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Rough-and-tumble   /rəf-ənd-tˈəmbəl/   Listen
Rough-and-tumble

noun
1.
Disorderly fighting.  Synonyms: dogfight, hassle, scuffle, tussle.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Rough-and-tumble" Quotes from Famous Books



... time her father had lost his arm. Now and then, being really nothing but a child in years, she clasped her hands over her head and yawned when he was not looking, or, when she was sent to the fire for the glue, sat down on the floor and began a rough-and-tumble romp with the dog, or while she was at work, sang scraps of songs into which the captain threw ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... you think we could stage a good rough-and-tumble here and now? I've been two years trying to get her back East ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan

... terraces dancing has commenced; the players of violins, concertinas, and penny whistles do a brisk trade among the groups eager for a rough-and-tumble valse; so do the pickpockets. Vigorous and varied is the jollity that occupies the external galleries, filling now in expectation of the fireworks; indescribable the mingled tumult that roars heavenwards. Girls linked by the half-dozen arm-in-arm ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing

... regardless of science. Just fancy a couple of crack teams meeting on a heather-covered field, with the "hailing spots" about a mile and a-half apart, and playing a match lasting four or five hours! Could any of our young men nowadays stand such rough-and-tumble work? Happily it is not required. It has been found that a match lasting an hour and a-half, with the ball ever and anon passing in front of one on a level field, is quite enough, even for the strongest back, half-back, ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone

... peace at sea or in any oversea possession). Spain was bound to keep Englishmen out of the New World. Englishmen were bound to get in. Of course the Sea-Dogs preyed on other people too, and other peoples' own Sea-Dogs preyed on English vessels when they could; for it was a very rough-and-tumble age at sea, with each nation's seamen fighting for their own hand. But Spanish greed and Spanish cruelty soon made Spain the one great enemy of all ...
— Flag and Fleet - How the British Navy Won the Freedom of the Seas • William Wood

... politeness. He was putting himself in an attitude of defense and was depending on the brawn of a man who had been a tough proposition when he swung his police club on a New York beat. He even moved a chair which might get underfoot in a rough-and-tumble. But his muscles relaxed when he looked at ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... We, for instance, have (or had, for perhaps it has been stolen) a biography of that same Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, with whom Andrew Marvell 'and others who called Milton friend' had such rough-and-tumble feuds about 1666, and at whose expense it was that Marvell made the whole nation merry in his 'Rehearsal Transprosed.' This Parker had a 'knack' at making himself odious; he had a curiosa felicitas in attracting hatreds, and wherever he lodged for a fortnight he ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... may be, a gentleman at the head of a concern is a priceless asset. The atmosphere of most business houses is determined by the man at the top. His character filters down through the ranks. If he is a rough-and-tumble sort of person the office is likely to be that kind of place; if he is quiet and mannerly the chances are that the office will be quiet and mannerly. If he is a gentleman everybody in the place will know it and will ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... County belonged to this party. The Democrats, on the other hand, did not much concern themselves with principles, but accepted General Jackson in place thereof, as constituting in himself a party platform. In the rough-and-tumble pioneer community they could not do better, and for many years they had controlled the State; indeed, Lincoln himself had felt no small loyalty towards a President who admirably expressed Western civilization. Now, however, he considered himself "an avowed Clay man,"[38] ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse

... agreed Grandma promptly, "they are the most rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can batch of young coyotes that ever lived. They don't respect God, man, nor the devil. And why should they? That's educated into children, not ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie

... very foolish thing for him to try to inflict personal punishment on such a lusty young fellow as Abner Briggs, Junior, one of the "hardest customers" in the way of a rough-and-tumble fight that there were anywhere round. No doubt he had been insolent, but it would have been better to overlook it. It pains me to report the events which took place when the master made his rash attempt to maintain his authority. Abner Briggs, Junior, was a great, hulking fellow, who had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various

... of denunciation on my head more violent than I, accustomed as I was to abuse from both sides, had ever before experienced. Happily, I am one of those people who find a hot fight stimulating and amusing and who, like Attila, love the certaminis gaudia, the glories and delights of a rough-and-tumble scrap. I and The Spectator were, I remember, denounced by name by Mr. Austen Chamberlain at a banquet of Die-Hards. Mr. Garvin in The Observer abused The Spectator in perfect good faith, I admit, but with characteristic intensity. I received dire ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... directness, the warmth, and the permanence that were inseparable from the Roosevelt character. One such friend he acquired at this stage of his progress. In that District Association, from which his friends had warned him away, he found a young Irishman who had been a gang leader in the rough-and-tumble politics of the East Side. Driven by the winter wind of man's ingratitude from Tammany Hall into the ranks of the opposite party, Joe Murray was at this time one of the lesser captains in "the Twenty-first" Roosevelt ...
— Theodore Roosevelt and His Times - A Chronicle of the Progressive Movement; Volume 47 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Harold Howland

... these methods is to put no slight upon them, or to offer a word of criticism: it is requisite and necessary, even as one should advise a change of clothing to somebody about to quit the ballroom for some rough-and-tumble pastime in ...
— The Morris Book • Cecil J. Sharp

... with dogs. They belong to a group which hunts in packs. For ages they have been used to a communal life. Their minds have thus become accustomed to social intercourse; they are used to having their excitements of the chase in comradeship, and generally they are accustomed to the rough-and-tumble fraternity which we behold in a pack of wolves. It was long ago remarked that the really social animals are those which afford the only good material for subjugation. The difference between the cat and dog seems, in a way, ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... be borne in mind that from the windows of the newspaper office the American desert was visible; that within a radius of ten miles Indians were encamping amongst the sage—brush; that the whole city was populated with miners, adventurers, Jew traders, gamblers, and all the rough-and-tumble class which a mining town in a new territory collects together, and it will be readily understood that a reporter for a daily paper in such a place must neither go about his duties wearing light kid gloves, nor be fastidious about having gilt ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... for the possession of a pitchfork, both naturally preferring it to a rake for bunching up from the winrows—being raked by Bob with a horse-rake—had decided to settle the matter, street fashion, with their fists. They were pretty evenly matched and a rough-and-tumble fight ensued. Ferry stopped to watch the bout and see that fair play was enforced. Everybody else stopped work also, and stood looking that way. Jake Kelly, perhaps the most interested spectator in the field, slid down ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond

... Lieutenant P. Whitcomb (who had no business to join in the charge, being weak in the knees), and Captain Fred Langdon, of General Harris's staff. Whitcomb was one of the most notable shots on our side, though he was not much to boast of in a rough-and-tumble fight, owing to the weakness before mentioned. General Ames put him among the gunners, and we were quickly made aware of the loss we had sustained, by receiving a frequent artful ball which seemed to light with unerring ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... cautiously; for while harbouring no apprehensions as to the outcome of a possible clash with Rondeau, Bryce was not so optimistic as to believe he would escape unscathed from an encounter. Experience had impressed upon him the fact that in a rough-and-tumble battle nobody is quite so thoroughly at home as a lumberjack; once in a clinch with such a man, even a champion gladiator of the prize ring may well feel apprehensive ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne

... up outer the ditch, says that he was half choked, and his black silk neck-handkercher was pulled tight around his throat. There was a mark on his nose ez ef some one had tried to gouge out his eye, and his left ear was chawed ez ef he'd bin down in a reg'lar rough-and-tumble clinch." ...
— From Sand Hill to Pine • Bret Harte

... rough-and-tumble house put straight and made comfortable, his hitherto unchecked expenses cut down by one half, and himself petted and made much of by his new acquisition, who sat at the head of his table and sang songs to him and ordered his ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... thought, but surely true, that the French as a nation seem to take, at present, little interest in pomp and ceremony. The meetings of the delegates at the "Quai d'Orsay," the handing over of the Peace Terms to our late enemies, were all rather rough-and-tumble affairs, and, in the end, the great signing of the Treaty had not as much dignity as a sale at Christie's. How different must the performance have been in 1870! One man, at least, was there who knew the difference—Lord ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen

... passed Aurora Peak, Blizzard and Ginger Bitch ran alongside. The former had hurt one of her forefeet on the previous day during the "rough-and-tumble" descending into the valley. Ginger Bitch was allowed to go free because she was daily expected to give birth to pups. As she was such a good sledge-dog we could not have afforded to leave her behind at the Hut, and later ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... idea, from the first, was not the mere leasing of telephones, but rather the creation of a Federal company that would be a permanent partner in the entire telephone business. Even in that day of small things, and amidst the confusion and rough-and-tumble of pioneering, he worked out the broad policy that prevails to-day; and this goes far to explain the fact that there are in the United States twice as many telephones as there are in ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson

... Westerner's arms. The latter had Barber by the front of his coat and by an elbow. For a moment they hung upon the sill. Then, pivoting, they swung beyond it. As Father Pat closed the door upon them, at once there came to the ears of the trio in the kitchen, the sounds of a rough-and-tumble battle. ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates

... and the two went at it rough-and-tumble. Jack got in a number of good blows, and Jerry tried his best to get away and deliver some in return. He did manage to punch Jack on the body, causing that worthy's breath to come ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young

... whipped with ease, and he did whip, but the spirit of the thoroughbred was not in Captain Mayhall Wells. He had Sturgill down, but Hence sank his teeth into Mayhall's thigh while Mayhall's hands grasped his opponent's throat. The captain had only to squeeze, as every rough-and-tumble fighter knew, and endure his pain until Hence would have to give in. But Mayhall was not built to endure. He roared like a bull as soon as the teeth met in his flesh, his fingers relaxed, and to the disgusted surprise of everybody he began ...
— Christmas Eve on Lonesome and Other Stories • John Fox, Jr.

... thought. The more we used to see each other, personally, the less we seemed to like to be together. If he ever had slapped me on the back and snivelled over me like I've seen men do to what they called their friends, I know I'd have had a rough-and-tumble with him on the spot. Same way with George. He hated my ways as bad as I did his. When we were mining, we lived in separate tents, so as not to intrude ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry

... the side-hold, and square-hold, and back-hold, and rough-and-tumble, the last the catch-as-catch-can of stage struggles. In early boyhood Harlson had learned the tricks of these, and in the college gymnasium he had supplemented this wisdom by persistent training in every device of the professional gladiators. ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... the rough-and-tumble but little against the fact that the Russian had now admitted that he knew it was not Grell's body that had been found in the study. Here was a starting-point ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest

... have given him is more than counterpoised by an acuteness and refinement of mind which have no sympathy with the mass of men, and which they in turn are likely to distrust from imperfect comprehension. Ill-adapted for the rough-and-tumble contests of a Democracy, he is admirably fitted to be the minister or the head of an oligarchical Republic. We wish all our Northern Representatives had the boldness and the abilities, we hope none of them will be seduced by the example, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... the prizefighter was at him again. He beat down the cowpuncher's defense and mauled him savagely with all the punishing skill of his craft. Steve was a man of his hands. He had held his own in many a rough-and-tumble bout. But he had no science except that which nature had given him. As long as a man could, he stood up to Harrison's trained skill. When at last he was battered to the ground it was because the strength had all oozed out ...
— Steve Yeager • William MacLeod Raine

... no slouch—there isn't a boy in the troop, young or old, who can take my measure on the ground—but if this fellow gave us a fair specimen of an Indian's way of rough-and-tumble fighting, I don't want to get hold of any more Indians.—He was a hard one, wasn't he?" said Loring, appealing to his wounded comrade, who grunted out an emphatic assent. "He didn't seem to be so very strong, but he was just a trifle quicker than chain-lightning, ...
— George at the Fort - Life Among the Soldiers • Harry Castlemon

... the greater portion of an adventurous career far from medical aid in time of bodily stress, Michael J. was, as most shipmasters are, rather adept in rough-and-tumble surgery. His compact little library contained a common-sense treatise on the care of burns, scalds, cuts, fractures and the few minor physical diseases that sailors are heir to, and in accordance with immemorial custom ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... writer who has occupied his pen at all with the life of the lumber-camps. But to the daring backwoodsman there seldom falls a task more hazardous than that of cutting loose a brow of logs when the logs have been piled in the form of what is called a "rough-and-tumble landing." Such a landing is constructed by driving long timbers into the mud at the water's edge, below a steep piece of bank. Along the inner side of these are laid horizontally a certain number of logs, to form a water ...
— Earth's Enigmas - A Volume of Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts

... Miller, Dave saw at once that the big man had chosen not to draw his gun. In spite of his fat the gambler was a rough-and-tumble fighter of parts. The extra weight had come in recent years, but underneath it lay roped muscles and heavy bones. Men often remarked that they had never seen a fat man who could handle himself like Ad Miller. The two clinched. Dave had the ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine

... versed in the antiquities of Oxford, you know that this small, still quadrangle has played its part in the rough-and-tumble of history, and has been the background of high passions and strange fates. The sun-dial in its midst has told the hours to more than one bygone King. Charles I. lay for twelve nights in Judas; and it was here, in this very quadrangle, that he heard from the lips of a breathless ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm

... something left. You see, I speak of it as a doctrine of life, and as a wisdom for this world. People must be themselves, I suppose. I feel every day as if religion had a greater interest for me; but that interest is still centred on the little rough-and-tumble world in which our fortunes are cast for the moment. I cannot transfer my interests, not even my religious interest, to any different sphere.... I have had some sharp lessons and some very acute sufferings ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... close to Lewis—so close that the latter did not need to advance a foot. Instead, he held his ground, and the challenger, accepting this as a sign of willingness for battle, rushed at him, with the evident intent of a rough-and-tumble grapple after the fashion of his kind. To his surprise, he was held off by the leveled forearm of his opponent, rigid as a ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough

... arranged for supplies to be forwarded to a given point, and outlined plans of action. In the late afternoon the boy in the loft saw them ride away, a dozen lean, long-bodied men armed to the limit. With all his heart the watcher wished he could be like one of them, ready for any emergency that the rough-and-tumble life of ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine

... eyes of yours, what I'm driving at.—This, beloved one—you see the waiting carriage over there. Hadn't we best get into it, turn the horses' heads citywards again, and drink our tea, you and I, on the way up to the station somewhere very much else than on board this rough-and-tumble rather foul-breathed cargo boat?—I'm so beastly afraid you may be disgusted and shocked by the interval between what you're accustomed to and what I am. To ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet

... scythes and clubs they fell on the six men. Their numbers worked to their disadvantage. Three of the men surrounding the woman, the Frenchman and the two Russian guardsmen, were accomplished swordsmen. The Cossacks were not to be disdained in rough-and-tumble fighting and the Englishman was a valiant ally. Their racial antagonisms were forgot in their common danger and the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... nor with the way the dishes were washed and placed in order on the shelves. She was, however, considerably surprised, not to say startled, at the culinary efforts of her son and his guests, and she declared she could not understand "how anyone can sleep in those beds, the rough-and-tumble way they're made!" But after making them properly, she realized that there were now not enough beds to go round. Hence Ralph and Blake for two nights slept in the hayloft ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Geological Survey • Robert Shaler

... Darley was the opposite exactly, and he interested me. He was unsocial; somehow that interested me more. I used to wonder why he was so when I first knew him; bit by bit I gathered his history and I wondered less. He's had a rough-and-tumble time of it from a youngster up." The voice halted suddenly, and the speaker looked at his companion equivocally. "Still interested, are you, Elice? I don't want to be ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge

... been in many a rough-and-tumble wrestling match and was able to take care of himself in competition with any ordinary opponent, even when weight was against him; he struggled desperately, but within the space of a very few seconds he realized that he was helpless. ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst

... the agent of the troupe, could have said nothing against Miss Saville which an outsider, not to say a foreigner like Mr. Beauvoir, had any call to resent. Mr. Kilburn is a gentleman unaccustomed to rough-and-tumble encounters, while his adversary has doubtless associated more with pugilists than gentlemen—at least any one would think so from his actions yesterday. Beauvoir hustled Mr. Kilburn out of Mr. McMullin's, where the unprovoked assault began, and violently ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various

... to ride races on our backs and have desperate mounted battles and tournaments. In many a playground and home since then I have seen boys tilt and race, and steeplechase, with smaller boys upon their backs, and plenty of wholesome rough-and-tumble in the game; and it has given me a twinge of heartache to think how, even when we were at play, Crayshaw's baneful spirit cursed us with its example, so that the big and strong could not be happy except at the expense ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... and faced me where I stood quite prepared for a rough-and-tumble. Instead of a typical housebreaker of fiction, I saw a pale, rabbit-like, decent-appearing little soul. He was neatly dressed; he seemed unarmed save for a great ring of assorted keys; and his manner was as propitiatory and mild-eyed as ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti

... bicycle, oftener on foot, and you couldn't tire him. I wonder what other divisions thought of the grimy private who was our chief means of communication. He knew nothing of military affairs before, but he got the hang of this rough-and-tumble fighting as if he had been born for it. He never fired a shot; he carried no arms; the only weapons he used were his brains. And they were the best conceivable. I never met a staff officer who was so quick at getting a point or at sizing up a situation. ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... a rude and boastful son of Mars, at heart a bully, if not a coward, is represented as ever aching for a fight, in which his domineering spirit and rough-and-tumble ways for a time gave him the advantage over abler, but ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson

... on his gun. He was, too, a rough-and-tumble fighter with his hands. But Hal Rutherford was one man he knew better than to tackle. He fell back, growling threats in ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine

... party generally. Gravity, solemnity, seriousness, are conspicuous by their absence; even that 'restraint' which is the salient characteristic of Greek expression in literature no less than in Art, is largely relaxed in the rough-and-tumble, informal, miscellaneous modern phantasmagoria of ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... next assault, confident of his skill in rough-and-tumble. He felt at his throat the horizontal arm of his enemy. He caught away the wrist in his own hand, but sustained a heavy blow at the side of his head. The defense of his adversary angered him to blind rage. He ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough

... smoke a pipe and go to sleep, hindered again and again his ambition. He had, as so many clergymen have, a great deal of the child in him, a remoteness from actual life, and a tremendous ignorance of the rough-and-tumble brutality and indecency of things. It had not been difficult for Grace, because of his laziness, his childishness, and his harmless conceited good-nature to obtain a very real dominion over him, and until now that dominion ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... directions. The drops from overhanging trees came down and played with them, bringing another set of perfumes altogether. A summer shower was, of course, "a month" to them, a day of rain like weeks of holiday by the sea.... But, most of all, they enjoyed the rough-and-tumble nonsense of the violent weather, when they were tied together by the ropes of running wind; for these were visiting days— all manner of strangers dropped in upon them from distant walks in life, and they never knew whether ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood

... was not as apt in such things as they were facing as his companions. He had been sheltered for years in the Cameron home, and was not so resourceful as his companions, not so ready to take advantage of any point which might occur in such a rough-and-tumble game as was now ...
— Boy Scouts in Mexico; or On Guard with Uncle Sam • G. Harvey Ralphson

... kind can be useful if they will only find their appropriate sphere, which is not literature, but that circle of rough-and-tumble political life where the fine-fibred men are at a discount, where epithets find their subjects poison-proof, and the sting which would be fatal to a literary debutant only wakes the eloquence of the pachydermatous ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... little outwardly. Whisky kills him suddenly; it does not sap him gradually. In his youth he must have been a remarkably handsome man, for he is still handsome. I don't believe he is much past forty. A bad one in a rough-and-tumble; all the water-front tricks. His hair is oddly streaked with gray—I might say a dishonourable gray. Perhaps in the beginning the women made fools ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath

... some of them get broad-leaved and succulent, and you have a coarse vegetable tapestry which Raphael would not have disdained to spread over the foreground of his masterpiece. The Professor pretends that he found such a one in Charles Street, which, in its dare-devil impudence of rough-and-tumble vegetation, beat the pretty-behaved flower-beds of the Public Garden as ignominiously as a group of young tatterdemalions playing pitch- and-toss beats a row of Sunday-school-boys with ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... hear a whirling, howling, clawing, spitting, rough-and-tumble conflict going on in the midst ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook

... of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... Clarence, lounging back in the arm-chair, "he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own part," said Mr. Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, "I shouldn't think of marrying till I was in a position to do the thing in style. It's downright selfishness. A man ought to go through the rough-and-tumble by ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... Happiness" was rich in stunts that would have made even Battling Nelson turn to tatting with a sigh of relief. Five gangsters, sicked on to their work by the villain, waylaid our hero on the stairs, and in the rough-and-tumble that followed, it was his duty to beat each and every one of them into a state of coma. He performed his task so conscientiously that his hands were swollen for a week, not to mention his eyes and nose. As for the five extra men ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks

... himself, the better he'll get on. If you do it, you'll make him soft. I know! Public School: University: Examinations, and L200 a year if he's lucky. That's your education! All very well if you are born with a golden spoon in your mouth and can afford to be a fool. If you can't, better learn to rough-and-tumble it in the world. Education doesn't make ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... and looking down at them in a way he had. "But, still, I have a great interest in questions of justice, and I confess that I find a certain wild equity in this principle, which I see nobody could do business on. It strikes me as idyllic—it's a touch of real poetry in the rough-and-tumble prose of our ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... I, "I dare say then he can fry ham and eggs and serve 'em up in ile, boil salt beef and pork, and twice lay cod-fish, and perhaps boil potatoes nice and watery like cattle turnips. What discoveries could such a rough-and-tumble fellow ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... do not. We prefer to blaze our own trails, or, rather, to have you do so, and the rougher they prove the better, as long as it is safe. My girls are equal to any sort of rough-and-tumble climbing. How do we get to ...
— The Meadow-Brook Girls in the Hills - The Missing Pilot of the White Mountains • Janet Aldridge

... law of life was to snatch at everything that she could reach because there was so much that was beyond her grasp. Her love for Martin was the one passion of her sordid little life, and she would be thankful and contented to carry memories back to her garret which no future rough-and-tumble could ever ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

... effect were of a very different nature. By introducing morals and religion into his scheme of education, he altered the whole atmosphere of public-school life. Henceforward the old rough-and-tumble, which was typified by the regime of Keate at Eton, became impossible. After Dr. Arnold, no public school could venture to ignore the virtues of respectability. Again, by his introduction of the prefectorial system, Dr. Arnold produced far-reaching effects—effects ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... astounded. They had always thought of Mexico as a land of rough-and-tumble, comic-opera revolutions; a place where one must forever be on the lookout for trouble; where robbers were rife and the days were nothing but a chain of abominations. A sunny, beautiful country, maybe; but no place for a God-fearing American citizen to settle. Why, they would as soon commit ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne

... technicalities, hot after declensions, and happy when they close in on a new exception to a Greek verb, giving it no quarter. When they come to die, they leave earth with but a single regret: they have never been able fully to compass the ablative. But the rough-and-tumble student was the rule, with nose deep into stein, exaggerating little things into great, making woful ballad to his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... The children raced to the very foot of it, and then retraced their steps to gather up the fragments of the milk-bottle, which had come to grief within the first twenty yards. Then on they went again, past more cottages and sundry turnings, until at last they reached a curious old rough-and-tumble wharf on one side of the road, where the coal which had been brought by train was piled up in great stacks for the coalmen to take round presently in their carts. Here, too, was drawn up a train—one such as ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... wasn't,' said Jim; 'I'd have the hobbles on you by this time, and you'd have got "fitted" to rights. I wish I'd gone into the police sometimes. It isn't a bad game for a chap that can ride and track, and likes a bit of rough-and-tumble now and then.' ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... scrap of a man, with nothing about him full-sized except his mustache. And yet, despite his unheroic physique, he was quick and remorseless in action. In Italy he would have carried a dagger. In England he would have been a light-weight rough-and-tumble fighter. In the violent West he was a gunman, menacing every citizen who crossed his inclination, and he took Kelley's appointment as a direct affront on the part of Hornaby ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland

... the stump and parliamentary candidates dressed as a woman of the lower middle class. It would have been unwise to do so in man's guise, in case there should be a rough-and-tumble afterwards and her sex be discovered. Although in order to avoid premature arrest she did not herself take part in those most ingenious—and from the view of endurance, heroic—stow-aways of women interrupters in the roofs, attics, inaccessible organ lofts or ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

... agreeable pair as they glared at each other. If they had been two little street boys they would have sprung at each other and had a rough-and-tumble fight. As it was, they did the next thing ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... useful than if he were a "perfect gentleman" with nothing of the track and stable and back stairs about him. Being a sort of betwixt and between, he could appreciate my needs as they could not have been appreciated by a fellow who had never lived in the rough-and-tumble I had fought my way up through. And being at bottom a real gentleman, and not one of those nervous, snobbish make-believes, he wasn't so busy trying to hide his own deficiencies from me that he couldn't teach me ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips

... to be grateful now!' said Longworth. 'In a rough-and-tumble fight I am afraid you would master me easier than you would do ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr

... system which forced itself upon our notice so enticingly, from the time when we entered the public schools up to that moment. How then had it come about that we had not taken our places in the chorus of its admirers? Perhaps merely because we were real students, and could still draw back from the rough-and-tumble, the pushing and struggling, the restless, ever-breaking waves of publicity, to seek refuge in our own little educational establishment; which, however, time would have soon ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... was saying, the meanness of these mothers in hiving up their young ones and cheating 'em out of the very best years of life, is enough to make a saint mad. The rough-and-tumble season, which gives a child sound lungs, strong limbs, and a brain that thinks of nothing but high play, is just knocked out of their lives. It's an awful swindle on the poor little things, and I'm ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... on the endless variety of chance weapons, there remained those good old-standers the musket, the cutlass and the knife, each of which, in the sailor's grasp, played its part in the rough-and-tumble of pressing, and played it well. A case in point, familiar to every seaman, was the last fight put up by that famous Plymouth sailor, Emanuel Herbert, another fatalist who, like Bingham, believed in having ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... broad-swords; thump went the cudgels; crash! went the musket-stocks; blows, kicks, cuffs; scratches, black eyes and bloody noses swelling the horrors of the scene! Thick thwack, cut and hack, helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy, hurly-burly, head-over-heels, rough-and-tumble! Dunder and blixum! swore the Dutchmen; splitter and splutter! cried the Swedes. Storm the works! shouted Hardkoppig Peter. Fire the mine roared stout Risingh. Tanta-rar-ra-ra! twanged the trumpet of Antony Van Corlear;—until all voice ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... for an hour past, the air has been made hideous by a free-for-all, rough-and-tumble fight going on in the yard that is back to back with my yard. When the first sounds reached me I took it for the barking and snarling of dogs, and some minutes were required to convince me that human beings, and women at that, could produce such a ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... the French Revolution and the cry, "A la lanterne!" First I went to my neighbor, the mayor of the city, in pursuit of the desired information. A jolly mayor was he,—a Yankee melted down into a Western man, thoroughly Westernized by a rough-and-tumble life in Kentucky during many years. Being obliged to hold a mayor's court every day, and knowing very little of law, his chief study was, as he expressed it, "how to choke off the Kentucky lawyers." Mr. Mayor not being at home, I turned next to the office of another ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... so much? Do you mean that you and I must fall upon him? You forget that he will have men about him. A duel is one thing, a rough-and-tumble another, and we shall fare none so well in this, ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini

... and he was caught in the middle of an adjoining cornfield, where a rough-and-tumble scuffle ensued, with poor Hans at the bottom of ...
— The Rover Boys on the River - The Search for the Missing Houseboat • Arthur Winfield

... habit had fixed upon him, was a reporter straight from God. His trained mind had instantly seized upon and mastered all the dramatic values of the complicated story, and his English, though crude and rough-and-tumble from his haste, was vivid passionate, rousing. He told how Doctor West was the victim of a plot, a plot whose great victim was the city and people of Westville, and this plot he outlined in all its details. He told of Doctor Sherman's ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott

... Steinmetz; "I must go alone. I will take Parks to drive the sleigh, if I may, though. Parks is a steady man, who loves a rough-and-tumble. A typical British ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... characteristic, and what was of the essence of it was grist to his scribbling mill, matter for his journalising hand. That hand already, in intention, played over it, the "motive," as a sign of the season, a feature of the time, of the purely expeditious and rough-and-tumble nature of the social boom. The boom as in itself required—that would be the note; the subject of the process a comparatively minor question. Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author of the "rotten" book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... my pocket," said Seabrooke; "how can you carry such a sum of money in such an insecure place, Neville? Playing rough-and-tumble games, too, when any minute it is likely to fall out of your pocket. I shall lock it up, I can tell you; and what if you tell me not to return it to you till we are ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews

... lived together in the great polar bears' den of the Zoological Park two full-grown, very large and fine polar bears. They came from William Hagenbeck's great group, and both were males. Their rough-and-tumble wrestling, both in the swimming pool and out of it, was a sight of almost perennial interest; and while their biting and boxing was of the roughest character, and frequently drew blood, they never got angry, and never had ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday

... kid—but business is business, and I was reluctantly compelled to double-cross poor old Buck. I sneaked the Nugget away from him next day. It's not worth talking about; it was too easy. Buck's all right in a rough-and-tumble, but when it comes to brains he gets left, and so he'll go on through life, poor fellow. I ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... encourages any young man or woman to look for his living to "literature," commits no less than a crime. If my voice had any authority, I would cry this truth aloud wherever men could hear. Hateful as is the struggle for life in every form, this rough-and-tumble of the literary arena seems to me sordid and degrading beyond all others. Oh, your prices per thousand words! Oh, your paragraphings and your interviewings! And oh, the black despair that awaits those ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing

... much for Udo. He forgot his manners and made a jump towards her. She glided gracefully behind the sundial in a pretty affectation of alarm . . . and the next moment Udo decided that the contest between them was not to be settled by such rough-and-tumble methods as these. The fact that his tail had caught in something ...
— Once on a Time • A. A. Milne

... jackets. The new scholar walked over to the flagstaff, where the stars and stripes were flying, and seated himself on a bench. The boys seemed to be having a good time, in spite of the strictness of the discipline. As he listened to the tremendous noise they made, and saw the rough-and-tumble games in which they were engaged, he became convinced that the Institute was not of the Blember style, and he began to have some hope that ...
— In School and Out - or, The Conquest of Richard Grant. • Oliver Optic

... letters, that never again would he compose anything in the operatic style: he was for ever done with opera; henceforth music-drama alone would occupy him. And lo! here, at the very first opportunity, we find him not merely writing a grand opera finale to his first act—which he could justify; a rough-and-tumble finale to his second act—which he could justify; but a set concerto piece in the middle of his third act—which according to his own theories at any rate, he could not justify! He might well avow that when he ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... looked no larger than jack rabbits. They were too far off to try to shoot at, and we had no time to try to steal up any nearer for at the rate we were making, food would be the one thing needful, for we were consuming it very fast. Sometimes we could ride a little ways, and then would come the rough-and-tumble with ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly

... Costigan, once more encased in his own armor, heaved a great sigh of relief. "Rough-and-tumble's all right with one or two, but that generator room is full of grief, and we won't have any too much stuff as it is. We've got to take Clio's suit along—we'll carry it down to the door of the power room, drop it there, and pick it up ...
— Triplanetary • Edward Elmer Smith

... these lines. They are too credulous. They are too impractical. They are too lacking in fighting qualities, and, therefore, too easily imposed upon. They are usually lazy physically and find disagreeable situations hard, so that they are out of place in the rough-and-tumble, strenuous, hurly-burly of business, manufacturing, or ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb

... heard in advance, which gradually becomes louder as I proceed eastward; in a short time the source of the noise is discovered, and a weird scene greets my enraptured vision. At a place where the fall is tremendous, the waters are opposed in their mad march by a rough-and-tumble collection of huge, jagged rocks, that have at some time detached themselves from the walls above, and come crashing down into the bed of the stream. The rushing waters, coming with haste from above, appear to pounce with insane fury on the rocks ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens

... the truth, I never had, and never desired to have, any capacity for the rough-and-tumble of politics. I greatly respect many of the men who have gifts of that sort, but have recognized the fact that my influence in and on politics must be of a different kind. I have indeed taken part in some stormy scenes in conventions, meetings, and legislatures, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... Elizabeth's shooting-box across the fields. In a lot close by cricketers are at play, and a little farther on, where there is a vine-covered beerhouse, a crowd of clod-hoppers are gathered in a green field, looking at two of their number engaged in a rough-and-tumble fight in their shirt-sleeves. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various

... front of the tavern door, I entered the common room, and found it stifling, brawling and drinking going on apace. Scarce had I found a seat before the whole room was emptied by one consent, all crowding out of the door after two men who began a rough-and-tumble fight in the street. I had seen rough-and-tumble fights in Kentucky, and if I have forborne to speak of them it is because there always has been within me a loathing for them. And so I sat quietly in the common room until the landlord came. I asked him if ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... followed him all the way, charged into him. Then there was a little conversation, and Briggs called Jack something especially horrid, and gave him a shove at the same time, so Jack hit him on the nose. After this there was a rough-and-tumble, until that most inquisitive man Carter and his bull-dogs came up and caught Jack. What happened to Briggs he ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley

... possessed a keen sense of humour, and was too awake to the ludicrous aspects of charlatanry to fall into the pits it offered on every band. His misfortune was the difficulty with which he uttered himself; even when he got over his nervousness, words came to him only in a rough-and-tumble fashion; he sputtered and fumed and beat his forehead for phrases, then ended with a hearty laugh at his own inarticulateness, Something like this was his talk ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... Macdonald's life—while ever externally friends, the two in their personal relations were antipathetic. This may in part be ascribed to Campbell's dignified love of ease and disinclination to join in the rough-and-tumble of party politics. When elections were to be fought (I speak only of my own time) Campbell, if he did not find that he had business elsewhere, was disposed to look on in a patronizing sort of way. ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope

... phase began for Nelsen. Offices bored him. Amassing money, per se, meant little to him, except as a success symbol that came out of the life he had known. He figured that a man ought to be a success, even a rough-and-tumble romantic like Ramos, or Joe Kuzak. Or himself, with both distance and home engrained confusingly into ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... would be found to a grave and growing evil which is beginning to imperil the mental health of every civilised community, and of this more than any other. The more civilised (in the Western sense of the word) a country becomes, the less educative does life—the rough-and-tumble life of the work-a-day world—tend to become. In a thoroughly "civilised" country, where the material conditions of life are highly organised, and where industry is highly specialised, so much is done for the individual by those ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes

... to himself. "The squalid racket of this rough-and-tumble life is playing the devil with my nerves. I believe I couldn't drink a wineglassful of grog at this moment without spilling half of it on the floor. I'll ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... arrival of the hard-bitted, Indian-fighting regiments of Tennessee who were toiling through the swamps with their brigadiers, Coffee and Carroll. The foremost of them reached New Orleans on the very day that the British were landing on the river bank. Gaunt, unshorn, untamed were these rough-and-tumble warriors who feared neither God nor man but were glad to fight and die with Andrew Jackson. In coonskin caps, buckskin shirts, fringed leggings, they swaggered into New Orleans, defiant of discipline and impatient of restraint, hunting knives ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine

... a chance to learn this well of old, when physician to the Broad Street district of the Boston Dispensary. There, there was no help for the utter want of wholesome conditions, and if anybody got well under my care, it must have been in virtue of the rough-and-tumble constitution which emerges from the struggle for life in the street gutters, rather than by the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... dressed girls, whose fathers did not sell by the cargo, or keep victualling establishments for some hundreds of people, considered her as rather in sympathy with them than with the daughters of the rough-and-tumble millionnaires who were grappling and rolling over each other in the golden dust of the great ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various

... the sponges, like almonds in plum-puddings, so that merely the extremities of the valves were visible as narrow slits, were the long-sought-for molluscs. Judging by the extreme care of the species for its own protection—for it is ill-fitted in model and texture for a rough-and-tumble struggle for existence—one is inclined to the opinion that it must have many enemies. The valves are frail and brittle, and only when they gape are they revealed, and the gape is self consciously polite. The ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... said quietly, "this is a man's game. I'm playing a rough-and-tumble, catch-as-catch-can fight. In it, the weak must fail and maybe die. But out of it a great good will come to this community. As long as the Indians are here to exploit, this community will be demoralized. I'm using every means fair or foul to carry ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... and say she thought it was a "'possum;" Riar would listen to no excuse; and as soon as Dilsey reached the ground they had a rough-and-tumble fight, in which both parties got considerably worsted in the way of losing valuable hair, and of having their eyes filled with dirt and their clean dresses all muddied; but Tot was so much afraid Riar, her little nurse and maid, would get hurt that she screamed and cried, ...
— Diddie, Dumps & Tot - or, Plantation child-life • Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle

... knock a Carthaginian over the head with Greenleaf's Arithmetic. Hannibal got the head of Scipio Africanus under his arm, and Scipio, in his efforts to break away, stumbled, and the two generals fell and had a rough-and-tumble fight under the blackboard. Caius Gracchus prodded Hamilcar with a ruler, and the latter in his struggles to get loose fell against the stove and knocked down about thirty feet of stove-pipe. Thereupon the Romans made a grand rally, and in five minutes they ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)

... the brute's chin, which prevented this movement; and the next moment, falling back, when I jumped on top of him, he and I were rolling over and over, locked together, the baboon and I, in each other's arms, and engaged in one of the biggest rough-and-tumble fights I ever had the pleasure of ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson

... his master marked up before, but on such occasions the other man was a sight for the gods to wonder at. Now Weaver was the spectacle, and the other was untouched. In view of Buck's reputation as a rough-and-tumble fighter, this seemed no less than a miracle. Curly departed with the wonder unexplained, for Weaver dismissed ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine

... up" for a moment, and said he guessed he'd wrestle with me; and asked me to name my hold. I proposed "rough-and-tumble." ...
— Twenty Years of Hus'ling • J. P. Johnston

... possible sort of combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort of rough-and-tumble fight between two hostile temperaments! What a childishly external view! And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime, and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... you for having come so promptly," he said, with melancholy courtesy. "I thought we should have met soon—on an occasion—more agreeable to us both. As you are here, forgive me if I talk business. This rough-and-tumble world has to be carried on, and if it suits you, I shall be happy to recommend your appointment to her Majesty—as a Junior Lord of the Treasury—carrying with it, as of course you understand, the office ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... boy often came to the farmhouse to romp and wrestle with the bear-cub. Nothing pleased him more than a rough-and-tumble, and he was quite an expert wrestler, once he learned how to ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes

... I'm game for a rough-and-tumble. It's sure to come sooner or later, and we may as well get ...
— The Wizard of the Sea - A Trip Under the Ocean • Roy Rockwood

... and calls himself Francois Vitalis. He speaks French, German, and Italian, besides Arabic and Turkish, and as he has been for twelve or fifteen years vibrating between Europe and the East, he must by this time have amassed sufficient experience to answer the needs of rough-and-tumble travellers like ourselves. He has not asked us for the place, which displays so much penetration on his part, that we shall end by offering it to him. Perhaps he is content to rest his claims upon the memory of our first Quarantine dinner. If so, the odors ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor

... camp-fire, had heard an explosive "Hands up!" and had found himself confronted by three men, with one of the three covering him with a sawed-off Winchester. From that to the unhorsing and the binding had been merely a rough-and-tumble half-minute, inasmuch as he was unarmed and the surprise had been ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... fine sense of humor in a child. I purposely use the word, "eventually," because I realize, first, that humor has various stages, and that seldom, if ever, can one expect an appreciation of fine humor from a normal child, that is, from an elemental mind. It seems as if the rough-and-tumble element were almost a necessary stage through which children must pass, and which is a normal and healthy stage; but up to now we have quite unnecessarily extended the period of elephantine fun, and, though we cannot control the ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock

... turned and watched the boy and the dog in their rough-and-tumble about the yard. He blinked and turned back to the horses. "Come on, ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs



Words linked to "Rough-and-tumble" :   fight, disorderly, fighting, scrap, combat



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