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More "Sprawling" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... third step all foothold slipped from under me; but my clutch was tight on a fistful of creepers, and their tendrils were tough as a ship's rope. So down I went, now touching earth, now fending off from the rock with my feet, now missing hold and sprawling into a mass of leaves and roots, among which I clutched wildly and checked myself by the first thing handy—until, with the crack of Hamid's musket above, the vine, or whatever it was to which I clung for the moment, gave way as if shorn by the bullet, and I pitched a full ...
— The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... be in his wife's, not his, handwriting—did ever such a scrap of a woman write so sprawling a hand!" she replied, holding ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... wavering half-turn of apology towards the gardener, with the hose still spouting in his hand. The gardener caught the cold crash of the water full in his face like the crash of a cannon-ball; staggered, slipped and went sprawling with ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the angry, frightened creature. Hemmed in on every side, the bear rushed blindly forwards, and leaped over the fires, where the cooks were busy with the dinner. Pots and kettles were knocked about in great confusion, and the scared cooks thrown sprawling upon the ground; and many a dainty dish and savory mess was spoiled. The bear fled fast down the forest road, followed by the baying hounds and the fleet-footed warriors. But none dared shoot an arrow ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... scarcely spoken when there came a terrific bump which almost threw him overboard. Whopper was sent sprawling on his side, and his oar sent a shower of ...
— Four Boy Hunters • Captain Ralph Bonehill
... where they had fallen—the Indian sprawling in the middle of a black stain on the platform; Tole huddled on the bare earth of the quadrangle. Ambrose's heart sank at the thought of returning to Simon Grampierre with the gift of ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... down with crashing fist that shattered an opalescent wine-glass and sent a great stain sprawling ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... were married with great state and ancientry; and now there are several little D'Cruzes sprawling about the verandahs of ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... But still it held. At last, hours and hours it seemed since he had first begun his journey, his hand clutched the edge of the bank, but the earth came away in wet handfuls at every clutch. At length his fingers encountered a sprawling root or branch, he knew not which, just beyond his sight; and, digging his toes into the wall in a final despairing effort, he scrambled over the brink and rolled fainting to ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... baby to kiss," I said, unfolding the blanket, and holding up the sprawling little goddess towards the ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... the Austrian Government neglect its duties that, ten years ago, Croatia and Slavonia were short of at least one thousand school buildings and twelve hundred teachers. Bishop Strossmayer, coming from a family[43] which had settled at the sprawling town of Osiek, in Slavonia, did what he could. His Yugoslav Academy at Zagreb, the Zagreb University and the Society for studying the history of the Yugoslavs are but a few of the national institutions to which he devoted the princely revenues of Djakovo. From there this most ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... stepped suddenly to the door, and opened it. "Get out of here!" he said; and then as Jurgis passed through the opening, he gave him a ferocious kick that sent him down the great stone steps at a run, and landed him sprawling in the snow at ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... indolent attention, and he resumed his reading. Suddenly something in the text suggested a thought which made him start and drop the book for the third time to the side of the sofa, whence, escaping from his hand, it fell sprawling to the floor, back upward. Brayton, half-risen, was staring intently into the obscurity beneath the bed, where the points of light shone with, it seemed to him, an added fire. His attention was now fully aroused, his gaze eager ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... to see more than a dozen yards ahead, and I stopped on the kerb to see it safely past. Just as the horses emerged from the fog, a man came up behind and lurched violently against me and, strangely enough, at the same moment passed his foot in front of mine. Of course I went sprawling into the road right in front of the lorry. The horses came stamping and sliding straight on to me, and, before I could wriggle out of the way, the hoof of one of them smashed in my hat—that was a new ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... sport-loving youth—this was the country, heart of a crumbling empire, that had ordered the gray torrent of Germany to alter its course and flow back to its own confines. It was absurd. It was grotesque. It was a sporting thing to do, but would it mean the collapse of the sprawling, disjointed British Empire, linked together by a flimsy tradition ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... to awaken fresh courage, the whole band plunged headlong down the sharp decline, striking the surprised "road-agents" with a force and suddenness which sent half of them sprawling. Revolvers flashed, oaths and shouts rang out fiercely, men clinched each other, striking savage blows. Lumley grasped the leader of the other party by the hair, and endeavored to beat him over the head with his revolver butt. Even as he uplifted ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... when he read the note. It happened to fit a certain vague feeling of uneasiness that possessed him. He laid it down on his desk, walked up and down behind his counter, and then returned and read it again. The sprawling words seemed to possess a fascination for him. He read them again and again, and turned them over and over in his mind. It was characteristic of his simple nature that he never once attributed the origin of the note to the humor of the young men with whom he was so familiar. He regarded ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... the wheel with mad velocity, now uncontrolled, jamming poor Davy's leg between the rudder beam and the wheel post, while Johnny lay sprawling on the deck, holding on like grim death to a stray end of the mizzen-halliard that had been cast loose from the cleats. Another turn of the spokes of the wheel, as the rudder was banged to and fro by the billows, and Davy's leg was released, although ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... sprawling on the grass, And beavers fell in showers; There was another Floorer there Beside ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... found himself sprawling on the ground. He looked up, and in the moonlight he saw Gregory Carker ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... it was number three or four, but Five hundred and Eighty-two Van Diemen's Avenue is horrible!" We had given in to Miss Fraenkel of course, save that none of us had the courage to disillusion Bill's cousin. We still received from him letters addressed in his sprawling painter's hand "Wigboro' House, Netley Heights, N. J., U. S. A.," a mail or so late. We never told him of Van Diemen's Avenue, nor for that matter had we mentioned our neighbours. Curiously enough, it was he, that painter cousin of Bill's, thousands of miles away in that other Essex, who ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... pistol at his head; which he had no sooner done than the other levelled a blow at him with his stick, which Joseph, who was expert at cudgel-playing, caught with his, and returned the favour so successfully on his adversary, that he laid him sprawling at his feet, and at the same instant received a blow from behind, with the butt end of a pistol, from the other villain, which felled him to the ground, and totally ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... isn't," said my Aunt Kezia, bluntly. "I'll go bail she kept her linen better washed than that. But what's that queer thing sprawling all over ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... was all a long time ago and the only points worth remembering about it are that Tom Slade didn't run, that he was ready to see the thing through no matter if it left him sprawling in the gutter, and that he and the burly truck driver had thereafter been good friends. Now Tom was an ex-scout and a returned soldier and Pete was janitor ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... stem and most of the side shoots are taken away as they appear. If plants of marigold, gaillardia, or other strong and spreading growers are held by stakes or wire-holders (a good practice), it may be advisable to remove the weak and sprawling shoots. Balsams give better results when side shoots are taken off. The removing of the old flowers, which is to be advised with flower-garden plants (page 116), is also a ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... a horrid jolt and a lurch and a leap and a rebound, and then the car stood still, quivering like a ship that has been struck by a heavy sea. The three men were pitched and tossed and thrown sprawling over one another onto the bottom of the car. Biggleswade screamed. McCurdie cursed. Doyne scrambled from the confusion of rugs and limbs and, tearing open the side of the Cape-cart hood, jumped out. The chauffeur had also just leaped from his seat. It was pitch dark save for the great shaft of light ...
— A Christmas Mystery - The Story of Three Wise Men • William J. Locke
... and the road was unfrequented, so I let the car out. We tore down an avenue of firs, great rugged banks of rhododendrons sprawling on either side, scudded into a beechwood—pillars all silver-grey, set in a ruffled mass of whispering green, swam through a sea of bracken, rippling and feathery. And all the time I was ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates
... pyramidal form. You pass a shrine, within its framework of marble pillars and a pediment, and come next to Dante's monument, a modern work, with likewise its sarcophagus, and some huge, cold images weeping and sprawling over it, and an unimpressive ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to a Person. Christians have been people believing in Jesus Christ. This abiding element has put unity into Christian history. The stream of Christian thought and progress has never been twice the same, yet for all that it has been a continuous stream and not an aimless, sprawling flood, and this unity and consistency have existed for one reason chiefly: the influence of the personality of Jesus. Folk may have been Romanists or Protestants, ritualists or Quakers, reactionaries or progressives, but still they have believed in Jesus. His personality ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... sat quiet till the bear was come within arm's length; and then he ran him through the body. This drove the bear so very savage, that he made a great spring to get at him; but the bough broke, and down he fell, and lay sprawling and howling on the ground. Fortunatus now looked around on all sides; and as he saw no more wild beasts near, he thought this would be a good time to get rid of the bear at once; so down he came, and killed him at a single blow. ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... flitches of bacon, sausages, and nets of vegetables. Agias stopped in the doorway and waited till his eyes were fairly accustomed to the fire-light. Over in a remote corner he saw a lamp gleaming, and there, sprawling on a bench, beside a table of his own, well piled with food and drink, he distinguished in solitary majesty Phaon—too exquisite to mingle with the other guests of ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... and that it is three gods,—Huitzilopochtli the god of war, Teoyaomiqui his wife, and Mictlanteuctli the god of hell. It has necklaces of alternate hearts and dead man's hands, with death's heads for a central ornament. At the bottom of the block is a strange sprawling figure, which one cannot see now, for it is the base which rests on the ground; but there are two shoulders projecting from the idol, which show plainly that it did not stand on the ground, but was supported aloft on ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... great pup he assuredly was, to be sprawling across that little sheep-dog's sandy flank. He covered pretty nearly as much space as a whole litter of her own kind would have occupied. His pink pads looked monstrous now; his timbers were quite twice the thickness you would have expected to find them; and his shapeless, ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... translation of all the excerpts. Most of the translations of Mozart's letters which have found their way into the books betray want of familiarity with the idioms and colloquialisms employed by Mozart, as well as understanding of his careless, contradictory and sprawling epistolary style. Some of the intimacy of that style the new translation seeks to preserve, but the purpose has chiefly been ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... leap after the flier, but up he went, up, up, and I after him, sharp! Further up he went, and I pursued. He laughed, fish-fashion, his big mouth sprawling way across his face as ...
— Lord Dolphin • Harriet A. Cheever
... they like it if we went over to their country and made remarks about them?" he exclaimed. "My brother went to London once and he saw people making love in public ... fellows and girls hugging each other in the street and sprawling about in the parks ... all over each other ... and no one took any notice. It wasn't decent.... How would they like it if we went over there and made ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... I took the same stage that had brought me to Jacksonville. This time I rode on the City of Alton, a better boat than the one that had brought me from La Salle to Bath; but all the conditions were the same. There was the same roistering and sprawling crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and its intemperate indulgence; the same barbaric hilarity of negroes, driven and cursed. And now many goatees, and much talk of ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... asleep. A rod away lay Danton, a sprawling heap in his blanket. Menard rose, tossed his blanket upon his bundle, and walked slowly ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... converse with the condemned without a brawl at the very door? Mother of God! what meaneth the fracas? Where is the guard? Why don't some of them jab their steel in the blasphemous ragamuffins who thus make mock of the holy offices of religion? Take that, you black, sprawling beast!" ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... hand close to Casey's jaw, and drove his right fist into his palm with a thudding smack. Casey went sprawling to the floor, and lay there loosely, with mouth agape, in perfect simulation of a man ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... down the coral banks, waddle with uncertain steps across the strip of smooth sand to be rolled over and over in their helplessness by the gentle break of the sea. They cool their panting bodies by a series of queer, sprawling marine gymnastics, swim about buoyantly for a few minutes, are tumbled on to the sand, and waddle with contented cheeps each back to its own birthplace among hundreds of highly-decorated eggs, and hundreds of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the bushes and threw themselves on the savage pair; they surrounded them, cast themselves upon them, threw them down, cast a sleeping spell upon them, and dragged them away into the depth of the dark hollow. And they left the naked bodies sprawling helplessly ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub
... by his name,) Courage! the day at length is ours; 725 And we once more, as conquerors, Have both the field and honour won: The foe is profligate, and run. I mean all such as can; for some This hand hath sent to their long home; 730 And some lie sprawling on the ground, With many a gash and bloody wound. CAESAR himself could never say He got two victories in a day, As I have done, that can say, Twice I 735 In one day, Veni, Vidi, Vici. The foe's so numerous, that we Cannot so often vincere As they perire, and yet enow Be left ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... chase at full speed. Full speed soon ended in a stand-still in such ground; it was deep, stiff clay, in which we sank over our ankles at every step, and varied our struggles by occasionally flying sprawling over the slippery roots ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... the floor. It had burnt almost to the wood and now the remnant of the wick stood in a little sprawling pool of grease white at the ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... It is that of a teaching Brother. He is a thin grizzled man of sixty, with an expression of melancholy benevolence in his rugged face. I have watched him sitting upon a bench with his arm round some little village urchin by his side, while the children from the outlying hamlets, sprawling upon a heap of stones in the sun, ate their mid-day meal of bread and cheese or buckwheat pancakes that their mothers had put into their baskets before they trudged off in the early morning. I have noticed by many signs that he is full of sympathy for the young peasants placed in ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... cock," said Jeremy, sprawling on the bed again and laughing, "don't look all that serious. Bring back your brigadier and I'll kiss him on both cheeks while you hold him! But say; suppose that doctor's one of these swabs who serve out number nine pills for shell-shock, broken ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... headforemost into the ditch! and now, spying Dilsey, who was running with all her might to gain the lumber-pile, he took after her, and catching up with her just as she reached the gin-house, placed his head in the middle of her back, and sent her sprawling on her face. Diddie and Chris had by this time regained their feet, both of them very muddy, and Chris with her face all scratched from the roots and briers in the ditch. Seeing Old Billy occupied with Dilsey, they started ...
— Diddie, Dumps, and Tot • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle
... he cried, sprawling in a chair and panting after his run, "it's time somebody caught those auto thieves. They are getting a little ...
— The Radio Boys Trailing a Voice - or, Solving a Wireless Mystery • Allen Chapman
... schoolroom there were four horses standing silent, but not "saddled and bridled," as in old nursery stories. Without head or tail, they stood on four sprawling legs—supports for two long, "shallow boxes" that had been in the schoolroom for fifty years or more. Wood was abundant in the old days, and unskilful hands had done the work; so the boxes were but clumsy specimens of carpentry, and deep enough, it seemed, to hold sand for all the ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... fire, which considerably delayed our advance, though we suffered in the loss of horses rather than of men. He was riding again now, and well in front, with Castro and myself behind him. Suddenly, after a scattering volley, I felt my horse slip, and the next instant the poor beast was sprawling on the ground with a bullet-hole in ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... till the chief said he was ready. Then, like a flash, he dropped to a low stooping posture, seized each leg of the other below the knee in a grip of iron, and straightening up with marvelous quickness and power sent Tall Bear sprawling like a frog through the ...
— The Story of Red Feather - A Tale of the American Frontier • Edward S. (Edward Sylvester) Ellis
... stationary in spite of its "new outlet." Instead of improving the soil, they persist in keeping up the pasture-lands, however depreciated they may be in value, and the lazy borough, growing away from the plain, has naturally spread riverward. It is seen from afar sprawling along the banks like a cow-herd taking a siesta by ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VIII (of X) - Continental Europe II. • Various
... the German right, and were being hurried forward. They had just driven the German rear-guard out of Chaudun, and said that the fighting was still going on at Soissons. But the only sign I saw of it were two Turcos who had followed the Germans too far. They lay sprawling in the road, and had so lately fallen that their rifles still lay under them. Three miles farther I came upon the advance line of the French army, and for the remainder of the day watched a most remarkable artillery ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... once more. I said, "Hang him, he had on TWO pair of boots!" For an hour that magician went on shuffling and pulling off boots till he had shed as many as twenty-five pair, and I was hovering on the verge of lunacy. I got my gun and stole up there. The fellow was in the midst of an acre of sprawling boots, and he had a boot in his hand, shuffling it—no, I mean POLISHING it. The mystery was explained. He hadn't been dancing. He was the "Boots" of the hotel, and was ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was on a root of gorse which cropped up at the edge of the pit. He aimed to swing himself back with all his might, depending on his grasp of the root. The root snapped short off close to the ground, and Chippy went tumbling and sprawling head-long into the pit, landing ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... figures were not soldiers. The soldiers were still. They lay down on the grass in irregular, sprawling windrows. The tanks were not in motion. There were two-wheeled carts in sight—reaching back along the invasion-route—and they were just as stationary as the men and the tanks. The horses had toppled in their ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... strove To place big stones below and big above; We made too quick work—down the fabric came; It crush'd our vitals: people call'd out shame! But we heard nothing, mute as fish we lay, And shall lie sprawling till the judgment day. From our misfortune this good moral know— Never to work too ...
— In Search Of Gravestones Old And Curious • W.T. (William Thomas) Vincent
... at the stationer's and I wrote on the photograph, in large, sprawling letters, "To YOU ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... blood, and the warm limbs quivered under his teeth. Yet not unavenged. Ulysses brooked not this, nor even in such straits did the Ithacan forget himself. For so soon as he, gorged with his feast and buried in wine, lay with bent neck sprawling huge over the cave, in his sleep vomiting gore and gobbets mixed with wine and blood, we, praying to the great gods and with parts allotted, pour at once all round him, and pierce with a sharp weapon the huge eye that lay sunk single ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... Thing was gaining upon me. There was no need for me to look behind, I knew that it was just at the back of me. I could scarcely breathe. My race had almost exhausted me; my breath came in gasps. I made one final effort and fell sprawling at Vitalis' feet. I could only ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... "Albatross" (from the way an albatross acts when sprawling on shipdeck). They laughed and poked ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... glass door, as though it had been pushed under the door, lay a paper closely folded in several laps. I picked it up and opened it. I was all in a tumult, for my heart told me whence it came. Inside was written in English, in a large, sprawling hand, such as might be from an English child of ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... in early December, they lay, these three young animals, sprawling upon the great room in Blake's house—the room that had been made for play. The gentle rays of the early-setting sun streamed in through the broad windows upon a tumbled heap of discarded playthings, and upon a floor strewn with that which might have appeared to be drifting snow ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... Fontainebleau. Narcisse had stolen the sausages of the concierge. The Master was always talking of me and of the great future for which I was destined. But when I became famous I was not to forget my little Blanquette. I see the sprawling mis-spelt words now: "Il ne fot james oublie ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... one of the crudest jabs he had ever known—flush in the mouth. Gamely he retaliated with a stinging uppercut and a right swing which, coming home on Redmond's cheek-bone, whirled him off his balance and sent him sprawling. ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... the thing on the ground at his feet. There was a movement in the scrub and Alice Marcum stood beside him. He glanced into her face. And as her eyes strayed from the sprawling figure to meet his, Endicott read in their depths that which caused his heart to race madly. She stepped toward him and suddenly both paused to listen. The girl's face turned chalk-white in the moonlight. From the direction ...
— The Texan - A Story of the Cattle Country • James B. Hendryx
... Rivers flung them into the dust and turned away. Kwong ran after him, expostulating, catching him by the coat sleeve. Rivers turned savagely. The wide road was deserted, and in a flash he brought his heavy blackwood stick across Kwong's face with a terrific blow. The coolie fell sprawling in the dust at his old master's feet, and Rivers, furious, kicked him savagely in the stomach, again and again, until the man lay still and ceased writhing. Blood gushed from his mouth, making a puddle in ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... computation. The computation, not the mail, is supposed to be in error. The vols. of SCRIBNER'S have arrived, and present a noble appearance in my house, which is not a noble structure at present. But by autumn we hope to be sprawling in our verandah, twelve feet, sir, by eighty-eight in front, and seventy-two on the flank; view of the sea and mountains, sunrise, moonrise, and the German fleet at anchor three miles away in Apia harbour. I hope some day to offer you a bowl of kava there, or a slice of a pineapple, ...
— Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 2 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... o'er a brazen arch; With squibs and crackers arm'd to throw Among the trembling crowd below. All ran to prayers, both priests and laity, To pacify this angry deity; When Jove, in pity to the town, With real thunder knock'd him down. Then what a huge delight were all in, To see the wicked varlet sprawling; They search'd his pockets on the place, And found his copper all was base; They laugh'd at such an Irish blunder, To take the noise of brass for thunder. The moral of this tale is proper, Applied to Wood's adulterate copper: Which, as he scatter'd, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... be engaged in so odious a strife with a fellow of his base conditions, and loathing longer to be made a spectacle to entertain the eyes of his foes, with one blow, which he struck him beneath the ear, so shattered the teeth and jawbone of this soon baffled coward that he laid him sprawling in the dust, with small stomach or ability to renew the contest. Then raising him on his feet, he led him bleeding and sputtering to the door, and put his staff into his hand, and bade him go use his command upon dogs and swine, but not presume himself to be ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB
... of Sophia from the melancholy reflections which she had been before indulging. We instantly quitted our seats and ran to the rescue of those who but a few moments before had been in so elevated a situation as a fashionably high Phaeton, but who were now laid low and sprawling in the Dust. "What an ample subject for reflection on the uncertain Enjoyments of this World, would not that Phaeton and the Life of Cardinal Wolsey afford a thinking Mind!" said I to Sophia as we were hastening to the field ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... been waiting. There was a lightning swing of his armed tail which, if it had reached its mark, would have filled the paw with deadly quills. Fortunately, however, the cruel barbs failed to reach their mark, for, an instant before the swing, the small bear received a cuff which sent him sprawling into the bushes, and Mother Bruin stood in the trail ...
— Followers of the Trail • Zoe Meyer
... jovial good humor sat almost perpetually enthroned. At the moment when we introduce him to the reader, however, that expression happened to be modified in consequence of his having laid him down to sleep in a sprawling manner on his back—the place as well as the position being, apparently, one of studied discomfort. His legs lay over the heel of the bowsprit, his big body reposed on a confused heap of blocks and cordage, and his ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... point of the march a lame hawker offered flowers for sale to the soldiers. As he held up his posies a Captain of Hussars by a movement of his steed sent the poor wretch sprawling and bleeding in the dust. Then from the crowd a Frenchwoman, her heart scorning fear, cried out, "You brute!" ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... that he started from his chair, seized the gun from Towser, and would certainly have shot Carlo on the spot, had not the youth sprung upon the Baronet, wrenched the gun out of his hands, and laid him sprawling on the floor. Towser ran to his master's assistance, and Carlo, without waiting for his sentence, jumped through the open window into the garden, flew across the lawn with the speed of a greyhound, and quickly put forty long miles between ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... those farmers howl, at the ludicrous sight of their companion sprawling all over the back of the black, with Phil, red-faced, struggling with all his might to keep the fellow on, and at the same time prevent himself ...
— The Circus Boys Across The Continent • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... for the poverty of her letters. She was no letter-writer. Her feelings were as cramped as her handwriting by the time she had got them down on paper; indeed, Joanna herself was wondrously expressed in that big, unformed, constricted handwriting, black yet uncertain, sprawling yet constrained, in which she recorded such facts as "Dot has calved at last," or "Broadhurst will be 61 come Monday," or—as an ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... I've no patience mit you,' and knocked him sprawling. He caught hold of the commander of the Rebel Brigade, and snatched him back over the works by main strength. Wonderful to say, he escaped unhurt, but the boys will probably not soon let him ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... approached the more became their numbers. There were many on foot and many in carts and coaches. Multi-coloured diligences were packed with people and luggage—the people often more miscellaneously packed than the luggage, clinging on behind, squashed in the middle, sprawling on the top. The drivers looked superb though dressed in thousand-times-mended black coats, the post-boys tootled on their horns, and the passengers sang or shouted to the music of accordions. Of course not all those in the coaches were ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... from her slavery with the Thenardiers, there they are upon his bed, where he can touch them, as if they were black tresses of the woman he had loved and lost. The bishop's candlesticks are lit. He is about to die, and writes in his poor, sprawling fashion to Cossette—writes to her. He fronts her always, as the hills front the dawn. He ceases, and sobs like a breaking heart. O! "She is a smile that has passed over me. I shall never see her again!" And the door dashes ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... so fast that instead of climbing that fence and balancing on the top and jumping off he jest simply seemed to hit the top rail and bounce on over, like he had been throwed out of the heart of the woods, and he fell sprawling over and over in the ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... and crying, and haunted by whispers, the little nursery governess had gradually become another woman, glorified, mysterious. I suppose a man soon becomes used to the great change, and cannot recall a time when there were no babes sprawling ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... coat tails, its nurse-maids, and its rows of people on piazzas? She could not know my tastes, and perhaps she had thought but little on the subject, and had taken her ideas from her father. He is just the man to be contented with nothing else than a vast sprawling hotel, with disdainful menials ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... his heel; his open hand caught Vahr just below the ear and knocked him sprawling. It must have been some kind of trick-blow. That or else the slim stranger ...
— The Keeper • Henry Beam Piper
... cried, and Chloe noticed that his glance flashed swiftly over the sprawling forms of the five ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... to the side of the cattle pony, and, as the horse veered away, Hal Dozier dropped limply into his arms. He lay with his limbs sprawling at odd angles beside him. His muscles seemed paralyzed, but his eyes were bright and wide, and his face ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... my cane on his sword-arm that his wrist snapped, and his sword dropped to the ground. Enraged at the sight of my own blood, which now covered my clothes in front, I was not satisfied with this, but applying my foot to his counter, two or three vigorous kicks sufficed to send him sprawling into the street. Captain Hopkins arrived just as the fracas was over, and instantly sent for a surgeon, and in the meantime I received the congratulations of all present on my victory. I learned that my man was a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... London was the place of adventures. He had lived in New York and Paris, but neither of these cities had for him the same fascination as the sprawling giant of the Thames. Paris was as stimulating and provocative as a paid mistress, but palled as quickly. In New York mysteries beckoned at every street corner, but too importunately. Neither city was sufficiently discreet for Colwyn's reticent mind. But ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... scuffle, in which blows had passed between them. The captain stuck to his prey, shaking him again and again in his drunken wrath, till Harry, roused to a passion almost equal to that of his opponent, flung him at last against the corner of the club railings, and there left his foe sprawling upon the ground, having struck his head violently against the ground as he fell. Harry passed on to his own bed, indifferent, as it was afterwards said, to the fate of his antagonist. All this occupied probably five ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... a chair awkwardly, and sat opposite her, tilting back to accommodate his sprawling length. Then he was at ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... get me out of this miserable ruin. Don't you hear them say the tiger is killed? Why do you stay sprawling here looking as ghastly as if he were grinning at ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... of pain as the hot liquor flew into his eyes, the miserable little man struck out helplessly with both his fists, and fell down between the benches. A friend who was with him, advanced to avenge his injuries, and was thrown sprawling on the floor. Yells of "Turn him out!" and "Police!" followed; people at the other end of the room jumped up excitably on their seats; the women screamed, the men shouted and swore, glasses were broken, ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... significant point,—this feeling is by no means restricted to the refined and cultured. "When working at Michelangelo," wrote a correspondent from Italy, "my upper gondolier used to see photographs and statuettes of all that man's works. Stopping one day before the Night and Dawn of S. Lorenzo, sprawling naked women, he exclaimed: 'How hideous they are!' I pressed him to explain himself. He went on: 'The ugliest man naked is handsomer than the finest woman naked. Women have crooked legs, and their sexual organs stink. I only once saw ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... floor, was hidden by a valance of white dimity, garnished with wide cotton fringe. Over this spacious place of repose, a patchwork quilt of the "rising sun" pattern displayed its gaudy rays, resembling some sprawling octopus, rather than the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... and unkempt locks. A strong pipe hanging from every lip; beer, or kummil (a spirit prepared with cummin) at every hand. Wild snatches of song, and hurried bursts of dialogue. Some are all violence and uproar; some are half dead with sleep and fatigue, their arms sprawling about the tables. Such is the inside of a ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... Donald did. For the next few weeks he was busy helping his father harvest the first crop of alfalfa grass, drying it, and storing it away in the great sprawling barn of the home ranch for winter feed. Days of hard work were succeeded by nights of heavy slumber. Life was very real. The boy was doing something—something that told—something that was of use to other persons; he had a place to fill, duties ...
— The Story of Wool • Sara Ware Bassett
... When our last man fell I made a dash for them, and directly I got to the top I cut them, and half a dozen men who were climbing after me fell sprawling to the deck. Then I cut them on the other side. I thought then that they would at once shoot me, but there was a lively argument among them and shouts of laughter, and they evidently thought that it would ...
— By Conduct and Courage • G. A. Henty
... grassy road or woodland lane. In the midst of it, sprawling on his back, for he had been pulled from his horse, lay a stout burgher, whose pockets were being rifled by a heavy-browed footpad, who from time to time, doubtless to keep him quiet, threatened his victim with a knife. On the pillion of the burgher's ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... they did than that; And what vexed him most of all Was a figure in shovel hat, Drawn in charcoal on the wall; With words that go Sprawling below, "This is Thangbrand, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... room, which housed an individual or a whole family, had the name of the owner upon it, in Chinese characters, black and sprawling, on a red label; and at one whose paper name-plate was peeling off, Angela's companion stopped. "Li Hung Sun; we makee visit," she announced, and opened the ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... formed the forest, it was ten times as thick and twice as tall as they. It was an enormous tree, its girth twice as great as a man could embrace, and evidently long ago some of its branches had been broken off and its bark scarred. With its huge ungainly limbs sprawling unsymmetrically, and its gnarled hands and fingers, it stood an aged, stern, and scornful monster among the smiling birch trees. Only the dead-looking evergreen firs dotted about in the forest, and this oak, refused to ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... of Constantinople fades from a lurid silhouette to a sooty monotone by night, it at least makes amends by day. Then the sun, shining out of a sky of intense blue, on water vividly green, catches the tiled color-chips of the sprawling town; glints on dome and minaret, and makes such a city as might ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... a played-out fraud, flabby and footy, flat and faddy. The Season's similar. Season? Bah? By sech a name it ain't worth calling. Shoulders like these and carves like those was not quite made for pantry-sprawling; But wot's the use? Trot myself hout for 'Ebrews, or some tuppenny kernel? No, not for JEAMES, if he is quite aweer of it! It's just infernal, The Vulgar Mix that calls itself Society. All shoddy slyness, And moneybags; a "blend" as might kontamernate a Ryal 'Igness, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 25, 1891 • Various
... gunners, rifles, and maxims were quick to leap upon. The German trench streamed fire, the German shells—shrapnel and high-explosive—blew gaping rents in the running line. The line staggered and flinched, halted, recovered, and went on again, leaving the ground behind it dotted with sprawling figures. The space covered by the Forward Officer's zone was flat and bare of cover clear to the German trench two hundred yards away. It was too deadly a stretch for that gallant line to cover; and before it was half-way ...
— Between the Lines • Boyd Cable
... map, England as she was in that day, sprawling in unwieldy fashion over the western half of France, we realize how much stronger she has been on "that snug little island, that right little, tight little island," and we can see that John's wickedness ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... knees and a smile of rapture surrounding his smacking lips. Near him, the three horses munched contentedly, stamping lightly now and then and whisking their tails to drive off the buzzing flies. Outside the door of the tent, Alice Mellen sat on a bench, with Carew at her side and Weldon sprawling lazily on the ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... incipient Diogenes, like others, all ignorant of his Why, his How or Whereabout, was opening his eyes to the kind Light; sprawling out his ten fingers and toes; listening, tasting, feeling; in a word, by all his Five Senses, still more by his Sixth Sense of Hunger, and a whole infinitude of inward, spiritual, half-awakened Senses, endeavoring daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange Universe where ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... The old man paused to sort out the scene; the box of a gramaphone laid out for a card table, a bottle of whiskey in the centre, two empty bottles with candles stuck in the necks for lights, a dull smudge fire, four rough fellows sprawling on the ground, one with corduroy velveteen trousers, an old white pack horse nosing windward of the smoke; one figure with sheepskin chaps to his waist, thumbs in his belt, standing erect with back to the trail; and face in light, a shaven face with a strong jaw and ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... people a nightmare; monsters akin to spiders, caterpillars, and wood-lice, grown to gigantic proportions, some with bare glaucous skins, others tufted with filthy matted hairs, whilst many had sickly limbs—dwarf legs, and shrivelled, palsied arms—sprawling around them. And some displayed horrid dropsical bellies; some had spines bossy with hideous humps, and others looked like dislocated skeletons. Mamillaria threw up living pustules, a crawling swarm of greenish tortoises, bristling hideously with ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... the wagon full of reapers, decked with ribbons and playing bag-pipes, shouting and singing with pleasure and drink, went along the white, high road, slowly drawn by six dapple-gray horses, driven by a lad in a blouse, with a rosette in his cap, Pavilly, in the midst of the sprawling women, danced like a drunken satyr, and kept the little dirty-faced boys and astonished peasants, standing staring at him open-mouthed on the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... went in to explore, and, to his farther satisfaction, found a "tank" where the water had gathered from the melting snows and in the rainy season. He tasted it and found it cool and fresh, and then, sprawling at full length, ...
— Sunset Pass - or Running the Gauntlet Through Apache Land • Charles King
... risk of hurting himself still more, he broke the fragments again in his hand. Then he began dropping the sharp pieces of glass. And in a minute he had his reward. From behind came two sharp explosions, and looking back, he saw the other motorcycle swerve and fall. The two riders went sprawling. ...
— The Belgians to the Front • Colonel James Fiske
... to remember. There were the great, square, white-painted, red-tiled houses lining both banks of the river; the picturesque groups beating their clothes on the flat steps which led down to the water; and the sprawling wooden bridge in the distance where the stream made an abrupt sweep ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... reassured her, pulling his own chair toward him with his foot, and sprawling into it with a grunt of relief. "If you'll draw me a glass of that beer of yours, I'll tell you all about it. It's not a thing for everybody to know, not to be breathed to a human being, for that matter—but you'll enjoy it, and it'll ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... were quite fresh. They had been driving all the morning; and for two hours they had been strolling up and down within a small circuit, looking at temples, or sprawling on the grass. They had eaten a good lunch before leaving the carriage, and had not had time yet to feel hungry. The weather was mild and pleasant. The sun shone brightly, without being too hot, and everything was favorable ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... adobe and massive, old and cloaked with the romance of another time; that even doors and windows, let into the thick walls, would be of another period; that somewhere there would be a trellis with a sprawling grape-vine over it; that no doubt in the yard or along the fence would ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... shouted to Alcides to keep in the centre of the channel. Of course he disobeyed. We were caught in the strong current. One moment later there was a violent bump which knocked us all off our seats and sent us sprawling in the bottom of the canoe. We had stuck fast between two rocks. The canoe, being of such great length, vibrated to and fro with the current forcing it at the side. Laden as she was with baggage, in a few moments she became filled with water, and it was only after working hard for the best ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... easily knocked over, and in an instant they were sprawling on the road, and cuffing, and pulling, and kicking, and punching with about equal success, except that the bigger boy prudently roared and howled all the time, in the hope of securing some assistance in ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... not gone why don't you come? Why did you leave me yesterday? You leave me crying—I who haven't cried for years and years, and you haven't the sense to come back within the hour, within twenty hours! This conduct is idiotic"—and a sprawling signature of the four magic letters ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... and put his shoulder to the mouldering door. It fell inward with a dull crash and as it did so the professor leaped backward with a startled cry, stumbling over a deck beam and sprawling in ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... it!" cried the first. Then they fell to blows, and some of them fell sprawling to the ground, and were kicked, the bag was snatched from the finder, and the money scattered on the floor; then they scrambled for it, as many as could get near it, laughing and cursing; while others ransacked drawers, cupboards, and shelves, and others broke ...
— Jacques Bonneval • Anne Manning
... and parry with an ill-concealed delight. Dorothy's face was impassive, expressionless. As the duke turned to mount the stairs, he stumbled clumsily across a young man coming to pay his respects to Miss Manners, and his Grace went sprawling against the wall. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... plunge in the lake, he detected one of the Indians crouching beside the canoe, and evidently tampering with its bark covering. Naked as he was, the young fellow bounded to the spot and, ere the Indian was aware of his presence, knocked him sprawling with a single blow. Like a panther the savage sprang to his feet, and, knife in hand, rushed at his assailant. Suddenly he paused, his outstretched arm fell to his side, and he stood like one petrified, ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... bureau, and snatching her own motto down, crumpled its face securely against her skirt and started for the door. Just what the motto was no one but herself knew. Sprawling in paint-brush hieroglyphics on a great flapping sheet of brown wrapping-paper, the sentiment, whatever it was, had been nailed face down to the wall for three ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... and leaped for the running-board of the car. Tom switched on the power. Just as the huge hound leaped, and his fore-paws touched the step, the car darted away and the brute was left sprawling. ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... came prancing up to us. We, as usual, made grabs at her horns and tail, and somewhat excited her temper. Now, she began to butt at us, and made us fly, right and left. Miss Susan was capsized, and sent sprawling on the deck; and Nancy, highly delighted at her victory, frisked off to the starboard side, where Mr Lukyn, with all the dignity of a first-lieutenant, was walking the deck with his glass under his arm. Nancy, either mistaking ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... started for the river. Sheathing my carbine, I took down my rope and caught him before he had gone a hundred yards. As I threw my horse on his haunches to receive the shock, the weight and momentum of the bull dragged my double-cinched saddle over my horse's head and sent me sprawling on the ground. In wrapping the loose end of the rope around the pommel of the saddle, I had given it a half hitch, and as I came to my feet my saddle and carbine were bumping merrily along after Toro. Regaining my horse, I soon overtook Tiburcio, who was attempting to turn the animal back from the ...
— A Texas Matchmaker • Andy Adams
... Newcomes he atones for this in 'Esmond,' if any atonement is needed for sprawling, which is probably only that Thackeray felt that there is nothing so elastic and sprawling as a human person, whether he be a villain or ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... I gasped, and I threw him from me sprawling on the sod. He fell, in his weariness, in an awkward and helpless mass; the knife, still in his hand, pierced him on the shoulder, and thus the injury I could not give him by my will was given him by Providence. Over on his back he turned with a plash of blood oozing ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... might never see such a splendid one,' when plong went one shot—every face went pale—r-r-r-r-r went the whole detachment, [and] the whole crowd of gentlemen and ladies turned and cut. Such a scene!—ladies, gentlemen, and vagabonds went sprawling in the mud, not shot but tripped up; and those that went down could not rise, they were trampled over.... I ran a short time straight on and did not fall, then turned down a side street, ran fifty yards and felt tolerably safe; looked for papa, did not see him; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... darted about with even greater confusion than before. Occasionally one of them, seized with a sudden impulse, would spring forward toward the nucleus of the comet with a sudden access of velocity that would fling every one of its crew from his feet, and all would lie sprawling on the floor of the car while it rushed, as it seemed, ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... through the air. The expectation of everyone was raised, while, beneath her pallor and composure, it could be seen that Mrs. Trent was deeply moved. It was evident that aesthetically she was by far the most important person present. Faull watched her, with his face sunk on his chest, sprawling as usual. ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... the glare waited the taxi, with Bill Hunt and Dennis Green sprawling on one side, their hats tilted over their faces, while on the other, Moira Morrison, in a bonnet like a huge strawberry, ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... thing was come and gone in a breath. Before Herrick could turn about, before Davis could complete his cry of horror, the clerk lay in the sand, sprawling and convulsed. ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... flowers, which are 1in. to 2in. across, are borne on slender stems, 4in. to 6in. long. They are nearly white, but have various tints, bluish reflections, with a line of blue in each petal. The leaves resemble those of the snowdrop when overgrown and turning flabby, and have a somewhat untidy and sprawling habit; they are abundantly produced from the rather small cocoon-shaped bulbs. On the whole, the plant is very ornamental when in flower, and the bloom is produced more or less for many weeks; at any rate, it is an early flower, and if it cannot be used indoors it should be extensively ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... their reach, till his turn comes, and then, whack goes one of the batter puddings against the big one's ribs, and bang goes the other into the big one's face, and, staggering, shuffling, slipping, tripping, collapsing, sprawling, down goes the big one in a miscellaneous bundle.—If my young friend, whose excellent article I have referred to, could only introduce the manly art of self-defence among the clergy, I am satisfied ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... being surgeon's work, Bass, throbbing with energy, looked about him for some useful employment. The whole of the New South Wales settlement at this time consisted of an oblong—the town of Sydney itself—on the south side of Port Jackson, a few sprawling paddocks on either side of the fang-like limbs of the harbour, some small pieces of cultivated land further west, at and beyond Parramatta, and a cultivable area to the north-west on the banks of the Hawkesbury River. A sketch-map prepared by Hunter, in 1796, illustrates ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... that they must be somewhere near the centre of the earth, the mule gave an unusually violent plunge forward, and then stopped so suddenly that poor Derrick found himself sprawling on the animal's back, with both arms clasped tightly about his neck. With this the mule began to caper and shake himself so violently that the boy was forced to loose his hold and fall to the ground, amid roars of laughter from a score of miners ...
— Derrick Sterling - A Story of the Mines • Kirk Munroe
... were sprawling on the grass, And beavers fell in showers; There was another Floorer there ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... with an air of unconcern by a blocky young man with bare red hands. The horse stood without being tied, in an apparently listless and melancholy dream. A red and white cow came out of the lane and attempted to cross the slippery sidewalk, sprawling helplessly for a moment, and then with a great effort recovered herself and went back the way she came, limping painfully, the blocky young man hastening her movements by throwing at her a piece of box lid, with the remark ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... overtook him—the dogs having already commenced biting at his hind feet. This was too much for his equanimity, so, suddenly turning round, he struck two or three of them with his fore paws, sending them sprawling to a distance. As he did so the glare of our torches dazzled his eyes, and so perplexed him that he seemed not to know what to do. Of one thing only he must have been convinced,—that he was in for a fight; and, brave ...
— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston
... Moliere are the highwater mark of French taste in this branch of decoration. In the old quarto first editions of Corneille's early plays, such as 'Le Cid' (Paris 1637), the printers used lax and sprawling combinations of flowers and fruit. These, a little better executed, were the staple of Ribou, de Luynes, Quinet, and the other Parisian booksellers who, one after another, failed to ...
— Books and Bookmen • Andrew Lang
... always would throw out a fine salmon on the bank. Toward this the cubs would start in their hunger, but the old lady, reproving them for their eagerness, would then cuff them soundly on the head, knocking them sprawling over in the water, to their very great disgust. Once in a while one of them, his ears tight to his head, would sit down in the water, lift up his nose and complain bitterly at this hard treatment. Then again he would make a half-hearted stroke at some of the fish which he could see swimming about ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... and had fastened to the end of the string a pellet of tobacco stolen from the old man's pouch. With this bait he had been fishing in the lotus pond; and a frog had swallowed it, and was now suspended high above the pebbles, sprawling in rotary motion, kicking in frantic spasms of disgust and despair. 'Kaji!' shouted ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall—green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red. Turning with an effort toward the side whence all the brightness came, in a moment two warm arms were round my neck, and a face that I could not see was pressed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... warning, a large dark shape loomed out of the mist. Smith instantly warped his planes, and the machine dived so precipitately as almost to throw him from his seat. Next moment there was a shock; he was flung headlong forward, and found himself sprawling half suffocated on a damp yielding mass, which, when he had recovered his wits, he knew to be the unthatched top ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... mystery. Might it be regret at leaving behind your preux chevaliers of California—that grand, gallant De Lara, whom, at our last interview, we saw sprawling in the road dust? You ought to feel relieved at getting rid of him, as I of my importunate suitor, the Senor Calderon. By the way, I wonder whatever became of them! Only to think of their never coming near us to say good-bye! And that ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... although he had just determined to give the Doctor a bit of his mind, felt his strength depart from him. His sentences lacked power to stand upright and fell sprawling. "No offence, Doctor, I merely wanted you to know—not so much my own views—difficulty to keep our friends together. Short—you know Tom Short—was saying to ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... still making the same sprawling movements ahead of me up the street. The sight of this infirm creature constantly in front of me, commenced to irritate me—his journey seemed endless; perhaps he had made up his mind to go to exactly the same place ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... who pleased could come there and get first-hand information; and an interpreter stood there sometimes, one of the educated younger sons of Mr. Piers, and read out to the groups from Lady Maxwell's sprawling old handwriting, ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... In one corner stood the poor captain shivering in his shirt, which was all torn to rags: with a woeful visage, scratched all over by his wife, who had by this time wrapped the counterpane about her, and sat sobbing on the side of her bed. At the other end lay the old usurer, sprawling on Miss Jenny's bed, with his flannel jacket over his shirt, and his tawny meagre limbs exposed to the air; while she held him fast by the two ears, and loaded him with execrations. When he asked what was the matter, ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... even guess, she was so greatly bewildered. But bye and bye, as she stared ahead into the black chasm with a beating heart, she began to dimly see the form of the horse Jim—his head up in the air, his ears erect and his long legs sprawling in every direction as he tumbled through space. Also, turning her head, she found that she could see the boy beside her, who had until now remained as still and ...
— Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz • L. Frank Baum.
... entreating brown eyes at her elbow, straightway forgave Toady, and released her victim so suddenly that he fell sprawling into a nest of sharp-thorned Mormon pears; but of this she was unaware, for with one swoop she gathered up the now hysterical baby, and stalked off toward the house, saying grimly, "You boys stay ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... of the situation. The men had placed the bench close to the door, which, owing to the stairs within, opened outwards; so that at the first push by the pair inside to release themselves the bench must have gone over, and sent the smokers sprawling on their faces. He whispered to her to ascend the column and ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... Hastings, sprawling comfortably in a low chair by the south window in the music room, stopped his whittling when Berne Webster came in with Judge Wilton. "Meddlesome Mike!" thought the ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... seemed to notice the young thrall when he came among them and began to refill the empty cups. The older men, sprawling on the sun-flecked grass and over the rude benches, were still drowsy from too deep soundings in too many mead horns. The four young people were talking together. They sat a little apart in the shade of some birch trees ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz
... lay on his back, sprawling with outstretched limbs in the centre of the room. He was clad only in a pink dressing gown, which covered his night clothes. There were carpet slippers on his bare feet. The doctor knelt beside him and held down the hand lamp which had stood on the table. One glance at the ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... well-housed, prudent, and moral New England lies back of her group of poets, and is voiced by them,—so America as a whole, our turbulent democracy, our self-glorification, our faith in the future, our huge mass movements, our continental spirit, our sprawling, sublime, and unkempt nature, lie back of Whitman and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... whole series of our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of Newcastle—those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais il a un certain tatillonage." If one could ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... fastened his eyes again upon the scene. Looking at things would keep him from thinking. To think was to cry out. He had learned this. His eyes, dark and heavy, fastened themselves upon the walls of the inn lost in shadows, painted with nymphs and satyrs sprawling over tapestried landscapes. He devoured their details, his heart searching in them for the mystery of Rachel and finding only a deeper emptiness—insistently naked bodies of nymphs lying like newly bathed housemaids amid stiff park sceneries. Miracles of photographic ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... order, and two figures from the corner sprang forward to seize the flyer with long clinging fingers. Their strength he had overestimated, for a violent throw of his body twisted him free, and his outstretched hands sent the two sprawling across the room. Their leader took one quick step forward, then paused as if hesitating to meet ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... Ainsley left the party sprawling flat at the foot of the rim, while he crept up to locate the position over the mine shaft. Each man had brought about a dozen small bombs and one large one packed with high explosive. Before leaving the ditch, on Ainsley's directions, each man tied his own lot in one bundle, bringing the ends ...
— Action Front • Boyd Cable (Ernest Andrew Ewart)
... Jack wandered round the little room, swinging the blind cords, and trifling with the broken-down metronome on the mantelpiece. It was this very instrument that had been upset when he sent Rosher sprawling into the fireplace; and yet, here was the same fellow talking about keeping up a correspondence. A litter of torn music lay on the top of the piano; among it a tattered hymn-book. Jack turned over the pages until he came to "Hark, hark, my ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... lion and an ox; the face too is turned away from the action of the figure, and is so badly set upon the neck, with such poverty of art and so ill a grace, that nothing worse was ever seen; his sprawling shoulders are like the two pommels of an ass' pack-saddle; his breasts and all the muscles of the body are not portrayed from a man, but from a big sack full of melons set upright against a wall. The loins seem to be modelled from a bag of lanky pumpkins; ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... but I felt it was time to leave it. I took hold of the iron handle at the back of the truck, pulled strongly with my left hand, and sprang. My feet struck the ground in two gigantic strides, and the next instant I was sprawling in the ditch, considerably shaken but unhurt. The train, my faithful ally of the night, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... settlement sprawling on both sides of an historic river should be a part of his native New England seemed at times to be a hideous dream; nor could he comprehend what had happened to him, and to the world of order and standards and religious sanctions into which he had been born. His had been a life of relinquishments. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... he was saying, 'you'll have me on my nose if you go that pace, man; you and I are more at home on deck than on slippery ground; don't send me sprawling at the very church door, ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... this moment Quidd felt a severe blow from behind, which sent him sprawling. I also received a push or a drive, and a loud laugh burst from ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... sharp drop into a small lake on one side and a swamp on the other. But the rider evidently had more caution than we generally credit to motorcyclists and made no attempt to pass us, so we were not treated to the spectacle of a man and a motorcycle turning a somersault into the lake or sprawling ...
— The Campfire Girls Go Motoring • Hildegard G. Frey
... he aroused, for some part, and the things about him began to take form. He saw that the ground in the deep shadows was cluttered with men, sprawling in every conceivable posture. Glancing narrowly into the more distant darkness, he caught occasional glimpses of visages that loomed pallid and ghostly, lit with a phosphorescent glow. These faces expressed in their lines the deep stupor of the tired soldiers. They ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... of pain and amazement, the man shot sprawling over the bank, and landed, half-stunned, in a clump of blueberry bushes. Dazed and furious, he picked himself up, passed a heavy hand across his scratched, smarting face, and turned to see the ram disappearing among the thickets above the road. His disappointment so overcame his wrath that ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... was attacked by a bully and ex-prize fighter who was hired by some of his enemies to teach him the rewards to be won from "meddling." The result was unexpected. The bully went sprawling, knocked down by a well directed blow from the undersized, bespectacled young assemblyman—and some of the gang that attempted to bring aid to the fallen also found themselves upon the floor. Roosevelt, flashing his teeth in characteristic manner, told the little knot of ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... with cheerful and childlike pleasure in both antique and modern, like Benozzo, crowding together half-naked youths and nymphs treading the grapes and scaling the trellise with Florentine magnificos in plaited skirts and starched collars, among the pines, and porticos, the sprawling children, barking dogs, peacocks sunning themselves, and partridges picking up grain, of his Pisan frescoes; yet others using the antique as mere pageant shows, allegorical mummeries, destined to amuse some Duke of Ferrara or Marquis of Mantua, ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... Colonial School's sprawling five-mile complex of buildings and tropical parks, the second student shift was headed for breakfast, while a larger part of the fourth shift moved at a more leisurely rate toward their bunks. The school's organized activities were not ...
— Legacy • James H Schmitz
... ... and the Thing moved! Tommy leaped like a madman shouting. As his feet struck the ground a mass of sold-seeming fungus gave way beneath him. He fell sprawling, but clutching the gun fast. The spreading beam of the flashlight showed him Evelyn turning, her face filled with a wakening horror—the horror of one released from the fascination of a snake. She ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... enraged at any toleration being extended to Hypatia, refused to let the youth enter the archbishop's house, and then struck him full in the face. The blow was intolerable, and in an instant Peter's long legs were sprawling on the pavement, while he bellowed like a bull to all the monks that stood by, "Seize him! The traitor! The heretic! He holds communion with heathens! And he was in ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... therefore, the circumstances in all their sprawling complexity, the overt act which signalizes them, the stereotyped bulletin which publishes the signal, and the meaning that the reader himself injects, after he has derived that meaning from the experience which directly ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the scarlet geraniums in the plaster vases on the wall of the grandest of the mansions had done blooming, and beyond scarlet geraniums on the wall the horticultural taste of Les Fontaines had never risen. The old cottages, with heavy thatched roofs and curious attic windows, with fruit trees sprawling over the walls, and orchards in the rear, were better than the new villas; but even these lacked the neatness and picturesque beauty of an English cottage in a pastoral landscape. There was a shabby dustiness, ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... from his grasp a second time, she caught him a stinging buffet on the ducal cheek which—so greatly did it take him by surprise—all but sent him sprawling. ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... twisted limbs. Why had they not left him in the forest, where there was no mirror to tell him how loathsome he was? Why had his father not killed him, rather than sell him to his shame? The hot tears poured down his cheeks, and he tore the white rose to pieces. The sprawling monster did the same, and scattered the faint petals in the air. It grovelled on the ground, and, when he looked at it, it watched him with a face drawn with pain. He crept away, lest he should see it, and covered his eyes with his hands. ...
— A House of Pomegranates • Oscar Wilde
... the other, and struck out awkwardly. He wanted to hit Joe on the nose, but the boy dodged with ease, and Sam Cullum fell sprawling over ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... little Gerard's little mole; but she could not stop there; she presently had him sprawling on her lap, and kissed his back all over again and again, and seemed to worry him as wolf a lamb; Catherine looking on and smiling. She had seen a good many of these ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... then as it is now)—there was the man chattering and ogling his best, when who should come up but Gus and I? And in the twinkling of a pegpost, as Lord Duberley says, my gentleman was seized by the collar of his coat and found himself sprawling under a stand of hackney-coaches; where all the watermen were grinning at him. The best of it was, he left his head of hair and whiskers in my hand: but Mary said, "Don't be hard upon him, Samuel; it's ...
— The History of Samuel Titmarsh - and the Great Hoggarty Diamond • William Makepeace Thackeray
... them like a flash of fire; no time for anything but dodging, and the pilot threw his craft wildly aside with a swerve that sent the men sprawling against a stanchion. Then up and back, where the other had turned ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... in one or two places behind Outpost craters. There were spots where the top of the parapet was not of sufficient thickness to keep out a rifle bullet. And it was just by one of these spots that the Company Commander, going round one night, suddenly stumbled on something that lay sprawling at the bottom of the trench—an unmistakable something. It lay half on the fire step and half off, midway between two saps, and the head sagged back helplessly. He switched on his torch, and having looked ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... clerk now brought in a batch of duplicate certificates for the Commissioner to sign. As he traced his sprawling signature, "Hollis Summerfield, Comr. Genl. Land Office," on each one, the chief clerk stood, deftly removing them ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... this day. Uncle Prudent and Phil Evans were left entirely to themselves. They hardly noticed Frycollin sprawling at full length in the bow, keeping his eyes shut so that he could see nothing. And they were not attacked by vertigo, as might have been expected. There was no guiding mark, and there was nothing to cause the vertigo, ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... the market-place and gave himself up to the fat sergeant. As they reached the outskirts of the village a sorry camel came with a sprawling gallop after them, and swaying and rolling above it was Yusef, the drunken ghaffir, his naboot of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... drifting like a heavy current. The women are seated, by church instinct, all together on the left, with perhaps an odd man at the end of a row, beside his wife. On the right, sprawling in the benches, are several groups of bersaglieri, in grey uniforms and slanting cock's-feather hats; then peasants, fishermen, and an odd couple or so of brazen girls taking their places ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... own drapery before, fell suddenly prostrate in the door-way that connected the chapel with the abbey, and was instantaneously buried under a pyramid of ghostly carcasses, that fell over him and each other, and lay a rolling chaos of animated rotundities, sprawling and bawling in unseemly disarray, and sending forth the names of all the saints in and out of heaven, amidst the clashing of swords, the ringing of bucklers, the clattering of helmets, the twanging of bow-strings, the whizzing of arrows, the screams of women, ...
— Maid Marian • Thomas Love Peacock
... Chinaman, who, being a great coward, immediately turned about and fled. But Charlie was upon him in a moment, and with the leg of pork dealt him a blow on the back of the head, which sent him sprawling on the ground. A knife fell from his hand and Charlie at once seized it. The woman, seeing what had befallen her husband, scrambled to her feet and toddled to him shouting, 'Foreigners!' as she went. To prevent her being ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... warning there came the roaring rush of great wings beating the air just above him. Powell tried to dive for cover, but he was too late. A slender snaky tentacle came lashing down and struck his shoulder with a force that sent him sprawling forward upon his face. Before he could rise, two of the tentacles twined around him, and he was jerked up into the air like a wood-grub captured by a ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... the rush from the direction of the village green came round the corner. The first to appear was the proprietor of the cocoanut shy, a burly man in a blue jersey. He was astonished to see the lane empty save for three men sprawling absurdly on the ground. And then something happened to his rear-most foot, and he went headlong and rolled sideways just in time to graze the feet of his brother and partner, following headlong. The two were then kicked, knelt on, fallen over, and cursed by quite ...
— The Invisible Man • H. G. Wells
... high up on a pile of shabby furniture on a moving van, mopped a shining black face with the end of a very dirty undershirt sleeve. A boy came wavering along on a bicycle, swerved in to the curbing across the street, stopped, got off and went in to the Baptist Seminary, leaving the bicycle sprawling in the gutter. An old woman came out of nowhere; he heard her uncertain steps before he saw her as she approached him; the wide pavement the moment before had been entirely deserted. She walked as though she had no definite ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... latter gave a convulsive spring forward. But his driver had not taken into consideration that the farm-wagon was the stronger of the two vehicles, and that in any collision the buggy must come off second best. So it happened that a wheel of the buggy was broken, and the driver, in the shock, thrown sprawling into a puddle on the other side of the road. The wagon suffered no damage, but the old horse, terrified, set off at a rapid pace. Herbert looked back to see if the stranger was injured, but seeing that he had already picked himself up unwounded, but decidedly dirty, he concluded ...
— Try and Trust • Horatio Alger
... such a wipe with my cane on his sword-arm that his wrist snapped, and his sword dropped to the ground. Enraged at the sight of my own blood, which now covered my clothes in front, I was not satisfied with this, but applying my foot to his counter, two or three vigorous kicks sufficed to send him sprawling into the street. Captain Hopkins arrived just as the fracas was over, and instantly sent for a surgeon, and in the meantime I received the congratulations of all present on my victory. I learned that my man was a certain Don Carlos Alvarez, a broken down hidalgo, who had formerly ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... limbs quivered under his teeth. Yet not unavenged. Ulysses brooked not this, nor even in such straits did the Ithacan forget himself. For so soon as he, gorged with his feast and buried in wine, lay with bent neck sprawling huge over the cave, in his sleep vomiting gore and gobbets mixed with wine and blood, we, praying to the great gods and with parts allotted, pour at once all round him, and pierce with a sharp weapon the huge eye that lay sunk single under his savage brow, in fashion of an Argolic ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... missive into my pocket and resumed a study of the immediate landscape. It had not changed as we progressed: ocean, sand, low dunes crowned with impenetrable tangles of wild bay, sparkleberry, and live-oak, with here and there a weather-twisted palmetto sprawling, and here and there the battered blades of cactus and Spanish-bayonet thrust menacingly forward; and over all the vultures, sailing, sailing—some mere circling motes lost in the blue above, some sheering the earth so close that their swiftly sweeping shadows slanted continually ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... across the trail. It was a small thing that a horse might ordinarily take in his natural stride without noticing its presence; but Werper's horse was jaded, his feet were heavy with weariness, and as the branch caught between his front legs he stumbled, was unable to recover himself, and went down, sprawling in the trail. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sailing—or punting. The picture of that London cad sprawling in the water, which my approval had created in his mind, had done it. And it was early and late too (there were few visitors that month); down by the Weir below the lock as far as Cliveden; up the backwater to the Mill—William stretched beside me while ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... concert hall. Everything seemed to sweep down on her to tear it out from under her cape. If one had that, the world became one's enemy; people, buildings, wagons, cars, rushed at one to crush it under, to make one let go of it. Thea glared round her at the crowds, the ugly, sprawling streets, the long lines of lights, and she was not crying now. Her eyes were brighter than even Harsanyi had ever seen them. All these things and people were no longer remote and negligible; they had to be met, they were lined up against her, they were there to take something from her. Very well; ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... the great piano sprawling over it; and in front of this, rows and rows and rows—and rows upon ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... senseless lie. The whole monument is one wearisome aggregation of that species of ornamental flourish, which, when it is done with a pen, is called penmanship, and when done with a chisel, should be called chiselmanship; the subject of it being chiefly fat-limbed boys sprawling on dolphins, dolphins incapable of swimming, and dragged along the sea ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... Emmy's—their shrill voices with her tender ringing tones; their attitudes and their elbows and their starch, with her humble soft movements and modest graces. Poor Swartz was seated in a place where Emmy had been accustomed to sit. Her bejewelled hands lay sprawling in her amber satin lap. Her tags and ear-rings twinkled, and her big eyes rolled about. She was doing nothing with perfect contentment, and thinking herself charming. Anything so becoming as the satin the sisters ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... set down so you can ask me sumpin'? I'll do dat! Of course I will! (He proceeded to do so—wiping his nose on his sleeve and sprawling down on the doorsill). My pappy name George, black George they call him in slavery time, 'cause dere was a small yallow slave on de place, named George. My mammy name Ca'line. My pappy b'long to de McNeals and my mammy b'long to Marse Joe Beard. His wife was ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves • Works Projects Administration
... but Dicey's cup happened to be at his lips at the moment, and was quite full. The effect on him was unfortunate. He was thrown violently on his back, and the tea poured over his face and drenched his hair as he lay sprawling on the floor. The steward saved himself by dropping the bread-tray and grasping the handle of the cabin door. So violent was the shock that the ship's ...
— Fast in the Ice - Adventures in the Polar Regions • R.M. Ballantyne
... Calumet. The latter became aware of the boy's presence when the latter seized his left hand from behind, and he turned with a snarl, his six-shooter half drawn, to confront the boy, whose grip on the hand had not been loosened. Calumet drew the hand fiercely away, overturning Bob so that he fell sprawling into the dust at his feet. The youngster was up again before Betty and Malcolm could reach him, hobbling toward Calumet, his thin face working from excitement, his big eyes alight over the discovery he ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... are in a grave that mine hands hollowed, for truly hath it been said that the child of man maketh his own path evil;" and her beautiful voice quivered, and broke in a note as soft as any wood-bird's. Suddenly her eye fell upon the sprawling frame of Billali, and she seemed to ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... withal, the Piece is crude in parts, and far enough from perfect. Our good painter has yet several things to learn, and to unlearn. His brush is not always of the finest; and dashes about, sometimes, in a recognizably sprawling way: but it hits many a feature with decisive accuracy and felicity; and on the palette, as usual, lie the richest colors. A grand merit, too, is the brevity of everything; by no means a spontaneous, or ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... of Celestial mythology. Then came more pagodas, and companies of standard-bearers in lavender tunics, red sashes, green and orange leggings and slippers; more and more splendid banners, painted with dragons sprawling in distressed attitudes; litters containing minor gods and the paraphernalia they were accustomed to need on a journey like this; more litters bearing Chinese orchestras, gongs going at full blast, fiddles squeaking, drums rumbling, trumpets shrieking, cymbals ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... walls. Presently there was a scarcely perceptible click, as of a door closing, and Brother Andrew came from the direction of the Superior's room. John called to him and he stepped up on tip-toe, for the monk hates noise as an evil spirit. The sprawling features of the big fellow ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... was fading into evening as the car went over the first ridge and dropped out of sight of Clair and the sprawling hospital in which Ruth Fielding ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson
... her violently. She was also escorted by gaudy female relatives, by looking at whom one could anticipate the awful possibilities of her maturity. As for the bridegroom, he was a Hebrew of the florid type. His waistcoat was protuberant; he had a red face with red whiskers sprawling all over it; he wore flash jewellery; his hair shone with pomatum; there was that in his bearing which indicated that he followed some sordid calling, such as pawnbroking, or the backing of horses ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... yacht's forward progress was checked with an abruptness that threatened to drag the bitts out of her as the strain of the line, with the plunging, struggling monster at the end of it, was suddenly thrown upon them, while the shock sent every individual, fore and aft, sprawling upon the deck, to the uproarious and most undignified amusement of the young Inca, and the mortal terror of his faithful subjects. Then, as all hands scrambled to their feet again and instinctively regained possession of their weapons, the hooked ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... Quest. Suddenly the latter sprang up, seized him by the leg and sent him sprawling. The gun fell from his hand. Quest picked it up and held it firmly out, covering both men. Gallagher was on his knees, groping for his ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... kill a man-child with ease; the greater the destiny, the weaker the immediate self-protection may be. And to me it seems that your complete and perfect imperialism, ruled by Germans for Germans, is in its scope and outlook a more antiquated and smaller and less noble thing than these sprawling emergent giant democracies of the West that struggle so ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... strength leached out, it is well worth saving for the humus still in it, and it may be dug in in the vegetable garden, or placed in a large flat pile about two feet high while still loosely spread. Melons, squash, pumpkins or similar sprawling vines may be grown in it. For each plant dump about one-half a wheelbarrow of good soil on the top, level and sow in it, or set out plants, if the seedlings are started elsewhere. The roots of these plants like the loose run the open manure allows. In ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... their own farms and the manufacture of their own wives; the women were in primitive short gowns and petticoats, with the venerable sun-bonnets of Holland origin. The lower part of the valley was cut up into small farms, each consisting of a little meadow and corn-field; an orchard of sprawling, gnarled apple-trees, and a garden, where the rose, the marigold, and the hollyhock were permitted to skirt the domains of the capacious cabbage, the aspiring pea, and the portly pumpkin. Each had its prolific little mansion teeming with children; with an old hat nailed against ...
— Wolfert's Roost and Miscellanies • Washington Irving
... Sprawling over the table with arrested pen, he glanced out of the door, and in that frame of his vision he saw all the stars flying upwards between the teakwood jambs on a black sky. The whole lot took flight together and disappeared, leaving only a blackness flecked with white flashes, for the sea ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... we six, then," said Much. He tumbled off his horse, and the other three of them did the like; and then strode over to where Robin stood. "Release him," said the miller, determinedly; and he promptly knocked two of the foresters sprawling. ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick
... hand in a clutch of steel, and, before the astonished boy could offer any resistance, had wrenched it over in such a manner that, without exactly knowing what had occurred, Roy found himself sprawling on his back. ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... less sympathizing made their way to the small boats which waited below. The individual in question had come alongside in a handsome barge, rowed by a dozen stout blacks, in the undress uniform of the Zouaves. These men, well drilled and disciplined, seemed of a different sort from the sprawling, screaming creatures in the other boats, and their bright red caps and white tunics became them well. But he who now claimed my attention was of British birth and military profession. His face was ardent, his pantaloons were of white flannel, his expression of countenance was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 19, May, 1859 • Various
... cried, when at length Farrington remained sprawling upon the floor. "Get up if you can, ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... bow window at the mention of Plum Corner—he could just see the flutter of Amaryllis' dress in the distance between the trees. That part of the garden was called Plum Corner because of a famous plum tree—the one that had not been pruned and was sprawling about the wall. ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... of victory, Jack, desirous of a share in the glory of conquest, ran close to the creature, firing his pistol into its side, when he was sent sprawling over and over by a movement of its tail, excited to a last galvanic ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... mate if he had heard anything, when my eyes fell suddenly upon something which projected from under the table. It was the leg of a man—a leg with a long sea-boot upon it. I stooped, and there was a figure sprawling upon his face, his arms thrown forward and his body twisted. One glance told me that it was Armstrong, the first officer, and a second that he was a dead man. For a few moments I stood gasping. Then I rushed on to the deck, called Allardyce ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a hotel, was actually painted, and on some of the shanties and rude huts of the newly arrived settlers were signs giving notice of hardware, groceries, and other commodities for sale within. On one structure, partly made of sawed boards and partly of canvas, was painted in sprawling letters, ...
— The Boy Settlers - A Story of Early Times in Kansas • Noah Brooks
... was broad daylight. The noise brought my friends hurrying into the apartment, and we found, sprawling over my improvised bed, the dismayed valet, who, while bringing me my morning cup of tea, had tripped over this obstacle in the middle of the floor, and fallen on his stomach, spilling, in spite of himself, my breakfast ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Mr. Pound, taking a limp, sprawling arm and lifting the culprit to his feet. "Tell me, who was the tempter who brought ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... four dead horses lay there sprawling in the road, three or four dead men in a trim row at one side of it, and a little back, down the hill. All but one were cavalrymen belonging to the Federal advance. One was a quartermaster. The general commanding the division and the colonel commanding the brigade, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... at the same moment the bedroom door was flung open, and her brother, who had been hastily fetched by the neighbours on the other side, burst into the room and with one hearty blow sent Mr. Grummit sprawling. ...
— Captains All and Others • W.W. Jacobs
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