. ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... crew were brought into Salem for trial, my brother had the questionable satisfaction of identifying in the court-room the ruffian of a boatswain who had threatened his life. This boatswain and several others of the crew were executed in Boston. The boy found his brief sailor-experience quite enough for him, and afterward settled down quietly to ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... "You unspeakable ruffian!" I threw the words at him, and threw myself at the same time. I think we struggled for a few moments, but I am younger than he, as well as bigger, so it was not much credit to my prowess that I soon had my hand twisted in his collar and was shaking ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... slender difference between barbarity and senti-mentalism. The same temper which delights in reading of murder and sudden death weeps with anguish at the mere hint of oppression. No cheek is so easily bedewed by the unnecessary tear as the cheek of the ruffian—and those who compose the "editorials" for Mr Hearst's papers have cynically realised this truth. They rant and they cant and they argue, as though nothing but noble thoughts were permitted to lodge within the poor brains of their readers. ...
— American Sketches - 1908 • Charles Whibley
... (in a fury). Officer, you are a disgrace to your coat! Arrest that man, I say. I would have had the Court cleared long ago, but that I hoped that you would have arrested the ruffian if I gave him a chance of repeating ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... and had been made ridiculous in doing so; and this contributed largely to that revolution in the public opinion of the county, which had been going on for eighteen months, and which at the last compelled a radical change in the policy of these "Border Ruffian" leaders. But this again gave the chiefs of this conspiracy abundant experience that it pays to do right, and that a good Providence had brought them prosperity and honor by defeating their original counsels and turning ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... like men for the first time in their lives. Well, I tell you, March, I know them inside out; and I know they are behaving like heroes. Every man of them ought to have a statue, and on the pedestal words like those of the noblest ruffian of the Revolution: 'Que mon nom soit fletri; que ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... absolutely dismissed her suspicions of the night before, or else had heartlessly abandoned the affair to me altogether. If she had really done this, then I saw no way out of it for me but by an accident which should reveal them to each other. Perhaps some one might insult Miss Gage- -some ruffian—and Kendricks might strike the fellow; but this seemed too squalid. There might be a terrible jam, and he interpose his person between her and the danger of her being crushed to death; or the floor of the grand stand might give way, and everybody be precipitated into the space ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... excursion was indeed an adventure. I came across Broadway and Sixth Avenue together! Sixth Avenue, with its barbaric paving, surely could not be under the same administration as Fifth! Between Sixth and Seventh I met a sinister but genial ruffian, proudly wearing the insignia of Tammany; and soon I met a lot more of them: jolly fellows, apparently, yet somehow conveying to me the suspicion that in a saloon shindy they might prove themselves ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... besmeared with the same guilty signs that bore witness against me on the dripping instrument I clenched; my whole appearance was haggard and squalid. Tall and muscular as I was in form, I must have looked like, what indeed I was, the merest ruffian that ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens all. "But while the lamp holds on to burn," says the paraphrase, "the greatest sinner may return." I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he accepted uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope the period of STURM ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... deceitful gipsy!" I began. "Who would have thought you would be sitting, hand locked in hand, with a horrid fellow like the ruffian that was with you in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... mind, that, in this misdirection of youth, all that constitutes the spirit, the power, the charm of youth is extinguished. The young man becomes prematurely old. We have all witnessed that saddest of spectacles, the petulant child developing into the ruffian boy, and hurrying into the ruffian man,—rude, hard-natured, swaggering, and self-willed, a darkness over his conscience, a glare over his appetites, insensible to duty or affection, and only tamed into decencies by the chains of restraint which an outraged community ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... ballad-monger; a corranto-coiner; a decoy; an exchange man; a forrester; a gamester; an hospitall-man; a iayler; a keeper; a launderer; a metall man; a neuter; an ostler; a post-master: a quest-man; a ruffian; a sailor; a trauller; an vnder sheriffe; a wine-soaker; a Xantippean; a ...
— Microcosmography - or, a Piece of the World Discovered; in Essays and Characters • John Earle
... contemptible. That ruffian who jostled me was right. He saw I was a fat pig and that's all, a boar with sharp tusks but a ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... caught her breath quickly. She knew the big ruffian's methods, and with good reason feared for her old friend, should he even unconsciously ...
— The Shepherd of the Hills • Harold Bell Wright
... But he was equal to the occasion; and when Steamboat staggered again to its feet Bannister was still in the saddle. It was a daring and magnificent piece of horsemanship, and, though he was supposed to be a desperado and a ruffian, his achievement met with a breathless gasp, followed by ...
— Wyoming, a Story of the Outdoor West • William MacLeod Raine
... feared nothing,—the streets of Hendrik at night were familiar to her and she to them; and although her shy and quiet traits were not sufficiently understood to make her universally beloved, not a loafing ruffian in town but knew her modest face, her odd attire, and her straightforward walk; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... seemed minutes to the silent, motionless congregation, his raised hand came down on the shoulder of the leader with the exact, resistless precision of the tiger's paw, and the ruffian was snatched from his seat to the floor sprawling. Before he could rise, the steel-like grip of the roused preacher sent him halfway to the door, and then out into ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... most unscientific and unmathematical artist, for having given me so many shocking misfits lately, until I have looked like a scarecrow in a cornfield; even now you are smelling like a distillery. And tell me, you ruffian, what right had you to say at Mrs. Haley's public house that I was 'thauto—thauto—gogical' in my preaching? If I, with all the privileges of senility, chose to repeat myself, to drive the truths ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... all applied their hands to their foreheads when they saw the Khan. The timid or peaceably disposed among them, dreading the consequences, either from the Russians or the Khan, to which this rencontre might expose them, exhibited much discomfiture at the question; but the idle, the ruffian, and the desperate—for all beheld with hatred the Russian domination—crowded turbulently round him with delight. They hurriedly told him what ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... justice-of-peace marriage with Jean Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or that misery of miseries, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... began to pay the penalty for his youthful dissipations in failing health, but he continued to write with great expenditure of time and energy. 'The History of Jonathan Wild the Great,' a notorious ruffian whose life Defoe also had narrated, aims to show that great military conquerors are only bandits and cutthroats really no more praiseworthy than the humbler individuals who are hanged without ceremony. Fielding's masterpiece, 'The History of Tom Jones,' followed hard after Richardson's 'Clarissa,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of course, the man who had been shot. Tom lighted the lantern, for it was now quite dark, and found that the ruffian had been shot in the lower part of his right leg, and had fainted from loss of blood. Taking a towel, Tom tore it into strips, and bound up the wound, and by the time he had finished the patient became conscious again, and begged Tom not ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... your Caesar. Believe me, he is very close to my heart, and I am not going to let him slip from his place. Now for the history of the Ides (13th). It was Caelius's tenth day.[584] Domitius had not obtained a full panel. I am afraid that foul ruffian, Servius Pola, will appear for the prosecution. For our friend Caelius has a dead set made at him by the Clodian gens. There is nothing certain as yet, but I am afraid. On the same day there was a full house for the case of the Tyrians: the publicani ...
— The Letters of Cicero, Volume 1 - The Whole Extant Correspodence in Chronological Order • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... this knowledge to any improper end. But he would have my Government know something—so very little—of his influence and of his power. He would have them recall those warrants for his apprehension that place him on a level with the Apache, the ruffian; that are an insult to a man who has never done wrong to a living soul, but who only has exercised the fundamental, the Divine, the Mosaic ...
— The Sins of Severac Bablon • Sax Rohmer
... later the right-hand ruffian, my man, also stirred, so sharply that I thought he had heard something. Apparently, however, he was only haunted by dreams resulting from an evil life, or perhaps by the prescience of its end, for after waving his arm and muttering something in a frightened ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... inanimate body of the menial witness. The white figure, bearing in her arms a sleeping child, glides to the tapestried wall, and vanishes through it, into the Chamber of the Crown Prince, a babe of fourteen days. She returns carrying another unconscious infant form, she places it in the hands of the ruffian Sauerbeck, she disappears. The miscreant speeds with the child through a postern into the park, you hear the trample of four horses, and the roll of the carriage on the road. Next day there is silence in the palace, broken but by the shrieks of a bereaved though Royal (or at least Grand ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... story that we are about to narrate, and we warn the lover of pleasant books to lay down our volume at the first page. We shall see Cunningham, that burly, red-faced ruffian, the Provost Marshal, wreaking his vengeance upon the defenceless prisoners in his keeping, for the assault made upon him at the outbreak of the war, when he and a companion who had made themselves obnoxious to the republicans ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... so the ruffian nearest him, with a hiss of rage, drew a knife, with which he made a wicked slash at Hal. Hal did not see the movement, being closely pressed elsewhere, but Chester, with a sudden cry, leaped forward and seized the hand holding the knife, just as ...
— The boy Allies at Liege • Clair W. Hayes
... destiny, thy all Which thou dost best and dearest call; Then let the darts of envy fall, Let ruffian malice ban and brawl. ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... few, and that is well, for the American article answers almost exactly to the vagrant and criminal tribes of India, being a predatory ruffian who knows too much to work. 'Bad place to beg in after dark—on a farm—very—is Vermont. Gypsies pitch their camp by the river in the spring, and cooper horses in the manner of their tribe. They have the gypsy look and some ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... kind, Rutherford! Suppose they were to elect to office some wild and reckless demagog... take, for instance, that ruffian you were telling us about... down there on the Bowery... [HAGEN starts, and listens] and he were to defy the law and the courts? He is preaching just that to the mob... striving to rouse the elemental wild beast in them! And some day they will pour ...
— Prince Hagen • Upton Sinclair
... was, was arrested and placed on trial for his misdemeanour, in accordance with the rough justice of the white man in his dealings with the native. In the night the poor dying woman crawled painfully to the tree against which the ruffian lay bound, cut his cords, and set him free. It was her last act in this life; in the morning she was found lying dead on the spot whence the prisoner had fled. This particular story may or may not be true, but the same kind of thing has been true ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... Nor is it strange. Your house is grown a nuisance to its neighbours, Where twice in every week, if not more frequent, A motley crowd at midnight hour assembles; Whose ruffian-like attendants in the street, Alarm the ...
— The Female Gamester • Gorges Edmond Howard
... many others. An attack on a servant with a knife is punished by forfeiture of the knife and a fine of half a florin, and a penalty of a florin (divided among the four victims) is inflicted for entering a house with arms and wounding the fingers of some of its inhabitants. A ruffian of noble birth, who had been guilty of gross immorality and of violence, declines to appear in the Rector's Court, and is duly sentenced to expulsion. But his father promises to satisfy the University and the injured ...
— Life in the Medieval University • Robert S. Rait
... apple-barrel on deck, and from this place of ambush overheard Soutar and a comrade conversing in their oilskins. The smooth sycophant of the cabin had wholly disappeared, and the boy listened with wonder to a vulgar and truculent ruffian. Of Soutar, I may say tantum vidi, having met him in the Leith docks now more than thirty years ago, when he abounded in the praises of my grandfather, encouraged me (in the most admirable manner) to pursue his footprints, and left ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... candy. She took no notice of them, for they spoke very rudely, and were no friends of hers. Among them was Johnny Grippen, whose acquaintance the reader made on the pier of South Boston bridge. This young ruffian led half a dozen others down the court in pursuit of her, for possibly they were not satisfied with the cavalier manner in which Katy had ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... for the ruffian try to buy him off, and at a valuation, too, that proves you to be deaf to the voice of reason and ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... last word he ever spoke, for, with a low terrible cry, the Seigneur snatched up a knife from the table and sprang upon him, catching him by the throat. Once, twice, thrice, the knife went home, and the ruffian collapsed under it with one loud cry. Not letting go his grasp of the dying man's collar, the Seigneur dragged him across the floor, and, opening the door of the small inner room, pulled him inside. For a moment he stood beside the body, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it was not likely that the ruffian band would have returned, unless with the intention of destroying those who had offended them. It is very probable that they hoped to make it appear that the blacks, having set the wood on fire, had afterwards killed them. The whole party in the hut felt, therefore, ...
— The Gilpins and their Fortunes - A Story of Early Days in Australia • William H. G. Kingston
... nerve, and clears the path of life Like wind, thou point'st him to the dreadful goal, And shak'st thy hour-glass in his reeling eye, And check'st him in mid course. Thy skeleton hand Shows to the faint of spirit the right path, And he is warned, and fears to step aside. Thou sett'st between the ruffian and his crime Thy ghastly countenance, and his slack hand Drops the drawn knife. But, oh, most fearfully Dost thou show forth Heaven's justice, when thy shafts Drink up the ebbing spirit—then the hard Of heart and violent of hand restores ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... "Thou ruffian, thou!" he chuckled. "See how he fights! A true Rajput! Nay, beat me not. Some day thou too shalt bear a sword for England, great-grandson mine. Ai-ee! But ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... never thought upon the Wrongs your Pedagogue has wrought upon you, and longed to meet that Wretch, and wheal his flesh with the same instrument with which he whealed you, and make the Ruffian howl for mercy? Mercy, quotha! did he ever show you any? A pretty equal match it was, surely! You a poor, weak starveling of a child shivering in your shoes, and ill-nurtured by the coarse food he gave you, and he a great, hulking, muscular villain, tall and long-limbed, and all-powerful in his ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... them in it—one a savage ruffian who will stick at nothing, and the other a chicken-hearted specimen. They often work in ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... herald, and, as such, is protected by all the laws of chivalry. Whatsoever his message, it is none of his. He is merely the mouthpiece of him who sent him." Then, turning to the herald, he said, "Tell the false knight, your master, on my part, that he is a foul ruffian, perjured to all the vows of knighthood; that this act of visiting upon a woman the enmity he bears her son, will bring upon him the execration of all men; and that the offer which he makes me is as foul and villainous as ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... beast! You filthy villainous fellow!—Now, I hope I've hurt the hellish brain in you. Take yourself off. You'll need a nurse to-night. [HAMISH slinks out. Poor girl! And are you sprained at all? That ruffian! ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... feeding; a collie dog barked at us, and among the scrub, not far from the track, there was a rude, black log cabin, as rough as it could be to be a shelter at all, with smoke coming out of the roof and window. We diverged towards it; it mattered not that it was the home, or rather den, of a notorious "ruffian" and "desperado." One of my companions had disappeared hours before, the remaining one was a town-bred youth. I longed to speak to some one who loved the mountains. I called the hut a DEN—it looked like the den of a wild beast. The big dog lay ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... too are mixed in the happiest proportion, so as to uphold and relieve each other—more especially in that constant interpoise of wit, gaiety, and social generosity, which prevents the criminal, even in his most atrocious moments, from sinking into the mere ruffian, as far at least, as our imagination sits in judgment. Above all, the fine suffusion through the whole, with the characteristic manners and feelings, of a highly bred gentleman gives life to the drama. Thus having invited the statue-ghost of the governor, whom he had murdered, to ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Divine Ironist who surely rules the world seldom leaves Himself without witness. On Lord Mayor's Day this witness appeared in the form of an ignorant ruffian. Within a few yards of the Mansion House, within a few hours of that "momentous declaration" which followed the turtle soup, in Liverpool Street—a street crowded not with ruffians but with business people and bankers' ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... its past," he admitted, "but we are living it down, and have succeeded pretty well. I think I've heard of a ruffian of the last generation named Jack Hollis; but I don't know anything, and I don't care to know anything, about him. But if you're interested in Garrison City, I'd like to show you a little plot of ground in a place that is going to ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... choleric little man before him; but not even for a second did he seem to lose his own imperturbable good-humour. He laughed his own pleasant and inane laugh, and burying his slender, long hands into the capacious pockets of his overcoat, he said leisurely—"a bloodthirsty young ruffian, Do you want to make a hole in a law-abiding man? . . . As for me, sir, I never fight duels," he added, as he placidly sat down and stretched his long, lazy legs out before him. "Demmed uncomfortable things, duels, ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... body in a box, and sprinkling it with salt, despatched it to a packet bound for New Orleans. Suspicions having been excited, he was seized and tried before Judge Kent. The trial is, perhaps, the most disgraceful upon the records of any country. The ruffian's mistress was produced in court, and examined, in disgusting detail, as to her connection with Colt, and his movements during the days and nights succeeding the murder. The head of the murdered man was bandied to and fro in the court, handed up to the jury, and commented on by witnesses ...
— The Bon Gaultier Ballads • William Edmonstoune Aytoun
... had, however, been hurled from the high wall, his brains beaten out as with a club, and his gun was missing. Further inquiries showed that one of the cells was empty; it had been occupied by a rather sullen ruffian giving his name as Oscar Rian. He was only temporarily detained for some comparatively trivial assault; but he gave everyone the impression of a man with a black past and a dangerous future. Finally, when daylight had fully revealed the scene of murder, it was found that he had written ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... away the outposts (he asked), may not something worse, think you, be the consequence? will not sheer plundering be free to any ruffian who likes?... But may I ask is this judgment the result of personal inspection? have you gone yourself and examined the defences? or how do you know that they are all ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... the robber, for such he was, and one, too, whose name will live for many a year in the ruffian histories of Madrid; I answered him in a speech of some length, in the dialect of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... anything to brag of: they've not had our chance. It's very well to say, give 'em a chance; but that's no use unless they take it, which they won't. 'Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.' If they wouldn't, you are bound to respect their right of choice. Your drunken ruffian will keep on breaking the furniture, till another like him breaks his skull. His wife, the washerwoman with six small children, will continue getting more and making things worse. This part of it at least ought to be regulated by law: but that would be a restriction of personal liberty, ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol
... may read strange matters." Midnight and secret murders too, from the imperfect state of the police, were more common; and the ferocious and brutal manners that would stamp the brow of the hardened ruffian or hired assassin, more incorrigible and undisguised. The portraits of Tyrrel and Forrest were, no doubt, done from the life. We find that the ravages of the plague, the destructive rage of fire, the poisoned chalice, lean famine, the serpent's ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... short time the young man will come to himself; and let us hope that it will be a better and wiser self," said Mr. Carrington. "But what was it all about? What did that truculent young ruffian want with Rupert?" ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... were in my mind, the cringing, foul-mouthed, brutal, contemptible ruffian who had caused all this misery stood within two paces of me! I could have reached out my hand, and, with half an effort, have crushed him, and—I did not do it! Some invisible Power held my arm, for murder was in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... cars with their tickets for Dixon bought, and, as Sandy exultingly declared, paid for, and their baggage checked all the way through. Then Sandy said, "I'm sorry that pretty lady from Baltimore is a Border Ruffian." ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... lion-like scout of former days, he told how he had fainted and fallen on the breast of his master, how he had lain all night on the battle-field among the dead and dying, how he had been stripped and left for dead by the ruffian followers of the camp, and how at last he had been found and rescued by one of the ambulance-wagons of the ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... with open mouth and trembling knees, while "Horror!" "Tyranny!" "Liberty!" "Rights!" "Taxes!" "Death!" "Destruction!" and a host of other patriotic phrases, were bolted forth before he had time to close his lips. Peter took no notice of the skulking throng, but strode up to the brawling, bully-ruffian, and pulling out a huge silver watch, which might have served in times of yore as a town-clock, and which is still retained by his descendants as a family curiosity, requested the orator to mend it and set it going. The orator humbly confessed it was utterly out of his power, as he was unacquainted ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... steered her straight for the Cuban coast, making disposition of what remained of the passengers on the way, and I knew that my great-grandfather had been one of these doomed survivors, and that he had been shot and murdered under orders of the ruffian that now sat before me. All this, as retailed by one who sailed for a season under Hardman to save his skin, is matter of old private history; and of common report was it that the monster buccaneer, after years of successful trading in the ship he had stolen, went into secret and prosperous ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... "We argued for a bit without much satisfaction. As a matter of fact we nearly came to blows again, only he got another waft of goldenrod, which started him sneezing, and then his nose began bleeding once more. He is convinced that I'm a ruffian, and said so in excellent prose. Honestly, I admire him a great deal. I believe he intends to have the law on me. I gave him my Brooklyn address in case he wants to follow the matter up. I think I rather pleased him by asking him to autograph 'Happiness and ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... two notable ecclesiastics from Sussex, the Abbot of Battle and the Prior of Lewes. The testimony to Cade's character is that he was the unquestioned and warmly respected leader of the host. The Cade depicted by his enemies—a dissolute, disreputable ruffian—was not the kind of man to have had authority as a chosen captain over country gentlemen and clerical landowners ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... smoothing old Jim's neck, crooning over him, talking to him in her motherly way, telling him what a ruffian he was and how ashamed she was of him for getting the hair worn off under his collar, and he a horse old enough to know better, Bobby's "Toodles," an animated doormat of a dog, sniffing at her skirt, when Otto and his ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... should have been trying to murder such a man Lysias does not seem to have considered. But when he heard the courteous, respectful Greek speech of the Apostle he saw at once that he had got no uncultured ruffian to deal with, and in answer to Paul's request and explanation gave him leave to speak. That has been thought an improbability. But strong men recognise each other, and the brave Roman was struck with something in the tone and bearing of the brave Jew which made him instinctively ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... loyalty to him was the most precious thing of his life, Therefore, the thought of that swarthy ruffian hunting her down as a hound hangs to the trail of a doe awoke in him a terrible anger. Second only to his hatred for the guerrilla chief was his bitterness against the traitor, Pancho Cueto, who had capped his villainy by setting ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... little drama closely, saw that the ruffian was plainly taken off his feet by this. He had not expected—or so it seemed clear—that he would encounter any opposition in carrying out his rascally plan of playing off the safety of a boy and a girl who had never wronged him for the sake ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... of France, awake to glory! Hark! hark! what myriads bid you rise! Your children, wives, and grandsires hoary, Behold their tears and hear their cries! Shall hateful tyrants, mischief breeding, With hireling hosts, a ruffian band, Affright and desolate the land, While ...
— Louis Philippe - Makers of History Series • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... all," rejoins the ruffian, interrupting. "There is one," he continues, looking askant at the Indian, with the leer of a demon, "one, I take it, whom the young Tovas chief would wish to retain as an ornament to his court. Pretty creature the nina was, when ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... Isabella's flight it had no unworthy motive. If this stranger was accessory to it, she must be satisfied with his fidelity and worth. I observed, did not you, Bianca? that his words were tinctured with an uncommon infusion of piety. It was no ruffian's speech; his phrases were becoming a ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole
... who had charge of the execution of this order was a stern and ruffian-like officer named Sir Richard Ratcliffe. This man is quite noted in the history of the times as one of the most unscrupulous of Richard's adherents. He was a merciless man, short and rude in speech, and reckless in action, destitute ...
— Richard III - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... "The ruffian!" He reached into his pocket and produced a gold cigarette- case, repeatedly snapping the heavy sides together with vicious force. When he attempted to light a match it broke in his fingers, then in a temper he threw the cigarette from him and hurried ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach
... Good examples of their kind; early part of the nineteenth century. Picked them up one cruise in the Indies. That faded one belonged to Morgan, the bloodthirsty ruffian. I've always regretted that I wasn't born a hundred years ago. Think of bottling them up in a shallow channel and raking 'em fore and aft!" With a bang of his fist on the desk, setting the ink-wells rattling like old bones, "That ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... liable to be hurried from me and sold to the highest bidder, or doomed to any drudgery her master might put her to, and even flogged at will. There was only one remedy that could be applied; and the specific was dollars. My friend was so kind as to negotiate with the ruffian. One thousand was demanded, and cheerfully paid. I carried the manumission home to my sorrowing Mary. From her I learned, as she lay in bed—her beautiful face buried in the clothes, and her voice choked by sobs—that the wretch who had called on me was her own father, whose ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... with a satanic grin. She sought to escape by him with the loud cry that Dennis heard, but the ruffian planted his big grimy hand in the delicate frill of her night-robe where it clasped her throat, and with a coarse laugh said: "Not so fast, ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... quiet glance and air, as devoid of a trace of fear as it was of ostentatious defiance. The calm, unquestioning assumption that no one would presume to stop him, was a moral force which paralyzed the arm of the most reckless ruffian in the crowd. And so, checking his horse when he would have gone faster, his features as composed as if he were sitting in the Senate, and his bearing as cool and matter of course as if he were on a promenade, he rode through the mob, and had passed out of musket shot by the time the demoralized ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... upturned to his own face. Near the door at the end of the court stood the man who had been known in Lancaster as Ralph's shadow. Their eyes met, but there was no expression of surprise in either face. Close at hand was the burlier ruffian who had insulted the girl that sang in the streets. In the body of the court there was another familiar face. It was Willy Ray's, and on meeting his brother's eyes for an instant Ralph turned his own quickly away. Beneath ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... posthumous work of 1592, his malicious feelings towards Shakspeare, could not have failed to notice it. For, be it remembered, that a judicial flagellation contains a twofold ignominy. Flagellation is ignominious in its own nature, even though unjustly inflicted, and by a ruffian; secondly, any judicial punishment is ignominous, even though not wearing a shade of personal degradation. Now a judicial flagellation includes both features of dishonor. And is it to be imagined that an enemy, searching with the diligence of malice ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... she cried, "the man by your side, a cowardly ruffian, a drunken swaggerer, and the companion of the vilest people in the country. We have sought to save her from him, John Penryn; and now, thank God, our ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking
... Scoundrel! Ruffian! Why do you go sniffin' around me now! Who are you? What has I done? You stuck to my heels! You followed me an' baited me an' snapped at me ... Rascal ... worse'n a ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume II • Gerhart Hauptmann
... end did it serve? Did it arm me with caution to elude or fortitude to bear the evils to which I was reserved? My present thoughts were, no doubt, indebted for their hue to the similitude existing between these incidents and those of my dream. Surely it was frenzy that dictated my deed. That a ruffian was hidden in the closet was an idea the genuine tendency of which was to urge me to flight. Such had been the effect formerly produced. Had my mind been simply occupied with this thought at present, no doubt the same impulse ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... your oars, bullies!" cried the ruffian at the bow, who was still standing up like an evil genius who had taken momentary command over events. "Lay on your oars, bullies; they'd better have ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... rude hand in ruffian anger Raised its bloody steel against Beauty so divinely fashioned? ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... who occupied the chair, ordered the galleries to be cleared, while Mr. Benton, in a towering rage, denounced the offenders and demanded their arrest. "Here is one," said he, "just above me, that may be easily be identified—the bank ruffian." Mr. King revoked his order to clear the galleries, but directed the arrest of the person pointed out by Mr. Benton, who was soon brought before the bar of the Senate. It was Mr. Lloyd, a practicing lawyer in Cleveland, Ohio, who was not permitted to say a word in ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... but Turnus shook his head, and said, "Ruffian! thy threats are but as empty sound; They daunt not Turnus; 'tis the gods I dread, And Jove my enemy." Then, glancing round, He marked a chance-met boulder on the ground, Huge, grey with age, set there in ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... that such a ruffian could not be Prince Roland. He was indeed the rude mechanic he proclaimed himself. No man of noble blood ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... unworthy materials," he said, "which go to the building of a great structure. Youth rebels at their use but age and experience recognize their necessity. The anarchist of your halfpenny papers and Police News is not always the bloodthirsty ruffian that you who read them are led to suppose. Very often he is a man who strenuously seeks to see the light. It is not always his fault if the way which is shown him to freedom must cross the ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hand for the ransom, the long-suffering Captain Michael Driver turned southward again, now in the schooner Mary, and he flew a flag of truce to indicate his errand. This meant nothing to the ruffian who commanded the English privateer Revenge. He violently seized the innocent Mary and sent her into New Providence. Here Captain Driver made lawful protest before the authorities, and was set at liberty with vessel and cargo—an act of justice quite unusual in the Admiralty ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... when necessary; and that even now, I confess that nothing but the reign of terror and gross prejudice by which I was surrounded at that time could justify many expressions I have here applied to them. Fact is, these people have disarmed me by their kindness. I expected to be in a crowd of ruffian soldiers, who would think nothing of cutting your throat or doing anything they felt like; and I find, among all these thousands, not one who offers the slightest annoyance or disrespect. The former is the thing as it is believed by the whole country, the latter the true state ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... stripped my mother," screamed the boy. The ruffian caught the saree with a fearful oath and turning on him said: "Now I can deal with you. I will fetch a brick from yonder kiln and pound the breath out of you," With these words he strode forward, tying the jewels in the saree as he went. Now her sorely-tried nerves gave way, and, distracted with ...
— Bengal Dacoits and Tigers • Maharanee Sunity Devee
... hulking ruffian, with an Australian digger's beard, had turned up of late to disturb the tranquillity of the partners. He had been asking what they regarded as an exorbitant price for his silence in respect to the construction of that adit which has just been mentioned, and had been fobbed off from time to time ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... of a girl like her, however it affected him, must also have brought up associations of a time when by family and breeding and habit he had been infinitely different. His action here, just like the ruffian Bill's, was instinctive, beyond his control. Just this slight thing, this frail link that joined Kells to his past and better life, immeasurably inspirited Joan and outlined the difficult ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey
... procession, with its sizzling band and its abhorrent orange-and-blue flags, following in the wake of Bill Kenna, whose proud post was at the head of the procession, carrying a cushion on which was an open Bible. The fact that Bill was a notorious ruffian—incapable of reading, and reeling drunk—had no bearing on his being chosen as Bible carrier. The Bible fell in the dust many times and was accidentally trampled on by its bearer, which was unfortunate but not important. Bill bore the emblem of ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... I see behind, My father to Red Raymond lending, His war-horse, fleeter than the wind, And on our chase, the traitor sending: He holds the lighted aquebus, Bearing death to both of us; Speed, my gallant Memnon, speed, Nor let us 'neath the ruffian bleed." ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... launch'd; light o'er the deep, Too kind, she wafts a ruffian band; Her blue track lengthens to the bark, And soon on deck ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... thought about Miss Picolet," she said. "Her people must be dreadfully common. Friends with a ruffian who plays a harp on a ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... me, sir?" said the doctor; and when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that this was so, replied, "I have only one thing to say to you, sir, that if you keep on drinking rum, the world will soon be quit of a very ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... compared to a man? I rushed in, seized the ruffian by the throat, which loosened his hold upon the weaker party, and hurling him with all my force against the ground, broke his ugly skull upon the rock on which ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, January 1878, No. 3 • Various
... hope that my exertions have afforded satisfaction at home, but if not, let me be allowed to state that it was not in my power to accomplish more than I have. I have borne hunger and thirst, cold and fatigue, I have exposed myself to danger from robbers, and was near losing my life from the ruffian soldiery at Arrayolos, whose bullets so narrowly missed me. I have been as economical as possible, though the charges in Portugal for everything are enormous, and a stranger there is like a ship on shore, a mark for plunder. In Spain the people are far more honest, ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... everything was completed when the host came in and took his seat at the head of the table. A bear out of the woods could hardly have been rougher, with his unshaven hair and unkempt beard. He answered to the type of border ruffian, and his appearance suggested the dark deeds that might be done here in secret, and hidden in the forest gloom. Imagine the astonishment of the travellers when this rough backwoodsman rapped on the table ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Child Sir Lancelot was dragged, insatiate, from the prostrate and howling Child Sir Galahad, after an onslaught delivered the precise instant the curtain began to fall upon the demoralized "pageant." And then—oh, pangs! oh, woman!—she slapped at the ruffian's cheek, as he was led past her by a resentful janitor; and turning, flung her arms round the ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... dear Oswald, I cannot stand by to see you thus insulted by this ungrateful young ruffian," said Voules. "He has threatened to shoot you, and he looks like a fellow capable of doing what he says. The sooner he is taken up and sent ...
— The Rival Crusoes • W.H.G. Kingston
... at that moment that I had been bred a gentleman, else in another instant his lifeless body would have lain at my feet. A plebeian blade would have made short work with the ruffian, and I confess that my instincts of fair-play were sorely tried. I had before me a man who had sought my life—a deadly foe—a deadly foe to her I loved—a perjured villain—a murderer! With such titles for himself, he had none to the laws of honour; and I confess that for ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... had a cathedral, but during the worst period of the Terror that exemplary ruffian, Joseph Lebon of Arras, the unfrocked priest, who organised pillage and massacre throughout the Pas-de-Calais, frightened the good people of Aire into a frenzy of destruction and devilry. The Church of St.-Pierre was then a collegiate church, ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... the man, and had been expelled. He had fallen through his violence into some terrible misfortune at Paris, had been brought before a public judge, and his name and his infamy had been made notorious in every newspaper in the two capitals. After that he had fought a ruffian at Newmarket, and had really killed him with his fists. In reference to this latter affray it had been proved that the attack had been made on him, that he had not been to blame, and that he had not been ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... inclined to peace, they have been forced into various wars, both with native Africans and Europeans; and in these wars they have acquitted themselves admirably, and given proofs that a pacific people when need be can fight just as well as those who are continually exulting in the ruffian glory of ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... precedents, believe it, a flesh'd ruffian, That hath so often taken the Strappado, That 'tis to him but as a lofty trick Is to a tumbler: he hath perused too All Dungeons in Portu[g]al, thrice seven years Rowed in the Galleys for three several murthers, ...
— Beaumont & Fletcher's Works (1 of 10) - The Custom of the Country • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... CLEVELAND City of Cleveland two twice (the heavy shell) mollusk unfamiliar word dictionary Johnson's JOHNSON son bad son (thievish bay) dishonest boy (back) Mac McKINLEY kill Czolgosz (zees) seize ruffian rough rider rouse ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... at once," returned the ruffian, "he'll not escape by refusing to do so; we'll search every corner ...
— Elsie's Motherhood • Martha Finley
... at this cowardly action, and his eyes, as they met the gaze of the ruffian, contracted with their characteristic steely glow, as if some powerful force within the depths of his being were at white heat and only this pale flash ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... marriage with Jean Armour. Burns, with all his faults, was an honest and a high-spirited man, and he loved the mother of his children. Had he hesitated to make her his wife, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian, or that misery of miseries, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... with you! The girl is gone! If you want to know where she is, apply to the police. Now, don't show your lying face here again! I will have you arrested! You are a child stealer! You and your ruffian had better never darken ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... his side. You cheapen and degrade yourself and you bring shame upon your brother and me by your disgraceful affair with this ruffian. Don't look shocked! You meet him secretly, I know—how much farther you have gone with him I don't know. ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... "Who's a drunken ruffian?" yelled Case, more angry than ever. "I'm not drunk; but I'm going to be, and cut some of you white-livered border mates. Here, you old masthead, drink this to my health, ...
— The Last Trail • Zane Grey
... conducted to the presence of Barbarossa. Wounded, shaken, bruised, his fortress in the hands of his enemy, the dying shrieks of his murdered garrison still ringing in his ears, the amazing spirit of the man was still utterly unsubdued. "It is to the treason of a ruffian that you owe your triumph," he said to his captor, "and not to your valour: had I received the smallest relief I could still have repulsed and kept you at bay. You have my maimed and mutilated body in your possession, and I hope that ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... in turn drove the enemy. Slowly and sullenly the Rebels fell back to the hill where James and his friend were lying. There they made a stand, and for half an hour fought desperately, but were at last overborne and forced back again. As they were on the eve of retreating, a tall, ragged ruffian came up to James, and demanded the watch and ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... thing to do would be to apply to the police, have the ruffian run to earth and arrested, no matter what his position. The worst of it is, though, I'm not anxious to have the eye of the Spanish police turned upon me, and there are those who ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... wind. He saw that it was printed—was interested professionally in seeing what it was like. He chased the flying scrap and overtook it. It was a leaf from some old history of Joan of Arc, and pictured the hard lot of the "maid" in the tower at Rouen, reviled and mistreated by her ruffian captors. There were some paragraphs of description, but the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... terrible story that we are about to narrate, and we warn the lover of pleasant books to lay down our volume at the first page. We shall see Cunningham, that burly, red-faced ruffian, the Provost Marshal, wreaking his vengeance upon the defenceless prisoners in his keeping, for the assault made upon him at the outbreak of the war, when he and a companion who had made themselves obnoxious to the republicans were mobbed and beaten in the streets of ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... saw that the end of the little play was murder; that its motive was a sacrilegious robbery—the theft of a diamond cross from the body of a woman lying dead in a church; that the man was a drink-besotted ruffian; that the woman was his illicit partner; that the atmosphere was assuredly brutal. Material eyes saw all this. Material senses reasoned that, given all these qualities, such a play must be horrible, and unduly strenuous. But intuition ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... here, Marables," said I, coming on deck, "and I am witness that you tried to save me, until you were struck senseless by that ruffian, Fleming, who threw me overboard, that I might not give evidence as to the silver and gold which I found in the cabin; and which I overheard him tell you must be put into sacks and sunk, as two of the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... against the attacks of a tall, strapping fellow, in a rough frieze coat, who was endeavouring to wrest his weapon from him. A still more formidable adversary was, however, approaching in the shape of a second ruffian, who had armed himself with a thick stake out of the hedge, and was creeping cautiously up behind the shorter man, with 231the evident intention of knocking him on the head. I instantly determined to frustrate his benevolent design, nor ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... struggle. There are times when what should exasperate a people, strikes them with terror. The population of Paris felt that a ruffian had his foot upon his throat. It no longer offered any resistance. That same evening Mathieu (of the Drome) entered the place where the Committee of Resistance was sitting and said to us: 'We are no longer in Paris, we are no longer under the Republic; we are ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... greasy, swaggering ruffian, but he only swore, and reiterated his threats. Then I told him to be gone for an insolent savage, and that if I found him prowling about the Fort again, I should send my men to take charge of him. Thereat his squaws began to jeer, and cut capers; and squatting ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... he heard this, the ruffian was stung to fury and burst into such wild and ungovernable rage that in the presence of her own son he heaped insults, such as he might have used to his own wife, on the purest and most modest of women. In the presence of many witnesses, whom, if you ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... I am unworthy of having such an angel," replied the old man, "but unless you were a cruel and a heartless ruffian, you would not at this moment mention her, or bring the thoughts of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... from seven and twenty to seven and forty? But that second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great advance, and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle-pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico. And it is right for you also, as you grow older, to be strengthened in the general sense and judgment which may enable you to distinguish the weaknesses from the virtues of what ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin
... horse; and they had many secret meetings, and much wanton familiarity; the which being discovered by the Earle, to prevent the pursuit thereof, when Generall of the Low Countreys, hee tooke Blunt with him, and theire purposed to have him made away: and for this plot there was a ruffian of Burgundy suborned, who, watching him in one night going to his lodging at the Hage, followed him and struck at his head with a halbert or battle-axe, intending to cleave his head. But the axe glaunced, and withall pared off a great piece of Blunt's skull, which was very dangerous ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 233, April 15, 1854 • Various
... to my mind," said Hardy; "just the sort of insolent young ruffian whom I should have liked to buy at my price, and sell at his own. He must have been very like some of our gentlemen-commoners, with the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... thing to a young, strong man," she added, shudderingly, after a moment, and she pressed her hands against her eyes as if to shut out a vision from which she shrank. "May he not still be in danger from this ruffian's revenge?" she asked, looking up in ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... the love of dress, I was most struck with the fineness of the voices and beauty of the intonations of both sexes. Every common ruffian-looking fellow, with a slouched hat, blanket cloak, dirty under-dress, and soiled leather leggins, appeared to me to be speaking elegant Spanish. It was a pleasure, simply to listen to the sound of the language, before I could attach any meaning to it. They have a good deal of the Creole ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the penalty for his youthful dissipations in failing health, but he continued to write with great expenditure of time and energy. 'The History of Jonathan Wild the Great,' a notorious ruffian whose life Defoe also had narrated, aims to show that great military conquerors are only bandits and cutthroats really no more praiseworthy than the humbler individuals who are hanged without ceremony. Fielding's masterpiece, 'The History of Tom Jones,' ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... thing was that her name had already been bandied about from a ruffian's lips. Lee winced at that even as he had winced at the remembrance of having been brutally rough with her himself. But what was past was past; Quinnion had talked ...
— Judith of Blue Lake Ranch • Jackson Gregory
... extended his arms straight out from either side, his head thrown back. He was a good-natured ruffian, with clear and ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... Calavangoo") hugging the northern side, where the Lufu torrent adds its tribute to the waters, convinced me that the charms of Congo scenery had not been exaggerated. Yet the prospect had its element of sadness; the old ruffian, Gidi Mavunga, recounted how he had burned this place and broken that, where palm-clumps, grass-clearings, and plantations lying waste denoted the curse of Ham upon ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Peter sees, while in the shade He stood beside the cottage-door; And Peter Bell, the ruffian wild, Sobs loud, he sobs even like a child, "Oh! God, I can ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... ridiculous optimism. He had been at sea, and shipwrecked on several islands in the Pacific; he had passed a rainy season at Panama, and a yellow-fever season at Vera Cruz, and had been carried far into the interior of Peru by a tidal wave during an earthquake season; he was in the Border Ruffian War of Kansas, and he clung to California till prosperity deserted her after the completion of the Pacific road. Wherever he went, he carried or found adversity; but, with a heart fed on the metaphysics of Horace Greeley, and buoyed up by a few wildly interpreted ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... which usually wore an expression of quiet dignity, seemed to degenerate into a mass of coarse but powerful features, so that, had I seen him thus at a first meeting, I should have thought at once, "This man is a sensualist and a ruffian!" His answers were distinctly rude; he said the question was foolish (probably it was)—that people had been pestering him with that kind of thing ever since he left India; in short, he gave me to understand ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... pause for breath, and in tones that were woefully unlike to those of the bold, lion-like scout of former days, he told how he had fainted and fallen on the breast of his master, how he had lain all night on the battle-field among the dead and dying, how he had been stripped and left for dead by the ruffian followers of the camp, and how at last he had been found and rescued by one of the ambulance-wagons ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... constitution and playing false when he went there, but was persuaded by his mother and terrified by the lengths to which the constitutional party was disposed to go. The Duke said the Government would be very foolish to interfere for Pedro, who was a ruffian, and for the constitution, which was odious, and that Pedro would never have more than the ground he stood on; talked of our foreign policy, his anxiety for peace, but of France as our 'natural enemy!' ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. III • Charles C. F. Greville
... were sitting at table, lashed to their chairs, pale and trembling, while six of the most ruffian-looking scoundrels I ever beheld stood on the opposite side of the table in a row fronting us, with the light from the lamps shining full on them. Three of them were small but very square mulattoes; one was a South American Indian, with the square high-boned visage ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... spirit, capacity, and love of their country, which providentially happened at this time, could ward off the ruin of the kingdom. Such Athelstan was; and such was his brother Edmund, who reigned five years with great reputation, but was at length, by an obscure ruffian, assassinated in his own palace. Edred, his brother, succeeded to the late monarchy: though he had left two sons, Edwin and Edgar, both were passed by on account of their minority. But on this prince's death, which happened after a troublesome ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... humanity. Intricate and unclean intrigues ended, by a curious turn of the wheel, in the election of a grotesque divine, whom Pattison, with an energy of phrase that recalls the amenities of ecclesiastical controversy in the sixteenth century, roundly designates in so many words as a satyr, a ruffian, and a wild beast. The poor man was certainly illiterate and boorish to a degree that was a standing marvel to all ingenuous youths who came up to Lincoln College between 1850 and 1860. His manners, bearing, and accomplishments ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... furious "that you are a drunken ruffian and a disgrace to the uniform you wear. I shall report your conduct immediately," with which he proceeded to the Customs desk to lodge ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... scarce observed, the knowing and the bold Fall in the general massacre of gold; Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined, And crowds with crimes the records of mankind For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws, For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws; Wealth heap'd on wealth, nor truth, nor safety buys, The dangers ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... Professor Gaubius of Leyden, physician to the Prince of Orange, in a conversation which I had with him several years ago, and he expanded it thus: 'If (said he) a man tells me that he is grievously disturbed, for that he imagines he sees a ruffian coming against him with a drawn sword, though at the same time he is conscious it is a delusion, I pronounce him to have a disordered imagination; but if a man tells me that he sees this, and in consternation calls to me to look at it, I ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... turned from him to the other man. It was Brockman, the burly ruffian who had seized the bridle of Falcon on the night of his flight to Redmead—the ruffian who struck the blow which ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... and are piloting me thither; only to conclude by their actions, the next minute, that they have not the remotest conception of my wants, beyond reaching the other side of the city. Now and then some ruffian in the crowd, in a spirit of wanton devilment, utters a wild, exultant whoop and raises the cry of "Fankwae. Fankwae." The cry is taken up by others of his kind, and the whoops and shouts of "Fankwae" ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... "The owdacious young ruffian!" ejaculated Mrs. Fox. "To beat my poor, dear Joel so! Never mind. Joel, dear, I'll give you a piece of pie and some cake. As for that boy, he'll be ...
— Facing the World • Horatio Alger
... thou do an' thou hadst a bow and arrows, Guilford?" said John. "Shoot all the Papists," replied the child. "Thou bloodthirsty little ruffian!" cried Mr Underhill, yet laughing. "Nay," said John to him, "blame not the child: he doth but take mightily after a certain father of his, that I know." Whereat (said John) Mr Underhill laughed till the ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... me, you ruffian!" exclaimed Allison, the oldest of the midshipmen. "It's poison! What have you ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... how she arrived at the conviction; it must have been from pulpit denunciations of the small Bethel on the outskirt of Bristol. Her uncle, J. Perkins, was a great ruffian, certainly, and Williams was dissolute enough, if one wished to call his festive imbecilities by a hard name. But these two could, by no means, be said to belong to the upper classes. And these two, apart from ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... informed the Spaniards of the state of the French settlement, when Pedro de Menendez, who was engaged in the colonisation of the West Indies, landed on the coast, some miles south of the River Saint John, at the head of a large band of ruffian troops. Guided by a party of the treacherous Indians, he and his band made their way through the forests, and fell suddenly, sword in hand, on the almost defenceless colonists. Not a human being who could be overtaken was allowed ...
— In the Wilds of Florida - A Tale of Warfare and Hunting • W.H.G. Kingston
... no excuse, sir," bellowed Uncle Wattleberry. "No one but an unmitigated ruffian would pull ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... greater trouble comes. I could not hold out for another fight. I am almost finished. Let the king fight the battles of his friends. The ruffian that escaped will return with re-enforcements, and I am not ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... followers—mostly rollicking and arrogant foreign adventurers—who robbed and devastated the land, and thrashed and even mutilated passers-by for fun, people looked forward with great fear to the accession of such a ruffian. A few years of responsibility, and failure, soon changed him into the noblest and most law-abiding of the Plantagenets. It was Wales which gave him his first lesson. He first tried his hand at the reorganisation ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... thousand pressures to bare his bosom to the lunacy of public dinners, lecture platforms, and what not pleasant folderol. He must be privileged apparent ruffian discourtesy. He has his own heart-burn to consider. One thinks of Rudyard Kipling in this connection. Mr. Kipling stands above all other men of letters to-day in the brave clearness with which he has made it plain that he consorts first of all ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... seven and forty? But that second volume is very good for you as far as it goes. It is a great advance, and a thoroughly straight and swift one, to be led, as it is the main business of that second volume to lead you, from Dutch cattle pieces, and ruffian-pieces, to Fra Angelico. And it is right for you also, as you grow older, to be strengthened in the general sense and judgment which may enable you to distinguish the weaknesses from the virtues ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... Two masked men were covering with revolvers a third, who was tied helpless in a chair. The captive's face was ghastly and blood-stained, and at first she thought he was dead. Then she saw his lips move in curious twitchings that showed his teeth. He seemed to be trying to speak, but the ruffian at his right would not give ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... rather unquotable in this nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her—something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had. ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... "Horror!" "Tyranny!" "Liberty!" "Rights!" "Taxes!" "Death!" "Destruction!" and a host of other patriotic phrases, were bolted forth before he had time to close his lips. Peter took no notice of the skulking throng, but strode up to the brawling, bully-ruffian, and pulling out a huge silver watch, which might have served in times of yore as a town-clock, and which is still retained by his descendants as a family curiosity, requested the orator to mend it and set it going. The orator humbly confessed ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... known sin; For by the law is the knowledge of sin (Rom 3:20). If thou dost call even nature itself, the light of Christ; That also doth shew, that sins are a shame, even those sins which some leap over (1Cor 11:14), and ruffian-like they will wear long hair, which nature itself forbiddeth, and is commended for the same by the apostle. The Spirit of Christ also will convince of sin. That, because these several things will convince of sin, therefore will they needs be the Spirit ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... even by the slightest insult to that clergy whose willing slave she had become, that the only method of reclaiming the sinner had been long forgotten, in genuine horror at his sin. "Is it not enough," she went on, sternly, "that you should have become the bully and the ruffian of all the fens?—that Hereward the leaper, Hereward the wrestler, Hereward the thrower of the hammer—sports, after all, only fit for the sons of slaves—should be also Hereward the drunkard, Hereward the common fighter, ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... and impudent letter. Any violence offered me I shall do my best to repel, and what I cannot do for myself the law shall do for me. I hope I shall never be deterred from detecting what I think a cheat by the menaces of a ruffian." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... Carlyle's History of Frederick the Great you can read a pleasanter account of the Emperor's business at Roncaglia about this time than our Italian chroniclers will give you. Carlyle loves a tyrant; and if the tyrant is a ruffian and bully, and especially a German, there are hardly any lengths to which that historian will not go in praise of him. Truly, one would hardly guess, from that picture of Frederick Redbeard at Roncaglia, with the standard ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... and despise you, old wretch that you are, seeking to tempt a poor child like me to her ruin. Oh! you are rich, and have the manners of a gentleman before the world,—and yet you are more base, mean and cowardly than the commonest ruffian that ever stole a purse or cut a throat! Let me go hence, I command you; you dare not refuse me, for I know there is a law to protect me, as well as the richest and the highest, and I will go to those who execute the law, and have you dragged to the bar of ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... in Belgium," said a Belgian jurist. "Our ability to suffer and to hold fast to our hearths has kept us going through the centuries. Flemish and French, we have stubbornness in common. Now a ruffian has come into our house and taken us by the throat. He can choke us to death, or he can slowly starve us to death, but he cannot make us yield. No, we ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... understand, and some that he could guess at: "Night work pays better than day work any time," etc. Then he heard his own name and a voice, "Let's go up and settle it with him now." Whatever their plan, it was clear that the drunken crowd, inspired by the old ruffian, were intent on doing him bodily harm. He heard them stumbling and reeling up the steep stairs. He heard, "Here, gimme that whip," and knew he was in peril, maybe of his life, for they were whiskey-mad. He rose quickly, locked the door, rolled ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... torture was practised. The females experienced brutality and murder, and the tenderest infants were perhaps transfixed to the mother's heart by a ruthless weapon—caught up by ruffian hands, and dashed against the rocks or the trees—or wantonly thrown up into the air, and caught on the point of the warrior's spear, where it writhed in agony, and died, ... some having two or three infants hanging on the spear they bore ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... battle, to a small dark cabin in one of the most densely inhabited parts of the town, where, secure in their privacy, she found Nanse M'Collum, who had never left the town since the night of the robbery, together with the man called Rody, and another hardened ruffian with ...
— The Dead Boxer - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... ronin or "wave man," one who had left the service of his feudal lord and was independent,—sometimes a gentleman and a scholar, oftener a ruffian ...
— Child-Life in Japan and Japanese Child Stories • Mrs. M. Chaplin Ayrton
... said I. "I have known a lesser ruffian who was hanged until he was dry, whereas you march along the lane with nought to your discouragement but three cracks in ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... and our aims are just! Behold, we seek Not merely to preserve for noble wives The virtuous pride of unpolluted lives, To shield our daughters from the ruffian's hand, And leave our sons their heirloom of command, In generous perpetuity of trust; Not only to defend those ancient laws, Which Saxon sturdiness and Norman fire Welded forevermore with freedom's cause, And handed scathless ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... first place, we must bear in mind that he lived in the woods. The West of that day was not wild in the sense of being wicked, criminal, ruffian. Morally, and possibly intellectually, the people of that region would compare with the rest of the country of that day or of this day. There was little schooling and no literary training. But the woodsman has an education of his own. The region was wild in the sense that ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... heavens. It would mean, said his brother, to whom he spoke of it, the Golden God worshiped in the West,—the Buddha. Buddhism had first come into China in the reign of Tsin Shi Hwangti; but that imperial ruffian had made short work of it:— he threw the missionaries into prison, and might have dealt worse with them, but that a "Golden Man" appeared in their cell in the night, and opened all doors for their escape. ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... her mother with a laugh. "After the scene enacted in front of our windows the other day, when one of them had so much trouble, and suffered such awful pommelling from the drunken ruffian he took up, I am quite prepared to admit that policemen are neither ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... that when the culprit was discovered the Irish law officers hesitated to prosecute; suppose that when a prosecution took place the Attorney-General showed that his heart was not in the matter, and that the jury acquitted a ruffian clearly guilty of murder, is it not as clear as day that smuggling would flourish and no customs be collected? In the same way the Irish Ministry might by mere apathy, by the very easy process of doing nothing, nullify the effect ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... none, amiable in every relation of life, a stanch friend, a fond husband, a devoted father, as useful a member of society as you might find in a day's journey, and obnoxious only to political opponents, who fear him more than he dislikes them, is called a 'liar,' a 'coward,' and a 'heartless ruffian.' He is nothing of the kind; he is proudly conscious of this fact; his accusers do not even believe it; the world—that portion of it in which he moves—is satisfied that he is a remarkable instance of truth, of courage, and extreme tenderness of spirit. The revilers have ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... supporters; he kidnapped the Queen and Maitland—not one of his supporters-with her. A scandalous divorce was pronounced between him and his wife, and Mary wedded him. The only credible explanation is that she was over-mastered by a passion for the daring ruffian who at least had always stood by her. The lords—accomplices in the murder with the rest—were almost immediately in arms to "rescue" the Queen, who took the field by her husband's side. The opposing forces met at Carberry Hill; Bothwell, seeing ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... flesh or iron,—no chains, and little dying, but very liberal running away. Thus ended the war in Kansas. It seems impossible that Slavery should not make in this case a rather better fight, where all is at stake. But it is well to remember that no Border Ruffian of Secession can now threaten more loudly, swear more fiercely, or retreat more rapidly, than his predecessors ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... such a thing to happen either. London in the darkness of the night was a terrible place. Out from all the dens of Whitefriars and other like places swarmed the ruffian and criminal population that by day slunk away like evil beasts of night into hiding. The streets were made absolutely perilous by the bands of cutthroats and cutpurses who prowled about, setting upon belated pedestrians or ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... outer door, went down two or three of the steps which led from the house to the road, and began to whistle for his companions. The girl (who had hitherto had presence of mind enough to remain perfectly quiet) now jumped up, rushed behind the ruffian, and pushed him down the steps. She then shut the door, locked it, and ran upstairs to try and wake the family, but without success: calling, shouting, and shaking were alike in vain. The poor ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... ease can save each object of his love; Wide as his will, extends his boundless grace; Nor lost in time nor circumscribed by place. Happier his lot, who, many sorrows' pass'd, Long labouring gains his natal shore at last; Than who, too speedy, hastes to end his life By some stern ruffian, or adulterous wife. Death only is the lot which none can miss, And all is possible to Heaven but this. The best, the dearest favourite of the sky, Must taste that cup, for man ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... to show fight. Naturally Leonard began to plunge and to double his fists. But he could not keep this up, for the man whose arm was round him quickly retired and stood a few paces off, looking wan and haggard, and very unlike a thief or ruffian. ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... consul at Zanzibar, if there is one there now, of which I am not sure, and of course no warship. The English made what inquiries they could for me, but could find out little or nothing, since all the country about Kilwa was in possession of Arab slave-traders who were supported by a ruffian who called himself the Sultan ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... he would like glass eyes, the ruffian!" he muttered to himself, "but I will not have the mockery. I will fill the sockets and sew up the eyelids, and the face shall be as ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... passionately fond of them. Admitted to the stage, they naturally took the place of interludes or afterpieces. When a man imitated e.g. a muleteer (Petr. Sat. 68), he had his mule with him; or if he imitated a causidicus, or a drunken ruffian (Ath. 14, 621, c.), some other person was by to play the foil to his violence. Thus arose the distinction of parts and dialogue; the chief actor was called Archimimus, and the mime was then developed after the example ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... nightcaps." But she was sympathetic about scalp troubles. "Without a fine head of hair, no woman can be really beautiful.... The dogs would bark at and run away from her in the street." To be well covered on top was, she held, "quite as important for the opposite sex." "How like a fool or a ruffian," she remarked, "do the noblest masculine features appear if the hair of the head is bad. Many a dandy who has scarcely brains or courage enough to catch a sheep has enslaved the hearts of a hundred girls with his ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
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