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More "Squat" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... painted ceiling. The intricate perforations of the lamp were inset with colored glass, and the result was a subdued and warm illumination. Odd-looking oriental vessels, long-necked jars, jugs with tenuous spouts and squat bowls possessing engraved and figured covers emerged from the shadows of niches. A low divan with gaily colored mattresses extended from the door around one corner of the room where it terminated beside ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf 185 He strikes on, only when ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... tide to get a boat off sharp, and a long shelving run of sandy shingle before we reach the sea; for all the boats are on the upper strand of the beach, above the last high-water mark, and the flow of the tide is scarcely an hour old. There is a short squat cobble, flat-bottomed and of intolerable weight, down near the waters, and its owner makes for it. Another man drives him out seawards, against the constant lift of breaking waves, large enough to be troublesome, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... Margate by-and-by. And oh! my boy cousins and my two greatest chums at school are staying with me now at The Hollies. The girls' names are Amelia and Rebecca Perkins. Oh, they're fine! Do give me room to squat between you girls. You are ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... This common, squat Virgin, fat and pudgy, was simply a good German girl, well-dressed and squarely seated, but she could never have been the ecstatic Mother of God! Then these kneeling and standing men were not in prayer; there was no devotion in this picture; the personages ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... myself, started at seven. We had four superb mules, and two good pack-horses, a large tent, and a plentiful supply of camping blankets. I put on all my own warm clothes, as well as most of those which had been lent to me, which gave me the squat, padded, look of a puffin or Esquimaux, but all, and more were needed long before we reached the top. The mules were beyond all praise. They went up the most severe ascent I have ever seen, climbing steadily for nine hours, without a touch of the spur, and after twenty-four ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... haven't any title to this land you've elected to occupy, although I created it. You see, I'm sort of lord of creation around here. My people call me 'The Laird of Tyee,' and nobody but a stranger would have had the courage to squat on the Sawdust Pile without consulting me. What's your idea about ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... our Mongol neighbors began to pay their formal calls. A picturesque fellow, blazing with color, would dash up to our tent at a full gallop, slide off and hobble his pony almost in a single motion. With a "sai bina" of greeting he would squat in the door, produce his bottle of snuff and offer us a pinch. There was a quiet dignity about these plains dwellers which was wonderfully appealing. They were seldom unduly curious, and when we indicated that the visit was at an end, they left ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... castle is flanked by two squat towers. They are circular and battlemented, and between them upon a parapet, which is higher than the towers themselves, appears the motto of the Cliffords, 'Desormais' (hereafter), in open stone letters. ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... and whisper to one another when they play upon its summit that a great giant in golden armour lies buried in a stone vault underneath. But if only they knew the real truth, they would say instead that that big, ungainly, overgrown grave covers the remains of a short, squat, dwarfish chieftain, akin in shape and feature to the Lapps and Finns, and about as much unlike a giant as human nature could easily manage. It maybe regarded as a general truth of history that the greatest men don't by any means always get the ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... was, a town of pretence, if such a word can be applied to anything Spanish, where things either are or are not, and there's an end. It was as drab as the landscape, as weatherworn and austere; but it had a squat officer sitting at the receipt of custom, which Sahagun had not, and a file of anxious peasants before him, bargaining for their ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... now the natives. The squat and squalid huts, stuck down upon the earth without any pretence of raised foundation, and jumbled together, corner to side, back to front, any way, as if some wind had blown them there, did not improve on acquaintance. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... not have noticed this squat vulgarism, had not the pen blazoned its own depravity by lifting it out of newspapers into bound volumes. The speech and page of every one, who would not be italicized for lingual looseness, should be forever closed against a phrase so shocking to taste, a phrase, we are sorry to say, ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert
... east wing of the squat adobe house. About midnight there was a vigorous and persistent shaking ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... shipping, especially the export of coal and iron. Until the opening of the Forth bridge, its commodious harbour was the northern station of the ferry across the firth from Granton, 5 m. south. The parish church, dating from 1594, is a plain structure, with a squat tower rising in two tiers from the centre of the roof. The public buildings include two hospitals, a town-hall, music hall, library and reading room and science institute. On the rocks forming the western end of the harbour stands Rossend Castle, where the amorous French poet Chastelard ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... briskly at first, swinging his stick and watching his shadow, a squat, incredibly agitated silhouette in the golden dust. But gradually and insensibly the peaceful influences of that still and lovely hour tempered his heart's impatience; and he found himself walking at a pace more leisurely. After all, there was no hurry; he was unwearied, ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... and far away to the eastward rose the first straggling cabins of the town. Creeping toward them down the road rolled a dark squat figure. It grew and spread slowly on the horizon until it became a fat old black woman, hooded and aproned, with great round hips and massive bosom. Her face was heavy and homely until she looked up and lifted the drooping cheeks, and then ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... whispers from the wind, 'Mid glories of the hollowed night, To storm-swept vales and mounts we haste, And, in monastic halls we see, Above a greenish gyrus rind, The flick'ring flames of a light, Beneath whose subtle, shadowed waste Squat men and women that would flee The ghastly words from Vellum told, Who pluck their eyes and pull their hair,— Beneath their feet there writhes a worm! As bludgeons smite a leering soul. And when a wench that Satan sold To some old seer, whose head is bare, And oily snakes in cauldrons ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... so abruptly to the wholesome nip of the outside air, were giving me a faintness which this moral check lessened my power to combat. Von Brning's face wore a sneering smile that I winced under; and, turning, I found another pair of eyes fixed on me, those of Herr Bhme, whose squat figure had appeared at a pair of folding doors leading to an adjoining room. Napkin in hand, he was taking in the scene before him with fat benevolence, but exceeding shrewdness. I instantly noticed a faint red weal relieving the ivory of his bald head; and I had suffered too often in the ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... in a garden three Moors sat at tea. A carpet was spread, and I caught a glimpse of the copper kettle, the squat charcoal brazier tended by a slave, the quaint little coffer filled no doubt with fine green tea, the porcelain dish of cakes. It was a quite pleasing picture, at which, had courtesy permitted, I would have enjoyed more than a ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... day on the Mississip, And her day come at last— The Movastar was a better boat, But the Belle she wouldn't be passed. And so come tearin' along that night— The oldest craft on the line, With a nigger squat on her safety valve, And her furnace ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... the whole of the valley, including the park, with its tall trees marking the horizon; and, beyond, a depression in a wood surmounting a hill, at a distance of some seven or eight hundred yards, stood another tower, squat and in ruins, covered with ivy ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... us as long as we want to be hid. Come, don't squat here, or we'll let the rascals slip, ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... was sitting on the side of the stretcher, and Jim Thorpe, his foreman, stood leaning against the table. McLagan's Irish face, his squat figure and powerful head were a combination suggesting tremendous energy and determination, rather than any great mental power, and in this he strongly contrasted with the refined, thoughtful ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... peregrination along the main street. There along the wall squat dozens of coolies, with their carrying arrangement, sitting on their heels, and basking in the sun. Further on, one of them is just loading a huge earthenware vase full of the native beverage. The weight must be something enormous. Yet see how quickly ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... "Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve, Assaying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list, ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... He sends word of it to Sir Louis by an orderly who can be trusted to talk to any one he meets on the way. I leave by the back way at ten forty-five. However, here's a chance for you to practise deaf-and-dumb drill. There's some one coming. Squat down in that corner. Look meek and miserable. That's the stuff. Answer the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... the fat brewer happened for once not to be resting his tired body in sleep after the fatigues of the day, he would squat down near Listing, who had been a wanderer and a vagabond. He would listen with many a shake of the head to the stories Listing related of his life on the roads, especially of the nights the fine ones, in which one lay on the dry grass beneath the twinkling ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... logs and canvas sprawled between the stream and a curving mountain-side. The day was still and clear, hence vertical pencil-markings of blue smoke hung over the roofs; against the white background squat dwellings stood out distinctly, like diminutive dolls' houses. Upon closer approach the river shore was seen to be lined with scows and rowboats; a stern- wheeled river steamer lay moored abreast of the town. Above it a valley broke through from the north, out of which poured ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... 540 feet on each side. In the centre of this, on a raised platform, stands the tomb itself, a square measuring 69 feet on each side. It is two stories in height, and at each angle is an octagonal tower, surmounted by an open pavilion. The towers, however, are rather squat in proportion, and the general design of the building very far from being so pleasing as that of many less pretentious tombs in the neighbourhood. Had it, indeed, been built in red sandstone, or even with an inlay of white marble like that ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... yet given any sign of having retrieved the use of his senses. And here Mr. Fillet could not help contemplating, with surprise, the strange figure and accoutrements of his patient, who seemed in age to be turned of fifty. His stature was below the middle size; he was thick, squat, and brawny, with a small protuberance on one shoulder, and a prominent belly, which, in consequence of the water he had swallowed, now strutted beyond its usual dimensions. His forehead was remarkably convex, and so very low, that his black bushy hair descended ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... physique was singing in a shrill, nasal voice a pathetic ballad. She sang without expression, bringing her hands with monotonous gestures alternately to her breast. Her squat, matronly figure, beef from the heels up, looked singularly absurd in her short skirt. Her face was excessively over-painted, her mouth good-naturedly large, and her eyes out of their slit-like lids ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... length, and so appreciably curved that the owner was evidently in a condition of transition from the semi-quadrupedal crouch of the ape to the erect attitude of man. The Ape-Man, in other words, was a heavy, squat, powerful, bestial-looking animal; of small stature, but above the pygmy standard; erect in posture, but with clear traces of the proneness of his ancestor; far removed from the highest ape in brainpower, but almost equally far removed from ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... is populous, chiefly with shoeless inhabitants, monotonously flat, few buildings for dread of earthquake being over one story, even the national palace and cathedral sitting low and squat. An elevation of five thousand feet gives it a pleasant June weather, but life moves with a drowsy, self-contented air. Its people are far more obliging than the average of Mexico and have little or none of the latter's sulkiness or half-insolence. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... begin. A thousand thickets, thro each opening glen, Pour forth their hunters to the chase of men; Trunks of huge trees, and rocks and ravines lend Unnumber'd batteries and their files defend; They fire, they squat, they rise, advance and fly, And yells and groans alternate rend the sky. The well aim'd hatchet cleaves the helmless head, Mute showers of arrows and loud storms of lead Rain thick from hands unseen, and sudden fling A deep confusion thro ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... rather more than a yard apart, and those yielding black grapes are trained, as a rule, up tall stakes, although some few are trained espalier fashion. Women dexterously detach the bunches with pruning-knives and throw them into the seilles—small squat buckets with wooden handles—the contents of which are emptied from time to time into baskets—the counterpart of the chiffonnier's hotte, and coated with pitch inside so as to close all the crevices of ...
— Facts About Champagne and Other Sparkling Wines • Henry Vizetelly
... the pole, except that he measured a shovel's length from it before beginning, nor was it his purpose to dig deep. Some dozen or so of expert strokes sufficed. Then, he stopped, looked down into the cavity, bent over it, and took out what appeared to be an ordinary case-bottle: one of those squat, high-shouldered, short-necked glass bottles which the Dutchman is said to keep his Courage in. As soon as he had done this, he turned off his lantern, and they could hear that he was filling up the hole in the dark. The ashes being easily moved by a skilful hand, the spies took this as a hint ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... programme consisted in a little darkey coming in front of our cell with a rudely constructed barber's chair. The cell door opened, and an officer said to me, as if he would hit me with a club the next moment, "Git out of there." I went out. Pointing to the barber's chair, he said, "Squat yourself in that chair." I sat down. "Throw back your head." I laid it back. It was not long before my raven mustache was off, and my hair cut rather uncomfortably short for fly time. After this tonsorial artist had finished his work then came the ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... fir woods they gave the country a singularly sombre aspect. There was little variation in the scenery all the way to Upsala. In some places, the soil appeared to be rich and under good cultivation; here the red villages were more frequent, and squat church-towers showed themselves in the distance. In other places, we had but the rough hills, or rather knobs of gray gneiss, whose masses were covered with yellow moss, and the straggling fir forests. We met but few country teams on the road; nobody was to be seen about ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... days, and the "dandies" whom he and his fellow caricaturists satirized and ridiculed were the sham "Corinthians" of his time. Apart from the idea of caricature they must have been queer fellows—these men with the large eye-glasses, squat broad-brimmed hats, huge cravats and collars, cauliflower frills, tight coats, short bell-shaped trousers, and well-spurred Wellington boots! In one of the satires of the time (which I take to be Robert's) we see five of them preparing for conquest in a hairdresser's shop; ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... chamber about seven feet deep and four feet square lay open to us. At one side of this was a squat, brass-bound wooden box, the lid of which was hinged upwards, with this curious old-fashioned key projecting from the lock. It was furred outside by a thick layer of dust, and damp and worms had eaten through the wood, so that a crop of livid fungi was growing on the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... many chickens together, an' the ground sickens like, an' you get a squat, an' your chickens die. 'Same way, you crowd Pharisees all in one place—they don't die, but Flesh an' Blood walkin' among 'em is apt to sick up an' pine off. They don't mean it, an' Flesh an' Blood don't know it, but that's the truth—as I've ...
— Puck of Pook's Hill • Rudyard Kipling
... in our noses, and put a ring in it—do you see my ring? How do you think I like a hole made in my nose, as if two holes were not enough! Then they tie a rope to the ring, and lead us about all day long just where they please, without a with your leave, or by your leave! And they make us squat down in the mud, and put a great load on our backs, enough to crush a whipper-snapper like you. Groan as we may, it's all of no use, they do what they choose. Man! the very name makes me shiver. Get out, and ...
— The Talking Thrush - and Other Tales from India • William Crooke
... with whole birds spitted in the centres; and there was an offensive array of blue and green and yellow glasses on the shore, through which you were expected to look at the Falls gratis. They missed the simple dignity of the blanching Indian maids, who used to squat about on the grass, with their laps full of moccasins and pin-cushions. But, as of old, the photographer came out of his saloon, and invited them to pose for a family group; representing that the light and the spray were singularly propitious, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... smother. Smothe, vapor. Snaw, snow. Snell, bitter. Snooded, bound up with a fillet. Snool, cringe. Solan, gannet. Soote, sweet. Souter, cobbler. Spak, spoke. Spean, wean. Speel, climb. Spier, ask, inquire. Spraing, stripe. Sprattle, scramble. Spreckled, speckled. Spryte, spirit. Squattle, squat. Stacher, stagger, totter. Stane, stone. Steer, stir. Steyned, stained. Stibble, stubble. Still, ever. Stirk, young steer. Stole, robe. Stonen, stony. Stote, stout. Stoure, dust, struggle. Stown, stolen. Strang, strong. Strath, river-valley. Strathspeys, dances for two persons. Straughte, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... devoid of everything save a couple of mattresses, a rickety wooden table, a chair or two, and a heap of Passover cakes, as the unloveliness of the three women who stood there, awkward and flushing before their important visitor. The wife-and-mother was dwarfed and black-wigged, the daughters were squat, with tallow-coloured round faces, vaguely suggestive of Caucasian peasants, while the sightless eye of the elder lent ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... portal. Despite the fact that the bride was considered the ugliest girl in the place, she had been duly "robbed" by her bold or possibly blind lover—her features were providentially veiled beneath her nuptial flammeum, and of her squat figure little could be discerned under the gorgeous accoutrements of the occasion. She was ablaze with ornaments and embroidery of gold, on neck and shoulders and wrist; a wide lace collar fell over a bodice of purple ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... she pleased. Every half-hour or so she would squat on the floor, pull out an intensely black clay pipe, and indulge in a smoke. I love smoking, but I never failed to put as much distance as possible between myself and the rank black fumes which poured with so much ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... they're written on. Haven't squatters dispossessed the Spaniards all over California? Didn't they take the San Antonio ranch in Oakland, defend it with cannon, and put old Peralta in jail for bothering them with his claims of ownership?" He laughed. "It's a rare joke, this land business. If we squat on the Rincon, who'll dispossess us? ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind—the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... King M'tesa, Mackay always saw many boys who used to drive away the flies from the King's face with fans, carry stools for the chiefs and visitors to squat upon, run messages and make themselves generally useful. Most of these boys were the sons of chiefs. When they were not occupied with some errand, they would lounge about playing games with one another in the open space just by the ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews
... rises, Bill Carmody is discovered fitting in a rocker by the stove, reading a newspaper and smoking a blackened clay pipe. He is a man of fifty, heavy-set and round-shouldered, with long muscular arms and swollen-veined, hairy hands. His face is bony and ponderous; his nose short and squat; his mouth large, thick-lipped and harsh; his complexion mottled—red, purple-streaked, and freckled; his hair, short and stubby with a bald spot on the crown. The expression of his small, blue eyes is one of selfish cunning. ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... Come and squat by the fire. I'm tired of the table, and prefer the floor for a change. Please don't expect anything extra blood-curdling, for you won't get it, unless you'd like me to romance a little. Where do you want me to begin? All my adventures in all the places I've lived ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... I could squat here for a week, provided of course that there was always plenty of provisions to keep us alive," came the ...
— Motor Boat Boys Mississippi Cruise - or, The Dash for Dixie • Louis Arundel
... head of the stepfather who did so cruelly stare at the poor young David Copperfield, and became a man with only one eye which still held the malevolence that was hurled at that small David. And with this squat, crooked, evil image of the General Robert Carruthers in my heart I alighted from the train into the City of Hayesville, which is the capital of the great American State of Harpeth. The black man had swung himself off ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... worse. It is a mere struggle for daily bread. I wondered whether in the spring-time the young men loved the maidens, or if they only coupled like the beasts. I saw one pair who seemed quite newly wed; for their scanty furniture was new and they were young. The man, short and squat, sat scowling, cross-legged on a chair, a cigarette between his lips. The woman was taller and not ill-made, a slattern; her hair fell dishevelled on her back and over her forehead; her dress was open, displaying the ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... odd-looking structure, her Ladyship was so overcome with excitement that she could hardly stand. Ridgeway caught her as she staggered from her improvised litter. Presently she grew stronger, and with her companion entered what was apparently a palace among the squat, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... stay in our valley, but drifted back to the West, to that nation we had come from, or went north to the wars with the white man, or became lonely hunters in the hills. Then from the south along the mountain crests came another people, a squat and murderous people, who watched us from the ridges and ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... fire is laid On bark and slabs that rot, and breed Squat ugly things of deadly shade, The scorpion, and the spiteful seed ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... battle for more than an hour, in full view of many thousands of ardent Southerners ashore. The scene, at its height, was appalling. The smoke, belching black from the funnels and white from the guns, made a suffocating pall overhead; while the dark, squat, hideous ironclad hulls seemed to have risen from a submarine inferno to stab each other with livid tongues of flame—so deadly close the two flotillas fought. When the awful hour was over the Confederates were not only defeated but destroyed; and a wail went up from the thousands ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... was directly below us. I lost sight of the vial almost instantly, but the indicating cross-hairs showed me exactly where the vial would strike; at a point approximately half way between the edge of the city and the great squat pile of the administrating building, with its gleaming glass penthouse—the laboratory in which, only a few minutes before, I had witnessed the demonstration of the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... proceeds to use his vocal powers by commanding all others to put theirs to rest. He then arranges his men on each side of the rope, like artillerists at the drag rope. Every man is commanded to grasp the rope firmly with both hands, straighten it, and squat down, inclined a little forward. The leader then passes from rear to front, and from front to rear, reviewing the line to see that every man grasps the rope. All is now still as the grave for a moment, when the commander, or marshal of the day, roars ...
— Daughters of the Cross: or Woman's Mission • Daniel C. Eddy
... head in response to my voice, and I soon tired of the attempt. The night told me little of who they might be, although they were both in the uniform of the Queen's Rangers, the one called Peter on my right a round, squat figure, and bald-headed, his bare scalp shining oddly when once he removed his cocked hat; the other was an older man, with gray chin beard, and glittering ...
— My Lady of Doubt • Randall Parrish
... can't you see!' 'But I'm all behind as 'tis'—he shouts to me—'You knows your gospel, don't you: time and tide wait for no man?' 'Ah, but dammit all, they always call for a feller'—I says. With that he turned round and we drove back for the girl. She clumb in and sat on my knees; I squat on a tub of vinegar, there was nowhere else and I was right and all, she was going on for a birth. Well, the old van rattled away for six or seven miles; whenever it stopped you could hear the rain ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... sea-serpent-like creatures rise slowly from below, to begin feeding on the fish—one of those great scientific wonders that you and your father are trying to discover and capture; for that's it, I suppose, though you do keep so squat ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... and spires and towers that surmount the various buildings that make up the far-famed Christian College. Driving along the Marina he sees the Senate House of the Madras University surmounted by its four squat towers; farther on he sees the staid Engineering College, and the still staider Presidency College, and, beyond, the whitewashed buildings of Queen Mary's residential College for Women; and on his way back by the Mount Road he sees the Muhammedan College, with its little ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... a "doctor," took me under her patronage. I would lie near a small fire towards the back of the hut, the two Bapedi crouching behind me. The old woman, with a sheaf of dry reeds in her withered hand, would squat on the floor near my head. Then the hut would fill up with men and women, who would arrange themselves in a crescent shaped mass, with the front rank lying down, the next crouching, those farthest from ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... indicated by the stoker, filled it with dry grass, rotten sticks, coals out of the engine bunker, and lumps of oily cotton waste. Then he struck and applied a match, saw the flame leap and roar amongst the combustibles, filled the stoker's squat tea-kettle with water from the green barrel, put in a generous handful of Tarawakee tea, and, innocent of refinements in tea-making, set ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... forward, and came out on a little clearing. Immediately in front of us stood the masonry of which we had caught glimpses; a low, squat, square tower, some forty feet in height, ruinous as to the most part, but having the side facing us nearly perfect and still boasting a fine old doorway which I set down as of Norman architecture. North ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... ever seed, an' it remembered me o' bit o' Scripter my ole mother hed often read from a book called the Bible, or some sich name—about a lion that wur so tame he used to squat down beside a lamb, 'ithout layin' a claw upon the ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... return to nature is practically a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content. There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You save yourself from ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... against the mat of the night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: "By gracious!" The following instant he had the lantern and was after her. I watched him go up above my head—a ponderous, swaying climber into the sky—come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that for a moment, then it disappeared, and in its place there sprang out a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens. I could ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... in secret. The devil has no need to blockade or besiege the gate of our ear if he has any of his good things to offer us. The gate that can only be opened from within will open at once of itself if he or any of his newsmongers but squat down for a moment before it. Shame on us, and on all of ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... fourteen Provinces in the Mission field, and attractive is the scene that lies before us. We sail on the "Harmony" to Labrador, and see the neatly built settlements, the fur-clad Missionary in his dog-drawn sledge, the hardy Eskimos, the squat little children at the village schools, the fathers and mothers at worship in the pointed church, the patients waiting their turn in the surgery in the hospital at Okak. We pass on to Alaska, and steam with the Brethren up the Kuskokwim River. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the goose-herd to the man with the crates. It reads: "Hasten thy feet because of the geese! Hearken! thou knowest not the next minute what has been said to thee!" Above, a reis with a stick bids other peasants squat on the ground before addressing the scribe, and he is saying to them: "Sit ye down to talk." The third scene is in another style; on it may be seen Semites bringing offerings of vases of gold, silver, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... a squat figure, her head tied up in a dirty towel, her dress ragged and dirty, and much too small for her abundant figure. She welcomed us telling us the "po chile was bad sick" but she would talk to us. As the door of the lean-to kitchen was open, it offered a breath of outside air, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 3 • Works Projects Administration
... here," he told me; "you must not mind. The sentry has orders to keep everybody away from the palace, as people come in the afternoon and squat under my windows to jabber, and I cannot sleep. Those orders, I assure you, were not meant for you. You will be my guest all the time you are in the city, and I can accept ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... the very day of the surrender, that I set out with my captives for the Eternal City. Caterina was conveyed in her litter with her elder daughter, but the younger insisted on riding on horseback at my side. She was an ugly little hoyden of five years, this Giovanna, who, squat of stature and swarthy as a gypsy, bestrode her little pony like a man; but, though by nature stubborn and subject to fits of anger in which she bit and scratched like a wildcat, to me she had taken a fancy as intense as it ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... state of agitation. She beckoned him into the house and hoarsely whispered: "Dar's a dirty Injun in de shed. I wouldn' 'low him ter set foot in dis yar house, I wouldn', not ef he'd scalped me on de spot. He grunt, an' squat, an' 'lowed he done wouldn' stir less ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... to the foregoing prayer, is to squat down upon the ground, placing the palm of their hands flat thereon twice, touching the earth the same number of times with their foreheads; then rubbing their arms from the wrist to the elbow, with that which is contracted by this operation, when the hands are applied to the face, and the ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... shadow line,—for it was not winter, but a brilliant summer morning, the grass all dusted with powdered diamonds, the sky a turquoise, the air a joy,—under this archway, I say, sat a big St. Bernard dog, squat on his haunches, his head well up, like a grenadier on guard. His eyes commanded the approaches down the road, up the road, and across the street; taking in the passing peddler with the tinware, and the girl with a basket strapped to her back, her fingers knitting for ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... some of our nearer neighbours were seen cautiously poking their heads from out their holes and looking cunningly, and at the same time inquisitively, about them. After some time, a dog would emerge from the entrance of his domicile, squat upon his looking-out place, shake his ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... laborers was engaged in moving the timbers back from the railroad siding. Superintending the work was a squat little man—Bannon could not see until near by that he was not a boy—big-headed, big-handed, big-footed. He stood there in his shirt-sleeves, his back to Bannon, swearing good-humoredly at the men. When ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... shuddered; but man being in the most critical moments liable to strange associations of idea, which play like meteors across the anguish of his spirit, it chanced that the broad back of the landlord suddenly reminded him of the back of a squat schoolfellow of his at Ostrau, a good-natured baker's son, upon whom, in many a scuffle, he had often practiced the boyish trick of tripping an adversary from behind. Quick as lightning he sprang upon the ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... in our power to support them; our Government can't help to float a bad loan, but I am sure we have done the French no harm at Washington. It will be good policy on the part of Maximilian to encourage Confederate soldiers, provided they don't come and squat in too great numbers. I understand that the French army is not to be withdrawn until it is no longer wanted by Maximilian, but that will not be till the day of ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the information to hand, he had formed in his mind an odd kind of anthropomorphic image of the germ. He pictured it as a squat, thick-set man of repellent aspect and stealthy movements, who sneaked up on you when you were not looking and did unpleasant things to you, selecting as the time for his attacks those nights when you had allowed ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... A squat tub of a boat, her stern piled high with wicker crab-pots, came round the northern headland and entered the little bay. The elderly fisherman who was rowing rested on his oars and sat contemplating the crab-pots in the stem. A younger man, clad in a jersey and sea boots, was busy ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... Eden's days return there is no deliverance for the lower animals. Vegetarians may reduce their theories to practice in the cities and among cultivated fields, but vegetarians among the red men of the Far West or the squat men of the Arctic zone, would either have to violate their ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... kinds of crawling things among the tottering walls, and peeping out of their rents and crannies. A monkey sitting squat, developing into a demon, reverses ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... the grass; and averted her head. She did not squat like the other red people; but reclined, supporting herself on one hand, much as Natalie ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... morning mists had uncovered a coast-line broken with bays and inlets. Above it towered green hills, the peak of each topped by a squat block-house; in the valleys and water courses like columns of marble ...
— The Boy Scout and Other Stories for Boys • Richard Harding Davis
... the males that the voice is well developed. But if we look forward, past Amphibians altogether, we find the voice becoming a maternal call helping to secure the safety of the young—a use very obvious when young birds squat motionless at the sound of the parent's danger-note. Later on, probably, the voice became an infantile call, as when the unhatched crocodile pipes from within the deeply buried egg, signalling to the mother that it is time to ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... rider on it, of course!" exclaimed the other lad, as he raised the glasses to his eyes, training them on the further end of the squat elevation that stood up in the midst of the sage level like a great hump ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... Basra, the House of Sinbad in Ashar Creek has quite the effect of a wonderfully staged production. The huge, high-prowed mahailas, the crazy wooden galleries skirting the river, the quaint, squat minaret appearing over the flat roofs, and the dim light of lamps reflected in the still water made a picture at twilight that it would be difficult to beat for mystery and romance. A man in black with a fire of brushwood in the bow of a mahaila added ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... A black squat beetle, vigorous for his size, Pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong The dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies— Has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... extremely short the Jap's legs were made itself plain in the fact that stirrups could not be fixed so he could reach them with his feet. When he used any support at all he stuck his feet through the straps above the stirrups. How funny his squat, broad figure looked in a saddle! Evidently he was not accustomed to horses. When I saw the mustang roll the white of his eyes and glance back at Takahashi then I knew something ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... put up in squat-shaped flasks of tinned copper, called kunkumas, holding from 1 to 10 lb., and sewn up in white woolen cloths. Usually their contents are transferred at Constantinople into small gilded bottles of German manufacture for export. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... all squat down in this patch of grass," suggested Madaline, who, as yet, had not even glimpsed the envelope Grace had passed on to Cleo. "Do let's read it!" she ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... Square. On of them was just bringing a long monologue to a close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his companion's rudeness, wore an amused listening face. He was squat and ruddy. A yachting cap was shoved far back from his forehead and the narrative to which he listened made constant waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed one another out of his convulsed ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... feel able to buy one of these machines, we would say that we have made arrangements for the approaching season, so that those who wish may bring their dough to our mammoth squatter and get it treated at our place at the nominal price of two bits per squat. Strangers calling for their squat or unsquat dough, will ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... said Langrish, leading the way to the bank facing that in the occupation of the enemy, "here's our place. Squat down and make ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... he was here, and it's a pity he threw up and left. Somebody's jumped his claims by this time, sure. Fact is, you can't leave a claim over night, without having somebody jump into it and squat. People are getting crazy, running 'round wild-like and grabbing any land they fancy. The Government will have to step in and ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... weird sisters in Macbeth upon the pilot's thumb, with curiosity as eager and scarcely less malignant. Mrs. Heukbane was a tall womanshe held the precious epistle up between her eyes and the window. Mrs. Shortcake, a little squat personage, strained and stood on tiptoe to have ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... beyond the town. And though it was growing late I consented; for there was one long white road under an archway and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord. We drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans, and I remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds which are the trinity of France. They make what some poet calls "a tangled trinity," and I am not going to disentangle it. Whatever ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... ended, he took hold of Chia Jui, and, extinguishing again the lantern, he brought him out into the court, feeling his way up to the bottom of the steps of the large terrace. "It's safe enough in this nest," he observed, "but just squat down quietly and don't utter a sound; wait until I come back before ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement, front and ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... threw his cigarette away, flexed his hands in his gloves, and set his monocle more firmly in his eye, stepping forward as the footsteps on the stairway behind him ceased and the other officers emerged from the squat flint keep—Captain Cazabielle, the post CO; big, chocolate-brown Brigadier-General Themistocles M'zangwe; little Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary. Far in front of him, to the left, the horizon was lost in the cloudbank over Takkad Sea; directly in front, and to the right, the brown ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... tortoise and hare— The one at the goal while the other is—where?" Why, back there in Dreamland, renewing his lease Of life, all his muscles preserving the peace, The goal and the rival forgotten alike, And the long fatigue of the needless hike. His spirit a-squat in the grass and the dew Of the dogless Land beyond the Stew, He sleeps, like a saint in a holy place, A winner of all that is good ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... thinking of Milton's striking description of Satan "squat like a toad" by the ear of the sleeping Eve ('Paradise Lost', IV, 800). In this passage "Eve" refers to Queen Caroline with whom Hervey was on intimate terms. It is said that he used to have a seat in the queen's hunting chaise "where he sat close ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... me, attached to the chain by his wrist, was a squat, heavily-built, powerfully-muscled man. He was somewhere between thirty-five and forty years of age. I sized him up. In the corners of his eyes I saw humor and laughter and kindliness. As for the rest of him, he was a brute-beast, wholly unmoral, and with all ...
— The Road • Jack London
... me, and she doffed hat and joseph. She set me comfortably before the fire in an elbow-chair, and handed me a new pipe and a fresh paper of tobacco, and insisted on my smoking. Then, sitting almost at my feet in a squat rush-bottomed chair, with quaint bow legs and a back like a yard of ladder, she set to work on the holes Brocton's rapier had ...
— The Yeoman Adventurer • George W. Gough
... has an artificial look; there is something ghastly and unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and varieties of hideousness—undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as fortunate as the traveler who relates ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... three, as they were in the act of looking at it, causing Leonard to make a great start, and then colour painfully. It was hard to believe, as Daisy said, that the old tower, that looked so short and squat below, could be so very high when you came to go up it; but the glimpses of the country, through the little loop-hole windows, were most inviting. At last, Aubrey, who was foremost, pushed up the trap-door, and emerged; but, as Dickie followed him, exclaimed, 'Here we are; ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... announce that some "men-bush" are approaching. Going to the veranda, we see some lean figures with big mops of hair coming slowly down the narrow path from the forest, with soft, light steps. Some distance behind follows a crowd of others, who squat down near the last shrubs and examine everything with shy, suspicious eyes, while the leaders approach the house. Nearly all carry old Snider rifles, always loaded and cocked. The leaders stand silent for a while near the veranda, then one of them whispers a few ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... for hear. The word "bowssen," too, is very frequently heard in these parts; it is a provincialism for a stall or shed where oxen are kept. "Boose" is the word from which it originally sprang. A very expressive phrase in common use is to "quad" or "quat"; it is equivalent to the word "squat." Other words in this dialect are "sprack," an adjective meaning quick or lively; and "frem" or "frum," a word derived from the Anglo-Saxon "fram," meaning fresh or flourishing. The latter word is also used in ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Road he overtook a man, a squat, broad-shouldered fellow, who limped as he walked. Constans would have brushed by, but the man plucked at his sleeve, and he was forced to stop and accommodate his pace to that of his interlocutor. A ...
— The Doomsman • Van Tassel Sutphen
... a short, squat, clean-shaven but hairy dark man, with coal-black hair sweeping round a big forehead, a determined face and large, indignant brown eyes. The Liverpool clergyman was of middle height, very thin, with snow-white hair, dark eyes and eyebrows, and a young ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... earnestly all up and down the wonderful stretch of country that lay along the Wall from north to south. She could see the tiny dots that went for the different homesteads, scattered here and there. Up at the head there lay, hard against the frowning hills, the squat, wide blur that was Courtrey's Stronghold. Her lips compressed ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... these elevated steppes, 7,000 feet or more above the level of the sea, and the bitter cold of the rarefied air before the dawn takes possession of the atmosphere. The shivering peones of the villages rise betimes to catch the sun's first rays, and stand or squat against the eastern side of their adobe huts, what time the orb of day shows his red disc above the far horizon. La capa de los pobres—"the poor man's cloak"—they term the sun, as with grateful benediction they watch his coming, and stamp ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... stood covered with a cloth and had an ikon and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another door: whereupon the priest—a grey-headed old monk with a severe, elderly face—blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened hand. I did ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... she minister warm drinks unto you, as broths and caudle. She can likewise speak to you through the hole, and be heard: but if you hear the noise of feet or strange voices in that chamber, have a care to lie as squat [quiet] and close as ever you can. So may you safely hover [lie concealed]; for the cleverest soldier of them all shall be hard put to it to find you ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective authority. The nose is one of the greatest indicators ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... branch,—the one on this side," said Legrand. The negro obeyed him promptly, and apparently with but little trouble, ascending higher and higher, until no glimpse of his squat figure could be obtained through the dense foliage which enveloped it. Presently his voice was heard in a ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... and hindering the escape of the effluvia—I know not, but I am far from being convinced even now that it is not so. A very good sportsman, and true friend of mine, insists upon it that birds give out no scent except from the feet, and that, consequently, if they squat without running they cannot be found. I do not, however, believe the theory, and hold it to be disproved by the fact that dead birds do give out scent. I have generally observed that there is no difficulty in ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... comfort, the ancient Egyptians gradually developed the art of making mats from papyrus, a plant as important to them as any of our trees, fibrous grasses, or hemp are to us. While at work on the manufacture of these mats, the weavers used to squat on the ground. They became skilful, both in constructing the fabric and arranging the colors; the latter were quite bright and effective, being chiefly red, blue, yellow, and green, with ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... 'What a squat little jockey!' exclaims Miss Hamilton, as a little dumpling of a man in Lincoln green is led past the stand on a fine bay horse, some one recognizing the rider as our old ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... down into the open drawer, and his eyes narrowed with a look of furtive eagerness that did not escape Blake. In a corner of the drawer was a squat black bottle and a tumbler. Ashton lifted them out and poured a half-glassful of whiskey that was thick and oily ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... right. Trying to assure herself that her father was a protection, she pushed open the door. She looked into an airless room, scattered with rubber boots, unsavory old corduroy caps, tattered magazines. By the stove nodded a wry-mouthed, squat old woman, and a tall, cheaply handsome man of forty. Tobacco juice stained the front of his stiff-bosomed, collarless shirt. His hands ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... not make her senses reel, This mystery, or dim her zeal, Till by degrees she seems to feel Her broken lot; She roams aloof, she grows depressed; And then, her broody sorrow guessed, Men lure her to a well-filled nest And bid her squat. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... he happens to be, and just large enough to admit him. He glides through like a phantom, without making the least grain of sand creak beneath his tread. He is perfectly naked, and all his body is rubbed over with oil; a two-edged knife is suspended from his neck. He will squat down close to your couch, and, with incredible coolness and dexterity, will gather up the sheet in very little folds, so as to occupy the least surface possible; then, passing to the other side, he will lightly tickle the sleeper, whom he seems ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... spears and knives, leave the encampment just before dark, walk a mile or two to the place where the deer happen to be pastured, build themselves little huts of trailing pine branches, about three feet in height and two in diameter, and squat in them throughout the long, cold hours of an arctic night, watching for wolves. The worse the weather is, the greater the necessity for vigilance. Sometimes, in the middle of a dark winter's night, when a terrible north-easterly storm is howling across the steppe in clouds ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... necropolis of Persepolis, where a pair of such altars exist; these are cut, each out of a single block, in a rocky mass which rises some thirteen feet above the level of the surrounding plain. They are of cubic form and squat appearance, looking like towers flanked at the four corners by supporting columns which are connected by circular arches; above a narrow moulding rises a crest of somewhat triangular projections; the hearth is hollowed out on the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... he dared not move forward into the sunlight or backward into the shade. She had not seen him yet. She was playing with the chain of flowers—a small wood goblin sprung out of nowhere, a little black-haired devil fired up from hell through the solid earth and out into this empty glade to squat there right in his track. Then she stood upon her feet, and admired the length of the chain ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... was no draught, and the feeble little flame burned quite still, casting a faint yellow stain on the ceiling like the refection from a buttercup held beneath a chin. These ceilings are far too low! Across the wide, squat window the apple branches fell in black stripes which never stirred. It was too dark to see things clearly. At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had sat down, moving her lips as ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... He knew that the roads, if not the tracks, had already been searched. He knew that he was being victimized by a chance impulse of the Colonel's. But he ignored all that. He was coldly angry and resentful. Utterly forgetting his fatigue, he inimically surveyed the Colonel's squat, shining figure in the cavalry coat, a pyramid of which the apex was a round head surmounted by a ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... Reginald and the professor, the former being flanked by Lethbridge (Mildmay, in accordance with previous arrangements, had ensconced himself in the pilothouse); Lualamba and the rest of the suite were quietly allowed to squat in a semicircle before them on ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... me, then, to start with. I'd like to get a few of the kinks out of my arms. Here, squat down, and begin work with that mess. Plenty more where that came from, and no bill ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... quiet. 'Pourquoi ils ne repondent pas?' asked the Russian prince. 'Yes, they are quiet to-day,' answered the senior. 'But we get it in the neck sometimes.' We are all led off to be introduced to 'Mother,' who sits, squat and black, amid twenty of her grimy children who wait upon and feed her. She is an important person is 'Mother,' and her importance grows. It gets clearer with every month that it is she, and only she, who can lead us to the Rhine. She can and ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... turned now and far away to the eastward rose the first straggling cabins of the town. Creeping toward them down the road rolled a dark squat figure. It grew and spread slowly on the horizon until it became a fat old black woman, hooded and aproned, with great round hips and massive bosom. Her face was heavy and homely until she looked up and lifted the drooping cheeks, and then kindly old eyes beamed on ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... spider was a squat, ugly-looking devil, hunched up on his string amongst all his crooked legs. The wind would come in little puffs, and swing him a little way toward the doctor's head, and then toward the pock-marked man's head, back and forth and back and forth, between them two as they spoke. It looked to ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... organized society. And yet they had failed to break his defiant spirit or to convince him of the infallibility of his creed that might makes right. Nor had they taken from him the gorillalike strength that was in his broad squat body, the magnificent brute lustihood that made him a terror to police and citizen alike. Instead, the many periods of incarceration had only served to increase his hatred of mankind and his contempt of the forces of law and order. Especially was he ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... and Arimoa, they continued their voyage through a part of the sea so very full of islands, that finding it difficult or impossible to count them, they gave them the name of Thousand Isles.[3] Their inhabitants were negroes, of a short squat make, and their heads covered with thick curled wool, being a bold, mischievous, and intractable race of savages. They were all naked, men, women, and children, having no other ornaments except a belt about two fingers broad, stuck fall of teeth, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... see that the boy is far more beautiful. It is your sex-instinct, your sinful sex-instinct which prevents you worshipping the higher form of beauty. Height and length of limb give distinction; slightness gives grace; women are squat! You must admit that the boy's figure is more beautiful; the appeal it makes far ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... hand at a novel just now; it may interest you to know, I am bound to say I do not think it will be a success. However, it's an amusement for the moment, and work, work is your only ally against the "bearded people" that squat upon their hams in the dark places of life and embrace people horribly as they go by. God save us from the bearded people! to think that the sun is still shining in some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are. A sheep run can be started with a small capital, and you might almost say with no capital at all. For instance, a man with very little money, or practically with none at all, can find a location and squat upon it, and then go to one of the cities, and if he is known to be a respectable, honest, and industrious man and free from vicious habits, he can find somebody who will supply the capital for buying a few hundred sheep. With these sheep he can make a start, and if he is industrious and ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... silence and its darkness, its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... her head, looking at him with eyes which implored him not to be bitter or unhappy. And as she looked, seeing the familiar red face and squat strong figure of him in a new ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... that, Jurgis was known to his "boss" as "Comrade Jurgis," and in return he was expected to call him "Comrade Hinds." "Tommy" Hinds, as he was known to his intimates, was a squat little man, with broad shoulders and a florid face, decorated with gray side whiskers. He was the kindest-hearted man that ever lived, and the liveliest—inexhaustible in his enthusiasm, and talking Socialism all day ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi) in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me to squat upon. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... on this occasion by a little squat figure, all belly, with a short pair of legs at one end, and a little red, fiery face, that looked as if it would explode—at the other. The figure was mounted on horseback, and as it and its party gallantly entered this city of cabins, it clapped its hands on its side, to impress the ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... oxen—five yoke. His far-reaching bull-whip exploded just beside Rip's left ear. The next shot took Squat exactly as aimed. There was a momentary scuffling of hoofs, an awful threat in the ox-driving language; then everything went on peacefully as before. The ox-driver caught the returning cracker deftly in two fingers of his right hand and settled down on his iron seat with his elbow on his ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... of the newly-hatched brood till the rest come out and enable the whole to start in quest of food. I have several times seen newly-hatched young in charge of the cock, who made a very good attempt at appearing lame in the plover fashion, in order to draw off the attention of pursuers. The young squat down and remain immovable when too small to run far, but attain a wonderful degree of speed when about the size of common fowls. It can not be asserted that ostriches are polygamous, though they often appear to be so. When caught they are easily tamed, but ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... bread. They had to show Marie Ivanovna their dirty little scraps of paper which described the portions to which they were entitled. How their bony fingers clutched the paper afterwards as they pressed it back into their skinny bosoms! Sometimes they could not wait to return home, but would squat down on the ground and lap their soup like dogs. The day grew hotter and hotter, the world smelt of disease and dirt, waste and desolation. Marie Ivanovna's face was soft with tenderness as she watched them. Semyonov had always his eye ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind—the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... clearly now, for the light from the Eye was slowly diminishing in brilliancy, or else his own eyes were growing more accustomed to it. Those carven figures, forming a semi-circle upon the platform were figures of gods, squat, huge forms seeming to emerge out of the blocks of rock from which ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... straight and greasy-looking like her skin, lay in two shining bands, forming an edge to a very handsome silk handkerchief. Her ears were remarkably pretty, and graced with two large dark pearls. Small, short, and squat, Asie bore a likeness to the grotesque figures the Chinese love to paint on screens, or, more exactly, to the Hindoo idols which seem to be imitated from some non-existent type, found, nevertheless, now and again by travelers. Esther shuddered as she looked ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... is practically a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content. There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... irregular buildings, illuminated from basement to roof, each with a monstrous chimney from which issued a fan of party-colored flame. On one long low structure, with a double row of windows gleaming like the port-holes of a man-of- war at night, was a squat round tower that now and then threw open a vast valve at the top, and belched forth a volume of amber smoke, which curled upward to a dizzy height and spread itself out against the sky. Lying in the weird light of these chimneys, with here and there a gable or a spire suddenly outlined in vivid ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... might be nearer the hot-air flue over which she toasted herself luxuriously, as happy as any chilly mortal could be. Steeped in the warm air, the two girls raised themselves inquisitively and gazed around on everything, the low ceiling with its woodwork panels, the squat pillars, connected by arches from which hung chandeliers, and the pulpit of carved oak; and over the ocean of heads which waved with the rise and fall of the canticle, their eyes wandered towards the dark corners of the aisles, towards the ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... settled into quietness, I slipped out of my room, and across to the entrance of the great corridor. I opened one of the low, squat doors, and threw the beam of my pocket searchlight down the passage. It was empty, and I went through the doorway, and pushed-to the oak behind me. Then along the great passageway, throwing my light before and behind, ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... pace the sleuth-hound of the sea tore towards the Hoorn, for such she was. Rounding under her squat counter, and reversing engines, the Capella brought up within fifty yards of the submarine before the astonished Germans could realize ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... was the small, rocky islet just off the shore whence had come the cable. It seemed a harmless place now, with only one squat building of stone and no Orconites about, but we were glad enough to turn away from it and look toward the dark and ragged range of mountains which loomed up some five miles inland—the mountains of Leider's headquarters. Not that the sight inspired us with greater confidence. It didn't. ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... termed a "street." Most of the buildings were unpainted and crude, composed of rough boards running perpendicularly, with narrow battens over the joints. There were several brick buildings two stories in height, bearing the appearance of having been recently erected, and these towered over the squat, one-story frames in seeming contemptuous dignity. There were many private dwellings, some stores, but the young man's first impression was that there was an ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... well darned, and pure as the driven snow. The two chairs were old, as was also the table, but they were not rickety; it was obvious that they owed their stability to a hand skilled in mending and in patching pieces of things together. Even the squat little stool in the side of the chimney corner displayed a leg, the whiteness of which, compared with the other two, told of attention to small things. There was a peg for everything, and everything seemed to be on its peg. Nothing littered the well-scrubbed floor or defiled the ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... forced an opening through the group of workmen by a savage sweep of his arms and came to the keg, where the Mexican at the moment was bending down and holding a cup under the spigot. When the man perceived the engineer, he leaped up. The fellow's short, squat figure and stony expression had for Bryant a vague familiarity—that face especially, brown, stolid, brutal, with ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... city than Pala-dar and of vastly different appearance. A hollow square of squat buildings enclosed the vast workshops and storage space of the fleet of war vessels. Their huge spherical bulks rose from their cradles in tier after tier that stretched as far as the eye could reach when the Nomad had dropped ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... beaver usually paused and appeared to look at its surroundings as if choosing a place to squat or sit while cutting it down; but so far as I could tell, he gave no thought as to the direction in which the tree was going to fall. This is true of every beaver which I have seen begin cutting, and I have seen scores. But beavers have individuality, and occasionally I noticed ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... Podvoisky, the thin, bearded civillian whose brain conceived the strategy of insurrection; Antonov, unshaven, his collar filthy, drunk with loss of sleep; Krylenko, the squat, wide-faced soldier, always smiling, with his violent gestures and tumbling speech; and Dybenko, the giant bearded sailor with the placid face. These were the men of the hour-and ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... spaces, and statues and monuments in them. The city, I understood, is of somewhat radical politics, tending from clericalism to socialism; and, like every other Italian city, it is full of patriotic monuments. There is a Victor Emmanuel on horseback, plump and squat, but heroic as always, and a Garibaldi struggling in vain for beauty in his poncho and his round, flat cap; there is a Mazzini, there is a Cavour, and, above all, there is a Guerrazzi, no great thing as to the seated figure, but most interesting, most touching in ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... now continue our peregrination along the main street. There along the wall squat dozens of coolies, with their carrying arrangement, sitting on their heels, and basking in the sun. Further on, one of them is just loading a huge earthenware vase full of the native beverage. The weight must be something enormous. Yet see how ...
— Corea or Cho-sen • A (Arnold) Henry Savage-Landor
... body was true to life, every spot on its tail a microscopic wonder. The beast (or the creeping thing, if you so prefer to name it) twined round one of his lower limbs, leaving the dent of its claws in the flesh, and resting its squat, outstretched head on the centre of the knee-cap. And so cunningly was the creature perched (as its owner gleefully pointed out) that the least movement of his crural muscles set the jagged backbone a-quivering, and the slobbering lips to mumble and mow. Cospatric said that dragon was a most finished ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... river, makes their clothes into a bundle and then climbs up with it into a tree. When the cowgirls come out of the water, they cannot find their clothes until at last one of them spies Krishna sitting in the tree. The cowgirls hurriedly squat down in the water entreating Krishna to return their clothes. Krishna, however, tells them to come up out of the water and ask him one by one. The cowgirls say, 'But this will make us naked. You are making an end ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... the first time since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. No, I withdraw that. It is fellows like me, to whom kindly ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... and making no pretensions, he says, to antiquity. It was built in Henry VII.'s reign, is perfectly plain and unadorned, and without painted glass, carved work, sculpture, or tracery. Within it, however, are low, squat, thick pillars supporting the roof, which he thinks are Saxon and upheld the roof of a former church, which, falling into decay, was rebuilt on these massive props because their strength had preserved them from the injuries of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... while at the left, above the Brindelle widened into a pool, could be seen long meadows, an entirely green flat sweep of the country, cut by dikes and willow edges like monsters, twisted dwarf-trees, always cut short, and having on their thick squat trunks a quivering ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... the screen of Casuarinas is a magnificent specimen of a wide-spreading shrub, in form a squat dome, which commemorates the name of a French naturalist—TOURNEFORTIA ARGENTA. The leaves, crowded at the ends of thick branchlets, are covered with soft, silky hairs of a silvery cast, which reflect the sun's rays. It would be gross exaggeration to say that the finely shaped shrub shines like ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... of military engineering, and not only twisted you into it and twisted you out of it, to the right, to the left, opposite, under here, over there, in the dark, in the dirt, by the gateway, archway, covered way, dry way, wet way, fosse, portcullis, drawbridge, sluice, squat tower, pierced wall, and heavy battery, but likewise took a fortifying dive under the neighbouring country, and came to the surface three or four miles off, blowing out incomprehensible mounds and batteries among the quiet crops of chicory and beet-root,—from those days to these the town ...
— Somebody's Luggage • Charles Dickens
... grunted acquiescence, and Creed inserted his arm between two logs and withdrew a squat, black bottle. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... having retrieved the use of his senses. And here Mr. Fillet could not help contemplating, with surprise, the strange figure and accoutrements of his patient, who seemed in age to be turned of fifty. His stature was below the middle size; he was thick, squat, and brawny, with a small protuberance on one shoulder, and a prominent belly, which, in consequence of the water he had swallowed, now strutted beyond its usual dimensions. His forehead was remarkably convex, and so very low, ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... had hoped that he would show us the method of using the sastun, or divining crystal. He is a full-blood, and neither in face nor manner shows the least emotion. Automatic in movement, he is quiet and phlegmatic in manner; having assumed the usual indian pose for rest, a squat position in which no part of the body except the feet rests upon the ground, or any support, he sat quietly, with the movement of scarcely a muscle, for hours at a time. He sang for us the invocation to the winds of the four quarters, which they use in the ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... a little at the horrible suggestion, but Shif'less Sol faced them boldly. Several white men in uniform had come up, and among them was an elderly one, short and squat, and with a great flame colored handkerchief ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... wood for legs—a truly Titanic bedstead; one might have put a ton or two on it—it would not have bent under the load; under the bed was a solid chest; in a corner stood a little table of the same strong kind, and near the table a three-legged stool, so solid and squat that Gerasim himself would sometimes pick it up and drop it again with a smile of delight. The garret was locked up by means of a padlock that looked like a kalatch or basket-shaped loaf, only black; the key of this padlock Gerasim always carried about him in his girdle. He did not ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... them in point of civilization, but are more reserved, more proud and altogether less "jolly," and appear, with their religion, to have acquired also some of the characteristics of the modern or true Malays. A Pagan can sit, or rather squat, with you and tell you legends, or, perhaps, on an occasion join in a glass of grog, whereas the Mahomedan, especially the true Malay, looks upon the Englishman as little removed from a "Kafir"—an uncircumcised Philistine—who through ignorance constantly offends ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... pop in here and squat on one of these pedestals, d'ye see? Presently its proper occupant comes in and glares at me from the door, puffing with indignation. Inwardly he is saying, 'How dare you trespass, you bally young cub?' and I pretend to be quite unconscious of his baleful gaze. I ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... with the balloons, who sits just outside. This is as near to being inside as she may venture, because, if she were to let go her hold of the railings for one moment, the balloons would lift her up, and she would be flown away. She sits very squat, for the balloons are always tugging at her, and the strain has given her quite a red face. Once she was a new one, because the old one had let go, and David was very sorry for the old one, but as she did let go, he wished he had ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... shifting his course. so as to bring his steps in a roundabout way toward the squat storeroom. "And before you begin there's an extra key to the room under the second packing box to the right. I made it from Roke's own key when I made duplicates of all the keys here. I put it there this morning. In case you should want to get out, you can ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... problem till near the end of his reign. In 213 he called a great meeting in the Hall of Audience at Changan. See the squat burly figure enthroned in grand splendor; the twelve weighty statues arranged around; the chief civil and military officers of the empire, thorough Taoists like himself, gathered on one side; the Academies and Censorates, all the leaders of the literati, on the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... I know she almost lives on acids and small whey— laces herself by pulleys and often in the hottest noon of summer you may see her on a little squat Pony, with her hair plaited up behind like a Drummer's and puffing round the Ring on ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe solitary persons with hook-nosed, ruminative faces. All about me was the din of the strange language, the clatter of dice and dominoes. All night long the doors of the ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... forcing the engines of screw propellers lets the stern of the boat "squat" or hug the bottom, and although these are minor features of want of mechanical adaptation to canal duty, they illustrate petty detentions serving to lengthen the through ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... stands just outside the monumental gate of the Alcala. It is a low, squat, prison-like circus of stone, stuccoed and whitewashed, with no pretence of ornament or architectural effect. There is no nonsense whatever about it. It is built for the killing of bulls and for no other purpose. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... people are dirty, Flat-headed, large-mouthed, and small; They squat round the fire and, frying Their fishes, they shout and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... decent, respectable-looking body too, this confederate whom I concluded was masquerading as maid. The very opposite of the younger woman (about her more directly), a neatly dressed unassuming person, short and squat in figure, with a broad, plain, and, to the casual observer, honest face, slow in movement and of no doubt sluggish temperament, not likely to be moved or distressed by conscience, neither at the doing or the memory of ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... bringing a long monologue to a close. The other, who walked on the verge of the path and was at times obliged to step on to the road, owing to his companion's rudeness, wore an amused listening face. He was squat and ruddy. A yachting cap was shoved far back from his forehead and the narrative to which he listened made constant waves of expression break forth over his face from the corners of his nose and eyes and mouth. Little jets of wheezing laughter followed ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... falling back, in an incomprehensible manner, into itself, began to darken, and to emit vapour. In the midst of the smoke, the young boor recognized Godfather Stringstriker. He was sitting upon a crystal throne, a-squat, with his crooked legs tucked under him, smoking with exquisite complacency a pipe as thick as his arm, terminating in a bowl as large as his head. He seemed wholly occupied in tracing the progress of the massive curls of smoke, which gushed abundantly from his capacious ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... typical of the south, and give confidence to the Arabs who seem to feel that they are way up north and yet still in the land of the myrrh and the incense. Here the children of the desert congregate and, pushing their bamboo-spears into the sand—point down, squat on the ground to admire the glory of a city—even though it be a city which affects the European with the very opposite of glory, but which for hundreds of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... his place, a stout, squat figure in the flannel shirt, spurs, and chaps of a cow-puncher. It took no second glance to tell Collins this bandy-legged fellow had been a rider of ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... only was "a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself "squat, low-browed, commonplace"—"a poor creature, with his dictionary literature and his saloon arrogance"—"no vision in him"—"will neither see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... the court-house square was relatively bright and as Brent crossed in front of the squat and shadowy bulk of the old jail-house—empty now, though it should have been full—he made out a figure hastening about him in a circuitous fashion at a dog trot as though bent on arriving at the hostelry first. That, then, must have been the presence he had felt ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... expanse of green pasture and smiling corn, or as a well in a happy garden, diffusing life and bloom? Look at the syce's children. Phil Robinson says there are nine of them, all about the same age and dressed in the same nakedness. As they squat together there, indulging "the first and purest of our instincts" in the mud or dust of the narrow back road, reflect that their tender roots are nourished by a thin rivulet of rupees which flows ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... altogether spiritual life. But mine being common, I must help to uphold myself by corporal comforts. And age having despoiled me of some of these, I sharpen my appetite for those remaining. Glory, which Pliny and Cicero propose to us, is far from my thoughts. "Glory and rest are things that cannot squat on the same bench." Stay your mind in assured and limited cogitations, wherein it best may please itself, and having gained knowledge of true felicities, enjoy them, and rest satisfied without wishing a further continuance either of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... the house, which at first sight had an almost neglected appearance. Casanova's attention was especially attracted by a broken window in the first story. Nor did it escape his notice that the battlements of the squat tower were crumbling in places. But the house door was gracefully carved; and directly he entered the hall it was plain that the interior was carefully kept, and was certainly in far better condition than might have been supposed from the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... before the looking-glass, and called his dog, Hope, a gift from his cousin, an old maid with an excellent heart, but no hair on her head. We started. My neighbour took with him the village constable, Arhip, a stout, squat peasant with a square face and jaws of antediluvian proportions, and an overseer he had recently hired from the Baltic provinces, a youth of nineteen, thin, flaxen-haired, and short-sighted, with sloping shoulders and a long neck, Herr Gottlieb von der Kock. My neighbour had himself ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... invisible occupants, a company of conversing shades. Renouard looked towards them with a sort of dread. A most elusive, faint sound of ghostly talk issuing from one of the rooms added to the illusion and stopped his already hesitating footsteps. He leaned over the balustrade of stone near a squat vase holding a tropical plant of a bizarre shape. Professor Moorsom coming up from the garden with a book under his arm and a white parasol held over his bare head, found him there and, closing the parasol, leaned over by his side with a remark on the increasing heat of the season. Renouard assented ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... with very light hair and very pale blue eyes, are almost unknown among us; and when they do occur, they occur side by side with relations of every other shade. As a rule, our people vary infinitely in complexion and anatomical type, from the quite squat, long-headed, swarthy peasants whom we sometimes meet with in rural Yorkshire, to the tall, flaxen-haired, red-cheeked men whom we occasionally find not only in Danish Derbyshire, but even in mainly Celtic Wales and Cornwall. As to the west, Professor ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... sin, or, very likely, all together. Possibly some miserly old wretch lived there, needing only a little light to count up his hoard, and caring little for any intrusive wind, if it did not blow away his treasure. I fancied I could see him running over the tale of his coin by a feeble rushlight—squat, perhaps, on the dirty tile-floor—then locking his box, and placing it carefully under the pillow of his straw pallet, then tip-toeing to the door to examine again the fastening, then carefully extinguishing the taper, and after, dropping into ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... had his head broken by Carrot lay curled in his blanket by the fire. He was sleeping an exhausted man's sleep. It was hard work waking him. At last he sat up, a squat patriarch with grizzled bushy beard and shrewd watchful eyes. He was huddled in a queer parti-colored blanket purple and brown and orange and grey. I tried to testify to him with zeal against blackness of witchcraft. I told him with zest of the Light. He ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... necessary precaution, for the outposts stopped no less than a dozen men stealing through the long grass on both sides of the river, and, to their great disappointment, turned them back to go and squat down sulkily in such shade as ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... high, as in some old print, and white and green, the town and shore came to him. The May afternoon was in it, hot and golden, but the town itself was in morning sunlight. A clutter of great houses and little houses, all white, a great church, and a squat dun fort, and about it and in it were green spaces and palm-trees that swayed to a ghostly breeze. And the green ran down to a white beach, and on the beach foamy waves curled like a man's beard. And in the air the town quivered and danced, as imaged ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... Speke, not allowing him an interview till the next day. On paying the lady a visit, he was received by an ugly, dirtily-garbed old woman, though with a smiling countenance, who, at his request, furnished him eggs and milk. At length the sultana appeared—an old dame with a short, squat figure, a nose flabby at the end, and eyes destitute of brows or lashes, but blessed with a smiling face. Her dress consisted of an old barsati, dirtier even than her maid's. Her fingers were covered with rings of copper wire, and her legs staggered under an immense accumulation ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for Bentinck street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated. There, where the way narrowed with an out-jutting balcony high up, and ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... up into the pass. More often he tied his horse and took the steep rough trail afoot. The way was guarded by strange, distorted trees, and rocks carved into fantastic shapes. Some of them were piled high like temples. Others, round and squat, resembled the fat and obscene deities of Eastern religions. There were seals and elephants and crocodiles and allegorical monsters, some of them as tiny as the grotesque Japanese carvings, others as stupendous as Egypt. The trail led by them, among them, between ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... a sled, the three other drivers being half-breed Kolyma-Russians, of whom two were of the usual stolid, sulky type. The third, who accompanied me, was a character. A squat little bundle of furs, with beady black eyes twinkling slyly from a face to which incessant cold and bad brandy had imparted the hues of a brilliant sunset. Local rumour gave Mikouline forty years, but he might have been any age, certainly an octogenarian ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the Hankow picked up the raft which it would tow all the way up to Ching-Fu. Upon this raft was a long, squat cabin, in and out of which poured incessantly members of China's large ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... David shut himself in his room and robbed his bank. It was a squat, cast-iron box, with "A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned" in raised letters on one side. The only way to open it was to smash it with a crowbar, but it could be emptied. It had to be tilted just so, with a knife blade in the slot to catch the coins and guide them out. This is what David ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... Morgan, made a buffoonish scene about the "dead usurper," on the death of George III. But Mme. d'Albany herself was getting to look and talk less and less like a queen, either the Queen of Great Britain or the Queen of Hearts; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed with an eternal red shawl (now the property of an intimate friend of mine), in a dress extremely suggestive of an old house-keeper. She was, when not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in manner, loving to have children about her, to spoil them with cakes ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... we see to-day is remarkable in many ways. It is the longest Gothic building in the world, and is only exceeded by St. Peter's in Rome. In spite of the disappointment the stranger invariably experiences at his first sight of the squat tower and straight line of wall, its majestic interior, and the indefinable feeling that this is still a temple and not a mere museum, will soon give rise to a sense of reverent appreciation that makes one linger long after the usual round of "sights" has been accomplished. The war memorial, ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... architecture had been modified by the generations as they passed. One lord of Ulland had expressed his fancy on the eastern facade in gable and sculptured gargoyle; another his fear or his defiance in the squat and sturdy tower with its cautious slits in lieu of windows. Yet another Ulland had brought home from eighteenth-century Italy a love of colonnades and terraced gardens; and one still later had cut down to the level of the sward ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... action, he swung aside the portiere that curtained off the squat, barrel-shaped safe in the little alcove, opened the safe, took out that curious leather girdle with its kit of burglar's tools, added to it a flashlight and an automatic revolver, closed the safe—and passed into ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... reach him at any time. He was the commander. We saw him operate the ship, we saw the ship, saw it glide over the barren, rocky surface of that world. We saw other men come in and go out. They were strange men. Short, squat, bulky men. Their arms were short and stocky. But their strength was enormous, unbelievable. We saw them bend solid bars of steel as thick as my arm. With ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... had already eaten and were loading the Atom for the voyage. With her cargo she drew eighteen inches of water. At full speed, she would squat four inches. It was the first of August and the water, which had reached in the spring its highest point for twenty years, had been falling rapidly, and now promised to go far below the average low-water mark. We had ahead of ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... they used to play at cricket In the bye-streets years ago, With a broomstick for a bat, a coat for wicket? Now the Bobbies hunt them so! The old ladies grumble at their skipping; The old gents object to their tip-cat; So they squat midst slums that shine like dirty dripping, Not knowing what the dickens to be at. And the young Town Children, O my brothers, Do you ask them why they stand Making mud-pies, to the horror of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 15, 1890 • Various
... of jagged stumps and ploughed earth; against the yellow sky, the yellow glare of guns that squat like toads in a tangle of wire and piles of brass shell-cases and split wooden boxes. Long rutted roads littered with shell-cases stretching through the wrecked woods in the yellow light; strung alongside of them, tangled ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos
... surrounded by a wall measuring 540 feet on each side. In the centre of this, on a raised platform, stands the tomb itself, a square measuring 69 feet on each side. It is two stories in height, and at each angle is an octagonal tower, surmounted by an open pavilion. The towers, however, are rather squat in proportion, and the general design of the building very far from being so pleasing as that of many less pretentious tombs in the neighbourhood. Had it, indeed, been built in red sandstone, or even with an inlay of white marble like that of Humayun, it would ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of the journey began at that point. Not greater is the contrast between the grassy slopes and deodar-clothed mountains of Kashmir and the flaming aridity of Lesser Tibet, than between the tall, dark, handsome natives of the one, with their statuesque and shrinking women, and the ugly, short, squat, yellow- skinned, flat-nosed, oblique-eyed, uncouth-looking people of the other. The Kashmiris are false, cringing, and suspicious; the Tibetans truthful, independent, and friendly, one of the pleasantest of peoples. I 'took' ...
— Among the Tibetans • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs Bishop)
... finally, unlighted, almost unmarked in the darkness. The boys wondered at the cleverness of the chauffeur as he silently rounded a corner and brought his car up to a ruined gateway, behind which a small squat building showed dimly. ...
— The Boy Scouts on a Submarine • Captain John Blaine
... spheroid a shade larger than a one-pound shell; and around it a semicircle of silent, masked and cowled figures. There were twelve of them, eleven men and a woman. In the shadows, which grew denser at the far end of the room, was a squat, globular object, a massive, smooth-sided, black, threatening thing ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... flat dish—nearer the shape of a bedroom bath-tub than anything else I have seen in England, or the dish we used for setting milk—I don't know whether the same is used here: the gold-dish measures, say, eighteen inches across the top. You get it full of wash dirt, squat down at a convenient place at the edge of the water-hole, where there is a rest for the dish in the water just below its own depth. You sink the dish and let the clay and gravel soak a while, then you work and rub it up with your hands, and as the clay dissolves, dish it off ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... of a narrow little street which twists back into the native quarter of Tondo, and affords a haven for the mixed population which labours on the Mole—coolies, seamen, Chinese mess "boys," Tagalog cargadores, Lascar serangs, stalwart Sikh watchmen from the hemp and sugar godowns, squat Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists, customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies, Scotch mechanics ...
— Isle o' Dreams • Frederick F. Moore
... permitted to follow their fancies. Patterns were discussed in hushed but intense undertones, faint but all-important modifications were offered by the vendeuse to bridge the gulf between the figures of the mannequins and those of the clients. The brave longing of a squat pigeon to have the model reproduced "textuellement" ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... gypsy traded Jim a mighty fine lookin' critter, and we all calculated that Jim had right smart of a bargain, 'til one day Jim went to ride him, 'n he found out if he fetched the peskey critter on the sides he'd squat right down. Wall, Jim knowed if he didn't git rid of that hoss, his reputation as a hoss trader wuz forever gone; so he went over in t'other township to see old Deacon Witherspoon. You see the Deacon he wuz mighty fond ...
— Uncles Josh's Punkin Centre Stories • Cal Stewart
... childish voices inside prompt the passer-by to look in. He sees a room, empty of furniture, and lit only by the open door. The school-master, a veritable Moses in appearance, is squatted on his haunches in the centre, and around him squat his pupils. Each has his slate before him, and repeats his lesson with monotonous chant, keeping his body moving backward and forward as if he were rowing hard the whole time against stream. The school-master's ...
— Harper's Young People, February 24, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... forehead is abnormally low, the eyes deeply sunk, the jaw heavy, the lips thick, and the cheek-bones extremely prominent; the whole recalling the physiognomy of Thutmosis II., though with a greater show of energy. Thutmosis III. is a fellah of the old stock, squat, thickset, vulgar in character and expression, but not lacking in firmness and vigour.* Amenothes II., who succeeded him, must have closely resembled him, if we may trust his official portraits. He was the son of a princess of the blood, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... MODE OF CAPTURING DUCKS.—On the American rivers, the modes of capture are various. Sometimes half a dozen artificial birds are fastened to a little raft, and which is so weighted that the sham birds squat naturally on the water. This is quite sufficient to attract the notice of a passing flock, who descend to cultivate the acquaintance of the isolated few when the concealed hunter, with his fowling-piece, scatters a deadly leaden shower amongst them. In the winter, when the ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... There was a big easy-chair moved up within warming distance of the cheery blaze; there were pipes and tobacco within reach of the master's hand; there was the weekly newspaper folded neatly on the mantel, and a tray holding an old-fashioned squat decanter and the necessary glasses—in fact, all the comforts possible and necessary for a man who having at twenty-five given up all hope of wedded life, found himself at fifty ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... courage and address of the bear; its attack more than the rush of the majestic, resistless bison, or the furious pass with antlers lowered of the noble, ambereyed, infuriated elk. Hidden as still as an adder in long grass of its own hue, or squat on a log, or amid the foliage of a sloping tree, it waited around the salt licks and the springs and along the woodland pathways for the other wild creatures. It possessed the strength to kill and drag a heifer to its lair; it would leap upon the horse of a traveller and hang there unshaken, ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... in the midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf 185 He strikes on, only ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... artificial look; there is something ghastly and unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and varieties of hideousness—undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as fortunate as ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... does not make her senses reel, This mystery, or dim her zeal, Till by degrees she seems to feel Her broken lot; She roams aloof, she grows depressed; And then, her broody sorrow guessed, Men lure her to a well-filled nest And bid her squat. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 18, 1914 • Various
... at length falling back, in an incomprehensible manner, into itself, began to darken, and to emit vapour. In the midst of the smoke, the young boor recognized Godfather Stringstriker. He was sitting upon a crystal throne, a-squat, with his crooked legs tucked under him, smoking with exquisite complacency a pipe as thick as his arm, terminating in a bowl as large as his head. He seemed wholly occupied in tracing the progress ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Cuvier's in the evening, and went first to M. Jullien's, in the Rue de l'Enfer, not far from the Jardin des Plantes, and there we saw one of the most extraordinary of all the extraordinary persons we have seen—a Spaniard, squat, black-haired, black-browed, and black-eyed, with an infernal countenance, who has written the History of the Inquisition, and who related to us how he had been sent en penitence to a monastery by the Inquisition, and escaped by ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... be, I cannot take upon me to say. Whether the land of the valley was the joint property of its inhabitants, or whether it was parcelled out among a certain number of landed proprietors who allowed everybody to 'squat' and 'poach' as much as he or she pleased, I never could ascertain. At any rate, musty parchments and title-deeds there were none on the island; and I am half inclined to believe that its inhabitants hold their broad valleys ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... private view of it the night before, when the faithful were dedicating it. They sat on the floor, these Mohammedans, rocking themselves back and forth, and chanting the Koran. I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when one uses one's legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake them into ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... seven to eight hundred feet in diameter, and one hundred and forty feet in height, sometimes round, sometimes with several stories and containing thousands of skeletons. These skeletons are the remains of men less slender and more squat than the present inhabitants of those countries. Other bones wrapped in fabrics resembling those of the Sandwich and Feejee Islands are found in the natural grottoes of Kentucky. What is become of those nations of Louisiana anterior to the Lenni-Lenapes, the Shawanese, and perhaps even ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... yawned. The immediate prospect was dull. Savages continued to drift in, to squat and stare, then to move on to the porters' camps. There a lively bartering was going on. From some unsuspected store each porter had drawn forth a few beads, some snuff, a length of wire, or similar treasure; and with them was making the best bargain he could ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... hour it is wreathed with women, scores squat upon their mats on the pave, their goods spread before the ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... is often only in the males that the voice is well developed. But if we look forward, past Amphibians altogether, we find the voice becoming a maternal call helping to secure the safety of the young—a use very obvious when young birds squat motionless at the sound of the parent's danger-note. Later on, probably, the voice became an infantile call, as when the unhatched crocodile pipes from within the deeply buried egg, signalling to the mother that it is ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... web," he replied. "The spider will be waiting. Petrie, I sometimes despair. Sir Lionel is an impossible man to shepherd. You ought to see his house at Finchley. A low, squat place completely hemmed in by trees. Damp as a swamp; smells like a jungle. Everything topsy-turvy. He only arrived to-day, and he is working and eating (and sleeping I expect), in a study that looks like an earthquake at Sotheby's auction-rooms. The rest of the house ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the squat grey lodge, there was Mrs. Earley standing in her doorway to welcome them. Mrs. Earley was Earley's mother, and Earley was gardener and general factotum at Wren's End. Mrs. Earley looked after the chickens, and when she had exchanged the news with Jan, and rather ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... pied kingfisher (Ceryle lugubris) is a bird as large as a crow. Its plumage is speckled black and white, like that of a Hamburg fowl. It feeds entirely on fish, and frequents the larger hill streams. Its habit is to squat on a branch, or if the day be cloudy, on a boulder in mid-stream, whence it dives into the water after its quarry. Sometimes, kestrel-like, it hovers in the air on rapidly-vibrating pinions until it espies a fish in the water below, when it closes its ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... see in the cliff the long line of caves. As we enter the first an intolerable odour meets us, and a flight of bats explains the cause. Gradually our eyes accustom themselves to the light, and we become conscious of a square hall, the flat roof resting on squat pillars elaborately carved, fragments of painting on the walls and ceiling, narrow slits opening into dark cells, and opposite the entrance, set back in a shrine, a colossal Buddha, the light falling full on the ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... delivered most faithfully to the man I sent for them. The man was about five feet two inches high, and well made; his colour of a light copper; his hair black and short, and with little beard. He had two holes in his under-lip, but no ornaments in them. The woman was short and squat, with a plump round face; wore a deer-skin jacket, with a large hood, and had on wide boots. The teeth of both were black, and seemed as if they had been filed down level with the gums. The woman was punctured from the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... and shaded her eyes as she gazed across the great depression of the volcanic crater which had made such a wonderful farm for the Brewsters. At the door of the long, squat homestead, stood Mrs. Brewster, waiting for ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... hovering over her charge, Martha never found wholly unhappy. They constantly reminded her of the good times at Oakdale when she used to bring in her young mistress's breakfast. She could recall the dainty, white egg-shell china, the squat silver service bearing the Carnavon arms, and the film of lace which she used to throw around her ladyship's shoulders, lifting her hair to give it room. The butler would bring the tray to the door, and Martha would carry it herself to the bedside, where she would be met ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... youth in the world. It was certain that the little Melisse understood what they were doing, and the word passed from Cummins and Jan to the others at the post, so that it happened frequently during the building operations that Mukee and Per-ee, and even Williams himself, would squat for an hour at a time in the snow near Melisse, marveling at the early knowledge which the great God saw fit to put into a white baby's brain. This miracle came to be a matter of deep discussion, in which there were the few words but much thought of men born to silence. One day Mukee brought ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... many eyes, of a dense crew of squat bodies, of long, many-jointed limbs hauling at their mooring ropes to bring the thing down upon him. For a space he stared up, reining in his prancing horse with the instinct born of years of horsemanship. Then the flat of a ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... tribe, and, if the platform be large enough, also the parents of the pair, go up and squat down in the rear. The bride and bridegroom also squat down facing each other, and the old man comes forward and knocks their heads together. I was told at Subig that only the bride and groom mount the platform and seat ...
— Negritos of Zambales • William Allan Reed
... since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... high when Zarwell left the analyst's office. The white marble of the city's buildings shimmered in the afternoon heat, squat and austere as giant tree trunks, pock-marked and gray-mottled with windows. Zarwell was careful not to rest his hand on the flesh searing surface ...
— Monkey On His Back • Charles V. De Vet
... apparently addressed by the goose-herd to the man with the crates. It reads: "Hasten thy feet because of the geese! Hearken! thou knowest not the next minute what has been said to thee!" Above, a reis with a stick bids other peasants squat on the ground before addressing the scribe, and he is saying to them: "Sit ye down to talk." The third scene is in another style; on it may be seen Semites bringing offerings of vases of gold, silver, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... shook it the wooden rings rattled on the pole and grey men with pointed heads and squat, bulging bodies came out of the folds on to the flat green ground. If you looked at them they turned into squab faces smeared ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... Lamb, "somebody killed poor Abel for his mortgage. I dun'no' of anything else he had." Ozias laughed again. He was a stout, squat man, leaning forward upon his knees as he sat, with a complete subsidence of all his muscles, which showed that it was his accustomed attitude. Just in that way had Ozias Lamb sat and cobbled shoes on his lapboard for nearly forty years. He was almost resolved into a ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fire and piled more wood on it. There were no less than seven tripods lying about the floor of the cabin, but all roughly made and of the squat, short-legged pattern which holds a pot barely clear of a low bed of coals; not one was fit to hold a cauldron over a newly made deep fire of ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... plain odd-and-even to bouchon learned from certain captive Frenchmen who were permitted to mingle with them under no very strict supervision. The square tower of the original Cassillis house had been cut down and roofed in, which gave it a very uneven and squat appearance, and all about the walls little sheds had been erected, to shelter this detachment and that on its way through to Ireland. Some of these were as old as Claverhouse and his King's Life Guards in the bad days of the covenant. But, one and ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... were choking him. "You have dared to intrude upon my privacy! Do you think I built this fence that all the vermin in the country might congregate round it? Oh, you have been very near your death, my fine fellow! You will never be nearer until your time comes. Look at this!" he pulled a squat, thick pistol out of his bosom. "If you had passed through that gap and set foot on my land I'd have let daylight into you. I'll have no vagabonds here. I know how to treat gentry of that sort, whether their faces ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... front of the huts and a board sidewalk, on which the amazons squat to perform their toilets, mainly consisting of the application of greasy combs to the half inch of wool accorded them by their Creator to serve ...
— The Adventures of Uncle Jeremiah and Family at the Great Fair - Their Observations and Triumphs • Charles McCellan Stevens (AKA 'Quondam')
... down on the grassy ledge and looked out across the lichen-covered roofs and squat, rugged church tower of Tarn Regis; and pictures rose in my mind, pictures to some extent inspired, perhaps, by scraps I had read of learned essays written by my father. He had loved this ancient ground; he had been used to finger the earth hereabouts ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... the stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?" The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a species of gourd, and capable of holding from one to three or four gallons. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of Bees' throats is a pretty, a very pretty creature, despite her unwieldy paunch fashioned like a squat pyramid and embossed on the base, on either side, with a pimple shaped like a camel's hump. The skin, more pleasing to the eye than any satin, is milk-white in some, in others lemon-yellow. There are fine ladies among them who adorn their legs with ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... clear upon. We sat at a little marble table. I know it was marble because it was so hard, and cool to the head. From out of the smoky mist a ponderous creature of strange, undefined shape floated heavily towards us, and deposited a squat tumbler in front of me containing a pale yellowish liquor, which subsequent investigation has led me to believe must have been Scotch whisky. It seemed to me then the most nauseous stuff I had ever swallowed. It is curious to look back and ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... a little out of the heart of the Denver business district. It was built far uptown at a time when real estate was booming. Adjoining it is the Rockford Building. The two dominate a neighborhood of squat two-story stores and rooming-houses. In dull seasons the offices in the two big landmarks are not ...
— Tangled Trails - A Western Detective Story • William MacLeod Raine
... eyes I had given him from out the head of the stepfather who did so cruelly stare at the poor young David Copperfield, and became a man with only one eye which still held the malevolence that was hurled at that small David. And with this squat, crooked, evil image of the General Robert Carruthers in my heart I alighted from the train into the City of Hayesville, which is the capital of the great American State of Harpeth. The black man had swung himself off with my bags and that of the beautiful Madam Whitworth, ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... were commanded on this occasion by a little squat figure, all belly, with a short pair of legs at one end, and a little red, fiery face, that looked as if it would explode—at the other. The figure was mounted on horseback, and as it and its party gallantly entered this city of cabins, it clapped its hands on its side, to impress ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... 'Pourquoi ils ne repondent pas?' asked the Russian prince. 'Yes, they are quiet to-day,' answered the senior. 'But we get it in the neck sometimes.' We are all led off to be introduced to 'Mother,' who sits, squat and black, amid twenty of her grimy children who wait upon and feed her. She is an important person is 'Mother,' and her importance grows. It gets clearer with every month that it is she, and only she, who can lead us to the Rhine. She can and she will if the factories of Britain ...
— A Visit to Three Fronts • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to wait till next summer. June and July are the best months. I can show you where the birds sit, though. They haven't proper nests, they just squat on the rocks, packed as close together as sardines. It's wonderful to see them. And the noise they make! No, it isn't here, it's over by the chasms; we shall ...
— The Youngest Girl in the Fifth - A School Story • Angela Brazil
... conscious chiefly of this lower portion, there comes the proper sense of nobility-the feeling that one obtains from a successful triumphal arch. The chief fault of the tower above is that it lacks the long lifting lines that would give a sense of aspiration. It seems just a little squat and fat-as if it were too heavy on top and splayed out at the sides and bottom. It is also somewhat "showy," with too much hung-on ornament; and the green columns against red walls are not satisfying-this being one of ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... one-pound shell; and around it a semicircle of silent, masked and cowled figures. There were twelve of them, eleven men and a woman. In the shadows, which grew denser at the far end of the room, was a squat, globular object, a massive, smooth-sided, black, threatening ...
— Elusive Isabel • Jacques Futrelle
... red, bloated face, and his figure is short and squat. So far there is nothing in him to notice, but when you see his eyes, you can read in these hard and shallow orbs a depravity beyond measure depraved, a thirst after wickedness, the pure, disinterested love of Hell for its own sake. The other night, in the street, I was watching ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... four o'clock in the morning Chekhov was up and about. After drinking his coffee he would go out into the garden and would spend a long time scrutinizing every fruit-tree and every rose-bush, now cutting off a branch, now training a shoot, or he would squat on his heels by a stump and gaze at something on the ground. It turned out that there was more land than they needed (639 acres), and they farmed it themselves, with no bailiff or steward, assisted only by two labourers, Frol ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... seeing them cuddle invisible under small tufts and weeds. Out in the stable lot, where the grass was grazed so close that the geese could barely nip it, she would sometimes get one of the negro men to scare the little pigs, for the delight of seeing them squat as though hidden, when they were no more hidden than if they had spread themselves out upon so many dinner dishes. All of us reveal traces of this primitive instinct upon occasion. Daphne was doing her best to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... start with wonder at what it can be or mean, you pursue the association, and think upon the fire and brimstone that were rained down. It is a human being of no very Apollo-like form or face: short, squat, with its shoulders drawn up to its ears, and its hands delved into its breeches'-pockets. The hue of its face is a mixture of brick-dust and saffron; and the texture seems that of the skin of a dead frog. There is a ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... of the mountain was knocked off, the ghost of the Cape, that tremendous sprite which cuts such a figure in the Lusiad, was discovered sitting squat in an excavation formed for him in the centre of the mountain. He seemed just like a young bee in his little cell before he comes forth, or like a bean in a bean-pod; and when the upper part of the mountain was split across and knocked off, the superior half ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... than over the middling size; the women especially are remarkably short and squat built: Their complexion is a dark brown, and their hair universally black and lank. We saw no difference in the colour of rich and poor, though in the South-Sea islands those that were exposed to the weather were almost as brown as the New Hollanders, and ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... such as we use in a typical Spanish dwelling, no bedsteads, tables, or chairs. The inmates squat on divans arranged on the floor around the walls of the rooms, and at nighttime they spread their bedding on the floors. Some of the rooms were nicely carpeted with Mexican rugs. My horse must have thought he had come to a suite of stables, for he acted accordingly. He nosed around after ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... wolves. Every day eight or ten Koraks, armed with spears and knives, leave the encampment just before dark, walk a mile or two to the place where the deer happen to be pastured, build themselves little huts of trailing pine branches, about three feet in height and two in diameter, and squat in them throughout the long, cold hours of an arctic night, watching for wolves. The worse the weather is, the greater the necessity for vigilance. Sometimes, in the middle of a dark winter's night, when a terrible north-easterly storm is howling across the steppe in clouds of flying snow, ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... black squat beetle, vigorous for his size, Pushing tail-first by every road that's wrong The dung-ball of his dirty thoughts along His tiny sphere of grovelling sympathies— Has knocked himself full-butt, with blundering trouble, Against a mountain he can neither double ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... sor?" came another shout as I rounded the squat building stuffed with boats—literally ...
— The Parthenon By Way Of Papendrecht - 1909 • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Eastern's power of concentration, love of meditation, and utter detachment from self, would doubtlessly prove wearisome in the extreme, neither for a true explanation thereof can help be got from highly or lowly born native. Without movement for hours he will sit or squat, as becomes his station, staring, as we should say, vacantly into space, in reality seeing and hearing that which others, blinded by material enjoyment, can never hope to ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... repeated Jenny. She was small and squat, with a broad, freckled face, and light blue, saucer eyes. She looked up at the handsome girl by her side with the most ...
— A Girl of the People • L. T. Meade
... still, some of our nearer neighbours were seen cautiously poking their heads from out their holes and looking cunningly, and at the same time inquisitively, about them. After some time, a dog would emerge from the entrance of his domicile, squat upon his looking-out place, shake his ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... camp-fire story. That would be spiffing!" clamoured the girls. "Sit on the floor, near the fire, and we'll all squat near you. We haven't had a story ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... and [)i]nc[)i]nil'tce, the manner in which fire is prepared for heating the stones placed in it when it is used. The structure is designed to hold only one person at a time, and he must crawl in and squat on his heels with his knees ...
— Navaho Houses, pages 469-518 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... the ivy which drapes the rock, the grotto opens," writes Zola, "with its eternally flaming candles. From a distance it looks rather squat and misshapen, a very narrow and humble aperture for the breath of the Infinite which issued from it. The statue of the Virgin has become a mere speck, which seems to move in the quiver of the atmosphere heated by the little yellow flames. To see anything it is necessary to raise oneself; ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... crept round the house towards the woodshed, opened the door, and stood in the kitchen, listening breathlessly. Her mother's voice drowned Granny's; it had often forced Ditte to her knees, but so frightful she had never heard it before. She was stiff with fear, and she had to squat on ...
— Ditte: Girl Alive! • Martin Andersen Nexo
... species of cyclops appeared on the threshold of the chapel, motionless, squat, and almost as broad as he was tall; squared on the base, as a great man says; with his doublet half red, half violet, sown with silver bells, and, above all, in the perfection of his ugliness, the populace recognized him on the instant, and shouted ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... light road-cart, trotted past. The driver was a short, squat man, his face almost hidden in hair. It was Dr. Buzzard. He was known for miles as a successful "conjurer" and giver of "hands." Most of the people around had perfect faith in his cures and revelations, and had advised Religion to try him, but the girl objected, ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Expanding in the mean egg... Little squat tailors with unkempt faces, Pale as lard, Fur-makers, factory-hands, shop-workers, News-boys with battling eyes And bodies yet vibrant with the momentum of long runs, Here and there ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... out in his leaky old punt to "jig" squid for bait. He was so disgusted with the punt—so ashamed of the squat, weather-worn, rotten cast-off—that he wished heartily for a new one all the way to the grounds. The loss of the Never Give Up had brought ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... need rifles and bayonets to take a bath gets me), a full quota of ammunition, and our tin hats. Each man had a piece of soap and a towel. After an eight-kilo march along a dusty road, with an occasional shell whistling overhead, we arrived at a little squat frame building upon the bank of a creek. Nailed over the door of this building was a large sign which read "Divisional Baths." In a wooden shed in the rear, we could hear a wheezy old engine ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... of two Indians from the Napo, who were on the way to Quito with the mail—probably half a dozen letters. A strip of cloth around the loins, and a short cape just covering the shoulders, were all their habiliments. We noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of course the White Tower, which still impresses even our generation with the squat and square shoulders of Norman strength. It and Ely are the best remaining expressions of the hardy little men, and it fills one, as does everything Norman, from the Tyne to the Euphrates, with something of awe. This building, the White ...
— The Historic Thames • Hilaire Belloc
... had come out from his curtain, a squat, formidable figure, monstrous in chest and arms, limping slightly on his distorted leg. His skin bad none of the freshness and clearness of Montgomery's, but was dusky and mottled, with one huge mole amid the mat of tangled black hair which thatched his mighty breast. His weight bore no relation ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... he said pleasantly, shaking hands with the squat little figure in front of him, "I remember ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... fortress of Nueva Cordoba. He looked down into the moat well stocked with crocodiles, great fish his mercenaries, paid with flesh, and he looked at the tunal which ringed the moat as the moat ringed the squat white fortress. A deadly girdle was the tunal, of cactus and other thorny things, thick, wide, dark, and impenetrable, a forest of stilettoes, and for its kings the rattlesnake and viper. Nor naked Indian nor mailed white man might traverse that thicket, where wall on wall was met a spiked and ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... no mast, no rigging, no outside gearing. One squat funnel amidship told that she used steam for some purpose, and out of this funnel black masses of smoke rose slowly in the motionless air. She resembled no ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... make an unburdened man gasp for breath. His lips were still pursed, though they had ceased to give forth sound. He came to the nearly level terrace whereon, among scattered boulders, were clustered the squat shanties ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... movement in the camp, for the old Emir had mounted his camel, and some of his party were already beginning to follow their companions. The squat lieutenant, the Moolah, and about a dozen Dervishes surrounded the prisoners. They had not mounted their camels, for they were told off to be the ministers of death. The three men understood as they looked ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... average criminal had the nose of the veriest cur dog he'd smell that oil a mile away. Now, where are you? There." He had butted into a constable's solid bulk. "Take me to the rock—quick. We must hide behind it, on the lower side.... Is this the place? Right! Squat down, both of you, and make yourselves comfortable, so that you won't feel your position irksome, and move perhaps at the wrong moment. When you feel me crawling away, follow to the upper foot of the ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... was saying: "I believe you're a square shooter, Vail." He was leading the way along the gravel path at the side of the house. Before them loomed the squat brick ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... the boat on Monday afternoon. This landed him some time before daylight at the time-worn village from which the coach ran to Sitford. A railway connected this village with New York, necessitating no worse inconvenience than crossing the river on a squat, old-fashioned ferry boat; but he calculated that both the lawyer and Mrs. Ransom would make use of this, and felt the risk would be less for him if he chose the ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... excuse for a half-hour's visit. Oftenest he went into Lan Yek's smelly little shop, for there the Bogobos brought their mountain hemp to trade for small agongs: tired from their heavy packing, they would squat down on the floor along the wall, one of them occasionally stepping to an agong to test it with deft contact of finger, all joining him in rapt study of its tone, measuring the duration of the lingering waves of sound. Terry learned, in time, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... scowman, stood upon the running-board of the leading scow and directed the stowing of the freight. He was a picturesque figure—Vermilion. A squat, thick half-breed, with eyes set wide apart beneath a low forehead bound tightly around with a handkerchief of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... be expected," he would say, "of a man who had lived in gay exile through his first years, and then of a sudden was made a King, and had all the beauties of England kneeling before him—and he with a squat, black, long-toothed Portugee fastened to him for a wife? And Mistress Barbara Palmer at him from his first landing on English soil to be restored—she that ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... indictable nuisance), and all the city ways, all public squares and places, were covered in with a recently invented glass-like substance. The roofing of London became practically continuous. Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation against tall buildings was abolished, and London, from a squat expanse of petty houses—feebly archaic in design—rose steadily towards the sky. To the municipal responsibility for water, light, and drainage, was added another, and that ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... name the man was much too polite to express this opinion aloud. He merely said, "Well, Dick, you know that you're welcome to squat here as long or as short a time as you like, an' use the best o' my horses, if so disposed, or do the postboy business on Black Polly. Do as ye like wi' me an' mine, boy, for it's only fair to ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... a dancing girl, only partly draped, balancing a sword on her head, while a brilliant green veil flies from head and face. Other Oriental women squat upon the floor watching her with a half indolent expression, while their Oriental masters and their friends sit in pomp at one side, absorbed in the dance and in the girl. The expressions upon all the faces are excellent and, the jewelled ...
— Pictures Every Child Should Know • Dolores Bacon
... squal'id ness wand wan'der squab was'ish ly squat squan'der squad watch'ful ness ...
— McGuffey's Eclectic Spelling Book • W. H. McGuffey
... four stumps of wood for legs—a truly Titanic bedstead; one might have put a ton or two on it—it would not have bent under the load; under the bed was a solid chest; in a corner stood a little table of the same strong kind, and near the table a three-legged stool, so solid and squat that Gerasim himself would sometimes pick it up and drop it again with a smile of delight. The garret was locked up by means of a padlock that looked like a kalatch or basket-shaped loaf, only black; the key of this padlock Gerasim always carried ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... to his writing table. From it he lifted, almost reverently, a small bronze figure,—the figure of a woman, strongly built, almost squat, without grace, whose eyes and head ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... with cold hate in his white, flabby, frog-face and in the very poise of his squat, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... have christened "Topsy," and I only wish you could see her when she is in one of her tantrums, which she has at frequent intervals. With her flashing black eyes, straight, jet-black hair, square, squat shoulders, she looks the very embodiment of the Evil One. She is twelve, but shows neither ability nor desire to learn. Her habits are disgusting, and unless closely watched she will be found filling her pockets with the contents of the garbage pail—and this in spite of the fact that we are ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... were very green and fresh. Climbing the precipitous ascent, he laughed and chattered, but she was silent, seeming to brood over something. There was scarcely time to go inside the squat, square building that crowns the bluff of rock. They leaned upon the wall where the cliff runs sheer down to the Park. Below them, in their holes in the sandstone, pigeons preened themselves and cooed softly. Away down ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... interesting to mark, where they encroached furthest on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the ordinary character of the Scotch fir, and how, sending out from their short gnarled boles immense branches, some two or three feet over the soil, they somewhat resembled in their squat, dense proportions, and rounded contours, gigantic bee-hives. It was of itself worth while undertaking a journey to the Highlands, to witness these last remains of that arboreous condition of our country to which ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... and is narrow, but very deep, with a roof showing traces of that delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward, and very much defaced. And in this great ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... early Gothic (about the year 1200), still full of Romanesque feeling, but the church having been much pulled about in the thirteenth century, it came to have a semi-Byzantine choir and two depressed domes, quite Byzantine, over the nave. The facade, with its squat towers, exhibits no lofty aim, but when one looks at the tabernacle-work in the tympan of the divided portal, the capitals in the jambs and the mouldings of the archivolts, the elegant arcade above ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... stood an animal, with neck and muzzle thrust forward, its head poking into the night, its whole body poised in that attitude of intense rigidity that precedes the spring into freedom, the running leap of attack. It seemed to be about the size of a calf, leaner than a mastiff, yet more squat than a wolf, and I can swear that I saw the fur ridged sharply upon its back. Then its upper lip slowly lifted, and I saw ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... palm-logs with palm-leaf thatch. These were the saddle-room, storehouse, chicken-house, and stable. The chicken-house was allotted to Kermit and Miller for the preparation of the specimens; and there they worked industriously. With a big skin, like that of the giant ant-eater, they had to squat on the ground; while the ducklings and wee chickens scuffled not only round the skin but all over it, grabbing the shreds and scraps of meat and catching flies. The fourth end of the quadrangle was formed ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... Gray was born and grew towards womanhood was one of a squat line of mean little houses that hid themselves behind a great church. The roadway in front of the houses led only to the back entrance of the church. Over against the windows was the playground of the church schools, surrounded by a high wall that shut away field and sky from ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... harbour, only a matter of six or seven miles, returning soon with a tug, who for a pound or two placed us, without further trouble, alongside the wharf, amongst some magnificent clipper ships of Messrs. Henderson's and the New Zealand Shipping Co.'s, who seemed to turn up their splendid noses at the squat, dumpy, antiquated old serving-mallet that dared to mingle with so august a crowd. There had been a time, not so very far back, when I should have shared their apparent contempt for our homely old tub; but my voyage ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... Shaw, the traveller in Thibet, says:—"My companion and I walked on to keep ourselves warm, but halting at sunset, had to sit and freeze several hours before the things came up. The best way of keeping warm on such an occasion, is to squat down, kneeling against a bank, resting your head on the bank, and nearly between your knees. Then tuck your overcoat in, all round you, over head and all; and if you are lucky, and there is not too much wind, you will make a little atmosphere of your own inside the covering, ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... used to squat herself under a couch and make all her servants lie above, one upon the other, so that if the thunderbolt fell, it might have its effect upon them before penetrating to her. She had ruined herself and her husband, though they were rich, through sheer imbecility; ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... The passengers squat on furs or other coverings laid flat on the toboggan. The steerer sits behind and controls the direction by a trailing pole and sometimes with ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... lived there, needing only a little light to count up his hoard, and caring little for any intrusive wind, if it did not blow away his treasure. I fancied I could see him running over the tale of his coin by a feeble rushlight—squat, perhaps, on the dirty tile-floor—then locking his box, and placing it carefully under the pillow of his straw pallet, then tip-toeing to the door to examine again the fastening, then carefully extinguishing the taper, and after, dropping ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... appearance of the heads of a party, and I never had the least doubt of their being the authors of the 'Gazette Ecclesiastique'. The one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard. They called each other cousin. They lodged at Paris with D'Alembert, in the house of his nurse named Madam Rousseau, and had taken at Montmorency a little apartment to pass the summers there. They did everything for themselves, and had neither a servant ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... killed him, for he does not move. Squat down. We don't want the savages to see us. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... through a soft wood forest with the aid of good workmen. Here, however, the trees were for the most part of extremely hard wood, teak and mahogany forming the majority. The natives had no idea of using an axe. Their only notion of felling a tree was to squat down beside it and give it little hacking chops with a large ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... Gunner Moon many a one had tried to end his splendid life, just as a worthless wretch of old sought fame by burning the Ephesian wonder of the world. But Redruff was deep in woodcraft. He knew just where to hide, and when to rise on silent wing, and when to squat till overstepped, then rise on thunder wing within a yard to shield himself at once behind some ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson
... furnished, and very clean. The hand of taste and order was everywhere visible. Snow-white curtains festooned the two small windows, and concealed all of a turn-up bedstead but two of its legs. A small array of white crockery shone from an open closet; and a squat-looking stove, which made the apartment agreeably warm, was smartly polished, and was evaporating cheerful music out of a bright teakettle. Through a door partly ajar could be seen another room, covered with a rag carpet, and the companion of the ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... you chaps," said Langrish, leading the way to the bank facing that in the occupation of the enemy, "here's our place. Squat down ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... always got a reason, such as it is. Wants to go and squat at Bathurst. Well, Tom, you are a fool for leaving us, but of course we shan't pay you the compliment of keeping you against your will, shall we?" ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... remote reflections from the squat figure, the harsh and grating voice, and the commonplace rhetoric of Mr. Bartley—so far can fancy and insight lead one astray in that great stage of Titanic passions which is spread on the floor of ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... cigarette and yawned. The immediate prospect was dull. Savages continued to drift in, to squat and stare, then to move on to the porters' camps. There a lively bartering was going on. From some unsuspected store each porter had drawn forth a few beads, some snuff, a length of wire, or similar treasure; ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... ratlines, a queer sight against the mat of the night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: "By gracious!" The following instant he had the lantern and was after her. I watched him go up above my head—a ponderous, swaying climber into the sky—come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that for a moment, then it disappeared, and in its place there sprang out a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... couple had gone through the whole of their performances, they used to squat themselves down suddenly in the most ungraceful style imaginable, and were then relieved by another pair of artistes ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... I took the key and fitted it to the lock. It turned noisily, and a cold whiff of air struck my face. Gazing round this new chamber, I saw two lines of squat pillars, supporting a low arch'd roof. 'Twas the crypt beneath the chapel, and smelt vilely. A green moisture trickled down the pillars, and dripp'd on the tombs ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... the Nanticoke. As he spoke, he raised himself up from his couch of leaves, and saw standing at his feet a strange-looking creature, whom the beams of the moon revealed to be a little, ugly, squat, brown man, not much higher than an Indian's hip. His shape was odd and singular, beyond anything the Nanticoke had ever seen. His legs were each as large as his body, and his feet were quite as much out of proportion. ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... A strange squat object loomed suddenly into sight—a well-known landmark to those who wandered daily behind the lines. Derelict, motionless, it lay on a sunken road, completely blocking it; and the sunken road was heavy with the stench of death. It is not ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... impressive, for it has nothing of the lightness and grace of the Transitional work in the Temple, and the heavy round arches opening into the circular aisle are supported by eight massive piers. Above there is another series of eight pillars, very squat, and of about the same girth as those below, and the spaces between are subdivided by a small pillar supporting two semi-circular arches. Part of the surrounding aisle collapsed in 1841, and the Cambridge Camden Society (now defunct) employed the architect Salvin to thoroughly restore the ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in squat-shaped flasks of tinned copper, called kunkumas, holding from 1 to 10 lb., and sewn up in white woolen cloths. Usually their contents are transferred at Constantinople into small gilded bottles of German manufacture for export. The Bulgarian otto harvest, during the five years 1867-71, ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... ring of bells throbbed thin music. It rose and fell on the easterly breeze and a squat grey tower, over which floated a white ensign on a flagstaff, appeared upon a little knoll of trees in the midst of the ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts
... are just terrible," said Jane, almost in tears. "I know I will just squat down if ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when the Scarrowmania lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the couple of steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them led to the Scarrowmania's forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... the greenery, bold and white, shone the buildings of Mombasa; and after a little while we saw an inland glitter that represented her narrow, deep bay, the stern of a wreck against the low, green cliffs, and strange, fat-trunked squat trees without leaves. Straight past all this we glided at half speed, then turned sharp to the right to enter a long wide expanse like a river, with green banks, twenty feet or so in height, grown thickly with the ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... say, Pepperrell tried something quite different. At daybreak of the 12th the whole fleet stood into Gabarus Bay, a large open roadstead running west from the little Louisbourg peninsula. The Provincials eyed the fortress eagerly. It looked mean, squat, and shrunken in the dim grey light of early dawn. But it looked hard enough, for all that. Its alarm bells began to ring. Its signal cannon fired. And all the people who had been living outside ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... lonely countryside; the nearest signs of human life were a church gauntly silhouetted on the hill above Grimsby Center, two miles away, and a life-saving station, squat and sand-colored, slapped down in a hollow of the cliffs. But near the Applebys' door ran the State road, black and oily and smooth, on which, even at the beginning of the summer season, passed a procession of motors from Boston and Brockton, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... highwaymen took his place, a stout, squat figure in the flannel shirt, spurs, and chaps of a cow-puncher. It took no second glance to tell Collins this bandy-legged fellow had been ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... continued to the door, which led to an antique, low-browed kitchen. A small dark passage led from the kitchen to a front room with a great fireplace, which rose so high that there was but just enough room between the mantle-board and the whitewashed ceiling for the squat brass candlesticks and the big foreign sea-shells which stood ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... difficult to bring it to such a form as might be in harmony with the rest. Such a thing would not have happened if Bandinelli had possessed as much knowledge in architecture as he did in sculpture; not to mention that the great niches in the side-walls at each end proved to be squat, and that the one in the centre was not without defect, as will be told in the Life of that same Bandinelli. This work, after having been pursued for ten years, was abandoned, and so it remained for some time. It is true that the profiled stones as well as the columns, both of ...
— Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi • Giorgio Vasari
... September morning some weeks later, a line of these selfsame tanks burst for the first time upon his incredulous vision, waddling grotesquely up the hill to the ridge which had defied the British infantry so long and so bloodily—there to squat complacently down on the top of the enemy's machine-guns, or spout destruction from her own up and down beautiful trenches which had never been intended for capture. In fact, Brother Boche was quite plaintive ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... of river-driving done; while others lounged upon the grass, or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the Chinamen, or chaffing the Indian idling in the sun—a garish figure stoically watching the inroads of civilisation. The town itself was squat but amiable: small houses and large huts; the only place of note and dignity, the new town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the big mill, and even by the two smaller ones flanking it ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... but a faint light; both window and door stood open, still there was no draught, and the feeble little flame burned quite still, casting a faint yellow stain on the ceiling like the refection from a buttercup held beneath a chin. These ceilings are far too low! Across the wide, squat window the apple branches fell in black stripes which never stirred. It was too dark to see things clearly. At the foot of the bed was a chest, and there Mrs. Hopgood had sat down, moving her lips as if in speech. Mingled with the half-musty smell of age; there ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of Say could not fail to arouse the sympathies of her own sex, even outside of her clan. Many were the calls from compassionate women. They would drop in, squat down, tender their services, suggest remedies, and gossip. Only one woman made herself directly useful, and that was Shotaye, a member of the Water clan. Shotaye was a strange woman. Nobody liked her, and yet many ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... planted about him, turbaned and blazing with jewels. His agents inveigled them from Istamboul with fair promises; but the moment he had got them, he baptized them by brute force in a large tub; and this done, let them squat with their faces towards Mecca, and invoke Mahound as much as they pleased, laughing in his sleeve at their simplicity in fancying they were still infidels. He had lions in cages, and fleet leopards trained by Orientals to run down hares and deer. In short, he relished all rarities, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... eaveless, bleak stone roof, Like a squared block of native crag, it stands, Hunched, on skirlnaked, windy fells, aloof: Yet, was it built by patient human hands: Hands, that have long been dust, chiselled each stone, And bedded it secure; and from the square Squat chimneystack, hither and thither blown, The reek of human fires still floats in air, And perishes, as life on life burns through. Squareset and stark to every blast that blows, It bears the brunt of time, withstands anew Wildfires of tempest and league-scouring ...
— Krindlesyke • Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
... with the black-green of the pine and fir woods they gave the country a singularly sombre aspect. There was little variation in the scenery all the way to Upsala. In some places, the soil appeared to be rich and under good cultivation; here the red villages were more frequent, and squat church-towers showed themselves in the distance. In other places, we had but the rough hills, or rather knobs of gray gneiss, whose masses were covered with yellow moss, and the straggling fir forests. We met but few country teams on the road; nobody ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... shrieks commence the deafening din, Rouse every ambush and the storm begin. A thousand thickets, thro each opening glen, Pour forth their hunters to the chase of men; Trunks of huge trees, and rocks and ravines lend Unnumber'd batteries and their files defend; They fire, they squat, they rise, advance and fly, And yells and groans alternate rend the sky. The well aim'd hatchet cleaves the helmless head, Mute showers of arrows and loud storms of lead Rain thick from hands unseen, and sudden fling A deep ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... I had not even attempted little Lizzie, but one day, when Miss Evelyn and Mary were again under menstruation, and I had dear Lizzie all to myself, she was seized with such an irresistible desire to ease herself, that she had only time to get behind a bush and squat down. I remained waiting for her, when she called to me, to ask if I had any paper. I advanced to give her some. She was in a half-standing position, with her clothes held up to her waist. While giving her the paper, my eyes accidentally fell upon what ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... Koraks, armed with spears and knives, leave the encampment just before dark, walk a mile or two to the place where the deer happen to be pastured, build themselves little huts of trailing pine branches, about three feet in height and two in diameter, and squat in them throughout the long, cold hours of an arctic night, watching for wolves. The worse the weather is, the greater the necessity for vigilance. Sometimes, in the middle of a dark winter's night, when a terrible north-easterly ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... nothing more than a ribbon torn from the green leaf of the ti plant, say three-quarters of an inch to an inch in width by 5 or 6 inches long, and rolled up somewhat after the manner of a lamplighter, so as to form a squat cylinder an inch or more in length. This was compressed to flatten it. Placed between the lips and blown into with proper force, it emits a tone of pure reedlike quality, that varies in pitch, according to the size of ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... carry them off in great numbers, and they are affected by drought quite as much as cattle are. A sheep run can be started with a small capital, and you might almost say with no capital at all. For instance, a man with very little money, or practically with none at all, can find a location and squat upon it, and then go to one of the cities, and if he is known to be a respectable, honest, and industrious man and free from vicious habits, he can find somebody who will supply the capital for buying a few hundred sheep. ...
— The Land of the Kangaroo - Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey through the Great Island Continent • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Robin sat there in the garden he happened to look down at the ground. And right before his eyes a long snout suddenly rose out of the dirt, followed by the squat form of Grandfather Mole. ...
— The Tale of Grunty Pig - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... "Squat lower, Le-loo; arrows has been the death of many a man afore you," whispered Big Pete in my ear, but even as he spoke another arrow sang over our crouching bodies, shaving the protecting rock so closely that their plumed tips brushed the dust on ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... elegant proportions. His air and gait have nothing of the clown in them. Take away his jacket and trousers, and you have as spruce a fellow as ever came from dancing-school or college. He is the exact picture of his mother, and the most perfect contrast to the sturdy legs, squat figure, and broad, unthinking, sheepish face of the father that can be imagined. You must confess that his appearance here is a pretty strong proof of the father's assertions. The money given for these clothes could not possibly have been honestly acquired. ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... its willows showed the brook, Haymakers rested. The tosser lay forsook Out in the sun; and the long waggon stood Without its team, it seemed it never would Move from the shadow of that single yew. The team, as still, until their task was due, Beside the labourers enjoyed the shade That three squat oaks mid-field together made Upon a circle of grass and weed uncut, And on the hollow, once a chalk-pit, but Now brimmed with nut and elder-flower so clean. The men leaned on their rakes, about to begin, But still. ...
— Poems • Edward Thomas
... an Indian squaw, a little old squat, black-faced thing as mean as a snake. They've got a big brood of children, that boy you saw this morning is the senior of the gang. Old Hargus usually harbors two or three cattle thieves, horse thieves or other crooks of that kind, some of them just ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... whole to start in quest of food. I have several times seen newly-hatched young in charge of the cock, who made a very good attempt at appearing lame in the plover fashion, in order to draw off the attention of pursuers. The young squat down and remain immovable when too small to run far, but attain a wonderful degree of speed when about the size of common fowls. It can not be asserted that ostriches are polygamous, though they often appear to be so. When caught they are easily tamed, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... about to enter the portal. Despite the fact that the bride was considered the ugliest girl in the place, she had been duly "robbed" by her bold or possibly blind lover—her features were providentially veiled beneath her nuptial flammeum, and of her squat figure little could be discerned under the gorgeous accoutrements of the occasion. She was ablaze with ornaments and embroidery of gold, on neck and shoulders and wrist; a wide lace collar fell over a bodice of purple silk; silken too, and of brightest green, was her pleated skirt. The priest seemed ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... sidewalk, showed occasional bullet scars on the rough red brownstone surface. Green outside shutters lay inertly back from dull leaded panes which reflected metallically the orange glow of the setting sun, and over the door, which was squat and low and level with the pavement, an ancient four-sided lantern, hung from a bracket of rusty black iron, was gathering cobwebs in disuse. All this lay within Mary Louise's field of vision from the summerhouse and yet she saw it not. She was staring ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... thing exhibited an atrocious determination to thwart me. It was with me in the church—in the reading-desk—in the pulpit—within the communion rails. At last, it reached this extremity, that while I was reading to the congregation, it would spring upon the book and squat there, so that I was unable to see the page. This ...
— Green Tea; Mr. Justice Harbottle • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... of smoke-bleared aspect, shambles forward, opening his blue lips, for there is sense in him; and croaks: "Alight then, and give up your arms!" the Hussar-Captain is too happy to be escorted to the Barriers, and dismissed on parole. Who the squat individual was? Men answer, it is M. Marat, author of the excellent pacific Avis au Peuple! Great truly, O thou remarkable Dogleech, is this thy day of emergence and new birth: and yet this same day come four years—!—But let the curtains of the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... and rise to a sitting posture; squat until the thighs rest upon the calves of the legs. Lie flat on the back, head downward on an inclined plane (an ironing board, uptilted, will do) and make a bridge at intervals by arching the abdomen and resting on shoulders ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... said Fritz, "which I found on the shore; most curious animals they are; they hopped rather than walked, and every now and then would squat down on their legs and rub their snouts with their fore paws. Had not I been afraid of losing them all, I would have tried to catch one ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... had made this simple arrangement I invited the doubting farmer to watch the old squat schoolhouse from a window that overlooked it, to see if a good smoke did not rise from the stovepipe. Sure enough, on the minute, he saw a tall column curling gracefully up through the frosty air, but instead of congratulating me on my success he solemnly shook ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... In the upper Ludlow rocks, remains of six genera of fish have been for a longer period known; they belong to the order of cartilaginous fishes, an order of mean organization and ferocious habits, of which the shark and sturgeon are living specimens. "Some were furnished with long palates, and squat, firmly-based teeth, well adapted for crushing the strong-cased zoophytes and shells of the period, fragments of which occur in the foecal remains; some with teeth that, like the fossil sharks of the later formations, resemble lines of miniature ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... time at Margate by-and-by. And oh! my boy cousins and my two greatest chums at school are staying with me now at The Hollies. The girls' names are Amelia and Rebecca Perkins. Oh, they're fine! Do give me room to squat between you girls. You are frightfully stand-off ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade
... head or hand, it is head or hand only, and the motion is slow, painful, and hesitating, as though mind functioned on body with difficulty, uncertain of its ground. Nevertheless, when the door opens, and the small squat figure of a very old and dear friend advances towards him, his face lights instantly. With tender reverence and affection the newcomer takes hold of his hand, lifts, presses it, lays it back again. And when he has seated himself, ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... under small tufts and weeds. Out in the stable lot, where the grass was grazed so close that the geese could barely nip it, she would sometimes get one of the negro men to scare the little pigs, for the delight of seeing them squat as though hidden, when they were no more hidden than if they had spread themselves out upon so many dinner dishes. All of us reveal traces of this primitive instinct upon occasion. Daphne was doing her best to ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the mountainside, overlooking a valley so deep and wide as to daze the brain of the gazing human, stands a squat building. It seems to have been crushed into the slope by the driving force of the vicious mountain storms to which it is open on three sides. There is no shelter for it. It stands out bravely to sunshine and storm alike with the contemptuous ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... to the gratification of their desire for comfort, the ancient Egyptians gradually developed the art of making mats from papyrus, a plant as important to them as any of our trees, fibrous grasses, or hemp are to us. While at work on the manufacture of these mats, the weavers used to squat on the ground. They became skilful, both in constructing the fabric and arranging the colors; the latter were quite bright and effective, being chiefly red, blue, yellow, and green, with black ...
— Rugs: Oriental and Occidental, Antique & Modern - A Handbook for Ready Reference • Rosa Belle Holt
... children, instead of being a burden to poor people, are often a source of wealth: at Massowah they certainly are. The young girls of Moncullou, &c., bring in a pretty good income to their parents. I know big, strong, but lazy fellows who would squat down all day in the shade of their huts, living on the earnings of two or three little girls, who daily went once or twice to Massowah laden with a large skin full of water. The water-girls vary in age from eight to sixteen. ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... the Lac d'Amour, and the two friends paused for some time on the other bridge. But no little window opened in the heavens. The great distant tower of the Halles, the enormous campanile of Notre Dame, a squat tower near the pond, the pointed roofs of the Beguinage stood outlined against the milky clouds, like a venerable assembly of old men. Carlino, not knowing what better to do, began discoursing in a loud voice on the most appropriate position ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro
... Arabs playing leap-frog in front of their German commandant as impudently as street boys back in their native bazaars. There are all the tribes and castes of British Indians—"I've got twenty different kinds of people in my Mohammedan camp," said the lieutenant who was showing me about—squat Gurkhas from the Himalayas, minus their famous knives—tall, black-bearded Sikhs, with the faces of princes. There are even a few lone Englishmen, though most of the British soldiers in this part of Germany are at Doberitz. Whether ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... seated themselves on the bench projecting from the inner wall of the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes divided into blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at the chalk-tinted village lifting its squat church-tower and grey roofs against the precisely drawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent, so intensely aware of Darrow's nearness that there was no surprise in the touch he laid on her hand. They looked at each other, ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... to a D'Arsonval galvanometer," replied the doctor. "This large, squat telescope catches and concentrates on the thermocouple and the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, March 1930 • Various
... country the towns squat low in the valleys, they lie in wait by the rivers, and often I scarcely know of their presence until I am so close upon them that I can smell the breath of their heated nostrils and hear ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... they now are guilty. All falsehood and all blasphemy proceed from them. They have set the last hand at establishing universal corruption. They are a public plague, the plague of the world, chameleons who take their color from the soil they squat on, flatterers of princes, perverters of youth. They not only excuse but laud lying; their dissimulation is bare and unqualified mendacity; their malice is inestimable. They have the art so to blend their ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... word of English, so we christened him Timothy, and he answers to it. The old man cut up rusty at first, and seemed disposed to drive us away, but by howling the name of Osten into his ears and giving him a little gold, we converted him into a friend, and got him to allow us to squat in the empty house. Then we went off prospecting, and found gold, sure enough, in the stream in front of the door, but there was not much in the places we tried—little more than ...
— Over the Rocky Mountains - Wandering Will in the Land of the Redskin • R.M. Ballantyne
... tree directly in Stubbs' path, stepped a short squat figure, with great long arms dangling at its side. A revolver was clasped in the right hand and the weapon was slowly raised until it ...
— The Boy Allies in the Balkan Campaign - The Struggle to Save a Nation • Clair W. Hayes
... That would be spiffing!" clamoured the girls. "Sit on the floor, near the fire, and we'll all squat near you. We haven't had a story for ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... shrewdly judged that Glenrock would try to steal the moment she got a runner on. He saw the runner break for second. He got the ball, drew back his arm, and shot the sphere down without rising from his squat. ...
— Don Strong, Patrol Leader • William Heyliger
... galleys, to be taken up again by naval architects in the nineteenth century. Then on the deck was built a pent-house of oak and iron, with sloping sides just high enough to cover the engine. The two towering smoke-stacks, the pride of the old river-steamers, were cut down to squat pipes protruding a foot or two above the strange structure. In the sides were embrasures, from which, when open, peered the iron muzzles of the dogs of war, ready to show their teeth and spit fire and iron at the enemy. This was the most powerful type of the river gunboat, and with them the ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 2 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... larger city than Pala-dar and of vastly different appearance. A hollow square of squat buildings enclosed the vast workshops and storage space of the fleet of war vessels. Their huge spherical bulks rose from their cradles in tier after tier that stretched as far as the eye could reach when the Nomad had dropped to a level but slightly above the tips of the highest spires. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... paragraph produced! She at once retorted, exclaiming in mock earnest, "I appeal! I appeal to the Titian of his age and country—I appeal to you, Sir Thomas Lawrence. Would you have painted a short, squat, broad-faced, inexpressive, affected, Frenchified, Greenland-seal-like lady of any age? Would any money have tempted you to profane your immortal pencil, consecrated by Nature to the Graces, by devoting its magic to such a model as this described by the Yankee artist of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... I look like a spacetramp," he observed. "But I'm not invisible. Mind if I pull up a cactus and squat?" ...
— Master of the Moondog • Stanley Mullen
... it out at last. The squat two-storied structure, similar to other merchants' strongholds, seemed unlit and unwatched. Carse swung back the hinged mittens of the suit and slid his hands out ready for action. In his left he took his ray-gun; then, pressing the mitten-switch, ...
— The Bluff of the Hawk • Anthony Gilmore
... divans, or ante-room] where the table stood covered with a cloth and had an ikon and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another door: whereupon the priest—a grey-headed old monk with a severe, elderly face—blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened hand. I did ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... "men-bush" are approaching. Going to the veranda, we see some lean figures with big mops of hair coming slowly down the narrow path from the forest, with soft, light steps. Some distance behind follows a crowd of others, who squat down near the last shrubs and examine everything with shy, suspicious eyes, while the leaders approach the house. Nearly all carry old Snider rifles, always loaded and cocked. The leaders stand silent for a while near the veranda, then one ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... individual himself has seen the bodies of the mediums possessed by the superior beings; he has communicated with them direct, has seen them cure the sick and predict coming events. At many a funeral, he has seen the medium squat before the corpse, chanting a weird song, and then suddenly become possessed by the spirit of the deceased; and, finally, he or some of his friends or townspeople are confident that they have seen and talked ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... over the moss, hurried through the ferns of the warren, retracing her steps, and arrived breathless at the lavoir. And scarcely had she dropped to her knees and seized soap and paddle, than a squat, bronzed, powerfully built young man appeared on the opposite bank of the stream, stepping briskly ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... stolen bone, till we are able to dig it up and chew it dry in secret. The devil has no need to blockade or besiege the gate of our ear if he has any of his good things to offer us. The gate that can only be opened from within will open at once of itself if he or any of his newsmongers but squat down for a moment before it. Shame on us, and on all of ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... seems a trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at fifty-five! I could bear up, I know I could, if it were not for the tree—yes, the tree, 'tis that's killing me. There he stands, threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us and squat us dead; and what will ye do when the life on your property is ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... of traffic seemed to be greater here than it had been at Elephant and Castle, and John, confused by it, stood looking about him. "Thet's the Benk of England, thet!" the conductor hurriedly continued, pointing across the street to the low, squat, dirty-looking building which occupied the whole of one side of the street. "An' thet's the Royal Exchynge owver there, an' this 'ere is the Mansion 'Ouse where the Lord Mayor lives. I can't stop to tell you no more. Ayngel, Ayngel, Ayngel! ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... the women had a hole called a cunt, and used it for fucking. I can recall no idea of the sort, it was simple curiosity to know something about those, whom I instinctively felt were made differently from myself. What sort of a hole could it be I wondered. Was it large? Was it round? Why did they squat instead of stand up, like men, my ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... which Ben Sessions was being led was thronged with people. There seemed to be three classes: rosy-skinned giantesses like his escort; men of his own size, but also with pink complexions; and the squat, hairy men who appeared to ...
— Daughters of Doom • Herbert B. Livingston
... of the Cathedral under the high tower. I noted the ponderous simplicity of the great squat pillars, the rough capitals—plain bulges of stone without so much as a pattern cut upon them—the round arch and the low aisles; but in one corner remaining near the door—a baptistery, I suppose—was ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... it looked to the weary money-lender. He had never seen him before; therefore, he had no reason to suppose that that face was not the index to an angelic nature. Unfortunately, Tinker knew by sight most of his father's friends and enemies, and at the first glance he recognised the squat figure, the thick, square nose, and muddy complexion ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... to squat round the fire, smoking tobacco and quaffing with evident pleasure the small glasses of usquebaugh which Dick bestowed upon them. Armitage objected, however, to ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... truth. Well, I resolved to venture on, and soon got up near enough to see that the bears were sitting as close as they could pack, in a large circle round the real, veritable North Pole, and that those who were moving were merely stragglers, who could not find room to squat down with the rest. I was standing contemplating the strange scene, when an immensely big fellow, catching sight of me, came waddling up on his hind legs, and growling terrifically with anger. 'This is inhospitable conduct, Mr Bruin, let me observe,' I shouted ...
— Marmaduke Merry - A Tale of Naval Adventures in Bygone Days • William H. G. Kingston
... him, for he does not move. Squat down. We don't want the savages to see us. They are ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... than I do, and myself, started at seven. We had four superb mules, and two good pack-horses, a large tent, and a plentiful supply of camping blankets. I put on all my own warm clothes, as well as most of those which had been lent to me, which gave me the squat, padded, look of a puffin or Esquimaux, but all, and more were needed long before we reached the top. The mules were beyond all praise. They went up the most severe ascent I have ever seen, climbing steadily for ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... prevent the imaginary contagion from spreading. The furniture was the sparest possible. There were, I remember, only two chairs in the sitting-room; so that when a guest came (and I think I was the only one) Cullingworth used to squat upon a pile of yearly volumes of the British Medical Journal in the corner. I can see him now levering himself up from his lowly seat, and striding about the room roaring and striking with his hands, while his little wife sat mum in the corner, ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... of the cliff she looked back, and saw that he was still standing—a squat, fantastic figure like a goblin out of a fairy-tale—outlined against the shining sea behind him, ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... a basket of fuel, two baskets of provisions, a cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her tete-a-tete companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen." The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... for they are young. They have plenty of society, real society, not the ill-assorted collection of a predetermined number of bodies, that blindly assumes that name, but the rich communication of various and fertile minds; they very, very seldom consent to squat four mortal hours on one chair (like old hares stiffening in their hot forms), and nibbling, sipping and twaddling in four mortal hours what could have been eaten, drunken and said in thirty-five ...
— Christie Johnstone • Charles Reade
... house was one of three in that block on Chatham Road. To the left of it was the residence of Mr. Samuel Doppelbrau, secretary of an excellent firm of bathroom-fixture jobbers. His was a comfortable house with no architectural manners whatever; a large wooden box with a squat tower, a broad porch, and glossy paint yellow as a yolk. Babbitt disapproved of Mr. and Mrs. Doppelbrau as "Bohemian." From their house came midnight music and obscene laughter; there were neighborhood rumors of bootlegged whisky and fast motor rides. They furnished Babbitt with many happy ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn down Axminster Road), is said to have been erected about 1400, and is a spacious Perp. building without a clerestory. It has a squat W. tower, some good porches (cp. N. porch with Ilminster), and some bold gargoyles. Within note (1) squints, (2) rood-loft stair with external turret, (3) indistinct traces of mural paintings in N. transept, (4) Brewer monument (early 17th cent.) in N. transeptal chapel. The main ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... of their shortcomings, that they were quite refreshing. Fancy Martha, the eldest girl, saying to me seriously, 'Dick is the only one who takes after mother and father; he is really nice-looking, you know, but Ailie and I are a couple of squat little toads. Now, please don't laugh, Mrs. Godfrey,' she went on, 'for we are very fond of toads, and they have such bright, projecting eyes.' What on earth could I say! for indeed poor Martha is almost grotesque-looking, and yet one can't help loving ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... womanhood in a way that stirred always a smoldering resentment against them. This particular squaw had nothing to commend her to his notice. She had a dirty red bandanna tied over her dirty, matted hair and under her grimy double chin. A grimy gray blanket was draped closely over her squat shoulders and formed a pouch behind, wherein the plump form of a papoose was cradled, a little red cap pulled ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... men understood. This was their comrade, the man to whose succour they had rushed. A tragic story of suffering was in that single figure, which, paddle in hand, was battling with a burden too great for any one man to bear. Only he, and the squat figures of Shaunekuk paddlers were to be seen. For the rest nothing was ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, ...
— On the Duty of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... restlessly about dark, medieval streets where squat groups were clustered about some coffee house door, intent upon a game of checkers or some patriarchal story teller, recounting, very probably, a bandied narration of the Thousand and One Nights. Through ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... was a single row of egregious dwellings, squat, uncouth, stretching away on either side of the veranda-fronted store and "gambling hell" which formed a sort of center-piece around which revolved the whole life of the village. It was a poor, mean place, ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... portal, but showing his smiling face to welcome us in. His head was got up with a tiara of beads, from the centre of which, directly over the forehead, stood a plume of red feathers, and encircling the lower face with a fine large white beard set in a stock or band of beads. We were beckoned to squat alongside Nnanaji, the master of ceremonies, and a large group of high officials outside the porch. Then the thirty-five drums all struck up together in very good harmony; and when their deafening noise was over, a smaller band of hand-drums and reed instruments was ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... Monadnock there was made that afternoon an image of snow of Gautama Buddha, something too squat and not altogether equal on both sides, but with an imperial and reposeful waist. He faced towards the mountain, and presently some men in a wood-sledge came up the road and faced him. Now, the amazed comments of two Vermont farmers on the nature and properties of a swag-bellied ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Pressing on, hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts of Canton, not raised on a paepae but squat in an acre of mud ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... raw fish: the clean white rice-tubs with their brass bindings polished and shining: the odd shape and entirely Japanese character which distinguished the most ordinary things, and gave to the short squat knives a romantic air and to the broad wooden spoons a suggestion of witchcraft: finally, the little shrine to the Kitchen God, perched on a shelf close to the ceiling, looking like the facade of a doll's temple, and decorated with brass vases, dry ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... take the place of the cow and hens in the city? The hens are Mansie's (he is the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night after night last winter I would climb the Hill to see the barn lighted, and in the shadowy stall two little human figures—one squat on an upturned bucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held between his knees, lodged perilously under the cow upon a half-peck measure; the other little human figure ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... confidence to the Arabs who seem to feel that they are way up north and yet still in the land of the myrrh and the incense. Here the children of the desert congregate and, pushing their bamboo-spears into the sand—point down, squat on the ground to admire the glory of a city—even though it be a city which affects the European with the very opposite of glory, but which for hundreds of miles ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... move forward into the sunlight or backward into the shade. She had not seen him yet. She was playing with the chain of flowers—a small wood goblin sprung out of nowhere, a little black-haired devil fired up from hell through the solid earth and out into this empty glade to squat there right in his track. Then she stood upon her feet, and admired the length of the chain as ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... spring to wash the temple of Vesta, carrying it in earthenware pitchers on their heads. In Juvenal's time the natural rock had been encased in marble, and the hallowed spot was profaned by gangs of poor Jews, who were suffered to squat, like gypsies, in the grove. We may suppose that the spring which fell into the lake of Nemi was the true original Egeria, and that when the first settlers moved down from the Alban hills to the banks of the Tiber they brought the nymph with them and found a new ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sell you balls of nard and honey, And squat jars of clarid butter, And the cheese from Kurdistan. When you offer Frankish money, Then they scowl and curse and mutter, Deep in Kurdish or Persan For they want your heart out and my hand In the ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... growing in the hollows of the gnarled roots of oaks and ash trees. At Sandyfield rectory, deep-roofed, bow-windowed, the red walls and tiles of it half smothered in ivy and coton-easter. At the low, squat-towered, Georgian church, standing in its acre of close-packed graveyard, which is shadowed by yew trees and by the clump of three enormous Scotch firs in the rectory garden adjoining. At the Church ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... City was directly below us. I lost sight of the vial almost instantly, but the indicating cross-hairs showed me exactly where the vial would strike; at a point approximately half way between the edge of the city and the great squat pile of the administrating building, with its gleaming glass penthouse—the laboratory in which, only a few minutes before, I had witnessed the demonstration of the death which awaited ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... of the Highland way of "lifting" what took their fancy occurred as we were all three walking toward the house of Macleod's aunt. Three shag-headed gillies in the tattered Cameron tartan dragged an innkeeper from his taproom and set him down squat on the causeway. Without even a by-your-leave they took from his feet a pair of new shoes with silver buckles. He protested that ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... themselves on the supposed love-letter, like the weird sisters in Macbeth upon the pilot's thumb, with curiosity as eager and scarcely less malignant. Mrs. Heukbane was a tall womanshe held the precious epistle up between her eyes and the window. Mrs. Shortcake, a little squat personage, strained and stood on tiptoe to have her share ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... really very thick and short, prodigiously talkative and wonderfully impudent. Now I am thin and tall, strangely silent, and very bashful. If these things continue, who is safe? Even you, Boswell, may feel a change. Your fair and transparent complexion may turn black and oily; your person little and squat; and who knows but you may eternally rave about the King of Great Britain's guards;[22] a species of madness, from which ...
— Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica • James Boswell
... deigned to notice their failure by swearing. There was no singing as the anchor was raised. A sort of gloom hung over the whole ship. As she stole out to sea again, the men, one by one, went aft and leaned outboard, peering down at the broad, squat stern. Jeremy did likewise and beheld in new white letters on the black of the hull, the words Royal James. Next day in the fo'c's'le council he learned why the renaming of the Revenge had cast a pall of apprehension over the crew. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... curiosity and love of excitement. The room was lighted dimly by two lamps hung on the walls; the heat was stifling, the odor sickening. We looked among the throng for Hugh. His father pulled my sleeve and pointed to a far corner, where he was squat on the floor with his face to the wall in the stupor of despair. The jailer jostled his way to him, and grasped his collar. Hugh turned his face in agonized apprehension of his fate, for he told us afterwards he expected ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... the largest branch,—the one on this side," said Legrand. The negro obeyed him promptly, and apparently with but little trouble, ascending higher and higher, until no glimpse of his squat figure could be obtained through the dense foliage which enveloped it. Presently his voice was heard ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... rose up politely; and as he is very tall and straight, rather thin, and extremely dark, he reminded me of a cedar towering beside one of those squat Dutch trees cut into the shape of ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... range after range of blue and snow-capped mountains. I was bewildered and amazed, having heard nothing of this great beauty. The town when entered is quite eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under the first story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet vendors and the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd; curs yelp between your ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... will notice that there are several distinct types of men in that country, the squat and vulgar, the oval-faced and refined, and many variations of these two; just as, in England, we have the Norman, Saxon, Irish, and Scotch types of face, with many other nuances. It is also clear from the kitchen-midden ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... sombreros. Poplanas with short skirts and slippered feet pass my window; and groups of "tame" Indians, pueblos, crowd in from the neighbouring rancherias, belabouring their donkeys as they go. These bring baskets of fruit and vegetables. They squat down upon the dusty plaza, behind piles of prickly pears, or pyramids of tomatoes and chile. The women, light-hearted hucksters, laugh and sing and chatter continuously. The tortillera, kneeling by her metate, bruises the boiled maize, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... and kids, seein' as I ain't got none," said the man. "Ketch me saddled up with a woman an' kids, if I know what I'm about. Them's for the benefactors. I live in a little shanty I rigged up myself out of two packin' boxes. I've got 'em on a man's medder here. He let me squat for nothin'. I git my meals here, an' I work on the railroad, an' I've got a soft snap, with nobody to butt in. Here, Mame, give us another cup of coffee. Mame's the girl I want, if I could hev ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... provided for your comfort in the bathroom is a wooden board, or rack, on which you squat, while you pour water over yourself with a tin pint-pot. It is well to see that no scorpion, or other stinging insect, has hid up in any of the crevices of the board. A very refreshing bath can be secured in this primitive way, and suggestions for improved ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... and the table set. A kettle, humming on a heap of fresh coals, and a squat little teapot of blue china, were waiting anxiously for the brown paper parcel which he placed upon the cloth. His mother was waiting also, in a high straight-backed rocking-chair, with ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... saw was the small, rocky islet just off the shore whence had come the cable. It seemed a harmless place now, with only one squat building of stone and no Orconites about, but we were glad enough to turn away from it and look toward the dark and ragged range of mountains which loomed up some five miles inland—the mountains of Leider's headquarters. Not that the sight inspired us with greater confidence. ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... chimney; and it was then that Jasper received his pipe from his still good-looking, though rather stout, Marie, and began to spin yarns about his young days. At this time, too, it was, that the door would frequently open, and a rugged old Indian would stalk in like a mahogany ghost, and squat down in front of the fire. He was often followed by a tall thin old gentleman, who was extremely excitable, but good-humoured. Jasper greeted these two remarkable looking men by the names of ...
— Away in the Wilderness • R.M. Ballantyne
... pieces of rabbit fur tied in; and the men wear theirs cut very short in front, hanging over their brows, and ornaments of every description. These people don't set at table on chairs, rich or poor; they squat down on their feet in a fashion that would soon tire us exceedingly. Then at night they wrap themselves up in a blanket, lie down and sleep as soundly as we would in our warm ...
— Two months in the camp of Big Bear • Theresa Gowanlock and Theresa Delaney
... village ordinance at a forty-mile an hour clip and would have had Rajah hull down in about two minutes, but Pinckney had to take one last look. The poor old mutt had quit after a few jumps. He had squat in the middle of the road, lifted up his trombone frontispiece and was bellowin' out his grief like a calf that has lost its mommer. Pinckney couldn't stand for that ...
— Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... defect that brought our landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father's companionship caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period of solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble about and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of the difference between my present and my other home. My father entered into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular morning visits opposite ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... every non-com. down the long length of the trench was giving the same advice, and the Turks were allowed to approach until their squat forms loomed clear ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... cunt, and used it for fucking. I can recall no idea of the sort, it was simple curiosity to know something about those, whom I instinctively felt were made differently from myself. What sort of a hole could it be I wondered. Was it large? Was it round? Why did they squat instead of stand up, like men, my curiosity ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... ways was to gather up one's skirt by an adroit movement, and suddenly squat down and sail along like a ball. There was a great art in going down, for you could lurch over so easily, and you were almost sure to come down ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... savages here," he told me; "you must not mind. The sentry has orders to keep everybody away from the palace, as people come in the afternoon and squat under my windows to jabber, and I cannot sleep. Those orders, I assure you, were not meant for you. You will be my guest all the time you are in the city, and I can accept ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... people than their Mahomedan brethren, who are ahead of them in point of civilization, but are more reserved, more proud and altogether less "jolly," and appear, with their religion, to have acquired also some of the characteristics of the modern or true Malays. A Pagan can sit, or rather squat, with you and tell you legends, or, perhaps, on an occasion join in a glass of grog, whereas the Mahomedan, especially the true Malay, looks upon the Englishman as little removed from a "Kafir"—an uncircumcised Philistine—who through ignorance constantly offends in ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... Others, white ones with pale ruby eyes, and black ones with jet eyes, galloped round their hutches with playful grace. Now a scare would make them bolt off swiftly, revealing at every leap their slender reddened paws. Next they would squat down all in a heap, so closely packed that their heads ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... of this animal countenance was one of meanness. Her black hair, straight and greasy-looking like her skin, lay in two shining bands, forming an edge to a very handsome silk handkerchief. Her ears were remarkably pretty, and graced with two large dark pearls. Small, short, and squat, Asie bore a likeness to the grotesque figures the Chinese love to paint on screens, or, more exactly, to the Hindoo idols which seem to be imitated from some non-existent type, found, nevertheless, now and again by travelers. Esther shuddered as she looked at this ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... slept in the east wing of the squat adobe house. About midnight there was a vigorous and persistent shaking of ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... attack. He stood still, ears pricked forward, alert and curious, surveying the strange animal that faced him. He had never seen such a dog before. Tim Keenan shoved the bull-dog forward with a muttered "Go to it." The animal waddled toward the centre of the circle, short and squat and ungainly. He came to a stop and ...
— White Fang • Jack London
... "All right! Come and squat by the fire. I'm tired of the table, and prefer the floor for a change. Please don't expect anything extra blood-curdling, for you won't get it, unless you'd like me to romance a little. Where do you want me to begin? All my ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... use a chamber and "squat" as savages do. In this position, the thighs support the abdomen, and force is exerted without straining. Massaging the abdomen by firmly rubbing it round and round, clockwise, with the hand, often does good, as does pressure with a finger on the flesh between the ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... from the disgusting scene, and, passing on, was met by Monsieur Charlie, who, order-book in hand, with his dark-skinned, woolly—covered cranium and squat figure, resembled more a toad than a human being. "Anything, Senor Captain, you vant?—me got in my store, all so cheap and so excellent," he said, making an attempt to bow, his keen, twinkling eyes fixed on his visitors, while he waited eagerly to note down the orders he might receive. ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... one, the boys filed in through the Silvey gateway, to squat outside the club-house entrance until their roster was complete. Bill glanced nervously at Sid and ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... do, Hugh," sighed the other boy, "but it's too bad they had to give in before that big eater was starved out, and took to the road again, where he could always make sure of begging a full meal at back doors. Now he'll just decide to squat down and stick through the summer, yes and winter in the bargain, acting as if he might be almost dying every little while, and then recovering his appetite wonderfully soon again. Oh! it makes me ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... group of squat square buildings their ship passed, decreasing speed and drifting lower with every moment. The lofty structures that were the nucleus of the strange city loomed closer. Now they were soaring slowly down a wide thoroughfare; and now, at last, they hovered above ...
— The Red Hell of Jupiter • Paul Ernst
... engaged to Cuvier's in the evening, and went first to M. Jullien's, in the Rue de l'Enfer, not far from the Jardin des Plantes, and there we saw one of the most extraordinary of all the extraordinary persons we have seen—a Spaniard, squat, black-haired, black-browed, and black-eyed, with an infernal countenance, who has written the History of the Inquisition, and who related to us how he had been sent en penitence to a monastery by the Inquisition, ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... large man physically, not so round of body as full and broad. His shoulders and chest were ample. He had a big blond head, with an ample breadth of forehead, which was high and sane-looking. He had a thick, squat nose, which, however, was forceful, and thin, firm, even lips. There was the faintest touch of cynical humor in his hard blue eyes at times; but mostly he was friendly, alert, placid-looking, without seeming in the least sentimental or even kindly. His business, as one could see plainly, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... glances lower under the slouch of broad sombreros. Poplanas with short skirts and slippered feet pass my window; and groups of "tame" Indians, pueblos, crowd in from the neighbouring rancherias, belabouring their donkeys as they go. These bring baskets of fruit and vegetables. They squat down upon the dusty plaza, behind piles of prickly pears, or pyramids of tomatoes and chile. The women, light-hearted hucksters, laugh and sing and chatter continuously. The tortillera, kneeling by her metate, bruises the boiled maize, claps it into thin flakes, flings it on the heated stone, ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... where the foaming waters of Black Bear Creek rioted down across a gravelled bar and into the silent, sweeping river, standing at the entrance to a wooded, grass-grown valley, with rolling hills and domes displayed at its head, while back of them lay the town, six miles away, its low, squat buildings tiny and toy like, but distinctly silhouetted against the ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... curiously. Idigi was squat and fat, but wise. None the less he gossiped, for, as they say on the river, "Even the ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... girl, who was lying motionless at the bottom of a slope or talus which led up to the mouth of the cavern. Freed from his burden the dragon now stood erect, and a more awful monster it would be difficult to conceive. He must have been at least forty feet in stature, yet he gave us an impression of squat ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... as the lower jaw there juts out a long, curving fang of high, smooth-rolling sand dunes, cutting sharp and clean against the still, blue sky above—silent, naked, utterly deserted, excepting for the squat, white-walled lighthouse standing upon the crest of the highest hill. Within this curving, sheltering hook of sand hills lie the smooth waters of Lewes Harbor, and, set a little back from the shore, the ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard I. Pyle
... pariah dog nosed a dead rat and was silhouetted. They picked out, too, the occasional pair of Corinthian columns, built into the squalid stucco sheer with the road that made history for Bentinck street, and explained that whatever might be the present colour of the little squat houses and the tall lean ones that loafed together into the fog round the first bend, they were once agreeably pink and yellow, with the magenta cornice, the blue capital, that fancy dictated. There, where the way narrowed ...
— Hilda - A Story of Calcutta • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... these thick-skinned animals, with a big head, a large, swollen snout, a mouth armed with teeth which extend a foot beyond it—animals which are squat on their short limbs, the skin of which, unprovided with hair, is of a ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... found Mam in a state of agitation. She beckoned him into the house and hoarsely whispered: "Dar's a dirty Injun in de shed. I wouldn' 'low him ter set foot in dis yar house, I wouldn', not ef he'd scalped me on de spot. He grunt, an' squat, an' 'lowed he done wouldn' stir less he ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... town, went out immediately afterwards, asked his way to Whitcliffe, and was directed to an electric tram which started from the Town Hall Square, and after running through a district of tall warehouses and squat weaving-sheds, began a long and steady climb to the heights along the town. When he left it, he found himself in a district eminently characteristic of that part of the country. The tram set him down at a cross-roads on a high ridge of land. Beneath him lay Barford, its towers and ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... blue. That white's white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow. He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,— When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean,)-gisms that squat 'em Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... those renegades out there, and we'll tend to them in due order. Watkins," he addressed that old timer, "you tend to this. Feel around cautious. Fill up the place full of lead. Work your men around through the brush until you get them surrounded, and then just squat and ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... was everywhere. Fir-trees perfumed the air. Every doorstep was a garden. The courtyards were alive with the squat figures of capped maidens, wreathing and twisting greens and garlands. And in the streets there was such a noise as was never before heard in a city on ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... from the rains. The frost scarcely interfered with her movements; indeed, it made exercise more than ever necessary. Forced to seek diligently for her food, she found it in a deserted stubble; there, when the sheep lay sleeping in the bright winter moonlight, she would squat beside them, nibbling the turnips scattered over the field ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... His black eyes darted curiously to the stranger, who, in Manuel's opinion, looked unpleasantly like a gringo, with his coppery hair waving crisply under his sombrero, and his eyes that were blue as the bay over there to the east. But when Dade introduced him, Jack greeted his squat host with a smile that was disarming in its boyish good humor, and with language as liquidly Spanish as Manuel's best Castilian, which he reserved for his talks with the patron on the porch when the senora and ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... Monster, Matron of the fields, I sing to you; And all the fondest love that summer yields I bring to you; Yet there you squat, immense in your disdain, Heedless of all the tears of streaming rain My eyes drip over you—your breathless ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... him, crowned with its white lantern, the Metropolitan Tower reared its graceful height to the stars. And all around, in the windows of the tall buildings that looked from this bastion on which he stood almost squat, a million lights stared up at him, the unsleeping eyes of New York. It was a scene of which Wally, always sensitive to beauty, never tired: but tonight it had lost its appeal. A pleasant breeze from the Jersey ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... rigging, no outside gearing. One squat funnel amidship told that she used steam for some purpose, and out of this funnel black masses of smoke rose slowly in the motionless air. She resembled no craft ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... Tall trees lined the open lane down which he was riding. Presently in the gray gloom he saw low, square houses with flat roofs. Ladd turned off to the left down another lane, gloomy between trees. Every few rods there was one of the squat houses. This lane opened into wider, lighter space. The cold air bore a sweet perfume—whether of flowers or fruit Dick could not tell. Ladd rode on for perhaps a quarter of a mile, though it seemed interminably long to ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... chorus of "I told you so's." The announcement of the proprietor of the ranch that he would entertain offers on a property to which he had no title other than that entailed in the God- given right of every American citizen to squat on a piece of land until he is driven off, was received as a rare piece of humor. In disgust the founder of the Hat Ranch abandoned his vegetable business, loaded his worldly effects on two burros and departed, leaving the kitchen door ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... two under the sand where they are laid, and the young come out when the rains have fairly commenced. The canoe-men were quite positive that crocodiles frequently stun men by striking them with their tails, and then squat on them till they are drowned. We once caught a young crocodile, which certainly did use its tail to inflict sharp blows, and led us to conclude that the native opinion is correct. They believed also that, if a person shuts the beast's eyes, it lets go its hold. ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... it is wreathed with women, scores squat upon their mats on the pave, their goods spread before ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... giving me a faintness which this moral check lessened my power to combat. Von Brning's face wore a sneering smile that I winced under; and, turning, I found another pair of eyes fixed on me, those of Herr Bhme, whose squat figure had appeared at a pair of folding doors leading to an adjoining room. Napkin in hand, he was taking in the scene before him with fat benevolence, but exceeding shrewdness. I instantly noticed a faint red weal relieving the ivory of his bald head; and I had ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... anti-social; it flies but little, so little indeed that its wings seem scarcely of any use, and with the laziness already alluded to that forms its characteristic feature, it seeks out a solitary spot, and having dug a hole amongst the dry leaves, there it will squat for days together without stirring. It likewise delights to cower under the gnarled roots of an old oak, or to hide itself in a holly-bush, and apparently derives so much satisfaction from its own meditations, and seems to hold all other birds of the forest in such utter contempt, that it never by ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... a central tower, which they built low and squat. Happily they built surely and well, firmly and solidly, as their successors loved to pile course upon course upon their Norman towers, to raise a massive superstructure, and often crown them with a lofty, graceful, but heavy spire. No wonder the early ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... nobility-the feeling that one obtains from a successful triumphal arch. The chief fault of the tower above is that it lacks the long lifting lines that would give a sense of aspiration. It seems just a little squat and fat-as if it were too heavy on top and splayed out at the sides and bottom. It is also somewhat "showy," with too much hung-on ornament; and the green columns against red walls are not satisfying-this being one of the very few failures ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... to come to the fire, her short squat figure lost in the depths of a chair which Mme. Poussette had found in one of the disused rooms, padded and carved, but also torn and moth-eaten; nevertheless a comfortable refuge on such a day, and soon the reverend lady sank into a soothing slumber, while her husband ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... house to announce that some "men-bush" are approaching. Going to the veranda, we see some lean figures with big mops of hair coming slowly down the narrow path from the forest, with soft, light steps. Some distance behind follows a crowd of others, who squat down near the last shrubs and examine everything with shy, suspicious eyes, while the leaders approach the house. Nearly all carry old Snider rifles, always loaded and cocked. The leaders stand silent for a while near the ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... stood curiously watching us. There seemed to be at least ten of them—men as tall as myself, though not so tall as Georg. Swarthy, gray-skinned fellows—one or two of them squat, ape-like with their heavy shoulders and dangling arms. Men of the Venus Cold Country. They were talking together in their queer, soft language. One of them I took to be the leader. Argo was his name, I afterward learned. He was somewhat taller than ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... she caught the man's silhouette against the tall white pillars of the mansion and she fled deeper into the forest with the hush of death about her, and the silence which is one great Voice. Slowly, and mysteriously it loomed before her—that squat and darksome cabin which seemed to fitly set in the centre of the wilderness, ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... all clothed in blankets, some of them highly ornamented with needle -work and pearl buttons. When they enter the building, the men take off the bandannah handkerchiefs which are tied round their heads, and squat all around me. The men sit on one side, and the women on the other, as a rule. This fact is in consequence of the inferior position of the women, and because they are not allowed to attend the meetings which the men constantly hold to talk over ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock
... rigging up the queerest curios you ever saw, and the sandal-makers cutting out shoes of leather; but the biggest treat of all is to watch a Parsee school and see how the master instructs the little shavers. The children, to the number of fifty or more, all squat on the floor of the school-room, which is a large open shed on a raised platform, each holding in one hand the blade-bone taken from the shoulder of a camel to serve as a slate, on which they make marks with a pencil-like brush. They are pretty little trots, the children; and are mostly ...
— The Penang Pirate - and, The Lost Pinnace • John Conroy Hutcheson
... you can't walk on any further, Step Hen, say so, and I'll get up something that ought to keep the wolves away; but of course, if you're ready to call quits, why I suppose we'll have to climb up here, and squat like a couple of ...
— The Boy Scouts in the Maine Woods - The New Test for the Silver Fox Patrol • Herbert Carter
... This was their comrade, the man to whose succour they had rushed. A tragic story of suffering was in that single figure, which, paddle in hand, was battling with a burden too great for any one man to bear. Only he, and the squat figures of Shaunekuk paddlers were to be seen. For the rest nothing was visible ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... but some keys fit all locks," says the Eastern proverb. King has been chosen for many ticklish errands in his time, and Saunders is still in Delhi. Through the great iron door into dim outer darkness King led them and presently made them squat in a close-huddled semicircle on the paving stones, like night-birds waiting for ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... wise judge!'" gibed Ted. "Ought to have a suit of ermine. Proper stunt, too. Let me put it, Cora; I'll be the court crier. Come on and let's squat on the bank like the rest. Judge, you ought to be the most elevated. Now, then, here's the dope: Did Edison really ever do anything much to ...
— Radio Boys Cronies • Wayne Whipple and S. F. Aaron
... the stress of necessity. The broad windows were trellised with vines, through which filtered the sunshine. A cooling evening breeze stirred the leaves lazily. The chairs were broad and comfortable—the workmanship of the monks of the neighboring mission. In the corners stood squat, earthen water-jars of Mexican molding. On the adobe walls were hung trophies of the hunt; war-bonnets and the crudely made ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... France. In this savage desert, inhumanly silent except for the shrieking of shells, for now more than a year's time France has struggled with the incarnated spirit of evil, rearing its head again, armed with all the enginery of modern science. The little, dirty-bearded soldiers squat there in their burrows, white-faced, tense, silent, waiting, watching, month after month, or plunge over their walls to give their lives on that death-field outside. They are the simple ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... machines that ever we beheld in our life: I suppose they are going to rob your orchard, fell your trees, or drive away your cattle. They told us strange things of settling your estate—one is a lusty old fellow in a black wig, with a black beard, without teeth; there's another, thick squat fellow, in trunk hose; the third is a little, long-nosed, thin man (I was then lean, being just come out of a fit of sickness)—I suppose it is fit to send after them, ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... clever method that accelerates decomposition by improving aeration and facilitating frequent turning. A rotating drum holding from eight to eighteen bushels (the larger sizes look like a squat, fat, oversized oil drum) is suspended above the ground, top-loaded with organic matter, and then tumbled every few days for a few weeks until the materials have decomposed. Then the door is opened and finished compost falls out the ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... color of their environment pretty close together, the better to hide the animals from their enemies and from their prey, as we are told; but the animals themselves do not know this, though they may act as if they did. Young terns and gulls instinctively squat upon the beach, where their colors so harmonize with the sand and pebbles that the birds are virtually invisible. Young partridges do the same in the woods, where the eye cannot tell the reddish tuft of down from the dry leaves. ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... a light road-cart, trotted past. The driver was a short, squat man, his face almost hidden in hair. It was Dr. Buzzard. He was known for miles as a successful "conjurer" and giver of "hands." Most of the people around had perfect faith in his cures and revelations, and had advised Religion to ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... to her room adjoining to put on her hat for church. It was her pleasure during that hour to do nothing but sit at the window, open if the weather permitted, and look over the home paddock and the squat spire of the village church rising among a group of elms. It is not known what she thought about at those times, unless of the countless Sunday mornings she had sat there with her hands in her lap waiting to be roused at 10.45 by the Squire's entrance and his "Now, my dear, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... stock to be born of, a hard-working, hard-fighting stock. She fell to wondering what her life would have been like had she been born a Chinese woman, or an Italian woman like those she saw, head-shawled or bareheaded, squat, ungainly and swarthy, who carried great loads of driftwood on their heads up from the beach. Then she laughed at her foolishness, remembered Billy and the four-roomed cottage on Pine Street, and went to bed with her mind filled ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... before him with its silence and its darkness, its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer, to be carrying Paris away ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... had it! Both the Hurons and the Iroquois laid in large stocks of fire wood, by forming piles of logs slanted together on end; and in one pile, here, was an opening through which he might squeeze into the center space, there to squat as under a tent. The ground in the village had been scraped bare of snow; ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... grasp of fire is laid On bark and slabs that rot, and breed Squat ugly things of deadly shade, The scorpion, and ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... bare legs and wooden shoes, driving shaggy Servian ponies attached to low, cumbersome carts, passed and repassed, to and from the markets. A gendarme, leaning the weight of his shoulder on the guard of a police saber, rested against the corner of a wine shop across the way. Students, wearing squat caps with vizors, sauntered indolently along, twirling canes and ogling all who wore petticoats. Occasionally the bright uniform of a royal cuirassier flashed by; and the Englishman would lean over the sill and gaze after him, nodding his head in approval ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... snapping an electric switch. And that was strange because camp fires take a little time in the dying. I stepped inside the tent, fumbled for the field glasses and came out, adjusting the night focus. Casey's squat, powerful form stood perfectly still where I had left him, his face turned toward the mountain. There was no fire on the slope. Beyond, hanging black in the sky, a thunder cloud pillowed up toward the peak of the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... to see the time. The clock in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him, but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he heard it for it made him think of McCann, and he saw him a squat figure in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in the wind at Hopkins' corner, ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... this arch used as the crowning work of the edifice. Eastern churches in this style usually took the form of the Greek cross, this form being better calculated to support the weight of the cupola. In Western Europe, however, where the flat squat tower afterwards developed into the steeple, as we shall see in a later chapter, the Latin cross was mostly used, and this, with a few notable exceptions, is the ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath
... time the squat figure of the chief advanced like a machine. Jack noticed the swing of the muscular arms, the play of the legs and the occasional slight turning or ducking of the head. The straggling black hair, with the painted eagle feathers drooping like the plume of a lady's hat, the blanket ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... the drawn twitch of muscle seemed an accent on every word of ill-omen I had ever spelt out of the alphabet of fear. If my body rested, my brain was an open chamber for any toad of ugliness that listed to "sit at squat" in. ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... could not fail to arouse the sympathies of her own sex, even outside of her clan. Many were the calls from compassionate women. They would drop in, squat down, tender their services, suggest remedies, and gossip. Only one woman made herself directly useful, and that was Shotaye, a member of the Water clan. Shotaye was a strange woman. Nobody liked her, and yet many applied to her for relief in secret; for Shotaye possessed ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... I just pop in here and squat on one of these pedestals, d'ye see? Presently its proper occupant comes in and glares at me from the door, puffing with indignation. Inwardly he is saying, 'How dare you trespass, you bally young cub?' and I pretend to be quite unconscious ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... name for the cheapest and most villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks in general to men of many nations dwelling under the subtropical South African sun. Thus, apple-brandy, and peach liqueur, "Old Squareface," in the squat, four-sided bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander, American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey—in default of arrack—and the swart and woolly-headed descendant of Ham, may be ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... he saw a squat, dark animal emerge from the tangled scrub and, climbing up the nullah on their side, stride away over the sand with a peculiar bounding motion that reminded Wargrave of a rocking-horse. All eyes were turned towards the Maharajah, who would decide whether the animal were worthy ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... a little, which did not in the least disconcert Jose, and, rising, he moved a small table forward, opened it and then going to a cupboard in the wall drew from it a short, squat bottle, four glasses and a pack of cards. "Your room is just beyond this," he said, turning to Pearl. "Jose says that you will find everything ready for you. You must be tired. You had ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... he declared. "Once they hear it, they have no will to resist; they just squat and listen. I don't know what it's doing to them, ...
— Naudsonce • H. Beam Piper
... "iron tag," "stone tag," and "tree tag." They are all simply the game of tag with the additional rule that when a player is in contact with iron, stone, trees, wood, and so on he is safe from being tagged by the one who is "it." The game of "squat tag" is similar, except that to be safe the one pursued must squat quickly on the ground before "it" catches him. In cross tag, "it" must select a victim and continue to run after him until some one runs ahead and crosses his path, when "it," who may be breathless by this time, must ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller
... The sun shone more kindly now, and the trees which framed the scene were golden and lovely. A balustrade of stone gracefully enclosed the space, and the flowers, freshly bedded, were very gay. In one corner they could see the squat, quaint towers of Saint Sulpice, and on the other side the uneven roofs of ...
— The Magician • Somerset Maugham
... the table set. A kettle, humming on a heap of fresh coals, and a squat little teapot of blue china, were waiting anxiously for the brown paper parcel which he placed upon the cloth. His mother was waiting also, in a high straight-backed rocking-chair, with ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... each side. In the centre of this, on a raised platform, stands the tomb itself, a square measuring 69 feet on each side. It is two stories in height, and at each angle is an octagonal tower, surmounted by an open pavilion. The towers, however, are rather squat in proportion, and the general design of the building very far from being so pleasing as that of many less pretentious tombs in the neighbourhood. Had it, indeed, been built in red sandstone, or even with an inlay of white marble like that of Humayun, it would ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... time for intelligent men to tire of all this burlesque of politics and this solemn joke of calling it "great statesmanship," that is breeding these ungainly toadies—squat and warty. A country is great only as her political institutions are good and wise—not merely when it is strong in numbers, large in acres, and swarming with politicians and parasites that are worshipped as great and good statesmen. That is not ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... All kinds of crawling things among the tottering walls, and peeping out of their rents and crannies. A monkey sitting squat, developing into a demon, reverses ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... steamships to the little tug-boats that shoot to and fro like gnats upon the surface of a pool. I say rather stately, for the high and graceful hull of the steamer comes to a lame and impotent conclusion in its squat chimney, like a large-faced man with a mayhemed nose, and in its toy masts and rigging, like a stout woman with curl-papers or a thin wisp of ringlet. When two or three of these steamships are together down the harbor, their white volleys of smoke often present ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... from the landing below, and out west of the bridge under the open sky. The roof, hemmed in by a low wall, seemed like a terrace, which, to his astonishment, was brilliant with flowers; in the rich surrounding, the house sat squat, a plain square block, unbroken except by a doorway in front. A dustless path led to the door, through a bordering of shrubs of Persian rose in perfect bloom. Breathing a sweet attar-perfume, he ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... stretches away in the direction of the Rhine, a mile and a quarter from Mulhausen, the camp was pitched. In the fitful light of the overcast August day, beneath the lowering sky that was filled with heavy drifting clouds, the long lines of squat white shelter-tents seemed to cower closer to the ground, and the muskets, stacked at regular intervals along the regimental fronts, made little spots of brightness, while over all the sentries with loaded pieces kept watch and ward, motionless as statues, straining their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... fat, burly little fellow by nature; but when he put on his winter dress he became such a round, soft, squat, hairy, and comical-looking creature, that no one could look at him without laughing, and the shout with which he was received on deck the first time he made his appearance in his new costume was loud and prolonged. But Meetuck was as good-humoured an Esquimau as ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... the weather was fine and the bluejays were quarrelling among themselves, a sure sign that no dangerous foe was about, Rag began a new study. Molly, by flattening her ears, gave the sign to squat. Then she ran far away in the thicket and gave the thumping signal for 'come.' Rag set out at a run to the place but could not find Molly. He thumped, but got no reply. Setting carefully about his search he found her foot-scent and, following this strange guide, that the ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... prospect.' In that humourous piece, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship (p. xliii), Dr. Joseph is made to hug his brother in his arms, when he sees him descend safely from the balloon in which he had composed his Ode. Thomas Warton is described in the same piece (p. 116) as 'a little, thick, squat, red-faced man.' There was for some time a coolness between Johnson and Dr. Warton. Warton, writing on Jan. 22, 1766, says:—'I only dined with Johnson, who seemed cold and indifferent, and scarce said anything ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... broad path led through a chestnut avenue to the house, which at first sight had an almost neglected appearance. Casanova's attention was especially attracted by a broken window in the first story. Nor did it escape his notice that the battlements of the squat tower were crumbling in places. But the house door was gracefully carved; and directly he entered the hall it was plain that the interior was carefully kept, and was certainly in far better condition than might have been supposed from ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... comforts. And age having despoiled me of some of these, I sharpen my appetite for those remaining. Glory, which Pliny and Cicero propose to us, is far from my thoughts. "Glory and rest are things that cannot squat on the same bench." Stay your mind in assured and limited cogitations, wherein it best may please itself, and having gained knowledge of true felicities, enjoy them, and rest satisfied without wishing a further continuance either of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... two-dollar watch; nine minutes of vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at—well, at Aythens." A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a kris, "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... structure, her Ladyship was so overcome with excitement that she could hardly stand. Ridgeway caught her as she staggered from her improvised litter. Presently she grew stronger, and with her companion entered what was apparently a palace among the squat, queerly built houses. ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... surprised at their own parts? I once carried this philosophy to that degree that in a knot of country folks who had a library amongst them, and who, to the honour of their good sense, made me factotum in the business; one of our members, a little, wise-looking, squat, upright, jabbering body of a tailor, I advised him, instead of turning over the leaves, to bind the book on his back.—Johnnie took the hint; and as our meetings were every fourth Saturday, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... of blanket-covered branches, in a low, squat log cabin, a man lay smoking his pipe, and conversing in snatches with two other men who sat by the ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... are soothed and steeped in Elysium during this rapid transit. The eye lazily runs over the squat-looking red houses with flat roofs which line the shore, to rest on the dark cypress trees which fill the intervening spaces, with the gilded balconies of some pleasure-palace of sultan or high Turk catching the sight occasionally. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... ready for the meal, the inmates of the house squat down upon the floor, the husband with his wife and children apart, male visitors and the unmarried portion of the house eating together. Slaves eat when all have finished, and get what is ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... overturn, overset[obs3]; upset, subvert, prostate, level, fell; cast down, take down, throw down, fling down, dash down, pull down, cut down, knock down, hew down; raze, raze to the ground, rase to the ground[obs3]; trample in the dust, pull about one's ears. sit, sit down; couch, squat, crouch, stoop, bend, bow; courtesy, curtsy; bob, duck, dip, kneel; bend the knee, bow the knee, bend the head, bow the head; cower; recline &c. (be horizontal) 213. Adj. depressed &c. v.; at a low ebb; prostrate &c. (horizontal) 213; detrusive[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... sleeping berths in good rooms, also of tables, etc. for their use, and which are peculiar to civilised life, and with which they are associated, yet they naturally verge towards, and cling to aboriginal education, and hence to squat on the sand to eat, to sleep a night in the bush, to have recourse to a Byly-a-duck man for ease in sickness; these to them seem reliefs and enjoyments from these restraints which civilized life entails ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... extreme modern luxury. The man standing over against the window with his broad back turned, somehow looked to be in perfect keeping with the setting his personal tastes had inspired. He was broad, squat, fat. His head and neck were set low upon his shoulders, and the hair oil was obvious on the longish dark hair which seemed to grow low ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... higher yet, up into the firmament, range after range of blue and snow-capped mountains. I was bewildered and amazed, having heard nothing of this great beauty. The town when entered is quite eastern. The streets are formed of open stalls under the first story, in which squat tailors, cooks, sherbet vendors and the like, busy at their work or smoking narghilehs. Cloths stretched from house to house keep out the sun. Mules rattle through the crowd; curs yelp between your legs; negroes are as hideous and bright clothed as usual; grave Turks with long ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... design of the commonest earthenware bowl: the little board and chopper for slicing the raw fish: the clean white rice-tubs with their brass bindings polished and shining: the odd shape and entirely Japanese character which distinguished the most ordinary things, and gave to the short squat knives a romantic air and to the broad wooden spoons a suggestion of witchcraft: finally, the little shrine to the Kitchen God, perched on a shelf close to the ceiling, looking like the facade of a doll's temple, and decorated with brass vases, dry grasses, and strips of white paper. The wide ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... For all her squat figure and her broad, dull face, she was quick of action as a weasel. She put her hands behind her, and, thrusting her head forward, caught the coin in her teeth. It was well done; so well that I said "Brava," and the braves around me gave ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... His head was got up with a tiara of beads, from the centre of which, directly over the forehead, stood a plume of red feathers, and encircling the lower face with a fine large white beard set in a stock or band of beads. We were beckoned to squat alongside Nnanaji, the master of ceremonies, and a large group of high officials outside the porch. Then the thirty-five drums all struck up together in very good harmony; and when their deafening noise was over, a smaller band ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... class and not pleasant. The Christian gentlemen are very pleasant, but the low are low indeed compared to the Muslimeen, and one gets a feeling of dirtiness about them to see them eat all among the coals, and then squat there and pull out their beads to pray without washing their hands even. It does look nasty when compared to the Muslim coming up clean washed, and standing erect and manly—looking to his prayers; besides ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... gabled, vine-clad, dove-nested country house, a shelter for the people you love—and always kept for your Master's use. It is something just to have had a man's road to Providence lead past the garden gate. I make acknowledgement. And mine? I think it is like one of those squat, heathen, Satsuma vases, inlaid with distorted figures and symbols and toned in all luridness of color, into which has been tossed a poor sort of flower plucked from any bush the owner happened to pass, which has been salted down in frivolity—or perhaps something stronger. ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... grassy ledge and looked out across the lichen-covered roofs and squat, rugged church tower of Tarn Regis; and pictures rose in my mind, pictures to some extent inspired, perhaps, by scraps I had read of learned essays written by my father. He had loved this ancient ground; he had been used to finger the earth hereabouts as ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... longer, and, after all, there seemed little doubt but that the short, squat individual before them was certainly no German. Taking his courage, therefore, in both hands, Henri at once admitted that he and Jules were Frenchmen, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... sluggish, disreputable creek whose fetid waters seemed to crawl onward even more slowly after receiving the noisome waste liquor from the tan-pits. At only one point, that nearest the village, did any of the buildings touch the encircling fence. There its sweep was broken by the facade of a squat two-story structure of yellow brick which contained the offices of the concern and the big bare room in which a few decrepit clerks pursued their uninspiring labors. Admission to this building, and through it to the yard, ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... this fence that all the vermin in the country might congregate round it? Oh, you have been very near your death, my fine fellow! You will never be nearer until your time comes. Look at this!" he pulled a squat, thick pistol out of his bosom. "If you had passed through that gap and set foot on my land I'd have let daylight into you. I'll have no vagabonds here. I know how to treat gentry of that sort, whether their ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... thing in its entirety had been recreated. The block house sat squat beside the lock, with its mushroom top projecting just as in years before. Clark, it seemed, was, after all traditional, and not one who lived entirely in the future, and with this touch of romance he took new attributes. His Japanese cook inhabited the lower story through which ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... when a happy home was to evolve from the "rollin'," the usual pot-pie, composed of boiled grouse, pigeon and venison, and always with dumplings, was the principal dish of the feasting. On a stump, accessible to all who needed it, rested a squat jug containing rum. ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... Despite the fact that the bride was considered the ugliest girl in the place, she had been duly "robbed" by her bold or possibly blind lover—her features were providentially veiled beneath her nuptial flammeum, and of her squat figure little could be discerned under the gorgeous accoutrements of the occasion. She was ablaze with ornaments and embroidery of gold, on neck and shoulders and wrist; a wide lace collar fell over a bodice of purple silk; silken too, and of brightest green, was her pleated skirt. ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... away! All the world's a holiday! Laugh away, and roar and shout Till thy hoarse tongue lolleth out! Bloat thy cheeks, and bulge thine eyes Unto bursting; pelt thy thighs With thy swollen palms, and roar As thou never hast before! Lustier! Wilt thou! Peal on peal! Stiflest? Squat and grind thy heel— Wrestle with thy loins, and then Wheeze thee whiles, ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... "We could squat down back to back," said West coolly, "and shoot a few of them first. I want to fight the brutes with ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... mighty peak—and who could stand unawed? As their summits blazed, he could stand undazed at the foot of the throne of God. North, aye, North, through a land accurst, shunned by the scouring brutes, And all I heard was my own harsh word and the whine of the malamutes, Till at last I came to a cabin squat, built in the side of a hill, And I burst in the door, and there on the floor, frozen to ...
— Ballads of a Cheechako • Robert W. Service
... no quickning ray, Nor stir of pulse, nor object to entice Abroad the spirits; but the cloister'd heart Sits squat at home, like Pagod in ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... gargoyled waterspouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealed into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you; you conjure up a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above; and at the precise moment a foul vagabond pounces on you and, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth, he draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs—things which no ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... trains go down loud tracks Past houses, which are like coffins. On the corners wheelbarrows with bananas squat. Just a bit of shit makes a tough kid happy. The human beasts glide along, completely lost As though on a street, miserably gray and shrill. Workers stream from dilapidated gates. A weary person moves quietly in a round ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... 1288-1292), of which only the choir and chancel, with some portions of the transepts, now remain, was originally dedicated to St. Thomas a Becket, but in the present day is called after St. Thomas the Apostle. It possesses an exceptionally fine vane, perched on a curiously squat, barn-like structure, which does duty for a tower. With its creeper-covered dormer windows and a somewhat convivial-looking chimney-pot sticking up out of one of them on the south side, it looks more picturesque than ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... in partibus. They've small regard for chancel door, Or Buddhist bolts contiguous To lustrous jade or gold galore Adorning idol squat or tall— These be strange gods that we adore— ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... natives. The squat and squalid huts, stuck down upon the earth without any pretence of raised foundation, and jumbled together, corner to side, back to front, any way, as if some wind had blown them there, did not improve on acquaintance. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... model attentively. It represented a very unattractive ship. Her bow was absurdly high, cocked up like the snout of a Yorkshire pig. Her long waist lay low, promising little freeboard in a sea. Her engines and single funnel were aft. On a short, high quarterdeck was her bridge and a squat deck-house. She was designed, like her owner, for ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... offshore, and cruel as the black fangs beneath that serenity, looked over the wall of the fortress of Nueva Cordoba. He looked down into the moat well stocked with crocodiles, great fish his mercenaries, paid with flesh, and he looked at the tunal which ringed the moat as the moat ringed the squat white fortress. A deadly girdle was the tunal, of cactus and other thorny things, thick, wide, dark, and impenetrable, a forest of stilettoes, and for its kings the rattlesnake and viper. Nor naked Indian nor mailed white man might traverse that thicket, where wall ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... ridges, through a forest where raindrops were still dripping from the thick leaves and where she knew that without him she never could have found her way. And not once more did they speak to each other until, unexpectedly for her, they came out of the wood and fairly upon a squat cabin with a light running out to meet them through ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... starlings rose out of a little holt, and streamed north; the herons or quiet cattle stood along the huge dykes. You could see the scattered figures of old labourers in the fields, and then for miles and miles the squat towers, at which you were making, staring over the flat, giving you a thrill every time you sighted them, and right away west the low hills that must have been the sandy downs that blocked the restless plunging sea; they must have looked for centuries ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... schooners and square-riggers and steamers, all huddled together, and our captain pointed out to me the 'Malvern' flying Admiral Porter's flag. Barges were tied up at the long wharves, and these were piled high with wares and flanked by squat warehouses. Although it was Sunday, a locomotive was puffing and panting along the foot of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... not without interest. As a child she had read about Indians, and memory returned images both colorful and romantic. From the car window she espied dusty flat barrens, low squat mud houses, and queer-looking little people, children naked or extremely ragged and dirty, women in loose garments with flares of red, and men in white man's garb, slovenly and motley. All these strange individuals stared apathetically ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Cariboo camped on the flats outside Fort Garry. Here was a strange world indeed. Two-wheeled ox-carts, made wholly of wood, without iron or bolt, wound up to the fort from St Paul in processions a mile long, with fat squaws and whole Indian families sitting squat inside the crib-like structure of the cart. Men and boys {57} loped ahead and abreast on sinewy ponies, riding bareback or on home-made saddles. Only a few stores stood along what is now Main Street, which ran northward towards the Selkirk Settlement. With the Indians, who ...
— The Cariboo Trail - A Chronicle of the Gold-fields of British Columbia • Agnes C. Laut
... desperate fight between two chameleons in a low oak-scrub on the hilltop. The little creatures attacked each other with such fury, with such rapid changes of color from gray to green and from green to brown, with such unexpected mutations of shape from long and slender to short and squat, with such sudden dartings out and angry flamings of the transparent membrane beneath the throat, with such swift springs and flights and glancings to and fro, as were wonderful to see. It seemed as though both must succumb to the fierce ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... sailing over towards the colonel's quarters. Anxious only for the coming of Merrick and no one else, Mr. Jerrold no sooner saw who was at the front door than he closed the shutters, called, "Come in!" and a short, squat, wiry little man, dressed in the fatigue-uniform of the infantry, stood at the door-way to ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... her side. But Kars turned to the squat figure which filled its chair to overflowing. His steady eyes regarded the smiling features ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... 1200), still full of Romanesque feeling, but the church having been much pulled about in the thirteenth century, it came to have a semi-Byzantine choir and two depressed domes, quite Byzantine, over the nave. The facade, with its squat towers, exhibits no lofty aim, but when one looks at the tabernacle-work in the tympan of the divided portal, the capitals in the jambs and the mouldings of the archivolts, the elegant arcade above and the tracery of the great rose window, one feels ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... first an intolerable odour meets us, and a flight of bats explains the cause. Gradually our eyes accustom themselves to the light, and we become conscious of a square hall, the flat roof resting on squat pillars elaborately carved, fragments of painting on the walls and ceiling, narrow slits opening into dark cells, and opposite the entrance, set back in a shrine, a colossal Buddha, the light falling full ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... thought that, they made a great mistake. To be sure, at anything except digging he was slow and awkward. He was too heavy and squat to be spry on his feet—to chase and catch his more nimble neighbors. But no one that knew much about Benny Badger would have said that his wits were dull. They were sharp. And so, too, were his teeth, which he never hesitated to use ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... lade, freight; pocket, put up, bag. inhabit &c. (be present) 186; domesticate, colonize; take root, strike root; anchor; cast anchor, come to an anchor; sit down, settle down; settle; take up one's abode, take up one's quarters; plant oneself, establish oneself, locate oneself; squat, perch, hive, se nicher[Fr], bivouac, burrow, get a footing; encamp, pitch one's tent; put up at, put up one's horses at; keep house. endenizen[obs3], naturalize, adopt. put back, replace &c. (restore) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... smell that oil a mile away. Now, where are you? There." He had butted into a constable's solid bulk. "Take me to the rock—quick. We must hide behind it, on the lower side.... Is this the place? Right! Squat down, both of you, and make yourselves comfortable, so that you won't feel your position irksome, and move perhaps at the wrong moment. When you feel me crawling away, follow to the upper ...
— The Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley • Louis Tracy
... agate. His sword, designed as carefully as a medieval cross, has a blued blade showing through an openwork scabbard of purple leather and filagree. The porters, conducted by Ftatateeta, pass along the quay behind the sentinel to the steps of the palace, where they put down their bales and squat on the ground. Apollodorus does not pass along with them: he halts, amused by the ...
— Caesar and Cleopatra • George Bernard Shaw
... seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men who the moment they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end. Childe Roland kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless horn" call and saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I felt it to be good; to me it was Browning's Knight personified. I could hear its underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... A massive radio-telephone set, by which, he judged, all communications between the fleets in the Pacific were overheard; a squat dynamo; a set of huge cylinders, from which, probably, had come the highly expansive gas that had snuffed out the crews of the two dirigibles. But there were other things—strange, monstrous. One of them, the tapered tube of metal that angled ...
— Raiders Invisible • Desmond Winter Hall
... A short, squat, broad-faced young fellow having for all costume a pair of white drawers was offering the scarf thrown over both his arms, as if they had been sticks, and holding it respectfully as far as possible from his person. Lingard took it from him and ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... window of an apartment house that upreared its form from amid squat, ignorant stables, there leaned a curious woman. Some laborers, unloading a scow at a dock at the river, paused for a moment and regarded the fight. The engineer of a passive tugboat hung lazily to a railing and watched. Over on the Island, a ...
— Maggie: A Girl of the Streets • Stephen Crane
... with words again." "Nay, do not doubt me; hard it is To break at once a life-long chain." Came we unto the riverside, Where motionless a rustic sate, His gaze fixed on the flowing tide. "Ho, mate, why thus so still and squat?" ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... corrugated iron. The three small windows had frames coloured with washing-blue and frills of crimson cotton within. There seemed scarcely room for even Hazel's small figure. The house was little larger than a good pigsty, and only the trail of smoke from its squat chimney ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... gourds. There the contents will stand, in dirty vessels and a warm place, maturing their exhilarating qualities until the evening, when the Tam o' Shanters and Souter Johnnies of the village begin to assemble and squat in a ring in the open space in front. They may be Kolees, or fishermen, and Agrees, who make salt, and aboriginal Katkurrees from the jungle, with their bows and arrows, most bibulous of all, but among them all there will be no Bhundaree. ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... and the professor, the former being flanked by Lethbridge (Mildmay, in accordance with previous arrangements, had ensconced himself in the pilothouse); Lualamba and the rest of the suite were quietly allowed to squat in a semicircle before them on ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... that toad, but somehow, as it sat nestled up all of a squat in the boy's warm hand, he felt as if he should like to take it with him. It was not big, and would take up little room, and cost ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... instances of this adpression of the feathers and apparent shrinking of the body from fear, which Mr. Weir has noticed, has been in the quail and grass-parrakeet.[15] The habit is intelligible in these birds from their being accustomed, when in danger, either to squat on the ground or to sit motionless on a branch, so as to escape detection. Though, with birds, anger may be the chief and commonest cause of the erection of the feathers, it is probable that young cuckoos when looked ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... built houses and planted trees; they had reclaimed the deep bog and converted it into good arable land. They had employed the peasantry, and given them plots of ground, and, more than all, they had allowed a number of families to squat on bits of bog by the roadside, where they lived as well as they could; working when there was a demand for labour, cutting turf and selling it in the neighbouring town of Tullamore, and perhaps carrying on some little dealings. At all events they had survived the famine; and there ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... little, which did not in the least disconcert Jose, and, rising, he moved a small table forward, opened it and then going to a cupboard in the wall drew from it a short, squat bottle, four glasses and a pack of cards. "Your room is just beyond this," he said, turning to Pearl. "Jose says that you will find everything ready for you. You must be tired. You had better go ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... into the mind. Not only was "a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself "squat, low-browed, commonplace"—"a poor creature, with his dictionary literature and his saloon arrogance"—"no vision in him"—"will neither see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it has been under the ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... present. Ramoo will do the cooking for me in future. He need not go into the kitchen to scare the maids. I could see they looked at him as if he had been his infernal majesty, as he came in. He can do it anywhere; all he wants is an iron pot with some holes in it, and some charcoal. He can squat out there on the veranda, or, if it is bad weather, any shed will ...
— Colonel Thorndyke's Secret • G. A. Henty
... down loud tracks Past houses, which are like coffins. On the corners wheelbarrows with bananas squat. Just a bit of shit makes a tough kid happy. The human beasts glide along, completely lost As though on a street, miserably gray and shrill. Workers stream from dilapidated gates. A weary person moves quietly in a round tower. A hearse crawls along the street, ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... the orders from Washington, to decide whether she would let herself be interned or not. And outside, beyond the three mile limit that marked the end of American territorial waters, were two good reasons to make the German think well of being interned. They were two cruisers, squat and ugly and vicious in their gray war paint, that watched the entrance to the harbor as you have seen a ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... Provinces in the Mission field, and attractive is the scene that lies before us. We sail on the "Harmony" to Labrador, and see the neatly built settlements, the fur-clad Missionary in his dog-drawn sledge, the hardy Eskimos, the squat little children at the village schools, the fathers and mothers at worship in the pointed church, the patients waiting their turn in the surgery in the hospital at Okak. We pass on to Alaska, and steam with the Brethren up the Kuskokwim River. We visit the islands ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... remnants of an ancient tavern, whose front wall, flush with the sidewalk, showed occasional bullet scars on the rough red brownstone surface. Green outside shutters lay inertly back from dull leaded panes which reflected metallically the orange glow of the setting sun, and over the door, which was squat and low and level with the pavement, an ancient four-sided lantern, hung from a bracket of rusty black iron, was gathering cobwebs in disuse. All this lay within Mary Louise's field of vision from the summerhouse and yet she saw it not. She was staring abstractedly at a wary robin ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... what fresh opponents he might have to reckon, and he was surprised to see but four men standing by Fortunio, whilst behind them among the thicker shadows, he dimly made out a woman's figure and, beside her, another man who was short and squat. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... of the paid taletellers, who squat and drone and reach a climax, and then pass the begging bowl before they finish it—each merrily related jest brought in by members of the constantly arriving trading parties—each neigh of his three chargers—every new phase of ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... "tratar com o branco" and, declining to bargain, he robs double. He is a short, small, dark man with mountaineer legs, a frightful psora, and an inveterate habit of drink. He saluted his superior, Nelongo, with immense ceremony, dating probably from the palmy times of the Mwani-Congo. Equals squat before one another, and shaking hands crosswise clap palms. Chico Furano kneels, places both "ferients" upon the earth and touches his nose-tip; he then traces three ground-crosses with the Jovian finger; again touches his nose; beats his "volae" on the ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a tomahawk ...
— South Sea Tales • Jack London
... traces of that delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward, and very much defaced. And in this great courtyard there are swarms of living ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... the setting sun. There were plum orchards—for the manufacture of plum brandy—so thick with fruit that there was more purple than green in the branches, and between the trunks showed square white ruddy-roofed hovels with great squat tile-decked chimneys. Some of the houses were painted with decorations of bright colours, vases of flowers or soldiers, and on one was a detachment of crudely drawn horsemen, dark on the white walls, meant to represent the heroes ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... shaggy Servian ponies attached to low, cumbersome carts, passed and repassed, to and from the markets. A gendarme, leaning the weight of his shoulder on the guard of a police saber, rested against the corner of a wine shop across the way. Students, wearing squat caps with vizors, sauntered indolently along, twirling canes and ogling all who wore petticoats. Occasionally the bright uniform of a royal cuirassier flashed by; and the Englishman would lean over the sill and gaze ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... lay by the hot white sand-dunes. . Small yellow flowers, sapless and squat and spiny, Stared at the sky. And silently there above us Day after day, beyond our dreams and knowledge, Presences swept, and over us streamed their shadows, Swift and blue, or dark. . . . What did they mean? What sinister threat of power? ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... out across the colony of low, square-shaped enclosures and to its far side where the twisted jungle began; to the spot where the mentacom was housed in a squat, guarded dome of crudely-shaped steel. Then he turned back to the Earthman, and Mason saw ...
— The Women-Stealers of Thrayx • Fox B. Holden
... can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks," Murchard had once said of him. "Or a phosphorescent log, rather," some one else amended; and we recognized the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... higher up, and almost that distance to one side, the agent's eyes made out two tiny specks. He watched them closely for a moment as they pitched and tossed queerly about; then darted into the engine-room, secured a pair of binoculars of an old, squat pattern, and swiftly focused upon the ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... was then no need for her to follow the road as far as The Cove, Margaret struck across the downs to her right in the direction of the village, thus saving herself two sides of a triangle. A little grey church with a squat tower, a little grey house that was obviously the parsonage, a row of small cottages, a few isolated ones, and a farm or two made up the village, and Margaret, after wandering up and down the little main street wondering where Mrs. Murray's house was, went into the one small general ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... to sink to the lowest practice of the worst class rooms. To define a tendency so sharply that it cannot flow without breaking the definition, is a lecturer's trick for which audiences should stone him. Solemn generalizations which squat upon a book like an ostrich on a goose egg and hatch out vast moral philosophies are to be dreaded like the devil, as are, equally, the critics with pet theories, who, having defined them, make everything from a squib to an epic ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... no proof, but it takes a deep fellow To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow. He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,— When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean,)-gisms that squat 'em Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... out a bit of fresco: "Questo e Gesu Nazzareno"—as the housekeeper might say, "This is the present Earl"—also points out the marble copy of the slab bearing the print of i suoi santissimi piedi, square little feet, of such a squat, fat, short-jointed Christ, about as miraculous or venerable as the pattern on a pat ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... the love for their children, lived in the little huts on their small plantations, raising yams and bananas, and if the men became too drunken and abusive the women ordered them to leave. Among those people, in a tropical climate, with land to squat upon, most of the work is done by the women. Let no one imagine that the so-called "matriarchate" of early ages was an ideal condition of society. It was based primarily upon the industrial and moral ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... Hell and Heaven, in this crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,—are we to lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into the ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... heads goes on the precise and scientific struggle of the artillery. Packed elbow to elbow in these obscure galleries, one might be content to squat all day long, auditor of the magnificent orchestra of battle, were it not that one becomes so soon habituated to it that it is no longer magnificent. We hear the voices of cannon of all calibres and at all distances. We learn to read the score & distinguish ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... this occasion by a little squat figure, all belly, with a short pair of legs at one end, and a little red, fiery face, that looked as if it would explode—at the other. The figure was mounted on horseback, and as it and its party gallantly entered this city of cabins, it clapped ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... low, forcing the engines of screw propellers lets the stern of the boat "squat" or hug the bottom, and although these are minor features of want of mechanical adaptation to canal duty, they illustrate petty detentions serving to lengthen the through ...
— History of Steam on the Erie Canal • Anonymous
... crest of the Downs at a lurching gallop; down the ragged rut-worn lane, the dusty convolvuluses glimmering up at him in the dusk; past the squat-spired Church in the high Churchyard among the sycamores; down the rough and twisted Highstreet of Newhaven in the chill of that August evening, as no man had ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... city, or the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the Ta-tu, or Great Residence—the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the spear-head ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... stirring crowds, you come to the poi merchants, squatting in the shade on their hams, in true native fashion, and surrounded by purchasers. (The Sandwich Islanders always squat on their hams, and who knows but they may be the old original "ham sandwiches?" The thought is pregnant with interest.) The poi looks like common flour paste, and is kept in large bowls formed of a ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... led on Pedro, his squat figure stiff in the saddle, but solid as a rock, and tilted a little forward, as his habit was. One of the Judge's horses came next, a sorrel, dragging back continually on the rope by which he was led. After ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... flowers was everywhere. Fir-trees perfumed the air. Every doorstep was a garden. The courtyards were alive with the squat figures of capped maidens, wreathing and twisting greens and garlands. And in the streets there was such a noise as was never before heard in a city on ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... banked entrenchment overhung the chalk pit, in which stood the house, a monstrous squat Egyptian shape that Cossar had built for his sons when the Giant Nursery had served its turn, and behind was a great dark shed that might have covered a cathedral, in which a spluttering incandescence came and went, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... attentive audience he drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... perfection of Christ that the uttermost evil of His enemies was brought out. There is a passage in "Paradise Lost," where a band of angels, sent out to scour Paradise in search of Satan, who is hidden in the garden, discover him in the shape of a toad "squat at the ear of Eve." Ithuriel, one of the band, touches him with his spear, whereat, surprised, he starts ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... The rice and fish are boiled in a pot and then allowed to cool in the same vessel or poured out to cool in a large earthen or wooden bowl. Then Mr. Tao together with Mrs. Tao and all the young Taos squat on their heels around the mixture and satisfy that intangible thing called the appetite. They do not use chop sticks as the Chinese do, but the rice and fish are caught in a hollow formed by the ...
— An Epoch in History • P. H. Eley
... be moved. He sends word of it to Sir Louis by an orderly who can be trusted to talk to any one he meets on the way. I leave by the back way at ten forty-five. However, here's a chance for you to practise deaf-and-dumb drill. There's some one coming. Squat down in that corner. Look meek and miserable. That's the ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... in the sunlight the hired landau drove up to the gate. Lawford, peeping between the blinds, looked down on the coachman, with reins hanging loosely from his red squat-thumbed hand, seated in his tight livery and indescribable hat on the faded cushions. One thing only was in his mind; and it was almost with an audible cry that he turned towards the figure that edged, white and trembling, into the chill room, to fling herself ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those ships were certainly so old— Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese Hell-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold. But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... its darkness, its lines of tall trees and low houses, its broad grey footwalks, speckled with the shadows of overhanging branches, and parted occasionally by the gloomy gaps of side streets. The squat yellow flames of the gas lamps, standing erect at regular intervals, alone imparted a little life to the lonely wilderness. And Florent seemed to make no progress; the avenue appeared to grow ever longer and longer, to be carrying Paris away into the far depths of the night. At ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... new gospel is toward anarchy. The return to nature is practically a return to barbarism. You would have all men content so long as they grew enough potatoes for their daily needs. You would have England return to the conditions of the Saxon heptarchy. Each man would squat upon his clearing in the forest, ignobly independent, brutally content. There would be no longer that struggle for life which develops capacity, that urging onward of the flood of life which cuts for itself new channels, that passion for betterment which means progress. You save yourself from ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... mountain called Tablas stretches across the view in lengthened bulk like the sky-line of some submarine upheaval. The waters are gayly colored, shadowed into exquisite greens by the plumy mountains above; and in a little valley lies the white town of Romblon with its squat municipal buildings, its gray old church, and a graceful campanile rising from a grassy plaza. They have dammed a mountain stream, so that the town is bountifully supplied with pure cold water, and with its clean streets and whitewashed ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... shrill, prolonged ululation that carries from spitzkop to spitzkop across the miles of karroo or high-grass veld between. And she unpinned her hat and waved it, standing amongst the thickly-growing poppies and chamomile on the high crest of the sand-wave, while her shadow—a squat, blue dwarf with arms out of all proportion—flourished ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... as she displayed herself. You may suppose, however, how curious I felt for such a conversation, and how scrupulously I followed her injunctions of watching her motions. A little squat good-humoured lady, with yellow flowers over a mob cap upon her hair - who had little sunken eyes, concise nose, and a mouth so extended by perpetual smiling, that, hardly leaving an inch for the cheek, it ran nearly into the ear, on my other side now demanded my attention also, and told ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically an athlete, the negro ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... reading a newspaper and smoking a blackened clay pipe. He is a man of fifty, heavy-set and round-shouldered, with long muscular arms and swollen-veined, hairy hands. His face is bony and ponderous; his nose short and squat; his mouth large, thick-lipped and harsh; his complexion mottled—red, purple-streaked, and freckled; his hair, short and stubby with a bald spot on the crown. The expression of his small, blue eyes is one of selfish cunning. His voice is loud and hoarse. He wears a flannel shirt, open at the ...
— The Straw • Eugene O'Neill
... was, without turning round,—a dark, squat woman, broad all over; broad in the hips, the waist, the face, and stamped with the race-mark of high cheekbones. Her thick, straight black hair was cut "tin-basin style;" she wore men's boots, and her petticoats were nearly up to ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... for all manner of subtlety, so that my fame ascends to heaven. I live in Ithaca, where there is a high mountain called Neritum, covered with forests; and not far from it there is a group of islands very near to one another—Dulichium, Same, and the wooded island of Zacynthus. It lies squat on the horizon, all highest up in the sea towards the sunset, while the others lie away from it towards dawn. {75} It is a rugged island, but it breeds brave men, and my eyes know none that they better love to look upon. The goddess Calypso kept me with her in her cave, and wanted me to marry her, ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... man I sent for them. The man was about five feet two inches high, and well made; his colour of a light copper; his hair black and short, and with little beard. He had two holes in his under-lip, but no ornaments in them. The woman was short and squat, with a plump round face; wore a deer-skin jacket, with a large hood, and had on wide boots. The teeth of both were black, and seemed as if they had been filed down level with the gums. The woman was punctured from the lip to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... of his piteous speech, So that their lives, prisoned in the shape of ape, Tiger or deer, shagged bear, jackal or wolf, Foul-feeding kite, pearled dove or peacock gemmed, Squat toad or speckled serpent, lizard, bat, Yea, or fish fanning the river waves, Touched meekly at the skirts of brotherhood With man, who hath less innocence than these: And in mute gladness knew their bondage broke Whilst Buddha spoke ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... become absorbed into his skin. His black mustache bristled roughly, but his face was freer than usual from his black beard-stubble, because the day before had been Sunday and he had shaved. His black right hand with its squat discolored nails grasped his cutting-knife with a hard clutch, his left held the piece of leather firmly in place, while he stared out with that angry and anxious scowl at Eva, who had paused on the street below, and was staring up at the windows, as if she meditated a wild search in the factory ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... humourous piece, Probationary Odes for the Laureateship (p. xliii), Dr. Joseph is made to hug his brother in his arms, when he sees him descend safely from the balloon in which he had composed his Ode. Thomas Warton is described in the same piece (p. 116) as 'a little, thick, squat, red-faced man.' There was for some time a coolness between Johnson and Dr. Warton. Warton, writing on Jan. 22, 1766, says:—'I only dined with Johnson, who seemed cold and indifferent, and scarce said anything to me; perhaps he has heard what I said of his Shakespeare, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... an unknown quantity here, as we in Australia understand it. These people simply squat down wherever they can find a natural catchment for water. There is no clearing to be done, as the land is quite devoid of timber. They put nigger labour on, and build a farmhouse. These farmhouses are much better built than those ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales
... the heads of a party, and I never had the least doubt of their being the authors of the 'Gazette Ecclesiastique'. The one, tall, smooth-tongued, and sharping, was named Ferrand; the other, short, squat, a sneerer, and punctilious, was a M. Minard. They called each other cousin. They lodged at Paris with D'Alembert, in the house of his nurse named Madam Rousseau, and had taken at Montmorency a little apartment to pass the summers there. They did everything ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... wherein the women had rested was a wooden lodging house, set barely back from the one business street of the camp. Next door was a small, squat domicile constructed of bottles and mud. The bottles were laid in the "mortar" with their ends protruding. Near by, at the rear of a prosperous saloon, was a pyramid of empty bottles, fully ten feet high—enough to build ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... at the end of a stout pole, and a small hook baited with a piece of red flannel? Well, when we'd see a whopping big greenback we'd dangle that red stuff close to his nose. It was funny to see him squat down like a cat does on sighting a sparrow or a robin, and then jump up ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... pores, and hindering the escape of the effluvia—I know not, but I am far from being convinced even now that it is not so. A very good sportsman, and true friend of mine, insists upon it that birds give out no scent except from the feet, and that, consequently, if they squat without running they cannot be found. I do not, however, believe the theory, and hold it to be disproved by the fact that dead birds do give out scent. I have generally observed that there is no difficulty in retrieving dead quail, but that, wounded, they are constantly ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... not done for it. The great parable which represents Him as sending out His summons to the feast in His palace puts the wonderful words in the mouth of the master of the house, after his call by his servants had been refused. 'Go out into the highways and hedges,' beneath which the beggars squat, 'and compel them to come in, that my house may be full.' 'Nature abhors a vacuum,' the old natural philosophers used to say. So does grace; so does God's love. It hates to have His house empty and His provisions unconsumed. And so He has done ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Transbalkania was a backward, feudo-capitalistic power of third class. The National Bank, the new buildings of the Borba and the Politica. And finally, set back a hundred feet from the boulevard, the sullen, squat Ministry of Internal Affairs. ...
— Expediter • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... countryside; the nearest signs of human life were a church gauntly silhouetted on the hill above Grimsby Center, two miles away, and a life-saving station, squat and sand-colored, slapped down in a hollow of the cliffs. But near the Applebys' door ran the State road, black and oily and smooth, on which, even at the beginning of the summer season, passed a procession of motors from Boston and Brockton, Newport and New York, ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... very pleasantly for me." The Queen's voice was measuredly polite. "I thank you for thinking of me—in my out-of-the-way corner, and bringing me such lovely gifts." Her eyes turned from the flowers which Brina had put in a squat pewter pitcher to the book which lay on the table. Then she turned to Robin and levelled a glance upon her which held a ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... that we have made arrangements for the approaching season, so that those who wish may bring their dough to our mammoth squatter and get it treated at our place at the nominal price of two bits per squat. Strangers calling for their squat or unsquat dough, ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... invited to the private view of it the night before, when the faithful were dedicating it. They sat on the floor, these Mohammedans, rocking themselves back and forth, and chanting the Koran. I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when one uses one's legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... corn, or as a well in a happy garden, diffusing life and bloom? Look at the syce's children. Phil Robinson says there are nine of them, all about the same age and dressed in the same nakedness. As they squat together there, indulging "the first and purest of our instincts" in the mud or dust of the narrow back road, reflect that their tender roots are nourished by a thin rivulet of rupees which flows from you. If you dried up, they ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it disappeared. ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... grandmas, love these tiny morsels of animation, with their quick, active, nervous movements, their simulations of fear and their sudden bursts of half-timorous confidence. With big black eyes, how they squat and watch, or stand, immovable on their hind legs, their little forepaws held as if in petition, solemnly, seriously, steadily watch, watch, watching, until they are satisfied either that you are all right, or are to be shunned. For, with ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... swearing. There was no singing as the anchor was raised. A sort of gloom hung over the whole ship. As she stole out to sea again, the men, one by one, went aft and leaned outboard, peering down at the broad, squat stern. Jeremy did likewise and beheld in new white letters on the black of the hull, the words Royal James. Next day in the fo'c's'le council he learned why the renaming of the Revenge had cast a pall of apprehension over the crew. There were low-muttered tales of disaster—of storm, shipwreck, ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... took hold of Chia Jui, and, extinguishing again the lantern, he brought him out into the court, feeling his way up to the bottom of the steps of the large terrace. "It's safe enough in this nest," he observed, "but just squat down quietly and don't utter a sound; wait until I come back ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... beflagged front of the War Museum, while night is falling. It is the Temple. It is joined to the Church, and resembles it. My thoughts go to those crosses which weigh down, from the pinnacles of churches, the heads of the living, join their two hands together, and close their eyes; those crosses which squat upon the graves in the cemeteries at the front. It is because of all these temples that in the future the sleep-walking nations will begin again to go through the immense and mournful tragedy of obedience. It is because of these ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... tears, the dolorous murmurs of those thick partitions, those smoky vaults, those arches resting on squat pillars, those almost speechless blocks of stone, those sober ornaments expressing their symbolism so curtly! The Romanesque is the La Trappe of architecture; we find it sheltering the austerest Orders, the sternest Brotherhoods, kneeling ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... thickened by the smoke of the city, drove out across the water when the Scarrowmania lay in the Mersey, with her cable hove short, and the last of the flood tide gurgling against her bows. A trumpeting blast of steam swept high aloft from beside her squat funnel, and the splash of the slowly turning paddles of the couple of steam tugs that lay alongside mingled with the din it made. A gangway from one of them led to the Scarrowmania's forward ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... master's hand. Accounts differ about his share in the remaining fourteen statues; but the matter is of no great moment, seeing that the style of the work is conventional, and the scale of the figures disagreeably squat and dumpy. It seems almost impossible that these ecclesiastical and tame pieces should have been produced at the same time as the David by the same hand. Neither Vasari nor Condivi speaks about them, although it is ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... gone out,' says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi) in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me to squat upon. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically an athlete, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... returned yet, but they were expecting him every instant. Johnson waited, drumming his fingers on his knees, in a high, dim lit room, the air of which was charged with a faint, sickly smell of ether. The furniture was massive, and the books in the shelves were sombre, and a squat black clock ticked mournfully on the mantelpiece. It told him that it was half-past seven, and that he had been gone an hour and a quarter. Whatever would the women think of him! Every time that a distant door slammed he sprang from his chair in a quiver of eagerness. His ears ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... before, when the faithful were dedicating it. They sat on the floor, these Mohammedans, rocking themselves back and forth, and chanting the Koran. I believe the reason nearly all Arabs have crooked legs is because they squat so much. One cannot have straight legs when one uses one's legs to sit down on for hours at a time. They always sit in the sun, too, and that must bake them ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... Billy, and a ribald song you sing, While the old men sit and tell us war it is a ghastly thing, When the swift machines are busy and the grim, squat fortress nocks At your bolts as vain as eggs of gulls that spatter ...
— 'Hello, Soldier!' - Khaki Verse • Edward Dyson
... first, thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his haunches and stare beadily at Rose-Marie, taut with quivering curiosity. Caroline scowled ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... one aged bullfinch—a cock. I remember," she broke off, "an Aunt of mine who lived at Dulwich and kept cactuses. You reached the conservatory through the double drawing-room, and there, on the hot pipes, were dozens of them, ugly, squat, bristly little plants each in a separate pot. Once in a hundred years the Aloe flowered, so my Aunt said. But she died before that happened—" We told her to keep to the point. "Well," she resumed, "when Professor Hobkin was out, I ...
— Monday or Tuesday • Virginia Woolf
... road flanked by trees and stark hedges; nothing but the flat expanse of white on either side, broken here and there by patches of thin woodlands or by some old-time farmhouse with its slab shingles painted white and its green shutters and squat roof. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... like a feather fan. A rabbit of the same weight would have made the trip in about twelve seconds; the squirrel protracted it for more than half a minute," and "landed on a ledge of limestone, where we could see him plainly squat on his hind legs and smooth his ruffled fur, after which he made for the creek with a flourish of his tail, took a good drink, and scampered away into the ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs
... losing itself among the street-gutter rabble as in our own; notwithstanding this mixture of blood and races, the diabolical Indian elements are easily recognisable in their wigwams. Then, again, their Indian origin can be traced in many of their social habits; among others, they squat upon the ground differently to the Turk, Arab, and other nationalities, who are pointed to by some writers as being the ancestors of the Gipsies. Their tramping over the hills and plains of India, and exposure to all the changes ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... reached the battleship, was hoisted and stowed on board. Almost immediately a long line of signal flags fluttered from the squat mast. Smoke began to pour from the funnels. The flags were hauled down and another festoon of them was hoisted in their place. I could see an answering stream of flags fluttering from one ...
— The Red Hand of Ulster • George A. Birmingham
... ridden in a close cab. Flinging his shoulders back, he surveyed the world on foot. "Odd faces one sees," he meditated. "I suppose they've got feelings, like the rest; but a fellow can't help asking—what's the use of them? If I inherit all right, as I ought to—why shouldn't I?—I'll squat down at old Wrexby, garden and farm, and drink my Port. I hate London. The squire's not so far wrong, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was their comrade, the man to whose succour they had rushed. A tragic story of suffering was in that single figure, which, paddle in hand, was battling with a burden too great for any one man to bear. Only he, and the squat figures of Shaunekuk paddlers were to be seen. For the rest nothing was ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... at the court-house square was relatively bright and as Brent crossed in front of the squat and shadowy bulk of the old jail-house—empty now, though it should have been full—he made out a figure hastening about him in a circuitous fashion at a dog trot as though bent on arriving at the hostelry first. That, then, must have been the presence he had felt at his back, ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... that's your trouble," P. Sybarite told him coolly, "this is your cue to squat on your haunches, scratch your left ear with your hind leg, and gaze up into my face with an intelligent expression ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance
... suspected sometimes—just from a faint phrase which had once escaped Stanley Lake—as the likeliest solution, that Mark Wylder had made a left-handed marriage somehow and somewhere, and that a subterranean wife and family would emerge at an unlucky moment, and squat upon that remainder, and defy the world to disturb them. This gave to his plans and dealings in relation to the vicar a character of irresolution and caprice foreign to his character, which was grim and decided enough when his data were clear, ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... vagabondage. He gazed across at a Greek restaurant with signs in real Greek letters like "ruins at—well, at Aythens." A Chinese chop-suey den with a red-and-yellow carved dragon, and at an upper window a squat Chinaman who might easily be carrying a kris, "or whatever them Chink knives are," as he observed for the hundredth time he had taken this journey. A rotisserie, before whose upright fender of scarlet coals whole ducks were happily roasting to a shiny brown. In a furrier's window were Siberian ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide, stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak a smaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon's guests, who by this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... snowy shells and glistening brass wire, perfect of limb. They made an uncouth babbling noise when they spoke, moved in a stately manner, and sent quick, wild glances out of their startled, never-resting eyes. Those warriors would squat in long rows, four or more deep, before the verandah, while their chiefs bargained for hours with Makola over an elephant tusk. Kayerts sat on his chair and looked down on the proceedings, understanding nothing. He stared at them with his round blue eyes, called ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... Jacques, in a pensive tone, as if the question had aroused some sorrowful recollections; "I can't say that I'd like to settle here now. There was a time when I thought nothin' could be better than to squat in the woods with one or two jolly comrades, and—"(Jacques sighed); "but times is changed now, master, and so is my mind. My chums are most of them dead or gone one way or other. No; I shouldn't care ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... loved a central tower, which they built low and squat. Happily they built surely and well, firmly and solidly, as their successors loved to pile course upon course upon their Norman towers, to raise a massive superstructure, and often crown them with a lofty, graceful, but heavy spire. No wonder the early masonry has, ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... folk around—any folk. I don't think that's why they murdered Allan. There was more to that. Seems to me we'll get a visit from a bunch of 'em. Maybe they'll get around with some of the rifles they stole from Allan. They'll squat right here on their haunches and tell us the things they fancy, ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... changes in the com dome since the capture of the cap. A squat box on the floor sprouted a collection of tubes from its upper surface. Perhaps that was some Throg equivalent of Terran equipment in place on the ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... the gate open, but the doors to the collection locked; ringing the bell proved fruitless. The gateway, however, gave admission to the not specially large court which was surrounded by a freshly whitewashed arcade whose short squat columns had black iron bars ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... He was only a lonely figure walking purposefully, with a great white beard like a pilgrim, and with a thick stick that resembled a weapon. On one side the new Courts of Justice had a low and unadorned portico of squat columns half concealed by a few old trees left in the approach. On the other the pavilion wings of the new Colonial Treasury came out to the line of the street. But Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... help to float a bad loan, but I am sure we have done the French no harm at Washington. It will be good policy on the part of Maximilian to encourage Confederate soldiers, provided they don't come and squat in too great numbers. I understand that the French army is not to be withdrawn until it is no longer wanted by Maximilian, but that will not be till ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... silver, some in boxes, much in bags, glimmering in the half-light like dwarfish ghosts; but the greater part uncovered, glittering in tarnished splendor wherever the lamplight fell. Rows upon rows of teapots, tall and squat, round and oval, chased, hammered, and plain; behind them, coffee-pots looking down, in every possible device. There were silver pitchers and silver bowls; porringers and fruit-dishes, salvers and platters. Such ...
— Fernley House • Laura E. Richards
... beautifully connecting in its habits Crotalus and the Viperidae, and plenty of new (as far as my knowledge goes) saurians. As for one little toad, I hope it may be new, that it may be christened "diabolicus." Milton must allude to this very individual when he talks of "squat like a toad" (4/2. "...him [Satan] there they [Ithuriel and Zephon] found, Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve" ("Paradise Lost," Book IV., ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... and a new stretch of coast appeared. On the summit of a mountain of red rocks, dotted here and there by dark masses of shrubbery, stood a broad yellow squat tower, with no opening on the side toward the sea except a window, a mere black hole of irregular contour. The outlines of a porthole in the battlement of the tower, that had formerly served for a small cannon, was outlined against the blue sky. On one side the promontory ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... light-colored; their complexion has an artificial look; there is something ghastly and unnatural in the yellow of the faces, penetrated by a rose or carmine color on the cheeks. They are hideous in all the possible aspects and varieties of hideousness—undersized, squat, evil-eyed, pug-nosed, tawdry in dress, ungraceful in every motion; they really mar the landscape, so that you are glad to escape from them to your hotel, which you find a clean and comfortable building, where, if you are as ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... has passed very pleasantly for me." The Queen's voice was measuredly polite. "I thank you for thinking of me—in my out-of-the-way corner, and bringing me such lovely gifts." Her eyes turned from the flowers which Brina had put in a squat pewter pitcher to the book which lay on the table. Then she turned to Robin and levelled a glance upon her which ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... black bonzes on the shore Watched where singing, faint and far, Boys in long blue garments bore Roses in a golden jar. While at carven dragon ships Floating o'er that silent sea, Squat-limbed gods with dreadful lips Leered ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... to Cuvier's in the evening, and went first to M. Jullien's, in the Rue de l'Enfer, not far from the Jardin des Plantes, and there we saw one of the most extraordinary of all the extraordinary persons we have seen—a Spaniard, squat, black-haired, black-browed, and black-eyed, with an infernal countenance, who has written the History of the Inquisition, and who related to us how he had been sent en penitence to a monastery by the ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... interfered with her movements; indeed, it made exercise more than ever necessary. Forced to seek diligently for her food, she found it in a deserted stubble; there, when the sheep lay sleeping in the bright winter moonlight, she would squat beside them, nibbling the turnips scattered over the field as provender ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... and down absorbed in the marked contemplation of the ship's fore and aft trim; but when I saw him squat on his heels in the slush at the very edge of the quay to peer at the draught of water under her counter, I said to myself, "This is the captain." And presently I descried his luggage coming along—a real sailor's chest, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... being in the entire lobby was the night clerk dozing behind the counter. The clock over his head said five minutes to six. Shifting his glance from the clock, Jon became aware of a squat black robot waving to attract his attention. The powerful arms and compact build identified him as a member of the Diger family, one of the most numerous groups. He pushed through the crowd and clapped Jon on the back ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... them that the Colonel had handed the parade over to me, and that they were to break ranks and sit on the ground as close as possible. At once military stiffness was dispelled, and amid much laughter the men would crowd around and squat on the ground tightly packed together. Imagine what a picture that was. Splendid stalwart young men they were, hundreds and hundreds of them, with healthy merry faces, and behind them in the distance the green trees and the sunset. Of course smoking was allowed, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... Surrounded by green meadows and stubble-fields dotted with apple-trees, lay the grey outskirts of the village It was a very ordinary collection of houses, some of them big farms, others humble cottages. The tiled roofs formed a reddish mass, and above them rose the squat church tower. With my glasses I could distinguish the clock-dial, and could see the time—a ...
— In the Field (1914-1915) - The Impressions of an Officer of Light Cavalry • Marcel Dupont
... all marched along the causeway like figures on some sculptured frieze, their shadows broken beneath them on the ruffled surface of the pond. I said that each of the women carried a babe: but there was one who did not—a plain, squat creature, at the tail of the procession, who wore a thick scarf round her neck, and a shawl of divers bright colours. She led a small child along with one hand, and with the other attempted to keep a large ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... company with her bust, while her head, which lay almost horizontally upon them, made one think of the 'stuck-on' head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers. Not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she was obliged, in order to console ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... is woeful, the dreary day itself, as it sinks, shoots one grim red leer at the doomed knight as he sets forth; in the penury and inertness of the wasted plain he sees "grimace"; the mountains fight like bulls or doze like dotards; and the Dark Tower itself is "round and squat," built of brown stone, a mere anticlimax to romance; while round it lie the sportsmen ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... the young guineas, and seeing them cuddle invisible under small tufts and weeds. Out in the stable lot, where the grass was grazed so close that the geese could barely nip it, she would sometimes get one of the negro men to scare the little pigs, for the delight of seeing them squat as though hidden, when they were no more hidden than if they had spread themselves out upon so many dinner dishes. All of us reveal traces of this primitive instinct upon occasion. Daphne was doing her ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... the sun as though there was no such thing as blindness!" said the women, thrusting their heads out of window. "But then, of course, he's from the country. And now he's going to deliver his work. Lord, how long is he going to squat up there and earn bread for that sweater? The red'll soon go from his cheeks if he stops there much longer!" And they looked after ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... inch of room for you," answered Lispeth, "but you may squat in the corridor outside if you like. Anybody who performs can join the show, but that's all. I'll tell you when it's your turn. It's VA. next. Now then," (turning to the hostesses), "who else can do anything? Francie Hall, come along ...
— A Popular Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... has gone out,' says Akira, setting the smoking-box (hibachi) in the middle of the floor, and spreading beside it a little mat for me to squat upon. ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... secure an investment of 'real property' may be, I cannot take upon me to say. Whether the land of the valley was the joint property of its inhabitants, or whether it was parcelled out among a certain number of landed proprietors who allowed everybody to 'squat' and 'poach' as much as he or she pleased, I never could ascertain. At any rate, musty parchments and title-deeds there were none on the island; and I am half inclined to believe that its inhabitants hold their broad valleys in fee simple from Nature herself; to have and to hold, so ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... the son of a great horse-breeder who dwelt north of the mountains, and whose name was Studas. He was short and squat of figure and square of face, but was all made for strength; and he was churlish and morose of disposition, wherefore men called him Heime (which was the name of a strong and venomous serpent), instead of Studas, which was of right ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... am,' said a squat, rough little fellow, appearing in the open doorway. 'What do you mean, you brigands, by entering my mill in this fashion? I am sitting reading my paper and smoking my pipe of coltsfoot, as my custom is ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... deep, with a roof showing traces of that delicious clear blue-green which is like a thin cry of joy rising up in the solemn temples of Egypt. A small sphinx keeps watch on the right, just where the guardian stands; this guardian, the gift of the past, squat, even fat, with a very perfect face of a determined and handsome man. In the court, upon a pedestal, stands a big bird, and near it is another bird, or rather half of a bird, leaning forward, and very much defaced. And ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... commemorative substance. I often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals—idealized images of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the men—those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a little satyr-like—look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at France erect on her borders. Even the women who are comparing different ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... that they prevented, for their own reasons, the natives working for us; while they preferred eternal chatter and squabbles to working themselves. So the Greek element was reduced to George the cook, a short, squat, unwashed fellow, who looked like a fair-Hercules out of luck; who worked like three, and who loudly clamoured for a revolver and a bowie-knife. His main fault, professionally speaking, was that he literally drenched us with oil till the store happily ran out. His complexion was that of an ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... the Altair officers were already there, a score of correct young men in white dress uniforms. Short, squat, and placid looking, Jimmy Chung stood making polite conversation. "Ah, there," he said, "Lieutenant Ziska and gentlemen, my partner, Michael Blades, Mike, ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... done; while others lounged upon the grass, or wandered lazily through the village, sporting with the Chinamen, or chaffing the Indian idling in the sun—a garish figure stoically watching the inroads of civilisation. The town itself was squat but amiable: small houses and large huts; the only place of note and dignity, the new town hall, which was greatly overshadowed by the big mill, and even by the two smaller ones flanking ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... battlefield of Armageddon between Hell and Heaven, in this crumbling of the old deities and the looming of the Unknown,—are we to lie down content and docile and suffer this hybrid monster of Frankenstein, under guise of governing, to squat on our necks, bind our Titan limbs, bandage our awakening eyes, gag our free voices, sterilize our civic manhood, and debase us from sons of divine liberty into ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the Ta-tu, or Great Residence—the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and fortifying it with immense strength, may be said to have fitted the spear-head on to the Chinese shaft, and to have given the ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... summer day between clipped hedges in the formal gardens of Herrenhausen—that palace as squat and ungraceful as those who had built and who inhabited it—she opened her heart to him very fully, allowed him, in her overwhelming need of sympathy, to see things which for very shame she had hitherto veiled from all other eyes. She kept nothing back; she dwelt upon her ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... lights, no quickning ray, Nor stir of pulse, nor object to entice Abroad the spirits; but the cloister'd heart Sits squat at home, like Pagod in a ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Hospitalier," who, like his brown-frocked lay-brother, wore a black stole over his white habit, as a badge of office. With the exception of the fine cloisters, there were no architectural features whatever about the squat, massive pile of buildings. The modern chapel, studiously severe in its details, bore the unmistakable imprint of Viollet-le-Duc's soulless, mathematically correct Gothic. Personally, I think that Viollet-le-Duc spoiled every ancient building in ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... loud cry, whereupon a door opened and in came seven black slaves whom he commanded to drag me from my bed and throw me down in the middle of the room. Furthermore, he ordered one of them to pinion my elbows and squat upon my head; and a second to sit upon my knees and secure my feet; and drawing his sword he gave it to a third and said, "Strike her, O Sa'ad, and cut her in twain and let each one take half and cast it into the Tigris[FN346] ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... scuts. Others, white ones with pale ruby eyes, and black ones with jet eyes, galloped round their hutches with playful grace. Now a scare would make them bolt off swiftly, revealing at every leap their slender reddened paws. Next they would squat down all in a heap, so closely packed that their heads could no longer ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... now and far away to the eastward rose the first straggling cabins of the town. Creeping toward them down the road rolled a dark squat figure. It grew and spread slowly on the horizon until it became a fat old black woman, hooded and aproned, with great round hips and massive bosom. Her face was heavy and homely until she looked up and lifted the drooping cheeks, and then kindly old ...
— The Quest of the Silver Fleece - A Novel • W. E. B. Du Bois
... with an over-sympathetic nature, not proud enough; while a long nose derives from the center of the upper will, the thoracic ganglion, our great center of curiosity, and benevolent or objective control. A thick, squat nose is the sensual-sympathetic nose, and the high, arched nose the sensual voluntary nose, having the curve of repudiation, as when we turn up our nose from a bad smell, but also the proud curve of haughtiness and subjective ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... Lapland the people are dirty, Flat-headed, large-mouthed, and small; They squat round the fire and, frying Their fishes, they ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to criticise the work. A Gavroche, not the Gavroche of the Miserables, but the boy of Belleville, chewing tobacco like a Jack-tar, drunk as a Federal, in a purple blouse, green trousers, his hands in his pockets, his cap on the nape of his neck; squat, violent, and brutish. With an impudent jerk of the head he grumbles out: "I don't want any of your kings!" This coarse sketch is ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... feet deep and four feet square lay open to us. At one side of this was a squat, brass-bound wooden box, the lid of which was hinged upwards, with this curious old-fashioned key projecting from the lock. It was furred outside by a thick layer of dust, and damp and worms had ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... and scarcely deigned to notice their failure by swearing. There was no singing as the anchor was raised. A sort of gloom hung over the whole ship. As she stole out to sea again, the men, one by one, went aft and leaned outboard, peering down at the broad, squat stern. Jeremy did likewise and beheld in new white letters on the black of the hull, the words Royal James. Next day in the fo'c's'le council he learned why the renaming of the Revenge had cast a pall of apprehension over the crew. There were low-muttered tales of disaster—of storm, ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... glanced doubtfully at the squat, white house, which in truth looked the reverse of hospitable; but the prospect of a fire being all-powerful at the moment, they turned obediently, and made their way up a worn gravel path, leading to the shabbiest ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various
... a decent, respectable-looking body too, this confederate whom I concluded was masquerading as maid. The very opposite of the younger woman (about her more directly), a neatly dressed unassuming person, short and squat in figure, with a broad, plain, and, to the casual observer, honest face, slow in movement and of no doubt sluggish temperament, not likely to be moved or distressed by conscience, neither at the doing or the ...
— The Passenger from Calais • Arthur Griffiths
... walking past the house of the old Patroon, with its squat walls and small square windows compactly grouped about a central chimney. The shutters stood wide, and through one of the newly-washed windows Archer caught the light of ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... desert-life in its strong dislike to cross the smallest stream of water, and in its pleasure in rolling in the dust. The same strong dislike to cross a stream is common to the camel which has been domesticated from a very early period. Young pigs, though so tame, sometimes squat when frightened, and then try to conceal themselves, even in an open and bare place. Young turkeys, and occasionally even young fowls, when the hen gives the danger-cry, run away and try to hide themselves, like young partridges or pheasants, in order that their mother may take flight, of which she ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... up on the cabin roof and sat on the peak and I scrambled up too, and sat down alongside of him. Honest, that fellow would squat in the funniest places. And always he had ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... which she toasted herself luxuriously, as happy as any chilly mortal could be. Steeped in the warm air, the two girls raised themselves inquisitively and gazed around on everything, the low ceiling with its woodwork panels, the squat pillars, connected by arches from which hung chandeliers, and the pulpit of carved oak; and over the ocean of heads which waved with the rise and fall of the canticle, their eyes wandered towards the dark corners of the aisles, towards the chapels whose gilding faintly ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... packed with customers. One didn't see very many young men, and most of the women wore mourning. Uniforms were everywhere, but their wearers generally looked like dug-outs or office fellows. We had a glimpse of the squat building which housed the General Staff and took off our hats to it. Then we stared at the Marinamt, and I wondered what plots were hatching there behind old Tirpitz's whiskers. The capital gave one an impression of ugly ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... Ben, pausing in his task of emptying a squat chest, marked, Don Ramon De Guzman, Sevilla, "you don't think I'm going to touch any of this loot do you? It all belongs to you boys and Bluewater Bill, and I've no right to a cent's worth of it. The excitement is ...
— The Boy Aviators' Treasure Quest • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... must be met. Until Eden's days return there is no deliverance for the lower animals. Vegetarians may reduce their theories to practice in the cities and among cultivated fields, but vegetarians among the red men of the Far West or the squat men of the Arctic zone, would either have to violate their ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne
... time he heard steps in the passage, and the chain being unhooked. The door opened quietly, and he went in without saying a word to the squat misshapen figure that flattened itself into the shadow as he passed. At the end of the hall hung a tattered green curtain that swayed and shook in the gusty wind which had followed him in from the street. He ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... mountain had seemed to roll toward us like the sea as we advanced to meet them. After the vineyards had come wild rocks, set with crumbling forts, and towers, and chateaux; then the mild interest of fruit blossom spraying pink and white among primly pollarded olives; then grape country again, with squat, low-growing vines like gnomes kicking up gnarled legs as they turned somersaults; then a break into wonderful mountain country, with Orgon's ruins towering skyward, dark as despair, a wild romance in stone. But before we reached the great ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... wandered to the squat Chinese god in the glass case. It was clear that he hadn't stirred for ages. A difficult thought partly formed in her mind—the Chinese was the god of this room, of Markue's party, of the women seated in the dim light on the floor and the divans; the low gurgle of their laughter, the dusky ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... rest, except for the fact that the interior partakes of a mere collection of curios and relics, it is in general no less imposing in its proportions than the exterior. The clerestory windows, however, are of ill proportions for so grand a structure, being short and squat; and here, as elsewhere throughout the building, is to be found only ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... delightfully aware of their shortcomings, that they were quite refreshing. Fancy Martha, the eldest girl, saying to me seriously, 'Dick is the only one who takes after mother and father; he is really nice-looking, you know, but Ailie and I are a couple of squat little toads. Now, please don't laugh, Mrs. Godfrey,' she went on, 'for we are very fond of toads, and they have such bright, projecting eyes.' What on earth could I say! for indeed poor Martha is almost grotesque-looking, and yet one can't help loving her. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... corporal comforts. And age having despoiled me of some of these, I sharpen my appetite for those remaining. Glory, which Pliny and Cicero propose to us, is far from my thoughts. "Glory and rest are things that cannot squat on the same bench." Stay your mind in assured and limited cogitations, wherein it best may please itself, and having gained knowledge of true felicities, enjoy them, and rest satisfied without wishing a further continuance either of ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella's hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... of coal and iron. Until the opening of the Forth bridge, its commodious harbour was the northern station of the ferry across the firth from Granton, 5 m. south. The parish church, dating from 1594, is a plain structure, with a squat tower rising in two tiers from the centre of the roof. The public buildings include two hospitals, a town-hall, music hall, library and reading room and science institute. On the rocks forming the western end of the harbour stands Rossend Castle, where the amorous French poet Chastelard ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... a curious pet, that toad, but somehow, as it sat nestled up all of a squat in the boy's warm hand, he felt as if he should like to take it with him. It was not big, and would take up little room, and ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... very squat, pot-bellied, little old man, with a plump, but agreeable face all of one colour, with sunken lips and very vivacious little eyes beneath lofty eyebrows. He brushed his scanty hair over the back of his head; it was only ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... glad to get a chance to have her breakfast before anybody else, for she was always hungry and hated waiting. I looked at the table, and saw that she had the breakfast ready for the whole party; so I said, 'I am a hermit too, and I am living for myself, and so I am going to sit down and eat.' 'Squat,' said she, and down I sat; and I had the best meal of her cooking that I have yet tasted. I told her so, and she said she shouldn't wonder. 'Because,' said she, 'I cooked this breakfast for myself—me, one—and as I wasn't thinkin' ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... Lady Mary, and she was I saw an inch taller than his squat solidity. A tall lady in rose-pink had taken possession of Guy, Evesham and Lady Ladislaw made the two centres of a straggling group who were bandying recondite political allusions. Then came one or two couples and trios with nothing very much ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... desk. He had, yielded his place to this man who was master of the Skandinavia. Now he looked down at the square-headed creature with his gross, squat body. It was a figure and face bristling with venom and purpose; and somehow he was conscious of a sudden ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... we saw was the small, rocky islet just off the shore whence had come the cable. It seemed a harmless place now, with only one squat building of stone and no Orconites about, but we were glad enough to turn away from it and look toward the dark and ragged range of mountains which loomed up some five miles inland—the mountains of Leider's headquarters. Not that the sight inspired us with greater confidence. It didn't. But it ...
— The Winged Men of Orcon - A Complete Novelette • David R. Sparks
... discords rose to my ear like the drum of insects. Beyond them, in the nearer prospect, the land seemed topsy-turvy, a maze of little hills and valleys. A pink villa flamed against the brown, and its flat, squat tower, glowing in the sunlight, called to its gaunt neighbor, rising from a deserted monastery, to cheer up and be merry with it. Distance levelled the land. It became broad plain, studded with gray villages and slashed by the Tiber; ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... a sitting position, pausing there for ten or twenty seconds, and then rising slowly from a sitting to a standing position. They are told that at the first sign of dizziness they must immediately put their head between their knees so that the head is lower than the heart, or squat/sit down on the floor, I once had a faster who forgot to obey my frequent warnings. About two weeks into a long fast, she got up rapidly from the toilet and felt dizzy. The obvious thing to do was to sit back down on the toilet or lie down on the bath ...
— How and When to Be Your Own Doctor • Dr. Isabelle A. Moser with Steve Solomon
... seemed strange to Dorn lost its strangeness. It became the victrola phrases of a bewildered diplomacy. But the diplomacy was not confined to frock-coats. It buzzed, snarled up and down the factory districts, in and out of the boulevard cafes and the squat resident sectors. ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... for the cheapest and most villainous of Cape brandies, has come to signify alcoholic drinks in general to men of many nations dwelling under the subtropical South African sun. Thus, apple-brandy, and peach liqueur, "Old Squareface," in the squat, four-sided bottles beloved no less by Dutchman and Afrikander, American and Briton, Paddy from Cork, and Heinrich from the German Fatherland, than by John Chinkey—in default of arrack—and the swart and woolly-headed descendant of Ham, may be ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... impression which entrance upon it in the dusk of the evening brings. There lay the great white Yukon in the middle distance; beyond it the Yukon Flats, snow-covered, desolate, stretched away enormously, hedged here at their beginning by grey, dim hills. Spread out in the foreground were the little, squat, huddling cabins that belonged to no one, with never a light in a window or smoke from a chimney, the untrodden snow drifted against door and porch. It would be hard to imagine a drearier prospect, and one had the feeling that it was a city of the dead rather ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... vivid. He stepped forward and peered through the crystalline glass. Before him was a city, bathed in orange and red, towering like the skyline of a dozen cities he had seen—and yet; not like any. The buildings were huge and many-windowed. But some were straight and tall, some were squat and fairy-colored and others blossomed from thin stalks into impossibly bulbous, minareted domes, like long-stemmed tulips reproduced in stone. Haroun-al-Rashid might have accepted the city, but Mayor Wagner could never have believed ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... time, when the weather was fine and the bluejays were quarrelling among themselves, a sure sign that no dangerous foe was about, Rag began a new study. Molly, by flattening her ears, gave the sign to squat. Then she ran far away in the thicket and gave the thumping signal for 'come.' Rag set out at a run to the place but could not find Molly. He thumped, but got no reply. Setting carefully about his search he found her foot-scent and, following this strange ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Venus disarming Mars, I withdrew in company with an American, who had gone into the shop with me. This American is a sort of transatlantic Bunsby. He talks little, but thinks much. His sole observation to me as we walked away was this, "They will squat, sir, mark my words, they will squat." I received this oracular utterance with respect, and I leave it to others to solve its meaning, I am myself a person of singular credulity, but even I sometimes ask myself whether all I hear and read can be true. Was ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... office slowly strode old Gideon Batts, fanning himself with his white slouch hat. He was short, fat, and bald; he was bowlegged with a comical squat; his eyes stuck out like the eyes of a swamp frog; his nose was enormous, shapeless, and red. To the Major's family he traced the dimmest line of kinship. During twenty years he had operated a small plantation that belonged ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... an ebony pedestal, stood a squat stone figure having the head of a man with the face of a bull. It was an idol of incalculable age, from Jules Thessaly's collection, a relic of prehistoric Greece and the ancient worship of the threefold Hecate. Set in some remote Thracian valley, it had once looked down upon orgies ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... am trying my hand at a novel just now; it may interest you to know, I am bound to say I do not think it will be a success. However, it's an amusement for the moment, and work, work is your only ally against the "bearded people" that squat upon their hams in the dark places of life and embrace people horribly as they go by. God save us from the bearded people! to think that the sun is still shining ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... my first chance to look about, to discover what sort of place this was. It was an oval plain, roughly a mile wide by five miles long. Buildings, squat structures of corrugated iron, were scattered here and there. In the distance, to my left, what seemed a great hole in the ground glowed; a huge ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... courage, endurance, and love of wild-weathery adventure. No superannuated mastiff or bulldog grown old in office surpassed this fluffy midget in stoic dignity. He sometimes reminded me of a small, squat, unshakable desert cactus. For he never displayed a single trace of the merry, tricksy, elfish fun of the terriers and collies that we all know, nor of their touching affection and devotion. Like children, ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... midst lay but the Tower itself? The round squat turret, blind as the fool's heart, Built of brown stone, without a counterpart In the whole world. The tempest's mocking elf Points to the shipman thus the unseen shelf He strikes on, only when the ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... murmured, looking about to try and discover what had caused the sound, and then my eyes lighted, to my great surprise, upon a pair of bright yellow morocco shoes with very long, pointed toes, standing on the floor in front of a favourite little squat chair of mine ...
— The Mysterious Shin Shira • George Edward Farrow
... and yawned. The immediate prospect was dull. Savages continued to drift in, to squat and stare, then to move on to the porters' camps. There a lively bartering was going on. From some unsuspected store each porter had drawn forth a few beads, some snuff, a length of wire, or similar treasure; and with them was making the best bargain he could for the delicacies of the country. The ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... number of breakages; a defect that brought our landlady on the scene. The enchantment of my father's companionship caused me to suffer proportionately in his absence. During that period of solitude, my nursemaid had to order me to play, and I would stumble about and squat in the middle of the floor, struck suddenly by the marvel of the difference between my present and my other home. My father entered into arrangements with a Punch and Judy man for him to pay me regular morning visits opposite ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pleased. Every half-hour or so she would squat on the floor, pull out an intensely black clay pipe, and indulge in a smoke. I love smoking, but I never failed to put as much distance as possible between myself and the rank black fumes which poured with so much gusto from her mouth. The last place she had to clean was the telegraph office. She ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... divide the Labor, however; so he did the Marketing. Only, when he had bought the Victuals, he would squat on a Shoe-Box with the Basket between his Legs and say that he couldn't see what ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... its head poking into the night, its whole body poised in that attitude of intense rigidity that precedes the spring into freedom, the running leap of attack. It seemed to be about the size of a calf, leaner than a mastiff, yet more squat than a wolf, and I can swear that I saw the fur ridged sharply upon its back. Then its upper lip slowly lifted, and I saw the ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... she was obstinate and determined. At once she found that something was the matter. During luncheon the two aunts sat like statues (Aunt Elizabeth a dumpy and squat one). Aunt Anne's aloofness was coloured now with a very human anger. Maggie realised with surprise that she had never seen her angry before. She had been indignant, disapproving, superior, forbidding, but never angry. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... himself with a young woman. Had she been a beautiful gipsy, holding fascinating allurements in lustrous eyes and pomegranate lips, and witchery in a supple figure, the act would have been a commonplace of human weakness. But in the case of poor Blanquette, squat and coarse, her heavy features only redeemed from ugliness by youth, honesty and clean teeth, the eternal attraction of ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... throat. Her maid was older than she, and waited upon her with a faithful solicitude. The little woman had some tea, which the maid produced from a small silver caddy in a travelling-bag, and the porter, with an obsequious air, brought boiling water in two squat, plated tea-pots. It was the tea which served to introduce Maria. She had just pushed aside, with an air half of indifference, half of disgust, her own luke-warm concoction flavored with soap, when the maid, at her mistress's ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... boat on Monday afternoon. This landed him some time before daylight at the time-worn village from which the coach ran to Sitford. A railway connected this village with New York, necessitating no worse inconvenience than crossing the river on a squat, old-fashioned ferry boat; but he calculated that both the lawyer and Mrs. Ransom would make use of this, and felt the risk would be less for him if he chose the slower and ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... little train that runs to my new-found Paradise, rocking and puffing and grumbling along on its narrow-gauge track with its cars labelled like grown-up ones, first, second, and third class; and no two painted the same colour; and its noisy, squat engine like the real ones in the toy-stores, that wind up with a key and go rushing off frantically in tangents. No wonder the train to my lost village is called "Le petit deraillard"—"The little get-off-the-track." ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... bright-coloured flags fluttered from the squat mast of the leading ship. The steady throbbing of the engines grew suddenly to a low staccato roar. The white waves astern rose up almost level with the counters and clouds of fine spray blew across the decks. This rapid movement through the sun-lit water, with the breeze of passage ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... Wils?" queried Bludsoe, a squat, bow-legged cowpuncher who appeared to be crippled ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... accoutrements; so, with a compliment about Venus disarming Mars, I withdrew in company with an American, who had gone into the shop with me. This American is a sort of transatlantic Bunsby. He talks little, but thinks much. His sole observation to me as we walked away was this, "They will squat, sir, mark my words, they will squat." I received this oracular utterance with respect, and I leave it to others to solve its meaning, I am myself a person of singular credulity, but even I sometimes ask ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... creature must have been a right loathly monster. Some think him to have been akin to lizards; but the usual opinion is that he was a cousin of frogs and toads. Looking at his hands and other remains, one pictures him to oneself as a short, squat brute, as big as a fat hog, with a head very much the shape of a baboon, very large hands behind and small ones in front, waddling about on the tide flats of a sandy sea, and dragging after him, seemingly, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... exceedingly thick bamboo rod in his hand. My fear was too great to admit of my accurately observing anything at that time, but I noticed that some kind of leather thong or loop was attached to the end of the squat cane. ...
— The Quest of the Sacred Slipper • Sax Rohmer
... plates and dishes, brushed the mahogany, and placed before his master squat decanters of sherry and Madeira. The flowing talk took a warmer tone, and began to sing with the music of the South and the golden West; to be charged with Spanish, French, and Indian names, with the odour of strange flowers, the roll ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... A square, squat room (a cellar on promotion), Drab to the soul, drab to the very daylight; Plasters astray in unnatural-looking tinware; Scissors ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... missionaries; now the natives. The squat and squalid huts, stuck down upon the earth without any pretence of raised foundation, and jumbled together, corner to side, back to front, any way, as if some wind had blown them there, did not improve on acquaintance. The walls, five feet high, were built of poles some five inches in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... a rest in any truce, except the utter defeat of her antagonist. And how she has tried—the happy thoughts, the faint hopes, the new departures and outflanking movements! And even to-day there the thing defies her—a coal-box, with a broad smile that shows its black teeth, thick and squat, filling a snug corner and swaggering in unmanly triumph over the outrage upon her delicacy that ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... primitive defense in this moment of infinite danger and kicked with all his strength at the squat monster before him. The thing tried to whirl aside, but Phobar's shoe squashed thickly through, and in a disorder of quivering pieces the metal creature fell, and subsided. Knowing at last that the invaders were vulnerable and how they could be killed, Phobar went leaping and stamping on those ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... in the form of arrow-heads and crude knives that bore out the statement that the Indians once even shaved with them. It was nearly eleven when we sighted, down among the trees on the lake shore, the squat church tower of the once capital of Michoacan. A native we spoke with referred to it as a "ciudad," but in everything but name it was a dead, mud-and-straw Indian village, all but its main street a collection of mud, ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... level line of the ridge on the left, a few hundred yards away, is broken and humped with barrows; far away to the east lies Charterhouse, grey in the haze by Godalming; behind, to the south-east, the Devil's Jumps, three little squat, conical hills whose very oddity is one of their attractions. They edge the horizon like inverted pudding bowls covered with bracken, and with bell-heather kindling to ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... serving-men obeyed the orders of a stout, squat, vigorous man, who cast upon Christophe, as he entered, the glance of a cannibal upon his victim; he looked him over and estimated him,—measuring, like a connoisseur, the strength of his nerves, their power and their endurance. The ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... did leap with surprising activity; but the treacherous brown hand went higher, so high that the combined altitude of his jump and the reach of his unnaturally long arms was overcome. Again and again he sprang vainly into the air comically, like a long-legged, squat-bodied frog. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... Both the Hurons and the Iroquois laid in large stocks of fire wood, by forming piles of logs slanted together on end; and in one pile, here, was an opening through which he might squeeze into the center space, there to squat as under a tent. The ground in the village had been scraped bare of snow; ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... in space suits extended the incredibly straight lines which were plastic hoses filled with air. Very, very gently indeed, the great, bulbous Platform and the squat, flat Moonship came together and ...
— Space Tug • Murray Leinster
... later than either of the last two, in 1591. Unlike them the two orders of the west front are short and of almost equal size, Doric below and Ionic above. The arches of the porch reach up to the lower entablature, and the windows above are rather squat; it looks as if there was to have been a third order above, but it ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... at the little squat figure of Napoleon. It was the pitcher the little man had given Mary for getting our trade for him, when ...
— At Home with the Jardines • Lilian Bell
... the street sat and crouched the small squat figures of the Alaskan Indians, each with a mat before it on which the owner had set out his little store of wares—bottles of various-coloured sands, reindeer slippers beautifully embroidered in blue beads, ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... live who can continue to keep off a fighting cobra from striking home; but Skag learned in that short interval. He faced not only the fastest thing he had ever seen move, but it was also the stillest. It would come to a dead stop before him—stillness compared to which a post or a wall is mere squat inertia. This lifted head and hood was sustained, elate—having the moveless calm one might imagine at the centre of a solar system. Its outline was mysteriously clear. Often the background was Carlin's ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost
... light at the court-house square was relatively bright and as Brent crossed in front of the squat and shadowy bulk of the old jail-house—empty now, though it should have been full—he made out a figure hastening about him in a circuitous fashion at a dog trot as though bent on arriving at the hostelry first. ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... there was then no need for her to follow the road as far as The Cove, Margaret struck across the downs to her right in the direction of the village, thus saving herself two sides of a triangle. A little grey church with a squat tower, a little grey house that was obviously the parsonage, a row of small cottages, a few isolated ones, and a farm or two made up the village, and Margaret, after wandering up and down the little main street wondering where Mrs. Murray's house was, went into the one small ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... that seemed to him very low owing to its immense size. Lit by powerful lamps and supported by squat pillars, with long vistas showing between them, it had nearly the same dimensions as the Needle itself. It was crammed with packing cases and miscellaneous objects—pieces of furniture, oak settees, chests, credence-tables, ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... besides," said the happy clerk, producing from his pocket a bottle of a squat shape, like a pumpkin, and ribbed on the sides. "I have found ten thousand bottles like that, all made ready to hand, at four sous, and six ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... him to a bend in the path which showed him the smoke he had been smelling, rising from the brick chimney of a squat stone cottage which, rather than to nestle among the woods, as well-behaved cottages should, seemed to shrink from the ragged ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... charming, to the clock, which clanged a tremendous three, as they were in the act of looking at it, causing Leonard to make a great start, and then colour painfully. It was hard to believe, as Daisy said, that the old tower, that looked so short and squat below, could be so very high when you came to go up it; but the glimpses of the country, through the little loop-hole windows, were most inviting. At last, Aubrey, who was foremost, pushed up the trap-door, ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... more than middle-aged, short, squat, and meagre; with the eye-teeth projecting on both sides, so as to hold up the upper lip, and exhibit all the others in their ivory whiteness, with an expression resembling that of the hyena. This is considered beauty,—a fashion in full vogue among her countrywomen, who cultivate it with great ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... earthworks, we expected them on us at once. Having only seven or eight tools to the company, we fell to work with our bayonets to make a hole to squat in. We had bluffed them so the night before that they thought Lee had arrived, and waited several hours before they drove in our brave skirmishers that held them in a wood until we had a good ditch. Though we had had but little sleep and ...
— The Southern Soldier Boy - A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy • James Carson Elliott
... for the meal, the inmates of the house squat down upon the floor, the husband with his wife and children apart, male visitors and the unmarried portion of the house eating together. Slaves eat when all have finished, and get what is left in ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... Snool, cringe. Solan, gannet. Soote, sweet. Souter, cobbler. Spak, spoke. Spean, wean. Speel, climb. Spier, ask, inquire. Spraing, stripe. Sprattle, scramble. Spreckled, speckled. Spryte, spirit. Squattle, squat. Stacher, stagger, totter. Stane, stone. Steer, stir. Steyned, stained. Stibble, stubble. Still, ever. Stirk, young steer. Stole, robe. Stonen, stony. Stote, stout. Stoure, dust, struggle. Stown, stolen. Strang, strong. Strath, river-valley. Strathspeys, ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... was broken off, and which, in spite of the heavy sea, had to be replaced; the vessel, meanwhile, being so tossed about, that we were often unable to take our meals at the table, but were obliged to squat down upon the ground, and hold our plates in our hands. On one of these fine days the steward stumbled with the coffee-pot, and deluged me with its burning contents. Luckily, only a small portion fell upon my hands, so that the accident was not ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... complaint, that malaria showed a disposition to spread extensively. It passed from Stokeleigh to the adjoining village of Woodleigh, whence it took a bend in the direction of the town, and proceeded to squat, as malarias can squat, and settle indefinitely on all the low-lying districts of Redcross. Neither did the epidemic improve in character with the change of locality. For, whereas on the higher, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... this country the towns squat low in the valleys, they lie in wait by the rivers, and often I scarcely know of their presence until I am so close upon them that I can smell the breath of their heated nostrils and hear their low ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... order to present an ideal head of a negro, our teachers make him resemble as far as possible the profile of Antinoeus, and then say, 'We have done our utmost; if, nevertheless, we fail to make the negro beautiful, then we ought not to introduce into our pictures such a freak of nature, the squat nose and thick lips, which are so unendurable to the eyes.'" True idealism treats everything after its own kind, making it more intensely itself than it is in the play of nature; the athlete is more heroically an athlete, the negro more vividly a negro. True idealism seeks ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's grandson, fixed his residence definitively in Peking in 1264, and began building the Ta-tu, or Great Residence—the Tartar city of to-day. The Chinese city is oblong; the Tartar city is squat and square and overlaps and dominates the northern walls of the older city. Kublai Khan, by building the Tartar city on the northern edge of the Chinese city and fortifying it with immense strength, may be said ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... phrase and Britten's squat gestures haunted me as I walked homeward alone. I went to my room and stood before my desk and surveyed papers and files and Margaret's admirable equipment ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... time since I was a squat little slip of a shaver the word had a personal meaning for me. Perhaps, if the only other home of mine had been less uninviting, I should not have looked forward with such high beating of the heart to that cold home Anita was making for me. ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... pleasantly for me." The Queen's voice was measuredly polite. "I thank you for thinking of me—in my out-of-the-way corner, and bringing me such lovely gifts." Her eyes turned from the flowers which Brina had put in a squat pewter pitcher to the book which lay on the table. Then she turned to Robin and levelled a glance upon her which held ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... When the occasion rises up, I'll advise Mary-Clare against pigs in pokes and I'll advise the squatters to squat on!" ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... and rattled his lokali to some purpose, bringing headmen and witch doctors, little and great chiefs, and spearmen of quality, to squat about the palaver house on the little hill to ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... cautious in their dealings with him. He was accommodated with a chair between Sir Reginald and the professor, the former being flanked by Lethbridge (Mildmay, in accordance with previous arrangements, had ensconced himself in the pilothouse); Lualamba and the rest of the suite were quietly allowed to squat in a semicircle before them ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... threw themselves on the supposed love-letter, like the weird sisters in Macbeth upon the pilot's thumb, with curiosity as eager and scarcely less malignant. Mrs. Heukbane was a tall womanshe held the precious epistle up between her eyes and the window. Mrs. Shortcake, a little squat personage, strained and stood on tiptoe to have her share ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... that brier thy tender leg shall rake: (I spare the thistles for Sir Arthur's[2] sake) Sharp are the stones; take thou this rushy mat; The hardest bum will bruise with sitting squat. ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... In an instant his strange head-gear began to move, and there reared itself from among his hair the squat, diamond-shaped head and puffed neck of a ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... frog-hunting in a boat, with a three-foot line at the end of a stout pole, and a small hook baited with a piece of red flannel? Well, when we'd see a whopping big greenback we'd dangle that red stuff close to his nose. It was funny to see him squat down like a cat does on sighting a sparrow or a robin, and then jump up ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... black walnut bed, without drapery, and set, like a French couch, low on three pairs of spiral legs, was a deep cushioned chair into which he sank and dragged off his sodden buckskin breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision—squat, rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds, he fell, his face hid ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dense commemorative substance. I often pass in the street women whose faces look like memorial medals—idealized images of what they were in the flesh. And the masks of some of the men—those queer tormented Gallic masks, crushed-in and squat and a little satyr-like—look like the bronzes of the Naples Museum, burnt and twisted from their baptism of fire. But none of these faces reveals a personal preoccupation: they are looking, one and all, at France erect on her ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... spread out, like a rich tapestry, above and behind the long unpicturesque line of hills, the lower acclivities of Blackstonedge, opposite to the stately mansion of Clegg Hall. The square squat tower of Rochdale Church peered out from the dark trees, high on its dim eyrie, in the distance, towards the south-west, below which a wan hazy smoke indicated the site of that thriving and populous town. To ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... down into the moat, whose dry bed was about five times a tall man's length below the window, which was on the second story. Out of the window came a man of rather squat figure, who let himself boldly and easily down the rope. As soon as he had reached the bed of the moat, he was followed out of the window and down the rope by a second man, who came bunglingly, as if in great ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... hemmed in on three sides by the black forests of balsam and spruce. Lights were burning in the cabins and in the Hudson Bay Post's store when the car was brought to a halt half a hundred paces from a squat, log-built structure, which was more brilliantly illuminated ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... sandstone, though they occur chiefly in an upper bed, are exhibited by what seem fields of petrified mushrooms, of a gigantic size, that spread out in some places for hundreds of yards under the high-water level. These apparent mushrooms stand on thick squat stems, from a foot to eighteen inches in height; the heads are round like those of toad-stools, and vary from one foot to nearly two yards in diameter. In some specimens we find two heads joined together in a form ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... and steeped in Elysium during this rapid transit. The eye lazily runs over the squat-looking red houses with flat roofs which line the shore, to rest on the dark cypress trees which fill the intervening spaces, with the gilded balconies of some pleasure-palace of sultan or high Turk catching the sight occasionally. Caiques similar to your own are darting about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... this hour it is wreathed with women, scores squat upon their mats on the pave, their goods spread before the eyes of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... built upon another, invisible from the landing below, and out west of the bridge under the open sky. The roof, hemmed in by a low wall, seemed like a terrace, which, to his astonishment, was brilliant with flowers; in the rich surrounding, the house sat squat, a plain square block, unbroken except by a doorway in front. A dustless path led to the door, through a bordering of shrubs of Persian rose in perfect bloom. Breathing a sweet attar-perfume, he followed ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... General Reno, who was here killed. While we were thus safely viewing this battle, and watching the potatoes boil, Lieut. Keech made a remark that amused me, and has remained fresh in my memory. We were just ready to squat around the camp fire and lay to, when he said, "Well boys, we'll have one more belly full anyway." Just about as he finished that sentence, the order came "fall in and march." I took my cup of boiled potatoes and carried ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... some "men-bush" are approaching. Going to the veranda, we see some lean figures with big mops of hair coming slowly down the narrow path from the forest, with soft, light steps. Some distance behind follows a crowd of others, who squat down near the last shrubs and examine everything with shy, suspicious eyes, while the leaders approach the house. Nearly all carry old Snider rifles, always loaded and cocked. The leaders stand silent ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... the observer regarded with greatest interest was a group of three well back in the shadow, and he needed none to tell him who that short, squat figure was. He held a guitar, and was accompanying his own songs while the other two joined in the refrain. It was his bete noir, the Mexican dwarf who had recently robbed him, and out-maneuvered him on two occasions ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... his way past him. It was fast growing light now. A ray of sunshine shot from beneath the edge of the dark sphere overhead, which still filled almost all the heavens. At that moment the hideous face and squat body of one of the Moon men came into view at the end of the path. The creature stopped, gibbering with surprise, and then rushed forward, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... cloth and had an ikon and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another door: whereupon the priest—a grey-headed old monk with a severe, elderly face—blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy
... thundered, she used to squat herself under a couch and make all her servants lie above, one upon the other, so that if the thunderbolt fell, it might have its effect upon them before penetrating to her. She had ruined herself and her husband, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... 'Whisky' and of dogs; he drank smoke from the cheroot after the fashion of the Sahib-log and not from the hookah nor the bidi;[6] he wore boots; he struck with the clenched fist when angered; and never did he squat down upon his heels nor sit cross-legged upon the ground. Yet he was true Pathan in many ways during his life, and he died as a Pathan should, concerning his honour (and a woman). Yea—and in his last fight, ere he was hanged, he killed more men with his ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... in which he stood, for a wonder in this part of town, ran a fairly straight course. At its western foot he could make out through the drifting flakes where a squat structure suggestive of a North River freight dock interrupted the sky line. In his immediate vicinity the street was lined with tall bleak fronts of jobbing houses, all dark and all shuttered. Looking the other way, which would be eastward, ...
— The Life of the Party • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... to dissemble longer, and, after all, there seemed little doubt but that the short, squat individual before them was certainly no German. Taking his courage, therefore, in both hands, Henri at once admitted that he and Jules were Frenchmen, ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... bristling, slunk off in the direction of the squat log barn. A woman appeared behind the man and stared out over his shoulder. From the tall stone chimney at the back of the cabin rose the blue smoke of the kitchen fire, to be whirled away on the wind that was guiding the storm ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... large lace works and some collar factories. The church, which stands in the "old town" (turn down Axminster Road), is said to have been erected about 1400, and is a spacious Perp. building without a clerestory. It has a squat W. tower, some good porches (cp. N. porch with Ilminster), and some bold gargoyles. Within note (1) squints, (2) rood-loft stair with external turret, (3) indistinct traces of mural paintings in N. transept, (4) Brewer monument (early 17th ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... noisome whiffs, or sweaty streams, Before, behind, above, below, Could from her taintless body flow: Would so discreetly things dispose, None ever saw her pluck a rose.[1] Her dearest comrades never caught her Squat on her hams to make maid's water: You'd swear that so divine a creature Felt no necessities of nature. In summer had she walk'd the town, Her armpits would not stain her gown: At country dances, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... London air we know, clear of filth and all impurity, the same air that gives our October days their unspeakable clarity and makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. We shall go along avenues of architecture that will be emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple boxes of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome; the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless new materials as kindly as once he took to stone. The gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... worship adapted to the foregoing prayer, is to squat down upon the ground, placing the palm of their hands flat thereon twice, touching the earth the same number of times with their foreheads; then rubbing their arms from the wrist to the elbow, with that which is contracted by this operation, when the hands ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... Hitherward bent (who could have thought?) escap'd The barrs of Hell, on errand bad no doubt: Such where ye find, seise fast, and hither bring. So saying, on he led his radiant Files, Daz'ling the Moon; these to the Bower direct In search of whom they sought: him there they found Squat like a Toad, close at the eare of Eve; 800 Assaying by his Devilish art to reach The Organs of her Fancie, and with them forge Illusions as he list, Phantasms and Dreams, Or if, inspiring venom, he might taint Th' animal ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... from one of the squat towers by the gate—each of which had a loophole-window looking out over the caravan way—for even before the head man of the cavalcade could reach the shut portals of faded gray palm-wood, both gates were thrown open, and a dozen men in white ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... fall. Pressing on, hampered by my clinging garments and slipping in the path that had instantly become a miniature torrent, I came upon a little clearing in which stood a dirty, dark shanty, like a hovel in the outskirts of Canton, not raised on a paepae but squat in an acre of mud and ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... white needs no proof, but it takes a deep fellow To prove it jet-black, and that jet-black is yellow. He offers the true faith to drink in a sieve,— When it reaches your lips there's naught left to believe But a few silly-(syllo-, I mean,)-gisms that squat 'em Like tadpoles, o'erjoyed with the mud at the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Bivouacking.—Unprotected.—Mr. Shaw, the traveller in Thibet, says:—"My companion and I walked on to keep ourselves warm, but halting at sunset, had to sit and freeze several hours before the things came up. The best way of keeping warm on such an occasion, is to squat down, kneeling against a bank, resting your head on the bank, and nearly between your knees. Then tuck your overcoat in, all round you, over head and all; and if you are lucky, and there is not too much ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... my brain seethed and boiled, for I am one of those unhappy men who the moment they get an idea must work it out to its bitter end. Childe Roland kept me awake all night. I even heard his "dauntless horn" call and saw the "squat tower." I had his theme. I felt it to be good; to me it was Browning's Knight personified. I could hear its underlying harmonies and the instrumentation, sombre, gloomy, without ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... As a child she had read about Indians, and memory returned images both colorful and romantic. From the car window she espied dusty flat barrens, low squat mud houses, and queer-looking little people, children naked or extremely ragged and dirty, women in loose garments with flares of red, and men in white man's garb, slovenly and motley. All these strange individuals stared apathetically as the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... you, dear, can ever make up to me if it makes you cry, and bothers you.—You bloated, pedantic thing!' he cried, in sudden fury, aiming a kick at the squat volume. 'It is to you I owe all those sad, tired looks which I have seen upon my wife's face. I know my enemy now. You pompous, fussy old humbug, I'll kick the red cover ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... drew a loud and elaborate plan of a very brilliant campaign. When he had finished, the blue-clothed men scattered into small arguing groups between the rows of squat brown huts. A negro teamster who had been dancing upon a cracker box with the hilarious encouragement of twoscore soldiers was deserted. He sat mournfully down. Smoke drifted lazily from ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... in the dairy told him that it was five minutes to five but, as he turned away, he heard a clock somewhere near him, but unseen, beating eleven strokes in swift precision. He laughed as he heard it for it made him think of McCann, and he saw him a squat figure in a shooting jacket and breeches and with a fair goatee, standing in the wind at Hopkins' corner, and heard ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... notwithstanding the provisions of sleeping berths in good rooms, also of tables, etc. for their use, and which are peculiar to civilised life, and with which they are associated, yet they naturally verge towards, and cling to aboriginal education, and hence to squat on the sand to eat, to sleep a night in the bush, to have recourse to a Byly-a-duck man for ease in sickness; these to them seem reliefs and enjoyments from these restraints which civilized life entails ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... his scent, his speed, and intelligence. The habits of this dog lead him to concealment and cunning, and he is seldom found in the possession of honourable sportsmen. He is often employed by poachers in killing hares and rabbits in the obscurity of night; and when taken to the warren, he lies squat, or steals out with the utmost precaution, and on seeing or scenting the rabbits, darts upon them with exceeding quickness or runs them down at a stretch, without barking or making the least noise. He is trained to bring the booty to his master, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... man attempted to squeeze himself into the room, but found his entrance barred by the square, squat figure ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... herald the spring, and it is often only in the males that the voice is well developed. But if we look forward, past Amphibians altogether, we find the voice becoming a maternal call helping to secure the safety of the young—a use very obvious when young birds squat motionless at the sound of the parent's danger-note. Later on, probably, the voice became an infantile call, as when the unhatched crocodile pipes from within the deeply buried egg, signalling to the mother that it is time to be unearthed. Higher still the voice expresses emotion, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... and started to walk down the Old Wharf that jutted out into the harbour, a faint wind blowing off the water ruffled under Fenella's hat, and she put up her hand to keep it on. It was dark on the Old Wharf, very dark; the wool sheds, the cattle trucks, the cranes standing up so high, the little squat railway engine, all seemed carved out of solid darkness. Here and there on a rounded wood-pile, that was like the stalk of a huge black mushroom, there hung a lantern, but it seemed afraid to unfurl its timid, quivering light in ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... the nation of soap, of fresh air, of condescending discontent; and when we are on the Continent every one else, including the native, is "a foreigner;" we carry our nationality about with us like a camp-stool; we squat on it; we are jealous of it; it is a case of "Regardez, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 1, 1892 • Various
... one on this side," said Legrand. The negro obeyed him promptly, and apparently with but little trouble, ascending higher and higher, until no glimpse of his squat figure could be obtained through the dense foliage which enveloped it. Presently his voice was heard in a ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... good-natured, and so delightfully aware of their shortcomings, that they were quite refreshing. Fancy Martha, the eldest girl, saying to me seriously, 'Dick is the only one who takes after mother and father; he is really nice-looking, you know, but Ailie and I are a couple of squat little toads. Now, please don't laugh, Mrs. Godfrey,' she went on, 'for we are very fond of toads, and they have such bright, projecting eyes.' What on earth could I say! for indeed poor Martha is almost grotesque-looking, ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Summer's grasp of fire is laid On bark and slabs that rot, and breed Squat ugly things of deadly shade, The scorpion, and the spiteful ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... Satan, in Naples; I immediately attached myself to her out of curiosity, and I soon fell in love with her. Not that she was beautiful, for she was a Russian who had all the bad characteristics of the Russian type. She was thin and squat, at the same time, while her face was sallow and puffy, with high cheek bones and a Cossack's nose. But her conversation bewitched ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... in a pensive tone, as if the question had aroused some sorrowful recollections; "I can't say that I'd like to settle here now. There was a time when I thought nothin' could be better than to squat in the woods with one or two jolly comrades, and—"(Jacques sighed); "but times is changed now, master, and so is my mind. My chums are most of them dead or gone one way or other. No; I shouldn't ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... comes, and finds me too badly hurt to be moved. He sends word of it to Sir Louis by an orderly who can be trusted to talk to any one he meets on the way. I leave by the back way at ten forty-five. However, here's a chance for you to practise deaf-and-dumb drill. There's some one coming. Squat down in that corner. Look meek and miserable. That's the stuff. Answer ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... the 'stuck-on' head of a pheasant which is brought to the table regally adorned with its feathers. Not that she in the least degree resembled a pheasant, having been endowed by nature with a short and squat and masculine figure; but successive mortifications had given her a backward tilt, such as one may observe in trees which have taken root on the very edge of a precipice and are forced to grow backwards to preserve their balance. Since she was obliged, in order ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Chinese pavilion consists of a pole about 6 ft. high terminating in a conical metal cap or pavilion, hung with small jingling bells and surmounted by a crescent and a star. Below this pavilion are two or more metal bands forming a fanciful double crescent or squat lyre, likewise furnished with tiny bells. The two points of the crescent are curved over, ending in fanciful animal heads from whose mouths hang low streaming tails of horse-hair. The Chinese pavilion is played by shaking or waving the pole up and down and jingling the bells, a movement ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... of the weight of the great banner he carried, marched proud, happy, and elated past all telling. Hugh was at his side, and next to Hugh came a squat, thick-set personage called Dennis, who, unknown to his companions, was no other than the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... would show tastefully in the breast pockets of their coats. Their shoes had been polished until they not only shone, but glittered. But by professional instinct Fitzgerald noted one cauliflower ear, and the barest fraction of a second later he saw a squat revolver being waved negligently at the ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... them, for the incident was both suggestive and exciting, when the strangers were brought in. As I expected, they were seamen, in appearance regular old salts. One was middle-sized, broad built, brawny, and large-limbed—a squat Hercules, with big red whiskers, earrings and a pig-tail. His companion was taller and less sturdy, his black locks hung in ringlets on either side of a swarthy, hairless face, and the arms and hands of both, as also ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... his visitor, but received no answer. Shefford saw a dark, squat figure bending forward in the saddle. The man was tense. All about him was dark except the glint of a rifle across the saddle. The face under the sombrero was only a shadow. Shefford kicked the fire-logs and ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... might drop in, you know, Todd." There was a big easy-chair moved up within warming distance of the cheery blaze; there were pipes and tobacco within reach of the master's hand; there was the weekly newspaper folded neatly on the mantel, and a tray holding an old-fashioned squat decanter and the necessary glasses—in fact, all the comforts possible and necessary for a man who having at twenty-five given up all hope of wedded life, found himself at fifty becoming accustomed ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... other words accented on the last syllable, when they end with a single consonant, preceded by a single vowel, or by a vowel after qu, double their final letter before a suffix beginning with a vowel: as, rob ed robbed; fop ish foppish; squat er squatter; prefer' ...
— New Word-Analysis - Or, School Etymology of English Derivative Words • William Swinton
... Stepan each drove a sled, the three other drivers being half-breed Kolyma-Russians, of whom two were of the usual stolid, sulky type. The third, who accompanied me, was a character. A squat little bundle of furs, with beady black eyes twinkling slyly from a face to which incessant cold and bad brandy had imparted the hues of a brilliant sunset. Local rumour gave Mikouline forty years, but he might have been any age, certainly an octogenarian ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... at the speaker. Squat, stout, heavy jowled—with a neck that pushed over the back of his collar—a follower of the ring, smug, assertive, confident. A prophet? I was ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... low room, the walls of which reeked with dampness and gave out a noxious odour. A single electric light provided a faint, almost unnatural light. Selim raised a lighted lantern as he led Chase through the squat door. Behind Genevra were enormous casks, a dozen or more, reaching almost to the ceiling. A number of boxes stood close by, while on the opposite side of the chamber four small iron chests were to be seen, dragged out from recesses in the distant corner. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... the merits of her immeasurably finer impersonation of Santuzza in "Cavalleria Rusticana." It was in Mascagni's opera that she effected her dbut on November 29, 1893, in company with Seor Vignas, a Spanish tenor, squat and ungraceful of figure, homely of features, restricted in intelligence, and strident of voice. New York knew very little of Mme. Calv when she came, though she had already been twice as long on the stage as Mme. Melba, and even ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... hard, his forehead gathered in puzzled furrows, Jimmie Dale stepped to the door, and locked it; then, drawing aside the portiere that hung before the little alcove at the lower end of the room, knelt down before the squat, barrel-shaped safe, and his fingers began to play over the knobs ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... quarrel that the whole boundless continent might be theirs. They had badgered France out of Louisiana, and they would badger England out of Canada and the West Indies. In New York and Boston, Philadelphia and Baltimore, it was customary to talk of walking into Canada and squat a conquest, as was afterwards carried into effect with regard to Texas. Mr. Dunn, the President of the Canadian government, looked upon the state of feeling in the adjoining republic with suspicion. He conceived it expedient to feel the public pulse in ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... says I. "Get up and shake yourself. Think I'm a bloomin' prayer rug that you can squat on all day? Roll over!" and I manages to hand him a short arm punch in the ribs that stirs him up enough so I can slide out from under. Soon's I get on my feet and can hop around once or twice I finds ...
— Odd Numbers - Being Further Chronicles of Shorty McCabe • Sewell Ford
... not seem to him to have changed in any way since he had left it. The windows had always been of a grim hideous glass, the stone shape of the place always squat and ugly, and the short flight of steps that led up to the heavy beetling door had always hinted, with their old hard surface, at a surly welcome and a reluctant courtesy. It was ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Men wrote letters from the West to friends who remained in the East. Presently these friends also, seized upon by some vast impulse which they could not control, in turn arranged their affairs and departed for the West. Franklin looked about him at the squat buildings of the little town, at the black loam of the monotonous and uninviting fields, at the sordid, set and undeveloping lives around him. He looked also at the white wagons moving with the sun. It seemed ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... sadness that surrounds it, the delicate aroma of regret through which it moves. The husband finding after some little difficulty the right key, fits it into the lock of the bureau. As a piece of furniture, plain, solid, squat, it has always jarred upon his artistic sense. She too, his good, affectionate Sara, had been plain, solid, a trifle squat. Perhaps that was why the poor woman had clung so obstinately to the one thing in the otherwise perfect ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... who were on the way to Quito with the mail—probably half a dozen letters. A strip of cloth around the loins, and a short cape just covering the shoulders, were all their habiliments. We noticed that they never sat down, though a bench was close by them; they would squat for an hour at a time. The day following we took our last horseback ride in South America. It was short, but horrible. Through quagmire and swamp, and down a flight of rocky stairs, in striking imitation of General Putnam's famous ride—over rocks, too, made wondrously slippery by a pitiless rain, ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... of the second Indiaman—the Schelde, of 950 tons, also from Batavia, and with an even more valuable cargo than that carried by the Haarlem, as I now learned from the chief mate of the latter. But oh, it was weary work to attempt to turn to windward in a light breeze in the deep, bluff-bowed, squat-sterned, Dutch-built Haarlem, after my experience of the smart, lively, swift-sailing British frigate; it was, therefore, with a feeling of the utmost satisfaction that shortly before the end of the second dog-watch I heard the Europa once more booming out her summons to surrender, and saw the ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... table at Miggleton's, Mr. Wrenn saw, in the squat familiar body and sturdy face of Morton of the cattle-boat, a stranger, slightly uneasy and very quiet, wearing garments that had nothing whatever to do with the cattle-boats—a crimson scarf with a horseshoe-pin of "Brazilian diamonds," and sleek ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... having resumed his graphic operations before the Castle. I shall not easily forget the face and figure of the matron. To a countenance of masculine feature, and masculine complexion—including no ordinary growth of beard, of a raven tint—she added a sturdy, squat, muscular figure—which, when put into action, moved in a most decided manner. A large bunch of massive keys was suspended from a girdle at her side; and her dress, which was black, was rendered more characteristic and striking, by the appearance of, what are yet called, bustles ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... thought my father hurried us towards the tall belfry. It rose cold and white against the moon, at the end of a nettle-grown lane. A garth of ilex-oaks surrounded it; and beside it, more than half-hidden by the untrimmed trees, stood a ridiculously squat church. By instinct, or, rather, from association of ideas learnt in England, I glanced around this churchyard for its gravestones. There were none. Yet for the second time within these few hours I was strangely reminded of home, where in an upper garret were stacked half a dozen ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... small dark passage led from the kitchen to a front room with a great fireplace, which rose so high that there was but just enough room between the mantle-board and the whitewashed ceiling for the squat brass candlesticks and the big foreign sea-shells which ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... typical cave man—squat muscular, and hairy, and of a type I had not seen before. His features, like those of all the primeval men of Pellucidar, were regular and fine. His weapons consisted of a stone ax and knife and a heavy knobbed bludgeon of wood. His ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... their utmost strength to placate him, while the naked spirit of murder moved in every heart among them. At the tail of the brace, Conroy, with his cuts stanched, pulled with them. His abject eyes, showing the white in sidelong glances, watched the great, squat figure of the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... dragoons having disappeared, the duty of keeping order is given to the French soldiers. There are soldiers ranged everywhere: along the street pavements there is one long line of blue overcoats and red trousers and oil-skin flowerpot hats covering the short, squat, small- made soldiers of the 40th Foot regiment, whose fixed bayonets gleam brightly in the rare sun-light intervals. At every piazza there are detachments stationed; their muskets are stacked in rows on the ground, ...
— Rome in 1860 • Edward Dicey
... time,—Hanover Imminency only two months gone. And Mamma sends for us to have private dialogues in her Apartment there, with spies out in every direction to make signal of Majesty's return from his hunt,—who, however, surprises as on one occasion, so that we have to squat for hours, and almost get suffocated. [Wilhelmina, i. 172.] Whereupon the Crown-Prince, who will be eighteen in a couple of months, and feels the indignity of such things, begs of Mamma to be excused in future. He has much to suffer from his Father again, writes ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... not fail to arouse the sympathies of her own sex, even outside of her clan. Many were the calls from compassionate women. They would drop in, squat down, tender their services, suggest remedies, and gossip. Only one woman made herself directly useful, and that was Shotaye, a member of the Water clan. Shotaye was a strange woman. Nobody liked her, and yet many applied ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... Nunez, who came trading to Scarborough from Seville. He further informed us that his ship now lay outside in the harbor, and was a fine vessel, of very graceful proportions, and much more beautiful to look at than our English ships, which are somewhat squat and ugly, though ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
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