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Lean   Listen
verb
Lean  v. t.  (past & past part. leant or leaned; pres. part. leaning)  To cause to lean; to incline; to support or rest. "His fainting limbs against an oak he leant."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lean" Quotes from Famous Books



... (Sergeant W. Collier) only received his orders at dawn—the runner having missed the way in the dark. The company of Somersets were to attack on the right, keeping touch with the Devons, C Company (Mr I.W. Cruickshank) in the centre, B Company (Mr J. M'Lean) on the left, with D Company (Mr Brodie Brown) in reserve. A Company (Sergeant W. Collier) was to keep in touch with the Londoners (58th Division) on the left and advance in conjunction with them. The time for our barrage opening was postponed, but ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie

... heart. On the threshold she suddenly looked up at him through her veil, and met in return such a look as a woman may lean upon. Her heart throbbed wildly in response, throbbed as only a sad heart may when it realizes that there is to be ...
— Mrs. Red Pepper • Grace S. Richmond

... Gap and to protect the property of Confederate citizens in the valley; and a commission of captaincy in the said company for the said Mayhall Wells. Mayhall's mouth widened to the full stretch of his lean jaws, and, when Bill was through reading, he silently reached for the paper and looked it up and down and over ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... wheel and stuck his lean face close to the quartermaster's. His glinting eyes grew to two little points and his hooked nose wrinkled on the sides as he showed his teeth while he drawled in a ...
— Mr. Trunnell • T. Jenkins Hains

... claw-footed chair, and old club-footed Deacon White, my neighbor, and that still nigher old neighbor, my betwisted old grape-vine, that of a summer evening leans in his elbow for cosy company at my window-sill, while I, within doors, lean over mine to meet his; and above all, high above all, am fond of my high-mantled old chimney. But she, out of the infatuate juvenility of hers, takes to nothing but newness; for that cause mainly, loving new cider in autumn, and in spring, as if she were own daughter of ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville

... his northern dialect, of his "twa bonnie lads, and the looks that the court ladies threw at them, when visiting his shop in their caroches, when on a frolic into the city." But David Ramsay never failed, at the same time, to draw up his own tall, thin, lathy skeleton, extend his lean jaws into an alarming grin, and indicate, by a nod of his yard-long visage, and a twinkle of his little grey eye, that there might be more faces in Fleet Street worth looking at than those of Frank and Jenkin. His old neighbour, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott

... a grain, Miss Lois," said Sam composedly. "I see that are stick was e'en a'most in two, and I thought I'd jest settle it. I'll sweep up the coals now," he added, vigorously applying a turkey-wing to the purpose, as he knelt on the hearth, his spare, lean figure glowing in the blaze of the firelight, and getting quite flushed ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... trapper, the instant he beheld them; "mount and fly, if you value those who lean on you for help. Mount, and leave us in the hands of ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper

... surveyed him in momentarily speechless wrath at the interruption. Then his eyes narrowed appraisingly as he noted the tall, lean, well-knit figure before ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant

... family was small and he took us all with him. The Indian meal which he brought was expended six weeks too soon, so that for that length of time we had to live without bread. The lean venison and the breast of wild turkeys, we were taught to call bread. I remember how narrowly we children watched the growth of the potato tops, pumpkin, and squash vines, hoping from day to day to get something to answer in the place of bread. ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... encourage, restrain, cherish, discipline all. Standish for the camp, Winslow for the council, but for you, Bradford, the sleepless vigil, the constant watch, the self-forgetting energy, whose fruits are safety, honor, and prosperity, for those who lean on you." ...
— Standish of Standish - A story of the Pilgrims • Jane G. Austin

... Folks, whose tenth cousins lately died, 470 Wrote letters long, and Knott replied; All who could either walk or ride Gathered to wonder or deride, And paid the house a visit; Horses were to his pine-trees tied, Mourners in every corner sighed, Widows brought children there that cried. Swarms of lean Seekers, eager-eyed, (People Knott never could abide,) Into each hole and cranny pried 480 With strings of questions cut and dried From the Devout Inquirer's Guide, For the wise spirits to decide— As, for example, is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... technicalities and its tactics, and the ethics of the liberation of Jones, the actual murderer, now long since vanished into the obscurity from which he came. On the one hand stands a public convinced of Patrick's guilt, and on the other the convicted "lifer" pointing a lean finger at the valet Jones and stubbornly repeating, "I ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train

... off the wet gloves that were plastered to her skin; she drew out the long pins from her hat, took it off, and gazed ruefully at the lean plume lashed to its raking stem. With the coquetry of pathos, she ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair

... Moody, Sir Huddlestone Fuddlestone's huntsman, was seen trotting up the avenue, followed by the noble pack of hounds in a compact body, the rear being brought up by the two whips clad in stained scarlet frocks, light, hard-featured lads on well-bred lean horses, possessing marvellous dexterity in casting the points of their long, heavy whips at the thinnest part of any dog's skin who dared to straggle from the main body, or to take the slightest notice, or even so much as wink at the hares and rabbits ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... but they are not secretive!" I sneered, flopping our inner shield over flat on the ground. "Come, sit on this, Doctor, and we will lean the outer shield over us, and snuggle in between them as cosy as two oysters! Let them fondly imagine they can shoot us through this pasty soil, and keep their own counsel better ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass

... Number One, he encountered a wiry, quick-moving little man, with restless black eyes and a lean, intelligent face. He wore a pair of common miner's "jumpers," but even so, he was not to be taken for a workingman. Everything about him ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... account her worshipper.' Lo! a white goat, and twins, I keep for thee: Mermnon's lass covets them: dark she is of skin: But yet hers be they; thou but foolest me. She cometh, by the quivering of mine eye. I'll lean against the pine-tree here and sing. She may look ...
— Theocritus • Theocritus

... like this before! What splendid lords and squires, fat or lean, hook-nosed or eagle-eyed, well tanned by sun and wind, in faultless kit, on priceless mounts! How redolent they are of health and wealth, and the secure consciousness of high social position—of the cool business-like ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier

... insurgent, arrived at the village last night, and sent to request some horses from the hacienda, which were sent him with all convenient speed, that he might not, according to his usual plan, come and take them. In exchange for some half-dozen farm horses in good condition, he sent half a dozen lean, wretched-looking quadrupeds, the bones coming through their ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... bare and rugged grew the whole land. Once, stopping hard by a hamlet, I had sat down to munch such food as I carried, and was sharing my meal with a little brown herd-boy, who told me that he was dinnerless. A few sheep and lean kine plucked at such scant grasses as grew among rocks, and herbs useless but sweet-scented, when suddenly a horn was blown from the tower of the little church. The first note of that blast had not died away, when every cow and sheep was scampering towards the hamlet and a kind of "barmkyn" {4} they ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang

... there on the first floor of which you were very welcome, where a handsome and well-bred couple once a week received young men for the sake of the lady's young niece. The master of the house was a lean and silent man, who always looked handsome, and was always dignified; he had honourably filled an exalted official post. His wife had been very attractive in her youth, had grown white while still quite young, and ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes

... quia absurdum et quia impossibile est, for there is an irreconcilable repugnancy in their natures between reason and belief; therefore, "My son, give thyself to the Lord with thy whole heart and lean not ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... itself into his eyes; but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was ...
— The Castle of Otranto • Horace Walpole

... take an inference To bed with me to-night to keep me warm. I thank you, Hamilton, and I approve Your fealty to the aggregated greatness Of him you lean on while he ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson

... well," replied the stranger with a sigh, "it is a way much frequented, and travelled hourly by many; lean upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various

... so acute, his imagination so vivid, and his memory so retentive, that he could at once, and readily apply the knowledge so widely gleaned to the subject under discussion, that they who were ignorant of his previous mental instruction, would have imagined that he had, in earlier years, been the lean and diligent student, who had wasted the midnight oil ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper

... cut all the flesh off the head and stacked it up on the slab. When the demonstrator of anatomy came by to test our knowledge and to see our work, he asked: "What have you here?" My friend very promptly answered: "A pile of lean meat." This student went by the not very euphonious name of "Lean Meat" ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... suspenders and a belt, fitted in loose folds around his stocky legs. On his head was a big sun helmet, and around his waist, less generous in amplitude than formerly, was a partly filled belt of Winchester cartridges. His horse was a stout little Abyssinian shooting pony, gray of color and lean in build, and in the blood-stained saddle-bag was a well-worn copy of Macaulay's Essays, bound in pigskin. Our hero—for it was he—was none other than Bwana Tumbo, the hunter-naturalist, exponent of the strenuous life, and ex-president ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon

... it," cried Katie, turning toward Waldo. But Elizabeth was still looking at Archdale. Suppose the shooting had been necessary, how could he speak of killing a human being as he would an animal, and then lean back and look at Mr. Waldo with a smile ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various

... trained dresses, but rather as lightly draped as possible, and bed with her among the pine needles. Her loud, slightly harsh voice filled the salon. She dropped her arms over the back of the chair, moving her lean hands from the wrists. We were thrilled and silent. The Herr Professor, beside me, abnormally serious, his eyes bulging, pulled at his moustache ends. Frau Godowska adopted that peculiarly detached attitude of the proud parent. The only ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield

... fail me. Hallelujah! He can not only sanctify, but He can preserve, sustain and keep. Whatever may come to us, Christ will not forsake us. As we look down the vista of years to come, and remember that life is swift and serious, we can only lean hard on the Son of God and push on, confident that His promise, "Lo, I am with you alway," can not ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees

... permanently fixed, the Lycosa, once she has set up house, prefers to lie in ambush and wait for the quarry. Every day, when the heat is greatest, I see my captives come up slowly from under ground and lean upon the battlements of their woolly castle-keep. They are then really magnificent in their stately gravity. With their swelling belly contained within the aperture, their head outside, their glassy eyes staring, their ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre

... the hay-rick a lean, hungry wolf crept out. At first in wonder she raised her eyes, which shone in the green light, astonished at this disturbance of her repose; and she seemed to take counsel within herself, whether this was the continuation of her sweet dreams. The providential joint ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai

... a quick step, and a somewhat heavy tread, showing that the foot comes down with a hearty good will. If the body lean a little forward, and the eyes keep steadily in the same direction, while the feet are going, so much the better, for these discover earnestness to arrive at the intended point. I do not like, and I never liked, your sauntering, soft-stepping ...
— The Young Man's Guide • William A. Alcott

... foot high. Beside these there are a number of smaller lions placed irregularly on the necks, behind the legs, under the feet, or on the back of the larger ones. The space between the columns is closed by stone slabs. Four sculptured stone elephants lean with their foreheads against the edge of the balustrades. The bridge is supported by eleven arches. At each end of the bridge two pavilions with yellow roofs have been built, all with large marble tablets ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa

... his door, like the sign of the Shoe, For court-understrappers to congregate to; For Southey to come, in his dearth of invention, And eat his own words for mock-praise and a pension; For Croker to lurk with his spider-like limb in, And stock his lean bag with waylaying the women; And Jove only knows for what creatures beside To shelter their envy and dust-liking pride, And feed on corruption, like bats, who at nights, In the dark take their shuffles, which ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... of men's lasts was taken down from the shelf, and these were tied to one end of the waxed-end and were let right down to the pavement. People collected in the street outside, and stood there staring. Pelle had to lean right out of the window, and bend over as far as he could, while Emil, as the oldest apprentice, laid the waxed-end over his neck. They were all on their feet now, with the exception of the young master; he took no ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo

... I'm sure you have made all the amends in your power, and we are much obliged to you. Good afternoon! Come, Grey, do you feel as if you could make a start? Lean on my arm, and ...
— Jack of Both Sides - The Story of a School War • Florence Coombe

... pervades the windows of carnation gauze. The moss-locked, streaked rocks shelter afford to the cranes, plunged in sleep. The dew, blown on the t'ung tree by the well, doth wet the roosting rooks. Wrapped in a quilt, the maid comes the gold phoenix coverlet to spread. The girl, who on the rails did lean, on her return drops the kingfisher flowers! This quiet night his eyes in sleep he cannot close, as he doth long for wine. The smoke is stifled, and the fire restirred, when tea is ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... might be necessary to lean on the little man for weapons of war, supposing Lord Fleetwood delayed his arrival yet another day, Livia was indulgent. She assisted him to think that he spoke ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... sustain the terrible pressure which it undergoes; it would sink of its own weight. Yet it must be acknowledged that in the making of a race overseriousness is a far lesser failing than its reverse, and even the faults resulting from it lean toward ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson

... tom-tom, and cultivated his land with a crooked stick, had a religion of his own. That gentlemen in the dugout was orthodox. He was never troubled with doubts. He lived and died settled in his mind. He believed in hell; and he thought he would be far happier in heaven, if he could just lean over and see certain people who expressed doubts as to the truth of his creed, gently ...
— The Ghosts - And Other Lectures • Robert G. Ingersoll

... of the sunset, How my heart to thy beauty thrills— Veiled dimly to-day with the shadow Of the greenest of all thy hills! Where daisies lean to the sunshine, And the winds a plowing go, And break into shining furrows The mists in the vale below; Where the willows hang out their tassels, With the dews, all white and cold, Strung over their wands so limber, Like pearls upon chords of gold; Where in milky hedges of hawthorn ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various

... nation, and assuredly easier than for Germany. We have had such years of material prosperity and progress as were never known in the history of any people, it is true; but every cycle of prosperity has been succeeded by lean years, and ever will be. When the inevitable over-production and lessened home consumption come, Eastern markets, though supplied at moderate profit, will be invaluable. We are building the Panama Canal, whose ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield

... wider and the man within stepping outside, his person was revealed. He was of medium height and spare, and he wore a long gray tunic of wool reaching to his knees. Beneath this garment his lean legs were bare, while on his feet he wore shoes of skin which reached to the ankle, and which were secured by thongs. Such as he Hugo and Humphrey had often seen, but never before a face like his, in which craftiness and credulity were strangely mingled. For ...
— A Boy's Ride • Gulielma Zollinger

... bed. Manasseh insisted upon that. They could not possibly expect Joseph till the morning. Accustomed as Rachel was to lean upon her husband's strength, at this moment his strength seemed harshness. The night was long. A hundred horrid visions passed before her sleepless eyes. The sun rose upon the Ghetto, striving to slip its rays between the high, close-pressed tops of opposite houses. The five Ghetto gates ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... him mad-man's strength And devil's skill. His straining form relaxed, Heavily slipping earthward; ere Malua Could gain fresh hold upon his fainting foe, Uhila with a twist had laid him low, Knee on his breast, lean fingers at his throat ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay

... Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it. Like them, he wore a blue hunting shirt and trousers of some stuff fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a cockade. He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest. After the drill was over he stood up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller

... with a dozen chairs in cotton shrouds, but congress, the ministry, and the "West Point of Honduras," the superintendent of which was a native youth who had spent a year or two at Chapultepec. Against it lean barefooted, anemic "soldiers" in misfit overalls, armed with musket and bayonet that overtop them in height. The main post-office of the republic is an ancient adobe hovel, in the cobwebbed recesses of which ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... fervently. "See, Jacob, there are houses. The village is near. There we can get food and shelter. Come, lean on me and we will be there ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith

... children and vegetable carts, while along the pavements shrill women with shawls over their heads are bargaining for food with street-vendors. As the railroad tracks rise higher still, we run on the level with the upper-story windows out of which the tenants lean and ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... crouded into churches & there guarded night and day. I cant paint the horable appearance they make—it is shocking to human nature to behold them. Could I draw the curtain from before you; there expose to your view a lean Jawd mortal, hunger laid his skinny hand (upon him) and whet to keenest Edge his stomach cravings, sorounded with tattred garments, Rotten Rags, close beset with unwelcome vermin. Could I do this, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge

... a quarter of an hour he came down, what his hostess saw, what she might have taken in with a vision kindly adjusted, was the lean, the slightly loose figure of a man of the middle height and something more perhaps than the middle age—a man of five-and-fifty, whose most immediate signs were a marked bloodless brownness of face, ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James

... your image of modern power—the lean, hungry, seamed face, surmounted by a dirty-gray pall. He was clawing his way to the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... his daughter put on their rubber suits and hastened into the glen. 'The chasm,' he writes, 'in which the brook, in any freshet I had heretofore seen, was still only a deep-down stream, now seemed too small for the torrent. Those giddy precipices on which the sky seems to lean as you stand below were the foam-lashed sides of a full and mighty river. The spray broke through the tops of the full-grown willows and lindens. As the waves plunged against the cliffs they parted, and disclosed the trunks and torn branches of the large ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... men whose hearts are set To find the way to Sion's gate; God is their strength, and thro' the road They lean upon their ...
— The Psalms of David - Imitated in the Language of The New Testament - And Applied to The Christian State and Worship • Isaac Watts

... set the stretcher down at the top of the steps that led to the door of the dugout, so that Martin found himself looking into the lean, sensitive face, stained a little with blood about the mouth, of the wounded man. His eyes followed along the shapeless bundles of blood-flecked uniform till they suddenly turned away. Where the middle of the man had been, ...
— One Man's Initiation—1917 • John Dos Passos

... withdraw from our engagement in full faith, loving you so truly that I was ready to go trembling to my grave alone if you shrank from sustaining me to it. But I see now that I did not dream for one moment that you would take me at my word and leave me to my fate. I thought I loved a man, and could lean on him when strength failed me; I know now that I loved a mere creature of my imagination. Take back your letters; loathe the sight of them. Take back the ring, and find, if you can, a woman who will never be sick, never out of spirits, and who ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss

... smile when, among a number of German princesses presented to her, one was announced under the name of Cunegonde [Cunegonde was the mistress of Candide in Voltaire's novel of Candide.] Her Majesty added that, when she saw the princess take her seat, she imagined she saw her lean to one side. Assuredly the Empress had read the adventures of Candide and the daughter of the very noble baron ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... of violence, of iteration. "You're afraid of her—afraid, afraid, afraid! Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear!" Mrs. Wix wailed it with a high quaver, then broke down into a long shudder of helplessness and woe. The next minute she had flung herself again on the lean sofa and had burst ...
— What Maisie Knew • Henry James

... a ratty head of straight black hair, and looked greasy. The rest of him struck me as equally unkempt and dingy—a youngish man, lean, deeply bitten by the sun of the semi-tropics to a mahogany hue, and ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers

... Fielding was called "The Blind Beak" (died 1780). BEAN LEAN (Donald), alias Will Ruthven, a Highland robber-chief. He also appears disguised as a peddler on the roadside leading to Stirling. Waverley is rowed to the robber's cave and remains there ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.

... be put in. In the meantime such cattle are to be bestowed in meadows till May Day, and after that date such meadows are to be cleansed and spared until the crops of hay be taken off. From now till midsummer sell fat cattle and sheep, and with the money buy lean ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler

... Martian came down the furrow, his lean, wiry figure silhouetted against the upper panorama of the valley; the neat rows of vegetables and the green riot of Venusian wheat, dotted with toiling men ...
— A World is Born • Leigh Douglass Brackett

... peaceably on the brink of the river, In years when the harvest is abundant, friendship reigns among men, and love and brotherly harmony, and these seven fat kine stood for seven such prosperous years. After the fat kine, seven more came up out of the river, ill-favored and lean- fleshed, and each had her back turned to the others, for when distress prevails, one man turns away from the other. For a brief space Pharaoh awoke, and when he went to sleep again, he dreamed a ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg

... he replied—"But with me,—well!—it is a different matter. However, it is really no use worrying one's self with the question of 'To be, or not to be.' It drove Hamlet mad, just as the knotty point as to whether Hamlet himself was fat or lean nearly killed our hysterical little boy, Catullus Mendes. It's best to leave eternal subjects like God and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... lean cattle were swinging easily over Black Mountain, and behind them came a big man with wild black hair and a bushy beard. Now and then he would gnaw at his mustache with his long, yellow teeth, or would sit down to let his lean horse rest, and would flip meaninglessly at ...
— 'Hell fer Sartain' and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... I mean to stand by my own sex through thick and thin, I should say that the laws lean a trifle over on the woman's side in York State; but, being a woman, I keep a lively thinking, while the other poor, downtrodden souls rush to the women's rights meetings, and wring their hands in desperation over the wrongs I ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... Father, help me with the love That casteth out my fear; Teach me to lean on Thee, and feel That Thou art very near: That no temptation is unseen, No childish grief too small, Since Thou, with patience infinite, ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton

... country!" cried Finley; "this wilderness does indeed blossom like the rose."—"Yes," replied Boone, "and who would live amid the barren pine-hills of North Carolina, to hear the screaming of the jay, and now and then shoot a deer too lean to be eaten? This is the land for hunters. Here man and beast may grow ...
— The Adventures of Daniel Boone: the Kentucky rifleman • Uncle Philip

... the long barracks and leaned wearily on his broom. That is, he didn't lean on it, or it would have collapsed him to the floor, but he made the gesture. Why, he wondered, didn't the Masters make the Toughs sweep their own barracks? Perhaps the Toughs couldn't be made, or perhaps the Masters did it just from an excess ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay

... incitations and temptations of the young and inexperienced, and to that extent it will, of course, in a sense, exercise a control over morals. But this will be only part of a wider law to safeguard the tender mind. For example, lying advertisements, and the like, when they lean towards adolescent interests, will encounter a specially disagreeable disposition in the law, over and above the treatment of their general dishonesty.] Change of function is one of the ruling facts ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells

... to recuperate before beginning anything new. Some were out of provisions and practically starved. The Yankee storekeeper sold food at terrible rates. I remember that quinine—a drug much in demand—cost a dollar a grain! We used to look up from our diggings at the procession of these sad-faced, lean men walking by their emaciated cattle, and the women peering from the wagons, and be very thankful that we had decided against ...
— Gold • Stewart White

... it was to be feared he might utterly lose the use of it. Only in consequence of Turner's authoritative representations was Ralegh's chamber changed. In the little garden under the terrace was a lath and plaster lean-to. It had been Bishop Latimer's prison. Since it had been used as a hen-house. Ralegh had already been permitted to employ this out-house as a still room. He was allowed now to build a little room next it, and use it as ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing

... for Mrs. Babbit was afraid to let Tommy go for her, and I've seen her goin' past and stoppin' every two or three steps to rest. Well, I stood it as long as I could, but one day I see her comin' with her arms full and stoppin' to lean against the Babbit fence, and I run out and took her bundles and carried them to her house. Then I went home and never spoke one word to her though she called after me dreadful kind of pitiful. Well, that night I was taken sick with a chill, and I was sick as I wanted to be for two weeks. ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

... endeavour to follow the thread of my feelings, but I cannot tell you all. Often when I plough my low ground, I place my little boy on a chair which screws to the beam of the plough—its motion and that of the horses please him; he is perfectly happy and begins to chat. As I lean over the handle, various are the thoughts which crowd into my mind. I am now doing for him, I say, what my father formerly did for me, may God enable him to live that he may perform the same operations for the same purposes when I am worn out and old! I relieve his mother of some trouble ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

... about it on his hands for the edification of a rustic audience. But the uniform he still wore; he seemed to think it gave him some claim to indulgent notice. The Signor, in his own way, was not less in contrast with his background. His lean, predatory face and capacious smile went fitly with the shabby frock coat and slouched hat he affected. He carried a fiddle under his arm, but the most he could do was strum on it with his thumb. Together, they made a couple that anyone would look twice at, and no one care ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... the convent. The empress went on through the dim, long corridor, now with hurried step and wildly-beating heart, now suddenly pausing faint and irresolute, to lean against a pillar, and gather courage for the interview. As she turned the corner of the corridor, a flood of light, streaming through an oriel window, revived and cheered her. She stepped forward and looked. The window opened upon ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach

... the disease of the country. With this poor young man, I prayed, as well as I knew how, and read, daily, to his great comfort and consolation, I believe. The reader may imagine how one dying in a strange land, surrounded by idolaters, would lean on a single countryman who was disposed to aid him. In this manner did Chap man lean on me, and all my efforts were to induce him to lean on the Saviour. He thought he had been too great a sinner to be entitled to any hope, ...
— Ned Myers • James Fenimore Cooper

... relatives brought up the procession; and a troop of village urchins came shouting along in the rear, scrambling among themselves for the largess of sous and sugar-plums that now and then issued in large handfuls from the pockets of a lean man in black, who seemed to officiate as master of ceremonies on the occasion. I gazed on the procession till it was out of sight; and when the last wheeze of the clarionet died upon my ear, I could not help thinking how happy were they who were thus to dwell together in ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various

... hotel, through the garish street, I nursed my wrath while it gnawed at me like the fox in the Spartan boy's bosom; and once in my room, which fortuitously had no other tenants at this hour, I had to lean out of the narrow window for sheer relief in the coolness. Surely pride had ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin

... the tower the ivy bushed out, old and handsome. Also, there were a few chill gillivers, in pale cold bud. Miriam wanted to lean over for some ivy, but he would not let her. Instead, she had to wait behind him, and take from him each spray as he gathered it and held it to her, each one separately, in the purest manner of chivalry. The tower seemed to rock in the wind. They looked over miles and ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence

... riches. For when they saw Sir Launcelot endure such penance, in prayers, and fastings, they took no force what pain they endured, for to see the noblest knight of the world take such abstinence that he waxed full lean. And thus upon a night, there came a vision to Sir Launcelot, and charged him, in remission of his sins, to haste him unto Almesbury: And by then thou come there, thou shalt find Queen Guenever dead. And therefore take thy fellows with thee, and purvey them of an horse bier, and fetch ...
— Le Morte D'Arthur, Volume II (of II) - King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table • Thomas Malory

... James Outram, then Political Resident at Aden, called the expedition a tempting of Providence, and tried hard to stop it, but in vain. Burton left Aden for Zeila on October 29th, taking with him a managing man called "The Hammal," a long, lean Aden policeman, nicknamed "Long Gulad" and a suave but rascally Moslem priest dubbed "The End of Time." [151] They landed on October 31st, and found Zeila a town of white-washed houses and minaretted mosques, surrounded by a low brown wall with round towers. Burton, who called himself ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright

... against its will, and is now supported in its action by funds almost entirely supplied by Trade Unions. But Trade Unions are not Socialistic. They are undoubtedly individualist organisations, more in the character of the old Guilds, and lean much more in the direction of the culture of the individual than in that of the smooth and bloodless uniformity of the mass. Now, the Trade Unions are the most respectable and the most powerful element in the labour world. They are the social bulwarks of our industrial system. ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill

... sort!" snapped the gentleman addressed as Sir Henry, shifting his posture a little so as to enable the young man to lean against his shoulder. "Haven't you eyes in your head, Willsden? Cannot you see for yourself that this gentleman has merely had ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... Tommy took advantage of his brief absence to lean over the back of the seat and grip ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges

... glass. His noble beard made amends for his untimely baldness. The glossy glory of it exhaled delicious perfumes; the keenest eyes might have tried in vain to discover a hair that was out of place. Miss Minerva's eager sallow face, so lean, and so hard, and so long, looked, by contrast, as if it wanted some sort of discreet covering thrown over some part of it. Her coarse black hair projected like a penthouse over her bushy black eyebrows and her keen black eyes. Oh, dear me (as they said ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins

... man; he was also an apostle, a vegetarian, a fine football player, an ex-Fabian, and a few other things. He was a large, emaciated-looking person, with extraordinarily bright grey eyes, inspiring a lean, pale, dark-browed face—the face of an ascetic, lit by a flame of energising life. He looked as if he would spend and be spent by it to the last charred fragment, in pursuit of the idea. There was nothing in his vivid aspect of Peter Margerison's ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay

... will give you this handkerchief. When you come to the first mountain, you must spread the handkerchief on the ground, and many fat horses will approach you; but I advise you not to choose any of them. You must choose the very last one, which will be lean and weak-looking. That is the horse which can endure hardships, and which will be able to carry you to ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... in the darkness, and I did the same, bringing on the giddy feeling once more, so that I was glad to lean against the wall of the ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... not resist such a provoking mixture of innocence and guile; he was first taken with her, and ended by falling in love. He was a man with a wide face, lean, grave, and bilious looking, having a moustache and imperial, and languid, dull looking eyes, very conscientious in his duties, and very fond of taking long walks. This type of silent, conventional man is most susceptible to the charm of cheerfulness and vivacity. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... he placed the fort under military rule, and left his prisoners, General Vallejos and the two captains, who had been captured at Sonoma. Also an American by the name of Lace, who was a brother-in-law to General Vallejos, and whose predilections appeared to lean in favor of the Mexican side. With all his mountain men, including Kit Carson, Fremont then took up his line of march towards Monterey, for the purpose of attacking and taking possession of the town; but, this movement had been anticipated by Commodore Sloat and the ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... businesses, he and I also did buy some apples and pork; by the same token the butcher commended it as the best in England for cloath and colour. And for his beef, says he, "Look how fat it is; the lean appears only here and there a speck, like beauty-spots." Having done at Woolwich, we to Deptford (it being very cold upon the water), and there did also a little more business, and so home, I reading all the why to make end of the "Bondman" (which the oftener I ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys

... out a hoarse laugh and Moze's black visage opened in a huge grin. Jim Wilson seemed to drink in the girl's words. Sullen and somber, he bent his lean head, very ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey

... with The Barbarian's heavy bulk lurching against Geoffrey's lean shoulder on occasion, and both of them uncertain of their footing in the darkness. But they made it across without being noticed—just two more battle-sore figures in a field where many such might be ...
— The Barbarians • John Sentry

... Peregrine Penguin,—I judge by his nose. Viscount Stork, as he strutted about, gave a beck To Earl Vulture, who wears no cravat round his neck; And the Bishop was there, though he stood rather back, Array'd in his robes of red, orange, and black, Sir Archibald Ostrich moved on rather chary, And lean'd on his cousin the Count Cassowary, Discoursing of Java, and far distant lands, And African Deserts, and hot burning sands. Old warrior Flamingo came limping along, And with Commodore Cormorant join'd in the throng, Profoundly ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset

... before seven o'clock the sky was cloudless; along the road were passing hundreds of people (though it was only five in the morning) in detachments of from two to nine, with cattle, sheep, pigs, and goats, picturesque enough but miserably lean and gaunt: we leave them to proceed to the fair, and after a three miles' level walk through a straight poplar avenue, commence ascending far above the Romanche; all day long we slowly ascend, stopping occasionally ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler

... but she might have found some way of persuading him to change his mind. Or she could have gone without his consent, and made him forgive her afterward. Even now she might go; but dimly and sadly she felt that Mary did not really wish for her superior knowledge of the world to lean upon; Mary longed to ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... minute's walk, but Lionel staggered as he went to it. Roy attended him. The man humbly asked if Mr. Lionel would be pleased to lean upon him, but Lionel waved him off. Matthew Frost was sitting indoors alone; his grandchildren were at school, his son's wife was busy elsewhere. Matthew no longer went out to labour. He had been almost incapable of it before Mr. Verner's annuity ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... stick out of the mud, and red landmarks and tide-marks stick out of the mud, and old roofless buildings slip into the mud, and all about is stagnation and mud! The desolate flat marshes look still more weird by reason of the tall pollards that lean over them like spectres. Far away are the rising grounds, between which and the marshes there appears no sign of life except here and there in the foreground a melancholy gull. The course which the boat bearing the hunted man took from Mill Pond stairs through the ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin

... presented us, and the old lady rose, and, as usual, gave us a salute. As she had no paint, I could put up with it; but when she approached your cousin I could think of nothing but Death taking hold of Hebe. The duchess is near eighty, very tall and lean. She was dressed in a silk chemise, with very large sleeves, coming half-way down her arm, a large cape, no stays, a black-velvet girdle round her waist, some very rich lace in her chemise, round ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... price." The Venusian's murmur was lost in the blare of the music. Ransome had eased his lean ...
— Bride of the Dark One • Florence Verbell Brown

... down on the seat by Polly's side and hung over the rail too. "Don't the houses lean over queerly?" she said, pointing to the long narrow buildings they were leaving behind. They look worse from the water than when we are in ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney

... with a small silver key, and took out a document in a closed envelope, and handed it to Pilar. He then opened the door, and permitted his followers to enter. They came in in single file, and ranged themselves silently along the wall. They were tall, lean men in great circular Spanish cloaks of brown or bottle-green, defective in the matter of footgear, and with shapeless greasy hats in their ungloved hands. Their deportment was as dignified as if they had been the chapter ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau



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