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Bedraggled   /bɪdrˈægəld/   Listen
Bedraggled

adjective
1.
Limp and soiled as if dragged in the mud.  Synonym: draggled.  "Scarecrows in battered hats or draggled skirts"
2.
In deplorable condition.  Synonyms: broken-down, derelict, dilapidated, ramshackle, tatterdemalion, tumble-down.  "A broken-down fence" , "A ramshackle old pier" , "A tumble-down shack"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Bedraggled" Quotes from Famous Books



... admit a feeling of disappointment in that first trench. I don't know what I expected to see, but what I did see was just a long, crooked ditch with a low step running along one side, and with sandbags on top. Here and there was a muddy, bedraggled Tommy half asleep, nursing a dirty and muddy rifle on "sentry go." Everything was very quiet at the moment—no rifles popping, as I had expected, no bullets flying, and, as it happened, absolutely no shelling in ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... was missed, and father and mother, and the farm hands ran hither and thither in wild search for him. No one, however, found him. In the haste of the search some one left his work at the irrigation dam, and the water running down rudely awoke the child out of his dreams. Wet and bedraggled, squalling at the top of his lungs, Panhandle trudged back home to the relief of ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey

... Finally they crossed Market Street and began to chatter into the tawdry dance halls of upper Kearny. Everywhere the drinks flowed in covert streams, growing viler and more nauseous as the pilgrimage advanced. Near Jackson Street they came upon a bedraggled pavilion of dubious gayety which lured them downstairs with its ear-splitting jazz orchestra. A horde of rapacious females descended upon them like starving locusts. Suddenly everybody in the party seemed moved with ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... of my sad reflections there scrambled up the steps a wet and bedraggled dog, who dropped at my feet a chip. Carrying her in my arms to my room, I lighted a lamp and examined her collar, and found a few leaves of a memorandum-book covered ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis

... forgotten to put it in my haversack. Yet the men—no doubt the same non-commissioned officer, with the private he had just relieved from duty as a vedette—passed so near me that I could distinctly see their dress, and could note its worn and bedraggled appearance. These men had ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson

... recognized. So absorbed had she been in giving the physician assistance and carrying out his directions that she had not thought of her appearance. Her white dress, which yesterday had been fresh and dainty, was in tatters and bedraggled strings, and her hair hung down her back in a disheveled mass. But she came shining down upon Mead's dark thoughts, fresh and beautiful and glorious beyond compare. He did not remember rising, but presently he knew that he was on his feet and that she was standing in front of him. He did not ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly

... had croup, and we have been up o' nights with them. Cook has given notice, and there's a dead rat in the walls. Our three camps leaked, and in the early dawn, after the first cloudburst, twenty-four bedraggled little Indians, wrapped in damp bedding, came shivering to the door and begged for admission. Since then every clothesline, every stair-railing has been covered with wet and smelly blankets that steam, but won't dry. Mr. Percy de Forest Witherspoon has returned ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster

... iceberg. The Titanic struck about 11.20 P. M. and did not go down until two o'clock. Many of the passengers were in evening dress when they came aboard our ship, and most of these were in a most bedraggled condition. Near me as I write is a girl about eighteen years old in a fancy dress costume of bright colors, while in another seat near by is a women in a white dress trimmed with lace and ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various

... features, and bowed her slender form. Her dress was travel-stained and shabby; her boots were down at heel and her thin hands were glove-less. Lettice noticed that she still wore a wedding-ring. But the neat trim look that had once been so characteristic was entirely lost. She was bedraggled and broken down; and Lettice thought with a thrill of horror of what might have happened if Mrs. Chigwin had left Birchmead, or refused to take the wayfarer in. For a woman in Milly's state there would probably have remained only two ways ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... of myself, and the sight made me more hopeless than ever. I saw in the water a tall, wild-looking youth, with bare head, save for a mass of unkempt hair; a face all scratched and bruised, and made to look savage and repulsive by vindictiveness; the clothes were dirty, bedraggled and torn, while the riding boots were ...
— The Birthright • Joseph Hocking

... lost! Flora ran about in wide circles, followed by the greater portion of the dogs. To the left, to the right they went. At that moment, chancing to look back, I caught a glimpse of "Old Sandy," broken down and bedraggled, making his way toward a clump of briars. He had played his last [v]trump and lost. Pushed by the dogs, he had dropped in his tracks and literally allowed them to run over him. I rode at him with a shout; there was a short, sharp race, and in a few moments [v]La ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various

... it as they wander, not two but one, farther into the forest, ardently believing in themselves; they are not hypocrites. The somewhat bedraggled figure of Joanna follows them, and the nightingale resumes his love-song. 'That's all you know, you bird!' thinks Joanna cynically. The nightingale, however, is not singing for them nor for her, but for another ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie

... home, presented a dejected figure, tired out and three-fourths beaten. So the Miss Dyers thought as they rolled past her in their carriage, and debated whether they should not stop to pick her up and save her walking the rest of the road. But she was such a fright, positively bedraggled with mud enough to soil the cushions, and she could speak of nothing now save the Deweshurst Girls' Day School and her duties there. It was too tiresome to be borne with. Poor Bell was not clever, she was one-idea'd and slow at work like Ned, and she had also his conscientiousness. ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler

... Chick, who received us with his usual bland hospitality; while his wife, who, though a little soured and stiffened by too frequent attendance on camp-meetings, was not behind him in hospitable feeling, supplied us with the means of repairing our drenched and bedraggled condition. The storm, clearing away at about sunset, opened a noble prospect from the porch of the colonel's house, which stands upon a high hill. The sun streamed from the breaking clouds upon the swift and angry Missouri, and on the immense expanse of luxuriant forest that stretched ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.

... went the four bedraggled ones. The twins saw them coming, and, grave-eyed and solemn, came down ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope

... as the night wore on. It seemed to Jarvis that this bedraggled line had neither beginning nor end. He saw it winding through this place night after night, year after year, the old-timers and the new recruits. Uptown reputable citizens slept peacefully in their beds; this was no concern of ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... Oberon's magic horn had called forth the raging tempest, and his power suddenly stayed its fury as Huon and his companion overtook a company of monks and nuns. These holy people had been celebrating a festival by a picnic, and were now hastening home, drenched, bedraggled, and in a sorry plight. They had scarcely reached the convent yard, however, where Sherasmin fancied all would be quite safe from further enchantment, when Oberon suddenly appeared in their midst like ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber

... and advanced. My shoes were spoiled, and my skirts bedraggled, but I captured the moth and saw no indication of snakes. Soon after she was placed in a big pasteboard box and began dotting eggs in straight lines over the interior. They were white but changed colour as the caterpillars approached time ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter

... their figures were sharply silhouetted against the grey sky. Each of the women held a baby close to her breast and bent over it as she advanced against the wind, that beat her gown tightly against her legs and blew it out behind in bellying folds. Yet beneath their uncouth and bedraggled garments they moved like mothers of a mighty race, tall, large-limbed, broad of hip, hiding generous breasts beneath the shawls—red, grey, and black—that covered their babes from the wind and rain. A few of the children struggled forward under ricketty umbrellas; ...
— The Delectable Duchy • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... bedraggled and pale, Poor Vivy approached her own door, She went, swift and straight As a dart, through the gate, Abhorring the ...
— The Youth's Coronal • Hannah Flagg Gould

... installation at that inn, so near to insensibility I was when I fell against its door. I have a dim memory of having exchanged a few words with a sleepy, stolid host; of being glad of the darkness of the night, for it prevented him from noticing my wet, frozen, begrimed, bedraggled, half-dead condition; of my bargaining for the sole occupancy of a room; of his leading me up a winding stairway to a chamber; of my plunging from the threshold to the bed as soon as the door was opened. I slept for several hours. When I awoke, it was about noon, and I was very ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens

... chin nestled in the lace jabot at her throat. A mass of tangled hair fell across her eyes; her arms hung limply at her sides; small, modish riding hoots showed beneath the hem of her skin, forlorn in their irresoluteness. Her garments were sadly bedraggled; a pathetic breast rose and fell ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... unnatural persecution was singularly weak. Upon a certain night long ago, said she, a poor bedraggled and attenuated gander had applied at her door for relief. He stated in piteous accents that he had eaten nothing for months but tin-tacks and an occasional beer-bottle; and he had not roosted under cover for so long a time he did not know what it was like. Would she give ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... to stone in the river-bed, he had soon reached a point where, with the aid of Lydia's stick, the bedraggled cutting was soon fished out and returned to its ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... settle into their usual morning quiet. Old folks come out to stroll in the sun. Tired young mothers in bedraggled skirts cuddle babies in their arms or sit on a bench to change diapers. Children run, squealing and ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola

... he hated her, with her smooth politeness, after a night when she had been unbearable and human by turns. He hated her bedraggled hair and tired face. Then he could have wept, so deeply did he desire to pull her head down on his shoulder and smooth the wrinkles of weariness out of her dear face, the dearer because they had endured the weariness together. But he said, "Well, ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... slowly swelled in broad circles; then quickly upheaved, as if sideways sliding from a submerged berg of ice, swiftly rising to the surface. A low rumbling sound was heard; a subterraneous hum; and then all held their breaths; as bedraggled with trailing ropes, and harpoons, and lances, a vast form shot lengthwise, but obliquely from the sea. Shrouded in a thin drooping veil of mist, it hovered for a moment in the rainbowed air; and then fell swamping back into the deep. Crushed thirty feet upwards, the waters flashed for an instant ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville

... Welsher," they lifted him bodily, protesting and struggling, rushed him out of the tent into a neighbouring field, and cast him into a dirty pond covered with green and slimy duckweed! A miserable object he scrambled out, for the pond was shallow, and took his dishevelled and bedraggled presence away as fast as he could limp along, amid the laughter ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory

... was so great that, forgetting his own bedraggled condition, he laughed. Then he looked again to see what they were going to do. A small man, his face shaded by the broad brim of a hat, emerged from the woods and joined them. Dick was too far away to see his face, even had it been uncovered, but his figure looked familiar. Nevertheless, although ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler

... The same evening, the bedraggled and footsore soldiers waded the Fishkill[55] where the bridge had been, but was now destroyed, and bivouacked on the heights of Saratoga.[56] Too weary even to light fires, to dry their clothing, or cook their suppers, they threw themselves on the wet ground to snatch a ...
— Burgoyne's Invasion of 1777 - With an outline sketch of the American Invasion of Canada, 1775-76. • Samuel Adams Drake

... preoccupation with the exact value of oral words, he is not a singing lyrist. There is not much bel canto in his volumes. Nor do any of his poems seem spontaneous. He is a thoughtful man, given to meditation; the meanest flower or a storm-bedraggled bird will lend him material for poetry. But the expression of his poems does not seem naturally fluid. I suspect he has blotted many a line. He is as deliberate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... were grouped upon the beaches close above the high water mark where the outfits of the travelers had been hastily dumped. Camp fires crackled and Indian fishermen traded fresh salmon for tobacco; but the tired and already mud-bedraggled prospectors slept heavily upon the damp, cold ground when too much exhausted to ...
— The Trail of a Sourdough - Life in Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan

... wife, holding her door open, as best she could, in the violent wind, had hardly given this information to the little snow-bedraggled object standing out there in the inky darkness, through which the lantern made a faint circle of light, before she ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... tall houses with sash windows without curtains; those ugly monuments, all in mourning with the dust and grime and black and greasy dirt; those flower-sellers at the corners of all the streets, with faces sad as the rain and bedraggled feathers in their hats and lamentable clothing; the black mud of the streets; the low sky; the funereal mirth of drunken women hanging on to men just as drunken; the wild dancing of dishevelled children round the street ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... is being made recently anent the blood-bedraggled cow-boy of the wild West, that I rise as one man to say a few things, not in a dictatorial style, but regarding this so-called or so esteemed dry land pirate who, mounted on a little cow-pony and under the black flag, sails out across the green surge of ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... not recognizable in Dick Melvyn, dairy farmer and cocky of Possum Gully. The former had been a man worthy of the name. The latter was a slave of drink, careless, even dirty and bedraggled in his personal appearance. He disregarded all manners, and had become far more plebeian and common than the most miserable specimen of humanity around him. The support of his family, yet not, its support. The head of his ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... as glass. In the corners, where the warmth of the sun did not reach, the morning frost still glistened like a coating of sugar. On the mossy carpet, the sparrows, thin with the privations of winter, trotted back and forth like children, shaking their bedraggled feathers. ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... been spared the unattractive sight of the domestic slave. The girls in that Bessborough Gardens house were often changed, but whether short or long, fair or dark, they were always untidy and particularly bedraggled, as if in a sordid version of the fairy tale the ash-bin cat had been changed into a maid. I was infinitely sensible of the privilege of being waited on by my landlady's daughter. ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad

... a drizzly, bedraggled Paris into a land of sunshine and gentle breezes; from the bare sullen lands of the Champagne, into a country where flowers grew by the side of the railway, and that in February; to a semi-tropic land, fragrant ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace

... heroic, this line of dishevelled, bedraggled pleasure-seekers. They were all looking Death in the face, and the closer they looked the less they feared him. They were conscious rather of a feeling of curiosity, together with the nervous tingling with which one approaches a dentist's chair. The dragoman made a motion ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... the small tree against which he leaned. In the back yard of a house across the stream from Sam and facing the factory four guinea hens sat on a board fence, their weird, plaintive cries making a peculiarly fitting accompaniment to the scene that lay before him, and in the yard itself two bedraggled fowls fought each other. Again and again they sprang into the fray, striking out with bills and spurs. Becoming exhausted, they fell to picking and scratching among the rubbish in the yard, and when they had a little recovered renewed the struggle. For ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson

... kept from any demonstration by the tempest. Carriages went round to the convent; and the women were loaded into them, packed into them, carried and put in, if they were too infirm to go themselves. They were driven away, cross and wet and bedraggled. They found their dwelling on the hill not half prepared for them, leaking and cold and cheerless. They experienced very rough treatment, if I can credit my informant, who says she hates the government, and would not even look out ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... scene upon the landing is the last picture, but one, I have to present of childhood days, ere I hasten, over the period that brought us all into our twenties and to strange, eventful times. The one remaining sketch is of an unkempt, bedraggled figure that I saw at the back hall door of the Faringfields one snowy night a week later, when, for some reason or other, I was out late in our back garden. This person, instead of knocking at the door, very cautiously tried it to see if it would open, and, finding it locked, stood timidly back ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... way. The obscure streets through which his course was bent were at no time very thickly thronged, and at the present hour the inclemency of the night rendered them utterly deserted. It is true that now and then a solitary female, holding up, with one hand, garments already piteously bedraggled, and with the other thrusting her umbrella in the very teeth of the hostile winds, might be seen crossing the intersected streets, and vanishing amid the subterranean recesses of some kitchen area, or tramping onward amidst ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... recounting his prison experiences, and I discovered that he had been a pilferer and pickpocket well known in all the London police courts. In his odd moments out of jail, he would hover outside the larger stations, touch a bedraggled cap with a filthy finger, and say, "Kerry yer beg, sir?" in a threatening tone to all passers-by; his main income, however, appeared to come from far less ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett

... on the Bowery, Blowing the fluff of night shelters Off bedraggled garments, And agitating the gutters, that eject little spirals of vapor Like ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... over her, and the story of the discovery had been repeated more than once, she was taken upstairs by Esther, and washed and changed, so that by the time Miss Ashe returned, instead of the bedraggled, dirty little maiden of an hour before, she saw only a perfectly neat and spotless one, and had no suspicion of all that had ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... these My spirit turns in restless ecstacy, And this enslaved brain is master sponge, And sucks the blood of body, hands and feet. While my poor spirit, like a butterfly Gummed in its shell, beats its bedraggled wings, And ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... was conscious of a woman's step close behind him. He turned as the woman came up beside him, and faced—Phrony Tripper. She was so worn and bedraggled and aged that for a moment he did not recognize her. Then, as ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page

... with paraffin auxiliary, and it ran, when there was no head wind, between four and five knots an hour. It was a bedraggled object; it had been painted white a very long time ago, but it was now dirty, dingy, and mottled. It smelt strongly of paraffin and of the copra which was its usual cargo. They were within a hundred feet of the reef now ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham

... pointing to a bedraggled horse that had made its way to within fifty feet of the vessel. "Now what ...
— Off Course • Mack Reynolds (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)

... fourteen shillings a-week, finding their own paint and frippery. Now, whenever you wish to form a correct idea of the two great classes of fashionable life, call to your remembrance the gentlemen who, like the late lamented Mr Richardson, are proprietors of shows, and the berouged, bedraggled creatures who exhibit on the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... many years—hundreds of waiters' aprons and cooks' caps, worn hotel towels and napkins, ragged shirts and collars—not a thing worth the lumber in the box, except as old linen for the hospitals. There was a great deal of bedraggled finery, than which nothing could have been less appropriate, when nine out of every ten women who applied for clothes, wanted plain black in which to mourn for their dead. And the hats and bonnets were of every shape ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton

... came through the undergrowth and they were pushing a figure before them. It was that of a man in a bedraggled and torn red uniform, his hands tied behind him, and all the color gone from his face. Powerful as was his self-control, Tayoga uttered a low cry of surprise. It was the young Englishman, Grosvenor, a prisoner of the hostile warriors, and ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler

... was stepping up to the dais, and the people in the court were rising to receive him, a poor bedraggled wayfarer was toiling through the country towards the town. It was a woman. She must have walked far, her step was so slow and so heavy. From time to time she rested, not sitting, but standing by the gates of the fields as she came to them, ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... whimsical picture of a pretty maid in full-skirted crinoline with a soft southern accent—moonlight and honeysuckle, a gallant, goateed colonel paying court to her charm and beauty while he sips a mint julep. This picture and that of the snaggle-toothed mountain woman in bedraggled black calico can no more be taken for fact than that Jesse James is still holding up stagecoaches or that cowboys in high boots and leather breeches are daily wedding the rich easterners' daughters who have ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... stream along the street, the rest of us see only the self-conscious walk, the giggling speech, the preposterous clothing. And yet through the huge hat, with its wilderness of bedraggled feathers, the girl announces to the world that she is here. She demands attention to the fact of her existence, she states that she is ready to live, to take her place in the world. The most precious moment in human development is the ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams

... tramps, and thieves had drifted into the Square and crowded its seats. A drunken woman, her slouchy black dress bedraggled and drenched from the rain, lurched across the walk, dropped on a bench and sat muttering curses at a carriage on the north side. He had often looked at those flashing windows in the millionaire's row beside Fifth Avenue and then at the grim figures of the human wolves and ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon

... physical force nor moral objurgation could move from the evil ways into which they had fallen, encumbered the track, and the way to Simpson's Bar was indicated by broken-down teams and hard swearing. And farther on, cut off and inaccessible, rained upon and bedraggled, smitten by high winds and threatened by high water, Simpson's Bar, on the eve of Christmas day, 1862, clung like a swallow's nest to the rocky entablature and splintered capitals of Table Mountain, and shook ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... bedraggled crowd stood before the park gates, awaiting the hour named on the notice board when they would be admitted to such lodging and shelter as iron seats and overspreading branches might afford. A weary, ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... woman in a bedraggled morning wrapper, was getting the breakfast. She did not participate largely in the prosperity of her husband, and often declared she was "worked to death," although there were no children to ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne

... in that portion of the McHurdie Biography devoted to "The Press of the Years," "why, as we go farther and farther into life, invariably it grows dingier and dingier. The 'large white plumes' that dance before the eyes of youth soil, and are bedraggled. And out of the inexplicable tangle of the mesh of life come dark threads from God knows where and colour the woof of it gray and dreary. Ah for the days of the large white plumes—for the days when life's woof ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... jars, with broken goblets, and remnants of fruits and cakes, looked uninviting and even weird in its aspect of departed cheer. The couches beneath their tumbled draperies of richly dyed silk looked bedraggled and forlorn, whilst the stains of wine upon the fine white cloths looked like widening streams of blood. Under the shadows of elaborate carvings in the marble of the walls ghost-like shadows flickered and danced as the smoke from the oil lamp ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... indeed poor, forlorn little Jane that had appeared like a specter in the kitchen door. She was as wet and bedraggled as a chicken caught in a shower. A little felt hat hung limp over her ears; her pigtail braid had lost its string and was unraveling at the end, and her torn, sodden shoes were ready to drop from her feet. She looked both curiously and apprehensively at Alida with ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... that she was fighting for the impossible, yet even at the outset she half despaired of ever making him understand. It is pitiful to think of her, with her tender human nature, seeking a true mate where human law required that she should find one, only to be repulsed and baffled and bedraggled herself in the end if she persevered. A good man might have failed to comprehend Beth, but a good man would have felt the force of goodness in her, and would have reverenced her. Maclure recognised no force ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... as Bud left it, bedraggled and dusty, did not interest him. He brushed himself as he went. The band was playing madly, and the young woman in the stiff skirts was standing by her horse ready to mount. The crowd did not stop laughing; Bud inclined his head to dust his knickerbockers, and then in a tragic ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White

... girl made no reply, and the stranger, opening the gate, came into the yard. She looked weary, rather bedraggled, yet hurried: her air was predominantly one of anxiety. "I'll give you a quarter for that cat," she said. "I want an all-white cat, but this one's only got that one gray spot over its eye, and I ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington

... believe. Her face matched her story; she was a poor, miserable, bedraggled creature, with teeth out in front. She wore black cotton gloves such as undertakers supply for the pallbearers, and every finger was out. The liquor traffic would have a better chance if there were not so many arguments ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung

... legs and these spurs—." And just as my friend was struggling to get his foot up through the slats, a washwoman in the second story emptied her soapsuds over the coop. He disappeared under the shower, amid the wild screaming of the hens. A moment later a bedraggled head, with one eye closed by suds, looked out through the side bars and remarked in a saddened voice—"I suppose the city authorities would be satisfied now—if they could see this." The sudden change in my old friend from a warrior to a bundle of wet feathers ...
— Observations of a Retired Veteran • Henry C. Tinsley

... confused impressions that crowded Nan's memory after the wild night on Music Mountain, the most vivid was that of a noticeably light-stepping and not ungraceful fat man advancing, hat in hand, to greet her as she stood with de Spain, weary and bedraggled ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman

... soon as possible. The carriage was broken and there was no alternative save for 'Lina to walk the remaining distance home. It was not far, for the scene of the disaster was within sight of Spring Bank, but to 'Lina, bedraggled with mud and wet to the skin, it seemed an interminable distance, and her strength was giving out just as she reached the friendly piazza, and called on her mother for help, sobbing hysterically as she repeated her story, but dwelling most upon ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes

... gone on deck I found in the narrow, white-walled circle of the storm a little world of ice and writhing space. The Shining Light was gripped: her foremast was snapped, her sails hanging stiff and frozen; she was listed, bedraggled, incrusted with ice—drifted high with snow. 'Twas the end of the craft: I knew it. And I went below to my uncle and the fool, sad at heart because of this death, but wishing very much, indeed, for my breakfast. 'Twas very warm and peaceful in the cabin, with pork and brewis ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... for though he paused and looked wistfully at them, he would not approach, but stood dripping in the rain with his frills much bedraggled, while his tasseled tail wagged slowly, and his pink nose pointed suggestively to the pails and ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 2, December, 1877 • Various

... semi-paralysis, originally induced by a kind of starvation of the intestinal nerve-tissues. One of its most prevalent forms is constipation," caused by "local torpor or semi-paralysis, dependent upon an anemic condition of the nerve-tissues of the rectal region." By "feeding directly" the limpid, bedraggled rectum and colon, they receive their "appropriate nutriment, by which comes added vigor,"—the nutriment the stomach and the rest of the system had failed to furnish on account of constipation, excessive fermentation, indigestion ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison

... both walked across to Part One of the General Sessions, where for so many years we had been monarchs of all we surveyed. A great throng filled the room and many reporters clustered around the tables by the rail, while at the head of a long line of waiting prisoners stood the bedraggled Hawkins. Presently the judge came in and took his seat and the spectators surged forward so that the officers had difficulty in preserving order. Somehow, it seemed almost as if we were being arraigned ourselves—not appearing as counsel for another; but Gottlieb preserved ...
— The Confessions of Artemas Quibble • Arthur Train

... bunks and moved some puncheons overhead. A light was raised under the dark roof canopy, but nothing rewarded its search. The much-bedraggled woman was young, with falling strands of silken hair, which she wound up with one hand while holding the baby. Marie took the poor wailer from her with a divine motion and carried ...
— The Lady of Fort St. John • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... pull off his coat, when he looked around and saw a woman on the plush upholstered seat of the elevator, leaning against the wall with her head on her hand. She was dressed in ball costume, with one of those white Oxford tie dresses cut low in the instep, which looked, in the mussed and bedraggled condition in which she had escaped from the exposition ball, very much to the Knight like a Knight shirt. The astonished pinery man stopped pulling off his coat and turned pale. He looked at the woman, then at the elevator boy, whom he supposed ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck

... desperate a journey, there came across his seamed and withered face so odd a look of complete disgust, I laughed outright in my nervousness, discovering some slight response in the amused eyes or Madame. It proved a good hour before the Chevalier returned, somewhat bedraggled of attire, yet with his prize dangling at the belt, and dropped wearily upon a seat within ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... A pudding minus the sauce, a sandwich without the mustard, a joke without the point. What pleasure could there be in a dry picnic? Ladies never appear to such excellent advantage, never are so utterly bewitching, as when, with light summer dresses bedraggled and dirty, they cling helplessly to their protectors, or run in frantic haste to some place of shelter—for it is only when a woman (or a gentle bovine) runs, that the poetry of motion is fully realized. Then the gentlemen! Under what circumstances ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various

... dress, and at five minutes to eight he was ready for dinner and stood looking out of the window at the moonlight on the white lawn below. The snow had stopped falling, and everything lay quiet and still as though it were cut in marble. And then suddenly, across the lawn, came a black, bedraggled object on four legs, limping painfully, and lifting its feet as though there were ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis

... sweeping up the river. It was coming fast, and the boy sprang through the bushes and, followed by Mavis, flew down the road. The storm caught them, and in a few moments the stranger boy and girl looking through the front door at the sweeping gusts, saw two drenched and bedraggled figures slip shyly through the front gate and around the corner to the ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.

... stripped the kimono off the baggage coolie's back, and made a lasso with which he pulled me up. Then shocked to a standstill by the shortcomings of the coolie's birthday suit, he snatched off his coat and gave it to him, with a dollar. Such a procession of bedraggled and exhausted pleasure-seekers as we were, when three men stood behind our hotel door and opened it just wide enough to haul us in. But hot baths and boiling tea revived us and soon we were as merry as any people can be who ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little

... name of the visitor. All uneasiness was dispelled. The household turned out with flambeaux to receive her, and never did torches gleam on a more weather-beaten, travel-stained band than came tramping into the court. Such pale, care-worn faces, such bedraggled dresses, as the poor Duchess and her females presented, each seated behind her cavalier; while half drenched, half drowsy pages and attendants seemed ready to fall from their horses with ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving

... Lottie, who yelled most furiously, was Anna Jeffrey, half blinded with mud, and bitterly denouncing American drivers and Yankee roads! To gather themselves together was not an easy matter, but the ten pieces were at last all told, and then, holding up her skirts, bedraggled with dew, Madam Conway resumed her seat in the wagon, which was this time driven in safety to her door. Giving orders for her numerous boxes to be safely bestowed, she hastened forward and soon stood ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes

... small, bedraggled, indecent procession, lost to everything except utter weariness and a spirit of cold revenge. In Stoughton's heavy heart was the thought that Clark had unexpectedly made their job vastly easier than they anticipated. The latter was on a little knoll that rose roundly ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan

... the silent dawn, shadowed in a lonely archway or on an abandoned doorstep the wet, bedraggled body of a hapless moth is sometimes found, her iridescent wings flattened in the mud. Then for a brief moment a cry of protest, or scorn, or pity goes up. The passers-by raise their hands in anger, ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith

... and said, apologetically: "Well, pardon me, sir, and I'll tell you all. She came in here this morning, wet and bedraggled. Her poor widow's weeds were dripping with the rain. She sat there. You see where her boots have left their mark. She said her husband had just died, and left her, of course, penniless, with four young children. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... grieve ye!" sang Tam and dropped straight through the clouds into the rain and a dim view of a bedraggled earth. ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... the three of them: Old Man Hatton with his back to the fire, looking benignly down upon her; Angie seated, with some knitting in her hands, as if entertaining bedraggled, tear-stained young ladies at dusk were an everyday occurrence; Tessie, twisting her handkerchief in a torment of embarrassment. But they asked no questions, these two. They evinced no curiosity about this disheveled creature ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber

... runaway she would have looked prim in death while awaiting the undertaker. She must have been wet almost to those unfractured bones which she had been feeling; her black silk dress, with its white ruching about the neck, was torn and bedraggled; her black hat, with its jet ornaments, was crushed and hung askew over one ear; nevertheless, Miss Pringle conveyed at once and definitely an impression of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... up into a generous idealisation of himself as the guardian of law and order amid the bloody strife of the cabbage-patch—the preserver of the balance of nature. If cats were as clever as we, they would compile an atrocities blue-book about worms. Alas, poor thrush, with how bedraggled a reputation you would come through such an exposure! With how Hunnish a tread you would be depicted treading the lawn, sparing neither age nor sex, seizing the infant worm as it puts out its head ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd

... made possible a common level on which we could stand. We discussed the storm, the prospect of its clearing, the number of unfortunates in the adjacent Bois who were soaked to the skin, especially the poor little bicycle-girls in their cotton bloomers, now collapsed and bedraggled. We talked of the great six-day cross-country bicycle-race, and how the winner, tired out, had wabbled over the Bridge that same morning, with the whole pack behind him, having won by less than five minutes. We talked of the ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... patch of garden-ground to the rear, one corner of it grotesquely adorned with a bower all bedraggled with rains, yet with the red berry of the dog-rose gleaming in the rusty leafage like grapes of fire. He passed through the little garden and up to the door. Its arch, ponderous, deep-moulded, hung a scowling eyebrow over the black and studded oak, and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... long time. She remained there and I went to the window. It had begun to rain. A barrel-organ below was playing some horrible music-hall air, and every vibrant note was like a hammer on one's nerves. The grinder's bedraggled Italian wife perceiving me at the window grinned up at me with the national curve of the palm. She had a black eye which the cacophonous fiend had probably given her, and she grinned like a happy child of nature. Men in my position do not blacken women's eyes; but ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... bedraggled, ragged, unshaven and unshorn, with one arm hanging helplessly at his side, Santa Claus came to Simpson's Bar, and fell fainting on the first threshold. The Christmas dawn came slowly after, touching the remoter peaks with the rosy warmth of ineffable love. And it ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various

... sympathetic to actual pain, and had always been morbidly in awe of death. The sight of any poor, lost, and suffering man threw him into instant, profound, and melancholy pity. A dead beetle in the road, a fly caught in a spider's web, a young robin water-soaked and bedraggled, appalled him, even as a boy, and he pondered them with sad and questioning eyes long after his young companions had forgotten them. Where had the light of their eyes fled? he asked himself. He found no sport in killing any creature, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... frost,—all these things are utterly and everywhere lacking to the Mormon inclosure. Sometimes we passed a fence which guarded three houses instead of one. Abundant progeny played at their doors, or rolled in their yard, watched by several unkempt, bedraggled mothers owning a common husband,—and we could easily understand how neither of these should feel much interest in the looks of a demesne held by them in such unhappy partnership. The humblest New-England cottage has its ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various

... also it was because after the evacuation of the palace at Princhester he had felt more and more, felt but never dared to look squarely in the face, the catastrophic change in the worldly circumstances of his family. Only this chapel adventure seemed likely to restore those fallen and bedraggled fortunes. He had not anticipated a tithe of the dire quality of that change. They were not simply uncomfortable in the Notting Hill home. They were miserable. He fancied they looked to him with something between reproach ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... the beat rang the bell of the Florence Mission at two o'clock on Sunday morning, and waited until Mother Pringle had unbolted the door. "One for you," he said briefly, and pointed toward the bedraggled shape that crouched in the corner. It was his day off, and he had no time to trouble with prisoners. The matron drew a corner of the wet shawl aside and took one cold hand. She eyed it attentively; there was a wedding ring ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis

... the freight yards of a town at nightfall, in a cold, driving rain, a bedraggled, forlorn figure, a stray dog. A passenger train had just passed him, stopped at the station ahead, then pulled out. A light glistened down wet rails into his hungry eyes and blinded him. Rows of silent dripping box cars hid the man crossing ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux

... o'clock we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part of it through ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... owe it to ye, Hank! Mebbe I'll pay it some day when you git han'somer 'n you are now!" laughed Captain Ephraim dryly. He gave a piercing whistle through his teeth. Straightway Toby, sadly bedraggled, came limping up to him. The Pup let go of his dead enemy, and lifted his head to eye his master inquiringly. His whole front was ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... which the slow rain dropped ceaselessly upon the pebble-paving below, could not give—steepy slopes, hedge-divided into small fields, some green and dotted with red cattle, others crowded with shocks of bedraggled and drooping corn, ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... great as to prevent strong expressions of disgust. Little wonder, for if a fiend could embody itself in a woman, this demented creature would leave nothing for the imagination. Her dress was wet, torn, and bedraggled; her long black hair hung dishevelled around a white, bloated face, from which her eyes gleamed with a fierceness like that ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... and the banks were slimy. Fingal's Creek was almost at its usual level and the silt was crusting along its bedraggled borders. Just above where it empties into the Neosho we noted a freshly broken embankment as though some weight had crushed over the side and carried a portion of the bank with it. Puddles of water and black mud filled the little hollows everywhere. ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... at him from the mouth of every dark alley; outrage, crime, misfortune, danced in every shadow. As for himself, he was a sorry sight and enough to frighten Grace into convulsions at one glance. Rain-soaked, muddy, bedraggled, it was not the debonnaire Chicagoan of old who skulked away from the cab at a certain black corner and made his way stealthily, even fearfully, ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon

... she exclaimed. "What a wonderful power it is—poetry! I wake up in the morning all bedraggled; there's a yellow fog outside; little Emily turns on the electric light when she brings me my tea, and says, 'Oh, ma'am, the water's frozen in the cistern, and cook's cut her finger to the bone.' And then I open a little green book, and the birds are singing, the ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf

... company for this poor would-be butterfly. They barely spoke when they met, kept asunder by a mutual embarrassment. One girl with whom she had played as a child had early taken to evil courses. Her she met one day in the street, and the bedraggled and painted creature called her by ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay

... mountains and the forest and the lake stood actually convicted of having been out all night. Dank and white with its vaporous vigil the listless lake kindled wanly to the new day's breeze. Blue with cold a precipitous mountain peak lurched craggedly home through a rift in the fog. Drenched with mist, bedraggled with dew, a green-feathered pine tree lay guzzling insatiably at a leaf-brown pool. Monotonous as a sob the waiting birch canoe slosh-sloshed against ...
— The White Linen Nurse • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

... upstairs holding on to the hand-rail and had thrown herself on a bed in the room leading out of the dressing-room, where she lay in her mud-stained dress, the silken petticoat torn and bedraggled in her leap from the window. She was weeping bitterly, her old black mammy sitting beside her trying to comfort her as ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith

... remainder of the act the lucky performers were those whose parts required changes of dress; the others were a soaked, bedraggled, and uncomfortable lot, but in the last degree picturesque. The stage scenery was ruined, trap-doors were so swollen that they wouldn't work for a week afterward, the fine costumes were spoiled, and no end of minor damages were done ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... out derisively a bedraggled female on the edge of the crowd as this utterly unrecognizable edition of Cleek stepped out upon the pavement. "Oh, yez! Oh, yez! 'Ere's to give notice! Them's the bright sparks wot rides in motor-cars, them is, and my poor 'usband a hoofin' of ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew

... after the sinking the Ambassador went to Euston Station, at an early hour in the morning, to receive the American survivors. The hundred or more men and women who shambled from the train made a listless and bedraggled gathering. Their grotesque clothes, torn and unkempt—for practically none had had the opportunity of obtaining a change of dress—their expressionless faces, their lustreless eyes, their uncertain and bewildered walk, faintly ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick

... he had belonged to another tribe altogether. Lena perpetually sorrowed over the box, and all of them were in deadly earnest. It was wonderful the way these children would work up their compassion for that bedraggled thing I wouldn't have touched with a pair of tongs. I suppose they were exercising and developing their racial sentimentalism by the means of that dummy. I was only surprised that Mrs. Hermann let Lena cherish and hug that bundle of rags ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... last arrived at the private establishment which was doing duty as a morgue. The bedraggled form that had been bandied about by the tides all night lay covered up in the cold damp basement. Bertha Curtis had been a girl of striking beauty once. For a long time I gazed at the swollen features before I realised what it was that fascinated and puzzled me about her. Kennedy, however, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... to win free, crawling out near where a smaller stream joined the river. There he lay panting, face down upon the moss. And there they found him, water dripping from his bedraggled finery, the Ana stroking his muddied hair. Thrala cried out with concern and pillowed his head on her knees ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North

... cloths on their heads here, some of the women in the street began to laugh at them and make rude remarks, upon which my wife fired up and replied in the same manner, so much so that they almost came to blows. In the end they came home all muddy and bedraggled, and were a fine sight! I believe, when your Highness is here, they will go out with all the more courage, since they will have in you so bold and spirited a comrade, and if any one dares to be rude to you, they will ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... sight of him there rose up all at once in their recollection that scene upon the Shell Road; the Texan vividly recalling how he had ducked the caitiff in the ditch, as how he looked after crawling out upon the bank—mud bedraggled and covered with the viscous scum,—in strange contrast to his splendid appearance now! And Kearney well remembered the same, noting in addition a scar on Santander's cheek—he had himself given—which the latter ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid

... Aunt Amanda. She struggled to her feet, rejecting the assistance offered by the ear-ring'd man, and stood facing him, her bedraggled bonnet very much over her right ear. "Who are ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... twenty years since she had first seen Laura Wilde as a child of ten, the meeting came to her suddenly with all the bright clearness of an incident of yesterday. She remembered herself as a weak, bedraggled little girl, in wet slippers, who was led by a careless nurse to a strange German school; and she felt again the agony of curiosity with which, after the first blank wonder was over, she had stared at the children ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... her disfigured face, and then her bedraggled frock. "It seems to have seen trouble since last night, don't it?" he remarked drily, and then the words and the sobs in Mona's ...
— The Making of Mona • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... to keep up this musical and love-making festival through three consecutive days of a cold northeast rainstorm. Bedraggled, but ardent and happy, the birds were not to be ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... his turn was studying her, and held up her head and faced him sturdily. In spite of her drenched condition she did not look so very bedraggled, thanks to the simple linen suit she had worn. Her jet black hair, loose and damp, framed an oval face which lacked color without appearing unhealthy. The skin was dark—the gypsy dark of one who has lived much out ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett

... lay and slept; they had strewn the dry sea-moss for a bed in their wattled cabin, and there lay against the leafy wall. Beside them wore strewn the instruments of their toilsome bands, the fishing-creels, the rods of reed, the hooks, the sails bedraggled with sea-spoil, the lines, the weels, the lobster-pots woven of rushes, the seines, two oars, and an old cobble upon props. Beneath their heads was a scanty matting, their clothes, their sailors' caps. Here was all ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... Kate's divided skirt was bedraggled, a rent showed in the sleeve of her blouse, her riding boots were shabby, and the fingers were out of her worn gauntlets. Her hat was white with the dust of the corral, her hair dishevelled and her face, still damp with perspiration, was grimy. But somehow she managed to be picturesque and ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart

... breath she saw that Thady was at her elbow. He had for some little time been stalking her warily, with the great coat expanded ready to throw over her, and having done so, was now holding it on with a rough hug. The joy with which he had at last caught sight of the forlorn, bedraggled figure had overflowed irrepressibly into this joke, and its successful accomplishment put the finishing touch to his happiness. As for Judy, if the sun had leaped up again in a fiery flurry, till the hills and the plain and the river were all flooded with ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane

... was in serious difficulties. It was a hundred yards out, but the enjoyment of a sunbath after a sea frolic enabled one to proceed to the rescue without preliminaries. Half drowned and completely cowed, the bird was now confronted by a more awful peril than that of the sea. A bedraggled crest indicated horror at the steady approach of the enemy man, whose presence stimulated the sodden bird to such extraordinary efforts that it succeeded in rising and in making slow, ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield

... remarkable sights of the Siege was, not the gravity of doctors, lawyers, directors, etc., presenting tickets for soup—that was piquant enough—but the number of young ladies, votaries of fashion, who emerged from the melee bedraggled and flushed with their pails of nectar, to all appearances not only forgetful of the convenances, but beaming with smiles of triumph. It may have been because their charms were enhanced, artful wenches! Enhanced, in any case, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... Ina's. Marie had not asked for her wages many times, and never of Captain Carroll, but to-night she took courage. There was a ball that week, Thursday, and her poor, little, cheap muslin of last season was bedraggled and faded until it was no longer wearable. Marie waylaid Captain Carroll as he was returning from the stable, whither he had been to see a lame foot of one of the horses. Marie stood in her kitchen door, around which was growing lustily a wild cucumber-vine. She put her ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... the bedraggled and ragged-haired old man, curiosity about whom had led to this predicament. The King of the Pipes was watching her with eyes that ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson

... he spied a crowd by the side of the road. An old woman was gesticulating with her stick, while the street boys mocked and laughed around her. It was Granny Moan. The good old granny whom Sylvestre had so tenderly loved—her dress torn and bedraggled—had now become one of those poor old women, almost fallen back in second childhood, who are followed and ridiculed along their roads. The sight ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... cruel beak could miss him, yet it did; for poor Jumbo was by that time so exhausted that he suddenly sank and disappeared. The angry, surprised swan dived his head down in search of him; but the current, which swept round here with some force, carried Jumbo away, and finally flung him, a bedraggled and most unhappy-looking rabbit, on to a corner of the island. Drusie always declared afterwards that Jumbo had dived and swum under water; but whether that was true or not, saved he certainly was. Luckily ...
— A Tale of the Summer Holidays • G. Mockler

... Pampaconas. We were soaked with perspiration and drenched with rain. Snow had been falling above the village; our teeth chattered like castanets. Professor Foote immediately commandeered Mrs. Guzman's fire and filled our tea kettle. It may be doubted whether a more wretched, cold, wet, and bedraggled party ever arrived at Guzman's hut; certainly nothing ever tasted better than that ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham

... this occasion that he would have to go in and show himself, though he was certainly not fit to be seen. Reluctantly he pulled the bedraggled pink coat on again. After all, it did not greatly matter. Hunting was its own excuse. No sportsman ever returned in the apple-pie order ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell

... your brigade to-night and be off at daybreak to-morrow. Wait; you will want an intelligence officer. (Here he swung round and ran his eye over the miscellaneous gathering of all ranks assembled on the platform. He singled out a bedraggled officer from amongst the group who had arrived the preceding night in the van of the ill-natured Africander guard.) What are you ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer

... but gazed down upon the man and his bedraggled companions with impassive features, but thoughtful eyes. Any one who knew him intimately, as Joseph Smith alone did, could have read his mind. He was asking himself what he ought to do. Here was the whole fundamental question to be gone over again. To what purpose had he taken so great pains ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... him, at the request of the old minister. They were rather a sorry looking group, though just as full of a desire to assist as ever. The fine new uniforms were bedraggled with mud and water. Several had holes burned in their coats, and that of Jack was a sight ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren

... the cottage they found Connie's mother almost beside herself with anxiety and Connie's father doing his best to soothe her. So that when the young folks came in the door looking rather damp and bedraggled but safe, Mrs. Danvers cried out joyfully, ran to them, and hugged them one after another till she was completely and rapturously ...
— Billie Bradley on Lighthouse Island - The Mystery of the Wreck • Janet D. Wheeler

... wheelbarrow, white with mould, was fast crumbling into earth, and a little farther off stood a disorderly group of chicken coops before which lay a couple of dead nestlings. On the soaking plank ledge around the well-brink, where fresh water was slopping from the overturned bucket, several bedraggled ducks were paddling with evident enjoyment. The one pleasant sight about the place was the sturdy figure of Jim Weatherby, still at work upon the giant body of ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... meantime Jack and Rob succeeded in raising the Jolly Pioneer and hauling her up on the bank. While they stood there, contemplating her in discouragement, and regardless of their own bedraggled condition, who should ...
— Apples, Ripe and Rosy, Sir • Mary Catherine Crowley

... I am a trifle melodramatic," observed Jimmie Dale apologetically, surveying his own bedraggled person; "but I assure you it is neither intentional nor for effect. As it is, I was afraid I would be late. Pardon me if I take the liberty of helping myself; one gets a chill in wet clothes so easily"—he passed to the liqueur ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... (sun helmet) had scarcely disappeared in the crowd when the Hindu of the freight caboose emerged from the steerage, no longer in bedraggled linen trousers and ragged turban, but dressed like a native fop. He was in no hurry. Leisurely he followed Kathlyn to the hotel, then proceeded to the railway station. He had need no longer to watch and worry. There was nothing left now ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... march for the sally-port," cried Roy; and the men tramped round by the north-west tower, along beneath the western rampart, turned the southern corner, and were admitted by the little sally-port beside the portcullis, where, bedraggled as they were, they received a tremendous hand-shaking and a ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn

... them—not many of them new, A grim revolver laid beside a baby's tiny shoe, A satin coat, a ragged gown, a gold-clasped book of verse, A necklace of bedraggled pearls, ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... a man in evening dress the worse for misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven jowls; and ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph

... been put out, the claim bare as the day I first saw it—save for charred grass, and a great mound of ashes, and the smell of smoke—when Sam Frye opened the mail sacks. Sitting bedraggled in his old buggy, Ida Mary distributed the mail to the patrons who had gathered. Even though the post office was gone, the mail must go on. We were never ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... Albert's picture or draped in the red, black, and yellow banner of the country-a city whose atmosphere was charged with fear and suspicion and excitement. Sometimes a crowd of a thousand or two drew one toward the Central Station where bedraggled refugee families, just arrived from Liege, Termonde, Aerschot, and Malines, stood on street corner or wagon top and thrilled the crowd with tales of atrocities and the story of their flight from their burning homes to the south. Now and then the crowd parted before ...
— The Log of a Noncombatant • Horace Green

... not yet broken when the 'watch' of the ship Vulcan, lying becalmed off the —— coast, was roused by a peculiar noise aft. Going to the spot he was surprised to find a much-bedraggled monkey rubbing itself on a pile of sail-cloth. The creature had evidently swum or drifted a long distance, and was now endeavouring to restore circulation. Jerry, being a humane man, got it some biscuit, and a saucer of grog, and waited developments. These were not slow to show themselves; ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond

... the saddle again fasting. My riding boots were so wet I could not get them on, so I must ride barefoot. The morning was fair but the roads very muddy, the weeds soaked us nearly to the waist, Sale was twice spilt at the fences, and we got to Apia a bedraggled enough pair. All the way along the coast, the pate (small wooden drum) was beating in the villages and the people crowding to the churches in their fine clothes. Thence through the mangrove swamp, among the black mud and the green mangroves, and the black and scarlet ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson

... prisoner," declared Tad, who, sitting upon his horse in his bedraggled, torn pajamas, presented a most ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Rockies • Frank Gee Patchin

... as they can fall only in the South. The landscape grows obscure, the forms of the pickers in the distance become dim and misty, and when at last it lightens up a little, they have disappeared from the fields. There they go, streaming and dripping toward the barns and sheds, looking as bedraggled as a flock of black Spanish fowls. Such of the mule-drivers as have been caught, now that they are in for it, drive leisurely by with the heavy crates that they should have gathered up ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... at his red, dirty hands, at his red, provokingly perspiring face, his big, heavy, mud-bedraggled boots, and all those external tokens of the deformity of our poor, coarse life. They so quickly became unused to this deformity here in the valley of their ...
— The Created Legend • Feodor Sologub

... often die for lack {58} of nourishment. So insistent is the young Cowbird and so persistently does it pursue the foster parent that it is well cared for and invariably thrives. It is no uncommon sight, during the days of June and July, to see a worn, bedraggled Song Sparrow {59} working desperately in a frantic effort to feed one or more great hulking Cowbirds twice its size. It is little wonder that discerning people are not fond of the Cowbird. Even the birds seem to regard it as an outcast from avian society, and rarely associate with it on ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson

... stifled and bedraggled, "let's go back." His companions were not brave. They were last. The next one to the little man pushed him on, so the little man said sulphurous words and cautiously ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane

... very self-controlled, had taken command of the situation. Eight people were thoroughly wet through and bedraggled, and must be hurried to camp and dried, and given hot drinks as speedily as possible. The rescuers needed cosseting as much as the rescued. Madge and Marion were shivering and trembling, and Rona, now the excitement of her sudden dash was over, looked more shaky than ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil

... but he took a wash in the river and combed his hair with his fingers. When he returned, there was a transformation in Jeanne. Her beautiful hair was done up in shining coils. She had changed her bedraggled skirt for another of soft, yellow buckskin. At her throat she wore a fluffy mass of crimson stuff which seemed to reflect a richer rose-flush in her cheeks. A curious thought came to Philip as he looked at her. Like a flash the memory of a certain night came to him—when it ...
— Flower of the North • James Oliver Curwood

... gave way under the strain, and the puppy, with a bit of the muslin in his mouth, rolled over on the grass, while Gyp, doubting if the bedraggled doll would be accepted, held it out, dripping, for Dollie ...
— Princess Polly's Playmates • Amy Brooks

... him even in intense tragic passion, he was far below Webster, and, indeed, far below all his generation, in moral fibre. The sight of evil fascinates him; his conscience staggers, his sympathies are bedraggled in foulness; in the chaos of good and evil he loses his reckoning, and recognizes the superiority only of strength of passion, of passion for good or evil: the incestuous Giovanni, daring his enemies like a wild beast ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee

... what this is all about, that every one is so crazy to see it?" the man at the wicket asked, with studied carelessness. He was a thick-set man, with dark glasses, and wore a battered hat, and a much bedraggled waterproof. ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung

... overestimated according to his master's way of thinking. For a place in some ways so near to civilization, the hills beyond the river woods abound in fox holes, and David has conducted some good runs on his own account, it seems; but this time alack! alack! he came limping slowly home, footsore and bedraggled, followed by his pupils and bearing a huge dead cat of the half-wild tribe that, born in a barn and having no owner, takes to a prowling life in ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright



Words linked to "Bedraggled" :   dirty, unclean, damaged, soiled



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