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More "Shambling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when Mr. Dayne answered in a curious voice, "Yes ... he's gone," the last expectancy faded from the rough vague face. He sidled in, timid and unwilling; laid his burden, speechless, upon a chair. And then he was shambling furtively out the door again, when the parson's hand ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... overhead light, and Jack caught a clearer view of the man. What he saw sent a shiver through him. A great change had come over his friend. His untidy dress,—always so neat and well kept; his haggard eyes and shambling, unsteady walk, so different from his springy, debonair manner, all showed that he had been and still was under some terrible mental strain. That he had not been drinking was evident from his utterance and gait. ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... does it; how I don't know. He alters the shape of his nose, his cheeks, and his chin. I suppose that he pads them out with little rubber insets. He alters his voice, and his figure, and even his height. He can be stiff and upright like a drilled soldier, or loose-jointed and shambling like a tramp. He is a finished artist, and employs the very simplest means. He could, I truly believe, deceive his wife or his mother, but he will never again deceive me. I am not a specially observant man; still one can make a shot ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... this Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed in a book, though, in fact, not a single word or look had escaped ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men, Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock. Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude had a grievance ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... however, and he could not recall them. He had no time to speak of anything, or to think of what course they should now pursue. Coming straight toward the tree with an awkward, shambling, but speedy gait withal, the monster would soon reach the spot where they stood. Its movements showed it to be in a state of excitement—the natural consequence of its late conflict with the crocodile. If seen, they would come in for a share ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... old stand. Whether it was the old inn, I did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I doubt if you now dine there "off the joint" in the "coffee-room"; more probably you have a table d'hote meal served you "at separate tables," by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead; and for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I heard telling an Englishman there in those disheartening days, of our civic corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that he himself ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... had disappeared by the time Amber regained his kit-bag and gun-case; standing over which he surveyed his surroundings with some annoyance, discovering that he now shared the station with none but the ticket-agent. A shambling and disconsolate youth, clad in a three-days' growth of beard, a checked jumper and khaki trousers, this person lounged negligently in the doorway of the waiting-room and, caressing his rusty chin with nicotine-dyed fingers, regarded ...
— The Bronze Bell • Louis Joseph Vance
... wicked-looking, houses pompous-looking. Heaven bless us! what a rakish pump! what a self-important town-hall! what a hard-hearted prison! The dead walls are covered with advertisements of Mr. Sleary's circus. Newman Noggs comes shambling along. Mr. and the Misses Pecksniff come sailing down the sunny side of the street. Miss Mercy's parasol is gay; papa's neck-cloth is white, and terribly starched. Dick Swiveller leans against ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... as thin as I am fat, and his clothes hang on him in the most comical way. He is very tall and shambling, wears a ragged beard and a broad Stetson hat, and suffers amazingly from hay fever in the autumn. (In fact, his essay on "Hay Fever" is the best thing he ever wrote, I think.) As he came striding up the road ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley
... shambling, yet in a way facile, footsteps of Barnaby, the sporadic freedman of the household, were soothing. Colonel Sommerton turned his eyes on the comer inquiringly, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden
... the oldest horse on the farm, a shambling, half-blind creature whose days of work had long been over. In summer she reveled in clover pasture, and the warmest box stall and choicest oats were hers in winter. Sarah had ridden her around the pasture a number of times, but it had never occurred to anyone that she would ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... had space to quote a particularly fine passage—you will find it on pp. 72-74—in which Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through the dust and brushing ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... blessed his people in a shambling manner, not at all to his own satisfaction, and had walked back to his palace with his mind very doubtful as to what he would say to his chaplain on the subject. He did not remain long in doubt. He had hardly doffed his lawn when the partner of all his toils ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... of shape means ugliness. (10) The stiff-limbed dog will come home limping from the hunting-field; (11) just as want of strength and thinness of coat go hand in hand with incapacity for toil. (12) The lanky-legged, unsymmetrical dog, with his shambling gait and ill-compacted frame, ranges heavily; while the spiritless animal will leave his work to skulk off out of the sun into shade and lie down. Want of nose means scenting the hare with difficulty, or only once in a way; and ...
— The Sportsman - On Hunting, A Sportsman's Manual, Commonly Called Cynegeticus • Xenophon
... trees, brought them nearer to the light of the upper air. At other times he could do little more than follow with his eye the tall figure of Nathan, plunging from shadow to shadow, and knoll to knoll, with a pace both free and rapid, and little resembling the shambling, hesitating step with which he moved among the haunts of his contemners and oppressors. As for the dog, little Peter, he was only with difficulty seen when ascending some such illuminated knoll as has been mentioned, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... school because he wishes to (no one ever "sent" a Grind to college). He has a sallow skin, a watery eye, a shambling gait, but he has the facts. His clothes are outgrown, his coat shiny, his linen a dull ecru, his hands clammy. He reads a book as he walks, and when he bumps into you, he always ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Meffia's proximity, by her lackadaisical manner, by her shambling gait, by her sleep-walking attitude, most of all by the peculiar thin, sour odor which Meffia exhaled. At the sight of Meffia's elaborately disagreeable demeanor of isolation, all Brinnaria's natural self began to boil in her; at the whiff which assailed ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... heedless as a bird, rather fond of talking, awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... The shambling barn man, summoned gruffly by McAlpin, hesitated as he appeared at the office door and seemed to regard the situation with suspicion. He looked at de Spain tentatively, as if ready either for the discharge with ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... honest pedagogue, for such his dress bespoke him. A long, lean, shambling, stooping figure was surmounted by a head thatched with lank, black hair somewhat inclining to grey. His features had the cast of habitual authority, which I suppose Dionysius carried with him from the throne to the schoolmaster's pulpit, ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... unhurrying mind grasped the fact that it was true; his heart blazed in his bosom; he threw back his head and, had his nose been larger, he would have sniffed the breeze like a warhorse. He advanced upon her in a quick, shambling slouch. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... on murdered LINCOLN'S bier, You, who with mocking pencil wont to trace, Broad for self-complacent British sneer, His length of shambling ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... staggering through his shop into the peaceful little kitchen, Sophy sat up and listened. They could hear his thick, coarse voice shouting out snatches of vulgar songs, mingled with oaths at his sister, who was doing her utmost to persuade him to go quietly to bed. His shambling step, dragging across the floor, seemed about to enter the darkened room where they were sitting; and Sophy caught her husband's arm, clinging to it with fright. It was a more bitter moment for Mr. Chantrey than even for her. The comparison thrust upon him was too terrible. His delicate, ...
— Brought Home • Hesba Stretton
... the madman swayed slowly back and forth, like a blood-stained marionette on a wire. Then he moved forward with a terrible, shambling gait, his head lowered, a dark, misshapen shadow seeming to lengthen before him on the sand like ...
— The Man the Martians Made • Frank Belknap Long
... transferred to what some economists call the productive section of society. The experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and their villages remind one ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... unobtrusive personage, twenty-seven years of age, low of stature, meagre, mean-visaged, muddy-complexioned, and altogether a man of no account—quite insignificant in the eyes of all who looked upon him. If there were one opinion, in which the few who had taken the trouble to think of the puny, somewhat shambling stranger from Burgundy at all, coincided, it was that he was inoffensive, but quite incapable of any important business. He seemed well educated, claimed to be of respectable parentage, and had considerable facility of speech when any person could ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... and heavily for the besieged boys in the tree, but the wolves, though hungry, were patient. Strong in union they were lords of the forest, and they felt no fear. A shambling black bear, lumbering through the woods, suddenly threw up his nose in the wind, and catching the strong pungent odor, wheeled abruptly, lumbering off on another course. The wild cat did not come back, but crouched ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... happened to be washing the corridor with his beaver up, what he took for a small but aged man passed him, shambling stiffly, with joints stiffened by perpetual crucifixion and rheumatism, that had ensued from perpetually being wetted through. This figure had his beaver down. At sight of Robinson he started and instantly went down on his knee and ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... head drooped more and more under its tree of horns, and the shambling trot grew weak and weaker. He took to standing for long periods, with nose to the ground and dejected ears dropped limply; and Buck found more time in which to get water for himself and in which to rest. At such moments, panting with red lolling tongue and with eyes ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... the keep, headlights blazing, keeping up a steady fire from its heavy weapons. The attackers climbed into it as they beat a retreat. Telt and Brion dragged the Disan behind them, struggling through the loose sand towards the circling car. Telt glanced over his shoulder and broke into a shambling run. ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... of the cottage opened, and a young man appeared, a distinctly unprepossessing young man, whose shabby clothing somehow suggested a corresponding shabbiness of soul. He stood irresolute for a moment, then turned and struck off across the fields, his shambling gait increasing the unfavorable impression that Peggy ...
— Peggy Raymond's Vacation - or Friendly Terrace Transplanted • Harriet L. (Harriet Lummis) Smith
... awaiting his fate, did not fly, but sat gravely on the log in front of Uncle Jim's hotel, and waited for the creaking, stage, white with far-gathered dust, to climb the last pitch of the road up from the arroyo and come on with the shambling trot of a pair of tired mules for the final nourish at the end of the ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... commencement of their acquaintance, the worthy publisher's lady had maintained a steady friendship. Bungay, having recreated himself with a copious luncheon, was madly shying at the sticks hard by, till the perspiration ran off his bald pate. Shandon was shambling about among the drinking tenants and gipsies: Finucane constant in attendance on the two ladies, to whom gentlemen of their acquaintance, and connected with the publishing house, came up to pay ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... understanding perfectly. He came at length to a brilliantly-lighted room, where a dark man with an exceedingly high forehead and wonderfully piercing eyes was sitting up in bed. The dark eyes lighted with pleasure as they fell upon Bell's queer, shambling figure ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... felt what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging emotions and mysterious fixity—like no human being that ever lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she said, "you are ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the slab-sided "Sprawleybridge Babe" or the shambling "Baldnob the Titan" have been in front of the small but active and accomplished "Duodecimo Dumps"? Why, where the vaunted "Benicia Boy" would have been after fifty rounds with TOM SAYERS—with his "Auctioneer" in full play. In fact, when a good little 'un meets a bad big ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. March 7, 1891. • Various
... come like the first reformed platoon of an army after fleeing from disaster. The leader of the platoon was a small boy. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and he looked as if he were sorely afraid. After him came half a dozen men with shambling gait. One was an Irishman, two were English, one was a German and one a colored man. Two of them carried pickaxes in their hands, which they had been using to clear away ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... "The difficulty is that he won't name his price," he answered. "Don't understand him! Queer, shambling sort of fellow, all hair and eyes, with the scar of an old cut, or something, across one side of his face. Keeps looking at you as if he hated you! Showed me the machine readily enough; consented to every test even offered to let me take my stuff to the other side of the lake, three ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... along the wood-path beyond the Light, heard the shambling steps behind her. She turned and saw Mark. He was tall and lank. He leaned forward from the shoulders loosely, and his face had the patient, dull expression of a faithful, but none too ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... shocking rumour which had reached her about Edith's projected visit, the confirmation of which was the sole object of her colloquy, wagged her way out of the shop again successfully, and was duly assisted by the page-boy into her shambling little palsied donkey-chair. ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a masculine sincerity naked and unashamed—as if his large coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... upon the proprietor of the donkey-cart, for it had caused him to 'eat all his economies,' and he resigned himself to the wages of a road-mender, which were small but sure. It was getting dusk when we parted. My next companion on the road was a poor bent-backed, shambling, idiotic youth, who was driving home two long-tailed sheep and a lamb, and who had just enough intelligence for this work. He kept at my side for a mile or two, flourishing a long stick over the backs of the sheep and uttering melancholy cries. His presence was not cheering, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... to look after him, so uncouth was his shambling figure. Several officers followed him with their eyes, to see that he did not ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... sentences, a branch of art so seldom mastered, was even greater. And here he could owe no great debt to his romantic predecessors in prose. Dumas, it is true, is a master of narrative, but he wrote in French, and a style will hardly bear expatriation. Scott's sentences are, many of them, shambling, knock-kneed giants. Stevenson harked further back for his models, and fed his style on the most vigorous of the prose writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the golden age of English prose. 'What English those fellows ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... believe that nymphs swim about those rocks; and when we go for a drive among those hillsides we'll keep a sharp lookout for satyrs. Now I know why I like this country. It is heathen. Those mountains—how different from the shambling Irish hills from whence I have come! And you, Doris, you might have been dug up yesterday, though you are but two-and-twenty. You are a thing of yester age, not a bit like the little Memline head which I imagined you to be like ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... in a sort of terror, the tall figure as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the house. The three moved on to the wing containing Ume's chamber, and the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this last stress," ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... occupant. Releasing the hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Bessie and, shouting furiously, ran toward her with the idea of saving his wheel. So it was no trick at all for the two girls, light on their feet and graceful in their movements, to avoid the shambling, ungainly, overgrown boy, who, smarting from the pain of the scratches Dolly had inflicted, ran after ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... in just now," said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head, "'cos Mr. Lowten's singin' a comic song, and he'll put him out. He'll ...
— The Law and Lawyers of Pickwick - A Lecture • Frank Lockwood
... Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone could see any promise in the shambling youngster. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... A shambling, loose-jointed giant rolled out of one of the tents, yawning and rubbing the sleep from his eyes. Then he sighted the strange canoe and was ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... you may as well understand, once for all, that we masters are divided into two classes, oppressors and oppressed. We who are good-natured and hate severity make up our minds to a good deal of inconvenience. If we will keep a shambling, loose, untaught set in the community, for our convenience, why, we must take the consequence. Some rare cases I have seen, of persons, who, by a peculiar tact, can produce order and system without severity; but I'm not one of ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the rocks directly ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... rough, unhandsome experience of every hour, he has been to her the forerunner of refinement and plenty and ease. If taste and imagination shrink from the squalor of the frontier, she remembers the greater squalor and the darker tragedy of the city slum. If the long-haired, shambling, shrill fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady Cavaliere, this fairer lady remembers John clad in goat-skins and crying in the wilderness. I wish, she says, that mankind might sit at ...
— From the Easy Chair, vol. 1 • George William Curtis
... its narrow, uneven sidewalk, for he swung without hesitation into the gloom and, with hands hooked behind his back, his stick held, as was his custom, close to his armpit, made his way past its shambling hovels and warehouses. Now and then he would pause, following with his eyes the curve of the great steel highway, carried on the stone shoulders of successive arches, the sweep of its lines marked by a procession of lights, its outstretched, interlocked palms gripped close. The memory ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... for my improvidence and heedlessness, in going to sea so ill provided with every thing calculated to make my situation at all comfortable, or even tolerable. In time, my wretched "long togs" began to drop off my back, and I looked like a Sam Patch, shambling round the deck in my rags and the wreck of my gaff-topsail-boots. I often thought what my friends at home would have said, if they could but get one peep at me. But I hugged myself in my miserable ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... ruthlessly as Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, and made ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... friend in the form of a Dialogue of the Dead in the Elysian Fields between Lord Lyttelton—who had been, in his Dialogues of the Dead, an imitator of the Dialogues so called in Lucian—and Lucian himself. "By that shambling gait and length of carcase," says Lucian, "it must be Lord Lyttelton coming this way." "And by that arch look and sarcastic smile," says Lyttelton, "you are my old friend Lucian, whom I have not seen this many a day. Fontenelle and I have ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... were heavy. The lean fellow—I have christened him Shanks, a long, shambling human bag of bones—moved about painfully in a listless sort of way, betokening severe rheumatics; his joints needed oil. Four or five huge basins of steaming rice and the customary amount of reboiled cabbage, however, bucked him up a bit, and holding up a crooked, bony finger, he ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... the shambling sea is a sexton old, And well his work is done. With an equal grave for lord and knave, He buries ...
— Ballads of Lost Haven - A Book of the Sea • Bliss Carman
... ungainly make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... watching how he would accomplish the feat of walking backwards from the Table to the Bar. More than once in past history the task has proved too much for the man who essayed it, and the orderly retreat has degenerated into a shambling rout. But there was no such hitch to-day. Progressive politician though he is, Mr. BECK retraced his steps with graceful ease, and fully deserved the applause that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 1, 1916 • Various
... pipe, and the supreme happiness of Phil Briant, and the placid joy of Tim Rokens, and the exuberant delight of Glynn, and the semi-scientific enjoyment of Dr Hopley as he examined a collection of rare plants; and the quiet comfort of the trader, and the awkward, shambling, loose-jointed pleasure of long Jim Scroggles; and the beaming felicity of her own dear father; who sat not far from her, and turned occasionally in the midst of the conversation to give her a nod—she felt in her heart that then and there she had fairly reached the very ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... fields and grazing land into vineyards and orchards. Not even Riverside can compare with it in the rapid evolution of a great source of wealth which ten years ago was almost unknown. What has transformed Fresno from a shambling, dirty resort of cowboys and wheat ranchers into one of the prettiest cities in California is the raisin grape. Though nearly all fruits may be grown here, yet this is pre-eminently the home of the raisin industry, and it is the raisin which in a single decade has converted ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... malevolent attempt to utterly disperse and scatter the "Half-way House," which seemed to have wholly lost its way, and strayed into the open, where, dazed and bewildered, unprepared and unprotected, it was exposed to the taunting fury of the blast. A loose, shambling, disjointed, hastily built structure—representing the worst features of Pioneer renaissance—it rattled its loose window-sashes like chattering teeth, banged its ill-hung shutters, and admitted so much of the ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... for her heart was breaking, but turned and went into her room. Burrell had an irresistible desire to tell Gale that he wanted his daughter for his wife; it would be an unwonted pleasure to startle this iron-gray old man and the shawled and shambling mummy of red, with the unwinking eyes that always reminded him of two ox-heart cherries; but he had given Necia his promise. So he descended to the exchange of ordinary topics, and inquired ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... the cabinet, took a long square box from the first shelf. This he brought to the table and opened. A new knife lay in the tissue paper inside and I picked it up and handed it to Vance, along with the order and the plan of Hawberk's apartment. Then Mr. Wilde told Vance he could go; and he went, shambling like an outcast of ...
— The King In Yellow • Robert W. Chambers
... Shambling awkwardly forward, simulating all the uncouthness possible, I retained my wits sufficiently to note our surroundings—the long, narrow passage, scarcely exceeding a yard in width, with numerous doors opening on either side. Several of these stood ajar, ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... a badly-bred, vulgar, common brute!" Later they would both come out of their bathing-boxes, and the "brute" would be a smartly dressed officer carrying himself with ease and distinction, and the "aristocrat" would be an untidy, uncouth "Tommy" shambling along. Truly on sight one should never judge a man ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... vowed profanely that he would die on his feet. Shambling to the casement niche, he gaped forth at the dawn. Below him a frosty world was emerging from the mist. He saw the ring of the ramparts, and in the courtyard the barrack ruins smouldering. Beyond, the hillside also smoked, with shredding vapours; and at the foot of the hill he observed ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... an accusation. Quite suddenly Barry felt cheap and mean and dishonest. He felt that he would like to talk about himself,—about home and his reasons for being out here; his hopes for the mill which now was a shambling, unprofitable thing; about the future and—a great many things. It was with an effort, when she queried him again concerning his memory, that he still remained Mr. Nobody. Then he shifted the conversation from himself ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... David watched the hill road from nine o'clock until stage-time. From the green bench under the poplar, the tavern porch on Main Street could just be seen; and at a little before twelve Jonas's lean, shambling nags drew up before it. Mrs. Richie was very pale. David, fretting at the dullness of the morning, asked her some question, but She did not hear him, and he pulled at ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... end of the alley and gave a low whistle. Out under the lamp from behind the corner came a long, thin, shambling, hump-backed youth, with his hat down over his head like an extinguisher, dragging a small bony horse, which, in its turn, dragged a rickety cart of the tray variety, such as is used in the dead marine trade. Behind the cart ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... can't go in just now,' said a shambling pot-boy, with a red head, 'cos' Mr. Lowten's a-singin' a comic song, and he'll put him out. He'll be ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... in the best condition, and Roanoke has but a shambling gait this morning; besides, there is another reason I could mention, if it were not that Miss Wharton ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... English Rite is one of the wholesome signs of the times. About preaching, I am not so clear. The almost complete disuse of the written sermon is in many ways a loss. The discipline of the paper protects the flock alike against shambling inanities, and against a too boisterous rhetoric. No doubt a really fine extempore sermon is a great work of art; but for nine preachers out of ten the ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... looked back a few moments later, to see his asistente emerge from the bodega perched between two queer-looking improvised saddlebags bulging with plunder. The pony was overloaded, but in obedience to the frantic urgings of its barelegged rider it managed to break into a shambling trot. Branch reappeared, too, looping the eight-foot string of straw hats to his saddle-horn, and balancing before him the remainder of the bedding, done up in a ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... did not hear the soldier's key turn in the lock, but soon he heard it and his heart pumped. He glanced at White, but the gray figure, flattened against the wall, never moved. The door swung open and the soldier, merely a shambling peon, bearing the tray, entered. Behind him according to custom came the second man who stood in the doorway, leaning upon his musket. But he stood there only an instant. A pair of long, powerful arms which must have seemed to ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... sniffed angrily. A wide gang plank was now being lowered from the boat, and as it touched the bank the boy stepped quickly aboard, followed by the wet, shambling Bear. ...
— The Arkansaw Bear - A Tale of Fanciful Adventure • Albert Bigelow Paine
... to the black floor of the slum's abyss. Spenser, stooped and shaking, rose abruptly, thrust Susan aside with a sweep of the arm that made her reel, bolted into the street. She recovered her balance and amid hoarse croakings of "That's right, honey! Don't give him up!" followed the shambling, swaying figure. He was too utterly drunk to go far; soon down he sank, a heap of rags and filth, against ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... maze of narrow passages and tranquil, echoing courts into the Sabbath stillness of the Strand. An occasional halt at a shop-window was sufficient to assure him that the watcher of the Temple was still on his heels. The man, he was interested to see, played his part very unobtrusively, shambling along in nonchalant fashion, mostly hugging the sides of the houses, ready to dart out of sight into a doorway or down a side turning, should he by any mischance arrive too close on ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... what—the worser part to view— Of wanton waste and reckless gambling, What darker paths shall he pursue With sacrilegious step and shambling? What coarse defiance, haply, hurl At lights beyond his comprehension— An attitudinising churl Who struts with ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... it, move; it must be the neck of the animal. Let loose the dogs, Swanevelt," cried the Major, starting off at full speed, and followed by Alexander, and Omrah with the spare horse. In a minute or two the giraffe was seen to get clear of the mimosa, and then set off in an awkward, shambling kind of gallop; but, awkward as the gallop appeared, the animal soon left the Major behind. It sailed along with incredible velocity, its long swan-like neck keeping time with its legs, and its black tail ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a rather shambling but self-important gait to the table next mine, carefully placed his manuscript upon a chair, and sat down upon it. He was soon lost in a prolonged contemplation of the limited bill of fare posted on the wall, a study which resulted ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... of the storm in the tower above, its intermittent onslaughts on the leadwork of the southern windows, and the voice of Parson Babbage lifted now and again from the chancel as if to correct the shambling pace of the choir ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... name to lift him to the finish: "Alcatraz!" Then they were over the line and the riders were pulling up. It was not hard to stop Alcatraz. He went by Marianne at a reeling trot, his legs shambling weakly and his head drooping, a weary rag of horseflesh with his ears still ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand
... critical self. Instead, Reed took a certain comfort in reflecting that he had foreseen it all along. However, he had felt an undeniable curiosity to see the shabby, under-nourished Scott Brenton, a thing of shambling feet and knobbly joints, transmogrified into the well-groomed, easy-mannered type of rector which had become traditional ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... and began to explain in a rather shambling fashion that he had been there some time and "intended to hunt him up, of course"; but he had "been so taken ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... silent, shambling youth, all hands, feet, and shyness, who had spent most of his spare time twisting his fingers and staring adoringly at her from afar. The opinion of those in the social whirl of Dunsterville had been that it was ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... hut was ceilingless. Resonant corrugated iron and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... head, and went forward with shambling steps and shaking limbs. Oscarovitch closed the port with hands which all his force could not keep steady, and betook himself to bed, to lie awake for the rest of the short summer night wondering vainly what really ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith
... little later a figure turned from the Bowery and shambled down the cross street, a disreputable figure, with hands plunged deep in his pockets—and a shadow across the roadway suddenly shifted its position as the shambling figure slouched into the black alleyway and entered the tenement's ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... without guard, went off together, Robin driving his shambling horse and rickety cart beside the Sheriff's ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... dim old shop, while the gay, lightsome step passed among the dusty treasures. Now she seldom smiled or sang, and among the few bits of comedy in her sad days, were the visits of Kit Nubbles, her grandfather's errand boy, a shock-headed, shambling, comical lad, whose devotion to the beautiful child verged on worship. Appreciating Nell's loneliness, Kit visited the shop as often as possible, and the exquisite oddity and awkwardness of his manner ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... in their weakness and haste. They were galloping skeletons draped in mangy hide, and they out-distanced the boys who herded them. But this was only for a time. Then they fell back to a walk, a quick, eager, shambling, sore-footed walk; and they no longer were lured aside by the ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... but they outstripped us. Some miles farther on, and near a thick hammock, about a quarter of a mile a-head, a huge black bear stood snuffing the air; we again put spurs to our horses to try to intercept his retreat, but he was too quick for us, and made at his utmost speed (a sort of shambling trot) for the coppice or jungle, which he soon entered, and disappeared from our sight. At nightfall, a pack of ravenous wolves, headed by a large white one, serenaded us, and came near enough to our camp-fire to seize a small terrier belonging to one of the party. ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... preceding day. I lay there half asleep, half awake, for, I suppose, a long time, hearing the window rattle sometimes when the cannon was noisy and feeling under the jerky reflections on the wall as though I were in an old shambling cab driving along a dark road, I thought a good deal about that talk with Semyonov that I had. What a strange man! But then I do not understand him at all. I don't think I understand any Russian, such a mixture of hardness and softness ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... hollows and on breezy knolls were gray old farm- houses and summer cottages-like weather-beaten birds' nests, and like freshly painted marten-boxes; but all of a cold New England neatness which made me homesick for my malodorous Spanish fishing-village, shambling down in stony lanes to the warm tides of my native seas. Here, every place looked as if it had been newly scrubbed with soap and water, and rubbed down with a coarse towel, and was of an antipathetic alertness. The sweet, keen breeze made ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... sea Into the lovely land of Italy, Whose loveliness was more resplendent made By the mere passing of that cavalcade, With plumes, and cloaks, and housings, and the stir Of jewelled bridle and of golden spur. And lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... their canvas sides make themselves conspicuous, and so do the bakers' carts; while light and neat American wagonettes glide rapidly along among less attractive vehicles. Now and then a Chinaman passes, with his peculiar shambling gait, with a pole across his shoulders balancing his baskets of "truck"; women with oranges and bananas for a penny apiece meet one at every corner, and still the sidewalks are so broad, and the streets so wide, that no ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... nostrils large, his ears sharply pointed and lively, while the white rings around his eyes hinted at a cross, somewhere in his pedigree, with Arabian blood. A huge, bony, homely-looking horse he was as he drew the deacon and Miranda into the village on market days and Sundays, with a loose, shambling gait, making altogether an appearance so homely and peculiar that the smart village chaps, riding along in their jaunty turn-outs, used to chaff the good deacon on the character of the steed, and satirically ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... sixteenth since a new mound had arisen on the bare lot adjoining that beneath which rested Landman Bud Smith, the twelfth since How Landor had arrived to haunt the tiny railway terminus. The one train from the East was due at 8:10 of the morning. It was now eight o'clock. Within the shambling, ill-kept hotel, with its weather-stained exterior and its wind-twisted sign, the best room, paid for in advance and freshly dusted for the occasion, awaited an occupant. In a stall of the single livery, a pair of half-wild bronchos, fed and harnessed according to directions, were passively ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... behind a log Anse lifted his rifle and started over the ridge with the long, shambling gait of the born hill-climber that eats up the miles. For this emergency he had been schooled years back when he sat by a wood fire in a cabin of split boards and listened to his crippled-up father reciting ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... turned hastily, to find themselves confronted with an absolute endorsement of the truth of Lennie's statements. A stranger of about fourteen was walking towards them, or perhaps "shambling" would be a better description of her method of progress. She stooped badly, swung her arms in an awkward fashion, and shuffled her feet along the grass; her eyes were vacant, her chin was retreating, and her mouth was set in a foolish smile. For a full ghastly minute she stood and stared at ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... station. I knew it was Jim when I caught sight of him loping along the platform, craning his neck, his head on one side as if in search of someone. He had the same stoop in his shoulders; the same long, disjointed, shambling body—six feet and more of it—that had ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... men had paused by the door. They now advanced. One was gaunt and haggard, his face disfigured by a great red scar, the other was a shockheaded individual who moved with a shambling gait. Both carried rifles and both ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... big, blear-eyed rogue, much the worse for wear and ale, came shambling out at the summons. His listlessness vanished quickly enough, however, at sight of the Knight and his following; and bowing to the ground he asked ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... witches, that made Detroit feared by the early settlers, none were more dreaded than the Nain Rouge (Red Dwarf), or Demon of the Strait, for it appeared only when there was to be trouble. In that it delighted. It was a shambling, red-faced creature, with a cold, glittering eye and teeth protruding from a grinning mouth. Cadillac, founder of Detroit, having struck at it, presently lost his seigniory and his fortunes. It was seen scampering along ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... sang to any one who would listen to him. I say that he sang—I mean, of course, that he spoke his verses; it was a minstrel's simple improvisation. But there are people in the villages of southern France who still recall that ungainly, shambling figure. He had grown a beard; it crinkled thickly, hiding his mouth and chin. He laughed a great deal. He was not altogether clean. And he slept wherever he could find a bed—in farmhouses, cheap hotels, haylofts, stables, ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... Stoke-d'Urbervilles, as they at first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles of the true ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... the suburbs, thereby taking us in a manner off the stones, and otherwise represents in his own proper person, buttons and all, less one of the dapper urchins we are now more particularly referring to, than the shambling hobbledehoy. Even in the unfinished story with which the Author's voluminous writings were closed, there was portrayed an entirely novel specimen, one marked by the most grotesque extravagance, in the shape of that impish malignant, "the Deputy," ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... miller, shambling forward as the blacksmith appeared in the doorway. "Come 'long ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... and trunk, and lastly the legs of a slouching shambling man of forty-eight or fifty entered ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester
... in Piccadilly, he realised that it was too early to wait upon Mrs. Germain in Albemarle Street, so continued his way up the empty hill, entered the Park, and flung himself upon the turf under the elms. Other guests were harboured by that hospitable sward, shambling, downcast lice of the town. These, having shuffled thither, dropped, huddled and slept. His way was not theirs: to him the open space was his domain. He ranged the streets, one saw, as if they had been the South Downs, with the long stride and sensitive tread of a man who reckons ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... great orator hallows the abode, and an inscription upon it proudly announces that here he lived. Dr. Johnson's house, in Gough Square, bears (or bore) a mural tablet, and standing at its time-worn threshold, the visitor needed no effort of fancy to picture that uncouth figure shambling through the crooked lanes that afford access to this queer, somber, melancholy retreat. In that house he wrote the first dictionary of the English language and the characteristic, memorable letter ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... with a gentle movement of my hand directed my people to follow me, and I made a sudden rush forward at full speed. Off went the herd; shambling along at a tremendous pace, whisking their long tails above their hind quarters, and taking exactly the direction I had anticipated, they offered me a shoulder shot at a little within two hundred yards' distance. Unfortunately, I fell into ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... burro now," called Walter, as a shambling object, much the worse for wear, came stumbling ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... themselves to the blues, that the last boat was on the point of leaving the shore. The old man had disdained to halloo, and had almost disdained to run; but he had suffered himself to be hurried into a shambling kind of gait, and when he was met by Chapeau, he was almost as much out of breath as ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... pleasant beginning. But if Georgiana, before her guest arrived, had thought the old house shabby, she felt it now to be positively shambling. She struggled mightily against this attitude of mind, knowing that it was unworthy of her, but, as she led this wonderful, winsome creature, whom she knew to be accustomed only to the softnesses of ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... nailed to a keeper's lodge bears to the bright-plumaged bird when flying about. On horseback, Tom was a cockey, wiry-looking, keen-eyed, grim-visaged, hard-bitten little fellow, sitting as though he and his horse were all one, while on foot he was the most shambling, scambling, crooked-going crab that ever was seen. He was a complete mash of a man. He had been scalped by the branch of a tree, his nose knocked into a thing like a button by the kick of a horse, his ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... interesting personality, Miss Clairville, threw him altogether on the society of the village, but, apart from Poussette, who had become mysteriously friendly again, the two individuals most in need of his ministrations were Mme. Poussette and the shambling guide, Edmund Crabbe, in whom were the dregs of a being originally more than the preacher's equal. Old world distinctions would seem to be of small account in such a hamlet as St. Ignace and yet questions of ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... over the cobbled street. He was like some immense bronze come suddenly to life and shambling. Like the brazen servant Thomas Aquinas made under the influence of particular stars. His great brown shoulders, his barreled chest, his upper arms like a man's leg, his packed forearms, his neck like a bull's, his shaven head. All seemed superhuman, and then came ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... cattle for sale later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own was not ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... the three in the cabin were playing cards and Tom was preparing lunch, Jarrow came shambling aft, and without a word went over the side and into the long boat. When Trask went out on deck the captain was pulling slowly for the shore, making a course to land near where Dinshaw was toiling in the broiling sun at his ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... road which led to the old dark manor-house upon the side of the hill a youth had been riding. His mount was a sorry one, a weedy, shambling, long-haired colt, and his patched tunic of faded purple with stained leather belt presented no very smart appearance; yet in the bearing of the man, in the poise of his head, in his easy graceful carriage, and in the bold glance of his large blue eyes, there was that stamp of ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... di Trinita, which may be taken to be the central points of English or American Rome. Yet you must have passed by the Bocca della Verita on your way to your drive on the Via Appia and the tomb of Caecilia Metella. Do you not remember a large, shambling, unkempt-looking open space, a sort of cross in appearance between the piazza of a city and a farmyard, a little after passing the remains of the Teatro di Marcello, the grand old arches of which are now, in the whirligig of Time's revenges, turned into blacksmiths' shops? The piazza in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the cloak which he wore on a winter day was a scandal to the town. His feet were large and flat, and his knees touched as the one passed the other, and the Seminary was honestly ashamed at the sight of him shambling across the North Meadow. He looked so mean, so ill put together, so shabby, so dirty, that the very "Pennies" hooted at him and flung him in our faces. The Rector was also careless of his dress, and mooned along the road, but then everybody ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... a poor shambling sort of house. Strangers wondered why Maurice Gorman, who owned Kilgorman as well, chose to live in this place instead of the fine mansion near the lough mouth. But to the country people this was no mystery. Kilgorman had an evil name, and for twelve years, since its late master ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... are we for that? It would be all the same if he did forget us!" growled a young fellow shambling along ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... John C. Underwood, a crawling, shambling, shuffling, ignorant demagogue who had set a new standard of judicial honor and dignity. He had selected one of the handsomest homes in Virginia, ordered it confiscated as a Federal judge, and made his wife buy it in and convey it to him after warning other bidders to keep off the scene. The ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... without moving her graceful, pretty head, she started off at full speed, and, although such a beautiful, graceful animal when still, or walking slowly, she certainly was awkward and ungainly when running. Her gait was clumsy and shambling, and, with her tail whisking to and fro all the time, she made an odd and undignified appearance. Her speed, however, made up for her ungainly movements, and for some time she outdistanced the lion by a long way. The lion was lazy, as usual, and, thinking he ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... the poor king ambled up and down the apartment in a piteous state of uncertainty, which was made more ridiculous by his shambling circular mode of managing his legs, and his ungainly fashion on such occasions of fiddling with the bunches of ribbons which fastened the lower ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... strong beer into the yard, knock out the bung, and put a pump in it, for the use of all my servants and neighbours; and, d'ye hear, let the patereroes be fired, and the garrison illuminated, as rejoicings for the safe arrival of your master. By the Lord! if I had the use of these d—d shambling shanks, I would dance a hornpipe ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... he, in full, hearty voice, advancing with a shambling limp, "here cometh one to lay alongside you awhile, old Resolution Day, friend, mate o' this here noble ship Happy Despatch, comrade, and ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... arm, stepped out and commenced to hobble at an ungainly cumbersome trot across the square. She was no more than half-way across when the shriek of another shell was heard approaching. She stopped and cast a terrified glance about her, dumped the basket down on the cobbles, and resumed the shambling trot at increased speed. A soldier in khaki crossing the square also commenced to run for cover as his ear caught the sound of the shell; passing near the woman's basket, he stooped and grabbed it and doubled on with it ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... I always mocked my swine-herd, who for a year and a half wore out the county court's chains. Ever since he walks with a shambling step, as if one leg was always trying to avoid knocking the other with the chain. Now we can ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... of the Braeside Harriers. It was asserted of him that the fence was not made which he did not know how to creep over. Of jumping, such as jumping is supposed to be in the shires, he knew nothing. He was, too, a bad hand at galloping, but with a shambling, half cantering trot, which he had invented for himself, he could go along all day, not very quickly, but in such fashion as never to be left altogether behind. He was a flea-bitten horse, if my readers know what that is,—a flea-bitten roan, or white covered with small ...
— Marion Fay • Anthony Trollope
... loud sneeze, and in a moment after a singular figure appeared at the doorway. It was that of a very old man, with long white hair, which escaped from beneath the eaves of an exceedingly high-peaked hat. He stooped considerably, and moved along with a shambling gait. I could not see much of his face, which, as the landlady stood behind him with the lamp, was consequently in deep shadow. I could observe, however, that his eyes sparkled like those of a ferret. He advanced to the foot of the bed, in which I was still lying, wondering ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... your travellers Need fleeter steeds than we poor shambling folks Who stay at home. To my unskilful sense, Speed for the chase and vigour for the tilt, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow, with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red and black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn. His face was thin and brown and crafty, with a perpetual smile upon it, which showed an irregular line of yellow teeth, and his crinkled hands ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... hands, but they were made by tailors who knew their man was not particular, and that he would not "try on." The result was a looseness and carelessness of good things—giving him, in a way, the look of shambling power. Yet in spite of the tie a little crooked, and the trousers a little too large and too short, he had touches of that distinction which power gives. His large hands with the square-pointed fingers had obtrusive veins, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... equipped for hunting; but greater contrast could not have been found than between his tall fine form and the King's ungainly figure. Sir Gilbert had remained behind with the rest of the courtiers in the chapel; but, calling him, James seized his arm, and set forward at his usual shambling pace. As he went on, nodding his head in return to the profound salutations of the assemblage, his eye rolled round them until it alighted on Richard Assheton, and, nudging Sir Gilbert, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... blazing, keeping up a steady fire from its heavy weapons. The attackers climbed into it as they beat a retreat. Telt and Brion dragged the Disan behind them, struggling through the loose sand towards the circling car. Telt glanced over his shoulder and broke into a shambling run. ...
— Planet of the Damned • Harry Harrison
... something sharp to him one day in a way that showed us boys that he thought himself as good as he was. And he stood up straight and looked him in the face, till we hardly could think he was the same man that was so bent and shambling and broken-down-looking most times. He used to live in a little hut in the township all by himself. It was just big enough to hold him and us at our lessons. He had his dinner at the inn, along with Mr. and Mrs. Lammerby. She was always kind to him, and made ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... direction paused a moment and looked vaguely round upon the wide country which the elevated position disclosed. While they looked a solitary human form came from under the clump of trees, and crossed ahead of them. The person was some labourer; his gait was shambling, his regard fixed in front of him as absolutely as if he wore blinkers; and in his hand he carried a few sticks. Having crossed the road he descended into a ravine, where a cottage revealed ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... utterly emptied out of the world, he saw a bunch of cattle, and, galloping among them, his spurred and booted kindred. And his manner took on that alertness a horse shows on turning into the home road. As the stage took him toward Washakie, old friends turned up every fifty miles or so, shambling out of a cabin or a stable, and saying, in casual tones, "Hello, Lin, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of surging emotions and mysterious fixity—like no human being that ever lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she said, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... round and motioned her onward. She followed without a word, holding the trim silver mounted umbrella, and I mechanically brought up the rear. It had all happened so quickly that I too was confused. The scanty populace in the rain-filled street stared and gaped. A shambling fellow in corduroys bawled an obscene jest. Pasquale put down ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... instances, for charity's sake. Few men can brave a city; and Sandford, certainly, was not the man to do it. The scowling, or suspicious, or contemptuous, pitying glances he encountered smote him as with fiery swords. He quailed; he cowered; he dropped his eyes; he acquired a stooping, shambling gait. The man who feels that he is looked down upon grows more diminutive in his own estimation, until he shrinks into the place which the world assigns him. So Sandford shrunk, until he crept through the streets where once he had walked erect, and earned a support as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... Presently his unhurrying mind grasped the fact that it was true; his heart blazed in his bosom; he threw back his head and, had his nose been larger, he would have sniffed the breeze like a warhorse. He advanced upon her in a quick, shambling slouch. ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... manage somehow to get through their work in life; but they never feel brisk or buoyant. They never know high health, with its attendant cheerfulness. It is a rare case to find such a combination of muscle and intellect as existed in Christopher North: the commoner type is the shambling Wordsworth, whom even his partial sister thought so mean-looking when she saw him walking with a handsome man. Let it be repeated, most civilized men are physically unsound. For one thing, most educated men are broken-winded. ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... she made haste to call Cyrus, who came shambling along the hall from the cabin. The parlor was dark, for though it was a day of sunshine and merry May wind, Gussie kept the shutters bowed—but Cyrus could see the pale intensity of his visitor's face. There was a moment's silence, broken by a ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... and distorted. The teeth are few in number and very irregular. The hard palate has a very deep arch, or may even be cleft. The complexion is sallow and unhealthy, the limbs imperfectly developed, and the gait is awkward, shambling, and unsteady. In his legal relations an absolute idiot is civilly disabled and irresponsible, but in regard to crime, or as a witness, see ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... the servant who had been up to my room. The servant was a poor London drudge, who was left in charge by the owners of the house, and who had been forbidden to speak to me. After a while I heard her heavy, shambling footsteps coming slowly up the staircase, and passing my door on her way to the attics above; they sounded louder than usual, and I turned my head round involuntarily. A thin, fine streak of light, no thicker than a thread, shone for an instant in the dark corner ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... hideous appearance, who consumed hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, for his breakfast; ate his prawns with their heads and their tails on, drank scalding hot tea, and performed so many horrifying acts that one almost doubted that he was human; and by Christopher Nubbles, a shock-headed, shambling, awkward, devoted lad, the only element of cheerfulness that ever came into her life. In this book appear Richard Swiveller and his Marchioness, Sampson and Sarah Brass and Mrs. Jarley, who to be appreciated must ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... in the front part of the shambling house, there sat in the kitchen, so the story goes, a slatternly old crone peeling potatoes for supper—should the few straggling boarders return with an appetite, now that all the ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... as they at first called themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the only really lineal representative of the old d'Urberville family existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew very well, that the Stoke-d'Urbervilles were no more d'Urbervilles of the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must be admitted that ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... mangled remains of the original great-coat, the original boot-tops yet towering in the region of his ears, and the upper half of the original beaver crowning his well-developed brain, there He was. Slowly and carefully he descended from the back of his shambling steed, settled himself well in his boots, pulled up the collar of his great-coat—and there was little but collar left of it—tipped the curtailed and weatherbeaten stovepipe to the proper angle, opened his paternal arms and feebly embraced his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... little—upon the— flightly order—a little touched or so;—but mum for that—the lady is now dead; and it is my maxim, de mortuis nil nisi bonum. The young squire was even then very handsome, and looked remarkably well in his weepers; but he had an awkward air and shambling gait, stooped mortally, and was so shy and silent that he would not look a stranger in the face, nor open his mouth before company. Whenever he spied a horse or carriage at the gate, he would make ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... make was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle, had ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... slowly and heavily for the besieged boys in the tree, but the wolves, though hungry, were patient. Strong in union they were lords of the forest, and they felt no fear. A shambling black bear, lumbering through the woods, suddenly threw up his nose in the wind, and catching the strong pungent odor, wheeled abruptly, lumbering off on another course. The wild cat did not come back, but crouched lower in his tree top; the ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... led to the old dark manor-house upon the side of the hill a youth had been riding. His mount was a sorry one, a weedy, shambling, long-haired colt, and his patched tunic of faded purple with stained leather belt presented no very smart appearance; yet in the bearing of the man, in the poise of his head, in his easy graceful carriage, and in the bold glance of his large blue eyes, there ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the front of the house, shambling like a somnambulist. Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was dead, all right; and this must be ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... beginning. But if Georgiana, before her guest arrived, had thought the old house shabby, she felt it now to be positively shambling. She struggled mightily against this attitude of mind, knowing that it was unworthy of her, but, as she led this wonderful, winsome creature, whom she knew to be accustomed only to the softnesses of life, up over ...
— Under the Country Sky • Grace S. Richmond
... surprised to move quickly in any case, and, when he saw her trying to ruin his bicycle, he was diverted from Bessie and, shouting furiously, ran toward her with the idea of saving his wheel. So it was no trick at all for the two girls, light on their feet and graceful in their movements, to avoid the shambling, ungainly, overgrown boy, who, smarting from the pain of the scratches Dolly had inflicted, ran after ...
— The Camp Fire Girls on the Farm - Or, Bessie King's New Chum • Jane L. Stewart
... to school because he wishes to (no one ever "sent" a Grind to college). He has a sallow skin, a watery eye, a shambling gait, but he has the facts. His clothes are outgrown, his coat shiny, his linen a dull ecru, his hands clammy. He reads a book as he walks, and when he bumps into you, he always ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... fell short of us. I saw that it had a range of about a hundred feet. Over the muffled heavy silence of the blood-red day the cripple's curse floated clear. He lowered his weapon; and, heedless that we also might be armed, he leaped nimbly past Mary's prostrate form and came shambling over the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... as the heritage of all men worth their salt; in consequence he was inclined to theoretic severity towards the worsted. The sensitiveness of youth had steeled itself in irony; he was impatient of delusions and exaltations, and scornful of the shambling, shame-faced motives that moved so many of the people who came ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... side, and there was disclosed a large white face atop of a shambling figure dressed in some coarse, dark stuff. "Neither, sir," said an expressionless voice. "Will it please your Honor ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... suffering for the death of him who in life fought against his freedom. I see him, when the mould is heaped and the great drama of his life is closed, turn away and with downcast eyes and uncertain step start out into new and strange fields, faltering, struggling, but moving on, until his shambling figure is lost in the light of this better and brighter day. And from the grave comes a voice saying, "Follow him! put your arms about him in his need, even as he put his about me. Be his friend as he was mine." And out into this new world—strange to me as to him, dazzling, bewildering both—I ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts promised a long, ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Releasing the hand of the general to shut a door which opened into another apartment, the President shoved an armchair towards him and sank somewhat wearily into another before the desk. But only for a moment; the long shambling limbs did not seem to adjust themselves easily to the chair; the high narrow shoulders drooped to find a more comfortable lounging attitude, shifted from side to side, and the long legs moved dispersedly. Yet the face that was turned towards ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... creatures came shambling rapidly forward on powerful bowed legs, and with the tips of their long hairy arms brushing the ground, they looked like grotesquely distorted apes. The crowning horror of those shambling figures, however, lay in the fact that ...
— Zehru of Xollar • Hal K. Wells
... among these men whose faces were not bad. Under favorable circumstances they might have been good and just men. But they were the victims of a pernicious system, as fully as were the poor, shambling, ragged wretches of the streets and slums, who had been ground down by their ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... Paul, shambling toward him, unseen by him. All his attention was riveted on the huge brute forty yards in front of him. It was Claude de Chauxville's task to protect Paul from any flank or rear attack; and Claude de Chauxville was peering ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... was a very strange kind of man; heedless as a bird, rather fond of talking, awkward and vacant-looking; he was excessively fond of drink, and never could sit still long; in walking he shambled along, and rolled from side to side; and yet he got over fifty miles in the day with his rolling, shambling gait. He exposed himself to the most varied adventures: spent the night in the marshes, in trees, on roofs, or under bridges; more than once he had got shut up in lofts, cellars, or barns; he sometimes lost ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... hardly help a squeal of surprise at the sight of the yellow lion and the big shambling bear. He remembered in time, though, to smother it, and hastily divided the rest of the cake between the two animals. When they had licked it up greedily, Rudolf turned his attention again to the white wolf, and this time he could not ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... veneration," says another. They "worship it after their fashion," says a third. Have we another case of "the heathen in his blindness"? Only here he "bows down" not to "gods of wood and stone," but to a live thing, uncouth, shambling but gracious—a Bear. ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... later a figure turned from the Bowery and shambled down the cross street, a disreputable figure, with hands plunged deep in his pockets—and a shadow across the roadway suddenly shifted its position as the shambling figure slouched into the black alleyway and entered ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... edition with a Life, written by a friend in the form of a Dialogue of the Dead in the Elysian Fields between Lord Lyttelton—who had been, in his Dialogues of the Dead, an imitator of the Dialogues so called in Lucian—and Lucian himself. "By that shambling gait and length of carcase," says Lucian, "it must be Lord Lyttelton coming this way." "And by that arch look and sarcastic smile," says Lyttelton, "you are my old friend Lucian, whom I have not seen this many a day. Fontenelle and I have just now been talking of you, and the obligations ...
— Trips to the Moon • Lucian
... mistakes in Coherence of sentences show the pupils the best examples of tight-jointed sentences to be found in the literature they are studying. Point out how these sentences have been made to hold together, and how their own shambling creations ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... there came a stir from the room beyond, the tap-tap of a cane and shuffling steps across the polished parquet. Dysart's grip relaxed, his hand fell away, and he made a ghastly grimace as a little old gentleman came half-trotting, half-shambling to the doorway. He was small and dapper and pink-skinned under his wig; the pink was paint; his lips and eyes peered and simpered; from one ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... had paused by the door. They now advanced. One was gaunt and haggard, his face disfigured by a great red scar, the other was a shockheaded individual who moved with a shambling gait. Both carried rifles and both ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... changed though he was. He wore a fashionable wig, and his clothes fitted well a figure that, once shambling and loose-jointed, had now all the erectness of the soldier, but the face ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... young girl, fashioned to slay the hearts of Southern chivalry—so young, so sweet, so soft of voice and manner, condemned to live life through alone in this shaggy solitude—fated, doubtless, to mate with some loose, lank, shambling, hawk-eyed rustic of the peaks—doomed to bear sickly children, and to fade and dry and wither in the full springtide of her ...
— Special Messenger • Robert W. Chambers
... along behind. Don't you want to?" And off started the little cavalcade, with Cricket driving, because she was the smallest, and could perch up on the others' knees, while old Billy, all beam, jogged after, making almost as good time, with his long legs and shambling gait, as the ponies. ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... lurked behind trees and crept along hedges, shooting birds. Even Reddin felt awed and could not gather courage to expostulate with him. In and out of the stealthy afternoon shadows, black and solemn, went the shambling old figure with his relentless face and outraged heart. He shot thrushes as they fluted after a meal of wild raspberries; he shot tiny silky willow-wrens, robins, and swallows—their sacredness did not awe him—a pigeon on its nest, blackbirds, a dipper, a goldfinch, and a great many sparrows. ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... to gain possession of the helmet, the ring, and the treasure, and through them to obtain that Plutonic mastery of the world under the beginnings of which he himself writhed during Alberic's brief reign. Mimmy is a blinking, shambling, ancient creature, too weak and timid to dream of taking arms himself to despoil Fafnir, who still, transformed to a monstrous serpent, broods on the gold in a hole in the rocks. Mimmy needs the help of a hero for that; and he has craft ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... to-day and looked over the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession. For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier," we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station. "The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully to his wife, his mother, and Aunt Jane as they sat later in the day mingling their tears in the "parlour"—that apartment sacred to Sundays, funerals, and weddings. "Poor ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... he stood in such a shambling, bow-legged sort of an attitude that even the politest of the girls smiled; and those who were specially anxious that the Reds should win felt more than ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... gray beard lay a heavy loose mouth, cruel and strong; above it, a great beak and a pair of pale green eyes, intensely alive. They were in startling contrast to the apparent decrepitude of the stooped shambling body, far too small for its covering of ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... rumour which had reached her about Edith's projected visit, the confirmation of which was the sole object of her colloquy, wagged her way out of the shop again successfully, and was duly assisted by the page-boy into her shambling little ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... and below, for we had risen some fifteen hundred feet since leaving Kalgan. Before me stretched the great Mongolian plateau. The wind that cooled my face had blown over thousands of miles of prairie and desert. The long lines of stately, shambling camels, the great droves of sheep herded by wild-looking men on sturdy little ponies told of an open country. Each mile led deeper and deeper into the rolling grassland and the barren waste of Gobi, and between ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... watched, with mingled admiration and envy, the games and pranks of the bolder lads: and "Dummy"—poor "Dummy"—the shining mark for every schoolboy trick and joke; with his shock of yellow hair, his weak cross eyes, his sharp nose, thin lips, and shambling, shuffling, shifting ...
— Their Yesterdays • Harold Bell Wright
... of structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms of maladies and the action of medicaments. But results which depend on human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of 1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the living ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... and ragged country that reminded her a little of parts of Surrey. The station was just a shed on a foundation of planks which lay flush with the rails. From this shed, as the train clanked in, there emerged a tall, shambling man in a weather-beaten overcoat. He had a clean-shaven, wrinkled face, and he looked doubtfully at Jill with small eyes. Something in his expression reminded Jill of her father, as a bad caricature of a public man will recall the original, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... on guard. The others departed or lay down to sleep on the ground. The fire slackened, and only now and then a shell came with its diabolical scream like a dragon into the town. All at last was quiet, when there came shambling to me an odd figure. There had been some slight attempt by him to look like a soldier—he had a feather in his hat—but he carried his rifle as if after deer or raccoons, and as if he were used ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... sound a creature came shambling forward, carrying what looked like a huge melon in either hand. Jim recognized the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... street-car line, which was a shambling affair, had been laid on Front Street, the streets of Philadelphia had been crowded with hundreds of springless omnibuses rattling over rough, hard, cobblestones. Now, thanks to the idea of John Stephenson, in New York, the double rail track idea had come, and besides the line on Fifth and Sixth ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... was not quite clear. Now that he was a miner he had no use for them, and at River Bend they were not saleable. This man, Abner Kent, came to Ferguson's tent, where he and Tom were resting after the labors of the day. He was a tall man, with a shambling gait ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men, Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock. Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and dirtiest hired men in the country ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... even if they had been unaccompanied by a complete indifference to, or unconsciousness of, the objects about him. So complete was his abstraction, however, that Ralph, usually as quick-sighted as any man, did not observe that he was followed by a shambling figure, which at one time stole behind him with noiseless footsteps, at another crept a few paces before him, and at another glided along by his side; at all times regarding him with an eye so keen, and a look so eager and attentive, that ...
— The Life And Adventures Of Nicholas Nickleby • Charles Dickens
... yet the more, planting might in his heart, to call an assembly of the long-haired Achaeans and speak out to all the wooers who slaughter continually the sheep of his thronging flocks, and his kine with trailing feet and shambling gait. And I will guide him to Sparta and to sandy Pylos to seek tidings of his dear father's return, if peradventure he may hear thereof and that so he may be had in ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... through which the German prisoners were being led, I hurriedly fixed my camera and filmed them shambling in, holding their hands up, their nerves completely shattered by the intensity of our terrific bombardment. Some were covered with wounds, others were carrying our wounded Tommies in on stretchers. It was an extraordinary sight. Ten minutes before these men were doing their ...
— How I Filmed the War - A Record of the Extraordinary Experiences of the Man Who - Filmed the Great Somme Battles, etc. • Lieut. Geoffrey H. Malins
... below of stokers and trimmers bobbing out of the forecastle doors like rabbits from a warren and making their way aft over the rusty deck to the mustering of the port doctor. They were Chinese, with expressionless, Sphinx-like faces, and they walked in peculiar shambling fashion, dragging their feet as if the clumsy brogans were too heavy for ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... about fifty yards behind, and was consequently unable to overhear the conversation. He went shambling along, half whimpering and not unfrequently invoking the God of Israel; but every now and then a cunning light gleamed from his eyes, and his lips became compressed with a ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... past shambling figures indistinct in the dusk; past figures that slunk furtively aside, or crouched to watch him from the gloom of some doorway; past ragged creatures that stared, haggard-eyed; past faces sad and faces evil that ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... the audience in the sixpenny seats. I wish I had space to quote a particularly fine passage—you will find it on pp. 72-74—in which Mrs. Woods describes the progress of these motley characters through Midland lanes on a fresh spring morning; the shambling white horses with their red collars, the painted vans, the cages "where bears paced uneasily and strange birds thrust uncouth heads out into the sunshine," the two elephants and the camel padding through ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... constitutes a bridge spanning the gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to translate, so to speak, into the colloquial of his audience ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... now advanced with rifles poised, ready to give the coup de grce to his bearship; when, with a thundering growl, another "grizzly" came shambling swiftly out from the bushes, and made directly for Franois. Before the party recovered from their surprise at this new appearance on the scene, the brute reared up and seized Franois by the leg, which ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and they turned through, dragging their awkwardly shambling burden. As they gained the front porch the front door was flung wide, and Mrs. Adams stood there, peering out, to find what was the meaning of this scuffling and grunting. Charley was glad to see ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... returned to the room in which his quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... merchandise are slung on rough pack-saddles, made of coarse sacking. Shambling along with knees bent together, sores on every joint, and frequently an eye knocked out, the poor pony's back gets cruelly galled; when the bazaar is reached, he is hobbled as tightly as possible, the coarse ropes cutting into the flesh, and he is then turned adrift to contemplate ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... deformed abridgment of a tragedy by Dekker and Webster on the story of Lady Jane Grey. In this tragedy, as in the two comedies due to the collaboration of the same poets, it appears to me more than probable that Dekker took decidedly the greater part. The shambling and slipshod metre, which seems now and then to hit by mere chance on some pure and tender note of simple and exquisite melody—the lazy vivacity and impulsive inconsequence of style—the fitful sort of slovenly inspiration, with interludes of absolute and headlong collapse—are qualities ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... interrupted by a scream of maniacal fury from Olsen, a shambling Swede who stood near the edge of the group. Ever since Layroh's unmasking the Swede had been staring at him with eyes rigidly wide in terror like those of a bird confronting a snake. The steady contemplation of the horror of the blaring red thing behind Layroh's ...
— The Cavern of the Shining Ones • Hal K. Wells
... naibours! Be ye rich men or be ye poor men, that ye must needs come to the world's end at this time o' night?' exclaimed a voice at this instant; and, turning their heads, they saw a rickety individual shambling round from the back door with a horn lantern dangling from ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... where all things were to be had; peppermints and cotton, china-faced dolls and lemons, had dwindled into the front windows of tiny private dwelling-houses; the black-wigged crones, the greasy shambling men, were uglier and greasier than she had ever conceived them. They seemed caricatures of humanity; scarecrows in battered hats or draggled skirts. But gradually, as the scene grew upon her, she perceived that in spite of the "model dwellings" ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Kit Nubbles, as he was commonly called, was not handsome in the estimation of anyone except his mother, and mothers are apt to be partial. He was a shock-headed, shambling, awkward lad, with an uncommonly wide mouth, very red cheeks, a turned-up nose, and certainly the most comical expression of ...
— Ten Boys from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... corrugated iron and boards an inch thick intervened between us and the noisy tramplings of the rain and heat of the sun. The only room accommodated some primitive furniture, a bed being the denominating as well as the essential feature. A little shambling structure of rough slabs and iron walls contrived a double debt to pay—kitchen ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... those little tents that we had practised pitching so carefully, and that we had meant to sleep in at night. Little, dirty, unkempt, broken-hearted men came shuffling in the dust of the road by day, shambling along the road at night. Thousands of them passed. No sound, save the fall of footsteps. No contrast, save where a huddle of refugees passed, their children beside them, their household goods, or their old people, on their backs. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... edge of the clearing a tall, narrow-shouldered man of forty in a red shirt, in patched trousers that had been a gentleman's, and in high boots, was slouching along with a lazy, shambling step. He was sauntering along the road. On the right was the green of the clearing, on the left a golden sea of ripe rye stretched to the very horizon. He was red and perspiring, a white cap with a straight jockey ...
— The Witch and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... was almost the only tangible reminder there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough to clear the place of its debt—the biggest thing by far in his heritage. Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood—and Denny's acres ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... do so. Slowly it came, tacking this way and that, pausing frequently as if uncertain or alarmed. And Uniacke, standing in the shadow of the red curtain, watched its movements, fascinated. He did not know why, but he had a sensation that Fate, loose-limbed, big-boned, furtive, was shambling over the grass towards his guest. Sir Graham went on quietly painting. The Skipper made a last detour, got behind the painter, stole up and peered over his shoulder. Once there, he seemed spellbound. For he stood perfectly still and never took his large blue eyes from the canvas. Uniacke went ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... in the light of ancient and modern learning, useful and ornamental knowledge, I am charmed with the prospect; but when I view you in another light, and represent you awkward, ungraceful, ill-bred, with vulgar air and manners, shambling toward me with inattention and DISTRACTIONS, I shall not pretend to describe to you what I feel; but will do as a skillful painter did formerly—draw a veil before the ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... offered me his hand for parting. I took it, and we said, together, "Well, good-by," and moved in different directions. I knew very well that I should turn back, and I had not gone a hundred feet away when I faced about. He was shambling off into the dusk, a most hapless figure. "Tedham!" I ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... What refinement!" and of another, "What a badly-bred, vulgar, common brute!" Later they would both come out of their bathing-boxes, and the "brute" would be a smartly dressed officer carrying himself with ease and distinction, and the "aristocrat" would be an untidy, uncouth "Tommy" shambling along. Truly on sight one should never judge a man ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... this ecclesiastical dress, as when discovering a pacific next-door neighbor beneath the bear-skin of an American military officer. A fit suggestion; for next follows a detachment of Portuguese troops-of-the-line,—twenty shambling men in short jackets, with hair shaved close, looking most like children's wooden monkeys, by no means live enough for the real ones. They straggle along, scarcely less irregular in aspect than the main body of the procession; they march to the tap of the drum. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... may as well understand, once for all, that we masters are divided into two classes, oppressors and oppressed. We who are good-natured and hate severity make up our minds to a good deal of inconvenience. If we will keep a shambling, loose, untaught set in the community, for our convenience, why, we must take the consequence. Some rare cases I have seen, of persons, who, by a peculiar tact, can produce order and system without severity; but I'm not one of them,—and so I made up my mind, long ago, to let things ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the little Ford car out of its shed, ran it up to the horse-tank, and began to throw water on the mud-crusted wheels and windshield. While he was at work the two hired men, Dan and Jerry, came shambling down the hill to feed the stock. Jerry was grumbling and swearing about something, but Claude wrung out his wet rags and, beyond a nod, paid no attention to them. Somehow his father always managed to have the roughest and dirtiest hired men in the country working for him. Claude ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... a moment, Oswald," said the Earl. And then Lord Brentford did make something of a shambling speech, in which he expressed a hope that they two might for the future live together on friendly terms, forgetting the past. He ought to have been prepared for the occasion, and the speech was poor and shambling. But I think that it was more useful than it might have been, ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... quest had started. He seemed dumb with despair. He had always looked ludicrously old and shriveled; his appearance now became tragic. He would start up from hours of trancelike motionlessness, would make a tour of house and grounds; scrambling and shambling from place to place; chattering at doors he could not open, then pausing to listen; racing to the front fence and leaping to its top to crane up and down the street; always back in the old room in a few minutes, to resume his watch and wait. He would let no one but Adelaide ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Dorothy. She was at her usual place on the edge of the precipice that looked down upon the deep, divided channels of the great river. She turned on hearing the deep breathing of Pepin and the shambling of Antoine as they passed over some loose gravel behind her. She rose to her feet with a little cry of welcome. There was something in the dwarfs face that spoke of a settled purpose and hope. Their late awkward meeting ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... James Dicksey, a shambling lad of eighteen, took his place, his eyes rolling in abject terror, and under the evident impression that he was being tried for his life. Every answer was wrung from this frightened youth, as with red-hot pincers, and it was with ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... had expected to go striding through miles of alder swamp and dark spruce woods, fleeing the hated world of men and bondage, before setting himself to get acquainted with his new followers. His high-strung temper was badly jarred. He drew off, shaking his vast antlers, and went shambling with spacious stride down along the barrier towards the brook. The four cows, in single file, hurried after him anxiously, afraid he might be ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... strolled a lad, "Foolish Joe" people called him, and he was, as usual, accompanied by a little band of fun-loving, teasing boys. In a moment they were gone; but the shambling central figure with its vacant face stayed with her to accentuate her distress. She leaned her head upon her arm, but she could not ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd
... brain of a drowning man; that same crowded my brain during the few moments which swung in to us Daniel, scowling, masterful, his raw bulk and his long shambling stride ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... was a miner he had no use for them, and at River Bend they were not saleable. This man, Abner Kent, came to Ferguson's tent, where he and Tom were resting after the labors of the day. He was a tall man, with a shambling gait ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... of the house, shambling like a somnambulist. Seated on the porch steps, head in hands, he slipped into a hell of regrets. He knew now that his suicide had been no hallucination. He was dead, all right; and this must be ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... simon-pure article, you ought to go down to one of our big factory towns and look at the mill-hands coming home in droves after a day's work, young girls and old women, boys and men, all fluffed over with cotton, and so dead tired that they can hardly walk. They come shambling along with all the individuality of a ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells
... was nothing for it but to stand on the far shore and whistle for Rorie with the boat. I had no need to repeat the signal. At the first sound, Mary was at the door flying a handkerchief by way of answer, and the old long-legged serving-man was shambling down the gravel to the pier. For all his hurry, it took him a long while to pull across the bay; and I observed him several times to pause, go into the stern, and look over curiously into the wake. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the soldier's key turn in the lock, but soon he heard it and his heart pumped. He glanced at White, but the gray figure, flattened against the wall, never moved. The door swung open and the soldier, merely a shambling peon, bearing the tray, entered. Behind him according to custom came the second man who stood in the doorway, leaning upon his musket. But he stood there only an instant. A pair of long, powerful arms which must ...
— The Texan Star - The Story of a Great Fight for Liberty • Joseph A. Altsheler
... next day, at ten o'clock, they buried Saunders on a certain little knoll among the sagebrush; buried him without much ceremony, it is true, but with more respect than he had received when he was alive and shambling sneakily among them. Good Indian was there, saying little and listening attentively to the comments made upon the subject, and when the last bit of yellow gravel had been spatted into place he rode down through the Indian camp on his way home, thankful ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... long time, and the first sound he heard was of slow and cautious footsteps. He listened to them attentively and he wondered. A warrior surely would not come walking in a manner that soon became shambling. Putting his ear to the earth he heard a soft and uncertain crush, crush, and then, raising his head a little, he traced a dark, ambiguous figure. But he knew it, nevertheless, by the two red eyes blinking in doubt and dismay. It was a black ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... prepare the reader for the presence of the "damsel"; he has forgotten to mention the spring and its relation to the ruin; and now, face to face with his omission, instead of trying back and starting fair, crams all this matter, tail foremost, into a single shambling sentence. It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably bad ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was a slight incline into the village, our miserable ponies commenced a shambling trot, the noise of which brought numerous idlers to the inn-door to inquire the news. This inn was a rambling, unpainted erection of wood, opposite to a "cash, credit, and barter store," kept by an enterprising Caledonian—an additional proof of the saying which ascribes ubiquity ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... by friends. One of these rovers interested me because I was sure he wanted to catch Rothenstein's eye. He had twice passed our table, with a hesitating look; but Rothenstein, in the thick of a disquisition on Puvis de Chavannes, had not seen him. He was a stooping, shambling person, rather tall, very pale, with longish and brownish hair. He had a thin vague beard—or rather, he had a chin on which a large number of hairs weakly curled and clustered to cover its retreat. He was an odd-looking person; but in the 'nineties ...
— Seven Men • Max Beerbohm
... Tom—the shambling butt of his comrades—began to like the notion of going into prayer-meeting with David Grieve in tow; and even that bitter and very real cloud of spiritual misery lifted ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... through Ellicott City, an old, shambling town quite out of character with its new-sounding name, which has such a western ring to it, we traversed for several miles the old Frederick Turnpike—formerly a national highway between East and West—swooping ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... red-faced and out of breath, had slowed down into a shambling walk and was puffing and blowing like a grampus. As he came up ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... was the oldest horse on the farm, a shambling, half-blind creature whose days of work had long been over. In summer she reveled in clover pasture, and the warmest box stall and choicest oats were hers in winter. Sarah had ridden her around the pasture a number of times, but it had never occurred ...
— Rainbow Hill • Josephine Lawrence
... to come like the first reformed platoon of an army after fleeing from disaster. The leader of the platoon was a small boy. His hat was pulled down over his eyes and he looked as if he were sorely afraid. After him came half a dozen men with shambling gait. One was an Irishman, two were English, one was a German and one a colored man. Two of them carried pickaxes in their hands, which they had been using to clear away the wreckage ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... found, back of the blacksmith shop, the wreck of an old cart which years ago had been used for breaking colts; he improvised shafts and seat; he discovered the encouraging fact that Old Bots, a shambling derelict who had lost an eye when Wayne Shandon was quite young, was gentle and trustworthy. After that, wherever he went abroad, and he travelled all over the countryside, he rode in the cart, steering Old Bots this way and that with much shouting, ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... passing through her mind she happened to glance out of the window. Nutty was shambling through the garden with his pail, a bowed, shuffling pillar of gloom. As Elizabeth watched, he dropped the pail and lashed the air violently for a while. From her knowledge of bees ('It is needful to remember that bees resent outside interference and will resolutely ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... men, dressed alike and apparently of the same height and shambling manner, whom she had seen in Nicko's garden, worried her quite as much—indeed, worried her even more than the sight of the mysterious creature the ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch,—a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour! Let ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... O, Sir, your travellers Need fleeter steeds than we poor shambling folks Who stay at home. To my unskilful sense, Speed for the chase and vigour for the tilt, ...
— Count Alarcos - A Tragedy • Benjamin Disraeli
... forward over the cobbled street. He was like some immense bronze come suddenly to life and shambling. Like the brazen servant Thomas Aquinas made under the influence of particular stars. His great brown shoulders, his barreled chest, his upper arms like a man's leg, his packed forearms, his neck like a bull's, his shaven head. All seemed superhuman, and then came his shy ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... meeting house was torn down to give place to the new structure. When a boy I had often been in the old shop, and have heard the founder, Bishop Allen, preach in the wooden building. He was much reverenced. I remember his appearance, and his feeble, shambling gait as he approached the ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... noble feelings; lips which spoke to the heart and proclaimed the man's intelligence and lucidity, a gift of second-sight, and a heavenly temper; and you would have judged him wrongly from looking merely at his sloping forehead, his fireless eyes, and his shambling gait. His life answered to his countenance; it was full of secret labor, and hid the virtue of a saint. His superior knowledge of law proved so strong a recommendation at a time when Napoleon was reorganizing it in 1808 and 1811, that, by the advice of Cambaceres, he was one of ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... her head; but she made haste to call Cyrus, who came shambling along the hall from the cabin. The parlor was dark, for though it was a day of sunshine and merry May wind, Gussie kept the shutters bowed—but Cyrus could see the pale intensity of his visitor's face. There was a moment's silence, broken by ...
— An Encore • Margaret Deland
... and in a moment after a singular figure appeared at the doorway. It was that of a very old man, with long white hair, which escaped from beneath the eaves of an exceedingly high-peaked hat. He stooped considerably, and moved along with a shambling gait. I could not see much of his face, which, as the landlady stood behind him with the lamp, was consequently in deep shadow. I could observe, however, that his eyes sparkled like those of a ferret. He advanced to the foot of the ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... By that shambling in his walk, it should be my rich old banker, Gomez, whom I knew at Barcelona: As I live 'tis he!—What, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... watch furtively, in a sort of terror, the tall figure as it was assisted from the kuruma and led, shambling, through the house. The three moved on to the wing containing Ume's chamber, and the painting room. Mata heard the fusuma close gently, the nurse's voice give admonition to "keep his spirit strong for this last stress," heard old Kano falter, "Farewell, ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... wish, Jean Ramel had been conveyed to the Pantheon in the wretched paupers' hearse, which conveys them to the common grave at the shambling trot of ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... their silence was in no way conspicuous, for the whole air throbbed with the rising and falling shriek of the saws, the trampling of the falls, and the obscurely rhythmic rush of the torrent around the island base. They were presently joined by Susan, shambling on her ungainly legs, wagging her big ears, and stretching out her long, ugly, flexible, overhanging nose to sniff inquiringly at the Boy's jacket. A comparatively new member of MacPhairrson's family, she was still full of curiosity about every one ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... couple were very fond of Lily. How carefully they made her bed on cold nights! How considerately they fed her on boiled potatoes, skim milk, and other wondrous delicacies! She, too, came shambling up whenever she heard her name, and, with a grunt, acknowledged their bounty. 'Dear old Lily,' poor Mary exclaimed fervently, as Lily lifted her snout to be rubbed, and looked with queer, piggish eyes into those of her ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... run on the previous day. Then at three or four points on the edge of the sulphurous area appeared the grotesque forms of the Beast People hurrying towards us. I could not help a creeping horror, as I perceived first one and then another trot out from the trees or reeds and come shambling along over the hot dust. But Moreau and Montgomery stood calmly enough; and, perforce, I ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... plumes, and cloaks, and housings, and the stir Of jewelled bridle and of golden spur. And lo! among the menials, in mock state, Upon a piebald steed, with shambling gait, His cloak of fox-tails flapping in the wind, The solemn ape demurely perched behind, King Robert rode, making huge merriment In all the country towns ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... first, the Mistress had been Bruce's champion at The Place. There was no competition for that office. She and she alone could see any promise in the shambling youngster. ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... was Sloppy. Too much of him longwise, too little of him broadwise, and too many sharp angles of him angle-wise. One of those shambling male human creatures, born to be indiscreetly candid in the revelation of buttons; every button he had about him glaring at the public to a quite preternatural extent. A considerable capital of knee and elbow and wrist and ankle, had Sloppy, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... unbelieving, and impious scorner was a man of shreds and patches, a pot-valiant tailor, whose ungartered hosen, loose knee-strings, and thin shambling legs, sufficiently betokened the sedentary nature of his avocations. "I wonder the parson hasn't gi'en her a lift wi' Pharaoh and his host ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... they swung up from the beach and trotted down the unkempt street of Sabaga. A chorus of howls, set up by bony, slinking curs of the type that infest all native villages, announced their presence but there was no sign of life in any of the shambling bamboo houses. The village ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... since the commencement of their acquaintance, the worthy publisher's lady had maintained a steady friendship. Bungay, having recreated himself with a copious luncheon, was madly shying at the sticks hard by, till the perspiration ran off his bald pate. Shandon was shambling about among the drinking tenants and gipsies: Finucane constant in attendance on the two ladies, to whom gentlemen of their acquaintance, and connected with the publishing house, came up ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of them came back excited and laughing. Old Conboy, tall as Mark Hammar, wide-shouldered, shambling like a bear, but a fine figure of an old fellow for all that; Mark Hammar, heavy and splendid in his sinister fashion; and between them Deolda with her big, red mouth and her sallow skin and her eyes burning as they did ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I saw his great frame swaying like a shambling ox. I marveled that he could show emotion. My ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... he cried, shrilly, "why didn't that one-eyed fool kill the fellow while he was about it? There's danger for us every moment while he is alive here. Why didn't that shambling idiot kill him?" ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... scrubbing stopped and shambling steps came along the landing as someone slopped along, dragging his slippers into which he had merely thrust his toes. There was a scratching sort of tap at the door. Marcella opened ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... There is Master Fielding—he with the black eye. What a magnificent build of a boy! There is Master Scott, one of the heads of the school. Did you ever see the fellow more hearty and manly? Yonder lean, shambling, cadaverous lad, who is always borrowing money, telling lies, leering after the house-maids, is Master Laurence Sterne—a bishop's grandson, and himself intended for the Church; for shame, you little reprobate! But what a genius the fellow has! Let him have a sound flogging, and as soon ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through the air. The city has disappeared. We walk down an incongruous stretch of pavement. It leads toward a forest or what looks like a forest. There are no houses. The sky asserts itself. I look up, but the shambling one whose clothes become active under water keeps her eyes to the pavement. This is disillusioning! "Here, slavey, is the sky," I think; "it becomes romantic for the moment because to you it is the symbol of lost dreams, or happy hours in fields. To me it is nothing but a ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... movement of my hand directed my people to follow me, and I made a sudden rush forward at full speed. Off went the herd; shambling along at a tremendous pace, whisking their long tails above their hind quarters, and taking exactly the direction I had anticipated, they offered me a shoulder shot at a little within two hundred yards' distance. Unfortunately, I fell into a deep hole concealed by the high grass, ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... find themselves confronted with an absolute endorsement of the truth of Lennie's statements. A stranger of about fourteen was walking towards them, or perhaps "shambling" would be a better description of her method of progress. She stooped badly, swung her arms in an awkward fashion, and shuffled her feet along the grass; her eyes were vacant, her chin was retreating, and her mouth was set in a foolish smile. For a full ghastly minute she stood and ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... which follows the conversion of wheat fields and grazing land into vineyards and orchards. Not even Riverside can compare with it in the rapid evolution of a great source of wealth which ten years ago was almost unknown. What has transformed Fresno from a shambling, dirty resort of cowboys and wheat ranchers into one of the prettiest cities in California is the raisin grape. Though nearly all fruits may be grown here, yet this is pre-eminently the home of the raisin industry, and it is the raisin ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 829, November 21, 1891 • Various
... soundly through the afternoon: it was our first real march, but none were tired. In the night we went faster, because it was cold. Many fell asleep on the backs of their beasts, and woke in the morning quite fresh. None tumbled off. Some rode shaggy, shambling bears, which yet made speed enough, going as fast as the elephants. Others were mounted on different kinds of deer, and would have been racing all the way had I not prevented it. Those atop of the hay on the elephants, unable to see the animals below them, would keep talking to them as long as ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... that poverty and crime are near neighbours; that the circumstances which make the honest man poor, make the lazy man a thief. Leonard was too young to be suspicious. He scarcely saw a shambling poorly-dressed rather wasted man whom he passed, and who afterwards stumbled along a very little way behind him. Nor did he specially notice two rather well-dressed but coarse-looking men who kept just ...
— Littlebourne Lock • F. Bayford Harrison
... perhaps, than is met with in the average Southerner of his class. "A plain man but honest, sir," was what one expected him to utter at every turn. It was written in the coarse open lines of his face, half-hidden by a bushy gray beard; in his small sparkling eyes, now blue, now brown; in his looselimbed, shambling movements as he crossed the room. His very clothes spoke, to an acute observer, of a masculine sincerity naked and unashamed—as if his large coffee-spotted cravat would not alter the smallest fold to conceal the stains it bore. Hale, hairy, ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the platform, and on its seat, reckless of danger, stood Camille waving the dust-cloth in utter forgetfulness of what she had in her hand. In close proximity stood Dorette, and by Dr. Browne's side, in his shambling old buggy, sat Madame Bonnivel, directing the demonstrations of Dodo, on her lap. Nate looked at ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the display of a catch-penny ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... man, but Apollo heard, and went fleeter on his path. Then marked he a bird long of wing, and anon he knew that the thief had been the son of Zeus Cronion. Swiftly sped the Prince, Apollo, son of Zeus, to goodly Pylos, seeking the shambling kine, while his broad shoulders were swathed in purple cloud. Then the Far-darter ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... Seven Dials. All the questionable pursuits, fancies, foibles of silly, childish man are discussed grimly and at length in the newspapers and magazines. Our poor hobby-horses are dragged out of the stable, and made to show their shambling paces before the mob of gentlemen who read with ease. There has been much prate lately of as innocent a foible as ever served to make men self-forgetful for a few seconds of time—the collecting of first editions. Somebody hard up for 'copy' denounced this pastime, ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... gamboling, Upon a pleasant day, And four grey wolves came shambling, And stopped to see it play In the sun. Said the lamb, "Perhaps I may Charm these creatures with my play, And they'll let me go ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... attendants talked, Badshah was moving at a fast shambling pace along animal paths through the forest farther and farther away from the peelkhana. Wild beasts always follow a track through the jungle, even a man-made road, in preference to forcing a way through the undergrowth for themselves. ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... face; for he had one wall-eye, and was so far under-jawed as to prove that a bull-dog had had something to do with his creation;—ugly in shape; for although larger than a pointer, and strongly built, he was coarse and shambling in his make, with his fore legs bowed out. His ears and tail had never been docked which was a pity as the more you curtailed his proportions the better looking the cur would have been. But his ears, although not cut, were torn to ribbons by the various encounters with dogs on shore, ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... this place, which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half-cowshed and half- kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time. The horseman had gone forward to have coffee and some eatables prepared, and they were by this time ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... And now one of the pot-bellied little horrors, shambling and bulbous-kneed, was scratching its warty, blue hide with its black claws as it trailed along through the forest. It looked up, grinning and jabbering; Stern saw the teeth that should have been molars. With repulsion he noted that they were not flat-crowned, but sharp like a dog's. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the wood-path beyond the Light, heard the shambling steps behind her. She turned and saw Mark. He was tall and lank. He leaned forward from the shoulders loosely, and his face had the patient, dull expression of a faithful, but none too ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... not they took that for a signal—or perhaps he made another that we did not see—the six undoubted gipsies got up and left the room, shambling out in single file with the awkward gait they share in common with ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... stone demijohn was almost the only tangible reminder there was left of the Bolton who had gone before. There were a few in the village who wondered how, in the three intervening years, the big silent, shambling boy had managed to tear from his acres money enough to clear the place of its debt—the biggest thing by far in his heritage. Eight hundred dollars was a large sum in Boltonwood—and Denny's acres were mostly rocks. Old Denny would have sold the last scythe and fork in the dilapidated barn to fill ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... hard-boiled eggs, shells and all, for his breakfast; ate his prawns with their heads and their tails on, drank scalding hot tea, and performed so many horrifying acts that one almost doubted that he was human; and by Christopher Nubbles, a shock-headed, shambling, awkward, devoted lad, the only element of cheerfulness that ever came into her life. In this book appear Richard Swiveller and his Marchioness, Sampson and Sarah Brass and Mrs. Jarley, who to be appreciated must be seen and known, as Dickens ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... being of Bully is that he shall hate the prowling great paws of the Plebs, whilst Plebs by inherent nature goes mad at the sight of Bully's jowl. "Drop it!" cries Plebs. "Hands off!" growls Bully. It is hands against head, the shambling, servile body in a rage of insurrection at last against the ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... we reached the mouth of the Little Missouri. There we found one of the few remaining mud lodges of the ancient type. We landed and found ourselves in the midst of a forsaken little frontier town. A shambling shack bore the legend, "Store," with the "S" looking backward—perhaps toward dead municipal hopes. A few tumble-down frame and log shanties sprawled up the desultory grass-grown main street, at one end of which dwelt a Mandan Indian family in the ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Mullins grumbled out something intended as a negative, and, shambling across the room, placed himself in a corner, as far as possible from Oaklands, where he sat rubbing his knees, the very image of sulkiness and terror. Cumberland, who appeared during the whole course of the affair absorbed in a book, though, in ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... the man; and with a knowing look at Rust, and a shambling bow to the girl, he went out, and seated himself on a chair in the hall, having taken the precaution to send his companion to keep an eye on the windows, which were within ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... to me of Ned Brooke's face as I had seen it the day before at the gate, coupled with the remembrance of seeing him walking down the lane at a quick pace, so unlike his usual shambling gait, while I ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... was growing dark when the weary car-horse surmounted the last hill on the road from Clifden and broke into a shambling trot down the long straight stretch into Carrowkeel. Soon, as the distance dwindled, the lights which twinkled here and there in the village became distinguishable. This—Hyacinth recognised it—was the great hanging lamp in the window of Rafferty's shop. That, a softer ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Bill Howard who stood outside when Randolph answered his doorbell next morning. He let the big, homely, almost shambling ...
— Prologue to an Analogue • Leigh Richmond
... He cast a single glance at the peaceful face of Jerry, and then started for the door. Haw-Haw waited until the door closed; then he wound his arms about his body, writhed in an ecstasy of silent laughter, and followed with long, shambling strides. ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... Paul found himself in a brief space of time standing hand in hand with Master Tonks, and looking him squarely in the eye. The fist Paul held in his own was like a mason's mallet, but its owner was of a clumsy and shambling build. Paul silently breathed the one word 'tactics,' and he and his opponent fell back from each other. He thought Master Tonk's attitude curiously awkward, but he had no guess as to what lay behind it. He sparred for an opening. It looked all opening, and he wondered, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... had sided with the Boone faction either called or wrote to confess their error. Even the Acredale Monitor, a weekly sheet notoriously in the interest of Boone, felt constrained to copy parts of the account and publish with it a shambling retraction of previous criticism, based on imperfect knowledge, that it had printed concerning Sergeant Sprague. "Death," it declared, "has obliterated all feeling that existed against our young townsman, whose conduct, though open to grievous doubt in the early part of his military ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... trains provided for them. The streets along the line of march were lined with whites, silent but triumphant. It was a beautiful day, clear and hot. Two by two, the Indians moved along the fine old elm-shadowed streets, old Wolf at the head, shambling and decrepit, but with his splendid old head held high. Two by two, in utter silence, their moccasined feet soundless, old Indians in buckskins, and young Indians in store clothes, then squaws, in calico "mother-hubbards," great bundles strapped to their ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... took note of the names of the owners of different lots, farms, and ranches, passing that of Delatour with the others. Then he drove leisurely in the direction of the woods, and, reaching them, tied his horse to a young sapling in the shade, and entered their domain with a shambling but familiar ...
— A Sappho of Green Springs • Bret Harte
... each other as they obeyed; and a heavy, shambling, graceless man, dressed in the most exaggerated fopperies of the day, but with a face which even sickliness, that refines most faces, could not divest of the most vacant dulness, and a mien and gait to which no attire could give dignity, passed through the group, bowing awkwardly to the ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... into the outer room, shambling awkwardly. The progress from failure to failure dazed him. He recalled afterwards, as many petty matters of this time stayed vivid in his memory, a preposterous blunder into a chair. The Pretender sat down and stretched at his ease. "We are too late, I think," ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... While shambling through the forest one day Mother Bruin made a wonderful discovery. She came to a tree which had recently fallen to the forest floor and from within came a curious humming. She stopped abruptly to listen, her great head cocked to one side ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... in the heat of the day or the cool of the evening, the giant Mexican strode on by the side of the two horsemen, sometimes trotting like a dog, more often walking with a shambling, wide-reaching step, tireless as any wild animal. His feet, seamed and parched into the semblance rather of horn than of flesh and bone, were quite bare, though now it was a time of year when the nights at least were very cool and when freezing ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... he was no longer among bog and heather. He was running—shambling now—along a road. The loping pursuit of that nameless, shapeless Something sounded like an ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... went on, lurching over the inequalities of the narrow road. Al shook his horse into a shambling trot, picking his way carelessly through the ...
— The Quirt • B.M. Bower
... are we, and what do we mean by Ourselves? When I meet a ragged, shuffling tramp on the road (and I meet a good many of them in my lonely walks) I often find myself asking the question, "How did that shambling vagabond come to his present condition? Did his father turn him out of doors? Did his mother drink? Did he learn nothing but lying and swearing and thieving when he was a child? Was his grandfather hanged for some crime, or was his great-grandfather ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... so much history should at least be genuine—the history may be all right, but the tooth is a shambling hoax, at best a crude proxy for the molar of Gautama. Intelligent priests of Buddhism must know this, but the millions of common people finding solace in the faith have never heard the truth—and wouldn't believe it ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... not hold as superb looking men as these appeared to me. Finely formed, stalwart, full-fed and well clothed, they formed the most delightful contrast with the scrawny, shambling, villain-visaged little clay-eaters and white trash who had looked down upon us from the sentry ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... street end of the alley and gave a low whistle. Out under the lamp from behind the corner came a long, thin, shambling, hump-backed youth, with his hat down over his head like an extinguisher, dragging a small bony horse, which, in its turn, dragged a rickety cart of the tray variety, such as is used in the dead marine trade. Behind the ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
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