"Weedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... cherry, hop, and hybrid wattle, clothed the spurs which ran up from the back of the detached kitchen. Away from the front of the house were flats, bearing evidence of cultivation, but a drop of water was nowhere to be seen. Later, we discovered a few round, deep, weedy waterholes down on the flat, which in rainy weather swelled to a stream which swept all before it. Possum Gully is one of the best watered spots in the district, and in that respect has stood to its guns in the bitterest drought. Use and knowledge have taught ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... 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, announced the place where our red-headed client carried ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... hall and found himself in the embrace of his sister, the youth was thrilling with excitement, hope, and pleasure. Lucy had changed much less than he had. Jock, who had been the smallest of pale-faced boys, was now long and weedy, with limbs and fingers of portentous length. His hair was light and limp; his large eyes, well set in his head, had a vague and often dreamy look. It was impossible to call him a handsome boy. There ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... 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 and inferior food. Horses are trained merely on fresh grass and ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... Captain Sutter, who stated that he 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
... than man; it was found so by incoming Celts, and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests. The earthy savour of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt with scarce a difference. I steeped myself in open ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ended a hundred yards from where the two lads lay as suddenly as if it had been cut sharply off, and went down perpendicularly some two hundred and fifty feet to where the transparent waves broke softly, with hardly a sound, amongst the weedy rocks, all golden-brown with fucus, or running quietly over the yellow sand, but which, in a storm, came thundering in, like huge banks of water, to smite the face of the cliff, fall back and fret, and churn up the weed into balls of froth, which ...
— Cormorant Crag - A Tale of the Smuggling Days • George Manville Fenn
... when 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 all ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... but my Mother, with a true woman's heart, and fine though uncultivated sense, was in the strictest acceptation Religious. How indestructibly the Good grows, and propagates itself, even among the weedy entanglements of Evil! The highest whom I knew on Earth I here saw bowed down, with awe unspeakable, before a Higher in Heaven: such things, especially in infancy, reach inwards to the very core of your being; mysteriously does a Holy of Holies build itself into visibility in the mysterious ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... rather village, in the county Leitrim, where the postmaster had come to some sorrow about his money; and my friend John Merivale was staying with me for a day or two. As we were taking a walk in that most uninteresting country, we turned up through a deserted gateway, along a weedy, grass-grown avenue, till we came to the modern ruins of a country house. It was one of the most melancholy spots I ever visited. I will not describe it here, because I have done so in the first chapter of my first novel. We wandered about the place, suggesting to each ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... to smoke and to inspect him critically: "You're a bit seedy and a bit weedy, Clive, but you'll come around with feeding. You're really all right. I'd have you myself if I was marrying young men ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... main road into the old untravelled one leading past Sylvia Crane's house. It appeared scarcely more than a lane; the old wheel-ruts were hidden between green weedy ridges, the bordering stone-walls looked like long green barrows, being overgrown with poison-ivy vines and rank shrubs. For a long way there was no house except Sylvia Crane's. There was one cellar where a house had stood before Barney could remember. There were a few old blackened ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... the little spot with a wistfulness that might have been given to one of Eden-like proportions. She was astonished to see how her strawberries had improved since she hoed them, but noted in dismay that both they and the rest of the garden were growing very weedy. ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... to dally about the pond on a mild April morning. While the Urchiness mutters among the violets, picking blue fistfuls of stalkless heads, the Urchin, on a plank at the waterside, studies these weedy shallows which are lively with all manner of mysterious excitement, and probes a waterlogged stump in hope to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be kept ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... beast I never saw. I can't think what the world is coming to. Scraggy, weedy legs.... Wonder how they keep ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... rounds below the 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 Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... 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 ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... brink Of weedy lake, or marge of river wide, Or where the rocking billows rise and sink On ...
— The Golden Treasury of American Songs and Lyrics • Various
... England, eat and drink and sleep and live in England, for a little while. Isn't the very name great? I'll be a better man for going, till I die. We're all right out here, but we're young and thin and weedy. They didn't grow so fast in England, to begin with, and now they're rich with character and strong with conduct and hoary with ideals. I've been reading up the history of our political relations with England. It's astonishing what we've stuck to her through, but you can't help seeing ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... the side of Mentone, San Remo is sadly prosaic. The valleys seem to sprawl, and the universal olives are monotonously grey upon their thick clay soil. Yet the wealth of flowers in the fat earth is wonderful. One might fancy oneself in a weedy farm flower-bed invaded by stray oats and beans and cabbages and garlic from the kitchen-garden. The country does not suggest a single Greek idea. It has no form or outline—no barren peaks, no spare and difficult ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... part, Lister undertook the diving, but for long his efforts to reach the floor of the engine-room were baffled. To crawl across slanted gratings and down weedy ladders, while air-pipe and signal-line trailed about the machinery, was horribly dangerous, but he kept it up, although he got slacker and felt his pluck was breaking. Then one afternoon he knew he could not go down again, and he stayed ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... 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
... Fort Garry that day, and started an hour before noon, taking Phil with her as usual, and having her boat piled high with skins taken in barter, bags of feathers, and other marketable products. There was a short outlet to the bay from the river, a weedy channel leading through flat meadows of vivid green; only, to use an Irishism, they were not meadows at all, but stretches of swamp, in Canadian parlance a muskeg: and the unwary creature, human or animal, that set foot thereon was speedily ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... little flat, with the ugly sideboard, and the bit of weedy yard in the rear, and the alley beyond that, and the red and green wall paper in the parlor. The next moment, to my horror, Alma Pflugel had dropped to her knees before the table in the damp little arbor, her face in her hands, her spare ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... find no one to embody them. It sometimes seemed to him that the traditional race of Englishwomen had become extinct. Those he met were either brilliant and hard, or handsome and horsey, or athletic and weedy, or smart and selfish, or pretty and silly, or sweet and provincial, or good and grotesque. With the best will in the world to fall in love, he found little or no temptation. Indeed, he had begun to think that ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... stations watched without a moment's delay. The man's game would be to get to one or other of them across country. There'll be no marks on him—he fired from a distance—but his boots are muddy. About five foot ten I should think—a weedy kind of fellow. Go and wake Tonson, and be back as quick as you possibly can. And listen!—on your way to the stables call the gardener. Send him for the farm men, and tell them to search the garden, and the woods by the river. They'll find me there. Or stay—one of them can come ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... and, at the period of which I am writing, Lord Hartington, afterwards, as 8th Duke of Devonshire, leader of the Liberal Unionists, might still be seen lounging and sprawling in doorways and corners. Mr. Arthur Balfour, weedy and willowy, was remarked with interest as a young man of great possessions, who had written an unintelligible book but might yet do something in Parliament; while Lord Rosebery, though looking absurdly youthful, was spoken of ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... been destroyed by fire, and has risen again from its ashes. A lawn runs about the house, and the lawn is in its turn surrounded by a system of little five-roomed cottages, each with a verandah and a weedy palm before the door. Some of the cottages are let to residents, and these are wreathed in flowers. The rest are occupied by ordinary visitors to the Hotel; and a very pleasant way this is, by which you have a little country cottage of your own, without domestic burthens, and by ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... For, in the weedy cellar, thick The ruined chimney's mass of brick Lies strown. Wide heaven, with such an ease Dost thou, too, lose the ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... earth and stones. It was the same with the flora and fauna. Or to give it in their own words: "The small stones fought with the grass, the stones were beaten and the grass conquered. The short grass fought with the strong weedy grass, the short grass was beaten and the strong grass conquered. The strong grass fought with the long grass of the bush, the strong grass was beaten and the bush grass conquered. The bush grass fought with the trees, the grass was beaten and the trees conquered. The trees fought with the ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... given the girl, not close companions, for her nature is like a rank, weedy flower that needs refining and cultivating ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... with a feminine member of his congregation. This time, the honour had fallen upon Olive, who had received it with temperate resignation rather than exuberant joy. Divested of his bunny hood, the curate was a weedy young man with painfully good intentions and a receding chin. Furthermore, he confessed to liking caraway seed in his tea cakes. In other words, the trail of his nursery was still upon him. Accordingly, to atone for the skim-milk quality of his conversation, ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... upwards. Higher up the mountain slope was a belt of pinewoods, close to which was a stubbly growth of low bush. This was curiously black in contrast with the white surroundings, for no snow was upon its weedy branches and shrivelled, discoloured leaves. Suddenly, while Grey was looking out beyond the dog-train, he observed the impress of snow-shoes in the snow. He pointed to them ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... train Springing o'er the blue main To our paeans reply With their long, long refrain; And the sea-folk upleap From their dark weedy caves; With a clear, briny laugh They dance over the waves; Now their mistress below,— See bright Thetis go, As she leads the mad revels, While loud Tritons blow! ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... and lowly birds. They are of the grass, the fences, the low bushes, the weedy wayside places. Nature has denied them all brilliant tints, but she has given them sweet and musical voices. Theirs are the quaint and simple lullaby songs of childhood. The white-throat has a timid, tremulous strain, that issues from the low bushes ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... mountain, 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 ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... chew the hemlock rank, Growing on the weedy bank; But the yellow cowslips eat, That will make it ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... was a weedy specimen physically, and I doubted whether he could pull through if escape should mean a fight with Nature for food and water and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... subjects that are almost unimprovable. She was, by nature, a poor, shallow, weedy thing; her education had been the worst possible for her. Evil habits, false views, low aims, had been imbibed, and not one fault corrected while young; and self-experience, which rectifies in most so much that is wrong, seemed to do nothing for her. There ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... supper 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
... women were narrow, and they were hard, and they did not understand men. Those were their faults. Had she learned better by now? Did she realize that she had far better marry a man who had loved her for herself, and who still loved her, rather than some fortune-hunter, like that weedy fellow Scarlett. (Mr. Tristram called all slender men weedy.) He would frankly own his fault and ask for forgiveness. He glanced for a moment at the ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... been spent upon this domain of kings, and nothing but the summer's natural verdure was left to unmown stretches. The foot shrank from sending echoes through empty palace apartments, and from treading the weedy margins of ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... 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, and, ...
— The Four Feathers • A. E. W. Mason
... slim, slight-made; scant, scanty; spare, delicate, incapacious[obs3]; contracted &c. 195; unexpanded &c. (expand &c. 194)[obs3]; slender as a thread. [in reference to people or animals] emaciated, lean, meager, gaunt, macilent[obs3]; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky[U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... like small lock-gates on the Thames. There was no doubt as to ownership. Mr. Sidney saw him while yet far off, and bellowed at him about pig-pounds and floodgates. These last were two great sliding shutters of weedy oak across the brook, which were prised up inch by inch with a crowbar along a notched strip of iron, and when Sidney opened them they at once let out half the water. Midmore watched it shrink between its aldered banks like some conjuring trick. This, ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... large swift Rivers, which ebb and flow; and are there plentifully to be found: As likewise Rocky and Weedy Rivers. But in the latter end of the Year he is to be found high up in the Country, in swift and violent Cataracts, ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... well as hooked; for how large trout are to be killed in a weedy chalk-stream without a stiff rod which will take them down, is a question yet unsolved. Even the merest Cockney will know, if he thinks, that weeds float with their points down-stream; and that therefore if a fish is to be brought through them without ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... wool, the hooked spines with which the seeds 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 much improvement ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... down through the doorway, and stood beside the officer, whose horse was grazing a few yards away upon a trifling patch of weedy grass. Her ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... Poor Man's Rock got its name. In the kelp that surrounded it and the greater beds that fringed Point Old, the small feed sought refuge from the salmon and the salmon pursued them there among the weedy granite and the boulders, even into shallows where their back fins cleft the surface as they dashed after the little herring. The foul ground and the tidal currents that swept by the Rock held no danger to the gear of a rowboat troller. He fished ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... triumph. It gives me a cold feeling at the heart when I think of the dreary heroism he must display. Nothing picturesque, nothing striking. He must simply baffle the scoffers by an inscrutable endurance. Mrs. Parflete is a beautiful creature, but quite a child, and therefore weedy as to figure. I consider her far too young for marriage in any case. She is only seventeen—tall, slight, with a transparent skin, and something actually babyish about the eyes. Her dignity, in the circumstances, ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... away from my work, you tempted me into the land of the dusk or the weedy corner of some garden in ...
— The Fugitive • Rabindranath Tagore
... 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 left knee-cap, he met the blow standing on one leg—exactly ...
— Under the Deodars • Rudyard Kipling
... loss just where to look for Dotty until he remembered a certain weedy field along the edge of which the bushes had been left growing. "Perhaps I'll find him there," thought Peter, for he remembered that Dotty lives almost wholly on seeds, chiefly weed seeds, and that he ...
— The Burgess Bird Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... weedy rock and dragged himself up. For a moment he lay breathing fast, water dripping from his soaked clothing. Once he feebly touched the glittering fish tail that lay on the rock beside him. It quivered, but ...
— The Green Mouse • Robert W. Chambers
... critics, my boy, to pick holes in you then: There's howling "HISTORICUS,"—he's but a sorry cuss! WEG, too, that grandest of all grand old men; He's ridden some races; of chances and paces, Of crocks versus cracks he did ought to be judge. He sees you are speedy; when MORLEY sneers "Weedy," Or LAB doubts your staying, WEG ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, March 21, 1891 • Various
... show that fair New England homes once there were found. Flaming orange tiger-lilies, most homely and cheerful bloom of country gardens, have spread from the deserted dooryards, across the untrodden foot-paths, in weedy thickets a-down the hill, and shed their rank ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... fir-trees, hoary and grim, shaggy with pendent mosses, leaned above the stream, and beneath, dead and submerged, some fallen oak thrust from the current its bare, bleached limbs, like the skeleton of a drowned giant. In the weedy cove stood the moose, neck-deep in water to escape the flies, wading shoreward, with glistening sides, as the canoes drew near, shaking his broad antlers and writhing his hideous nostril, as with clumsy trot he ...
— Pioneers Of France In The New World • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... lady turned and haughtily surveyed the complainant. "Do you mean that little weedy, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... 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 wind, the rest have lost their proportions, the edges of the arches are hacked into deep hollows, ...
— Modern Painters Volume I (of V) • John Ruskin
... intervals, though the clearance was only momentary, and had scarcely become perceptible before reinforcements of dull white vapour, tainted with miasma, rolled up from the marshy ground, bringing dank odours of standing water and weedy vegetation, half decayed, and gradually encroaching on the river, the smooth surface of which glowed with a greasy gleam beneath it, making it look like a river ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... attention was attracted by a new arrival. The boy Freedham, having listlessly wandered across from Kensingtowe, slouched on to the Nursery playground. He was a tall, weedy youth of sixteen; and the unhealthiness of his growth was shown by the long, graceless neck, the spare chest, and the thin wrists. There was a weakness, too, at his knees which caused me to think that they had once worked on springs which now were broken. But the ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... and torn into gulleys and small channels, in which the mahogany-coloured rivulets, springing from the peat morass, straggle silently with a sluggish motion in harmony with the lifeless scene. There, if a weedy-roofed hut do appear, (detected by its thin feeble smoke column) or the shepherd who tenants it should show his solitary figure in the distance, the only upright object where is not one tree-trunk, neither the home of man nor man's appearance lessens the sense of almost savage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... rain, passing under the unconquerable golden glow of the maples, cast a surreptitious glance at the old Ramsey house as she passed. It had been wonderfully changed for the better. Even the garden at the side next her aunt's house was no longer a weedy enclosure, but displayed an array of hardy flowers which the frost had not yet affected. Marigolds tossed their golden and russet balls through the misty wind of the rain, princess-feathers waved bravely, and chrysanthemums ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... 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 and looking for the other birds that should have been about. None were seen or heard. ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... determine its length, for the lake disappeared into a distant horizon, into a semblance of low shores, still as stagnant water, reflecting the golden purple of the sunset, and covered with millions of waterfowl. The multitude swimming together formed an indecisive pattern, like a vague, weedy scum collected on the surface of a marsh. Ducks, teal, widgeon, coots, and divers were recognisable, despite the distance, by their prow-like heads, their balance on the water, and their motion through it, "like little galleys," Owen said. Nearer, in ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... glassy stream; Therewith fantastick garlands did she make Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples;[51] There, on the pendent boughs her cornet weeds Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies, and herself, Fell in the ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... set redly when at last he reached the outskirts of the town, opened up the wicket gate, and walked up the weedy, unkept path leading to the cottage where ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... of you to keep me company. That Hahlstroem and his henchman are disgusting. Though I have been an actor for twenty years, I can't stand the sight of such weedy weaklings, who don't do anything themselves and exploit their daughters. They have the effect of an emetic on me. For all that, he plays the great man. He has no talent, so he is going to boil soup from his daughter's bones. Yet he goes about nose up in the air. If he sees a ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... period. Fig. 86, by Cima da Conegliano, a Venetian, No. 173 in the Louvre, compared with Fig. 3 of Plate 10 (Flemish), will show the kind of received tradition about rocks current throughout Europe. Claude takes up this tradition, and, merely making the rocks a little clumsier, and more weedy, produces such conditions as Fig. 87 (Liber Veritatis, No. 91, with Fig. 84 above); while the orthodox door or archway at the bottom is developed into the Homeric cave, shaded with laurels, and some ships are put underneath it, or seen through ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... you rave to your grave with the fever, and they rob the corpse 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 hands ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... and pauper vegetation proper solely to the New York Battery. At that hour of the summer morning when our friends, with the aimlessness of strangers who are waiting to do something else, saw the ancient promenade, a few scant and hungry-eyed little boys and girls were wandering over this weedy growth, not playing, but moving listlessly to and fro, fantastic in the wild inaptness of their costumes. One of these little creatures wore, with an odd, involuntary jauntiness, the cast-off best dress of some happier child, a gay little garment cut ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... hard case, but some said that Smith was harder. Steelman was big and good-looking, and good-natured in his way; he was a spieler, pure and simple, but did things in humorous style. Smith was small and weedy, of the sneak variety; he had a whining tone and a cringing manner. He seemed to be always so afraid you were going to hit him that he would make you want to hit him ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... on the broad boulevard from the weedy outskirts of her father's garden, the clatter of horse-hoofs startled her into drawing back. She would have got herself altogether out of sight had there been anything at hand in the nature of a shrub high enough to conceal her. As it was she ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... 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 of their fathers. ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... arrested by a weedy looking young man rushing down the street at a great pace. It was the expression on his face that was extraordinary—a curious ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... a taint of decay; but I reckoned rightly that I should meet with them in the water lanes through which the machine had been driven. One large triangle in the vent of the bait was sufficient tackle. I am not certain that more elaborate flights are better anywhere; for weedy water I should have no reservation. From ten o'clock till five, with half an hour for luncheon, I toiled on, acquired a grand shoulder-ache that lasted me three days, and covered the bottom of the boat with close upon three-quarters of a hundred-weight of pike ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior
... (it was not going on an errand) in the dark, along a road thickly shaded with trees. I was a little fellow; but I got over the distance in half an hour. Part of the way was along the wall of a church-yard, one of those ghastly, weedy, neglected, accursed-looking spots where stupidity has done what it can to add circumstances of disgust and horror to the Christian's long sleep. Nobody ever supposed that this walk was a trial to a boy of twelve years old: so little are the thoughts of children understood. And children are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... 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 ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... necessities of civilisation were necessities no more: I needed luxury even less than I needed news. I cared for nothing that the men of a city ask: there was space before me and room to ride. The lack of small urgent stimuli, the barren growth of civilisation's weedy fields, left me to the great and simple organic impulses of the outstretched world. And in that moment I perceived that this silence is the very life of the wandering Boer, even though he knows it not; for it has sunk so deep into him that he is unaware ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... a bit of bog-land. The familiar country, evocative of a great part of my childhood, carried my thoughts hither and thither. My thoughts ranged like the swallows; the birds had no doubt just arrived, and in swift elliptical flights they hunted for gnats along the banks of the old weedy canal. That weedy canal along which the train travelled took my thoughts back to the very beginning of my life, when I stood at the carriage window and plagued my father and mother with questions regarding the life of the barges passing up and down. And it was the sudden awakenings ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... am afraid, for I've never been before. But I shall be less afraid with you than with him." And she glanced at a weedy youth who was pouring oil from a ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... used to get entangled in this weedy region for weeks together, unable to proceed on their voyage. The great Columbus fell in with it on his voyage to America, and his followers, thinking they had reached the end of the world, were filled with consternation. This Sargasso Sea lies in the same spot at ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... vines came down), and began her hatmaking in earnest. In five years she had opened a shop on a side street near Elm, had painted the old house, installed new plumbing, built a warty stucco porch, and transformed the weedy, grass-tangled yard into an orderly stretch of green lawn and bright flower beds. In ten years she was in Elm Street, and the Chippewa Eagle ran a half column twice a year describing her spring and fall openings. On these occasions Aunt Sophy, in black satin and marcel wave and her most ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... 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 ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was weedy, his beard was long, And weedy and long was he, And I heard this wight on the shore recite, ...
— Bab Ballads and Savoy Songs • W. S. Gilbert
... 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
... athlete, an orator, a statesman, a writer with a sense of style, popular, rich, and with nine out of ten of the attributes that we envy most. Had achievement come less easily to him, he might have been a greater man. There have been ugly men who have been more enviable. There have been weedy men who were more enviable. There have been poor men who were more enviable. But the truth is, one does not know whom to envy. It is probably ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... 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 little use ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... 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 within ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... crowd, Jimmy had found his attention attracted chiefly by a party of three, a few tables away. The party consisted of a girl, rather pretty, a lady of middle age and stately demeanor, plainly her mother, and a light-haired, weedy young man in the twenties. It had been the almost incessant prattle of this youth and the peculiarly high-pitched, gurgling laugh which shot from him at short intervals that had drawn Jimmy's notice upon them. And it was the curious ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... Pride and the Hope came home from school. The brook, the barn, Old Beek, and Mis' Cow all had their uses then—also a tent in the yard, a swing, hammock and whatnot. When God made the country He made it especially for children. Burning suns, a weedy garden and potato blight may dismay the old, but such things do not fret the young mind. As long as the brook is cool and the fields are sweet and there is fresh milk and succotash on the table, happy childhood ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... since dawn. He scarcely troubled to ask himself why they had stopped. Breyette and MacDonald were given to casual haltings. He sat in irritable discomfort brushing aside the hordes of mosquitoes that rose up from the weedy brink and the shore thickets to assail his tender skin. He did not notice that MacDonald was waiting for him to move. Mike Breyette looked down on him from the top of ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... or two across the landes brought him into a green lane with tall wild hedges, full of enormous blackberries, behind which were the vineyards, rather weedy as to soil, but loaded with the small black and white grapes which made the good pure ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... conducted a miniature survey; rivalry had been developed in the competition over plots; the gardens, laid out side by side, served as a splendid object lesson in quality of work; no boy or girl could allege a teacher's unfairness from an untilled, weedy plot; the parents were made to feel that the school was doing something practical for their children; the children were taught a simple form of accounting and cost-keeping; and, best of all, they were made to feel their ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... came two men aboard with a letter from the agent in San Francisco, which agent was irritating on account of slowness, and had weedy-looking hair. But the ...
— The Belted Seas • Arthur Colton
... three parcels, the little model pursued her way to Hound Street. At the door of No. 1 the son of the lame woman, a tall weedy youth with a white face, was resting his legs alternately, and smoking a cigarette. Closing one eye, he ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... 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 ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... you the words were not out of his mouth when old Padda shot from the top of a cold wrinkled swell, drove himself over the weedy ledge, and landed fair in our laps with a rock-cod between his teeth. I could not help smiling at Eddi's face. "A miracle! A miracle!" he cried, and kneeled down ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... and seeing whether anything could be done. He came back in a state of voiceless gloom, and spent the rest of a beautiful day indoors, smoking a pipe which had lost much of its flavour, and regarding with a critical and anxious eye the small, weedy figure of his wife as she went about ...
— Night Watches • W.W. Jacobs
... it. There was a strong family likeness in 'em all—the same ugly 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' ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of granite steps, weedy in the interstices of the old stone, and terminating in a pair of couchant lions at the base, led down to the middle terrace, which was called the upper garden. This was split in twain by a very gallery of gigantic box trees running down towards the lower terrace, and bearing eloquent witness ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... Moselle the road made a great curve round the base of a hill descending to the river, and then mounted a little spur of the valley wall. Beyond the spur the road went through lonely fields, in which were deserted farmhouses surrounded by acres of neglected vines, now rank and Medusa-like in their weedy profusion. Every once in a while, along a rise, stood great burlap screens so arranged one behind the other as to give the effect of a continuous line when seen ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... meridian of Fayal, one of the Azores, between the twenty-fifth and thirty-sixth degrees of latitude.* (* It would appear that Phoenician vessels came "in thirty days' sail, with an easterly wind," to the weedy sea, which the Portuguese and Spaniards call mar de zargasso. I have shown, in another place (Views of Nature Bohn's edition page 46), that the passage of Aristotle, De Mirabil. (ed. Duval page 1157), ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... with fantastic garlands did she come Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them. There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds Clamb'ring to hang, an envious sliver broke; When down her weedy trophies and herself Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide; And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes; As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indu'd Unto that element: but ...
— Hamlet, Prince of Denmark • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... he asked. "Can it be possible that you, a man worth millions of piasters, an exalted ruler, a Noble of the Mystic Shrine, have deliberately chosen this waspy, weedy——" ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... should possess The poet's treasure, silence, and indulge The dreams of fancy, tranquil and secure. Vain thought! the dweller in that still retreat Dearly obtains the refuge it affords. Its elevated site forbids the wretch To drink sweet waters of the crystal well; He dips his bowl into the weedy ditch, And heavy-laden brings his beverage home, Far-fetched and little worth: nor seldom waits Dependent on the baker's punctual call, To hear his creaking panniers at the door, Angry and sad and his last crust consumed. So farewell envy of the PEASANT'S NEST. If solitude make ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... harvest, even the process of moving into the new house, are obscured in my mind by the clouds of smoke which rose from calamitous fires all over the west. It was an unprecedentedly dry season so that not merely the prairie, but many weedy cornfields burned. I had a good deal of time to meditate upon this for I was again the plow-boy. Every day I drove away from the rented farm to the new land where I was cross-cutting the breaking, and the thickening haze through which the sun shone with a hellish red glare, produced ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... 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 ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... hers, sprung from the old roots which in Paris she had been eager to kill and he was hoping were about dead, sprung in vigor and spreading in weedy exuberance! He often looked at her in sad wonder when she was unconscious of it. "What is the matter?" he would repeat. "She is farther away than in Paris, where the temptation to this sort of nonsense was at least ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... taper, slim, slight-made; scant, scanty; spare, delicate, incapacious^; contracted &c 195; unexpanded &c (expand) &c 194 [Obs.]; slender as a thread. [in reference to people or animals] emaciated, lean, meager, gaunt, macilent^; lank, lanky; weedy, skinny; scrawny slinky [U.S.]; starved, starveling; herring gutted; worn to a shadow, lean as a rake [Chaucer]; thin as a lath, thin as a whipping post, thin as a wafer; hatchet-faced; lantern-jawed. attenuated, shriveled, extenuated, tabid^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... raked up a large mass of stuff, which, as it came 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 remnant ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... painted this miniature hasn't done Eric justice; the face is too white and pink, and the moustache isn't at all the right shade. I know I could catch the exact tone of Eric's moustache if I were a painter. It's a kind of browny, yellowy, red-tinted, a sad auburn, with a sea-weedy wash about it. Under the nose it suggests one of our daybreak skies, and there, where the ends droop, a sunset of Turner's. Dear ...
— The Squire - An Original Comedy in Three Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... recruits were quartered, under the charge of an old soldier. Some of these new comrades were fresh from the plough, and some were the rowdy refuse of the town; one wore a miner's flannels, and another was a weedy youth from a shop-counter, who had a higher opinion of himself than others ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... uplands we may flush ruffed grouse from their snug retreats in the snow; while in the weedy fields, many a fairy trail shows where bob-white has passed, and often he will announce his own name from the top of a rail fence. The grouse at this season have a curious outgrowth of horny scales along each side of the toes, which, acting as a tiny ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... 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
... 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 day there ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... am well enough," 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 ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... her large eyes deepened and glowed. "I heerd tell of you, Mr. Holliwell. Fellers come up here to see Pierre once in a while an' one or two of 'em spoke your name. An' I kinder figured out you was a weedy feller, awful solemn-like, an' of course you ain't, but it's real hard for me to notion that there ain't two Mr. Holliwells, you an' the weedy sin-buster I've ben picturin'. Like as not I'll get to thinkin' of you like two fellers." Joan sighed. "Seems like ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... to have faded from the dripping wet landscape. Phantasmal clouds of grey mist brooded here and there in the hollows. The distant hills were wreathed in vapour, so that even the green of the pastures was invisible. Every now and then a snipe started up from one of the weedy places with his shrill, mournful cry, and more than once a solitary hawk hovered for a few minutes above his head. The only other sign of life was a black speck in the distance, a speck which came nearer and nearer until he paused to watch it, standing upon a little incline and ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... salaam enlightened Roy. Yesterday there had been a buzz of curiosity over the belated arrival of a new boy—an Indian—weedy-looking and noticeably dark, with a sullen mouth and shifty eyes. Roy, though keenly interested, had not felt drawn to him; and a new self-protective shrinking had withheld him from proferring advances that ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... the flowers bloomed luxuriantly in her mental picture, though she conscientiously remembered that they weren't doing as well as they might. They were weedy and unkempt, she supposed, but a little time and care would remedy that; and was she not coming to be the mistress of all this, and to make everything beautiful? Besides, the spring, and the brook ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... football crowds on Saturday afternoons. They made the countryside hideous on bank holiday afternoons. They were the despair of church and chapel, of the social reformer, and often of the police. This boy was under-sized, of poor chest development, thin-limbed, weedy; but there was a curious light in those staring ...
— Our Casualty And Other Stories - 1918 • James Owen Hannay, AKA George A. Birmingham
... this hope the boy climbed one of the biggest rocks to where he could gaze across the river and over the plain on the other side, looking out in expectancy of seeing the big weedy horse his brother rode coming toward the ford, but he watched in vain day after day, while Jack kept the fire going, and cooked and ate and slept without a care, not even seeming to give a thought to the wife waiting at Kopfontein, or, judging from appearances, ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... with its fragrant, weedy scent, where the green river plunges and whitens through the sluices, lies a deep pool, haunted by generations of schoolboys, who wander, flannelled and straw-hatted, up through the warm meadows to bathe. In such sweet memories I have my part, when one ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one of them nearly had me as I was bringing the mail-bags," snorted a weedy youth scarcely out of his teens, looking over the top of his coffee pot. "I always said that was a dangerous gap where the communication trench ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean |
