"Scrubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk, but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of discoloured rock, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave a footing to a scrubby growth, by which Eudena and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... north of the colony of New South Wales. During his journey into the interior he saw it in tolerable abundance at Brezi, on the river Mokai, to the northward of the Liverpool plains; and it was also equally numerous in all the low scrubby ranges in the neighborhood of the Namoi, as well as in the open brushes that intersect the plains on its borders. Mr. Gould is gifted with the eye of an observer; but from the extreme shyness of its disposition, it generally escapes the attention of ordinary ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... mouth, I am induced to beleive that the timbered country of which they speak is similar to that we have passed for a day or two, or that in our view above, which consists of nothing more than a few scattering small scrubby pine and dwarf cedar on the summits of some of the highest hills nine tenths of the country being wholy destitute of timber of any kind, covered with a short grass, arromatic herbs and the prickley pear; the river bottom however, so far as we have explored it or 8 m. are ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... up into the face that was looking down at him. It was a white man's face, covered with a scrubby red beard. The beard was new, but the eyes and the voice he would have recognized anywhere. For two years he had messed with Rookie McTabb down at Norway and Nelson House. McTabb had quit the Service because of a ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... fence where the two men had climbed it he could see them in the pallid light, far away across the level, scrubby meadow land, walking toward a narrow ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... mounted on scrubby looking horses, which would have excited the derision of any respectable cowboy in the West, Rob and his two chums, accompanied by Anthony Wallenhout, the Belgian guide, passed out of the city, ...
— The Boy Scouts on Belgian Battlefields • Lieut. Howard Payson
... country before the sun went down, but I was too thirsty to waste any light in viewing the prospect, and set out directly to find water. First, going down a well-beaten path for half a mile through the low scrubby wood, till I came to where the water stood in the tracks of the horses which had carried travellers up, I lay down flat, and drank these dry, one after another, a pure, cold, spring-like water, but yet I could not fill my dipper, though I contrived ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... remember what we've just heard. He's been used to comfort and to having someone to look after him. How long do you think it'll be before he gets tired of a scrubby room in a scrubby hotel? Besides, he hasn't any money. ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... Peuquenes, we descended into a mountainous country, intermediate between the two main ranges, and then took up our quarters for the night. We were now in the republic of Mendoza. The elevation was probably not under 11,000 feet, and the vegetation in consequence exceedingly scanty. The root of a small scrubby plant served as fuel, but it made a miserable fire, and the wind was piercingly cold. Being quite tired with my days work, I made up my bed as quickly as I could, and went to sleep. About midnight I observed the sky became suddenly clouded: I awakened ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... verses, given up to such ferocious executioners. But these literary murderers, ready to destroy a comrade's book, are more pitiless than the Inquisition. There were two inquisitors more relentless than the others; first, the little scrubby fellow who claimed for his share all the houris of a Mussulman's palace; another, the great elegist from the provinces. Truly, his heartaches must have made him gain flesh, for very soon he was obliged to let out the strap on ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... horror and consternation of himself and of all present, she introduced the aforesaid Master Charles,—an ugly, ill-tempered, blubbering little brat of seven years old, with a bloated red face, scrubby white hair, and red eyes; and with the interesting appendage of a thick slice of bread and ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... yards across, completely encircled the Island, which was not a quarter of a mile in diameter. Inside this regular ridge was a small sandy plain. The encircling ridge was occupied by a belt of small trees, while on the plain grew only a short scrubby vegetation, a foot or two in height. Some vegetable soil was found, a few inches in thickness, the result of the decomposition of vegetable matter and birds' dung. On the weather side of the island was a ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... land, but in order to reach this, if it existed, they would be obliged to force a path through miles of reeds. Therefore they thought it safer to follow the river bank. Their progress was very slow, since continually they must make detours to avoid a quicksand or a creek, also the stones and scrubby growth delayed them so that fifteen or at most twenty miles ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... breaking on a scene of wintry grandeur and solitude, rises before my eyes. I see the frozen, snow-covered waste of the Lake of the Woods, the surrounding evergreen forests and towering hills, the low leaden sky overhead. Along the edge of the scrubby-timbered shore, five husky dogs come at a trot, harnessed in single file to a sledge. The dogs are short-legged and very hairy, with long snouts, sharp-pointed ears, and the tails of wolves; the sledge is a simple toboggan made of two pieces of birch nine feet in length, their ...
— The Cryptogram - A Story of Northwest Canada • William Murray Graydon
... the horse Ole Scrubby owing to some sort of facetious perversity of his own temperament, for the horse, instead of being "ole," was quite young, and, far from being scrubby, it was ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... the runnin' herd With a crack like the stroke of a cowboy's lash. Thar! I could see it; I tell ye, pard, Things seem'd whittl'd down sort of fine— We wasn't five hundred feet from the gulch, With its mean little fringe of scrubby pine. ...
— Old Spookses' Pass • Isabella Valancy Crawford
... stopped. Ben doubled up the reins to give him a cut, when "WHOA!" he roared so loud that the horse in very astonishment gave a lurch that nearly flung him headlong. But he was over the wheel in a twinkling, and up with a bound to a small thicket of scrubby bushes on a high hill by the road-side. Here lay a little bundle on the ground, and close by it a big, black dog; and over the whole, standing guard, was a boy a little bigger than Ben, with honest gray eyes. And the ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... slept now. All night vehicles rattled over the hard prairies. Settlers on their way home, starting for Pierre, hurried by in the middle of the night. Art Fergus's team of scrubby broncos were so tired they didn't even balk in harness. Flivvers bumped over the rough ground, ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... must rather have gone to be delivered from confinement; and, in truth, Crooked Island was a most desolate domicile for a lady; our friend the postmaster's family, and a few negroes employed in catching turtle, and making salt, and dressing some scrubby cotton—trees, composing the whole population. In the evening the packet did arrive, however, and Captain Transom ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... us until the morrow, and I began to look about in search of a suitable spot whereon to pitch our camp for the night. And to choose seemed difficult. The western shore of the bay, with its broken ground and scrubby vegetation looked uninviting to say the least of it, in addition to which it was on the other side of those same hills, at a spot only a few miles distant, that we had, that afternoon, witnessed the ...
— The Strange Adventures of Eric Blackburn • Harry Collingwood
... lonely stretch of road with gently rolling land on either side of them, dotted with a scrubby growth of trees. Not a house was in sight, and they had passed only one team, a pair of mules harnessed to a wagon filled with lengths ...
— Betty Gordon in the Land of Oil - The Farm That Was Worth a Fortune • Alice B. Emerson
... nearer the light-house, they felt the salt sea-wind strong in their faces. The bluff was so gale-swept that the trees, few, small, and scrubby, had caught a slant to westward, and the scanty vegetation clung timidly to the ground, like some tiny state whose existence depends upon its humility. From the edge of the bluff rose the light-house,—a round stone building, dazzling in its coat of whitewash. Far up in the air its plate-glass ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... meeting natives, and we were now getting so near the shore that we could hear the beat of the waves upon a reef that lay off our hut, and sheltered the boat from being washed about, when all of a sudden, as we were traversing some low, scrubby bushes which were more thorny than was pleasant, Ebo suddenly struck us both on the shoulder, forcing us down amongst the leaves and twigs, and on looking sharply round we saw that he had dropped our splendid specimens, and, wild-eyed and excited, ...
— Nat the Naturalist - A Boy's Adventures in the Eastern Seas • G. Manville Fenn
... around the hole, though, it was harder to tell. There was no clear-cut line, just the difference in what you could see through it. In the other world, the ground seemed to fall away, with low scrubby brush in the foreground. Then, a mile or so away, there were rising hills with hardwood forests of some kind, still ...
— Cat and Mouse • Ralph Williams
... short, thick-set, scrubby, wiry nag, tough as a pine knot, and self-willed as a pig. He was moreover exceedingly lazy, as well as prone to have his own way, and take his own jog—preferring a walk or gentle trot to a canter; and so ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... interesting journey to us, who knew only the Western Desert, to note the difference between it and Sinai. To our eyes Sinai did not appear to be a desert at all, as there were scrubby bushes of sorts growing in nearly every hollow, various kinds of camel grass, and even a few flowers—such as poppies and one or two species of lilies. After the waste of misshaped lumps of limestone and volcanic looking boulders, which were the only decoration ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... expecting you to write to me; but as you don't do it, and as, moreover, you may possibly think it is my turn, and not yours, though on that point I am far from clear, I shall just send you one of my scrubby notes for the express purpose of eliciting a reply. Anne was very much pleased with your letter; I presume she has answered it before now. I would fain hope that her health is a little stronger than it was, and ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of Byrsa Cottage, as you look down the hollow of the ground toward the sea, a ridge of high scrubby land runs up to a forefront of bold cliff, indented with a dark and narrow bay. "Goyle Bay," as it is called, or sometimes "Basin Bay," is a lonely and rugged place, and even dangerous for unwary visitors. For at low spring tides a deep hollow is left dry, ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... wool bales or provisions. Proverbially rough and foul mouthed. bush: originally referred to the low tangled scrubs of the semi-desert regions ('mulga' and 'mallee'), and hence equivalent to "outback". Now used generally for remote rural areas ("the bush") and scrubby forest. bushfire: wild fires: whether forest fires or grass fires. bushman/bushwoman: someone who lives an isolated existence, far from cities, "in the bush". (today: a "bushy") bushranger: an Australian "highwayman", who lived in the 'bush'— scrub—and attacked especially gold carrying coaches ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... specimens were secured,—large boulders crowded with colossal shells and perfectly preserved echini. From the top of the cliff, looking inland, only a level plain was seen, stretching as far as the eye could reach, broken by no undulations, and covered with low, scrubby growth. The seine was drawn on the beach, and yielded a good harvest for the fish collection. At evening the vessel anchored at the head of the bay, off the Port of San Antonio. The name would seem to imply some settlement; but a more lonely spot cannot be imagined. More than thirty years ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... and as many of the Lancers, for, tired of the plodding life of keeping with the tremendous baggage train for a whole week, the two friends had ridden out in advance over a wide open series of rolling downs covered with dry scrubby growth, parched to ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... there was no shade. Years ago, prospectors hunting for minerals had started forest-fires to level the ridges. The result was the burning-over of perhaps a hundred square miles of magnificent forest. The second growth which has come up is scrubby, a wilderness of young trees and chaparral, through which ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... to the uninstructed eye was—now in April—but a wilderness of scrubby stunted thorns. In the midst of it he found Mrs Bosenna, gloved, armed with a pair of secateurs, and engaged in cutting the thorns back to a ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... abruptly, hollowed out by the wind, and one can look down into a hole ten or twenty feet deep, arched over by thorn-bushes, grapevines and a species of bay. These sand-caverns are of frequent occurrence. There are clumps of scrubby oak completely covered with scarlet honeysuckle and trumpet-flower. While seeking to investigate one of these I startled a hen-quail, which, after whirring rapidly out of sight, returned and manifested much anxiety by plaintive calls. This is a queer place for quail: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day? And even now if I liked—Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs? Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, 'Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma'am Cibot!—I dreamed last night that it was ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... fifty miles of John Chinn's grave, and rose to the command of a regiment of small, wild hill-men, most of whom had known his father. His son John was born in the small thatched-roofed, mud-walled cantonment, which is even to-day eighty miles from the nearest railway, in the heart of a scrubby, tigerish country. Colonel Lionel Chinn served thirty years and retired. In the Canal his steamer passed the outward-bound troop-ship, carrying his son ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... thought to myself, for it was the wildest bit of forest I had seen anywhere in this neighbourhood. At one side, not far off, rose a huge gray rock, partly covered on one side with moss, and round about were oaks and a few ash trees of a poor scrubby sort (else they would long ago have been cut out). The earth underneath was soft and springy with ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... the Platte River, and, bearing northwesterly, entered the Black Hills, a region of low, rolling uplands, sparsely grown with scrubby pine trees; the soil black, very dry; where little animal life was visible, ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... marshes. But the valley beyond, similar in character, had yet more of gloom at the time of which I write. In the higher part there were large plantations of firs, set too closely to attain any size, and remaining stunted in height and scrubby in appearance. Indeed, many of the smaller and more weakly had died, and the bark had fallen down on the brown soil neglected and unnoticed. These trees had a ghastly appearance, with their white trunks, seen by the dim light which struggled through the thick boughs above. Nearer to ...
— The Doom of the Griffiths • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the ear during the night in a far off place like this, are peculiar. The old owl hoots mournfully, the frogs bellow hoarsely along the reedy shore, while the tree toads are quavering from among the branches of the scrubby trees that grow along the rocky banks; the whippoorwill pipes shrilly in the forest depths; the breeze murmurs among the foliage of the tall old pines, while the everlasting roar of the waters, as they go tumbling down ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... Island, and during the summer they continued to arrive, until about 5,000 had settled between Parrtown (St. John) and St. Anne's. The peninsula now occupied by the city of St. John was then almost a wilderness, covered with shrubs, scrubby spruce, and marsh. Large numbers of emigrants also arrived at Annapolis, Port Roseway, and other points; and Governor Parr, in a letter to Lord North in September, 1783, estimates the whole number that had arrived ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... now driving rain came flashing larger particles, and one of more than ordinary size rebounded from that curly pate, sending its owner hurriedly to shelter beneath the scrubby trees, one hand ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... excitement. And mingled with the anxiety there was curiosity, and along with the curiosity fury. If they could catch the culprit, they would hurl him from the roadside down into the brook with such violence that he should never stand on his feet again! Or they would climb the mountain that rears its scrubby head behind the village and there hang him on the wind-swayed hazel-tree—after having soundly thrashed him with its switches! Then the cows and swine which the village herdsman pastured on the close-cropped field would have a sight to see, and ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... nodded to Tahn-te, who leaped on the horse and rode where the yells of the victors sounded in the pinyons towards the hills. Beyond all the other horsemen he rode, and saw far above in the scrubby growth, the enemy seeking footholds where the four-footed animals could not follow. Then, when Ka-yemo had called the names of the trailers who were to follow the enemy beyond the summit, Tahn-te the Po-Athun-ho turned back and chanted ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... silent the black beast crawled, now hiding amidst the scrubby grass, now bounding over trees and stream as if playing with herself, with her own desire for a ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... through a sort of gap in a wall which does duty as the gateway of the domain of a proscribed pretender. I followed a straight avenue through a disfeatured park—the park of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference; a very sandy, scrubby, melancholy plantation, in which the timber must have been cut many times over and is to-day a mere tangle of brushwood. Here, as in so many spots in France, the traveller perceives that he is in a land of revolutions. Nevertheless ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... I planted a few kernels as an experiment. There never was a more insignificant looking stalk of corn in our garden. With misgivings we made trial of the scrubby looking ears. To our surprise it was the best we ever had on our table. It seemed too good to be true. I gave several messes to my friends and this year am hoping to give pleasure to many others. I denied myself the delicious product that many ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... stairs to the outer door, and watched the big mill foreman as he walked down the trail to the mill. Then, as was his custom when perturbed in mind, Pierre crossed the dusty waggon trail and seated himself on a boulder, leaning his back against a scrubby spruce. He let his eyes rest contentedly on a big, square-faced building. Rough stone steps led up to a broad veranda, from which rose, in barbaric splendour, great sheets of shining plate-glass, that ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... would prefer a husband without romance? Thus Phineas was arguing to himself as he was driven up to the door of Loughlinter Castle, while Mr. Ratler was eloquent on the beauty of old park trees. "After all, a Scotch forest is a very scrubby sort ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... If I might wander, It should be toward the sun; The blessed South Should fill my mouth With ripeness just begun. For bleak hills, bare, With stunted, spare, And scrubby, piney trees, Her gardens rare, And vineyards fair, And her rose-scented breeze. For fearful blast, Skies overcast, And sudden blare and scare Long, stormless moons, And placid noons, And—all sorts ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... a Miss Petrovitch, and an officer. The coachwork—if one may dignify it by such a phrase—which was made from packing cases, had a thousand creaks and one abominable squeak, which made conversation impossible. The scenery was all grey rock and little scrubby trees; the road was magnificent and wound and twisted about the mountain side like a whip lash. Driving down these curves was no amateur's game, and we saw immediately that our chauffeur knew his job. We came over a ridge, and in the far distance, gleaming like ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... chillen, Jimmy, an' bring dem all home to Prencess Anne from dat ar Joe Johnson!" cried Samson, and trotted his mule through the swamp and away. Jimmy Phoebus saw him overtake the old woman in the cart and begin to speak with her as the scrubby woods ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... over here a minute!" called the fat man. As they approached, the aviators with him turned from their work. One, a slender fellow with swarthy skin and a scrubby black mustache, scowled when he looked at John Ross, and as Bob Giddings and Tom Meeks got their eyes on him, they gave an involuntary start, for they recognized in the man the fellow they had seen hanging around the fair-grounds in Yonkers when ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... in Yucatan, where the ancient Mayas reared their stately temples. On the northern coast the annual rainfall is only ten or fifteen inches and is concentrated largely in our summer months. There the country is covered with scrubby bushes six to ten feet high. These are beautifully green during the rainy season from June to October, but later in the year lose almost all their leaves. The landscape would be much like that of a thick, bushy pasture ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington
... to take their lunch, and spend the day on the beach, or in the scrubby woods, not far away, taking to a boat if ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... was to write to me, I recall—and precisely on the occasion of The Tragic Muse—that he was at a loss to conceive how one could find an interest in anything so vulgar or pretend to gather fruit in so scrubby an orchard; but the view of a creature of the stage, the view of the "histrionic temperament," as suggestive much less, verily, in respect to the poor stage per se than in respect to "art" at large, affected ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... sitting outside the hotel, taking his coffee at one of the little round iron tables, by the inevitable trio of scrubby orange trees in green tubs, when Caffyn, whom he had not seen since leaving the table, came up and sat down beside him ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... No. 11, a bearded man, "wearing a conical Phrygian cap, his mouth wide open," and his expression "obstreperously animated;"—and by No. 12, "a middle-aged or old man, with a snub nose, high forehead, and thin, scrubby hair," we will go on to the fairer examples of Divine heads in ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... husbands and fathers, and studied the picture before them—they would never see it just the same again—as the foggy curtains furled towards the azure ceiling. How it imprinted itself upon their minds! A long sandy beach strewn with hides and skeletons of slaughtered cattle, a few scrubby oaks, farther back low sand hills rising behind each other as a background to a few old shanties that leaned away from the wind, an old adobe barracks, a few donkeys plodding dejectedly along beneath towering bundles of wood, a few loungers stretched lazily upon the beach as though nothing ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... steeply as to be stiff climbing. It bore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... River Seine, a short distance from Paris. Was anything ever more simple? Slender willow-trees almost leafless, bare rocks with a few scrubby bushes, a tiny village sheltered in a curve of the river—what is there to suggest a picture? And yet something grips us. We seem to be at the beginnings of creation. Nature is confiding in us. We are hearing the winds play on the harp to the listening ...
— The Children's Book of Celebrated Pictures • Lorinda Munson Bryant
... the view which met their eyes as they rounded the turn at the top of the canyon. Turning, the narrow trail wound its way around the mountainside until one looked down upon the tops of foothills, green with scrubby vegetation. Then it stretched in an irregular line down the mountainside, to disappear in their midst. Beyond lay another ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... of some cold, bleak, Highland croft.' On this unpromising ground, grow those grapes which produce the finest wine in the world. As for the vines themselves, they have about as much of the picturesque as our drills of potatoes at home. 'Fancy open and unfenced expanses of stunted-looking, scrubby bushes, seldom rising two feet above the surface, planted in rows upon the summit of deep furrow-ridges, and fastened with great care to low, fence-like lines of espaliers, which run in unbroken ranks from one end of the huge fields to the other. These ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 434 - Volume 17, New Series, April 24, 1852 • Various
... acknowledged the enthusiastic reception offered to him by a stare of grim surprise. He was a dry, hard old man, with a scrubby white beard, a narrow wrinkled forehead, and an obstinate lipless mouth; fitted neither by age nor temperament to be the intimate friend of any of his younger brethren among the Community. But, at that saddest time of his life, the heart of Amelius warmed to any one who reminded him of his ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... lay across a rising plain, very wild and scrubby, as I imagine, by the frequent deviations of our beast, and then through a forest of cork oaks, which keep their leaves all the year through, and here, by reason of the great shade, we went, not knowing whither, as if blindfold, only we were conscious of being on rough, ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... black silk thereafter. Her daughter upon the same occasion had worn a voluminous frock of pale blue camel's hair trimmed with flounces of Valenciennes lace, that being the simplest frock in her wardrobe; but she privately thought even Mrs. Washington's apotheosised lawns and organdies very "scrubby," and could never bring herself to anything less expensive than summer silks, made at ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... something tragic and thrillin'. But all I can see is an old slate-roofed house, one of these weather-beaten, dormer-windowed relics of the time when that part of town was still in the suburbs. There's quite a big yard in the back, with a few scrubby old pear trees, a double row of mangy box-bushes, and other traces of what must ...
— Wilt Thou Torchy • Sewell Ford
... is now uninhabited, but arrow heads and stone hatchets are sometimes found; and in places there are piles of stones supposed to have been made by the aborigines. Most of the growth is scrubby, with ...
— The Life of Christopher Columbus from his own Letters and Journals • Edward Everett Hale
... inches long; often called "Fool Quail" because of its eccentric and clownish markings, streaks and spots of black, white, buff, gray and chestnut. It is met with in small flocks on the mountains and less frequently in the valleys. It frequents scrubby wooded places rather than open hill sides and is very easy to approach and kill; this confidence or stupidity together with its clownish appearance are the reasons for its commonly used local name. Their nests are hollows in the ground, lined with grasses and concealed by overhanging ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... the first light of dawn that we saw, close on board, the metropolitan island of Hawaii. We held along the coast, as near as we could venture, with a fresh breeze and under an unclouded heaven; beholding, as we went, the arid mountain sides and scrubby cocoa-palms of that somewhat melancholy archipelago. About four of the afternoon we turned Waimanolo Point, the westerly headland of the great bight of Honolulu; showed ourselves for twenty minutes ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Scrubby coat and trousers, dirty shirt, scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" or mangy ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... prisoners. We saw boys fifteen years old, whose voices had not changed. We saw men past fifty. We saw slope-shouldered, hollow-chested, pale-faced men of the academic type, wearing glasses an eighth of an inch thick. We saw scrubby looking men who seemed to "be the dirt and the dross, the dust and the ...
— The Martial Adventures of Henry and Me • William Allen White
... himself upon a bench near the door, and waited torpidly. A few moments later came a voice, and then the soft patter of bare feet in the thick dust without. Carmen was talking as she approached. Jose rose in curiosity; but the girl was alone. In her hand she held a scrubby flower that had drawn a desperate nourishment from the barren soil at the roadside. She glanced up at ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... breakers playing about them, while the distant sea stretches out to a horizon, with dark, stormy clouds brooding over the solitary waste. A remarkable union of the beauty of land and water is produced by a foreground of brilliant fancy flowers relieved by a scrubby tree in the background, with the faint responsive touch of yellow in the clouds over a calm sea, where gentle motion is only indicated by the little boat floating ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... faithful, attached, and affectionate animal that I have ever known; and that is saying much. He seems to think it necessary to atone for his ugliness by extra good conduct, and does so dance on his lame leg, and so wag his scrubby tail, that it does any one, who has a taste for happiness, good to look at him—so that he may now be said to stand on his own footing. We are all rather ashamed of him when strangers come in the way, and think it necessary to explain that he is ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 336 Saturday, October 18, 1828 • Various
... the blacksmith's forge. Beside it was a rickety, unpainted gate opening into a snake-fenced lane feathered here and there with scrubby little spruces. It ran down a bare hill, crossed a little ravine full of young white-stemmed birches, and up another bare hill to an equally bare crest where a farmhouse was perched—a farmhouse painted a stark, staring yellow and the ugliest thing in farmhouses that ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in her little house lived her adopted son, Prokofyi, a butcher, a huge, clumsy fellow, of about thirty, with ginger hair and scrubby moustache. When he met me in the hall, he would silently and respectfully make way for me, and when he was drunk he would salute me with his whole hand. In the evenings he used to have supper, and through the wooden partition I could hear him snorting ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... away. "Buy that horse," said Mr. Petulengro, coming after me; "the dook tells me that in less than three months he will be sold for twice seventy." "I will have nothing to do with him," said I; "besides, Jasper, I don't like his tail. Did you observe what a mean scrubby tail he has?" "What a fool you are, brother," said Mr. Petulengro; "that very tail of his shows his breeding. No good bred horse ever yet carried a fine tail—'tis your scrubby-tailed horses that are ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Boulevards. And on the broad, dark, deserted footway, where the sound of the revelry died away, women were standing and waiting. They remained for long intervals motionless, patient and as stiff-looking as the scrubby little plane trees; then they slowly began to move, dragging their slippers over the frozen soil, taking ten steps or so and then waiting again, rooted as it were to the ground. There was one of them with a huge body and insect-like arms and legs, wearing a black silk rag, with ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... travelled on. They had not come up with us at about four o'clock, and being anxious to find water before dark, we proceeded along a narrow open valley covered with long grass and large pandanus trees, skirted on each side by rather scrubby forest land. At dark we reached a large waterhole. One of the men left behind shortly arrived, and stated that the rest had halted for the night. Mr. Kennedy being anxious to bring all the horses to water, and to have the party together, sent ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... impervious growth, He and his lieutenants could approach within striking distance, whenever they chose, without being seen, and had little to fear from the Union artillery, which the past had given them much cause to dread. It was a region also to disgust the very soul of a cavalryman; for the low, scrubby growth lined the narrow roads almost as effectually as the most ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... noticed where the Mercutian Light had burned off the scrubby desert vegetation. As we got closer I could see it now in the sunlight, standing vertically up in the air, motionless. There were signs all about now where the light had burned. We were passing along a little gully—the country here was somewhat ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... speckled and freckled and red and brick-dust and leather-coloured, and enclosed with scrubby whiskers, ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... they had an addition to their small family. A little, wiry-haired, scrubby, melancholy Irish terrier followed O'Connell for miles. He tried to drive him away. The dog would turn and run for a few seconds and the moment O'Connell would take his eyes off him he would run along ...
— Peg O' My Heart • J. Hartley Manners
... mixed with the pines and spruces. In northwestern Minnesota and in northern Dakota the oaks are near their northern limit, but even there the burr oak drags on a bare existence among the pines and spruces. In the Black Hills, in Dakota, poor, forlorn, scrubby burr oaks are scattered through the hills among the yellow pines. In Colorado we find them as shrubs among the pines and Douglas spruces. In New Mexico we find them scattered among the pinons. In Arizona they grow like hazel bushes among the yellow pines. On the Sierra Nevada the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 711, August 17, 1889 • Various
... also thinly scattered over large portions of fertile prairie. To a casual observer these oaks, from their stunted appearance, would be taken as evidence of poor soil. But the soil is not the cause of their scrubby looks. It is the devouring fires which annually sweep over the plains with brilliant though terrific aspect, and which are fed by the luxuriant grass grown on that same soil. If the oaks did not draw ...
— Minnesota and Dacotah • C.C. Andrews
... open country, beautifully green, and undulating like the waves of the sea. Near the town and the suburb of Belgrano are a great many peach-tree plantations, the fruit of which is used for fattening pigs while the wood serves for roasting them. There is also some scrubby brushwood, and a few large native trees; but these are soon left behind, and are succeeded by far-spreading rich pasture land, and ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... the man had come out onto the ground and the boy beheld a tall, spare-boned man, with weather-tanned face, a scrubby beard, and ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... A vast area of scrubby, low jungle, composed of cinnamon bushes, is seen to the right and left, before and behind. Above, is a cloudless sky and a broiling sun; below, is snow-white sand of quartz, curious only in the possibility of its supporting vegetation. Such is the soil in which the cinnamon delights; ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... was, and what you'd have done when you was a scrubby thing. Don't bolt your food, but make every bit 'elp you to 'ealth and long living. You won't 'ave gormandising when we've got the laundry, ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... to tell me how she feared the North—-its snows and bitter cold, its roaring, foaming rivers, its wild, fierce storms, and its wind-lashed lakes. She hated its rugged cliffs and hills, its treeless barrens and its mean, scrubby timber. She loved the warm, long summers, and the cities and people, and—" he paused, knitting his brows—"and whatever there is to love in your land of civilization. But she loved my father more ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... much as thus pitching camp in the midst of civilisation. The scrubby newspaper packets of chestnuts, plums, figs and rusks were spread out: Francis flew for salt to the man at the bar, and came back with a little paper of rock-salt: the brown tea was dispensed in the silver-fitted glasses ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... their crannies, edged the stream. On the opposite shore, one giant eucalyptus stood by itself and cast its shadow across. Beyond, lay the gum-peopled immensity of the bush. The stony walls of the knoll, curving inward and sheltering a thick growth of ferns and scrubby vegetation, closed in the bridal chamber. Creepers festooned the rocky ledges and crevices. Here and there, a young sapling slanted forward to greet the morning sun when it should ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... All the way over the lake we kept the shores of Michigan in sight, beaches of white sand alternating with others of limestone shingle, and the forests behind, a tangled growth of cedar, fir, and spruce in impenetrable swamps, or a scanty, scrubby growth upon a sandy soil. Two hours were spent at Thunder Bay, where the steamer stopped for a supply of wood, and we went steaming on toward Mackinaw, a hundred miles away. At sunset of that day the shores of the green rocky island dawned upon us. The steamer swept up to an excellent dock, ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... on a few steps—then stopped a second time, and made a sign for Leon to come up. Without speaking, he pointed to a little thicket of scrubby bushes, through the leaves of which they could just make out some large brown object perfectly at rest. That was the tapir ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... when the boom of cannon burst on the air, rolling heavily from away to the southward up from what we knew must be the neighborhood of the camps at Pittsburg Landing. It was after seven o'clock. The sun was mounting over the scrubby oak copse behind our camp, and the day grew warm apace. Another and still another explosion followed ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... hundred yards they heard shoutings, and guessed that they were being followed. Just here the road crossed a ravine full of boulders and rough scrubby growth, whereas beyond it was bare and open. Peter seized Castell and dragged him up this ravine till they came to a place where, behind a great stone, there was a kind of hole, filled with bushes and tall, dead grass, into which ...
— Fair Margaret • H. Rider Haggard
... counties, and, it is probable, was founded by them when they found Uttoxeter (the Uriconiam of the Romans), no longer tenable. On the conquest of the town by the Anglo-Saxons it received the name of Scrobbes- byrig; that is to say Scrub-burgh, or a town in a scrubby or bushy district, and, in the Saxon Chronicle, Scrobbesbyrig-scire is mentioned, now corrupted or polished into Shropshire. Ethelfleda, whose name we have so often had occasion to mention as the builder of castles and churches, founded ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney
... Hall—where Edward had his head-quarters—and Park's Mill was a marge of firm soil, along which a column could pass, in scrubby country, and between the bogs was a sort of bridge of dry land. By these two avenues the English might assail the Scottish lines. These approaches Bruce is said to have rendered difficult by pitfalls, and even by caltrops to maim the horses. He determined to fight ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... dismal pieces. The several vocations of its tenants were indicated by a typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed "hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen of ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... for this business like a rapacious bird, but has feet like a robin. One wintry evening, near sunset, I saw one alight on the top of a tree by the roadside, with some small object in its beak. I paused to observe it. Presently it flew down into a scrubby old apple-tree, and attempted to impale the object upon a thorn or twig. It was occupied in this way some moments, no twig or knob proving quite satisfactory. A little screech owl was evidently watching the proceedings from his doorway in the trunk of a decayed apple-tree ten ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... implements needed, some one had to make a trip across a small pasture-field from which the scrubby timber had not been cleared. Will had hitched a team of young mules to one of the wagons and gone on this errand. The mules were frisky fellows and enlivened this little journey by running away. Wilbur got them under control with little trouble, but it was noticed ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... again, but this time he looked into each compartment. He saw three Englishmen and an American playing whist, Germans eating, and French people sleeping, and at last he came upon his rose. A small man, mean-featured and scrubby-haired, was seated opposite to her, and his shining eyes were fixed upon her face. She had taken off her hat and was holding it on her lap, and Jean saw that she was clutching at it nervously, and that she was pale. He understood ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... idea of the superb and dainty Zette coming in contact with such abomination. He hated Bondon with a murderous hate. He drank a great gulp of absinthe and wished it were Bondon's blood. Great tears rolled down Bocardon's face, and gathering at the ends of his scrubby moustache dripped in splashes on the ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... at his watch and took up his hat. He passed out through the immaculate kitchen, odorous of soapsuds and sunlight, and down through the orchard, which Zenas Third with his saw and shears had converted from a neglected and scrubby riot into a spruce and orderly parade. Unconsciously his feet led him over the same course he had taken on that first walk of his, which ended in an unintentional and disconcerting visit to The Cedars. As before, he followed the brook, much less a brook now than then by reason of ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the darkness that he was able to recognize Skelly, who was in advance, an old army rifle across his saddle bow. Behind him were at least fifty men, and Harry knew they were all mountaineers. They rode the scrubby mountain horses, more like ponies, and ...
— The Guns of Bull Run - A Story of the Civil War's Eve • Joseph A. Altsheler
... vanished, appeared, as it seemed, right beneath our horses' feet and disappeared. If we caught them with our eyes they bowed with a loathsome, trembling subservience. There were many little Jewish children, with glittering eyes, naked feet, bare scrubby heads and white faces. Nikolai at length caught an old man and asked him where the soldiers were. The old man replied in very tolerable Russian that all the soldiers had gone last night—not one of them remained—but he believed that some more were shortly to arrive. They were always coming and ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... Johnson is right,—great happiness in an English post-chaise properly driven; more exhilarating than a palanquin. 'Post equitem sedet atra cura,'—true only of such scrubby hacks as old Horace could have known. Black Care does not sit behind English posters, eh, my boy?" As he spoke this, the gentleman had twice let down the glass of the vehicle, and twice put it ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... were open and clear of undergrowth, and the troops passed through, preserving their array with little difficulty; but as the point, where the fight between the pickets had commenced, was neared, the timber became dwarfed into scrubby brush, and at some places dense thickets impeded the advance. The ground, too, grew rugged and difficult of passage in unbroken line. Frequent halts to reform and dress the ranks became necessary, and at such times General Johnson's magnificent ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... is scrubby, littery; ill-tilled, scratched rather than ploughed; physiognomic of Czech Populations, who are seldom trim at elbows: any beauty it has is on the farther side of the Dobrowa, which does not concern Prince Leopold, Prince Karl, or us at present. Prince Leopold's camp lies east and ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the left, so as to get nearer to the snow, and where it seems easy walking we'll take to it; but for the most part I shall keep to the division-line between the snow and the scrubby growth. It will be rough travelling; but we shall not have to cut our way through ...
— Fix Bay'nets - The Regiment in the Hills • George Manville Fenn
... on a rock and looked around. There seemed to be nothing in sight but rocks and scrubby bushes, and already twilight was ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... of waxy light which marked certain trees, bushes, and scrubby ground-hugging plants were spreading, running together in pools. And from those center cores of concentrated glow, tendrils of mist lazily curled out, as a many-armed creature of the sea might allow its appendages to float in the water which supported it. Tendrils crossed, met, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... trade, (As being bricks at second hand,) Now move, and now in order stand. The building, as the Poet writ, Rose in proportion to his wit— And first the prologue built a wall; So wide as to encompass all. The scene, a wood, produc'd no more Than a few scrubby trees before. The plot as yet lay deep; and so A cellar next was dug below; But this a work so hard was found, Two acts it cost him under ground. Two other acts, we may presume, Were spent in building each a room. Thus far advanc'd, he made a shift To raise a roof with act the fift. The epilogue ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... from equaling the horse in grace or beauty, the ass, in his wild condition, is a handsome, swift, and powerful animal, so different to the degenerated, ill-used, and scrubby creatures of this country, that they would scarcely be recognized as belonging to the same stock, if placed side by side. In Spain, and other parts of Southern Europe, and the Cape de Verde Islands, they are very superior; but they are even surpassed by those of the East. ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... of four days' hard marching through scrubby grounds the troops began to climb the almost trackless hinterland, where water was scarce and vegetation scanty. It was much of the same nature as the veldt in the dry season, kopjes being plentifully ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... apartment number. She hated the jangling of the hall telephone, the scurrying to answer, the prodding of whichever bell button would summon the tenant asked for by the caller. She hated the meek little Filipino boy who swept that ugly hall every morning. She hated the scrubby palms in front. She hated the pillars where the paint was peeling badly. She hated the conflicting odours that seeped into the atmosphere at certain hours of the day. She hated the three old maids on the third floor and the frowsy woman on the ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... also persuaded many of the workmen in the garden to neglect the good tree, and let the briers and weeds grow up around it and so prevent its growth. Thus in time the once precious fruit of the good tree became wild and scrubby, no better than the enemy's trees which ...
— A Young Folks' History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints • Nephi Anderson
... near the horsemen. The last man dismounts as we approach; his companions are disappearing over the rise; he shifts his saddle forward, staring at us intently. A tall, well-built fellow, red hair, chin scrubby, dust-covered features. A bayonet at his side—by heavens! ...
— With Steyn and De Wet • Philip Pienaar
... recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little brown pillow which my mother had made for the purpose. We had ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... a.m.; passed through long dry grass with scrubby box; then flooded box flats to Paul Cooroogannie and reached depot at 6.5 p.m. It blew quite a gale of wind during the day from south-south-west with dust and a few ...
— McKinlay's Journal of Exploration in the Interior of Australia • John McKinlay
... went to strike him, Virokannas moved against him, Went to slay the ox unhappy; But his head the ox was turning, And his black eyes he was blinking. To a pine-tree sprang the old man, 70 Virokannas in the bushes, In the scrubby willow-thicket. ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... cushions of the sofa, on which I had placed him, and he put his arms round me as I knelt down beside him, and whispered that his back was bad, and his legs felt funny, and he was so glad I was home again, for Martha was cross, and had hard scrubby hands, and hurt him often, though she did not mean it. This and much more did Dot whisper in ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... a most pleasant acquaintance, cocked up his ragged ears, and tried to wag his poor little scrubby tail, never quite getting it into his head that it wasn't long and graceful. And then he set upon the task of licking Dick's hands all over, and as much of his face as was ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... was said until they reached the wood and flung themselves panting under the shade of a scrubby live oak. ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... sisters; of the Hoopers even. About them, his new tone was no doubt a trifle patronising, but still, quite tolerable. Ewen Hooper, he vowed, was "a magnificent scholar," and it was too bad that Oxford had found nothing better for him than "a scrubby readership." But "some day, of course, he'll have the regius professorship." Nora was "a plucky little thing—though she hates me!" And he, Falloden, was not so sure after all that Miss Alice would not land her Pryce. "Can't ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... are hot and deserted, and the town more than ordinarily dull, as most of the inhabitants are out planting. The court has gone to Buonavista, on account of the unhealthiness of Porta Praya, at this season of the year. A few dozen scrubby trees have been planted in the large square, but, though protected by palings and barrels, have not reached the height of two feet. In the centre stands a marble monument, possibly intended for a fountain, but wholly ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge
... show the sight; On Sundays, after evening prayer, He gathers all the parish there, Points out the place of either Yew: Here Baucis, there Philemon grew, Till once a parson of our town, To mend his barn, cut Baucis down; At which, 'tis hard to be believed How much the other tree was grieved, Grow scrubby, died a-top, was stunted: So the next parson stubbed ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... was one of 180 degrees and we soon fell in with the native path which we had quitted yesterday; but it now became wide, well beaten, and differing altogether by its permanent character from any I had seen in the southern portion of this continent. For the first five miles we traversed scrubby stony hills, thickly wooded with banksia trees; but the limestone here again cropped out and we entered a very fertile valley, running north and south and terminating in a larger one which drained the country from east to west. This ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... sunlight amid the tall brown grass, it is almost impossible to see him. But the zebra and the giraffe are the kings of all camouflagers! So deceptive are the large blotch-spots of the giraffe and his weird head and horns, like scrubby limbs, that his concealment is perfect. Even the cleverest natives often mistake a herd of giraffes for a clump of trees. The camouflage of zebras is equally deceptive. Drummond says that he once found himself in a forest, looking ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... of the river. It was a good-sized creek frozen solid, and already deep buried under snow. Without a pause they crossed to the other side and broke their way through the scrubby snow-laden ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... impalpable, intangible, evanescent, imperceptible, invisible, inappreciable, insignificant, inconsiderable, trivial; infinitesimal, homoeopathic[obs3]; atomic, subatomic, corpuscular, molecular; rudimentary, rudimental; embryonic, vestigial. weazen|!, scant, scraggy, scrubby; thin &c. (narrow) 203; granular &c. (powdery) 330; shrunk &c. 195; brevipennate[obs3]. Adv. in a small compass, in a nutshell; on a small ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... with uncertain light; the bright blue morn stretching over miles of moor and mountain; the slow up-gathering of the bellied thunder-cloud; summer lakes, and cattle knee-deep in them; rustic bridges forever crossed by old women in scarlet cloaks; old-fashioned waggons resting on the scrubby common, the waggoner lazy and wayworn, the dog couched on the ground, its tongue hanging out in the heat; boats drawn up on the shore at sunset; the fisher's children looking seawards, the red light full on their dresses ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... or glaciers, or deep forests, to excite curiosity or adventure; no trace of gardens or waterfalls. From base to summit all seems gray, barren, silent—dead, bleached bones of mountains, overgrown with scrubby bushes, like gray moss. But all mountains are full of hidden beauty, and the next day after my arrival at Pasadena I supplied myself with bread and eagerly set out to give ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... conducting to the basilica of the Sacred Heart; but to reach the house itself one had to skirt the wall and climb to the Place du Tertre, where one found the facade and the entrance. Some children were playing on the Place, which, planted as it was with a few scrubby trees, and edged with humble shops,—a fruiterer's, a grocer's and a baker's,—looked like some square in a small provincial town. In a corner, on the left, Guillaume's dwelling, which had been whitewashed during the previous spring, showed its bright frontage and five lifeless windows, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... through some scrubby brushwood, brought us to the base of a steep stony ridge covered with tall and thrifty hickories and a few oaks and maples intermixed, rising so steeply from the shore that it was necessary not only to ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... the travellers had set their faces, after turning their backs on Engleton, had by this time dwindled into a narrow bridle-path. And as they proceeded, it too gradually disappeared until it was completely lost in the wide stretch of hilly land, half heather, half scrubby grass, that spread all around them as far ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... unlike a kiosk, was opened by a man-servant who might easily have been mistaken for a waiter from Delmonico's or Sherry's. He did not have the air or aplomb of a butler, nor the smartness of a footman. On the contrary, he was a thick-set, rather scrubby sort of person with all the symptoms of cafe servitude about him, including the never-failing doubt as to nationality. He might have been a Greek, a Pole, an Italian or ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... Falls of St. Anthony to the Rum river, the Mississippi is a continued chain of rapids, with eddies, formed by winding channels. The land, on both sides, consists of Prairie, with scarcely any timber, except small groves of scrubby oaks. Not far from this spot is Red Cedar lake, the grounds in the vicinity of which are considered, by the Indians, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... life. A large majority of them were as naked as they were when they were born. Their hair in many instances looked as if it never had been straightened out. They lived mostly on pine nuts. The nuts grow on a low, scrubby tree, a species of Pine, and in gathering the nuts they covered their hands with gum which is as sticky as tar and rubbed it on their bodies and in their hair. The reader may imagine the effect; I am satisfied that many of these Indians had never seen a white man before they saw us. Very few of ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... tops, glimmering and marvellous in the evanescent night. She went out for a moment on to the balcony. It was a wonder-world: the moon over the snow heights, the pallid valley-bed away below; the river hoarse, and round about her, scrubby, blue-dark foothills with twiggy trees. Magical it all ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... since a good friend had told me of some lyrics by Miss Frances Wynne; and the little volume, charmingly entitled Whisper, was close under my arm as I turned from the road across the heath—a wild scramble of scrubby chance-children, wind-sown from the pines behind. And then presently, like a much greater person, 'I found me ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... rear of the hall Mr. Thomas came. But the drunken rowdy of the night before had been transformed. Gone was the scrubby beard and the shabby suit. Shorn was the unkempt mop of hair and vanished the impudent swagger. He was dressed in clean linen and respectable black, and his manner was modest and subdued. Only a discoloration of one eye ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... no tree so much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from the mossy ground, wide fans of branches—a ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... powerfully built, broad-shouldered man of about fifty, with a massive jaw, covered with a scrubby beard; the face of a bulldog; a grim, masterful man, who never speaks except when he has to. He enters and seats himself in a chair by the table.] Will you have a cigar? [Grimes takes a cigar, without comment, and chews on it; sits, staring in front of him.] Mr. ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... heart on being the 'little scrubby lawyer's clerk,'" said Busy Bee; "it is what I am just fit for; and let me see—Fred shall be Antonio, and that will make you plead from your very heart, and you shall have Alex for ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the way along the most nearly level ground. Low creepers became more plentiful, interspersed with scrubby thickets of tangled, spike-armored bushes. Occasionally, small flying things flickered among the foliage. Once, a shrub puffed out an enormous cloud of ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe
... on the threshold, a man of middle age, with white drawn face and scrubby beard. His clothes were in rags, his hair unkempt, and his light grey ...
— Sea Urchins • W. W. Jacobs
... workshops. This image fixed his wavering purpose. He would try to find old Giorgio if he could. God knows what might have happened to him! He made a few steps, then stopped again and shook his head. To the left and right, in front and behind him, the scrubby bush rustled mysteriously ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... green wave ran up, gleaming like curved glass in the sunlight, and broke in a million sparkles against a shelf of shingle. Above the shingle rose the soft cliffs, clothed with scrubby grass and ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... Hewitt bit his scrubby mustache. When a special correspondent married that was the end ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... cultivation. I have often been struck with the great general similarity between the barren and sandy tracts of this district, and many parts of New South Wales, where sandstone is the prevailing rock. In both countries there are the same low scrubby bushes, at the Cape consisting of Heaths and Proteae, and in Australia of Epacridae and Banksiae—the last the honeysuckles of the Colonists. Even the beautiful sunbirds of the Cape, frequenting especially the flowers of ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... world, the finery rued that they had tended so carefully to catch the eyes of men on the darkened streets; brazen young girls, who blazed forth defiance to all order; derelict men, sodden and hopeless, with scrubby beards; shifty looking burglars and pickpockets. All these I beheld, at first with twinges of pity, later to mass them with the ugly and inevitable with whom society had to deal somehow. Lawyers, after all, must be practical men. I came to know the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... country. The commonest oak is a low, scrubby bush. The "cedars of Lebanon" have almost disappeared. The carob tree, white poplar, a thorn bush, and the oleander are found in some localities. The principal fruit-bearing trees are the fig, olive, date palm, pomegranate, orange, and lemon. ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... get ourselves up as well as we could. The most, however, that we were able to do was to array ourselves in our spare suits of shooting clothes, of which we each had several, all the fine clothes in the world could never make it otherwise than scrubby and insignificant; but Sir Henry looked what he is, a magnificent man in his nearly new tweed suit, gaiters, and boots. Alphonse also got himself up to kill, giving an extra turn to his enormous moustaches. Even old Umslopogaas, ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... Finn, both of whom growled fiercely while they ate, in a manner which said plainly that they were not entertaining that night, at all events before the edge had been taken off their own appetites. So old Tufter got nothing more nutritious than a few scraps of scrubby fur. ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... a miserable cur came sniffing along the gutter on the opposite side of the street. His ribs showed plainly through his dirty yellow coat, the scrubby hair along his back stood on end, and his tail was held closely between his legs. And so he tipped along, half-starved, vainly seeking some morsel of food. He stopped and looked up, shivering visibly as the cold wind pierced him through and through, then trotted to ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... narrow window looked off across the sandy cart tracks which served as a road toward the blue waters of Cape Cod Bay. It was early June, and the strong breath of the sea filled the rough little house, bringing with it the fragrance of the wild cherry blossoms and an odor of pine from the scrubby growths on the low line of hills ...
— A Little Maid of Province Town • Alice Turner Curtis
... artist who secretly entertained his sister in his studio grew with the minutes. It would be his privilege very shortly to read that scrubby dauber a lesson in deportment which he ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... a few scrubby bushes overhanging a little stream, which passed under the road near ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... before long whole train-loads of cement and sand and corrugated iron walls and roofing came rattling and banging past the Higgins's back-door. Day and night this continued; and a little way beyond they knew that a two-mile square of scrubby waste was being laid out with roads and tracks and little squat buildings, set far apart from each other. In a few months the frightened family would lie awake at night and listen to trains rattling past, ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... pines began. They were short and scrubby as yet, but beautiful in the velvet of their dark green needles. Bob glanced at them critically. They were perhaps eighty to a hundred feet high and from a foot to thirty inches ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... temporary sepulchres, for five-year grants were the only ones to be obtained, and families hesitated to go to any serious expense. Thus, the stones sinking into the ground for lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw there, imparted to that vast field of repose a look of poverty and cold, clean, dismal bareness like that of a barracks ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... a muddy stream, densely fringed by the nipah palm, whose dark green fronds, ten and twelve feet long, look as if they grew out of the ground, so dumpy is its stem. The country, as overlooked from our lofty deck, appeared a dead level of rice and scrubby jungle intermixed, a vast alluvial plain, from which the heavy, fever-breeding mists were rising in rosy folds. Every now and then we passed a Cochin Chinese village—a collection of very draughty-looking wooden huts, roofed with palm leaves, built over the river on ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop) |
