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More "Strut" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... framework of aluminum alloy dragged loosely on the ground; the other end swung out and projected above the shaft, swayed for an instant—and then came the first direct knowledge of the enemy's presence. The end of a metal strut, though nothing visible was touching it, grew suddenly white hot, sagged, then broke into a shower of molten, dazzling drops that rained down ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... such a polite element abroad on polling day. Men are so respectful and hurl such affectionate terms at one another. Even the dogs are upset, and strut about in quite a different manner than on ordinary days, so puffed out with vanity are they, on account of their decorations. The members' wives and their friends are all taking part in the scene too, bringing voters along in their carriages, and shaking ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... continual payments to a strange woman, while all through their lives a shadow of degradation and ridicule clings to them; both their wives and their company must be taken from beneath them. They talk no longer of going out into the world and making their way; they used to strut arrogantly before the old folk and demand free play for their youth, but now they go meekly in harness with hanging heads, and blink shamefacedly at the mention of their one heroic deed. And those who cannot endure their fate ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... the elf-like girl—the living Peter Pan to millions of theater-goers—was to assume the feathers and strut of the barnyard Romeo, there was a widespread feeling that he was making a great mistake, and that he was putting Miss Adams into a role, admirable artist that she was, to which she was absolutely unsuited. A storm of criticism arose. But Frohman was absolutely ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... Something by way of wind-up-farewell burst Of firework-nosegay! Where's your fortune fled? Or is not fortune constant after all? You lose ten thousand pounds: had I lost half Or half that, I should bite my lips, I think. You man of marble! Strut and stretch my best On tiptoe, I shall never reach your height. How does the loss feel! Just ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... of course, no fashion plates in that day, nor were there any "living models" to strut back and forth before keen-eyed customers; but fully dressed dolls were imported from France and England, and sent from town to town as examples of properly attired ladies. Eliza Southgate Bowne, after seeing the dolls in her shopping ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... said Hope, dryly. "Praise is sweet, especially behind one's back. So pray go on, unless you have something better to say to each other;" and Hope retired briskly into his office. But when the lovers took him at his word, and began to strut up and down hand in hand, and murmur love's music into each other's ears, he could not take his eyes off them, and his thoughts were sad. She had only known that young fellow a few months, yet she loved him passionately, and he would take her away from her father before she ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... little, though, my boy, If you're from Chile or from Illinois; You can't, because you serve a foreign land, Spit with impunity on ours, expand, Cock-turkeywise, and strut with blind conceit, All heedless of the hearts beneath your feet, Fling falsehoods as a sower scatters grain And, for security, invoke disdain. Sir, there are laws that men of sense observe, No matter whence they ...
— Black Beetles in Amber • Ambrose Bierce
... boy in all that assembly cared two straws about him. Why wasn't he playing in the match? Why did the fellows, as they came near him, look straight in front of them, or go round to avoid him? Why did the Guinea-pigs and Tadpoles strut about and crack their vulgar jokes right under his very nose, as if he was nobody? Alas, Loman! something's been wrong with you for the last year or thereabouts; and if we don't all know the cause, we can see the effect. For it is a fact, you are nobody ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... you'll have a letter from the mother, To say her daughter's feelings are trepanned; Perhaps you'll have a visit from the brother, All strut, and stays, and whiskers, to demand What "your intentions are?"—One way or other It seems the virgin's heart expects your hand: And between pity for her case and yours, You'll add to ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... thief?" asked the magistrate, without any politeness to him who ruled the land before white men broke into the country. Some in authority are polite to those they dispossess; the Prussians, for instance, to the miserable King Billys who strut about the empire. But the Anglo-Saxon only respects himself, and even that to a limited extent, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... agriculture; and soon, I suppose, we have to send to China for labourers. Why, those who do not emigrate demand twice as much to-day for half the work they used to do five years ago; and those who return from America strut about like country gentlemen deploring the barrenness of ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... Manor by the Thames; I've seen it oft through beechen stems In leafy Summer weather; We've moored the punt its lawns beside Where peacocks strut in flaunting pride, The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... write such a book the author must at the same time sink his ego and exhibit frankly his personality. The paradox in this is only apparent. He must forget either to strut or to blush with diffidence. Neither audience should be forgotten, and neither should be exclusively addressed. Never should he lose sight of the wholesome fact that old hunters are to read and to weigh; never should he for a moment slip into the belief that he is justified in addressing ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... the fairies' rooms; They use their folded tails for brooms; But fairy dust is brighter far Than any mortal colours are; And all about their tails it clings In strange designs of rounds and rings; And that is why they strut about And proudly spread ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... touched with wararra poison, or ten times distilled kakodyle, and a layer of honey over all, Dewhurst hurried away, to make no call. He was hard to subdue, and a puppy, whose passion it was to strut, in the perfection of a refined toilette, among fashionable street-walkers. While he was abroad, his cares rankling within were overborne by the consciousness of being "in position." The dog's nose is cold even when his tongue is reeking; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... too dazzling for Paul; he was born to great things, the consciousness of his high destiny being at once her glory and her despair; but, as regards herself, her outlook on life was cool and sober. Paul was peacock born; it was for him to strut about in iridescent plumage. She was a humble daw and knew her station. It must be said that Paul held out the stage as a career more on account of the social status that it would give to Jane than ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... Sholto's step slowed, and lost its braggart strut and confidence. Behind him Laurence chuckled and laughed, smiting his thigh in ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... when the realization caused him to strut a little, but he'd got over it. He was single, had no ties, wanted none. He had a good job which he took seriously, was doing significant work which he also took seriously, was paid premium wages even for a space captain, which didn't matter except in terms of recognition. He didn't ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... Luther to the lessons he learned in childhood from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to trust in God, and to whom God also has given good ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... over in here a little farther. I've a notion we'd come out somewhere closer to Kadiak town; and maybe we'd run across some native who would take us in. But there doesn't seem to be any game except once in a while a ptarmigan—those mountain grouse that strut and crow around here on the snow, and aren't big enough to waste rifle ammunition on. Maybe it's safer to go back to our camp and wait for a month or so more at least. ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... beautiful, springs on Kitty's shoulder, rounds its back, and purring, insists on caresses; in the large clean stables where the horses munch the corn lazily, and look round with round inquiring eyes, and the rooks croak and flutter, and strut about Kitty's feet. It was Kitty; yes, it was Kitty everywhere; even the blackbird darting through the ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... which grew a close hedge of thorns, that could easily afford room for two or three men to walk abreast between them. Here she had not remained more than a minute or two, when, issuing from the cover of the thorns, and approaching her with something of a stage strut, our friend, Buck ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... English Collection, one of my schoolbooks. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were "The Life of Hannibal" and "The History of Sir William Wallace." Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... unexpectedly from behind rocks and trees, and stand about considering; then one, more venturesome than the rest, runs quickly down to drink, and is followed by a string of others; then they run up again ever so fast, and strut about cooing and spreading their crests—one seldom sees them fly; when they do they rise straight up, and then dart away close to the ground and drop suddenly within a few yards. Of all birds the crow has most ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... you hear human people swell and brag and strut round about how they are different from the animals and have something they call a soul that the animals haven't got, but that's just the natural conceit of this electricity or something before it has found ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... scholar who had left them. Floors, doors, and rafters made a great variety of angles; every room had a particular inclination; the gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner of a leaning tower, and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and nothing but its excellent brightness—the window-glass polished and shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... under-graduates, to such a man are real luxuries, and the relish with which he enjoys them is deep and strong. And if he have but the luck to immortalize himself by holding some University office, to strut through his year of misrule as proctor, or even as his humble "pro," then does he at once emerge from the obscurity of the family annals a being of a higher sphere. And when there comes up to commemoration a waddling old lady, and two thin sticks of virginity, who horrify ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... in astonishment, and they watched the wrathful gallant strut down the street, his back as stiff ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the gentleman's cruel sarcasm," said Blaine, "I hope he will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all the members of this House, that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which had been made of Conkling to Henry Winter Davis, Blaine continued: "The gentleman took it seriously, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... awakened next morning by the sun shining brilliantly in at my bed-room window, my apprehensions had vanished, my enthusiasm was again at fever-heat, and I panted for the moment—not to be very long deferred—when I should don my uniform and strut forth to sport my glories before ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... be done. But in looking round you may perceive men booted and spurred, who perhaps never crossed a horse, and some with whips in their hands who deserve it on their backs—they hum lively airs, whistle and strut about with their quizzing-glasses in their hands, playing a tattoo upon their boots, and shewing themselves off with as many airs as if they were real actors engaged in the farce, that is to say, the buyers and ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a sword, nor does he strut about adorned with all his crosses and medals, nor does he wear the resplendent uniforms of other days. On the contrary, his uniform is ugly and dirt coloured, and innocent ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... an "Oblique Halving Joint," where the oblique piece, or strut, does not run through (Fig. 28, 3). This type of joint is used for strengthening framings and shelf brackets; an example of the latter is shown at Fig. 48. A strut or rail of this type prevents movement or distortion to a frame diagonally (generally spoken of in the trade as ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... the author of Thersites in his exaggerated caricature until the least semblance of truth to nature is banished from the portrait. It is interesting to compare him with Ralph Roister Doister. Nevertheless if we project Sir Tophas upon the stage, and by our imagination dress him and make him strut and gesticulate after such a fashion as the text seems to indicate, we shall probably discover ourselves smiling over puns and remarks which, on casual perusal, we might pronounce flavourless imbecilities. Indeed, for sheer laughable absurdity on the stage, Sir Tophas would be hard to ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... this airy, fantastic idea of irregular grace and bewildered melancholy any one can play Hamlet, as we have seen it played, with strut, and stare, and antic right-angled sharp-pointed gestures, it is difficult to say, unless it be that Hamlet is not bound, by the prompter's cue, to study the part of Ophelia. The account of Ophelia's death ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... a day with nautical dictionaries and chocolate creams, could not tell whether she was Rudderina or Maratima; she finally concluded that she was Nautica. It required neither time nor confectionery to enable these two members of the family to rename the third. They viewed the strut of plain Mr. So-and-So at the prospect of commanding a vessel, and promptly dubbed ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the lark in the morning; the pensive man hears the nightingale in the evening. The cheerful man sees the cock strut, and hears the horn and hounds echo in the wood; then walks, "not unseen," to observe the glory of the rising sun, or listen to the singing milkmaid, and view the labours of the ploughman and the mower: then casts his eyes about him over scenes of smiling plenty, and looks up to the ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... horizontal frame pieces on the floor 3 feet apart. Between these place six of the strut pieces. Put one at each end, and each 4 1/2 feet put another, leaving a 2-foot space in the center. This will give you four struts 4 1/2 feet apart, and two in the center 2 feet apart, as shown in the illustration. This makes five rectangles. Be sure that the points of contact are ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... Nights. Your backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that Providence and Norman Wilkinson have dropped mutual jealousies and collaborated to produce a background for an open-air Russian Ballet; in point of fact, it is merely the background to your luncheon party. If there is any ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... leonine magnanimity of courage, a vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf, cold moon, Or haunts the brakes where serpents ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... to bear the brunt of the late ambassador's malice, and to engage at a little later period in hottest controversy with him, personal and political. "Why should van der Myle strut about, with his arms akimbo like a peacock?" complained Aerssens one day in confused metaphor. A question not easy ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... was suddenly cut short. He fought against his disease (small pox) with that rashness that had been his ruling spirit through life, and thus ingloriously terminated his days. The pride of this man was to strut through the Mexican towns and gloat over his many crimes. To the gazing crowd, he would point out the trophies of his murders, which he never failed to have about him. To his fringed leggins were attached the phalanges (or finger bones) of those victims whom he had killed with his own hands. ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... controls? What, as a rule, DO men believe in? ... Themselves! ... only themselves! They are, in their own opinion, the Be-All and the End-All of everything! ... as if the Supreme Creative Force called God were incapable of designing any Higher Form of Thinking-Life than their pigmy bodies which strut on two legs and, with two eyes and a small, quickly staggered brain, profess to understand and weigh the whole foundation and ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... purpled madmen, were they numbered all From Roman Nero down to Russian Paul, Could grate upon my ear so mean, so base, As the rank jargon of that factious race, Who, poor of heart and prodigal of words, Formed to be slaves, yet struggling to be lords, Strut forth, as patriots, from their negro-marts, And shout for rights, with rapine in their hearts. Who can, with patience, for a moment see The medley mass of pride and misery, Of whips and charters, manacles and rights, Of slaving blacks and democratic whites, And ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... as well up to it as ever ye will be," he said. "Not that such mumming would have passed in our time. Harry as the Saracen should strut a bit more, and John needn't holler his inside out. Beyond that perhaps you'll do. Have you got all your ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... became a terrible trial. He could not work in the garden. On Sundays the fortifications were deserted; he could no longer strut about among the workingmen's families dining on the grass, and pass from group to group in a neighborly way, his feet encased in embroidered slippers, with the authoritative demeanor of a wealthy landowner of the vicinity. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers. CAPT. (puzzled). Very true, So they do. BUT. Black sheep dwell in every fold; All that glitters is not gold; Storks turn out to be but logs; Bulls are but inflated frogs. CAPT. (puzzled). So they be, Frequentlee. BUT. Drops the wind and ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... power; but more than all, I love the way of life. Talk of romances and adventure! What romance or adventure is half so wonderful as those that come daily to my notice? And I play a part in every one of them, and none the less a leading part because I do not shout and strut ...
— Montezuma's Daughter • H. Rider Haggard
... across the world. The supreme councils of the Allies—what are they? They change, form and reform. Generals, field marshals, staff officers in gold lace, cabinets, presidents, puppet kings, and God knows what of those who strut for a little time in their pomp of place and power—what are they but points on the drill of the great machine whose power is the people of the world, struggling in protest against despotism, privilege, ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... Two inches from one end of it make a cross mark with the square, and from the ends of the mark run lines towards the end at an angle of 45 degrees. Cut along these lines, and lay one of the edges just cut up against C, and flush with the outer edge of L1 (Fig. 5). Tack the strut on temporarily to both legs, turn the trestle over, and draw your pencil (which should have a sharp point) along the angles which the strut makes with the legs. This gives you the limits of the overlaps. Detach ...
— Things To Make • Archibald Williams
... proposal before him, till I know how it will be relished by my mother. If it be not well received, perhaps I may employ him on the occasion. Yet I don't like to owe him an obligation, if I could help it. For men who have his views in their heads, do so parade it, so strut about, if a woman condescend to employ them in her affairs, that one has ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... woman now and there are such a lot of 'em in the world. When I remember all you have done for us it makes me ill to think of some in our town—giggling, silly little flirts, with no higher ambition than to strut down the ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed—but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... the laird gae kaim his wig, The sodger not to strut sae big, The lawyer not to be a prig; The fool he cried, Te-hee! I kenn'd that I could never fail! But she pinn'd the dishclout to his tail, And soused him frae the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... glittering bayonets he caught the flourish of energetic drumsticks. The big drum gave forth its clamor with window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down to the smallest drummer-boy. Although ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... Lovin Child; enough to last the winter through, and some to spare; a woman would have laughed at some of the things he chose: impractical, dainty garments that Bud could not launder properly to save his life. But there were little really truly overalls, in which Lovin Child promptly developed a strut that delighted the men and earned him the title of Old Prospector. And there were little shirts and stockings and nightgowns and a pair of shoes, and a toy or two that failed to interest him at all, after the ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... its interest with him; but when men saw that after victory was another war; after the destruction of armies, new conscriptions; and they who had toiled so desperately were never nearer to the reward,—they could not spend what they had earned, nor repose on their down-beds, nor strut in their chateaux,—they deserted him. Men found that his absorbing egotism was deadly to all other men. It resembled the torpedo, which inflicts a succession of shocks on any one who takes hold ...
— Representative Men • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... woebegone, with great patches of red flesh showing through its wet plumage, with the membrane of its face, and its short gills and comb swollen and bloody, with one eye put out, and the other only kept open by the thread attached to its eyelid, yet makes shift to strut, with staggering gait, across the cock-pit, and to notify its victory, by giving vent to a lamentable ghost of a crow. Then it is carried off followed by an admiring, gesticulating, vociferous crowd, to be elaborately tended and nursed, as befits so gallant ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... hurried towards the geese. He didn't take time to strut, but ran across the yard with ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... going to meeting; she was to stay at home with Hattie, and read to her, or, what was better, comfort her with affectionate, gentle, confiding words. But Willie was going with Helen, as he seemed anxious, by strut, and hurry, and loud, impatient talk, to let every body know. And Frank wished from his heart that he could be with them that day; and he wondered, did they miss him, and were they thinking of him, far ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... lorded it over the whole house. Then he grew right saucy and impudent, but my father minded it not, deeming the fellow indispensable in managing the estate. But when I came back it irked me sorely to see the fellow strut about as though he owned the place. He was sly enough with me at first, and would brow-beat the Squire only while I was out of earshot. It chanced one day, however, that I heard loud voices through an open window and paused ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... East: we will absorb it with the rest: we have absorbed many others! I just laugh at the air of triumph they assume, and the pusillanimity of some of my fellow-countrymen. They think they have conquered us, they strut about our boulevards, and in our newspapers and reviews, and in our theaters and in the political arena. Idiots! It is they who are conquered! They will be assimilated after having fed us. Gaul has a strong stomach: in these twenty centuries she has digested more than ...
— Jean Christophe: In Paris - The Market-Place, Antoinette, The House • Romain Rolland
... Bolleau. It was situated on a pretty rise of ground to the very borders of the forest. Cecile, walking quickly, reached it before long; then she stood still, leaning over the paling and looking across the enchanted ground. This paling in itself was English, and the very strut of the barn-door fowl reminded her of Warren's Grove. How she wished that fair child to run out! How she hoped to hear even one word of the only language she understood! No matter her French origin, Cecile was all English at this moment. Toby stood ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... in it, for they issued a placard on which they called Borghese a traitor and threatened him with death. "He who after November 1918 returns to the martyred town," writes Signor Zanella, "is simply stupefied in beholding that those personages who now strut on the political scene, burning with the most ardent Italian patriotism, are the same who until the eve of Vittorio Veneto were the most unbending, the most eloquent and the most devoted partisans and servants of the reactionary Magyar regime." And around them ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... instead of coming forth in a spontaneous manner to see who I am and look at the bicycle, he pays me a ceremonious visit at the chapar-khana half an hour later. In this visit he is preceded by his farrash, and he walks with a magnificent peacock strut that causes the skirts of his faultless roundabout to flop up and down, up and down, in rhythmic accompaniment to his steps. Apart from his insufferable conceit, however, he tries to make himself as agreeable as possible, ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... high military dignitaries, Councillors, members of Legislatures, Judges, etc., going in and out, and side by side with representatives of the aristocracy of birth, of finance, of commerce and of industry,—all of them, who, by day and in society, strut about with grave and dignified mien as "representatives and guardians of morality, of order, of marriage, and of the family," and who stand at the head of the Christian charity societies and of societies for the "suppression of prostitution." Modern capitalist society resembles a huge carnival ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... certain roughness. The demeanor of my men to each other is very courteous, and yet I see none of that sort of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the North, the dandy-barber strut. This is an agreeable surprise, for I feared that freedom and regimentals would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... The whilom dandy and friend of Baudelaire went about dressed in a shabby military frock-coat. He had no longer a nodding acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little's reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois. A Barmecide feast this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did not waste the fruits of his observation. At sixty-five ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... opening into the bed- chambers running round; the barbarous peach-coloured drawing-room; the bright look-out through the garden-door upon the grassy lawns and terraces behind, where the soft-hued pigeons still love to coo and strut in the sun,—are described in "Shirley." The scenery of that fiction lies close around; the real events which suggested it took place ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Of deeds of martial fame, Or that our peasant mean Was born of rank or name, And soon will strut, As in romance, A knight and all ...
— Cottage Poems • Patrick Bronte
... a cowboy-like strut as she made this assertion, shaking her head in a bronco gesture which dashed the dark hair from her eyes and made her look like an unbroken thoroughbred. Never in all his life, even in the magazine pictures of stage beauties ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... "Did I strut? I daresay. They are my own people and I love their affection. Also, as you say, it pleases my vanity. Helas, my dear, I am ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... while I pray the Lord every day to keep me from judging my fellow men, I just couldn't for the life of me help passing judgment on a civilised custom which keeps alive all this war fuss and feathers and asking men made in God's image to strut around in all this gilt and lace toggery when immortal creatures are starving to death by the million for the bread of life. And I just couldn't keep still when day after day I heard on deck this naval fashion plate girding at men and women whose plain shoes he wasn't ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... he wuz with that, and Josiah too. Every hour a procession of bears come out, led, I believe, by a rooster who claps his wings and crows, and then they walk round a old man with a hour glass who strikes the hour on a bell. But the bears lead the programmy and bow and strut ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... Battle, every Campaign carry'd two or three of their best Towns, the Nation dispirited, and Credit sunk, and nothing but a dismal Scene of Poverty and Misery: And yet in the midst of all this Misery, (as the Spanish Beggars are said to strut about in their Cloak and Bilboes at their Side) so this Gasping Monarch had the Assurance not only to talk of making a Descent, but actually equipp'd a small nimble Fleet with a Body of Men, and persuaded the Pretender to go upon the foolish Errand, as if he you'd have any prospect ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... articles. To create concrete images must be the writer's constant aim. Instead of a general term like "walk," for example, he should select a specific, picture-making word such as hurry, dash, run, race, amble, stroll, stride, shuffle, shamble, limp, strut, stalk. For the word "horse" he may substitute a definite term like sorrel, bay, percheron, nag, charger, steed, broncho, or pony. In narrative and descriptive writing particularly, it is necessary to use words that make pictures and that reproduce ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... annoying to the King of the Cats. He used to strut up and down saying to himself over and over again, "I'm Cock-o'-the-Walk, I'm Cock-o'-the-Walk." Sometimes he would come into the Forge and say it to the horses. The King of the Cats wondered how the human beings could put up with a creature who was so stupid and ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... dispersing, their bundles under their arms, each one making direct for his own front door. "Every woman in Riverfield will have to put down needle and fry-pan and butter-paddle to feed them so plum full of compliments that they'll strut for a week. Bless my heart, honeybunch, we have all got to turn around twice in each track to get ready, and as I'm pretty hefty I must begin right now." With this remark, Aunt Mary departed from the back door ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... by the most popular artists to enliven the scenes of the pilgrimage; but no colour glows like the enchanting words of Bunyan. No figures are so true to nature, and so life-like. Those eminent engravers, Sturt and Strut, Stothard and Martin, with the prize efforts excited by the Art Union of England, and the curious outlines by Mrs. M'Kenzie, the daughter of a British admiral, have endeavoured to exhaust the scenes in this inexhaustible work of beautiful scenery. The most elegant and correct edition ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... bills of costs and deputy sheriffs, but I do know that Mr. Aristabulus Bragg is an amusing mixture of strut, humility, roguery and cleverness. He is waiting all this time in the drawing- room, and you had better see him, as he may, now, be almost considered part of the family. You know he has been living in the house at Templeton, ever since he was installed by Mr. John Effingham. It was there ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... his representation of Christ he does not offend us by a single word or a single gesture. If there were in his manner the slightest touch of affectation or of self-consciousness; if there were the remotest suspicion of a strut in his gait, we should be compelled to turn aside in disgust. As it is, we forget the artist altogether. For it is easy to see that Josef Mayr forgets himself, and wishes only to give a faithful picture of the events in ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... announced that she was sorry for them. "Every brood," she declared, "should have at least one swimmer in it." She began to strut up and down the edge of the duck-pond, clucking in a most overbearing fashion. Really, she had never felt quite so important before—not even when her first brood pecked their way out ...
— The Tale of Henrietta Hen • Arthur Scott Bailey
... who had a whole farmyard of hens to look after and manage; and among them was a tiny little Crested Hen. She thought she was altogether too grand to be in company with the other hens, for they looked so old and shabby; she wanted to go out and strut about all by herself, so that people could see how fine she was, and admire her pretty ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" - "My dear—a raw country girl, such as you be, Isn't equal to that. You ain't ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... partial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... incitement to laughter?—It was the different cut of a coat. It was a silk bag, in which the hair was tied, an old sword, and a dangling pair of ruffles; which none of them suited with the poverty of the dress, and meagre appearance, of a person who seemed to strut and value himself upon such ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... where its selfishness is appealed to, not otherwise. You must find, then, what pleases it, and pander to its tastes. So will ye cheat it,—or ye will cheat it also by affecting the false virtues which it admires itself,—rouge your sentiments highly, and let them strut with a buskined air; thirdly, my good young men, ye will cheat it by profuse flattery, and by calling it in especial ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... indignation. All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut about their streets, and—according to their light—they are not guilty of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... been used to regarding his comrade as a blatant child with an audacity grown from his inexperience, thoughtless, headstrong, jealous, and filled with a tinsel courage. A swaggering babe accustomed to strut in his own dooryard. The youth wondered where had been born these new eyes; when his comrade had made the great discovery that there were many men who would refuse to be subjected by him. Apparently, the other had now climbed a peak of wisdom ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... that am not shap'd for sporting tricks, Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty, To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;— I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion, Cheated of feature by dissembling nature, Deform'd, unfinish'd, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up And that so lamely ...
— The Critics Versus Shakspere - A Brief for the Defendant • Francis A. Smith
... up, and out of the dreadful place, put the slab in the opening, secured it with a strut against the opposite side of the recess, and closed the shutters and drew the curtains of the room; if the earl came up the stair in the wall, found the stone immovable, and saw no light through any chink about its edges, he would not suspect it had ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... cannot fortune-hunt, nor afford to marry without a fortune. My parliamentary schemes are not much to my taste—I spoke twice last Session, [1] and was told it was well enough; but I hate the thing altogether, and have no intention to "strut another hour" on that stage. I am thus wasting the best part of life, daily repenting ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... the yellow blossoms of the wattle-tree and many light-green ferns. In this ingeniously contrived sylvan retreat the feathered architect runs about and holds a sort of carnival, to which others of his tribe gather. Here the little party chirp vigorously, and strut about in a ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... same witless breed, the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed elegance alone. Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt as could well ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... business. I wish MD walked half as much as Presto. If I was with you, I'd make you walk; I would walk behind or before you, and you should have masks on, and be tucked up like anything; and Stella is naturally a stout walker, and carries herself firm; methinks I see her strut, and step clever over a kennel; and Dingley would do well enough if her petticoats were pinned up; but she is so embroiled, and so fearful, and then Stella scolds, and Dingley stumbles, and is so daggled.(14) Have you got the whalebone petticoats ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... multifarious veracities; a substratum of inarticulate good sense withal, and much magnanimity run wild, or run to seed. A big-limbed, swashing, perpendicular kind of fellow; haughty of face, but jolly too; with a big, not ugly strut;—captivating to the French Nation, and fit God of War (fitter than 'Dalhousie,' I am sure!) for that susceptive People. Understood their Army also, what it was then and there; and how, by theatricals and otherwise, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVI. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Ten Years of Peace.—1746-1756. • Thomas Carlyle
... Setch, but lived in villages, and assembled as necessity demanded. As they were completely beyond the sphere of Polish influence, they knew nothing about "knightly honour" and similar conceptions of Western chivalry; they even adopted many Tartar customs, and loved in time of peace to strut about in gorgeous Tartar costumes. Besides this, they were nearly all emigrants from Great Russia, and mostly Old Ritualists or Sectarians, whilst the Zaporovians were Little ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... Albanians," says Mr Hobhouse, "strut very much when they walk, projecting their chests, throwing back their heads, and moving very slowly from side to side. Elmas (as the officer was called) had this strut more than any man perhaps we saw afterwards; ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Susan Tall, "Gable Oak is coming it quite the dand. He now wears shining boots with hardly a hob in 'em, two or three times a-week, and a tall hat a-Sundays, and 'a hardly knows the name of smockfrock. When I see people strut enough to be cut up into bantam cocks, I stand dormant with wonder, and says ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... beaus, At once confounded into sober sense, He feels his pristine insignificance: And blinking, blund'ring, from the general quiz Retreats, "to ponder on the thing he is." By pride inflated, and by praise allured, Small Authors thus strut forth, and thus get cured; But, Critics, hear I an angel pleads for me, That tongueless, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... P. Applerod added two full inches to his strut. He seldom came out to the scene of actual operations, for there was none there except workmen to see his frock-coat and silk hat; but occasionally, from a sense of duty inextricably mingled with self-assertiveness, he paid a visit of inspection, and upon one of these his eyes ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... STRUT—The upright braces between the upper and lower wings of a machine are called struts. They take the compression of the truss frame of the biplane or triplane. Each wing is divided into truss ...
— Opportunities in Aviation • Arthur Sweetser
... light-green ferns. In this ingeniously contrived sylvan retreat the feathered architect runs about and holds a sort of carnival, to which others of his tribe gather. Here the little party chirp vigorously, and strut about in a ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... whose arm lacked the strength, of a man's, but he was nevertheless the favourite of the Great Spirit. He was less in stature than a man, and crooked withal, his height being little more than that of the tall bird[A] which loves to strut along the sandy shore, picking up the fish as they flutter joyously along in the beams of the warm and cheering sun. But if he was diminutive in body he was great in his soul—what others lacked in wisdom he ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... celebrities, shaking hands with the drunken P., [Translator's Note: Probably Palmin, a minor poet.] listening to the raptures of a stray spectator in a picture show, being renowned in the taverns.... If they do a pennyworth they do not strut about as though they had done a hundred roubles' worth, and do not brag of having the entry where others are not admitted.... The truly talented always keep in obscurity among the crowd, as far as possible from advertisement.... Even Krylov ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... lower down on the beach. Carlotta, however, was delighted and said that I looked pretty. Now I have grown callous, seeing other fools similarly apparelled. But a year ago, should I have dreamed it possible for me to strut about a fashionable plage in white ducks, a pink shirt, and a yachting-cap? I trow not. They are signs of some sort of madness—whether that of a Jaques or a ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... vainly look for fruit on it in autumn." All through the great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous. The thousands of characters who "strut their brief hour" upon the stage in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and generous, lofty and incorruptible. Then they ripen into manhood, glory waits upon their comings and their goings, and they are soon between two masters, their interests and their consciences. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... oneself comes nearest to it; but the word cannot be given, even by equivalents, in English; nor can it be naturalised, because, in fact, we have not the feeling. An Englishman is too proud to boast—too bashful to strut; if ever he peacocks himself, it is in a moment of anger, not in display. The language of every country," continued he, raising his voice, in order to reach Lady Davenant, who just then returned to the room, as he did not wish to waste a philosophical observation on Lady ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... of all India!" she said. "Another may wear the baubles, but thou shalt be the true king, even as thy name is! And behind thee, me, Yasmini, whispering wisdom and laughing to see the politicians strut!" ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... that time there was a great army of Danish men west there, whose chief was Heming, the son of Earl Strut-Harald, and brother to Earl Sigvaldi, and he held for King Knut that land that Svein ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... manner. And certainly his illustrators are drugged with the Dickens atmosphere. Those hideous-lovely persons, whose legs and arms are so thin that it is impossible to suppose they ever removed their clothes; do they not strut and leer and ogle and grin and stagger and weep, in the very style ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... set their minds on worldly glory, and spent their money on extravagant dress. "The men," said he, "wear capes reaching down to the ground, and their long hair falls down to their shoulders; and the women wear so many petticoats that they can hardly drag themselves along, and strut about like the Pope's courtezans, to the surprise and disgust of the whole world." What right had these selfish fops to call themselves Christians? They did more harm to the cause of Christ than all the Turks and heathens in ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... gods call dross, Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving, Only secure in every one's conniving, A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. But stay! no age was e'er degenerate, Unless men held it at too cheap a rate, For in our likeness ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... as a rule, DO men believe in? ... Themselves! ... only themselves! They are, in their own opinion, the Be-All and the End-All of everything! ... as if the Supreme Creative Force called God were incapable of designing any Higher Form of Thinking-Life than their pigmy bodies which strut on two legs and, with two eyes and a small, quickly staggered brain, profess to understand and weigh the whole foundation ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... poachers, who fish in others' ponds, are proud of their achievements. They will talk. They brag in their cups and strut and ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... up to the men; he asked them questions with patronising kindness, he gave them scraps of information upon all subjects of temporary interest, with a funny little air of pompous importance. When by mere force of habit they grew more familiar with him, he would strut up and engage them in long conversations, listen to all they said with consummate good nature, giving his opinion in return. He was wholly unconscious that he looked like a bantam crowing to a group of larger and more sleepy fowls, but ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... outdone in generosity, offers his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the dramatis personae strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their poses—-melodramatic, in fact—and do unlikely things. But this fault is the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the heroes of these ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... no fashion plates in that day, nor were there any "living models" to strut back and forth before keen-eyed customers; but fully dressed dolls were imported from France and England, and sent from town to town as examples of properly attired ladies. Eliza Southgate Bowne, after seeing the dolls in her shopping expeditions, wrote to a friend: ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... Chebe became a terrible trial. He could not work in the garden. On Sundays the fortifications were deserted; he could no longer strut about among the workingmen's families dining on the grass, and pass from group to group in a neighborly way, his feet encased in embroidered slippers, with the authoritative demeanor of a wealthy landowner of the vicinity. This he missed more than anything else, ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... was a short, stout woman whose personality seemed to be strangely familiar to Medenham. He never forgot anyone, and this lady was certainly not one of his acquaintances; nevertheless, her features, her robin-like strut, her very amplitude of girth and singular rotundity of form, came definitely within the net of his ...
— Cynthia's Chauffeur • Louis Tracy
... these!—For my parts, I value not myself upon them. Thou wilt say, I have no cause.—Perhaps not. But if I had any thing valuable as to intellectuals, those are not my own; and to be proud of what a man is answerable for the abuse of, and has no merit in the right use of, is to strut, like the ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... left to itself, and not ennobled by any prosecution, as the schemers expected, it became as foisonless as the "London Gazette" on ordinary occasions. Those behind the curtain, who thought to bounce out with a grand stot and strut before the world, finding that even I used it as a convenient vehicle to advertise my houses when need was, and which I did by the way of a canny seduction of policy, joking civilly with Mr Absolom anent his paper trumpet, as I called it, they were utterly vanquished by seeing themselves of so little ...
— The Provost • John Galt
... the work gradually made its way—slow but sure—if we may judge from the wished-for "new editions." How unlike is this course of favour to the blaze of fashionable annals, or novels of high life, that are born and die in a day, or with one reading circle of a subscription library. They strut and fume in the publisher's newspaper puffs; but their light is put out within a few brief hours, and they are laid to sleep on the capacious shelves of the publisher's warehouse. Not so with the Tales of Historical ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 476, Saturday, February 12, 1831 • Various
... enables them to shift from one scene to another with great rapidity. First-rate actors receive as much as a thousand riyos (about L300) as their yearly salary. This, however, is a high rate of pay, and many a man has to strut before the public for little more than his daily rice; to a clever young actor it is almost enough reward to be allowed to enter a company in which there is a famous star. The salary of the actor, however, may depend ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... stood as still on his square foot of floor as did Ranjoor Singh on his. It was the fact that he did not flinch and did not strut about, but stood in one spot with his arms behind him that confirmed Ranjoor Singh in his reading of the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... time when the realization caused him to strut a little, but he'd got over it. He was single, had no ties, wanted none. He had a good job which he took seriously, was doing significant work which he also took seriously, was paid premium wages even for a space captain, which ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... attitudes. But this is all that can be said for her. Her mind has no room for anything but looks and dress; she has no feeling for anybody but her little self; and is only too truly declared by Mrs. Poyser to be "no better than a peacock, as 'ud strut about on the wall, and spread its tail when the sun shone, if all the folks i' the parish was dying"—"no better nor a cherry, wi' a hard stone inside it."[1] Over and over this view of Hetty's character is enforced on us, from the time when, early in the first volume, we are ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... What Orpheus-like I forc'd from stocks and stones? 'Twill never swell thy bag, nor ring one peal In thy dark chest. Talk not of shreeves, or gaol; I fear them not. I have no land to glut Thy dirty appetite, and make thee strut Nimrod of acres; I'll no speech prepare To court the hopeful cormorant, thine heir. For there's a kingdom at thy beck if thou But kick this dross: Parnassus' flow'ry brow I'll give thee with my Tempe, and to boot That horse which ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... friend of Baudelaire went about dressed in a shabby military frock-coat. He had no longer a nodding acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little's reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois. A Barmecide feast this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did not waste the fruits of his observation. At sixty-five he began to go down-hill. His ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the indifference with which she neglected to improve any strong points in her own favor—the indifference, as every heart perceived, of despairing grief. Then came the manners on the hostile side—the haggard consciousness of guilt, the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut which sought to dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses, assembled on that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of conscious uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising that the storm of popular ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... ark of Israel so vulnerable that its defenders dare not challenge the great Goliath of the Philistines, who, year by year, comes forth to strut before the armies of the saints in ridicule of that they hold so dear; and thus it is to be held responsible for the loss of the young men who throw away their ancestral faith and go over to the ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... shrieked with delight at this impudent speech, and that made the mock policeman strut ...
— Policeman Bluejay • L. Frank Baum
... boast, or triumph. To crow over any one; to keep him in subjection: an image drawn from a cock, who crows over a vanquished enemy. To pluck a crow; to reprove any one for a fault committed, to settle a dispute. To strut like a crow in a gutter; to walk proudly, or with ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... amusing to see the pompous strut of the men on a Sunday, as they walk to mass in their ill-made silk coats, with gold-headed sticks in hand. Both men and women are the worst-favoured race I ever saw: their flat, unmeaning countenances, small, lacklustre eyes, strong, upright, black hair, resembling hogs' bristles more than ...
— Trade and Travel in the Far East - or Recollections of twenty-one years passed in Java, - Singapore, Australia and China. • G. F. Davidson
... conversation. The great delight of this poor creature was to be considered the tallest individual in the kingdom, and indeed nothing could be more amusing than to witness the manner in which he held up his head while he walked, or sat, or stood. In fact his walk was a complete strut, to which the pride, arising from the consciousness of, or rather the belief in, his extraordinary height gave an extremely ludicrous appearance. Poor Tom was about five feet nine in height, but imagined himself to be at least a foot higher. His whole family were certainly tall, and one of ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... real man; an out-and-out man; a being who realised the fact that he had been made and born into the world for the purpose of doing that world good, and leaving it better than he found it. He did not think that to strut, and smoke cigars, and talk loud or big, and commence most of his sentences with "Aw! 'pon my soul!" was the summit of true greatness. Neither did he, flying in disgust to the opposite extreme, speak like a misanthrope, and look like a bear, or dress like a savage. ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... the plane of the drunkard is the dude, that missing link between monkey and man, whose dream of happiness is a single eye-glass, a kangaroo strut, and three hours of conversation without a sensible sentence; whose only conception of life is to splurge, and flirt, and spend his ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... angles; every room had a particular inclination; the gable had tilted towards the garden, after the manner of a leaning tower, and one of the former proprietors had buttressed the building from that side with a great strut of wood, like the derrick of a crane. Altogether, it had many marks of ruin; it was a house for the rats to desert; and nothing but its excellent brightness—the window-glass polished and shining, the paint well scoured, the brasses radiant, the very prop all wreathed about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... true that the goldfinch and the kingfisher are not often seen except in picture-books; but our own little robin is a real beauty, is he not? And what can be gayer than the feathers of some of our cocks, which strut about so proudly? Then, the more you notice the songs of birds, the more you will admire them. The sweet notes begin before daylight in the spring-time, and the cock-bird seems never tired of singing to his mate as she sits on her eggs. By and ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... amazement, the girl saw Billina crouching upon the prostrate form of a speckled rooster. For an instant they both remained motionless, and then the yellow hen shook her wings to settle the feathers and walked toward the door with a strut of proud defiance and a cluck of victory, while the speckled rooster limped away to the group of other chickens, trailing his crumpled plumage in ...
— Ozma of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... sea-sands, and the still country-sides that I had frequented up to then. The throng of the citizens in particular abashed me. Rankeillor's son was short and small in the girth; his clothes scarce held on me; and it was plain I was ill qualified to strut in the front of a bank-porter. It was plain, if I did so, I should but set folk laughing, and (what was worse in my case) set them asking questions. So that I behoved to come by some clothes of my own, and in the meanwhile to walk by the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was in Rome during the winter, I was very much astonished, one day, as the King of Italy passed, to see a whole school of little boys under the direction of three Christian Brothers, strut by with their little noses in the air, and without raising their hats. At the same pension with myself was a young Swiss Benedictine monk, who sat by me at table d'hote, and with whom I struck up a warm friendship. I commented to him on what I had seen. "Oh!" he replied, ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... roofs and chimneys, she had a good clear view of the sky. Some pigeons occupied a little house outside one of the neighbouring windows, and there was a roof covered with red tiles on which they loved to strut and plume their feathers ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use. "The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.... Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.... The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... draggled and woebegone, with great patches of red flesh showing through its wet plumage, with the membrane of its face, and its short gills and comb swollen and bloody, with one eye put out, and the other only kept open by the thread attached to its eyelid, yet makes shift to strut, with staggering gait, across the cock-pit, and to notify its victory, by giving vent to a lamentable ghost of a crow. Then it is carried off followed by an admiring, gesticulating, vociferous crowd, to be elaborately tended and nursed, as befits so gallant a bird. The beauty of the sport ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... pretty rise of ground to the very borders of the forest. Cecile, walking quickly, reached it before long; then she stood still, leaning over the paling and looking across the enchanted ground. This paling in itself was English, and the very strut of the barn-door fowl reminded her of Warren's Grove. How she wished that fair child to run out! How she hoped to hear even one word of the only language she understood! No matter her French origin, Cecile was all English at this moment. Toby stood ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... grew jealous of his rival's success, and alarmed lest it should lead to extraordinary advancement. When the Marquis of Rockingham was posed before Sir Joshua for the full-length picture, engraved by Fisher, the nobleman asked the painter if he had not given a strut to the left leg. 'My lord,' replied Sir Joshua with a smile, 'I wish to show a ...
— Art in England - Notes and Studies • Dutton Cook
... nation for the miserable sake of party popularity? Are we to stand here in the guise and manner of free men, knowing that we are driven together like a flock of sheep into the fold by the howling of the wolves outside? Are we to strut and plume ourselves upon our unhampered freedom, while we act like slaves? Worse than slaves we should be if we allowed one breath of party spirit, one thought of party aggrandizement, to enter into the choice we are about to make. ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... was a prize: and that evening, when the public were shrieking with laughter over the capers of a clown arm-in-arm with a tame bear, followed by a couple of monkeys skilfully mimicking their very strut, Ned was behind one of the vans scribbling with pencil a few frantic, ill-spelt words that, when the crumpled envelope arrived at the Bunk, were wept over and laughed over in tumultuous joy. The penny thrown him went for a stamp; the letter was pushed, with trembling haste, into a letter-box, ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... to some distance, would leap upon a rock that was there; then, after dropping his wings, flirting with his spread tail, erecting the ruff upon his neck, and throwing back his head, he would swell and strut upon the rock, exhibiting himself like a diminutive turkey-cock. After manoeuvring in this way for a few moments, he would commence flapping his wings in short quick strokes, which grew more rapid as he proceeded, until a 'booming' sound was produced, more like the rumble of ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... style is like the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted. The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be a good man. Good style is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... very annoying to the King of the Cats. He used to strut up and down saying to himself over and over again, "I'm Cock-o'-the-Walk, I'm Cock-o'-the-Walk." Sometimes he would come into the Forge and say it to the horses. The King of the Cats wondered how the human beings could put up with a creature who was so stupid and ...
— The King of Ireland's Son • Padraic Colum
... Hobhouse, "strut very much when they walk, projecting their chests, throwing back their heads, and moving very slowly from side to side. Elmas (as the officer was called) had this strut more than any man perhaps we saw ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... unobtrusive, never arming themselves with Scriptural texts in order to carry on offensive operations. Never being perplexed by doubt, they desired no one to corroborate their faith, and no inducement could persuade them to strut about in the garb of piety in order to attract respect. The reverence for the Creator was in the heart, rather than upon the lips. In that land papists and protestants lived together in charity and brotherhood, earnest ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... best, John's pockets are an integral part of his personality. He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what corresponds in the genus homo with the polywog state in batrachia. The incipient man begins to strut as soon as mamma puts pockets into his kilted skirt—a stride as prophetic as the strangled crow of the cockerel upon the lowest bar ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the Gobbler would love the young Turkeys dearly. Even now he did not try to strike them, as he might have done a while before. They were afraid of him, yet down in their hearts the brothers all thought that when they were grown up they wanted to be just like him and strut around with their wings trailing, their tails spread, their necks drawn back, and their feathers ruffled. Then, they thought, when other people came near them, they would puff and gobble and cry, "Get out of my way!" They tried it once in a while to see ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... over to the water-cooler, drew a brimming glass, drank it off, and gave vent to a great exhaust of breath. He tried not to strut as he crossed back to his desk, climbed his stool, adjusted his eye-shade, and, with a last throaty chuckle, plunged into ...
— Emma McChesney & Co. • Edna Ferber
... the reality of kings and queens and court pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune. They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident in the contemporary poets than in the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... to be told what had become of the manhood of Ascalon, and asked it with contempt. What was the fame of the town based upon but a bluff when one man was able to shut it up as tight as a trunk, and strut around that way adding the insult of his tyrannical presence to the act of his oppressive hand. There were plenty of questions and suggestions, but nobody went ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... concrete images must be the writer's constant aim. Instead of a general term like "walk," for example, he should select a specific, picture-making word such as hurry, dash, run, race, amble, stroll, stride, shuffle, shamble, limp, strut, stalk. For the word "horse" he may substitute a definite term like sorrel, bay, percheron, nag, charger, steed, broncho, or pony. In narrative and descriptive writing particularly, it is necessary to use words that make pictures and that reproduce sounds ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... law"—and "Sir, your eloquence—" "Yours, Cowper's manner"—and "yours, Talbot's sense." Thus we dispose of all poetic merit, Yours Milton's genius, and mine Homer's spirit. Call Tibbald Shakespeare, and he'll swear the nine, Dear Cibber! never matched one ode of thine. Lord! how we strut through Merlin's cave, to see No poets there, but Stephen, you, and me. Walk with respect behind, while we at ease Weave laurel crowns, and take what names we please. "My dear Tibullus!" if that will not do, "Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you: Or, I'm content, allow me Dryden's strains, And ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... at Peter and his excitement. "That was Big Tom Gobbler, and he was doing all that for the benefit of Mrs. Gobbler, who was hiding in that brush. It was her head you saw. Big Tom is the most conceited fellow in the Green Forest. He dearly loves to strut. He is just like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather. The Gobblers never have gotten over strutting since Old Mr. Gobbler, the first of the family, ...
— Mother West Wind "Where" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... simplicity. It is this portion of the instrument which sustains the tension of the strings, which in full to large-sized pianos is not less than from six to twelve tons, and it is a matter of prime necessity that the portions which serve as a strut or stretcher between the ends of the strings, and which are to resist this enormous pull, must be made correspondingly strong and rigid, since by any gradual yielding under the pull of the strings, their lengths and tensions, and hence their tone, must undergo ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... for a seaplane; the machine was completed in March 1912 and its first flight was made at Portland. On this seaplane Lieutenant Samson flew, first and last, for about a hundred and fifty hours, without breaking a strut or a float, which is a signal testimony to the merits of both the design and the construction. The Royal Aircraft Factory, working for the Air Department of the Admiralty, also produced a seaplane, which was successfully tested on ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... make way wid ole Brer Lion, all de yuther creeturs say he sholy is a mighty man, en dey treat 'im good. Dis make 'im feel so proud dat he bleedz ter show it, en so he strut 'roun' like a boy when he git his fust ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... hard to attend a political feast, And strut like a peacock, and crow like a bantam, Yet feel at one's back, like a blast from the east, A be-robed and be-wigged and blood-curdling law phantom. Stentorian cheers, and uproarious hear-hears, Though ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... which would have been beauty had it been on a larger scale, had begun to fill what little there was of Corney's imagination; and he left her with a feeling that he knew where a treasure lay. He walked with an enlargement of strut as he went home through the park, and swung his cane with the air of a man who had made a conquest of which he had ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... so imperious as in the American ships. They are divided into three (I think) probationary classes of "volunteers," instead of being at once advanced to a warrant. Nor will you fail to remark, when you see an English cutter officered by one of those volunteers, that the boy does not so strut and slap his dirk-hilt with a Bobadil air, and anticipatingly feel of the place where his warlike whiskers are going to be, and sputter out oaths so at the men, as is too often the case with the little boys wearing best-bower ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... straight lines; but before he turned the corner he glanced up and down the empty sidewalk in a quick, furtive fashion, and after he had swung into the side street a trifle of the steam seemed gone from his stiff-spined, hard-heeled gait. It ceased to be a strut; it ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... hung with beads. Here serpents dash their stings into my face, All tipped with fire; and there a wild bird drives His red-hot talons in my burning scalp. Here bees and beetles buzz about my ears Like crackling coals, and frogs strut up and down Like hissing cinders; wasps and waterflies Scorch deep ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... tuft on his head. They arrive at the water suddenly and unexpectedly from behind rocks and trees, and stand about considering; then one, more venturesome than the rest, runs quickly down to drink, and is followed by a string of others; then they run up again ever so fast, and strut about cooing and spreading their crests—one seldom sees them fly; when they do they rise straight up, and then dart away close to the ground and drop suddenly within a few yards. Of all birds the crow has most sound common sense; ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... it," she said slowly. "Perhaps that's why life is sometimes a huge joke and sometimes nothing but sadness and disillusionment. We play our little game of make-believe and strut around proudly, making ourselves, as well as others, think that we amount to something and then comes death, like a curtain; the footlights go out and where are we? Who thinks ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... they laugh and look Down upon the crowded square Where unto a bag-pipe's drone He- and she-bear strut ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... sir. He found him very useful for stealing pistols and cartridges, and fastening people in the cabins, but once he got all he wanted, though he made a fuss with him and encouraged him to strut about, and called him his lieutenant, he used to be always looking at him ugly-like, and I got to think that before long there would be ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... me medals, God give me loud honors, That I may strut before you, sweetheart, And be worthy of— The ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... that this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated. Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had "a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... with flexible opinions and liable to be swayed in any course. When he was at Flower De Hundred, living in the atmosphere of liberalists and republicans, he was one of the most outspoken of all. He would strut for hours before any one who would listen to his senseless twaddle and would harangue and discourse on the rights of ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... went, she danced and sang, and laughed out joyously at everything and at nothing, and talked the most fascinating nonsense—all in the role of "Cousin Burwell." She could imitate him to perfection; her strut and swagger and slang threw me into paroxysms of delight. We picked huckleberries, and dived into the woods to feast upon wild plums that had ten drops of syrupy juice between tough skins and flinty stones encased in the pulp of bitterness, and gathered handfuls of ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... boots, shall strut and shout, Keep my locks curled. The fame of my name shall go ringing about ...
— Country Sentiment • Robert Graves
... travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut about their streets, and—according to their light—they are not guilty of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen in an August day's walk ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... leave to match him, if they can; It's fun to see him strut about, and try to be a man! The gamest, cheeriest little chap, you'd ever want to see! And then they laugh, because I think the child resembles me. The little rogue! he goes for me, like robbers for their prey; He'll turn my pockets inside out, when ...
— Farm Ballads • Will Carleton
... heavy shadows of the trees at the far side of Undern Pool. The water looked cold and ghastly even on this golden day. She watched the wagtails strut magisterially, the moorhens with the worried air of overworked charwomen, all the mysterious evening life of a summer pool, but she had no smile for them to-day. The swallows slid and circled across the water; their silence was no longer intimate, but alien. She looked across at Undern. There ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... nuisance within, and not much better without, and the ground immediately around the premises a dirty place. The common pigeon is a pugnacious cavalier, warring apparently upon mere punctilio, as we have often seen, in the distant strut-and-coo of a stranger bird to his mate, even if she be the very incarnation of "rejected addresses." On all these accounts, we would locate—unless a small and select family of fancy birds, perhaps—the pigeon stock at the principal farm-yard, and in the ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... professors and generals stood about the farmers—led by the farmer-in-chief, morning-coated, carefully groomed, plainly nervous but sustained by the dignity of it all. His voice was firm; his manner that of a very circumspect bridegroom. The old smug strut and case-hardened pomp of legislature inaugurals was lacking. An undercurrent of deep sincerity stayed many a tremorous hand. Drury was the least nervous of all. I imagine that in the morning he had sung to himself some good old fortifying ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... dress in fine clothes and wear that horrible crown till it makes my head ache. Rabbits come to me with all sorts of troubles, when my own troubles are the only ones I care about. When I walk out I can't hop and run; I must strut on my rear legs and wear an ermine robe! And the soldiers salute me and the band plays and the other rabbits laugh and clap their paws and cry out: 'Hail to the King!' Now let me ask you, as a friend and a young lady of good judgment: isn't all this pomp ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... September murderers, whom" says an observer[33104] in a position to know them, "I can compare to nothing but lazy tigers licking their paws, growling and trying to find a few more drops of blood just spilled, awaiting a fresh supply." Far from hiding away they strut about and show themselves. One of them, Petit-Mamain, son of an innkeeper at Bordeaux and a former soldier, "with a pale, wrinkled face, sharp eyes and bold air, wearing a scimitar at his side and pistols at his belt," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... having ascertained that no one was near. As they left the gates of the house the rajah walked rapidly along, concealing his face in his robe, while Reginald swaggered on by his side with a martial strut assumed generally by the sowars. A large number of people were still abroad; and as they passed on they caught some of the expressions which were being uttered. It was very evident that a rebellion had taken place, and that the star ...
— The Young Rajah • W.H.G. Kingston
... well up to it as ever ye will be," he said. "Not that such mumming would have passed in our time. Harry as the Saracen should strut a bit more, and John needn't holler his inside out. Beyond that perhaps you'll do. Have you got all ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... Winslow complacently, "though I didn't have much to work with. Two small vials of my liquid and a hand generator to furnish the current. A tubular strut from the frame of the ship made ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... our viciousness grow hard, O, misery on't! the wise gods seal our eyes: In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut To our confusion." ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... with your sex when we compelled you to beauty, made you carry the topknots and the tail- feathers? Men propose marriage, women adorn themselves to listen. Let women choose their mates, and they might go as plain as peahens; and men would strut about, displaying ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... by Luther to the lessons he learned in childhood from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to trust in God, and to whom God also has given good ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... roses riot over an old stone wall, and the air is rich with the scent of them. At one end is a tall cypress-tree, and the sunlight touches the stem of it until it shines like fire against the green darkness of its boughs. On the worn old stone pavement white pigeons strut and preen themselves, puffing out their chests with the most absurd air of self-satisfaction. There are steps down from the terrace, and at the bottom there is a great bed of carnations, red and white and yellow, and their fragrance meets you ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... more delicate hue as they receded, till, far away, they looked like mottled glass. Only yesterday he had laughed with me, talked and smoked with me, and now he was dead. A rage pervaded me. We are puny things, we, who strut the highways of the world, parading a so-called wisdom. There is only one philosophy; it is to ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... appearance to the contrary being a bluff for success—effect. But now that I have been wisely and scrupulously and unscrupulously examined by the most exalted rulers of the Inner Temple, and they pronounce me all that man should be, why shouldn't I strut some? But, damn it, strutting brings that Devil's clutch—and a man cannot be anything more strutty than a dish-rag then. In William James you will find a questionnaire, "Why do I believe in immortality? 'Because I think I'm just about ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... unclasped his hands and let me slip from his knee; and then I began to strut the floor, my chest puffed out to twice ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... steep-pitched, curiously shaped roofs are covered with tiles of every color—peacock blue, vermilion, turquoise, emerald green, burnt orange; no inch of exposed woodwork has escaped the carver's cunning chisel; everywhere gold has been laid on with a spendthrift hand. And in this marvelous setting strut or stroll figures that might have stepped straight from the stage of Sumurun—fantastically garbed functionaries of the Household, shaven-headed priests in yellow robes, pompous mandarins in sweeping silken ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... life, he does not gape after things beyond it. Man, what do you wish to happen to you? I am satisfied if I desire and avoid conformably to nature, if I employ movements towards and from an object as I am by nature formed to do, and purpose and design and assent. Why then do you strut before us as if you had swallowed a spit? My wish has always been that those who meet me should admire me, and those who follow me should exclaim, O the great philosopher! Who are they by whom you wish to be admired? Are they not those ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... and certain of himself; a well-graced actor. It was presently suggested that he should appear in his war costume; he gracefully consented; and returned in that strange, inappropriate and ill- omened array (which very well became his handsome person) to strut in a circle of admirers, and be thenceforth the centre of photography. Thus had Moipu effected his introduction, as by accident, to the white strangers, made it a favour to display his finery, and reduced his rival to a secondary role on the theatre of the disputed village. ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... presented him with a piece of plate, with an inscription to commemorate this extraordinary instance of true worth; which should make some people in Scotland blush, while, though mean themselves, they strut about under the protection of great alliance, conscious of the wretchedness of numbers who have lost by them, to whom they never think of making reparation, but indulge themselves and their families in ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... fools, those wretched Beaux Tibbs's of society, who sport a lace dickey, and nothing besides,—the poor silly jays, who trail a peacock's feather behind them, and think to simulate the gorgeous bird whose nature it is to strut on palace-terraces, and to flaunt his magnificent fan-tail ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... then relieved from duty at the steering sweep, was less subtle of deduction. With his eye on Alexander, whose back was turned to him, he jauntily straightened his shoulders and gave his long mustache a twirl. Brent thought of the turkey-gobbler's strut as, with amused eyes, he watched the backwoods lady-killer. Jase had heard many of the old wives' tales of Alexander and thought of her as one, ambitious of amorous conquest, may think of a famous and much ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... the slope of his narrow shoulders. His dress was a long overcoat of mouse-coloured velvet slashed with gold, beneath which were high leather boots, which, with his little gold-laced, three-cornered hat, gave a military tinge to his appearance. In his gait and bearing he had a dainty strut and backward cock of the head, which, taken with his sharp black eyes, his high thin features, and his assured manner, would impress a stranger with the feeling that this was a man of power. And, indeed, in France or out of it there were few to whom this man's name was not familiar, for in all France ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... emperor certainly manifested great interest in Zurich. He has been represented no less than three times in various parts of the building. About midway up one of the towers, his statue appears in a niche, where pigeons strut and prink their feathers, undisturbed. Charlemagne is sitting with a mighty two-edged sword upon his knees, and a gilded crown upon his head; but the figure is badly proportioned, and the statue is a good-natured, stumpy affair, that makes one smile rather than admire. The outside ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... by bayonets is always repugnant, wherever it comes from, and under whatever name it may strut. It can have nothing in common with Socialism, which is not only a doctrine of economic necessity, but also a doctrine of superior justice ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... Tintint the Captain of the Sunrise Tribe. Tintint had a very pink skin and eyes so faded in their pink color that he squinted badly in order to see anything around him. He was a fat and pompous little fellow and loved to strut up and down his line of warriors twirling his long, pointed stick so that all might ...
— Sky Island - Being the further exciting adventures of Trot and Cap'n - Bill after their visit to the sea fairies • L. Frank Baum
... behind the Partridge and tried for a long time to learn to strut. At last the Partridge turned around and asked the Crow ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... "cut cut cut." The rooster he goes "cock a doodle doo! You want me and I want you, But I'm up here and you're down there." The little hen goes "cut cut cut," The rooster he steps with a funny little strut, He cocks his eye, gives a funny little sound, He looks at the hen, he looks all around, He flaps his wings, he beats the air, He stretches his neck, then flies to the ground. "Cock a doodle, cock a doodle, cock a doodle doo! Now you have ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... said, and wagged his head, looking like a solemn owl. "Too bad. Dictator Stutsman won't have a chance to strut his stuff." ...
— Empire • Clifford Donald Simak
... head erect, he paced three or four times round the company, saying, in a loud voice :—"God preserve you, good people." Then taking the habit off indignantly, he threw it from him with contempt, and, turning to Elias, "That is the way," he said, "that the bastard brethren of our Order will strut." After this he resumed his usual demeanor and walked humbly with his old and tattered habit, saying:—"Such is the deportment of the true Friars Minor." Then, seating himself amongst them, he addressed them in the mildest manner, and spoke on poverty and humility, of which he so forcibly ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... will walk upright, and strut with fine canes, Stalking in towns, 'stead of roaming in lanes, Misfortunes they'll meet with, no doubt, such as Jack's, Getting shots through their ears, ...
— Surprising Stories about the Mouse and Her Sons, and the Funny Pigs. - With Laughable Colored Engravings • Unknown
... but never can I forget the agony of the next few minutes. That hat, that face, those flat black feet, that strut, that smile. I felt a sob of laughter beginning somewhere about my waist-belt, and yet my heart ached with fear for Dennis. Oh, if only His Magnificence would move a little quicker, and let us have ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... you might say, and Dr. McCurdy, poor man, was very polite, but not cheerful. If we had known then what he had been yelling in the woods, we should have understood better why Captain Markley seemed to pluck up and strut at ...
— A British Islander - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... In their religious convictions they were peaceable and unobtrusive, never arming themselves with Scriptural texts in order to carry on offensive operations. Never being perplexed by doubt, they desired no one to corroborate their faith, and no inducement could persuade them to strut about in the garb of piety in order to attract respect. The reverence for the Creator was in the heart, rather than upon the lips. In that land papists and protestants lived together in charity and brotherhood, earnest and devoted in their churches, and in ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... remarkable for the brilliancy of their plumage, not only is this brilliancy most remarkable during the pairing season, but at this season also the male birds take elaborate pains to display their charms before the females. Then it is that the peacock erects his tail to strut round and round the hens, taking care always to present to them a front view, where the coloration is most gorgeous. And the same is true of all other gaily coloured male birds. During the pairing ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... spleen, removes the qualmish fit, And gives a brisker turn to female wit, Warms in the nose, refreshes like the breeze, Glows in the herd and tickles in the sneeze. Without it, Tinsel, what would be thy lot! What, but to strut neglected and forgot! What boots it for thee to have dipt thy hand In odors wafted from Arabian land? Ah! what avails thy scented solitaire, Thy careless swing and pertly tripping air, The crimson wash that glows upon thy face, Thy modish hat, and coat that flames with lace! In vain ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... an all-seeing Providence, was suddenly cut short. He fought against his disease (small pox) with that rashness that had been his ruling spirit through life, and thus ingloriously terminated his days. The pride of this man was to strut through the Mexican towns and gloat over his many crimes. To the gazing crowd, he would point out the trophies of his murders, which he never failed to have about him. To his fringed leggins were attached the phalanges (or finger bones) ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... hills; A Tyrian light the village fills; A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn; A print of a vermilion foot; A purple finger on the slope; A flippant fly upon the pane; A spider at his trade again; An added strut in chanticleer; A flower expected everywhere; An axe shrill singing in the woods; Fern-odors on untravelled roads, — All this, and more I cannot tell, A furtive look you know as well, And Nicodemus' ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... of the Koran is unlawful, but it is being printed. All pictures of living objects are unlawful, but the Sultan is photographed, Abd el Kader is photographed, the "Sheikh ul Islam" is photographed. European shoes are unlawful because sewed with a swine's bristle, but Moslem Muftis strut about the streets in French gaiters, and the women of their harems tottle about in the most absurd ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... paying the bath, I detained him for the purpose of surveying myself, arranging my curls to twist up behind the ear, and pulling my moustaches up towards my eyes. I then paid him handsomely, and leaving my old clothes under his charge, I made my exit with the strut of a man ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... arbitrary and cruel Creator who inflicts pain and pleasure at will then disappears from the stage; and it is well, for he is indeed an unnecessary character, and, worse still, is a mere creature of straw, who cannot even strut upon the boards without being upheld on all sides by dogmatists. Man comes into this world, surely, on the same principle that he lives in one city of the earth or another; at all events, if it is too much to say that this is so, one may safely ask, ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... falls; or he is maimed and hobbles off toward a pension or beggary—both tolerable things; anyway he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a Belgian—which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut like a Greek of Thermopylae—and become thus a permanent part of the world's ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of course, mother will be along there, but she will serve ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... piper strut upon the gravelled walk beside the bridgegate, we saw Argile himself come out to meet ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... swim," Turkey Proudfoot cried from his tree, as soon as the geese were out of hearing. "I don't want them about the farmyard. I haven't time to bother with them. Besides, they're so stupid that I never could teach them anything. I walked ahead of them, across the farmyard, to show them the stylish strut. But they couldn't learn it. They'll waddle to the end ...
— The Tale of Turkey Proudfoot - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... how to strut, too! It's all on the cards that the Queen Will ask him to Buckingham Palace, to say what he's done and he's seen. Victoria's fond of her soldiers: and she's got a nose for a fight. If Tom tells a cleverish story—there is such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the lover. There's nothing in the pockets, and that's very interesting, for that's half of an unfortunate attachment. And here we have the nut-cracker's boots, with spurs to them. Row, dow, dow! how they can stamp and strut! They shall represent the unwelcome wooer, whom the lady does not like. What kind of a play will you have now? Shall it be a tragedy, or a ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... hen goes "cut cut cut." The rooster he goes "cock a doodle doo! You want me and I want you, But I'm up here and you're down there." The little hen goes "cut cut cut," The rooster he steps with a funny little strut, He cocks his eye, gives a funny little sound, He looks at the hen, he looks all around, He flaps his wings, he beats the air, He stretches his neck, then flies to the ground. "Cock a doodle, cock a doodle, cock a doodle doo! Now you have ...
— Here and Now Story Book - Two- to seven-year-olds • Lucy Sprague Mitchell
... He was not trying out a business venture so much as he was trying out himself. Previously he had always figured success and failure as his performance reacted on his audience. He was learning that one could impress a stupendous crowd and really fail, or strut upon the boards of an empty playhouse and still succeed. He began to realize just what was meant by the term self-esteem—how hard and uncompromising and exacting it was. To disappoint another was a humiliation; to disappoint oneself ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... Cat smiles all over her face. Peace restored, Dimples and the Owlet remember a dead lizard they found in a corner of the verandah, and set off to recover it. These two walk exactly like mechanical toys; and as they strut along hand in hand, or one after the other, they look like something wound up and going, in a Christmas shop window. Presently they return with the lizard. Its tail is loose, and they sit down to pull it off. This is not a nice game, and something else is suggested. Dimple's ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... famed Cassibelan, who was once at point (O giglot fortune!) to master Caesar's sword, Made Lud's town with rejoicing fires bright, And Britons strut with courage." ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... have much to remember in after years. You can never become a commonplace woman now and there are such a lot of 'em in the world. When I remember all you have done for us it makes me ill to think of some in our town—giggling, silly little flirts, with no higher ambition than to strut down the street ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... prepare for instant siege set all the young fire-eaters of our Habitation working like beavers to complete the French fort. The marquis took a hand at squaring timbers shoulder to shoulder with Allemand, the pilot; and La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, forgot to strut while digging up earthworks for a parapet. The leaven of the New World was working. Honour was for him only whose brawn won the place; and our young fellows of the birth and the pride were keenest to gird for the ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... took myself off to the anteroom to go to bed, she came out after me, stopped on the threshold, and said loudly, whilst her unsightly figure seemed to strut out towards me: ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun
... I found that I had risen to the dignity of Sergeant, and carried my Halberd with an assured strut and swagger, nobody dreaming that I was a wild Irish girl from the Wicklow Mountains. I might have risen, in time, to a commission and the Cross of St. Louis; but the piping times of peace turned all such brave grapes sour. I was glad enough, when the alternative ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... his own, feeling the pulse as if merely caressing the slender wrist. Then he began to describe his bailiff's cottage, with woodbine round the porch, the farm-yard, the bee-hives, the pretty duck-pond with an osier island, and the great China gander who had a pompous strut, which made him the droll est creature possible. And Sophy should go there in a day or two, and be as happy as one of the bees, but not so busy. Sophy listened very earnestly, very gravely, and then sliding her hand from the Mayor, caught hold of her ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... John's pockets are an integral part of his personality. He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what corresponds in the genus homo with the polywog state in batrachia. The incipient man begins to strut as soon as mamma puts pockets into his kilted skirt—a stride as prophetic as the strangled crow of the cockerel upon the lowest bar ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... the instrument which sustains the tension of the strings, which in full to large-sized pianos is not less than from six to twelve tons, and it is a matter of prime necessity that the portions which serve as a strut or stretcher between the ends of the strings, and which are to resist this enormous pull, must be made correspondingly strong and rigid, since by any gradual yielding under the pull of the strings, ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... father, upon whose middle age it came as a monstrous iron innovation. The locomotive is one of the wonders of modern childhood. Children crowd upon a bridge to see the train pass beneath. Little boys strut along the streets puffing and whistling in imitation of the engine. All that romance, silly as it looks, becomes sacred in afterlife. Besides, when it is not underground in a foul London tunnel, a train is a beautiful thing. ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... alone ought to be made responsible for the money. And lastly, she loathed and condemned him for the reason that he was so obviously unequal to the situation. He could not handle it. He was found out. He was disproved, He did not know what to do. He could only mouth, strut, bully, and make rude noises. He could not even keep decently around him the cloak of self-importance. He stood revealed to Mrs. Maldon and Rachel as he had sometimes stood revealed to his dead wife and to his elder children ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... tried to get somethin' out o' Quassy. Lordy massy! you might as well 'a' tried to get it out an old tom-turkey, that'll strut and gobble and quitter, and drag his wings on the ground, and fly at you, but won't say nothin'. Quassy she screeched her queer sort o' laugh; and she told 'em that they was a makin' fools o' themselves, and that the cap'n's ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed—but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... work was Tamburlaine the Great, in two parts; printed in 1590, but written before 1588. In this work, what Ben Jonson describes as "Marlowe's mighty line" is out in all its mightiness. The lines, to be sure, have a vast amount of strut and swell in them, but then they also have a good deal of real energy and force. Marlowe has had much praise, perhaps more than his due, as the introducer of blank-verse on the public stage; it being alleged ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... friends, for he cries out against him for his house and yard and God knows what. For my part, I do hope, when all is done, that my following my business will keep me secure against all their envys. But to see how the old man do strut, and swear that he understands all his duty as easily as crack a nut, and easier, he told my Lord Chancellor, for his teeth are gone; and that he understands it as well as any man in England; and that he will never leave to record that he should be ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... where to stop. The starting-point was easy. Curiosity began by asking, Why the deuce, Albert Pride was so carefully hiding himself away in the city of Mexico? He must be a fellow-countryman; because an Englishman, no matter how branded at home, by fraud or dishonor, could boldly strut about New-Orleans or New-York, without submitting to voluntary self-imprisonment in the city of Mexico. Was he a fraudulent merchant, or a bank-defaulter? Good heavens! such gentlemen generally ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that the annals of Theology are false, and her record of Time a fable; that the Deluge, for instance, is an old wives' story, and the economy of times and seasons a human fabrication:—when Astronomical and Mechanical Science strut up to the Throne whereon sits the Ancient of Days,—prate to Him, (the first Author of Law,) about the "supremacy of Law,"—and tell Him to His face that His miracles are things impossible:—when Physiology insinuates that Mankind cannot be descended from one primval pair; ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... disappoint those who would extract daily profit from Me in the form of miracles, when I lay bare the carefully-concealed thoughts of their hearts, then I am hard. And when I shatter their childish love of the world, their craving for vanities, then I am hard. And when they strut about with their condemnations and their hard-heartedness, trampling the weak underfoot out of greed and malice, haughty as the heathens who bring human sacrifices to their gods, I would fain chastise them with a lash of scorpions. ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... be told that this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated. Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had "a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; and again, that one might ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... towards heaven, intersecting the territory of the clouds—all standing as mighty living monuments, of the industry, enterprise, and intelligence of the white man. And yet, with all these living truths, rebuking us with scorn, we strut about, place our hands akimbo, straighten up ourselves to our greatest height, and talk loudly about being "as good as any body." How do we compare with them? Our fathers are their coachmen, our brothers their cookmen, and ...
— The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States • Martin R. Delany
... amang farmers I hae muckle pride, But I mauna speak high when I 'm tellin' o't, How brawlie I strut on my shelty to ride, Wi' a sample to shew for the sellin' o't. In blue worset boots that my auld mither span, I 've aft been fu' vanty sin' I was a man, But now they 're flung by, and I 've bought cordivan, And my wifie ne'er ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... up with that sunshiny face that never stayed clouded long, and chuckled softly. "Judson's on the crest right now. Oh, let him ride. He's doomed, so let him have his little strut. He comes to me a few days backward into the gone on, and says, says he, important and commercial like, 'O'mie, I shall not need you any more. I've got a person to take your place.' 'All right,' I responds, respectful, ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... you ruler of all India!" she said. "Another may wear the baubles, but thou shalt be the true king, even as thy name is! And behind thee, me, Yasmini, whispering wisdom and laughing to see the politicians strut!" ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... whose promise poisons trust, Would cast a shieldless soldier forth to death And wreck three realms to sate his rancorous lust With ruin of them who have weighed and found him dust. Get thee to Wales: there strut in speech and swell: And thence betimes God speed thee safe ...
— Locrine - A Tragedy • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... thrust his hands into his pockets, ignored the presence of the middy, and with something of a strut marched up to the two marines in the gangway, whistling softly the while, gave each a friendly nod, examined their grounded arms and their stiff uniform with its abundant pipe-clay, and ended by spreading his legs a little, swinging himself ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn
... men. They set their minds on worldly glory, and spent their money on extravagant dress. "The men," said he, "wear capes reaching down to the ground, and their long hair falls down to their shoulders; and the women wear so many petticoats that they can hardly drag themselves along, and strut about like the Pope's courtezans, to the surprise and disgust of the whole world." What right had these selfish fops to call themselves Christians? They did more harm to the cause of Christ than all the Turks and heathens ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... the earlier Palissy models; and crowd the rough cobble-paved courtyard with a rare and distinguished assemblage of flamingoes, peacocks, herons, cockatoos swinging from gabled windows, and game-cocks that strut about in company with pink doves—and you have the famous inn of ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... swooped. With a hoarse croak it lit on the snow at a wary distance, and began to strut back and forth. Presently, its suspicions at rest, the raven advanced, and with eager beak began its dreadful meal. By this time another, which had seen the first one's swoop, was in view through the ether; then another; then another. In ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... the rare arch-poet, Jonson, died, The sock grew loathsome, and the buskin's pride, Together with the stage's glory, stood Each like a poor and pitied widowhood. The cirque profan'd was, and all postures rack'd; For men did strut, and stride, and stare, not act. Then temper flew from words, and men did squeak, Look red, and blow, and bluster, but not speak; No holy rage or frantic fires did stir Or flash about the spacious theatre. No clap of hands, ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... views near Horne is at Outwood, a little more than a mile to the north-west, on the way back to Horley. Outwood Common is delightful. Two great windmills, black and white, spread sails to the blowing air; below them, black and white like the mills, pigs nose quietly over the short grass, and geese strut cackling. To the north, beyond rich and tranquil fields, lie the grey-green wooded ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... their visitors, gazed with admiring eyes at every motion of his grandfather. To one who had from earliest infancy looked up to him with reverence, there was nothing ridiculous in the display, in the strut, in all that to other eyes too evidently revealed the vanity of the piper: Malcolm regarded it all only as making up the orthodox mode of playing the pipes. It was indeed well that he could not see the expression upon the faces of those ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... worshipped fetishes; and even as thus called already civilized, they sacrificed men to gods,—could our great pro-slavers know all this, they would be more decent in their ignorant assertions, and not, so self-satisfied, strut ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski
... men debate peace who understand neither its nature nor the way in which we may attain it with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the Nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... him, smiling and wagging his tail, and reported all well. The other dog was only a small pup, a Skye terrier, like a bunch of tow, a present from Tommy Traddles. Pup's early days were made very miserable by Maggie, the magpie. That wicked bird used to strut around Philip while he was digging in the garden, and after filling her crop with worms and grubs, she flapped away on one wing and went round the hut looking for amusement. She jumped on Pup's back, scratched him with her claws, pecked at his skull, and pulled locks of wool out ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... proud that you are born an Irishman. My father is Irish, and if you want to see him get up and strut give him a teeny opening to enlarge on his race. He says that if the Irish had decent territory they'd lead the world. He says they've always been handicapped by lack of space and of fertile soil. He says if Ireland had been as big and fertile as Indiana, why, ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... obsequious attention of college servants, and the more unwilling "capping" of the under-graduates, to such a man are real luxuries, and the relish with which he enjoys them is deep and strong. And if he have but the luck to immortalize himself by holding some University office, to strut through his year of misrule as proctor, or even as his humble "pro," then does he at once emerge from the obscurity of the family annals a being of a higher sphere. And when there comes up to commemoration a waddling old lady, and two thin sticks of virginity, who horrify the college ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... to the footlights with the greatest possible strut.> Both Leaders: King Solomon he had ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... starts—as if he had taken her by surprise. Observe her hand rising suddenly to her wicked little heart. This is the moment when I stir my coffee violently. He gazes down at her in such rapture that he is in everybody's way, and as she takes his arm she gives it a little squeeze, and then away they strut, Mary doing nine-tenths of the talking. I fall to wondering what they will look ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... at various points. Several crows are walking about a newly sowed wheat-field we pass through, and we pause to note their graceful movements and glossy coats. I have seen no bird walk the ground with just the same air the crow does. It is not exactly pride; there is no strut or swagger in it, though perhaps just a little condescension; it is the contented, complaisant, and self-possessed gait of a lord over his domains. All these acres are mine, he says, and all these crops; men plow and sow for me, and I stay here or go there, ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... ashore, and ran and offered to carry their carpet-bags or portmanteaus; but some growled at me, and others laughed at me, and one old gentleman asked me if I thought he was a North American Indian to strut up Broadway with a female behind him carrying his pack. And so, sir, while all the ragged boys I knew could get little jobs to earn bread, I, because I was a girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman's parcel ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... smart publicans, smart politicians, smart women, smart scoundrels! Greatness became commonplace here, and Mr. Douglas might drink at Willard's Bar, with none so poor to do him reverence, or General Winfield Scott strut like a colossus along "the Avenue," and the sleepy negroes upon their backs would give him the attention of only one eye. It was interesting, to notice how rapidly provincial eminence lost caste here. Slipkins, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... reference by Luther to the lessons he learned in childhood from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to trust in God, and to whom God also has given good ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... feathers, and awaken the just ridicule of the peacocks; in which, while every justice is done to the peacocks themselves, the splendour of their plumage, the gorgeousness of their dazzling necks, and the magnificence of their tails, exception will yet be taken to the absurdity of their rickety strut, and the foolish discord of their pert squeaking; in which lions in love will have their claws pared by sly virgins; in which rogues will sometimes triumph, and honest folks, let us hope, come by their own; in which there will be black crape and ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Kirkwood's pocket, all right enough. By George, can you beat it! And here's another thing. A man hates to talk against his own flesh and blood; and you may think I'm not in a position to strut around virtuously and talk about other people's sins; but I guess I've got some sense of honor left. I've never stolen any money. I did run off with another man's wife, and I got my pay for that. That was in the ardor of youth, Waterman; ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... half spread his wing, suh He try ter look young, but he wuz ol' suh— He try ter strut an' walk wid a swing, suh; He wuz dreamin' 'bout dat pot er gol', suh, An' what he wuz gwine ...
— Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit • Joel Chandler Harris
... One nymph, to whom fat Sir John Falstaff's lean, 10 There with her single person fills the scene. Another, with long use and age decay'd, Dived here old woman, and rose there a maid. Our trusty doorkeepers of former time There strut and swagger in heroic rhyme. Tack but a copper-lace to drugget suit, And there's a hero made without dispute: And that, which was a capon's tail before, Becomes a plume for Indian emperor. But all his subjects, to express the care 20 Of imitation, go, like Indians, bare: Laced linen there would be ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... away, where, after laying aside his female attire, and being snugly dressed up in a straight collared coat, and pantaloons to match, was again put on the right road towards Canada. Two weeks after this found him in the town of St. Catharines, working on the farm of Colonel Strut, and attending a ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... always growling, always shuffling, who is like this spider—look!—a tiny body and huge, hairy legs—pull her legs, the Colonies, off, and leave her little English body, all shriveled and shrunk alone, and I should like to know what size she would be then, and how she would manage to swell and to strut?" ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... an enmity as is allotted by nature to wolves and lambs, [so great a one] have I to you, you that are galled at your back with Spanish cords, and on your legs with the hard fetter. Though, purse-proud with your riches, you strut along, yet fortune does not alter your birth. Do you not observe while you are stalking along the sacred way with a robe twice three ells long, how the most open indignation of those that pass and repass turns their looks on thee? This fellow, [say they,] cut with the ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... I see a distinct difference in their walk from that of the others, don't you, Natalie? They seem to be saying 'We were invited—and by this splendiferous creature at our side!' See how they strut! And look at the soldierless ones, how timidly they go—just as if they had found their tickets in the street, or had crept in through the basement windows. 'Please, kind Mr. Soldier-man, let us stay and see the show. We'll ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... coarse work is generally left for the apprentice. Everything coarse, be it a block, a wedge, or a blade, passes as unfinished, as raw, jagged, and just the reverse of cutting. No one is proud of a coarse shirt, but many, even quite distinguished people, proudly strut about the streets in a coarse smock of abusive language, quite unconcernedly, without any ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... past, but it will rob them of any effect of reality. The whole of their history becomes more and more foreign, more and more like some queer barbaric drama played in a forgotten tongue. There they strut through their weird metamorphoses of caricature, those premiers and presidents, their height preposterously exaggerated by political buskins, their faces covered by great resonant inhuman masks, their voices couched in the foolish idiom of public utterance, disguised beyond any semblance ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... iron, or any other material is used for a pillar or strut, it has not only to resist a crushing force, but also a force tending to bend or bulge ...
— Instructions on Modern American Bridge Building • G. B. N. Tower
... nixies of Dreamland play on us while we sleep! Methinks "they are jesters at the Court of Heaven." They frequently take the shape of daily themes to mock me; they strut about on the stage of Sleep like foolish virgins, only they carry well-trimmed note-books in their hands instead of empty lamps. At other times they examine and cross-examine me in all the studies I have ever had, and invariably ask me questions as easy to answer as this: "What was the ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... the story-teller as a good fellow standing at a great window overlooking a busy street or a picturesque square, and reporting with gusto to the comrade in the rear of the room what of mirth or sadness he sees; he hints at the policeman's strut, the organ-grinder's shrug, the schoolgirl's gaiety, with a gesture or two which is born of an irresistible impulse to imitate; but he never leaves his fascinating post to carry the imitation ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... notion we'd come out somewhere closer to Kadiak town; and maybe we'd run across some native who would take us in. But there doesn't seem to be any game except once in a while a ptarmigan—those mountain grouse that strut and crow around here on the snow, and aren't big enough to waste rifle ammunition on. Maybe it's safer to go back to our camp and wait for a month or so more at least. What do you ...
— The Young Alaskans • Emerson Hough
... Partridge and tried for a long time to learn to strut. At last the Partridge turned around and asked the Crow what ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... the shaft. One end of the assembled framework of aluminum alloy dragged loosely on the ground; the other end swung out and projected above the shaft, swayed for an instant—and then came the first direct knowledge of the enemy's presence. The end of a metal strut, though nothing visible was touching it, grew suddenly white hot, sagged, then broke into a shower of molten, dazzling drops that rained down into ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... of place, but city pigeons are as much at home as anybody else. There are few houses so small that there is not room somewhere for a pigeon-box, and there are no roofs or yards so humble that the handsomest and proudest "pouters" and "tumblers" and "fan-tails" will not willingly come and strut and coo about them as long as they receive good treatment ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... his face salved and puffed at the apothecary's to conceal his muddy complexion, he was reckoned, in the Mercato Nuovo, as little better than an ill-conditioned braggadoccio! His shortness of stature he sought to atone for by his accentuation of the Florentine pout and the Tuscan strut—he was well known, too, for his contemptuous jokes at the expense ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... ubiquitous emperor certainly manifested great interest in Zurich. He has been represented no less than three times in various parts of the building. About midway up one of the towers, his statue appears in a niche, where pigeons strut and prink their feathers, undisturbed. Charlemagne is sitting with a mighty two-edged sword upon his knees, and a gilded crown upon his head; but the figure is badly proportioned, and the statue is a good-natured, stumpy ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with what in one of our race would have been tenderness. Cheschapah had been secretly ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... who wishes to give up his life for his master he, too, had the stately walk, or strut, of a minister. The character of the newspaper writer was performed by the same Mr. Palmer who acted the part of the Nabob, but every one said, what I thought, that he made him far too much of a gentleman. His person, and his dress also, were ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... cowboy-like strut as she made this assertion, shaking her head in a bronco gesture which dashed the dark hair from her eyes and made her look like an unbroken thoroughbred. Never in all his life, even in the magazine pictures of stage beauties which form a conspicuous mural decoration in those parts, had Creede ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... do thy best. But now the senate (if things hit, And thou at Stockbridge[4] wert not bit) Must feel thy eloquence and fire, Approve thy schemes, thy wit admire, Thee with immortal honours crown, While, patriot-like, thou'lt strut and frown. What though by enemies 'tis said, The laurel, which adorns thy head, Must one day come in competition, By virtue of some sly petition: Yet mum for that; hope still the best, Nor let such cares disturb thy rest. Methinks ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... was expected. The Little Lady surrendered to Arnaux and the Available Lady to the Big Blue. Two nests were begun and everything shaped for a "lived happily ever after." But the Big Blue was very big and handsome. He could blow out his crop and strut in the sun and make rainbows all round his neck in a way that might turn the heart of the ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... 'tis true, Though they be old, the thing is something new; Each new, quite new—(except some ancient tricks), New white-sticks, gold-sticks, broom-sticks, all new sticks! With vests or ribbons, deck'd alike in hue, New troopers strut, new turncoats blush in blue; So saith the muse! my ——, what say you? Such was the time when Waltz might best maintain Her new preferments in this novel reign; Such was the time, nor ever yet was such: Hoops are no more, and petticoats ...
— English Satires • Various
... Grizel came up the path on that bright afternoon, she could no more have helped strutting than the bud to open on the appointed day. She was obeying one of Nature's laws. I think I promised long ago to tell you of the day when Grizel would strut no more. Well, this is the day. Observe her strutting for the last time. It was very strange and touching to her to remember in the after years that she had once strutted, but it was still more strange ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... feasible," Mr. Dick said in a relieved voice, getting up and beginning to strut up and down the room. "It isn't as though I'm beyond call. You can come out here and consult me if you get stuck. And then there's Minnie; she knows a good bit ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... about her—in her gait, despite its limp, in her pose, her figure—there was something masterful, something dominating, something tremendously proud. Considering her sparseness of bulk she had a most astoundingly big strong voice, and in the voice as in the strut was arrogant pride. ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... vigorously. A tuft of green leaves waved upon his crest, a larger tuft of brakes made an umbrageous tail, and a shawl of many colours formed his flapping wings. A truly noble bird, whose legs had the genuine strut, whose eyes shone watchfully, and whose voice had a ring that evidently struck terror into the catterpillar's soul, if it was a catterpillar. He squirmed, he wriggled, he humped as fast as he could, trying to escape; but all in vain. The ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... but be conscious by comparison; the intellectual difference, which in other cases of comparison of characters, is often a matter of undecided contest, being as clear in his case as the superiority of stature in some men above others. Johnson did not strut or stand on tip-toe: He only did not stoop. From his earliest years his superiority was perceived and acknowledged[152]. He was from the beginning [Greek: anax andron], a king of men. His schoolfellow, Mr. Hector, has obligingly furnished me with ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... radiant beauties, and accomplish'd beaus, At once confounded into sober sense, He feels his pristine insignificance: And blinking, blund'ring, from the general quiz Retreats, "to ponder on the thing he is." By pride inflated, and by praise allured, Small Authors thus strut forth, and thus get cured; But, Critics, hear I an angel pleads for me, ...
— Poems (1828) • Thomas Gent
... others of his own sex, there is apt to be something too much of the magnifico in his demeanour. If people grow presuming and self-important over such matters as a dukedom or the Holy See, they will scarcely support the dizziest elevation in life without some suspicion of a strut; and the dizziest elevation is to love and be loved in return. Consequently, accepted lovers are a trifle condescending in their address to other men. An overweening sense of the passion and importance of life hardly conduces to simplicity of manner. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... strut, vapour, and swagger as thou dost; but why offended at this? Oh, but he has been a naughty man, and I have been righteous! sayst thou. Well, Pharisee, well, his naughtiness shall not be laid to thy charge, if thou hast chosen none of his ways. But since thou wilt yet bear me down that thou ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... period are full of the high-flown titles and affected phraseology which was so beloved of Byzantine scribes. "Glorious Dukes of the Thebaid," "most magnificent counts and lieutenants," "all-praiseworthy secretaries," and the like strut across the pages of the letters and documents which begin "In the name of Our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, the God and Saviour of us all, in the year x of the reign of the most divine and praised, great, and beneficent Lord Flavius Heraclius (or other) the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, And Assyria In The Light Of Recent Discovery • L.W. King and H.R. Hall
... Jerry went at once at their grinding, and by two o'clock all was in readiness. Every rod and strut and bolt and screw was in place, tight as a drum. The nickel and brass of the bearings flashed in the sun; the Skyrocket looked fit as a fiddle. There was still a little gasoline in the gallon can that they had been using for testing the ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Air on Lost Island • Gordon Stuart
... not precisely English—-nor will we insult a great nation by calling them Kickapoo; perhaps they are Channingese. We may convey some general idea of them by two foreign terms not in common use—-the Italian pavoneggiarsi, "to strut like a peacock," and the German word for "sky-rocketing," Schwarmerei. They are more preposterous, in a word, than any poems except those of the author of "Sam Patch;" for we presume we are right (are we not?) in taking it for granted that the author of "Sam Patch" is the very worst ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... the different cut of a coat. It was a silk bag, in which the hair was tied, an old sword, and a dangling pair of ruffles; which none of them suited with the poverty of the dress, and meagre appearance, of a person who seemed to strut and value himself upon such ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... enim seria agit et praecepta pleno effundit penu, ad quae componere vitarn oporteat; in sententiis quanta gravitas, orationis quanta vis, quam probe et meditate cum hominum ingenia moresque novisse omnia testantur." We feel sure that our Umbrian fun-maker would strut in public and laugh in private, could he hear such an encomium of his lofty moral aims. For it is our ultimate purpose to prove that fun-maker Plautus was primarily and well-nigh ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • Wilton Wallace Blancke
... around and raising a little shower-bath. Like many a foolish fellow, I found it easier to get into than out of a difficulty. I had not yet led my command into action, and, remembering that one must "strut" one's little part to the best advantage, sat my horse with all the composure I could muster. A provident camel, on the eve of a desert journey, would not have laid in a greater supply of water than did my thoughtless beast. At last he raised his head, looked placidly around, turned, and walked ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with what in one of our race ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... You haue beene a boggeler euer, But when we in our viciousnesse grow hard (Oh misery on't) the wise Gods seele our eyes In our owne filth, drop our cleare iudgements, make vs Adore our errors, laugh at's while we strut ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... time before the colonel; for he mended not his pace any more than a Spaniard. To say truth, I believe it was not in his power: for he had so long accustomed himself to one and the same strut, that as a horse, used always to trotting, can scarce be forced into a gallop, so could no passion force the colonel ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... carry'd two or three of their best Towns, the Nation dispirited, and Credit sunk, and nothing but a dismal Scene of Poverty and Misery: And yet in the midst of all this Misery, (as the Spanish Beggars are said to strut about in their Cloak and Bilboes at their Side) so this Gasping Monarch had the Assurance not only to talk of making a Descent, but actually equipp'd a small nimble Fleet with a Body of Men, and persuaded the Pretender to go upon the foolish Errand, as if he you'd have any prospect ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... their lives a shadow of degradation and ridicule clings to them; both their wives and their company must be taken from beneath them. They talk no longer of going out into the world and making their way; they used to strut arrogantly before the old folk and demand free play for their youth, but now they go meekly in harness with hanging heads, and blink shamefacedly at the mention of their one heroic deed. And those who cannot ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... would separate from the pack, and running out to some distance, would leap upon a rock that was there; then, after dropping his wings, flirting with his spread tail, erecting the ruff upon his neck, and throwing back his head, he would swell and strut upon the rock, exhibiting himself like a diminutive turkey-cock. After manoeuvring in this way for a few moments, he would commence flapping his wings in short quick strokes, which grew more rapid as he proceeded, until a 'booming' sound was produced, more like ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... fellow. He fancied he was the handsomest creature in existence and looked down with contempt on all the other kinds of wolves. He used to go to the side of the clear transparent lake, where he could see his shadow reflected in the water, and he would strut up and down and say: 'O dear, what a lovely creature ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... the wing-strut which he had been setting in place, Tom faced the window just in time to see a swarthy-looking countenance, adorned with a toothbrush-like mustache, pulled out of range. The mechanic had been informed of Bob's experience with the man who had ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... yon bird strut by, Thus proud of his array; But human friends we may espy As foolish ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... Tom; "I flatter myself I shall know how to strut about the quarter-deck and order the men here and there as well ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... face. That smile, alas! gave the last touch of exasperation to the watching Cads. To stand still and behold the line vanishing into space had been in itself an ordeal, but Harry's lordly air, his strut, his smile—these were beyond their endurance! With a rallying shout of battle they plunged forward, grabbed at the ascending cord, hung for a dizzy moment suspended on its length, then with a final cheer felt it snap in twain and ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the hills; A Tyrian light the village fills; A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn; A print of a vermilion foot; A purple finger on the slope; A flippant fly upon the pane; A spider at his trade again; An added strut in chanticleer; A flower expected everywhere; An axe shrill singing in the woods; Fern-odors on untravelled roads, — All this, and more I cannot tell, A furtive look you know as well, And Nicodemus' mystery Receives its ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... head, Removes the spleen, removes the qualmish fit, And gives a brisker turn to female wit, Warms in the nose, refreshes like the breeze, Glows in the herd and tickles in the sneeze. Without it, Tinsel, what would be thy lot! What, but to strut neglected and forgot! What boots it for thee to have dipt thy hand In odors wafted from Arabian land? Ah! what avails thy scented solitaire, Thy careless swing and pertly tripping air, The crimson wash that glows upon thy face, Thy modish hat, and coat that ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... his muddy complexion, he was reckoned, in the Mercato Nuovo, as little better than an ill-conditioned braggadoccio! His shortness of stature he sought to atone for by his accentuation of the Florentine pout and the Tuscan strut—he was well known, too, for his contemptuous jokes at the ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley
... than a mile to the north-west, on the way back to Horley. Outwood Common is delightful. Two great windmills, black and white, spread sails to the blowing air; below them, black and white like the mills, pigs nose quietly over the short grass, and geese strut cackling. To the north, beyond rich and tranquil fields, lie the grey-green wooded hills by Bletchingley ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... maimed and hobbles off toward a pension or beggary—both tolerable things; anyway he has drunk deep of cruelty and terror and may go his way. By rare good grace he may have been a hero. In other words, he may have been a Belgian—which is a word like a decoration, a name to make one strut like a Greek of Thermopylae—and become thus a permanent part of the world's ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... way wid ole Brer Lion, all de yuther creeturs say he sholy is a mighty man, en dey treat 'im good. Dis make 'im feel so proud dat he bleedz ter show it, en so he strut 'roun' like a boy when he git his fust ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... backyard becomes voluptuous with pomegranate and almond trees, lemon groves, and hedges of flowering cactus, dazzling banks of azaleas, marble- basined fountains, in which chestnut-and-white pond-herons step daintily amid exotic water-lilies, while golden pheasants strut about on alabaster terraces. The whole effect rather suggests the idea that Providence and Norman Wilkinson have dropped mutual jealousies and collaborated to produce a background for an open-air Russian Ballet; in point of fact, it is merely the background to your luncheon party. ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... to be outdone in generosity, offers his life to his enemy and preserver, giving him his horn and promising to come to meet his death at its summons. There is the same fault here which is felt in Hugo's novels. Motives are exaggerated, the dramatis personae strut. They are rather over-dramatic in their poses—-melodramatic, in fact—and do unlikely things. But this fault is the fault of a great nature, grandeur exalted into grandiosity, till the heroes of these plays, "Hernani," ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... satisfy herself in having rendered this age miserable, without rendering it ridiculous too. I hate to see it, for one poor inch of pitiful vigour which comes upon it but thrice a week, to strut and set itself out with as much eagerness as if it could do mighty feats; a true flame of flax; and laugh to see it so boil and bubble and then in a moment so congealed and extinguished. This appetite ought to appertain only to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... skilful of all politicians: he has a perfect art in being unintelligible in discourse, and uncomeatable in business. But he having no understanding in this polite way, brought in upon us, to get in his money, ladder-dancers,[183] rope-dancers, jugglers, and mountebanks, to strut in the place of Shakespeare's heroes, and Jonson's humorists. When the seat of wit was thus mortgaged, without equity of redemption, an architect[184] arose, who has built the muse a new palace, but secured her no retinue; so that instead of action there, we have been put off by song and ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... do screen My brown-ruf'd house, an' here below, My geese do strut athirt the green, An' hiss an' flap their wings o' snow; As I do walk along a rank Ov apple trees, or by a bank, Or zit upon a bar or plank, To see how ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... trunks have some, and some are hung with beads. Here serpents dash their stings into my face, All tipped with fire; and there a wild bird drives His red-hot talons in my burning scalp. Here bees and beetles buzz about my ears Like crackling coals, and frogs strut up and down Like hissing cinders; wasps and waterflies Scorch deep like ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... across the river, almost black at the water's edge, turned a fainter and more delicate hue as they receded, till, far away, they looked like mottled glass. Only yesterday he had laughed with me, talked and smoked with me, and now he was dead. A rage pervaded me. We are puny things, we, who strut the highways of the world, parading a so-called wisdom. There is only one philosophy; it is to ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... that a connecting rod functions as a strut, it is considered that this part should be only stiff enough to prevent any whipping action during the running of the engine. The greater the fatigue-resisting property that one can put into the rod after this stiffness is reached, the longer the life of ...
— The Working of Steel - Annealing, Heat Treating and Hardening of Carbon and Alloy Steel • Fred H. Colvin
... a James like this. The man and the greyhound are the same witless breed, the kind that achieve a result by their clean-limbed elegance alone. Van Dyck has painted the two with what might be called a greyhound brush-stroke, a style of handling that is nothing but courtly convention and strut to the point of genius. He is as far from the meditative spirituality of Rembrandt ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... can proceed to install the power equipment. This consists of a small battery motor driven with two dry cells. The design and installation of such things as stern-tubes and propeller-shafts have been taken up in detail in an earlier part of this book. The strut that holds the propeller-shaft is shown in Fig. 91. This consists merely of a brass bushing held in a bracket made of a strip of brass 1/2 inch wide. The brass strip is wound around the bushing and soldered. ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... steer. Stole, robe. Stonen, stony. Stote, stout. Stoure, dust, struggle. Stown, stolen. Strang, strong. Strath, river-valley. Strathspeys, dances for two persons. Straughte, stretched. Strunt, strut. Sugh, sough, moan. Sumph', blockhead. Swanges, swings. Swankie, strapping youth. Swatch, sample. Swats, foaming new ale. Swith, shoo! begone! Swote, sweet. Swythyn, quickly. ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... humble than I have, any appearance to the contrary being a bluff for success—effect. But now that I have been wisely and scrupulously and unscrupulously examined by the most exalted rulers of the Inner Temple, and they pronounce me all that man should be, why shouldn't I strut some? But, damn it, strutting brings that Devil's clutch—and a man cannot be anything more strutty than a dish-rag then. In William James you will find a questionnaire, "Why do I believe in immortality? 'Because I think ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... resolutions to give battle to the Border robbers, in the style of their ancestors. Ever since the first announcement, they had been drilled by the Captain, whose loud command of voice, proud bearing, bent back (bent in self-defence against the counterpoise of his stomach), and martial strut, filled them with great awe of his power, and great confidence in his abilities. Many hundred people, "on horse and foote," (we use the language of our old chronicle), "were gathered together, considerably armed with swordes, pistolles, firelocks, blunderbushes, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland Volume 17 • Alexander Leighton
... felicity? is this magnificence? Oh! what a sentence dire will God the Judge pronounce Upon the day of doom, when from His throne so loudly It sounds, how shall they seem who strut and boast so proudly! ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... Daughter of the House, who had been listening very eagerly, "what made you talk like that, and strut about, and pound the deck? That's not like you. I would not have supposed that you ever could have ...
— John Gayther's Garden and the Stories Told Therein • Frank R. Stockton
... on it in autumn." All through the great history of Thiers, wherein he recites the scenes of the French revolution, the Consulate, the Empire, and the rock of St. Helena, there runs one consistent observation that youth is noble and magnanimous. The thousands of characters who "strut their brief hour" upon the stage in the terrible drama which this historian depicts are young and generous, lofty and incorruptible. Then they ripen into manhood, glory waits upon their comings and their goings, ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... statements, and the indifference with which she neglected to improve any strong points in her own favor—the indifference, as every heart perceived, of despairing grief. Then came the manners on the hostile side—the haggard consciousness of guilt, the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut which sought to dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses, assembled on that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of conscious uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising that the storm of popular opinion made itself ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... sweep the fairies' rooms; They use their folded tails for brooms; But fairy dust is brighter far Than any mortal colours are; And all about their tails it clings In strange designs of rounds and rings; And that is why they strut about And proudly spread their ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of wishing ...
— When a Man Comes to Himself • Woodrow Wilson
... arrangement consists of a truck on which is fixed a post, round which the crane revolves; the jib is supported midway by an inclined strut, above which is placed the king-post; the strut is curved round at the bottom and forms one piece with the side frames, which are carried right back as a tail to support ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... and Shakspeare might be surprised to find themselves rubbing elbows with the wigmaker of the High Street. Still, he shows a fine spirit, and his very strut ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and Pfauentritt (peacock-strut), were nicknames given to the leaders of the guilds who rebelled against the patrician families in Nuremberg, from whom alone the aldermen or town-council could be elected. This patrician class originated in 1198 under the Emperor Henry ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... surrendered to Arnaux and the Available Lady to the Big Blue. Two nests were begun and everything shaped for a "lived happily ever after." But the Big Blue was very big and handsome. He could blow out his crop and strut in the sun and make rainbows all round his neck in a way that might turn the heart of ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream. High-lows pass as patent leathers, Jackdaws strut in ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... shrew, which is very rare, they almost immediately reject it. They will sit hour after hour watching at the mouth of a hole, and after seizing their prey, bring it to their favourites in the house to show their prowess, and strut about with a great air of self-satisfaction. They generally have a great dislike to water; but they have been known to surmount this when they could catch a fish, for which species of food they have a great preference. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... element abroad on polling day. Men are so respectful and hurl such affectionate terms at one another. Even the dogs are upset, and strut about in quite a different manner than on ordinary days, so puffed out with vanity are they, on account of their decorations. The members' wives and their friends are all taking part in the scene too, bringing voters along in their carriages, and shaking hands with everybody indiscriminately. ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... rich he could reproduce its images on his drawing-pad. The whilom dandy and friend of Baudelaire went about dressed in a shabby military frock-coat. He had no longer a nodding acquaintance with the fashionable lions of Napoleon the Little's reign, yet he abated not his haughty strut, his glacial politeness to all comers, nor his daily promenade in the Bois. A Barmecide feast this watching the pleasures of others more favoured, though Guys did not waste the fruits of his observation. At sixty-five he began to go ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... expediency. It is a presumptuous spirit at war with all the passive worth of mankind. The independence which they boast of despises habit, and time-honoured forms of subordination; it consists in breaking old ties upon new temptations; in casting off the modest garb of private obligation to strut about in the glittering armour of public virtue; in sacrificing, with jacobinical infatuation, the near to the remote, and preferring, to what has been known and tried, that which has no distinct existence, even in imagination; in renouncing, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... boldness, and soon distinguished the chieftain from his attendants by his giant stature. No bishop's cassock covered his towering form. Clothed in scarlet and gold, he descended the hill with the true Albanian strut. His manner was frank and cordial; and on his invitation we all three sat down on the grass to partake of a camp luncheon. The Vladika was then in the thirty-fifth year of his age. In truth, he was a goodly man—a very Saul among his people. His height I should think ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... racks or thumbscrews on the island. Of course we could have invented various instruments of torture—I felt I could have developed some ingenuity that way myself—but too fatally well Mr. Tubbs knew the civilized prejudices of those with whom he had to deal. With perfect impunity he could strut about the camp, sure that no weapons worse than words would be brought to bear upon him, that he would not even be turned away from the general board to browse on ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... Myle remained to bear the brunt of the late ambassador's malice, and to engage at a little later period in hottest controversy with him, personal and political. "Why should van der Myle strut about, with his arms akimbo like a peacock?" complained Aerssens one day in confused metaphor. A question not ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... man with a red face and a bald brow. His very strut pronounced him a self-made man. He glared at his son, whose cool nonchalance he often declared ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... did not try to strike them, as he might have done a while before. They were afraid of him, yet down in their hearts the brothers all thought that when they were grown up they wanted to be just like him and strut around with their wings trailing, their tails spread, their necks drawn back, and their feathers ruffled. Then, they thought, when other people came near them, they would puff and gobble and cry, "Get out of my way!" They tried it once in a while to see how it would ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... And rests, deep-sorrowing, On the low rock beside the stream. Up to the oak he looks, Looks up to heaven, While in his noble eye there gleams a tear. Then, rustling through the myrtle boughs, behold, There comes a wanton pair of doves, Who settle down, and, nodding, strut O'er the gold sands beside the stream, And gradually approach; Their red-tinged eyes, so full of love, Soon see the inward-sorrowing one. The male, inquisitively social, leaps On the next bush, and looks Upon him ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... the stumps are concealed behind their dress, which is like that of a man. They walk, when grown up, on clogs a foot high, which are like stilts, as they have but one support instead of two, like the sort which men wear. The tengus strut about ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... the radius, the official radius of the Madison Square branch of the post-office, for such was the postmark. Common sense urged him to dismiss the whole affair and laugh over it as the Lady in the Fog had done. But common sense often goes about with a pedant's strut, and is something to avoid on occasions. Here was a harmless pastime to pursue, common sense notwithstanding. The vein of romance in him was strong, and all the commercial blood of his father could not subjugate it. To find out who she was, to meet her, to ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... We see this plain," say they, "in the Whore of Babylon [Roman Catholic Church]! To what a degree of luxury and intemperance, besides a great deal of false doctrine, have riches and honour raised up that strumpet! How does she strut it! and swagger it over all the world! terrifying Princes, and despising ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... my cloth in Ognissanti, when I saw my fine Messeri going by, looking round as if they thought the houses of the Vespucci and the Agli a poor pick of lodgings for them, and eyeing us Florentines, like top-knotted cocks as they are, as if they pitied us because we didn't know how to strut. 'Yes, my fine Galli,' says I, 'stick out your stomachs; I've got a meat-axe in my belt that will go inside you all the easier;' when presently the old cow lowed, [Note 1] and I knew something had happened—no matter ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... the cruellest team will win. So hold your nose against the stink And never stop too long to think. Wars don't change except in name; The next one must go just the same, And new foul tricks unguessed before Will win and justify this War. Kaisers and Czars will strut the stage Once more with pomp and greed and rage; Courtly ministers will stop At home and fight to the last drop; By the million men will die In some new horrible agony; And children here will thrust and poke, Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke, With bows ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... borders of the forest. Cecile, walking quickly, reached it before long; then she stood still, leaning over the paling and looking across the enchanted ground. This paling in itself was English, and the very strut of the barn-door fowl reminded her of Warren's Grove. How she wished that fair child to run out! How she hoped to hear even one word of the only language she understood! No matter her French origin, Cecile ...
— The Children's Pilgrimage • L. T. Meade
... Creator who inflicts pain and pleasure at will then disappears from the stage; and it is well, for he is indeed an unnecessary character, and, worse still, is a mere creature of straw, who cannot even strut upon the boards without being upheld on all sides by dogmatists. Man comes into this world, surely, on the same principle that he lives in one city of the earth or another; at all events, if it is too much to say that this is so, one may safely ask, why is it not so? There is neither for nor ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... individual in his relations to society and to humanity. Very true, religion has operated mainly with precatory rites for the purpose of deflecting God's wrath, or, as Mr. James would say, with some sneaking design upon His bounty. And morality has been the starched buckram in which men walk and strut for distinguished consideration. But religion in its true and native meaning is that which binds man to God in loving unison, and morality covers all the relations which bind a man to his neighbor, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and petty persecutions are the kind that kill, because the weak are nervous or easily wrought up and must have allowances made for them. And the person so considered always thinks himself strong beyond others and never suspects the truth. Only the weak and foolish can strut independently ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... peacock; and they so far resemble this bird that they are sometimes called peacock-pheasants. I am also informed by Mr. Bartlett that they resemble the peacock in their voice and in some of their habits. During the spring the males, as previously described, strut about before the comparatively plain-coloured females, expanding and erecting their tail and wing-feathers, which are ornamented with numerous ocelli. I request the reader to turn back to the drawing (Fig. 51) of a Polyplectron; In P. napoleonis the ocelli are confined ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... company, saying, in a loud voice :—"God preserve you, good people." Then taking the habit off indignantly, he threw it from him with contempt, and, turning to Elias, "That is the way," he said, "that the bastard brethren of our Order will strut." After this he resumed his usual demeanor and walked humbly with his old and tattered habit, saying:—"Such is the deportment of the true Friars Minor." Then, seating himself amongst them, he addressed ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... told what had become of the manhood of Ascalon, and asked it with contempt. What was the fame of the town based upon but a bluff when one man was able to shut it up as tight as a trunk, and strut around that way adding the insult of his tyrannical presence to the act of his oppressive hand. There were plenty of questions and suggestions, but nobody ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... worldly glory, and spent their money on extravagant dress. "The men," said he, "wear capes reaching down to the ground, and their long hair falls down to their shoulders; and the women wear so many petticoats that they can hardly drag themselves along, and strut about like the Pope's courtezans, to the surprise and disgust of the whole world." What right had these selfish fops to call themselves Christians? They did more harm to the cause of Christ than all the Turks and heathens ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... pride exalts Thyself in other's eyes, And hides thy folly's faults, Which reason will despise? Dost strut, and turn, and stride, Like a walking weathercock? The shadow by thy side Will ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... are dreaming of recouping their harvest from the neighbouring wheat fields. To change the figure, we forget that, for proficiency in walking, it is better to train the muscles of our own legs than to strut upon wooden ones of foreign make, although they clatter and cause more surprise at our skill in using them than if they ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... fancy, like the most piteous of puppets, a jeering fate manipulating the strings. This manipulator had kept her long to one set of motions, stiff pleading arm, anxious head, interrogative joints, and a strut of wolfish eagerness and hunger. But such a game was now to be abandoned. And behold the puppet a warrior forsooth, a very Amazon, hounded to fight by the doctor's voice, the doctor's word of encouragement, battling with the stiff arms that had abandoned the pleading gesture, stern ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... bargain with your sex when we compelled you to beauty, made you carry the topknots and the tail- feathers? Men propose marriage, women adorn themselves to listen. Let women choose their mates, and they might go as plain as peahens; and men would strut about, displaying ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... imprisonment—pay his fine, stride out of the court and kill another—pay his fine again and butcher another, and so long as he paid to the state, cash down, its own assessment of damages, without putting it to the trouble of prosecuting for it, he might strut 'a gentleman.'—See 2 Brevard's ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... now what good-for-nothings you are! Why do you strut and turn up your noses as if you were the lords of creation? Well, I am going to give you orders. Go up and dress. Get some travelling money, and ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... came from the Pecos!" She gave that single melodious croak I had heard once before. Then she sat up with her back as straight as if she was twenty. "My dear young fellow, never do you buy trash in these trains. Here you are with your coat full of—what's Gadsden's absurd razor concoctions—strut—strop—bother! And Chinese paste buttons. Last summer, on the Northern Pacific, the man offered your cat's-eyes to me as native gems found exclusively in Dakota. But I just sat and mentioned to him ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister
... of all this interest? Was it devotion to a young and innocent girl that made me willing to undertake so difficult and so delicate a task? Doubtless these motives went for something, but I will not attempt to strut in borrowed plumes, and must freely confess that if she had been ugly and stupid I should probably have left her to her fate. In short, selfishness was at the bottom of it all, so let us say no more ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... do nothing but plane down into the water. On the first occasion he alighted neatly, suffering no injury, and being rescued by a torpedo boat; but in the second descent, striking the water hard, he was thrown forward in his seat and his head injured by a strut. ...
— Learning to Fly - A Practical Manual for Beginners • Claude Grahame-White
... and croaking gut, See how the half-star'd Frenchmen strut, And call us English dogs: But soon we'll teach these bragging foes That beef and beer give heavier blows Than soup and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... wish I had feathers, a fine sweeping gown, And a delicate face, and could strut about Town!" - "My dear—a raw country girl, such as you be, Isn't equal to that. You ain't ruined," ...
— Poems of the Past and the Present • Thomas Hardy
... faith higher and greater,—so the first represents nature with more true feeling and love, with a deeper insight into her tenderness; he follows her more humbly, and has produced to us more of her simplicity; we feel his appeal to be more earnest: it is the crying out of the man, with none of the strut ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk banners, strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of twenty-four pieces, and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come the religious processions, when the little girls are taken to their first communion. Six sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... is like the melancholy task of the teacher of gesture and oratory; some palpable faults are soon corrected; and, for the rest, a few conspicuous mannerisms, a few theatrical postures, not truly expressive, and a high tragical strut, are all that can be imparted. The truth of the old Roman teachers of rhetoric is here witnessed afresh, to be a good orator it is first of all necessary to be a good man. Good style is the greatest of revealers,—it lays bare the soul. The soul of the cheat shuns nothing so much. "Always ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... bravado on approaching what was supposed to be his end. As the reader can readily imagine, from what I have heretofore said of him, Davis was the man to improve to the utmost every opportunity to strut his little hour, and he did it in this instance. He posed, attitudinized and vapored, so that the camp and the country were filled with stories of the wonderful coolness with which he contemplated ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... fishing ground and take their share of cockles and other muddy fare in the bank uncovered by the falling tide. Here, in company with gulls, turnstones, and other fowl of the foreshore, the rooks strut importantly up and down, digging their powerful bills deep in the ooze and occasionally bullying weaker neighbours out of their hard-earned spoils. The rook is a villain, yet there is something irresistible ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo
... was so much weaker in him than love of his theories that when Congress passed laws enlarging his prerogatives he wrote long messages declining them on constitutional grounds." A friend described him as "a game-cock—with just a little strut." Said one who stood in close relations with him: "He was so sensitive to criticism and even to questioning that I have passed months of intimate official association with him without venturing to ask him a question." Pure in his personal ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes. The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... position above the shaft. One end of the assembled framework of aluminum alloy dragged loosely on the ground; the other end swung out and projected above the shaft, swayed for an instant—and then came the first direct knowledge of the enemy's presence. The end of a metal strut, though nothing visible was touching it, grew suddenly white hot, sagged, then broke into a shower of molten, dazzling drops that rained ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... it swooped. With a hoarse croak it lit on the snow at a wary distance, and began to strut back and forth. Presently, its suspicions at rest, the raven advanced, and with eager beak began its dreadful meal. By this time another, which had seen the first one's swoop, was in view through the ether; then another; then another. In an hour ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... scraped off frost. He jammed his jaw against the wet iron. His right hand never let go, but it crawled up the fin of the strut like a blind animal, while the load on his points of purchase mounted—watchmaker co-ordination where you'd normally think in boilermaker terms. The flame sank to a spark as he focused, but it never blinked ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... queens and court pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune. They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that sunshiny face that never stayed clouded long, and chuckled softly. "Judson's on the crest right now. Oh, let him ride. He's doomed, so let him have his little strut. He comes to me a few days backward into the gone on, and says, says he, important and commercial like, 'O'mie, I shall not need you any more. I've got a person to take your place.' 'All right,' I responds, respectful, 'just as you please. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... grow very familiar to us, and in spite of their Polish titles and faces, and a certain tenderness of nature that is almost feminine, they seem to have good, stout, Saxon stuff in them. Especially where the illustrious knights recount their heroic deeds there is a Falstaffian strut in their performance, and there runs riot a ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... but the whole play—he has to undergo a severe physical training, part of which consists in standing for an hour every day with his mouth wide open, to inhale the morning air. He is taught to sing, to walk, to strut, and to perform a variety of gymnastic exercises, such as standing on his head, or turning somersaults. His first classification is as male or female actor, no women having been allowed to perform since the days of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung (A.D. 1736-1796), whose mother was an actress, just as in ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... not manage—that is just it," he angrily retorted. "You two boys will strut about like roosters showing what good fighters you are, and get blown up through the insides! Have I not seen it often? Bah!" He ran his hands through his hair. "Why is it, when brains are as easily cultivated as biceps, that young bloods think only of a strong ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... Smart pages, smart messengers, smart cabmen, smart publicans, smart politicians, smart women, smart scoundrels! Greatness became commonplace here, and Mr. Douglas might drink at Willard's Bar, with none so poor to do him reverence, or General Winfield Scott strut like a colossus along "the Avenue," and the sleepy negroes upon their backs would give him the attention of only one eye. It was interesting, to notice how rapidly provincial eminence lost caste here. Slipkins, who was "Honorable" at ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... made by the most popular artists to enliven the scenes of the pilgrimage; but no colour glows like the enchanting words of Bunyan. No figures are so true to nature, and so life-like. Those eminent engravers, Sturt and Strut, Stothard and Martin, with the prize efforts excited by the Art Union of England, and the curious outlines by Mrs. M'Kenzie, the daughter of a British admiral, have endeavoured to exhaust the scenes in this ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... and his boots tightly fitting, and that his cane, hooked over his arm, swung jauntily, was not entirely at his ease. Mrs. Tretherick, however, vouchsafed him a gracious smile and a glance of her dangerous eyes; and the colonel, with an embarrassed cough and a slight strut, took ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... their own, without acknowledging the Piracy they are guilty of, or so much as paying the least Complement to the Authors of their Wisdom: No, Gentlemen and Ladies, I am not the Daw in the Fable, that would vaunt and strut in your Plumes. And besides, I know very well you might have me upon the Hank according to Law, and treat me as a Highwayman or Robber; for you might safely swear upon your Honours, that I had stole the whole Book from your recreative Minutes. But I am more generous; I am what ...
— The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany. Part 1 • Samuel Johnson [AKA Hurlo Thrumbo]
... outside. The foundation is slightly raised, to prevent flooding. The superstructure strikes most travellers as having somewhat the look of a chalet, although Proyart compares it with a large basket turned upside down. Two strong uprights, firmly planted, support on their forked ends a long strut-beam, tightly secured; the eaves are broad to throw off the rain, and the neat thatch of grass, laid with points upwards in regular courses, and kept in site by bamboo strips, is renewed before the stormy season. The roof and walls are composed of six screens; they are made upon the ground, often ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... Anti-Slavery man and a Temperance man and a Woman's-Rights' man, and still be very little of a man. There is, indeed, no more ludicrous sight than to see Mediocrity, perched on one of these resounding adjectives, strut and bluster, and give itself braggadocio airs, and dictate to all quiet men its maxims of patriotism or morality, and all the while be but a living illustration through what grandeurs of opinion essential ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... of other birds, besides the yellow blossoms of the wattle-tree and many light-green ferns. In this ingeniously contrived sylvan retreat the feathered architect runs about and holds a sort of carnival, to which others of his tribe gather. Here the little party chirp vigorously, and strut about in a ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... little red combs above the eyes of the males are swollen and conspicuous. At this season they strut and perform curious antics, such as all ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... passing out. I recalled the exaggerated military styles for men that came in with the Spanish-American and the South African wars. Those enormously padded shoulders and tight-shaped waists and swelling trouser legs, and the strut and the stoop that went with the whole ugly ensemble, roused my anger. My feelings remained unchanged until some time after the Russo-Japanese War, and then one day it came to me that I must have a suit of military cut. It was like the sudden ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... the hour of the chaise's starting and the route so that you can plant your men. I grant that this has the air of a highwayman's attack, but, after all, the uniform covers a host of civil sins, and, really, I do not see a better way to have done with the youth. It will never do to have him strut about Paris boasting that he snatched the sword away from an officer and drubbed him with a cane into ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... poet's curse? Wilt rob an altar thus? and sweep at once What Orpheus-like I forc'd from stocks and stones? 'Twill never swell thy bag, nor ring one peal In thy dark chest. Talk not of shreeves, or gaol; I fear them not. I have no land to glut Thy dirty appetite, and make thee strut Nimrod of acres; I'll no speech prepare To court the hopeful cormorant, thine heir. For there's a kingdom at thy beck if thou But kick this dross: Parnassus' flow'ry brow I'll give thee with my Tempe, and to boot That horse which struck a fountain with ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... has mowed the hero down, The muse again awakes him to renown; She tells proud Fate that all her darts are vain, And bids the hero live and strut about again: Nor is she only able to restore, But she can make what ne'er was made before; Can search the realms of Fancy, and create What never came ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... "Sir, your eloquence—" "Yours, Cowper's manner"—and "yours, Talbot's sense." Thus we dispose of all poetic merit, Yours Milton's genius, and mine Homer's spirit. Call Tibbald Shakespeare, and he'll swear the nine, Dear Cibber! never matched one ode of thine. Lord! how we strut through Merlin's cave, to see No poets there, but Stephen, you, and me. Walk with respect behind, while we at ease Weave laurel crowns, and take what names we please. "My dear Tibullus!" if that will not do, "Let me be Horace, and be Ovid you: Or, I'm content, allow me ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... spirit of juniper juice warmed his vitals and his breath. Good drop of gin, that was. His frocktails winked in bright sunshine to his fat strut. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... be as it were joynt-comptroller with him, at which he is stark mad; and swears he will give up his place. For my part, I do hope, when all is done that my following my business will keep me secure against all their envys. But to see how the old man do strut, and swear that he understands all his duty as easily as crack a nut, and easier, he told my Lord Chancellor, for his teeth are gone; and that he understands it as well as any man in England; and that he will never leave to record that he should be said to be unable to do his ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... Chateaubriand because of the many beauties, the veritable grandeurs of their styles, we cannot quite learn to love yours. For in you the disease was aggravated by the presence of another powerful incentive to strut and posture and externalize and inflate your art. For you were the virtuoso. You were the man whose entire being was pointed to achieve an effect. You were the man whose life is lived on the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who finds his highest good in the instantaneous ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... works upon tactics, he drew up a simpler system for the use of his men. Throwing aside the old ideas of soldierly bearing, he taught them to use vigor, promptness, and ease. Discarding the stiff buckram strut of martial tradition, he educated them to move with the loafing insouciance of the Indian, or the graceful ease of the panther. He tore off their choking collars and binding coats, and invented a uniform which, though too flashy and conspicuous for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... that the hair used to form a regular pomatumed spike. But he did not look at all fierce, for his fat round face, dull eyes, and tenchy mouth would not let him; but he used to speak very loudly, and thump his Malacca cane down on the ground, and strut and look as important as many more people do who have not brains enough to teach them their insignificance as parts of creation, or how very little value they are in the world, which could go on just as ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... now very like How woman smites your souls? Whatever dress Of thought you take to royalize your nature,— Gorgeous shawls of kingship, a world's fear, Or ample weavings of imagination, Or the spun light of wisdom,—like a gust Of flame, that weather of impersonal thought You strut beneath, that hanging storm of Love, Strikes down a terrible swift dazzling finger, Sight of some woman, on your clothed hearts, And plucks the winding folly off, and leaves Bare nature there. And hear another likeness. Look, if the priests have made an altar-fire, They ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... might have truthfully declared that she looked French this morning, and there was a suggestion of a strut in her walk which seemed to speak of personal satisfaction in her appearance. Bridgie did indeed look shabby beside her, but then no clothes, however poor, could ever make the sweet thing look anything but a lady, and she too held up her head in triumphant fashion, for was she not ...
— More about Pixie • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the strut and meen Of new prais'd Poets, having often seen Some of his Fellows, who have writ before, When Nel has danc'd her Jig, steal to the Door, Hear the Pit clap, and with conceit of that Swell, and believe themselves the ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... that the goldfinch and the kingfisher are not often seen except in picture-books; but our own little robin is a real beauty, is he not? And what can be gayer than the feathers of some of our cocks, which strut about so proudly? Then, the more you notice the songs of birds, the more you will admire them. The sweet notes begin before daylight in the spring-time, and the cock-bird seems never tired of singing to his mate as she sits on her eggs. By and by, when they are busy with family cares, feeding ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... who although an ex-Civil Servant was a man of resource, that mirrors of polished steel, as used on the handlebars of motor-cycles, to give warning of roadcraft at the rear, might be valuable in an aeroplane. Forthwith he screwed one to the sloping half-strut of his top center-section. The trial was a great success, and we bought six such mirrors, an investment which was to pay big dividends in many ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... he resumed, "cannot be of very lofty pretensions, or he would have aspired higher. I suspect him of being merely one of those silly young countrymen of mine, of whom so many crowd stage-coaches and packets, to swagger over their less ambitious fellow-mortals with the strut and ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... high liver, and a good fellow every inch of him, he could be natural, racy, charming, and without vanity, when in the midst of men; but let so much as the rustle of a petticoat sound on the pavement, and he would begin to strut and plume himself as instinctively as the cock ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... its object the manufacture of weldless stayed chains, whereof each link, together with its cross strut or stay, is made of one piece of metal without any weld or joint; and the invention consists in producing a chain of stayed links from a bar of cruciform section by the consecutive series of punching, twisting and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 819 - Volume XXXII, Number 819. Issue Date September 12, 1891 • Various
... efforts to make up to the men; he asked them questions with patronising kindness, he gave them scraps of information upon all subjects of temporary interest, with a funny little air of pompous importance. When by mere force of habit they grew more familiar with him, he would strut up and engage them in long conversations, listen to all they said with consummate good nature, giving his opinion in return. He was wholly unconscious that he looked like a bantam crowing to a group of larger and more sleepy fowls, but the ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... mother's neglect. Almost without a notion how even to take him in his arms, he would now send for him the moment he had had his tea, and after a fashion, ludicrous in the eyes of the nurse, would dandle and caress him, and strut about with him before his wife, glancing up at her every now and then, to point the lesson that such was the manner in which a parent ought to behave to a child. In his presence she never made any ...
— Stephen Archer and Other Tales • George MacDonald
... with which she neglected to improve any strong points in her own favor—the indifference, as every heart perceived, of despairing grief. Then came the manners on the hostile side—the haggard consciousness of guilt, the drooping tone, the bravado and fierce strut which sought to dissemble all this. Not one amongst all the witnesses, assembled on that side, had (by all agreement) the bold natural tone of conscious uprightness. Hence it could not be surprising ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... and strut around in such a funny, pompous way, that one could not help laughing. He would take food from any one's hand, but would not let any one touch him, except Mr. Hart, the ...
— The Nursery, No. 169, January, 1881, Vol. XXIX - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... cabmen, smart publicans, smart politicians, smart women, smart scoundrels! Greatness became commonplace here, and Mr. Douglas might drink at Willard's Bar, with none so poor to do him reverence, or General Winfield Scott strut like a colossus along "the Avenue," and the sleepy negroes upon their backs would give him the attention of only one eye. It was interesting, to notice how rapidly provincial eminence lost caste here. ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon." ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... worker can proceed to install the power equipment. This consists of a small battery motor driven with two dry cells. The design and installation of such things as stern-tubes and propeller-shafts have been taken up in detail in an earlier part of this book. The strut that holds the propeller-shaft is shown in Fig. 91. This consists merely of a brass bushing held in a bracket made of a strip of brass 1/2 inch wide. The brass strip is wound around the bushing and soldered. It is held to the bottom of the hull by means of two 8-32 brass ...
— Boys' Book of Model Boats • Raymond Francis Yates
... shown an "Oblique Halving Joint," where the oblique piece, or strut, does not run through (Fig. 28, 3). This type of joint is used for strengthening framings and shelf brackets; an example of the latter is shown at Fig. 48. A strut or rail of this type prevents movement or distortion to a frame diagonally (generally ...
— Woodwork Joints - How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used. • William Fairham
... when he felt the pride of conquest of another soul and body strongly upon him, that Judge Thomas Van Dorn began to acquire—or perhaps to exhibit noticeably—the turkey gobbler gait, that ever afterward went with him, and became famous as the Van Dorn Strut. It was more than mere knee action—though knee action did characterize it prominently. The strut properly speaking began at the tip of his hat—his soft, black hat that sat so cockily upon his head. His head was thrown back as ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... deal more than a guide; he has a good education, and would not be here if it were not for his love of nature. He is going to make nature his object in life, and there is something noble in that; a great deal better than trying to strut about on ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... His dearest hopes hung upon Cheschapah, in whom he thought he saw a development. From being a mere humbug, the young Indian seemed to be getting a belief in himself as something genuinely out of the common. His success in creating a party had greatly increased his conceit, and he walked with a strut, and his face was more unsettled and visionary than ever. One clear sign of his mental change was that he no longer respected his father at all, though the lonely old man looked at him often with ...
— Red Men and White • Owen Wister
... tightly fitting, and that his cane, hooked over his arm, swung jauntily, was not entirely at his ease. Mrs. Tretherick, however, vouchsafed him a gracious smile and a glance of her dangerous eyes; and the colonel, with an embarrassed cough and a slight strut, took his place ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... of party popularity? Are we to stand here in the guise and manner of free men, knowing that we are driven together like a flock of sheep into the fold by the howling of the wolves outside? Are we to strut and plume ourselves upon our unhampered freedom, while we act like slaves? Worse than slaves we should be if we allowed one breath of party spirit, one thought of party aggrandizement, to enter into the choice we are about to make. Slaves are driven to their work; shall we willingly ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... aptitude, between the flat of his hand and what of trouser-leg he had left, gazing eagerly between at the advancing masterpiece. Occasionally the triumph of expectation would exceed his control, when he would spring from the floor, and caper and strut about like a pigeon—soft as a shadow, for he knew his father could not bear noise in the morning—or behind his back execute a pantomimic dumb show of delight, in which he seemed with difficulty to restrain ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... "the September murderers, whom" says an observer[33104] in a position to know them, "I can compare to nothing but lazy tigers licking their paws, growling and trying to find a few more drops of blood just spilled, awaiting a fresh supply." Far from hiding away they strut about and show themselves. One of them, Petit-Mamain, son of an innkeeper at Bordeaux and a former soldier, "with a pale, wrinkled face, sharp eyes and bold air, wearing a scimitar at his side and pistols at his belt," promenades the Palais-Royal[33105] "accompanied or followed at a distance ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and see this long train of camels coming up to the king's gate, and the ox-trains from Egypt, gold and silver and precious stones, and beasts of every hoof, and birds of every wing, and fish of every scale! See the peacocks strut under the cedars, and the horsemen run, and the chariots wheel! Hark to the orchestra! Gaze upon the dance! Not stopping to look into the wonders of the temple, step right on to the causeway, and ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... that he wanted to see you personally. Jay, you did a tremendous thing, man! Damn it, why don't you strut a little? Be—be normal for once! Why, I'd be damned near bursting with pride if one of the Hasturs insisted on congratulating ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... the sun turns against the clock, When Avon waters upward flow, When eggs are laid by barn-door cock, When dusty hens do strut and crow, When up is down, when left is right, Oh, then I'll break the troth I plight, With careless eye Away I'll fly And Mary here ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... heart, James Armstrong! But well is he called Felix in comparison with you. Happy in being born of a despised and persecuted race; happy in being condemned to the life of a servant, to an ignorance that diminishes responsibility; happy in receiving no good thing here. Strut about, James Armstrong, in purple and fine linen, but know that for all these things, God will ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... gineratshun ob niggers, I 'clare dey ez jes 'bout gon'. Dey won't wuk, all's stealin' en mabe wuk long 'nuff ter git a few clothes ter strut 'round in. I may be wrong but dat ez ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Tennessee Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... brief years Cloverdale, in the Grass River Valley in Kansas, had a name, even in the Eastern money markets. Speculation became madness; and riotous commercialism had its little hour of strut and rave. ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... the realization caused him to strut a little, but he'd got over it. He was single, had no ties, wanted none. He had a good job which he took seriously, was doing significant work which he also took seriously, was paid premium wages even for a space captain, which didn't matter except in terms of ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... determination. He was not trying out a business venture so much as he was trying out himself. Previously he had always figured success and failure as his performance reacted on his audience. He was learning that one could impress a stupendous crowd and really fail, or strut upon the boards of an empty playhouse and still succeed. He began to realize just what was meant by the term self-esteem—how hard and uncompromising and exacting it was. To disappoint another was a humiliation; to disappoint oneself was a tragedy. ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... protruding eyes. Some settle on the Scotch moors, where they industriously waddle themselves thin. Others take short flights to neighboring bathing-places, where they splash in the water with their goslings, strut proudly on the sands, display a tendency to pair, and are often preyed upon by the foxes which also resort to those localities. Many more cross the Channel, and may be heard during two months cackling more or less loudly in every large hotel upon the Continent. And in addition ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... shaft. One end of the assembled framework of aluminum alloy dragged loosely on the ground; the other end swung out and projected above the shaft, swayed for an instant—and then came the first direct knowledge of the enemy's presence. The end of a metal strut, though nothing visible was touching it, grew suddenly white hot, sagged, then broke into a shower of molten, dazzling drops that rained down into ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... this other person was of a cynicism hopelessly indurated. Not so with Rigby Reeves, even after Reeves alleged the other discoveries that the rector of St. Antipas had "a walk that would be a strut, by gad! if he was as short as I am"; also that he "walked like a parade," which, as expounded by Mr. Reeves, meant that his air in walking was that of one conscious always of leading a triumphal procession in his own honour; ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... with wararra poison, or ten times distilled kakodyle, and a layer of honey over all, Dewhurst hurried away, to make no call. He was hard to subdue, and a puppy, whose passion it was to strut, in the perfection of a refined toilette, among fashionable street-walkers. While he was abroad, his cares rankling within were overborne by the consciousness of being "in position." The dog's nose is cold even when his tongue is reeking; and as he walked slowly along, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... boys are going to leave is this, that they exercise self-control; that they are ready and diligent to make the place where they went fitter to live in than they found it; that they regarded other people's rights; that they did not strut and bluster, but went quietly, like self-respecting gentlemen, about their legitimate work. And the people of Vera Cruz, who feared the Americans and despised the Americans, are going to get a very different taste ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson
... expenditure has risen twofold. America is ruining our agriculture; and soon, I suppose, we have to send to China for labourers. Why, those who do not emigrate demand twice as much to-day for half the work they used to do five years ago; and those who return from America strut about like country gentlemen deploring the barrenness ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... behind their visitors, gazed with admiring eyes at every motion of his grandfather. To one who had from earliest infancy looked up to him with reverence, there was nothing ridiculous in the display, in the strut, in all that to other eyes too evidently revealed the vanity of the piper: Malcolm regarded it all only as making up the orthodox mode of playing the pipes. It was indeed well that he could not see the expression ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and happily with his wife the Princess. His merriest time was when the Grand Vizier visited him in the afternoon; and when the Caliph was in particularly high spirits he would condescend to mimic the Vizier's appearance when he was a stork. He would strut gravely, and with well-stiffened legs, up and down the room, chattering, and showing how he had vainly bowed to the east and cried 'Mu...Mu...' The Caliphess and her children were always much entertained by this performance; but when the Caliph went on nodding and bowing, and calling 'Mu...mu...' ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various
... his name called. A rouged young flapper, high heeled, short skirted and a jaunty green hat. One of the impudent little swaggering boulevard promenaders who talk like simpletons and dance like Salomes, who laugh like parrots and ogle like Pierettes. The birdlike strut of her silkened legs, the brazen lure of her stenciled child face, the lithe grimace of her adolescent body under the stiff coloring of her clothes were a part of the blur in the ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... position as dwelling on the King's lands, our delusion of possession will vanish, and we shall feel more keenly the pressure of responsibility while we feel less keenly the grip of anxiety. We are for the time being entrusted with a tiny piece of the royal estates. Let us not strut about as if we were owners, nor be for ever afraid that we shall not have enough for our needs. One sometimes comes on a model village close to the gates of some ducal palace, and notes how the lordly owner's honour prompts its being kept up to a high standard of comfort ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... obedience: a soldier is, of all descriptions of men, the most completely a machine; yet his profession inevitably teaches him something of dogmatism, swaggering, and sell-consequence: he is like the puppet of a showman, who, at the very time he is made to strut and swell and display the most farcical airs, we perfectly know cannot assume the most insignificant gesture, advance either to the right or the left, but as he is moved by his exhibitor.'—Godwin's ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... thing is something new; Each new, quite new—(except some ancient tricks), New white-sticks, gold-sticks, broom-sticks, all new sticks! With vests or ribbons, deck'd alike in hue, New troopers strut, new turncoats blush in blue; So saith the muse! my ——, what say you? Such was the time when Waltz might best maintain Her new preferments in this novel reign; Such was the time, nor ever yet was such: Hoops are no more, and petticoats not much: Morals and minuets, virtue and her ...
— English Satires • Various
... walked about in front of the line and at every step pulled himself up, slightly arching his back. It was plain that the commander admired his regiment, rejoiced in it, and that his whole mind was engrossed by it, yet his strut seemed to indicate that, besides military matters, social interests and the fair sex occupied no small part ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... an' my marster gi'e me dat intitlemint on account o' my shape," he would say, with a strut, on occasion, if he were bantered, for he had learned that the name held personal suggestions which it took a little bravado to confront. Evidently ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... as is allotted by nature to wolves and lambs, [so great a one] have I to you, you that are galled at your back with Spanish cords, and on your legs with the hard fetter. Though, purse-proud with your riches, you strut along, yet fortune does not alter your birth. Do you not observe while you are stalking along the sacred way with a robe twice three ells long, how the most open indignation of those that pass and repass turns their looks on thee? This fellow, [say they,] cut with ...
— The Works of Horace • Horace
... moved, to his fancy, like the most piteous of puppets, a jeering fate manipulating the strings. This manipulator had kept her long to one set of motions, stiff pleading arm, anxious head, interrogative joints, and a strut of wolfish eagerness and hunger. But such a game was now to be abandoned. And behold the puppet a warrior forsooth, a very Amazon, hounded to fight by the doctor's voice, the doctor's word of encouragement, battling with the stiff arms that had abandoned ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... with the step of gosling, Strut thou with the feet of duckling, In the yard that's washed so cleanly, On the smooth and level grassplot, Where the father rules the household, And the mother holds dominion, To the workplace of the brother, And the sister's ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... done. But in looking round you may perceive men booted and spurred, who perhaps never crossed a horse, and some with whips in their hands who deserve it on their backs—they hum lively airs, whistle and strut about with their quizzing-glasses in their hands, playing a tattoo upon their boots, and shewing themselves off with as many airs as if they were real actors engaged in the farce, that is to say, the buyers ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... a group of wounded soldiers were just entering. With them was a woman in a man's uniform. Her hair was curly and short, and her chin pointed. Her feet looked ridiculously small in the heavy, high, soldier's boots, and in spite of a strut her knees knocked together in an unmistakably feminine manner. But the men treated her quite as one of themselves. One soldier, who had had his leg cut off up to the thigh, supported himself by her shoulder. I have seen several women soldiers in Kiev, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in rapture up and down after the recruiting drum and bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil along there, till the flood-gates of ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... were asked to desist, the more obstinately they persevered. For fear of misapprehension, I must state that though these negroes go stark naked when cruising or working during a shower of rain, they all possess a mantle or goat-skin, which they sling over their shoulders, and strut about in when on shore and the ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... to smuggle into Mr. Jordan's library a picture of Tom Steele, one of Daniel O'Connell's henchmen, to whom he gave the title of Head Pacificator of Ireland. Many amusing stories are told of this official, of his gaudy uniform, his strut and swagger, and his pompous language. At a political meeting on one occasion, he attacked, it seems, one Peter Purcell, a Dublin tradesman who had fallen out with the Liberator on some minor question. "Say no more on the subject, Tom," cried O'Connell, who was in the ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... fellow was Turkey Proudfoot. He loved to strut about the farmyard and spread his tail, which he claimed was the most elegant ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... independence which Chase had held out to her in the brief season of his adroit courtship. The meanest men sometimes turn out to be the nimblest cock-pheasants during that interesting period, and, like those vain birds of the jungles, they strut and dance and cut dazzling capers before the eyes of the ladies when they want to strike ...
— The Bondboy • George W. (George Washington) Ogden
... to the gentleman's cruel sarcasm," said Blaine, "I hope he will not be too severe. The contempt of that large-minded gentleman is so wilting, his haughty disdain, his grandiloquent swell, his majestic, supereminent, overpowering, turkey-gobbler strut has been so crushing to myself and all the members of this House, that I know it was an act of the greatest temerity for me to venture upon a controversy with him." Referring to a comparison which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... childhood from his experience of poverty at home, in his remarks in later life, on the sons of poor men, who by sheer hard work raise themselves from obscurity, and have much to endure, and no time to strut and swagger, but must be humble and learn to be silent and to trust in God, and to whom God also has given good ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... that the elf-like girl—the living Peter Pan to millions of theater-goers—was to assume the feathers and strut of the barnyard Romeo, there was a widespread feeling that he was making a great mistake, and that he was putting Miss Adams into a role, admirable artist that she was, to which she was absolutely unsuited. A storm of criticism arose. But ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... go to the footlights with the greatest possible strut.> Both Leaders: King Solomon ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... which the boys of the more fortunate classes in life obtain as it might be without knowing it. Yes, Jason bowed down to the golden calf, in spite of his puritanism, his love of liberty, his pretension to equality and the general strut of his disposition ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... replied grandpapa. "It shall be the lover. There's nothing in the pockets, and that's very interesting, for that's half of an unfortunate attachment. And here we have the nut-cracker's boots, with spurs to them. Row, dow, dow! how they can stamp and strut! They shall represent the unwelcome wooer, whom the lady does not like. What kind of a play will you have now? Shall it be a tragedy, ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... world's history has asked more from man than she has asked or has had more to give. She asks your life, your thoughts, your passions—every breath of your body must be a breath of desire for her and her alone. You think that you can strut about the world, a talking doll, pay court to women, listen to the voices that praise you, smirk your way through the days, and all the time climb. My young friend, no! I tell you no! Don't interrupt me. I am going to speak ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... astonishment, and they watched the wrathful gallant strut down the street, his back as stiff ...
— Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... the Available Lady to the Big Blue. Two nests were begun and everything shaped for a "lived happily ever after." But the Big Blue was very big and handsome. He could blow out his crop and strut in the sun and make rainbows all round his neck in a way that might turn the heart of ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... stayed behind, to make one of that exuberant group, and to see Reg 'take off' Urania and her father. His mimicry was cordially admired, though it was not always clear to his audience which was the doctor and which was his daughter. A stare, a strut, a toss, an affected drawl were the leading features ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... he watched the little tyrant strut off to his class. How long would he be able to keep ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... the young fire-eaters of our Habitation working like beavers to complete the French fort. The marquis took a hand at squaring timbers shoulder to shoulder with Allemand, the pilot; and La Chesnaye, the merchant prince, forgot to strut while digging up earthworks for a parapet. The leaven of the New World was working. Honour was for him only whose brawn won the place; and our young fellows of the birth and the pride were keenest to gird for the task. On our return from the upper river to the fort, the ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... man in this class," replied the Virginian solemnly, "who has been treated unjustly by the others. Lots of you won't see it, and can't be made to reason. But that injustice has put the hoodoo on the Army's athletics, and the hoodoo will strut along beside the present first class all the way through this year. You'll find it out more and more as time goes on. Just wait until next spring, and see the Navy walk away ...
— Dick Prescotts's Fourth Year at West Point - Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps • H. Irving Hancock
... a letter from the mother, To say her daughter's feelings are trepanned; Perhaps you'll have a visit from the brother, All strut, and stays, and whiskers, to demand What "your intentions are?"—One way or other It seems the virgin's heart expects your hand: And between pity for her case and yours, You'll add ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... in to tell how happy and contented the chickens seemed in the new coop. He saw some evidences of displeasure on the faces of Meg and Harry, and he exclaimed, "I met Aunt Barbara in the hall, with her indignation strut on. What's up?" ...
— Hatty and Marcus - or, First Steps in the Better Path • Aunt Friendly
... cravats at parties, the same being evidently an attempt of sixth-rate individuals to ape the manners of first-class circles. And that no Gent, who does not actually keep a horse, and is not in the Army, be allowed to strut up and down the Burlington Arcade, with a whip and moustachios, such imposition being exceedingly offensive, and amounting to a passive swindling ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... clinging to a strut while he stared fascinatedly in the direction Johnny had indicated. "Git in, bo, and we'll beat it. She may have power enough to hop us outa this death trap. We can come down somewheres else." He clawed ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... been made by the most popular artists to enliven the scenes of the pilgrimage; but no colour glows like the enchanting words of Bunyan. No figures are so true to nature, and so life-like. Those eminent engravers, Sturt and Strut, Stothard and Martin, with the prize efforts excited by the Art Union of England, and the curious outlines by Mrs. M'Kenzie, the daughter of a British admiral, have endeavoured to exhaust the scenes in this inexhaustible work of beautiful scenery. ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... Ready for thy descent; and now skip down And smooth the creases from thy coat, and order The laces on thy breast; a little stoop, And on thy snowy stockings bend a glance, And then erect thyself and strut away Either to pace the promenade alone,— 'T is thine, if 't please thee walk; or else to draw Anigh the carriages of other dames. Thou clamberest up, and thrustest in thy head And arms and shoulders, ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... bird far away, on a ridge across the valley where he had no concern; for presently he drummed again on his own log. I answered it promptly, rolling back a defiance, and also telling any hen grouse on the range that here was another candidate willing to strut and spread his tail and lift the resplendent ruff about his neck to win his way into her good graces, if she would but come to his drumming log ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... teachers wanting in talent! We see and hear a great many virtuosos, old and young, with and without talent, renowned and obscure. They either play in an entirely mechanical manner and with faulty and miserable touch, or else, which is less bearable, they strut with unendurable affectation and produce musical monstrosities. In order to conceal their indistinct mode of execution, they throw themselves upon the two pedals, and ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... prevent flooding. The superstructure strikes most travellers as having somewhat the look of a chalet, although Proyart compares it with a large basket turned upside down. Two strong uprights, firmly planted, support on their forked ends a long strut-beam, tightly secured; the eaves are broad to throw off the rain, and the neat thatch of grass, laid with points upwards in regular courses, and kept in site by bamboo strips, is renewed before the stormy season. The roof and walls ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... self-forgetful vagrant than by the deliberate and self-conscious seeker. A cheerful doctrine this. Not only cheerful, but self-evidently true. How right it is, and how cheerful it is, to think that while philosophers and clergymen strut about this world looking out, and smelling out, for its prime experiences, more careless and less celebrated men are continually finding such things, without effort, without care, in ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... devour mice. If they should swallow a shrew, which is very rare, they almost immediately reject it. They will sit hour after hour watching at the mouth of a hole, and after seizing their prey, bring it to their favourites in the house to show their prowess, and strut about with a great air of self-satisfaction. They generally have a great dislike to water; but they have been known to surmount this when they could catch a fish, for which species of food they have a great preference. The ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... Hope, dryly. "Praise is sweet, especially behind one's back. So pray go on, unless you have something better to say to each other;" and Hope retired briskly into his office. But when the lovers took him at his word, and began to strut up and down hand in hand, and murmur love's music into each other's ears, he could not take his eyes off them, and his thoughts were sad. She had only known that young fellow a few months, yet she loved him passionately, and he would take her away from her father before ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... wind-up-farewell burst Of firework-nosegay! Where's your fortune fled? Or is not fortune constant after all? You lose ten thousand pounds: had I lost half Or half that, I should bite my lips, I think. You man of marble! Strut and stretch my best On tiptoe, I shall never reach your height. How does the loss ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... conscious by comparison; the intellectual difference, which in other cases of comparison of characters, is often a matter of undecided contest, being as clear in his case as the superiority of stature in some men above others. Johnson did not strut or stand on tip-toe: He only did not stoop. From his earliest years his superiority was perceived and acknowledged[152]. He was from the beginning [Greek: anax andron], a king of men. His schoolfellow, Mr. Hector, has obligingly ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... some belted Earl, Some Baronet, or K.C.B., But I'm a most unhappy girl, And no such luck's in store for me! I would I loved some Soldier bold, Who leads his troops where cannons pop, But if the bitter truth be told— I love a man who walks a shop! For oh! a King of Men is he— With princely strut and stiffened spine— So his, and his alone, shall be, This fondly foolish heart ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... cambric and point-lace, surely we ought to hold as miserable, envious fools, those wretched Beaux Tibbs's of society, who sport a lace dickey, and nothing besides,—the poor silly jays, who trail a peacock's feather behind them, and think to simulate the gorgeous bird whose nature it is to strut on palace-terraces, and to flaunt his magnificent fan-tail in ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... gettin' a scratch acrost the cheek, that sent the blood spurtin' out all over my face. It was from the talon o' the she-eagle, while the ole cock war makin' a confusion o' noises as if he hed jest come all a-strut from the towers o' Babylon. I had grupped one o' the young baldies, but I war only too glad to lot it go an' duck my head under the nest, till the critters were tired threatenin' me, an' guv up ...
— Our Young Folks—Vol. I, No. II, February 1865 - An Illustrated Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... Quaker hue and cut, By Mammon misbegotten; See the mad Hamlet mouth and strut! And mark ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... there was a great army of Danish men west there, whose chief was Heming, the son of Earl Strut-Harald, and brother to Earl Sigvaldi, and he held for King Knut that land that ...
— The Story Of Gunnlaug The Worm-Tongue And Raven The Skald - 1875 • Anonymous
... apt to strut:—Israel among the nations, the dog among animals, the cock among birds. Some say also the goat among small cattle, and some the caper shrub ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... arch-poet, Jonson, died, The sock grew loathsome, and the buskin's pride, Together with the stage's glory, stood Each like a poor and pitied widowhood. The cirque profan'd was, and all postures rack'd; For men did strut, and stride, and stare, not act. Then temper flew from words, and men did squeak, Look red, and blow, and bluster, but not speak; No holy rage or frantic fires did stir Or flash about the spacious theatre. No clap of hands, or shout, or praise's proof Did crack the play-house ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... Tall, "Gable Oak is coming it quite the dand. He now wears shining boots with hardly a hob in 'em, two or three times a-week, and a tall hat a-Sundays, and 'a hardly knows the name of smockfrock. When I see people strut enough to be cut up into bantam cocks, I stand dormant with wonder, and says ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... know he's tall and graceful and has chestnut hair," fawned Judith. "I've loved Ted from the moment I saw how he curls his cross letters like a riding crop. That's always a sign of originality and genius." There was a hint of strut in Judith's ordinarily graceful motion, and tiny drops of pool water flicked her eyelashes unnoticed. When Judith Stearns professed to "love a boy" she did so heroically, though he be myth or just an ordinary ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... mirrors multiply the rows Of radiant beauties, and accomplish'd beaus, At once confounded into sober sense, He feels his pristine insignificance; And blinking, blund'ring, from the general quiz Retreats, "to ponder on the thing he is." By pride inflated, and by praise allur'd, Small Authors thus strut forth, and thus get cur'd; But, Critics, hear! an angel pleads for me, That tongueless, ...
— Poetic Sketches • Thomas Gent
... other's drawing-rooms, Ye idols of a petty clique: Strut your brief hour in borrowed plumes, And ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... recite these lines at his assemblies: O you who, in sumptuous array, strut about like princes and scorn the hatred of the poor, know that the saddle-cloth changeth not the nature of the ass, neither do splendid trappings change the nature of the ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... in stone or brickwork designed to receive and resist the lateral pressure of an arch, vault or strut. When built outside a wall it is termed a ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... the Plaza, with winter twilight hovering outside and faint drums down-stairs... they strut and fret in the lobby, taking another cocktail, scrupulously attired and waiting. Then the swinging doors revolve and three bundles of fur mince in. The theatre comes afterward; then a table at the Midnight Frolic—of course, mother will be along there, but she ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... demanded Bob, as he noticed this expression. "Are you huffed just because the independent little rascal wouldn't let us mother him? Say, look at his strut, will you? If he was heir to the throne of Alfonso he couldn't walk finer. Give me a whack between the shoulders, won't you, Frank? Perhaps I've been asleep, and dreamed ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... punished in a way that would disgrace him.' I observed, that the pillory does not always disgrace. And I mentioned an instance of a gentleman[931] who I thought was not dishonoured by it. JOHNSON. 'Ay, but he was, Sir. He could not mouth and strut as he used to do, after having been there. People are not willing to ask a man to their tables who has ...
— The Life Of Johnson, Volume 3 of 6 • Boswell
... Disregarding all extant works upon tactics, he drew up a simpler system for the use of his men. Throwing aside the old ideas of soldierly bearing, he taught them to use vigor, promptness, and ease. Discarding the stiff buckram strut of martial tradition, he educated them to move with the loafing insouciance of the Indian, or the graceful ease of the panther. He tore off their choking collars and binding coats, and invented a uniform which, though too flashy and conspicuous for ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... cock would separate from the pack, and running out to some distance, would leap upon a rock that was there; then, after dropping his wings, flirting with his spread tail, erecting the ruff upon his neck, and throwing back his head, he would swell and strut upon the rock, exhibiting himself like a diminutive turkey-cock. After manoeuvring in this way for a few moments, he would commence flapping his wings in short quick strokes, which grew more rapid as he proceeded, until a 'booming' sound was produced, more like the ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... sweetness, and the prettiness which would have been beauty had it been on a larger scale, had begun to fill what little there was of Corney's imagination; and he left her with a feeling that he knew where a treasure lay. He walked with an enlargement of strut as he went home through the park, and swung his cane with the air of a man who had made a conquest of which he had reason to ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... of college servants, and the more unwilling "capping" of the under-graduates, to such a man are real luxuries, and the relish with which he enjoys them is deep and strong. And if he have but the luck to immortalize himself by holding some University office, to strut through his year of misrule as proctor, or even as his humble "pro," then does he at once emerge from the obscurity of the family annals a being of a higher sphere. And when there comes up to commemoration a waddling old lady, and two thin sticks of virginity, who horrify the college ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... sharp scythe has mowed the hero down, The muse again awakes him to renown; She tells proud Fate that all her darts are vain, And bids the hero live and strut about again: Nor is she only able to restore, But she can make what ne'er was made before; Can search the realms of Fancy, and create What never came into the ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... day then, and sometimes half a dozen times in a day, the Judge and the baby may see some Italian society parading through the street. Fourteen proud sons of Italy, clad in magnificent new uniforms, bearing aloft huge silk banners, strut magnificently in the rear of a German band of twenty-four pieces, and a drum-corps of a dozen more. Then, too, come the religious processions, when the little girls are taken to their first communion. Six sturdy Italians struggle along under the weight of a mighty temple or pavilion, ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... muse shall no high tone assume, Nor strut in arms;—farewell my cap and plume: Brief be my verse, a task within my power, I tell my feelings in one happy hour; But what an hour was that! when from the main I reach'd this lovely valley once again! A glorious harvest fill'd my eager sight, Half shock'd, ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... ability of Josef Mayr that in his representation of Christ he does not offend us by a single word or a single gesture. If there were in his manner the slightest touch of affectation or of self-consciousness; if there were the remotest suspicion of a strut in his gait, we should be compelled to turn aside in disgust. As it is, we forget the artist altogether. For it is easy to see that Josef Mayr forgets himself, and wishes only to give a faithful picture of the events in ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... was virtue the cause of all this interest? Was it devotion to a young and innocent girl that made me willing to undertake so difficult and so delicate a task? Doubtless these motives went for something, but I will not attempt to strut in borrowed plumes, and must freely confess that if she had been ugly and stupid I should probably have left her to her fate. In short, selfishness was at the bottom of it all, so let us say ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... cafes on the way to the Posthof, and with their shoulders against the overhanging cliff, spread for the passing crowd a lure of Viennese jewelry in garnets, opals, amethysts, and the like, and of such Bohemian playthings as carrot-eating rabbits, worsted-working cats, dancing-bears, and peacocks that strut about the feet of the passers and expand their iridescent tails ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... schoolbooks. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were "The Life of Hannibal" and "The History of Sir William Wallace." Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... you say?" cried Vallombreuse, contemptuously. "What! a man of birth and condition mingle voluntarily and on terms of equality with these low buffoons of actors, paint his nose red, and strut about the stage, receiving cuffs and kicks from everybody? Oh no, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... does not represent the usual practice, but it brings sharply to consciousness the well known fact that for these buildings we have substantially one method of construction—that of the vertical strut, and the horizontal "fill"—while in style they appear as Grecian, Roman, Renaissance, Gothic, Modern French and what not, according to the whim of ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... phenomenon of love is the contentment which it never fails to kindle in the bosom of its object, regardless of its source. In a world where love is far more general than aversion, wherein the most hateful and hideous is frequently the most beloved, it remains true that even a king will strut with added arrogance because of the ardent glance of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... were a Life of Hannibal, the great Carthagenian general, and a Life of Wallace, the great Scottish hero; this last being lent him by the blacksmith. These books excited little Robert so much that if ever a recruiting sergeant came to his village, he would strut up and down in raptures after the drum and bagpipe, and long to be tall enough to be a soldier. The story of Wallace, too, awoke in his heart a love of Scotland and all things Scottish, which remained with him his whole life through. At times he ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... not tell whether she was Rudderina or Maratima; she finally concluded that she was Nautica. It required neither time nor confectionery to enable these two members of the family to rename the third. They viewed the strut of plain Mr. So-and-So at the prospect of commanding a vessel, and ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... before him, till I know how it will be relished by my mother. If it be not well received, perhaps I may employ him on the occasion. Yet I don't like to owe him an obligation, if I could help it. For men who have his views in their heads, do so parade it, so strut about, if a woman condescend to employ them in her affairs, that one has no patience ...
— Clarissa, Volume 2 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... method. He was a good-looking young fellow, and in capital health, but fast; one of those odious race of provincial fast men, and he appeared to me to be a sufficient sort of a husband, who could be got rid of later, by making him an allowance. He came to the house to pay his addresses, and to strut about before the idiot girl, who, however, seemed to please him. He brought her flowers, kissed her hands, sat at her feet and looked at her with affectionate eyes; but she took no notice of any of his attentions, and did not make ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... sense." Thus we dispose of all poetic merit, Yours Milton's genius, and mine Homer's spirit. Call Tibbald Shakespeare, and he'll swear the nine, Dear Cibber! never matched one ode of thine. Lord! how we strut through Merlin's cave, to see No poets there, but Stephen, you, and me. Walk with respect behind, while we at ease Weave laurel crowns, and take what names we please. "My dear Tibullus!" if that will not ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... wise decrees of an all-seeing Providence, was suddenly cut short. He fought against his disease (small pox) with that rashness that had been his ruling spirit through life, and thus ingloriously terminated his days. The pride of this man was to strut through the Mexican towns and gloat over his many crimes. To the gazing crowd, he would point out the trophies of his murders, which he never failed to have about him. To his fringed leggins were attached the phalanges (or finger ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... croaks of delight; Harry stood in manly calm, arms akimbo, a beam of satisfaction broadening his face. That smile, alas! gave the last touch of exasperation to the watching Cads. To stand still and behold the line vanishing into space had been in itself an ordeal, but Harry's lordly air, his strut, his smile—these were beyond their endurance! With a rallying shout of battle they plunged forward, grabbed at the ascending cord, hung for a dizzy moment suspended on its length, then with a final cheer felt it snap in twain and drag limply along ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... almost black at the water's edge, turned a fainter and more delicate hue as they receded, till, far away, they looked like mottled glass. Only yesterday he had laughed with me, talked and smoked with me, and now he was dead. A rage pervaded me. We are puny things, we, who strut the highways of the world, parading a so-called wisdom. There is only one philosophy; it ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... The stove went out into the airy kitchen, and a larger flock of geese squawked in the weeds and ditches. Again Andy and Jim drove the cows, Andy of a morning with a dreamy stroll, and Jim of an evening with a strut that was intended for a military gait. Who had told little Jim of West Point, the family did not know. But he had been told ...
— The Widow O'Callaghan's Boys • Gulielma Zollinger
... their pieces are sometimes capitally got up: a revolving stage enables them to shift from one scene to another with great rapidity. First-rate actors receive as much as a thousand riyos (about L300) as their yearly salary. This, however, is a high rate of pay, and many a man has to strut before the public for little more than his daily rice; to a clever young actor it is almost enough reward to be allowed to enter a company in which there is a famous star. The salary of the actor, however, ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... propagandists, by an ingenious casuistry, spread abroad the opinion that these mighty preparations were a colossal bluff which would redound to Germany's advantage. They said that President Wilson had bided his time so that his country might strut as a belligerent for only the last six months, and so obtain a voice in the peace negotiations. He did not intend that America should fight, and was only getting his armies ready that they might ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... dark shade of the palace wall, Where the peacocks strut, Where the queen may have heard ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... bayonets he caught the flourish of energetic drumsticks. The big drum gave forth its clamor with window-shaking insistence; it seemed to be the summons of power that all else should stand aside. On they came, these spruce Guards, each man a marching machine, trained to strut and pose exactly as his fellows. There was a sense of omnipotence in their rhythmic movement. And they all had the grand manner—from the elegant captain in command down to the smallest drummer-boy. Although the sun was shining brightly now, the earlier rain ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... imagine. Our deportment depends upon our dress. Make a man get into seedy, worn-out rags, and he will skulk along with his head hanging down, like a man going out to fetch his own supper beer. But deck out the same article in gorgeous raiment and fine linen, and he will strut down the main thoroughfare, swinging his cane and looking at the girls as ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... Oliver P. Applerod added two full inches to his strut. He seldom came out to the scene of actual operations, for there was none there except workmen to see his frock-coat and silk hat; but occasionally, from a sense of duty inextricably mingled with self-assertiveness, he paid a visit of ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... see yon bird strut by, Thus proud of his array; But human friends we may espy As ...
— Chatterbox Stories of Natural History • Anonymous
... death they either furnish valuable skins or wholesome food. Moreover, here the wolf awakes the reverberating echoes of the forest with its dismal howl; the raccoon, opossum, and squirrel pass their lives in sportive gambols; the wild and the ocellated turkeys strut about, pompous in manner, as if conscious of their handsome plumage, while the timid deer and shaggy-coated bison roam over prairies or through woodland glades, as yet unacquainted with the report of the white ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... the OUTSIDE. And so, when he heard bravery extolled and cowardice derided, it woke him up. He was ashamed. Perhaps his sweetheart turned up her nose and said, "I am told that you are a coward!" It was not HE that turned over the new leaf—she did it for him. HE must not strut around in the merit of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... lawn wagtails run nimbly in search of tiny insects, hoopoes probe the earth for grubs, mynas strut about, in company with king-crows and starlings, seeking ...
— A Bird Calendar for Northern India • Douglas Dewar
... were paying tribute to his importance, and he again went suddenly out of my control. He began to strut and caper and pose with the air of knowing that he was the finest gentleman ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... the last strap and smiled, taunting assurance in the twisted unpleasantness of it. "The appearance of this battleship has very much disrupted your plans to strut like conquering heroes among the slaves on Athena, ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... Sun-kissed—" as Tom goes on and says— "Er dower'd with sich advantages!" And I've come back, with welcome tread, From journeyin's vain, as I have said, To settle down in ca'm content, And cuss the towns where I have went, And brag on ourn, and boast and strut Around the streets ...
— Afterwhiles • James Whitcomb Riley
... were a leonine magnanimity of courage, a vulpine subtlety of cunning, or a pavonine strut of vanity. The spirit, freed from its fallen cell, "Fills with fresh energy another form, And towers an elephant, or glides a worm, Swims as an eagle in the eye of noon, Or wails, a screech owl, to the deaf, cold moon, Or ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the Westerns on this drama, so wrapped up in the actors, so anxious to declaim and strut, that they forget to what end the play exists: they have left the spectators out for whom alone the scenes are enacted, and who, though apparently so silent and motionless, are the raison d'etre of the whole performance. The play ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... letters to be given below. On the 16th he departed on his rounds, carrying, as observer, Lieutenant de Lavalette. His airplane was hit by a shell projectile in the right wing. On the 17th his machine returned with eight wounds, two in the right wing, four in the body, and in addition one strut and one longitudinal spar hit. On the 18th he returned from a reconnaissance with Lieutenant Colcomb during which his machine had been hit in the right wing, the rudder, and the body. But his notebook only contains statements of facts, ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... and some are hung with beads. Here serpents dash their stings into my face, All tipped with fire; and there a wild bird drives His red-hot talons in my burning scalp. Here bees and beetles buzz about my ears Like crackling coals, and frogs strut up and down Like hissing cinders; wasps and waterflies Scorch deep like ...
— Gipsy Life - being an account of our Gipsies and their children • George Smith
... Seville, not near to its cigarette factory and the guard-house, but at the scene of the great bull-fight, where Escamillo is to strut and show what a famous fellow he deserves to be! The old amphitheatre at the back with its awning stretched, the foreground with its orange-girls, fan-girls, wine-pedlars, ragged idlers and beggars, fine gentlemen, mules—all eager for the entertainment! Escamillo ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... still on his square foot of floor as did Ranjoor Singh on his. It was the fact that he did not flinch and did not strut about, but stood in one spot with his arms behind him that confirmed Ranjoor Singh in his reading of the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... villages, and assembled as necessity demanded. As they were completely beyond the sphere of Polish influence, they knew nothing about "knightly honour" and similar conceptions of Western chivalry; they even adopted many Tartar customs, and loved in time of peace to strut about in gorgeous Tartar costumes. Besides this, they were nearly all emigrants from Great Russia, and mostly Old Ritualists or Sectarians, whilst the Zaporovians ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... peragrate^; circumambulate, perambulate; nomadize^, wander, ramble, stroll, saunter, hover, go one's rounds, straggle; gad, gad about; expatiate. walk, march, step, tread, pace, plod, wend, go by shank's mare; promenade; trudge, tramp; stalk, stride, straddle, strut, foot it, hoof it, stump, bundle, bowl along, toddle; paddle; tread a path. take horse, ride, drive, trot, amble, canter, prance, fisk^, frisk, caracoler^, caracole; gallop &c (move quickly) 274. [start riding] embark, board, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... name is Clowes—is notorious. She has eight children, and she has brought them all up to her trade. I have made inquiries. The elder daughters are actresses and married to play-actors, and even the youngest child is taught to strut on the boards. Her troupe is the largest ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... me hasten to add that these men claim no especial merit for their altruism and unselfishness. They do not pose before the world as philanthropists. They do not strut about and preen themselves as who would say: "See what a noble man am I! See how I sacrifice myself for the welfare of society!" The attitude of cant and pose is entirely alien to the spirit of true service. Their delight is in doing, in serving, ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... Company and the Five Families got together and marketed a luxury item to the galaxy. You know how every super-jet big shot on twenty-five planets wants to say he's hunted on Khatka. And if he can point out a graz head on his wall, or wear a tail bracelet, he's able to strut with the best. To holiday on Khatka is both fabulous and fashionable—and very, very profitable for the natives and for Combine who sells transportation to ...
— Voodoo Planet • Andrew North
... intelligibleness illumines the universe. The arbitrary and cruel Creator who inflicts pain and pleasure at will then disappears from the stage; and it is well, for he is indeed an unnecessary character, and, worse still, is a mere creature of straw, who cannot even strut upon the boards without being upheld on all sides by dogmatists. Man comes into this world, surely, on the same principle that he lives in one city of the earth or another; at all events, if it is too much to say that this is so, one may safely ask, why is ...
— Light On The Path and Through the Gates of Gold • Mabel Collins
... 'cited I'd git when one o' dem shindigs 'ud come off. I sho' would strut den. De mistis 'ud dress me up an' I'd carry de likker an' drinks' roun' 'mongst de peoples. 'Would you prefer dis here mint julip, Marster? Or maybe you'd relish dis here special wine o' de Judge's. 'Dem ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Mississippi Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... "The men," said he, "wear capes reaching down to the ground, and their long hair falls down to their shoulders; and the women wear so many petticoats that they can hardly drag themselves along, and strut about like the Pope's courtezans, to the surprise and disgust of the whole world." What right had these selfish fops to call themselves Christians? They did more harm to the cause of Christ than all the Turks and heathens in ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... peace who understand neither its nature nor the way in which we may attain it, with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the Nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut about their ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... of costs and deputy sheriffs, but I do know that Mr. Aristabulus Bragg is an amusing mixture of strut, humility, roguery and cleverness. He is waiting all this time in the drawing- room, and you had better see him, as he may, now, be almost considered part of the family. You know he has been living in the house at Templeton, ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... military dignitaries, Councillors, members of Legislatures, Judges, etc., going in and out, and side by side with representatives of the aristocracy of birth, of finance, of commerce and of industry,—all of them, who, by day and in society, strut about with grave and dignified mien as "representatives and guardians of morality, of order, of marriage, and of the family," and who stand at the head of the Christian charity societies and of societies for the "suppression of prostitution." Modern capitalist society resembles a huge ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... what good-for-nothings you are! Why do you strut and turn up your noses as if you were the lords of creation? Well, I am going to give you orders. Go up and dress. Get some travelling money, and then come ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... peace, could attack him without forfeiting his recognizances—that villain Jinks, I say, had the outrageous audacity to ask my opinion on this point, and then when I gave it, to rise and say that it was a fine morning, and so strut out, without another word. A villain, sir! the man who consults a lawyer without the preparatory retainer, is a wretch ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... history has asked more from man than she has asked or has had more to give. She asks your life, your thoughts, your passions—every breath of your body must be a breath of desire for her and her alone. You think that you can strut about the world, a talking doll, pay court to women, listen to the voices that praise you, smirk your way through the days, and all the time climb. My young friend, no! I tell you no! Don't interrupt me. I am going to speak my say ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fellow with a tuft on his head. They arrive at the water suddenly and unexpectedly from behind rocks and trees, and stand about considering; then one, more venturesome than the rest, runs quickly down to drink, and is followed by a string of others; then they run up again ever so fast, and strut about cooing and spreading their crests—one seldom sees them fly; when they do they rise straight up, and then dart away close to the ground and drop suddenly within a few yards. Of all birds the crow has most sound common sense; there is no dawdling in his methods; ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the dial of the compass, fixed to a strut on the pilot's left. By that telltale their course lay nearly due northeast. Already the weltering roofs of Paris were in sight, to the right, the Eiffel Tower spearing up like a fairy pillar of gold lace-work, the Seine looping ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... metaphysician, 'this is association: just so a strain of music reminds you of a fine passage in a book you have read, or a beautiful tone in a picture you have seen; just so the Ranz des Vaches bears the exile to the timber house, with shady leaves, corbelled and strut-supported, whose very weakness appeals to the avalanche that shakes an icicly beard in monition ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... I? When I disappoint those who would extract daily profit from Me in the form of miracles, when I lay bare the carefully-concealed thoughts of their hearts, then I am hard. And when I shatter their childish love of the world, their craving for vanities, then I am hard. And when they strut about with their condemnations and their hard-heartedness, trampling the weak underfoot out of greed and malice, haughty as the heathens who bring human sacrifices to their gods, I would fain chastise them with ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... lantern jaws and croaking gut, See how the half-star'd Frenchmen strut, And call us English dogs: But soon we'll teach these bragging foes That beef and beer give heavier blows Than soup and ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... of the long horizontal frame pieces on the floor 3 feet apart. Between these place six of the strut pieces. Put one at each end, and each 4 1/2 feet put another, leaving a 2-foot space in the center. This will give you four struts 4 1/2 feet apart, and two in the center 2 feet apart, as shown in the illustration. This makes five rectangles. Be sure that the points ...
— Flying Machines - Construction and Operation • W.J. Jackman and Thos. H. Russell
... his cleanly best, John's pockets are an integral part of his personality. He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what corresponds in the genus homo with the polywog state in batrachia. The incipient man begins to strut as soon as mamma puts pockets into his kilted skirt—a stride as prophetic as the strangled crow of the cockerel upon the lowest bar ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... are in Kirkwood's pocket, all right enough. By George, can you beat it! And here's another thing. A man hates to talk against his own flesh and blood; and you may think I'm not in a position to strut around virtuously and talk about other people's sins; but I guess I've got some sense of honor left. I've never stolen any money. I did run off with another man's wife, and I got my pay for that. That was in the ardor of youth, Waterman; it was a calamitous mistake. Nobody ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... of the broad, plump shoulders gave to Peter in his perplexity the not inaccurate notion that the fat little man had enjoyed his joke and was giggling to such an extent that it almost interfered with his dignified strut. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... finger, while white soldiers seem rather to prefer a certain roughness. The demeanor of my men to each other is very courteous, and yet I see none of that sort of upstart conceit which is sometimes offensive among free negroes at the North, the dandy-barber strut. This is an agreeable surprise, for I feared that freedom and ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... mania for great people wishing to strut and fret their four hours and a quarter upon the stage is on the increase—at least according to our friends the constituent members of the daily press. Despite the newspaper-death of the manager of the Surrey, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... having rendered this age miserable, without rendering it ridiculous too. I hate to see it, for one poor inch of pitiful vigour which comes upon it but thrice a week, to strut and set itself out with as much eagerness as if it could do mighty feats; a true flame of flax; and laugh to see it so boil and bubble and then in a moment so congealed and extinguished. This appetite ought to appertain only ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... although an ex-Civil Servant was a man of resource, that mirrors of polished steel, as used on the handlebars of motor-cycles, to give warning of roadcraft at the rear, might be valuable in an aeroplane. Forthwith he screwed one to the sloping half-strut of his top center-section. The trial was a great success, and we bought six such mirrors, an investment which was to pay big dividends in ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... been mentioned before, as the dance in Duple time which preceded the Galliard which was in a triple rhythm. It was a stately dance, with a stately name, for the derivation is most probably from Pavo, a peacock, with a reference, no doubt, to the majestic strut and gay feathers of that bird. It was de rigueur for gentlemen to dance the Pavan in cap and sword; for lawyers to wear their gowns, princes their mantles; and ladies to take part in the fullest of full dress, the long trains of their gowns being supposed to correspond ...
— Shakespeare and Music - With Illustrations from the Music of the 16th and 17th centuries • Edward W. Naylor
... most comical, contemptible French boy, mop, boat, steamer, prince—Psha! it is of this wretched vapouring stuff that false patriotism is made. I write this as a sort of homily 'a propos of the day, and Cape Trafalgar, off which we lie. What business have I to strut the deck, and clap my wings, and cry "Cock-a-doodle-doo" over it? Some compatriots are at that ...
— Notes on a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Hero has come," she teased. "I have been watching your advance down the street. Such a strut!" ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... lofty elem trees do screen My brown-ruf'd house, an' here below, My geese do strut athirt the green, An' hiss an' flap their wings o' snow; As I do walk along a rank Ov apple trees, or by a bank, Or zit upon a bar or plank, To ...
— Poems of Rural Life in the Dorset Dialect • William Barnes
... a very wide-awake and active fowl advanced, pecking, chirping, and scratching vigorously. A tuft of green leaves waved upon his crest, a larger tuft of brakes made an umbrageous tail, and a shawl of many colours formed his flapping wings. A truly noble bird, whose legs had the genuine strut, whose eyes shone watchfully, and whose voice had a ring that evidently struck terror into the catterpillar's soul, if it was a catterpillar. He squirmed, he wriggled, he humped as fast as he could, trying to escape; but all ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... shamelessly given to the practice of "wieldin' a pencil" until he discovered that he could make folk laugh. After that he was an abandoned soul, with a naughty strut on the roads. For folk laughed with flattering amazement, and they clapped Terry Lute on his broad little back, and much to his delight they called him a limb o' the devil, and they spread his fame and his sketches from Out-of-the-Way and Twillingate Long ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... place for birds is in the air or on the bushy tops of trees or on smooth-shaven lawns. Let them twitter and strut on the greens of golf courses and intimidate the tired business men. Let them peck cinders along the railroad track and keep the trains waiting. But really they have no right to take possession of a man's house ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... with Bluff to be always expecting something serious to happen; and in case his suspicions were verified, as might occasionally occur, he would crow over the others, and strut around as though he thought himself a prophet gifted with second-sight, and able to forecast coming ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... knew that the captain of a pirate ship ought to be the most severe and rigid man on board, and so, at the slightest sign of insubordination, his grumbling men were put in chains or flogged, and it was Bonnet's habit at such times to strut about the deck with loaded pistols, threatening to blow out the brains of any man who dared to disobey him. Recognizing that although their captain was no sailor he was a first-class tyrant, the rebellious crew kept their grumbling to themselves ...
— Buccaneers and Pirates of Our Coasts • Frank Richard Stockton
... stepped into the water to drink. Instantly a brisk fire was opened on me, bullets striking all around and raising a little shower-bath. Like many a foolish fellow, I found it easier to get into than out of a difficulty. I had not yet led my command into action, and, remembering that one must "strut" one's little part to the best advantage, sat my horse with all the composure I could muster. A provident camel, on the eve of a desert journey, would not have laid in a greater supply of water than did my thoughtless beast. At last he raised his head, ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... did ye toil, and fagg, and fume, and fret, And—what the bashful muse would blush to say. But, now, your painful tremors are all o'er, Cloath'd in the glories of a full-sleev'd gown, Ye strut majestically up and down, And now ye fagg, and now ye fear, no more! ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... Horne is at Outwood, a little more than a mile to the north-west, on the way back to Horley. Outwood Common is delightful. Two great windmills, black and white, spread sails to the blowing air; below them, black and white like the mills, pigs nose quietly over the short grass, and geese strut cackling. To the north, beyond rich and tranquil fields, lie the grey-green wooded hills ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... independence which they boast of despises habit, and time-honoured forms of subordination; it consists in breaking old ties upon new temptations; in casting off the modest garb of private obligation to strut about in the glittering armour of public virtue; in sacrificing, with jacobinical infatuation, the near to the remote, and preferring, to what has been known and tried, that which has no distinct existence, even in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn, their knowledge of our race is limited to the unfortunate selection of specimens who strut about their streets, and—according to their light—they are not guilty of outrageous exaggeration. I venture to assert that an Englishman will meet more unpleasant samples of his countrymen and countrywomen in an August day's walk in Paris, than he will come across during a month in London. To ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... make you ruler of all India!" she said. "Another may wear the baubles, but thou shalt be the true king, even as thy name is! And behind thee, me, Yasmini, whispering wisdom and laughing to see the politicians strut!" ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... in the afternoon and lasts until ten at night. Tea and dinner is brought into your box in those nice little lacquer lunch boxes. Ganjiro is on the stage in every scene for eight hours, so you can see the actors work for their art here. The costumes are superb, but the actors do not simply strut to show off. Their speech being very affected in manner they have had to depend upon expression to get results, and as a consequence their acting is done with their entire body more than any other school in the world. The best ones, like the ones we are to see, can express any emotion, so 'tis ...
— Letters from China and Japan • John Dewey
... Children like to play at being grown-up, whether by wearing long dresses or by smoking, and it makes them feel important to do what the grown-ups do; you can observe how important they feel by the way they strut ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... shows a radical departure from anything that had been previously attempted, and as a model an ordinary boat was taken. In shape it is as nearly streamline as is practicable, having a keel and ribs of wood with curved longitudinal members, the strut ends being housed in steel sockets. The whole frame is braced with piano wire set diagonally between the struts. The car is floored from end to end, and the sides are enclosed with ...
— British Airships, Past, Present, and Future • George Whale
... manner and behavior, her sweetness, and the prettiness which would have been beauty had it been on a larger scale, had begun to fill what little there was of Corney's imagination; and he left her with a feeling that he knew where a treasure lay. He walked with an enlargement of strut as he went home through the park, and swung his cane with the air of a man who had made a conquest of which he had reason ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... really mean what you say?" cried Vallombreuse, contemptuously. "What! a man of birth and condition mingle voluntarily and on terms of equality with these low buffoons of actors, paint his nose red, and strut about the stage, receiving cuffs and kicks from everybody? Oh no, Vidalinc, ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... wretched Beaux Tibbs's of society, who sport a lace dickey, and nothing besides,—the poor silly jays, who trail a peacock's feather behind them, and think to simulate the gorgeous bird whose nature it is to strut on palace-terraces, and to flaunt his magnificent fan-tail ...
— The Book of Snobs • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the step of gosling, Strut thou with the feet of duckling, In the yard that's washed so cleanly, On the smooth and level grassplot, Where the father rules the household, And the mother holds dominion, To the workplace of the brother, And ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... plane of the drunkard is the dude, that missing link between monkey and man, whose dream of happiness is a single eye-glass, a kangaroo strut, and three hours of conversation without a sensible sentence; whose only conception of life is to splurge, and flirt, ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... scattered grain, and thievishly resolved To escape the impending famine, often scared As oft return, a pert voracious kind. Clean riddance quickly made, one only care Remains to each, the search of sunny nook, Or shed impervious to the blast. Resigned To sad necessity, the cock foregoes His wonted strut; and, wading at their head, With well-considered steps, seems to resent His altered gait ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... passengers coming ashore, and ran and offered to carry their carpet-bags or portmanteaus; but some growled at me, and others laughed at me, and one old gentleman asked me if I thought he was a North American Indian to strut up Broadway with a female behind him carrying his pack. And so, sir, while all the ragged boys I knew could get little jobs to earn bread, I, because I was a girl, was not allowed to carry a gentleman's parcel or black ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... stone or brickwork designed to receive and resist the lateral pressure of an arch, vault or strut. When built outside a wall it ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... As we went, she danced and sang, and laughed out joyously at everything and at nothing, and talked the most fascinating nonsense—all in the role of "Cousin Burwell." She could imitate him to perfection; her strut and swagger and slang threw me into paroxysms of delight. We picked huckleberries, and dived into the woods to feast upon wild plums that had ten drops of syrupy juice between tough skins and flinty stones encased in the pulp of bitterness, ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... of the visitors who were staying at Chateau Desir were assembled in the drawing-room. The Marquess sallied forward to receive his guest with a most dignified countenance and a most aristocratic step; but, before he got half-way, his coronation pace degenerated into a strut, and then into a shamble, and with an awkward and confused countenance, half impudent and half flinching, he held forward his left hand to his newly-arrived visitor. Mr. Cleveland looked terrifically ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... asked to desist, the more obstinately they persevered. For fear of misapprehension, I must state that though these negroes go stark naked when cruising or working during a shower of rain, they all possess a mantle or goat-skin, which they sling over their shoulders, and strut about in when on shore and the ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... found by a careless and self-forgetful vagrant than by the deliberate and self-conscious seeker. A cheerful doctrine this. Not only cheerful, but self-evidently true. How right it is, and how cheerful it is, to think that while philosophers and clergymen strut about this world looking out, and smelling out, for its prime experiences, more careless and less celebrated men are continually finding such things, without effort, without care, in irregular ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... Frank?" demanded Bob, as he noticed this expression. "Are you huffed just because the independent little rascal wouldn't let us mother him? Say, look at his strut, will you? If he was heir to the throne of Alfonso he couldn't walk finer. Give me a whack between the shoulders, won't you, Frank? Perhaps I've been asleep, and dreamed ...
— The Saddle Boys of the Rockies - Lost on Thunder Mountain • James Carson
... on the left, opposite the bar, where they entertained themselves with agreeable conversation, cards, backgammon, draughts, and an occasional song by Dr. Toole, who was a florid tenor, and used to give them, 'While gentlefolks strut in silver and satins,' or 'A maiden of late had a merry design,' or some other such ditty, with a recitation by plump little stage-stricken Ensign Puddock, who, in 'thpite of hith lithp,' gave rather spirited imitations of some of the players—Mossop, ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... neither its nature nor the way in which we may attain it with uplifted eyes and unbroken spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the Nation. They do not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their uneasy hour ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... I accept it so, for I tell ye I am of a mollifying nature. I can strut and againe in kindnesse I can suffer a man to breake my head, and put it up ...
— A Collection Of Old English Plays, Vol. IV. • Editor: A.H. Bullen
... not to be done. But in looking round you may perceive men booted and spurred, who perhaps never crossed a horse, and some with whips in their hands who deserve it on their backs—they hum lively airs, whistle and strut about with their quizzing-glasses in their hands, playing a tattoo upon their boots, and shewing themselves off with as many airs as if they were real actors engaged in the farce, that is to say, the buyers and sellers; when in truth they are nothing but loungers in search of employment, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... young woman come to look after my birds?" said Mrs d'Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. "I hope you will be kind to them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he? He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena too—yes, they are a little frightened—aren't you, dears? But they will soon get used ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... next morning by the sun shining brilliantly in at my bed-room window, my apprehensions had vanished, my enthusiasm was again at fever-heat, and I panted for the moment—not to be very long deferred—when I should don my uniform and strut forth to sport my ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... pyramid over the barren place on the top of his head, so that the hair used to form a regular pomatumed spike. But he did not look at all fierce, for his fat round face, dull eyes, and tenchy mouth would not let him; but he used to speak very loudly, and thump his Malacca cane down on the ground, and strut and look as important as many more people do who have not brains enough to teach them their insignificance as parts of creation, or how very little value they are in the world, which could go on just as ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... look about the hills; A Tyrian light the village fills; A wider sunrise in the dawn; A deeper twilight on the lawn; A print of a vermilion foot; A purple finger on the slope; A flippant fly upon the pane; A spider at his trade again; An added strut in chanticleer; A flower expected everywhere; An axe shrill singing in the woods; Fern-odors on untravelled roads, — All this, and more I cannot tell, A furtive look you know as well, And Nicodemus' mystery Receives ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... upon the rising grounds over against them, was filing off towards their right. No certain judgment could, however, yet be formed of the enemy's real design, and as they were in want of bread, it wras thought probable that they intended to repass the Un-strut; but it was soon perceived that their several motions were contradictory to each other. At the same time that some of their infantry were filing off towards their right, a large body of cavalry wheeled round towards their left, directing ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... while I continued to strut about and plan how to punish the bold woman for her offence. Yet not more than a few moments had passed when Natalia returned and, stealing to my side, began to ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... attractiveness, displays his great desirability, he tries to make every woman think how wonderful it would be to have him for a lover. His very ignoring of the women is part of the game. He is never UNCONSCIOUS of them. He should have been a cockerel, so he could strut before fifty females, all his subjects. But really, his Don Juan does NOT interest me. I could play Dona Juanita a million times better than he plays Juan. He bores me, you know. His maleness bores me. Nothing is so boring, so inherently stupid and stupidly conceited. Really, the fathomless ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... read the paper when Clark sent for him; but he could not join in the extravagant delight of his fellow officers and their brave men. What did all this victory mean to him? Hamilton to be treated as an honorable prisoner of war, permitted to strut forth from the feat with his sword at his side, his head up—the scalp-buyer, the murderer of Alice! What was patriotism to the crushed heart of a lover? Even if his vision had been able to pierce the ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... for us to live for the present in just a shade "better style" than we do; but we have mean ambitions in other directions than style. Style is not for those who are placidly indifferent to display; and before whom on a comely, scornful Isle shall we strut and parade? "You and I cannot be confined within the weak list of a country's fashions," for do we not proclaim and justify our own? Are we not leaders who have no subservient, no flattering imitators, no sycophantic copyists? The etiquette of our Court finds easy expression, and ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... could not but be conscious by comparison; the intellectual difference, which in other cases of comparison of characters, is often a matter of undecided contest, being as clear in his case as the superiority of stature in some men above others. Johnson did not strut or stand on tiptoe; He only did not stoop. From his earliest years his superiority was perceived and acknowledged. He was from the beginning [Greek text omitted], a king of men. His school-fellow, Mr. Hector, has obligingly furnished me ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... to strut:—Israel among the nations, the dog among animals, the cock among birds. Some say also the goat among small cattle, and some the ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... the Belgian. "But philosophy is like courage—easy to assume. We strut and talk big; we call the politicians sharks, the soldiers fools; but does it do any good? The war will go on; the enemy will destroy our homes, separate our families, take away our bread and leave us to starve; but we have the privilege to philosophize, if we like. For myself, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... holds conference polite, And indiscriminate the gaudy beau And sloven mix. Here he, who all the week Took bearded mortals by the nose, or sat Weaving dead hairs, and whistling wretched strain, And eke the sturdy youth, whose trade it is Stout oxen to contund, with gold-bound hat And silken stocking strut. The red arm'd belle Here shows her tasty gown, proud to be thought The butterfly of fashion: and forsooth Her haughty mistress deigns for once to tread The same unhallow'd floor.—'Tis hurry all And rattling cups and saucers. Waiter here, And waiter there, and waiter here and there, At once is ...
— Inns and Taverns of Old London • Henry C. Shelley
... in what they are to do. Every monitor should know his work, and when you have taught him this, you must require it to be done. To get good order, you must make every monitor answerable for the conduct of his class. It is astonishing how some of the little fellows will strut about, big with the importance of office. And here I must remark, it will require some caution to prevent them from taking too much upon themselves; so prone are we, even in our earliest years, to abuse the ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... reality of kings and queens and court pageantry was not so far past that it did not appeal powerfully to the imaginations of the frequenters of the Globe, the Rose, and the Fortune. They had no such feeling as we have in regard to the pasteboard kings and queens who strut their brief hour before us in anachronic absurdity. But, besides that he wrote in the spirit of his age, Shakespeare wrote in the language and the literary methods of his time. This is not more evident in the contemporary poets than in the chroniclers of that day. They all delighted ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... celebrity. It is the largest diamond yet obtained from Brazil; and it is owned by the King of Portugal. It weighed originally two hundred and fifty-four carats, but was trimmed down to one hundred and twenty-five. The grandfather of the present king had a hole bored in it, and liked to strut about on gala-days with the gem suspended around his neck. This magnificent jewel was found by three banished miners, who were seeking for gold during their exile. A great drought had laid dry the bed of a river, and there they discovered this lustrous wonder. Of course, on promulgating their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... et praecepta pleno effundit penu, ad quae componere vitarn oporteat; in sententiis quanta gravitas, orationis quanta vis, quam probe et meditate cum hominum ingenia moresque novisse omnia testantur." We feel sure that our Umbrian fun-maker would strut in public and laugh in private, could he hear such an encomium of his lofty moral aims. For it is our ultimate purpose to prove that fun-maker Plautus was primarily and well-nigh ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... into his own, feeling the pulse as if merely caressing the slender wrist. Then he began to describe his bailiff's cottage, with woodbine round the porch, the farm-yard, the bee-hives, the pretty duck-pond with an osier island, and the great China gander who had a pompous strut, which made him the droll est creature possible. And Sophy should go there in a day or two, and be as happy as one of the bees, but not so busy. Sophy listened very earnestly, very gravely, and then sliding her hand from the Mayor, caught hold of her grandfather's arm firmly, and said, "And you, ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... nervous or easily wrought up and must have allowances made for them. And the person so considered always thinks himself strong beyond others and never suspects the truth. Only the weak and foolish can strut independently through life." ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... great day came when old Mother Nature arrived to inspect the kingdom of old King Bear. All the little meadow people and all the little forest folk hastened to pay their respects to old Mother Nature and to strut about in their fine clothes—all but Mr. Toad. He was so busy that he didn't even know that old Mother Nature ...
— Mother West Wind's Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... wilt say, I have no cause.—Perhaps not. But if I had any thing valuable as to intellectuals, those are not my own; and to be proud of what a man is answerable for the abuse of, and has no merit in the right use of, is to strut, like ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... English three-pence hight. One nymph, to whom fat Sir John Falstaff's lean, 10 There with her single person fills the scene. Another, with long use and age decay'd, Dived here old woman, and rose there a maid. Our trusty doorkeepers of former time There strut and swagger in heroic rhyme. Tack but a copper-lace to drugget suit, And there's a hero made without dispute: And that, which was a capon's tail before, Becomes a plume for Indian emperor. But all his subjects, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... a large number of plays—not merely his own part, but the whole play—he has to undergo a severe physical training, part of which consists in standing for an hour every day with his mouth wide open, to inhale the morning air. He is taught to sing, to walk, to strut, and to perform a variety of gymnastic exercises, such as standing on his head, or turning somersaults. His first classification is as male or female actor, no women having been allowed to perform since the days of the Emperor Ch'ien Lung (A.D. 1736-1796), whose ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... fledgling from a Brussels or Axminster carpeted reception-room would stand on the hustings and publish a fear that he might be boring his audience. One familiar with the trade of electioneering, as it has always been conducted by men, would strut and shout and brag, never for a moment worrying whether or not he came anywhere near the truth or feeling the slightest qualm, though he deafened his hearers with his trumpeting or bored them to complete extinction, ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Peacocks sweep the fairies' rooms; They use their folded tails for brooms; But fairy dust is brighter far Than any mortal colours are; And all about their tails it clings In strange designs of rounds and rings; And that is why they strut about And ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... cause the existing rot is chargeable the editor, at least of all others, had the power to stop or check it, and failure to meet this great responsibility shows that the strut of this great personage is assumed, and that, like the rest, his necessities have been used by the master to bend and break him till he no longer dare ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... during the winter, I was very much astonished, one day, as the King of Italy passed, to see a whole school of little boys under the direction of three Christian Brothers, strut by with their little noses in the air, and without raising their hats. At the same pension with myself was a young Swiss Benedictine monk, who sat by me at table d'hote, and with whom I struck up a warm friendship. I commented to him on what I ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
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