"Weedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... forlorn Europa through the waves, Leaving behind a track of ruffled foam; Powerless with fear she held him by the horns, Her golden tresses streaming on the winds; In curved shells, young Cupids sported near, While sea gods glanced from out their weedy caves, And on the shore were maids with waving scarfs, And hinds a-coming to the rescue—late! But I have broken my divinest cup, And trod its fragments in the dust ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... have boldly sprung, Washing her weedy tresses to and fro, That round her crouching knees have darkly hung; But she sits careless of waves' ebb and flow, Like a lone beacon on a desert coast, Showing where all her hope was wreck'd ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... reticulatus, the swiftest, wariest, and most ravenous of fishes, which Josselyn calls the Fresh-Water or River Wolf, is very common in the shallow and weedy lagoons along the sides of the stream. It is a solemn, stately, ruminant fish, lurking under the shadow of a pad at noon, with still, circumspect, voracious eye, motionless as a jewel set in water, or moving slowly along to take up its position, darting ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... by upland fences, Where the season's wealth condenses Over many a weedy wreck, Wild, uncared-for, desert places, That sovereign Beauty loves to deck With her softest, dearest graces. There the long year dreams in quiet, And the summer's strength runs riot. Shall I not remember these, Deep in winter reveries? Berried ...
— Lyrics of Earth • Archibald Lampman
... holy truth doth blur. Doth the great ocean from the small fish run When it sleeps fast in its low weedy bower? Is the sun far from any smallest flower, That lives by his dear presence every hour? Are they not one in oneness without stir— The flower the flower because the ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... at Mr. Thomas and was agreeably prepossessed by his open although nervous countenance, and the simplicity and timidity of his manner. "What a people are these Americans!" he thought. "Look at this nervous, weedy, simple little bird in a low-necked shirt, and think of him wielding and directing interests so extended and seemingly incongruous! But had we not better," he observed aloud, "had we not perhaps better approach ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ghosts—phantoms of people with whom upon this road he had walked and ridden and laughed, ghosts of old thoughts and recollected words. He came to a thick grove of trees, a broken fence, a gateway with no gate. Inattentive to these evidences of desertion, he turned in at the gate and rode along a weedy and neglected drive. At the end of it he came to an open space before a ruined house. The aspect of the tumbling walls and unroofed rooms roused him at last completely from his absorption. He dismounted, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... also," said Mortimer Shelton; "I can't understand it! The only new entry was a weedy chestnut, listed by a Yorkshireman in the afternoon. 'Holdfast' ...
— Adrien Leroy • Charles Garvice
... was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, ...
— Fifty Bab Ballads • William S. Gilbert
... the plashy brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... replied Malcolm hurriedly. "If we come to that, you have rather a weedy appearance yourself;" for Cedric looked decidedly thinner, and his eyes were almost unnaturally bright. He seemed older, too, and changed in some undefinable way; but he had never looked handsomer. Malcolm forgot his own troubles in his ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... freedom of the morning beginning to act upon his well-trained blood, the mechanical manner of the old man's mind gave place to a mild exuberance. A weight seemed to be lifting from it ounce by ounce as the fence panels, the weedy corners, the persimmon sprouts and sassafras bushes crept away behind him, so that by the time a mile lay between him and the life partner of his joys and sorrows he was in a reasonably contented frame ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... little islands of flags, when a hungry pike, observing the delicious frog towing in the rear, seizes it, and makes off to his hole, to gorge the bait at his leisure. More easily thought than done;—the goose stoutly resists, and refuses to accompany the fresh-water shark to his weedy home. A warm and obstinate engagement is the result; the peasant watches, with approving eye, the embarassment of his feathered accomplice, until he thinks it time to put an end to the scrimmage, when he whistles like an easterly wind in a passion. The goose, rather encumbered ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... flat and uninviting plain—poor and barren, as the uncultivated border-land of the two kingdoms—Guines and its castle offered little attraction, and if possible less accommodation, to the gay throng now to be gathered within its walls. Its weedy moat and dismantled battlements, "its keep too ruinous to mend," defied the efforts of carpenters and bricklayers, as the English commissioners pathetically complained; and could not by any artifice or contrivance be made to assume the appearance of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... we first meet with temperate forms of herbaceous plants, so low as 3,000 feet, where strawberries and violets begin to grow, but the former are tasteless, and the latter have very small and pale flowers. Weedy composites also begin to give a European aspect to the wayside herbage. It is between 2,000 and 5,000 feet that the forests and ravines exhibit the utmost development of tropical luxuriance and beauty. The abundance of noble Tree-ferns, sometimes fifty feet high, contributes greatly to the general ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... this, fortunately, is comparatively harmless to the human digestion. But some of this vegetable matter, such as we find in the water from bogs or swamps, or even heavy forests, will sometimes upset the digestion; hence, the natural dislike that we have for water with a marshy, or "weedy," taste. ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... shouted Simmons, firing as he spoke. The shot missed, and the shooter, blind with rage, threw his rifle down and rushed at Slane from the protection of the well. Within striking distance, he kicked savagely at Slane's stomach, but the weedy Corporal knew something of Simmons's weakness, and knew, too, the deadly guard for that kick. Bowing forward and drawing up his right leg till the heel of the right foot was set some three inches above the inside of the ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... let the eye fall where it would. The fences were down, here and there; the hedges, once so green and nicely trimmed, had grown rankly in some places, but were stunted and dying in others; all the beautiful walks were weedy and grass-grown, and the box-borders dead; the garden, rainbow-hued in its wealth of choice and beautiful flowers when I first saw it, was lying waste,—a rooting-ground for hogs. A glance at the house showed ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... is so good to have got beyond the confines of stereotyped civilisation and the trammels of Japanese travelling to the solitude of nature and an atmosphere of freedom. It was grey, with a hard, dark line of ocean horizon, and over the weedy level the grey road, with grey telegraph-poles along it, stretched wearisomely like a grey thread. The breeze came up from the sea, rustled the reeds, and waved the tall plumes of the Eulalia japonica, and the thunder of the Pacific surges ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... be given the girl, not close companions, for her nature is like a rank, weedy flower that needs refining and cultivating into a ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... much of foreign travel—rather of past ages; it seemed not so much degrees of latitude that we had crossed, as centuries of time that we had re-ascended; leaving, by the same steps, home and to-day. A few children followed us, mostly nude, all silent; in the clear, weedy waters of the canal some silent damsels waded, baring their brown thighs; and to one of the maniap's before the palace gate we were attracted by a low ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... these Sargassos—the great Atlantic one that lies between Africa and the West Indies,—and his men were alarmed lest this strange weedy sea should turn out to be the end of the world! Columbus was long detained in this region of stagnation and calm, and so were most of the early navigators, who styled it the "Doldrums." Now-a-days, however, our knowledge of the currents of ocean and atmosphere ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... for its clothes. And sometimes it leads to the Northland, and the scurvy softens your bones, And your flesh dints in like putty, and you spit out your teeth like stones. And sometimes it leads to a coral reef in the wash of a weedy sea, And you sit and stare at the empty glare where the gulls wait greedily. And sometimes it leads to an Arctic trail, and the snows where your torn feet freeze, And you whittle away the useless clay, and crawl on your ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... was in a mood to fight for our car till the death, even if knives flashed out; and I think I was gasping "Police! Police!" but at that instant Mr. Jack Dane hurled himself like a catapult from the hotel. He dashed the weedy youths out of his way like ninepins, jumped to his seat, and the car and the ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... Saxe-Coburg Square, the scene of the singular story which we had listened to in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in enclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass and a few clumps of faded laurel-bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a brown board with "JABEZ WILSON" in white letters, upon a corner house, ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was so white, it was not the face of death. There was a sense of movement and life which was in accord with their own spirits and rapid motion. Snow-birds fluttered and twittered in weedy thickets by the way-side, breakfasting on the seeds that fell like black specks upon the snow. The bright sunlight had lured the red squirrels from their moss-lined nests in hollow trees, and their barking was sometimes heard above the ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... paved with hot blocks of granite over which the carriage rattled; spread with car tracks, bordered by heterogeneous buildings of all characters and descriptions, bakeries and breweries, slaughter houses and markets, tumble-down shanties, weedy corner lots and "refreshment-houses" that announced "Lager Beer, Wines and Liquors." At last they came to a region which was neither country nor city, where the road-houses were still in evidence, where the glass roofs of greenhouses caught the burning rays of the sun, where yards filled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the obvious fulsomeness in the old woman's praise in no way detracted from my feeling of having done a good deed. Aunt Sally was a clever psychologist and as I carefully picked my way up the weedy path toward the street, I felt indeed that the "Lawd" was "sho goin'" ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... is a sure sign of dishonesty. "Look at So-and-so," he said to Las Cases at Saint Helena, alluding to a confidential servant whom he had been obliged to dismiss for malversation. "I do not know how I could have been deceived in him for so long; he has a magpie eye." Tall Cointet, surveying the weedy little lawyer, noted his face pitted with smallpox, the thin hair, and the forehead, bald already, receding towards a bald cranium; saw, too, the confession of weakness in his attitude with the hand on the hip. "Here is my man," said he ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... mother with the housework, picked peas and a squash and a saucer full of yellow pansies in the weedy little garden, and, at noon, dined on the trophies of her husbandry, ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... but he and the war-men, expecting that their enemies would return in greater numbers, were again forced to fly. The dreary pine forest, the weedy marsh, and the muddy swamp were once more passed through. Brooks and rapid rivers were crossed by Econchatti, wounded as he was, with his son on his back. He swam with one hand, for the other was of ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... king's orders. Moreover, Blackthorn wore most of the clothes brought by the scullion. At last, Rough Ruddy found out that the sight of such horrid jumping would make her children vulgar; and, as soon as he was old enough, she sent Fairyfoot every day to watch some sickly sheep that grazed on a wild, weedy pasture, ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... is chiefly supplied from cold bottom springs. Its only constant tributaries are two small streams, whose entire volume is not half that of its outlet, the Susquehanna River, which here begins its long journey to Chesapeake Bay. The upper and lower portions of the lake, being shallow and weedy, afford ample pickerel grounds, while the middle portion and whole eastern shore are admirably adapted, by deep water and soft marl bottom, to the coregoni and salmon trout, and nearer shore, by rocky bottom and sharp ledges, to the rock bass, black bass, and yellow perch. Large fish find ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... Columbus's ship first plunged her bows into the tangled 'ocean meadow,' and the sailors, naturally enough, were ready to mutiny, fearing hidden shoals, ignorant that they had four miles of blue water beneath their keel, and half recollecting old Greek and Phoenician legends of a weedy sea off the coast of Africa, where the vegetation stopped the ships and kept them entangled till ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... ran a very welcome brook of water through this glade, I left Rosinante to follow whithersoever a sweet tooth might dictate, and climbed down into the weedy coolness at the waterbrink. ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... my barn-door study I see a vesper sparrow fly up and alight on the telephone wire with nesting-material in her beak. I keep my eye upon her. In a moment she drops down to the grassy and weedy bank of the roadside in front of me and disappears. A few moments later I have her secret—a nest in a little recess in the bank. That straw gave the finishing touch. She kept her place on the nest until she had deposited her first egg on June 24th, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... features, the same cast o' countenance. The "black knob" was discernible, there was no mistake: barn doors broken off, fences burnt up, glass out of windows; more white crops than green, and both lookin' poor and weedy; no wood pile, no sarse garden, no compost, no stock; moss in the mowin lands, thistles in the ploughed lands, and neglect every where; skinnin' had commenced—takin' all out and puttin' nothin' in—gittin' ready for a move, SO AS TO HAVE NOTHIN' BEHIND. Flittin' time had come. ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... importation of thoroughbreds from Australia and Europe, it tends to perpetuate the native race. The country-bred horse is undoubtedly a handsome-looking animal, but he exhibits a tendency to become weedy and razor-chested, and fails to carry a heavy weight from deficiency of bone. It is also found that the progeny of imported stock decline in quality both in size and stamina. This is the joint effect of climate ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... had been fished over a few times, the trout there seemed to grow more shy, and there was a certain monotony in walking this tiny quarter-deck of space. So I went round to the west side, where the water-lilies are. Fish were rising about three yards beyond the weedy beds, and I foolishly thought I would try for them. Now, you cannot overestimate the difficulty of casting a fly across yards of water-lilies. You catch in the weeds as you lift your line for a ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste, With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy, For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... front gate with his neuro while the others struggled through the weedy garden to the police ship in the alley, rejoining them as they were ready ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... thing; but I should say, for a low-growing flower, quiet lankily and disagreeably stalky! And, thinking over what I remember about wild pansies, I find an impression on my mind of their being rather more stalky, always, than is quite graceful; and, for all their fine flowers, having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting into places where they have no business. See, again, vol. i., ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Yellow wood-sorrel (oxalis) was here, of course, as it was everywhere. It dotted the grass in Florida very much as five-fingers do in Massachusetts, I sometimes thought. And the creeping, round-leaved houstonia was here, with a superfluity of a weedy blue sage (Salvia lyrata). Here, also, as in Daytona, I found a strikingly handsome tufted plant, a highly varnished evergreen, which I persisted in taking for a fern—the sterile fronds—in spite of repeated failures to find it described by Dr. Chapman under ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... in at 1.15—Ward's waggons in our front, and a Frenchman's four-horse team in our rear. At 4 P.M. we reached the "Weedy," a creek which, to our sorrow, was perfectly dry. We drove on till 7 P.M., and halted at some good grass. There being a report of water in the neighbourhood, Mr Sargent, the Judge, Ward, and the Frenchman, started to explore; and when, at length, ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... called "the everlasting tree." The tree itself stood in a corner of the room, a colossal but lop-sided plant with a lamentable tendency to straggle about the lower branches, and an inclination to run to weedy and ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... frail-looking, weedy, pale-faced boy, fifteen years of age and about four feet nine inches in height. His trousers were part of a suit that he had once worn for best, but that was so long ago that they had become too small for him, fitting rather lightly and scarcely reaching the top ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... the mighty sea expand Like Time's unmeasured and unfathomed waves, One with its tide-marks on the ridgy sand, The other with its line of weedy graves; And as beyond the outstretched wave of time, The eye of Faith a brighter land may meet, So did I dream of some more sunny clime Beyond the waste of waters ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... woman whose instincts are maternal, who desires superior children more than anything else, never hesitates. She would take a thousandth share, if necessary, in a husband who was a man in a thousand, rather than have some comparatively weedy weakling all to herself. It is the comparatively weedy weakling, left mateless by polygyny, who objects. Thus, it was not the women of Salt Lake City nor even of America who attacked Mormon polygyny. It was the men. ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... face of France in many counties. The fields lay weedy and untilled; the starving peasant-folk took to the highway, every man preying on his neighbour. Woods had grown up, and broken in upon the roads. Howbeit, though robbers harboured therein, none of them held to ransom a ...
— A Monk of Fife • Andrew Lang
... whose effect was not inferior to the weathered parts, even to those of which the design had in some parts almost disappeared. On the front of the church of San Michele at Lucca, the mosaics have fallen out of half the columns, and lie in weedy ruin beneath; in many, the frost has torn large masses of the entire coating away, leaving a scarred unsightly surface. Two of the shafts of the upper star window are eaten entirely away by the sea ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... his recreations tired of life, nor because his daily round had turned to "white of egg";[17] but with genuine, honest fatigue, taking amusement as he takes sleep, and going back from it with a joyous rebound to his special weedy corner ...
— Tired Church Members • Anne Warner
... tall and weedy; the Squire was tall and robust. Amabel inherited height on both sides, but in face and in character she was more like her father than her mother. Indeed, Lady Louisa would close her eyes, and Lady Craikshaw would put up her gold glass at the child, and they would both cry, ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... year's drudgery, and the whereabouts really matters little.... We hear that the cholera is in Edinburgh. I cannot help thinking with the deepest anxiety of those I love there, and I imagine with sorrow that beautiful, noble city, those breezy hills, those fresh, sea-weedy shores and coasts breathed upon by that dire pestilence. The city of the winds, where the purifying currents of keen air sweep through every thoroughfare and eddy round every corner—perched up so high upon her rocky throne, she seems to sit in a freer, finer atmosphere than all the ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... of a family' racket needn't be brought forward. It doesn't hold as much water as it used to. Women are thought just as much of now who are good useful workers in the world, and not tied up to some man and the mother of a few weedy kids that aren't any credit to ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... much to look at," he remarked on the first of these occasions—he was a weedy, pallid youth of six-and-twenty—"and the title's not very old, I must admit. Governor only a scientific Johnnie, Margetson, the celebrated chemist, you know, who discovered some beastly gas or other and got made a peer—but I can sit with the other old rotters in the House of Lords, ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... geraniums and lobelias and polished shells. His little windows were chastely swathed in Nottingham lace. "Cissie" was to let. Three notice-boards, belonging to Dorking agents, lolled on her fence and announced the not surprising fact. Her paths were already weedy; her pocket-handkerchief of a lawn was yellow ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... three days before. But he was present with his bride, and he knew of a haunt that would compensate us for all loss or disappointment. We crossed the desert nursing a faint hope. We threaded one or two wide, weedy, silent streets; not a soul was visible, though it was but nine in the evening,—which was not to be wondered at, since the town was divided against itself: the one half slept, the other half still sat upon the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... sauntered round, with the most unconcerned manner I could assume, to the back of the house, by the inn yard. A door in one part of it stood half-open. Inside was a bit of kitchen-garden, bounded by a paling; beyond that some backs of detached houses; beyond them, again, a plot of weedy ground, a few wretched cottages, and the open, heathery moor. Good enough for running away, ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... long-haired, barefooted and freckled, hung about the door of Nancy's cabin, where she sat with her little girl playing in the weedy turf at her foot. The late October weather was sometimes hot at noon, but the evenings were cool and the evening air was sweet with the scent of the ripened corn, and the faint odor of the fallen leaves. The grasshoppers still hissed; at moments the crickets ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... and for two months in the year a cider-maker, was an employer of labour of the old school, who worked himself among his men. He was now engaged in packing the pomace into horsehair bags with a rammer, and Gad Weedy, his man, was occupied in shovelling up more from a tub at his side. The shovel shone like silver from the action of the juice, and ever and anon, in its motion to and fro, caught the rays of the declining sun and reflected them in ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... serenely blue and warm, and on the wrinkled water remotely below a black tender and six hooded submarines came presently, and engaged in mysterious manoeuvers. Shrieking gulls and chattering jackdaws circled over us and below us, and dived and swooped; and a skerry of weedy, fallen chalk appeared, and gradually disappeared again, as ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... more flattering if she had chosen you or Wandle instead of that blasted weedy drummer. Still, there the thing is, and it has to be faced." Then he surprised his companion, for his voice and expression became suddenly normal. "Go in and get me ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... height of his wishes, was, like many a man when he has reached that dangerous elevation, disappointed. Ah, dear friends, it is but too often so in life! Many a garden, seen from a distance, looks fresh and green, which, when beheld closely, is dismal and weedy; the shady walks melancholy and grass-grown; the bowers you would fain repose in, cushioned with stinging-nettles. I have ridden in a caique upon the waters of the Bosphorus, and looked upon the ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... head of his army, and received an immense ovation, as did all his regiments and artillery as they passed through the lines of the weedy, sickly-looking garrison. These with their thin, pale faces cheered to the full bent of their power, but after standing in the sun for some time they became exhausted, and Sir Redvers sent back word for them to sit down, which they ...
— The Record of a Regiment of the Line • M. Jacson
... by which cattle descended to drink, they waded into the weedy water, which here rose a few inches above their ankles. To ascend the stream, stoop under the arch, and reach the centre of the roadway, was the work of a ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... to a wirily weedy and slouching manhood, almost as ignorant of the world beyond his mountain walls as were any of his own "critters." His life was bounded by fruitless labor, varied only by such sleep and food as might fit him ...
— His Dog • Albert Payson Terhune
... the use to grumble, what's the use to fret, 'Cause the cotton's weedy and the days go wet? 'Tis the Lord that sorts the weather and the sun and rain to you, And you needn't kick and holler 'cause he don't explain to you! When it rains, don't get to mopin! There's more sunny skies ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... was all run wild; the trees grown out of shape; the fish-ponds stagnant; the urns and statues fallen from their pedestals and buried among the rank grass. The hares and pheasants were so little molested, except by poachers, that they bred in great abundance, and sported about the rough lawns and weedy avenues. To guard the premises and frighten off robbers, of whom he was somewhat apprehensive, and visitors, whom he held in almost equal awe, my uncle kept two or three blood-hounds, who were always prowling round the house, and were the dread of the neighboring peasantry. They were gaunt ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... place and manner of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... in forest shades; The Indian hunter strings his bow, To track through dark entangling glades The antlered deer and bounding doe, Or launch at night the birch canoe, To spear the finny tribes that dwell On sandy bank, in weedy cell, Or pool, the fisher knows right well— Seen by the red and vivid glow Of pine ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... which we had listened to in the morning. It was a poky, little, shabby-genteel place, where four lines of dingy, two-storied brick houses looked out into a small railed-in inclosure, where a lawn of weedy grass, and a few clumps of faded laurel bushes made a hard fight against a smoke-laden and uncongenial atmosphere. Three gilt balls and a brown board with JABEZ WILSON in white letters, upon a corner house, announced the place where our red-headed client carried on his ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where alone his fellow-boarders had any opportunity of observing him, was such as to induce a very general ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... joining in the rough games of his schoolmates, and in consequence he found relaxation in the association of books. Indeed, it was at this time that the first seeds of literary ambition took root, with the result that a certain weedy thing, called "A Tragedy," grew up under the title of "Misnar, the Sultan of India," which at least gave the young author fame among his immediate ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... masses of golden-rod and purple asters, gathered by the hostess or her guests during their afternoon drive, and all the more satisfactory because of the pleasure taken in their impromptu arrangement. Wild flowers should be neatly trimmed and symmetrically grouped to avoid a ragged or weedy appearance. ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... through the doorway, and stood beside the officer, whose horse was grazing a few yards away upon a trifling patch of weedy grass. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... louring with storm. A time of drought had sucked the weedy pool And baked the channels; birds had done with song. Thirst was a dream of fountains in the moon, Or willow-music blown across the water Leisurely sliding on by weir ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... genteel and good, had a certain character of angularity and scantiness. She was accustomed to wear odd weedy little flowers in her bonnets and caps. Strange grasses were sometimes perceived in her hair; and it was observed by the curious, of all her collars, frills, tuckers, wristbands, and other gossamer articles—indeed of everything she wore which had two ends to it ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... mighty blackthorn he carried—he knew the ground so well that he walked as if he could see (indeed, he saw more than I could, for while to me the breakers were only streaks of light, he spoke as if he was close to them on the wet weedy rocks), or I came on him lying by the edge, listening to the grumbling of the breakers and ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... time—magazines, vacuums, old gold, nearnylons—and I must have been aware of green spaces before most of the houses, but now for the first time I saw lawns. Neat, sharply confined, smoothshaven lawns. Sagging, slipping, eager-to-keep-up-appearances but fighting-a-losing-game lawns. Ragged, weedy, dissolute lawns. Halfbare, repulsively crippled, hummocky lawns. Bright lawns, insistent on former respectability and trimness; yellow and gray lawns, touched with the craziness of age, quite beyond all interest in looks, content to doze ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... some horrid dream, ghost-like glide abroad, and fright the wakeful world; so that night, with death-glazed eyes, to and fro I flitted on the damp and weedy beach. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... remember when it looked a good deal worse," Asher replied. "The Coburn Reports must have helped to turn bare prairie and weedy ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious. Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the PIERRES PERDUES of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a gesture ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are armed attaching themselves to the fleece, rendering portions of it quite stiff and rigid. The common carrot belongs, of course, to this genus, and the fact that it is descended from an apparently worthless, weedy plant, indicates that the present species is capable of ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... in Burnley Beach. She was very pretty, with the obvious, indisputable prettiness of rich black hair, vivid, certain colour, and laughing, brilliant eyes. Nobody ever called Janet a beauty, or even thought her pretty. She was only seventeen—five years younger than Avery—and was rather lanky and weedy, with a rope of straight dark-brown hair, long, narrow, shining brown eyes and very black lashes, and a crooked, clever little mouth. She had visitations of beauty when excited, because then she flushed deeply, and colour ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... a fact. I believe she's the daughter of an old broken-down Catholic marquise—one of the weedy sort—who lives at Troyes, or some such dead-alive hole as that. Her mother tried to make her take the veil, and ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... the adjournment to a luxuriously upholstered parlour, circled with plush-seated chairs and adorned with countless mirrors, and there we began to beg the question at issue, to-whit, "To what extent has Ibsen (if any) contributed towards the cause of Female Emancipation?" which was opened by a weedy, tall male gentleman, with a lofty and a shining forehead, and round, owlish spectacle-glasses. He read a very voluminous paper, from which I learnt that IBSEN was the writer of innumerable new-fangled dramas of very problematical intentions, ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... at each window. Miss Peace was a little plump, partridge-like woman, with lovely waving brown hair, and twinkling brown eyes. She had never been a beauty, but people always liked to look at her, and the young people declared she grew prettier every year. Mrs. Means was tall and weedy, with a figure that used to be called willowy, and was now admitted to be lank; her once fair complexion had faded into sallowness, and her light hair had been frizzed till there was little left of it. Her eyebrows ...
— "Some Say" - Neighbours in Cyrus • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... be weedy. I maintain it's a grand thing for our English nobs that their slips of sons have taken to marrying young women of the stamp of Maidie Trevail and Gwennie Harker— or Lil; keen-witted young women full of the joy of life, with strong frames, beautiful hair and fine eyes, and healthy pink ...
— The 'Mind the Paint' Girl - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... dogs should have selected and followed the same kangaroo was sad and humiliating. And such a waif of a thing, too! Still, they stuck to it. For more than a mile, down a slope, the weedy marsupial outpaced them, but when it came to the hill the daylight between rapidly began to lessen. A few seconds more and all would have been over, but a straggling, stupid old ewe, belonging to an unneighbourly squatter, darted up from the shade of a tree right in the way of Maloney's Brindle, ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... if even in inferior things, there can be gratitude from you to me!—or rather, do not judge—but listen when I say that I am delighted to have met your wishes in writing as I wrote; only that you are surely wrong in refusing to see a single wrongness in all that heap of weedy thoughts, and that when you look again, you must come to the admission of it. One of the thistles is the suggestion about ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain: 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest; Amidst thy desert walks the lapwing flies, 45 And tires their echoes with unvaried cries. Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all, And the long grass o'ertops the mould'ring wall; And trembling, shrinking ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... pretty vase with hers, but Ethie's was simply tied with a bit of ribbon she had worn about her neck. And Richard took it in his hand, an exclamation escaping him as he saw and smelled the fragrant pinks, whose perfume carried him first to Olney and Andy's weedy beds in the front yard, and then to Chicopee, where in Aunt Barbara's pretty garden, a large plant of them had been growing when he went after his bride. A high wind had blown them down upon the walk, and he had come upon Ethie one day trying to tie them up. He had ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... ground. There has been a fire in that simple savage home. Our path here is cut by one that goes east and west, and after a consultation between my men and the Bakwiri, we take the path going east, down a steep slope between weedy plantations, and shortly on the left shows a steep little hill-side with a long low hut on the top. We go up to it and I find it is the habitation of a Basel Mission black Bible- reader. He comes out and speaks ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... were moving about the place, weedy little fellows; and Mr. Barrymore was like a giant among them, a splendid giant, handsomer than ever in a workman's blouse of blue linen, open at the throat, and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to show muscles that rippled under the skin ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... herds of red and fallow deer, not always undisturbed, made it a paradise for young people. The boys delighted in the large ponds, full of old carp and tench, with dace and roach, perch, gudgeons, eels, tadpoles, sticklebacks, and curious creatures of the weedy bottom. There was the best of riding over the smooth grass in the open sunny expanses or among the quiet and shady glades. Combe Wood, a little south of the Park, was then an island of pure country, quite unfrequented, and an occasional ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... and ruin. The drives were ill kept, and the neat carriage splashed and floundered in muddy pools along the road. The great sweep in front of the terrace and entrance stair was black and covered with mosses; the once trim flower-beds rank and weedy. Shutters were up along almost the whole line of the house; the great hall-door was unbarred after much ringing of the bell; an individual in ribbons was seen flitting up the black oak stair, as Horrocks at length admitted the heir of Queen's Crawley and his bride into the halls ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... a hurry to look old, Rupert," Captain Clinton laughed; "that will come soon enough, and you have widened out a good deal in this last year. You had got very weedy, and I am glad to see that you are ...
— The Dash for Khartoum - A Tale of Nile Expedition • George Alfred Henty
... the public temples soared far above it; but, small as it was, the whole town might be seen from the summit, with its separate quarters and its belt of gardens; and beyond, the open country intersected with streams, studded with isolated villages, patches of wood, pools and weedy marshes left by the retiring inundation, and in the far distance the lines of trees and bushes which bordered the banks of the Euphrates and its confluents. Should a troop of enemies venture within the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... clear: See a great Tree of Life that never sere Dropped leaf for aught that age or storms might wreak: Such ending is not Death: such living shows What wide illumination brightness sheds From one big heart—to conquer man's old foes: The coward, and the tyrant, and the force Of all those weedy monsters raising heads When Song is murk from ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... congregation of weeds nodding and bobbing in the morning breeze, as if to say, "We hope you are well, sir—we've got the ground, you see!" I began to explore, and to hoe, and to weed. Ah! did any body ever try to clean a neglected carrot or beet bed, or bend his back in a hot sun over rows of weedy onions! He is the man to feel for my despair! How I weeded, and sweat, and sighed! till, when high noon came on, as the result of all my toils, only three beds were cleaned! And how disconsolate looked the good seed, thus unexpectedly ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Watch'd his advantage, pash'd him on the cheek He stood no longer, but, his shapely limbs, Unequal to his weight, sinking, he fell. As by the rising north-wind driven ashore 865 A huge fish flounces on the weedy beach, Which soon the sable flood covers again, So, beaten down, he bounded. But Epeues, Heroic chief, upraised him by his hand, And his own comrades from the circus forth 870 Led him, step dragging after step, the blood Ejecting grumous, and at ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... towards the surface, looked somewhat like a flowing garment, but proved to be a monstrous tuft of water-weeds. Hollingsworth, with a gigantic effort, upheaved a sunken log. When once free of the bottom, it rose partly out of water,—all weedy and slimy, a devilish-looking object, which the moon had not shone upon for half a hundred years,—then plunged again, and sullenly returned to its old resting-place, for the ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... night is very still, and a young and inexperienced moon is making a somewhat premature appearance behind the Bosche trenches. The ground is covered with weedy grass—disappointed hay—which makes silent progress a fairly simple matter. The bombers move forward in extended order searching for the saphead. Simson, in the centre, pauses occasionally to listen, and his well-drilled line pauses with him. Sergeant ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... thought of starting for the upper or lower washings himself, as soon as he had gathered in his wheat harvest, which he hoped to accomplish during the present week. A number of wild ducks haunt the, river, and especially abound in the grassy and weedy pools which skirt its edges. This morning we shot some of these, and found them an agreeable addition to our dinner ...
— California • J. Tyrwhitt Brooks
... out of the house, walked in a savage hurry down to the end of the lot, and there, feeling no more at ease with himself, skirted along the bank bordered by inlets filled with weedy loveliness, and came to the lower end of the town where the cotton mills were. He glanced up at them as he struck into the street past their office entrance, and wondered what the stock was quoted at now, and whether an influx of foreigners had ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... people talked before him seriously of grades in the service, decorations, salaries, he smiled good-naturedly and repeated Prutkov's aphorism: "It's only in the Government service you learn the truth." He had a little wife with a wrinkled face, who was very jealous of him, and five weedy-looking children. He was unfaithful to his wife, he was only fond of his children when he saw them, and on the whole was rather indifferent to his family, and made fun of them. He and his family ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... over to aid me in choosing a two-acre plot of ground for corn and potatoes. This we marked out from the upper and eastern slope of a large meadow. The grass was running out and growing weedy. ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... sense of insecure motion as he sat alone over coffee an hour later in one of the remote rooms of the Vatican; but there was a sense of exhilaration as well, as his tired brain realised where he was. It had been strange to drive over the rattling stones in the weedy little cab, such as he remembered ten years ago when he had left Rome, newly ordained. While the world had moved on, Rome had stood still; she had other affairs to think of than physical improvements, now that the spiritual weight of the earth rested entirely upon her shoulders. All had ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... over railway lines and rubble heaps, and came on the harbour. Davies led the way to a stairway, whose weedy steps ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... thought. Unquestionably the Zenith Club acted as a fulminate for little Annie Eustace. To others it might seem, during some of the sessions, as a pathetic attempt of village women to raise themselves upon tiptoes enough to peer over their centuries of weedy feminine growth; an attempt which was as futile, and even ridiculous, as an attempt of a cow to fly. But the Zenith Club justified its existence nobly in the result of little Annie Eustace, if in no other, ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... looking rather weedy, standing on one leg like a marabou stork!" quizzed Sadie. "What's ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... July Drives the pelting hail, 50 From thunderous lightning-clouds, that blot Blue heaven grown lurid-pale. Weedy waves are tossed ashore, Sea-things strange to sight Gasp upon the barren shore And fade away ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... and cloudy November morning I thought I had caught a pair of nuthatches that had betrayed their trust. I had followed an old rail fence that bordered a weedy cornfield next to an open woods, and the only birds seen were a few juncos and tree sparrows. After walking about thirty rods, a pair of nuthatches were found; the next ten minutes were spent listening ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... went out not to see it. To get away from it. I meant to give things their chance. That's why I went in for medicine. I wasn't going to shirk. I wanted to be a man. Not a long-haired, weedy thing in ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... produce profitable crops for half a century. In some of the Western States are meadows from 25 to 40 years old. Ordinarily, however, the season of profitable growth is not more than, say, 6 to 12 years when grown on upland soils. The meadows usually become more or less weedy or possessed by various grasses, and some of the plants die. The plants at first send up a single stem. When this matures or is cut back the uncut portion of the stem dies down to the crown of the plant, which then sends out other stems. This is repeated as often as the stems are cut down ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he had been; but, on the other hand, it now came up against the incandescent sky, beneath the sun, so as to seem dark and indistinct. Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by a skerry of weedy boulders. But he perceived that it was made up of seven rounded bodies distinct or connected, and that the birds kept up a constant croaking and screaming, but seemed afraid ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... a great broad-shouldered countryman, with a rainy smell in his cumbrous overcoat, cleared his throat vehemently, looked startled at the sound, and again settled forward, his weedy chin resting on the knuckles of his hands as they tightly clutched the seat before him. And it was like being taken into a childish confidence ...
— Pipes O'Pan at Zekesbury • James Whitcomb Riley
... wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it, which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy offshoot into the ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... and on the curved dish We lay the reeking entrails. If to rear Cattle delight thee rather, steers, or lambs, Or goats that kill the tender plants, then seek Full-fed Tarentum's glades and distant fields, Or such a plain as luckless Mantua lost Whose weedy water feeds the snow-white swan: There nor clear springs nor grass the flocks will fail, And all the day-long browsing of thy herds Shall the cool dews of one brief night repair. Land which the burrowing share shows dark and rich, With crumbling soil- for this ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... a mill, a big, timbered place, with a tiled roof, odd galleries and projecting pent-houses, all pleasantly dusted with flour, where a great wheel turned dripping in a fern-clad cavern of its own, with the scent of the weedy river-water blown back from the plunging leat. Oh, the joyful place of streams! River and leat and back-water here ran clear among willow-clad islands, all fringed deep with meadow-sweet and comfrey and butterbur and melilot. The sun shone overhead ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... was a small, wizened old man, of obsolete cut, but with remarkably up-to-date manners, and a pair of keen little eyes, penetrating as Roentgen rays. His hair was weedy, and his clothes snuffy and ill-fitting; but spite of this there was something uncommonly brisk and wide awake about the little man, and a certain business-like directness in his manner which impressed me favourably. I felt ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... we beat the willow thicket for driftwood. By the time we had collected enough, night had fallen, and the pungent, weedy smell from the shore increased with the coolness. We threw ourselves down about the fire and made another futile effort to show Percy Pound the Little Dipper. We had tried it often before, but he could never be ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... decorated in soft blue and pink and lilac, with an art devoid of genius yet so charming and so Roman; and in particular it was the abandoned garden once stretching down to the Tiber, and now shut off from it by the new quay, and presenting an aspect of woeful desolation, ravaged, bossy and weedy like a cemetery, albeit the golden fruit of orange and citron tree still ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola |
