"Unkempt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... him reveals the origin of his sobriquet. Amid the rawness and roughness of everything in the bush, its primitive society included, the figure of Dandy Jack stands out in strong relief. Contrasted with the unkempt, slovenly, ragged, and dirty bushmen with whom he mostly comes in contact, he is the very essence of foppery. Yet, as we are afterwards to learn, he is anything but the idle, effeminate coxcomb, whose appearance he so assiduously cultivates. Here is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the forests these jungle men look wild and unkempt, but seen in their natural surroundings and compared there with the white man, they have a Beauty which is wanting in the white man. In these surroundings they have a dignity and composure and assurance which ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... one, with the exception of the editor of the Times, ever dreamed that there was anything out of the common in the shaggy, unkempt head upon which poor Bogg used to "do his little time," until a young English doctor came to practise at Geebung. One night the doctor and the manager of the local bank and one or two others wandered into the bar of the Diggers' Arms, where Bogg sat in a dark corner mumbling ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... flower-press. There was hardly any ground under cultivation, and the orchard bore signs of neglect. They saw a man in a barn painfully rolling along a heavy cylindrical bundle which had just come off a waggon. As they advanced to ask him the way, he left his work and came to meet them, a being as unkempt as his farm, and with an unpleasant ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... morning by some one who shook him gently but persistently, and at last he sat up, looking around in the dim light for the person who had dragged him back from peace to a battle-mad world. He saw an unkempt, bearded man in a French uniform, one sleeve stained with blood, and he ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... breakfast-room, and Rebecca and Lucy ironing in the impeachable kitchen, and not one of them with the least suspicion that Adam had not really waked up one morning minus a rib. I wandered in fancy all over the house—the attics, my aunt's bedroom so miraculously neat, and mine so unkempt, and the dark places in the ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... I was lying gazing at the long unkempt hair and head of him I had come to seek, and thinking that I would rest like that, rising now and then to see and watch with the doctor; the next I was wandering away in dreams through the forest in search of my father; and then all was blank till I started up to catch at my gun, for some ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... cavalry had gone into billets in the surrounding villages, and were behaving splendidly. The people took to them very kindly, and the men themselves looked so clean and happy that it was difficult to realize that they were the same unkempt, dirty individuals who had been seen not so long before wading through the mud and ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... the two upturned boats, live ten unkempt and careless lodgers, who drop boots, mitts, and other articles of apparel on to the men below. Reindeer hairs rain down incessantly day and night, with every movement that they make in their moulting bags. These, with penguin feathers and a little grit from the floor, occasionally ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... police cordon closed on the procession from the Old Church, definitely dividing the spectators from the spectacle, it grew clear that the spectators were in the main a shabby lot; persons without any social standing: unkempt idlers, good-for-nothings, wastrels, clay-whitened pot-girls who had to work even on that day, and who had run out for a few moments in their flannel aprons to stare, and a few score ragamuffins, whose parents were too poor or too careless to make them superficially presentable enough to figure ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Moline to Pierre I made by train. Ida Mary was at the depot to meet me, and at once we took a ferry across the river to Ft. Pierre. The river was low and the ever-shifting sandbars rose up to meet the skiffs. Ft. Pierre was a typical frontier town, unkempt and unfinished, its business buildings, hotel and stores, none of more than two stories, on the wide dirt road called Main Street. At one end of Main Street flowed the old Missouri, at the other it branched off into trails that lost ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... unkempt and unshaven, their heads bent forward and their hands thrust deep into their trousers pockets ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... was derived in some considerable measure from the writings of Mr. Henry James. This to explain our emotion. We had never expected to behold himself, the illustrious expatriate who had so far enlightened an unkempt mind. But the night before we had been talking of him. Indeed, it is impossible for us to fail to perceive here ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... and four bony fingers slipped in and gripped the sill. As he sprang to his feet the gaunt face of a man rose slowly above the window sill and a pair of brilliant, cavernous eyes, framed in a shock of unkempt beard and sandy ...
— The Lady of Big Shanty • Frank Berkeley Smith
... pictures of his life in London, portraying the English of that period as they impressed a sensitive Italian.[88] His descriptions are valuable, since they dwell on slight particulars unnoticed by ambassadors in their dispatches. He was much struck with the filth and unkempt desolation of the streets adjacent to the Thames, the rudeness of the watermen who plied their craft upon the river, and the stalwart beef-eating brutality of prentices and porters. The population of London displayed its antipathy to foreigners by loud ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... soles were curved like rockers. An old pipe clamored at his nostrils, though it was on the table near the window, the full length of the room from him. Papers and books were strewn about everywhere. It was difficult to believe these unkempt and uncouth surroundings, and the personality that had created them, were actually being harbored behind the walls of ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... against the fence. He was red-headed, and his unkempt hair and ragged beard flamed in the sun. A rope tied round his waist kept up his loose trousers, and his shirt was open, disclosing a hairy chest. Where his skin showed, it was unexpectedly white. He kept plucking at his chest, ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... beautiful as Italy or Ireland, and it isn't as tidy as England. If you keep away from the big manufacturing towns and their outskirts you may go by motor or railway through shire after shire in England and never see anything unkempt, down-at-the-heel, out-at-elbows, or ill-cared-for; no broken-down fences or stone walls; no heaps of rubbish or felled trees by the wayside; no unpainted ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... into sight. They ran erect, and they wore a few rags of skin garments, and they carried spears and hatchets and clubs, so they were probably classifiable as men. Their hair was long and unkempt; their bodies were almost black with dirt and from the sun. A few of them were yelling; most of them ran silently. They ran more swiftly than the boy they were pursuing; the distance between them narrowed every moment. There were at least ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... paws of a gorilla. Like so many of those Colorado ranchers of the early days, he was a Missourian, and his wife, big, fat, worried and complaining, was a Kentuckian. Neither of them had any fear of dirt, and Fan had grown up not merely unkempt, but smudgy. Her gown was greasy, her shoes untied, and yet, strange to say, this carelessness exercised a subduing charm over Lester, who was fastidious to the point of wasting precious hours in filling his boots ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... was far from perfect condition. Her high notes, which had never been developed properly, were almost bad. But she acquitted herself admirably from the standpoint of showing what her possibilities were. And Moldini, unkempt, almost unclean, but as natural and simple and human a soul as ever paid the penalties of poverty and obscurity and friendlessness for being natural and simple and human, exactly suited her peculiar temperament. ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... occupation while I was talking to him. He was constructing a camp-table and benches of some packing-boxes he had procured from the post trader. He was a tall, well-proportioned man, of dark complexion and regular features, with black, unkempt hair and restless brown eyes. He was clothed in a faded and stained butternut suit of flannel, consisting of a loose frock and baggy trousers, the legs of the trousers being tucked into the tops of road-worn boots. His hat was a battered and frayed broad-brimmed felt. Mrs. Arnold sat on a stool ...
— Captured by the Navajos • Charles A. Curtis
... came from behind the two men. Turning, they saw a stout, ill-looking fellow, with unkempt hair and beard, peering in at them from ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... and within a moment was ushering in the new arrivals. And Purdie was quick to note that the Levendale who entered, a sheaf of morning papers in his hand, was a vastly different Levendale to the man he had seen nine hours before, dirty, unkempt, and worn out with weariness. The trim beard and mustache were hopelessly lost, and there were lines on Levendale's face which they concealed, but Levendale himself was now smartly groomed and carefully dressed, and business-like, and it was with the air of a man who means business that he strode ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... our state coach and started for that stroll in Spain which I have measured as two up-town blocks, by what I think a pretty accurate guess; two cross-town blocks I am sure it was not. It was a mean-looking street, unswept and otherwise unkempt, with the usual yellowish or grayish buildings, rather low and rather new, as if prompted by a mistaken modern enterprise. They were both shops and dwellings; I am sure of a neat pharmacy and a fresh-looking ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... to them only to be rejected on the instant. They were still clad in the skins of beasts, which had taken the place of their worn-out clothing; they were unkempt, unshaven, and altogether far too conspicuous in every way to justify them in venturing into the streets by daylight, or indeed at any time while the inhabitants were abroad, therefore they must remain in hiding until darkness fell ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... Sebastian's usual method, so far from his lax comprehension of a father's duty, that Barlasch paused and looked at him with suspicion. With the back of his hand he pushed up the unkempt hair which obscured his eyes. This unusual display of parental anxiety required ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... seen from those backdoor suburbs that every railway in every land appears to regard as the only natural avenue of approach to busy communities. The line turned sharply along the right bank of the Tave and ran past tobacco factories, breweries, powder mills, scattered hovels, and unkempt streets. Here was no sun, but plenty of bare whitewash. Even Alec, accustomed to the singularly ugly etchings of Paris viewed from its chief railways, was completely disillusioned by these drab adumbrations of commerce and squalor. The Tave was no longer blue, but dull brown with ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... morning Emma Boyd journeyed out to her brother's. A coarse, common, loud voiced farmer, rough and unkempt and five unruly children. She was appalled, and a dreary stretch of prairie land with hardly a neighbor in sight. Why she had been crazy to come! and she found farm work quite too hard for her. She had better be housemaid at ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... bush, so that the slopes looked like a charming carpet of the loveliest pattern. This tree, the most beautiful of the tropical forest, far surpasses the palm in elegance, whose crown too often looks yellowish and unkempt. ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... by the traffic into a horrible rutted paste of muddy snow. The sidewalks were narrow and uneven. The numerous gas-lamps served only to show more clearly a long line of wooden houses, each with its veranda facing the street, unkempt ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... close against the hut wall, two low-looking half-breeds in gaudy shirts, and wearing their black hair long and unkempt, were filling in the time waiting for breakfast, shooting "crap dice." The only words spoken between them were the filthy epithets and slang they addressed to the dice as they threw them, and the deep-throated curses as ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... were ready to receive the group from up on the hill. There were nearly twenty men in the delegation, representing every shade of inelegance. Indeed, they demonstrated beyond all argument that the ways of looking rough and unkempt are infinite. There were tall and short who were rough, bearded and shaved who were rougher, and washed and unwashed who were roughest. And there were still many denizens of Borealis not then ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... in his Miscellany Poems, the other in The Spectator—to a few ballad-gypsies, yet poetry in general, that most "flat, stale, and unprofitable" poetry of the early and middle eighteenth century, disdained all fellowship with the unkempt, wandering tribe. ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... completion, was a lamentable spectacle of gaping doors and windows—a melancholy skeleton. Last of all, Presley had caught a glimpse of Dyke himself, seated in his rocking chair on the porch, his beard and hair unkempt, motionless, looking with vague eyes upon his hands that lay palm upwards ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... then to strengthen his coffee with applejack. Being a short, thickset man, he generally sat in his blouse after he had eaten, with his elbows on the table and his rough bullet-like head, with its crop of unkempt hair, buried in ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith
... also a fair amount of variety; they stand, they walk, they trot, they gallop at full speed, always truthfully and naturally. The stag, the hare, and the dog are likewise well portrayed; the ape has less merit; he is too human, too like a mere unkempt savage. The human forms are about upon a par with those of the Assyrians and Egyptians, which have evidently served for their models, the Assyrian for the outer zone, the Egyptian for the medallion. The encircling snake, as already observed, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... which Cookie in captivity had been heard to utter. Yet from time to time I had caught a glance of dark significance from Cookie's rolling eye, and I felt that he was loyal, and that this enforced servitude to the unkempt fraternity of pirates was a degradation which ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... unkempt creature, with nothing very pleasant in his face. The Spaniard was wrapped in a serape; he had bushy white whiskers; long white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he wore green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was talking in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... whom Uncle John saw for the first time. One was a Cappuccin monk, with shaven crown and coarse cassock fastened at the waist by a cord. He was blind in one eye and the lid of the other drooped so as to expose only a thin slit. Fat, awkward and unkempt, he stood holding to the back of his chair and swaying slightly from side to side. Next to him was a dandified appearing man who was very slight and thin of form but affected the dress and manners of extreme youth. Ferralti ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne
... in the land—can anyone who ever smelt it forget the sweetness of the flowering bean in the wide fields near the Bay of Naples? But Pompeii could never be the same without the Sole. And it was made for our shabbiness, its three tumbled-down little houses ranged round the three sides of an unkempt, mud-floored court; our bedroom without lock or latch and with a mirror cracked from side to side like the Lady of Shalott's, though for other reasons; the dining-room with earthen floor, walls decorated by a ...
— Nights - Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London, Paris, in the Fighting Nineties • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... in the least. She had a starved-looking cat on her lap, which she was huddling against her breast. The face had fallen away almost to nothing, so small and thin it was. She was dirty and unkempt. Her still brown hair, once so daintily neat, straggled out beneath her torn cap; her print bed-gown was pinned across her, her linsey skirt was in holes; everywhere the same tale ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cage the home of some feathery pet. Snipes and plover, orioles and ovenbirds, bobolinks and meadow-larks, all had lived in it by turns for a few days. But the snipes and plover had gone into a decline, the orioles and ovenbirds had grown thin and unkempt, and the bobolinks and meadow-larks had eaten themselves to death. Sorrowful over so much misfortune, she had longed to secure a hardy bird that would not only live in captivity, but would repay her loving ...
— The Biography of a Prairie Girl • Eleanor Gates
... the trenches a confused chatter from below told us that machine-guns were trained on the machine. By way of retaliation, I leaned over and shot at what looked like an emplacement. Then came the Boche front line, ragged and unkempt. I fired along an open trench. Although far from fearless as a rule, I was not in the least afraid during the eventful glide. My state of intense "wind up" while the fuselage was burning had apparently exhausted my stock of nervousness. I seemed detached from all idea of danger, ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... that remnant into which fifty years of toil, misery and social injustice had turned a man. And he ended by distinguishing Laveuve's white, worn, sunken, deformed head. Here, on a human face, appeared all the ruin following upon hopeless labour. Laveuve's unkempt beard straggled over his features, suggesting an old horse that is no longer cropped; his toothless jaws were quite askew, his eyes were vitreous, and his nose seemed to plunge into his mouth. But above all else one noticed his resemblance to some beast of burden, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... announce the fact that the girl was beautiful, but alas! in what questionable shape did she appear? She was attired in a loose gown tightened about the waist with a leathern belt, her feet were bare, and her long hair hung unkempt upon her shoulders. ...
— The Dock Rats of New York • "Old Sleuth"
... came to the door. A smile played about her lips, smouldering embers glowed in her blue eyes, and the sunlight lighted up the unkempt braids of golden hair which fell down about ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... realised who I was—and probably, too, what my errand was—he found the strength not only to move, but to seize both his crutches and raise himself on them! I shall never forget his gaunt ashen-grey face, the feverish gleam in his sunken eyes, his unkempt hair and beard— ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... garments swaying in the wind! The ebon-haired young mother with teeth like pearls and with warm-tinted cheeks sits fondling the last helpless little addition to her growing family, whilst toddlers of any age from two to seven, unkempt but bright-eyed and engaging, play around the door-step, watched over by their grandmother, or may be their great-grandam, who with her wizened face enfolded in her yellow kerchief, her skinny neck, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... by careful training. And it is astonishing how much can be accomplished by systematic discipline and drill. See how, for instance, out of the most unpromising materials—such as roughs picked up in the streets, or raw unkempt country lads taken from the plough—steady discipline and drill will bring out the unsuspected qualities of courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice; and how, in the field of battle, or even on the more trying occasions of perils by sea—such as the burning of the SARAH SANDS or ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... celestial seems to be, Disconsolate will wander up and down 'Mid many things unsightly to strange e'e; For hut and palace show like filthily. The dingy denizens are reared in dirt, No personage of high or mean degree Doth care for cleanness of surtout, or shirt, Though shent with Egypt's plague, unkempt, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... in places, and his boots were worn considerably, and the uppers were just beginning to gape at the crack across the top; but the clothes were neat and clean, and his boots were brushed. His hair was of the straw-coloured variety, with a tendency to red, but it was not tousled or unkempt, but neatly combed; while his little cap was not on straight but pushed back carelessly, just showing a pair of clear but dark-blue Irish eyes ...
— Irish Ned - The Winnipeg Newsy • Samuel Fea
... immense but extremely uneven and unkempt. Around it the Warhoons had piled building stone from some of the ruined edifices of the ancient city to prevent the animals and the captives from escaping into the audience, and at each end had been constructed cages to hold them until ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... stove, where the ashes were still warm. It was not a day for fires, but he loved his accustomed corner. He was a middle-aged man, old with the suffering which is not of years, and the pathos of his stricken state hung about him, from his unkempt beard to the dusty black clothing which had been the Tiverton minister's outworn suit. One would have said he belonged to the generation ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... rugged, hair unkempt, and naked feet, All her garments torn and ragged, her appearance far from neat; "So yer called me," said the maiden, "wonder wot yer wants o' me; Most folks call me Singing Jessie; wot may your ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... this chamber, to whom Brand was immediately introduced, was a man of about fifty, carelessly if not even shabbily dressed, with large masses of unkempt hair, and eyes, dark gray, deep-set, that had very markedly the look of the eyes of a lion. The face was worn and pallid, but when lit up with excitement it was capable of much expression; and Mr. O'Halloran, when he ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... red and green ribbons in the seams), and with huge clubbed pigtails under their black, glazed hats. One of them was evidently ill, for he lay back against the backboard and did not speak. I noticed also that he had not been to sea for a long time, as his beard was long and unkempt. The other, who drove the cart, was a one-legged man, very short and broad, with a thick black stubble on his cheeks. He was a hearty person with a voice like a lion's roar. They had rigged up Union Jacks on the donkey's blinkers, ...
— Jim Davis • John Masefield
... creepers, the rose bushes, the grass, the pigeon lofts all spoke of neglect and want of money to put them straight, a want caused by the fall in the price of cinchona, a misfortune which had involved many a fair estate and reduced it to the desolate and unkempt condition exemplified by the one now visited. But even unkempt and uncared for, what a picture it made! It was the realisation of a poetic death—the victim smothered by roses beside the singing waters of a brook. ...
— From Jungle to Java - The Trivial Impressions of a Short Excursion to Netherlands India • Arthur Keyser
... it all is to me," said Mrs. O'Shanaghgan, "I must take you in hand myself. But I do wish your Uncle George would invite you over to stay with them at The Laurels. It will do Terence a wonderful lot of good; but you want it more, you are so unkempt and undignified. You would be a fairly nice-looking girl if any justice was done to you; but really the other day, when I saw you with that terrible young person Bridget Murphy, it gave my heart quite a pang. You scarcely looked a lady, you were laughing in ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... pressed against her as she half turned from him, looked up at him, abashed and wondering, for to her small mind there was in this stranger something awe-inspiring. The sleek man in spotless, creaseless clothes, with polished boots and close-shaved, powdered, barbered face, was so different from her unkempt father that she could hardly believe him kin. Baal would have seemed as near to her, and had the idol stretched out his arms to take her into his destroying embrace, she could hardly have been more frightened than when she saw Mr. Blight's ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... was heard, and, accompanied by the boy, eight or ten men entered. All carried pikes. Between them and the men already in the hut an eager conversation took place. Harry felt far from easy. The aspect of the men was wild in the extreme. Their hair was long and unkempt, and fell in straggling masses over their shoulders. Presently one, who appeared to be the leader, approached Harry, who had now risen to his feet, and crossed himself on the forehead and breast. Harry understood by the action ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... little, unkempt, sun-bleached herd-boy there dwelt a very tender, chivalrous heart, and on his little sister Jean all his wealth, of affection had as yet been bestowed. Never did faithful knight serve his lady-love more devotedly than Geordie had this ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... terrifying and savage appearance than any of his ruffianly partners in crime, tattooed as he was from the back of his neck to his heels in broad, perpendicular lines. As he fixed his keen eyes upon the countenance of Corton his white teeth showed in a cruel smile through his tangled, unkempt moustache. ...
— The Ebbing Of The Tide - South Sea Stories - 1896 • Louis Becke
... impurities drift there, they must be burnt up as in a clear flame. It is droll that she should work in a pants factory. —Yet where else... tousled and collar awry at her olive throat. Besides her hands are unkempt. With English... and everything... there is so little time. She reads without bias— Doubting clamorously— Psychology, plays, science, philosophies— Those giant flowers that have bloomed and withered, scattering their seed... —And out of this young ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... and I see myself locked in a narrow cell on the fifth floor, a jug of water at my side, a piece of black bread in my hand, with unkempt hair and unshorn chin, and the image of Silvio Pellico before me; condemned to ten days' imprisonment for having made an address of thanks to the professor of chemistry on the occasion of his closing lecture, thereby committing an infraction of article number so- and-so ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Italian • Various
... over his farm. For this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam. He was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt, after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots. The house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of the house in Nankeen Square. There were certainly all the necessaries, but no luxuries ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... stood well out against a square-cut jaw and beneath a prominent nose; a pair of keen blue eyes looked out from beneath a tousled mass of crinkled hair. He wore neither hat nor cap; his attire was a carelessly put on Norfolk suit of brown tweed; he looked half-unkempt, half-groomed. But knotted at the collar of his flannel shirt were the colours of one of the most famous and exclusive cricket clubs in the world, and everybody knew that in his day their wearer had been a mighty figure in the ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... to him. He came over to my table. He never recognized me, so dull was he with disappointment ... me with my unshaven, unkempt appearance and in my mean German shoddy ... but stood silently, awaiting ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... under an elevated railroad structure; the street grew more narrow and—to tell the truth—Helen thought the place appeared rather dirty and unkempt. ...
— The Girl from Sunset Ranch - Alone in a Great City • Amy Bell Marlowe
... survivors were plainly starving, for they fell ravenously on the Eskimos' putrid whale meat. The next summer only two demented men were alive. They were clad in rabbit and fox skins. Their hair and beards had grown unkempt, and they acted like maniacs. Again the superstitious Eskimos fled in terror. Next summer when the savages came down to the coast no white men were alive. The wolves had scraped open a ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... of the road. They were rough-looking men in long brown cloaks that were in tatters at the edge; they wore round caps of mail on their heads, with a broad leathern strap under the chin; their faces were dark, their beards black and unkempt, and they rode small, ragged horses, as ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... so I polish them as you see; also, though I am dead tired, I shall have my hair brushed for half an hour before going to bed, and then steam my foolish face. It bores me profoundly, but it would bore me more to feel unkempt. So far as that goes, I should do exactly the same on twopence ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... successful gardening, not too far to prevent little feet from wandering thither from narrow courts and alleys, to breathe a purer air, and gaze, with longing eyes, at the fair blossoms. It always irritated Mrs. Crook to see these dirty, unkempt little creatures clustering around her gate, ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... He was utterly unkempt and slovenly. His coarse beard covered his lips, his matted hair was dull with dirt, his skin was scarcely less dark than that of the Indians themselves. The nails on his hands were foul; the floor of the house ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... figure framed in the entry. The man was of middle height, spare and slight and lean; his thin, eager face was bronzed with the suns and winds of a generation, and lined with the stern ciphers of malign experiences. His dark, straight hair was long and unkempt; the finer lines of his cheeks and chin were blurred with the uncropped growth of a week-old beard; his eyes were bright and quick; his glance restless and comprehensive. A cunning reader of features would have found a home for high thoughts behind ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... fancy, for they look half starved," said the old woman, astonished at the unkempt, unshorn, and hungry ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... looked at him, but without the slightest interest. He was a particularly unkempt person with the look of a fixed idea ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... along the quay, limping, with his hat on the back of his head, his beard unkempt, and dragging an old carpet-bag. He was almost repulsive; yet, in spite of his fifty years of age, he looked young, so clear and lustrous were his eyes, so much ingenuous audacity had been retained in ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... after her stealthily—not Uncle Mo; his weight on the old stairs would have made a noise. They stood side by side on the landing, just catching sight of the little poppet in the armchair, all unkempt gold and blue eyes, quite content with her personation of the beloved old presence it would never know again. Aunt M'riar could just follow Susan Burr's stifled whisper:—"She's being old Mrs. Picture, in ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the ever-faithful Lily. Her condition seemed as serious as when Sophy had arrived from England, ten months previously, she found the patient propped up among her pillows, weak, apathetic, and terribly wasted. She looked dreadfully ill and her whole appearance was unkempt and strange. ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... Captain. 'My lord!' exclaimed Hind, a blush upon his cheek, 'I protest my innocence; but willingly will I suffer the heaviest penalty of your law if I am recognised for the thief.' The victims, confronted with their robber, knew him not, picturing to the Governor a monster with long hair and unkempt beard. Hind, acquitted with apologies, fetched from his lodging the disguise of periwig and beard. 'They laugh who win!' he murmured, and thus forced forgiveness and a chuckle even ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... his rapid glance amongst the bracken Waller found himself face to face with a lad of about his own age—no poaching gipsy, given to preying upon the indwellers of the forest, but a strange-looking, wild-eyed being, sunken of cheek, hollow of eye, and with long unkempt hair hanging about his shoulders. Yet he was no threatening beggar, for, in spite of his garments being muddied, stained, and torn, he was well dressed, but menacing of aspect all the same; for as he stood there, bareheaded and fierce, there was ...
— The New Forest Spy • George Manville Fenn
... Big Pete now called me "Le-loo," which I understand is Chinook for wolf and I took so much pride in my promotion that I would not have changed clothes with the Prince of Wales; I gloried in my wild, unkempt appearance! ...
— The Black Wolf Pack • Dan Beard
... stage scene for a secret meeting of conspirators. In the daylight, the tower was ugly with its rubble of fallen stones—unkempt like a ragged tramp—but in the moonlight there was a glamour of ages in its mournful brooding. Elaine was right to make her sketch at night-time. Riviere placed the campstool for her, and watched her in silence as she plied her pencil with ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... which she would not close behind her. It seemed to shut her in with the dead. She waited in the passage. After an age—seven minutes by any honest clock—Grodman made his appearance, looking as dressed as usual, but with unkempt hair and with disconsolate side-whisker. He was not quite used to that side-whisker yet, for it had only recently come within the margin of cultivation. In active service Grodman had been clean-shaven, like all ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... Rivers in his shack. He looked as if he had been sitting where Northrup left him the night before. He was unkempt and haggard and there were broken bits of food on the untidy ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... Cowpunchers such as Tresler had heard of. Some were still wearing their fringed "chapps," their waists belted with gun and ammunition; some were in plain overalls and thin cotton shirts. All, except one, were tanned a dark, ruddy hue, unshaven, unkempt, but tough-looking and hardy. The pale-faced exception was a thin, sick-looking fellow with deep hollows under his eyes, and lips as ashen as a corpse. He it was who was talking, and his recital demanded a great display ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... voice of the landlady. I saw, when I opened the door, that she wanted to talk to me. I also saw, what I had not noticed in my hasty interview the night before, that she was superior to most of the women of her class. She had been grimy and unkempt the night before, after her long week's work of sweeping and cleaning and coal-carrying; but to-day, in her clean wrapper and smooth gray hair, there was a pathetic Sabbath-day air of cleanliness about her spare, bent figure. Somehow, I felt that she would ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... table habits, and, like a gourmet, spent hours at his meals merely to kill time; who threw himself into vicious ways, and contracted a loathsome disease; who lost all interest even in his troops, and finally, unkempt, preoccupied, and feverish, seemed indifferent to everything. The crown, scepter, and robe wherewith he had hoped to be invested as Emperor of the West were not unpacked from the camp chests. The pompous ceremonies of military occupation were scrupulously ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... The unkempt man swung on his heel with a growl and walked away, his course leading him towards Glenister and the girl. With two strides he was abreast of them; then, detecting the flashing movement of the other, he whirled like a wild animal. His voice ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... Pheasant, "you know Mr. St. Clair says, 'Dress is one of the fine arts,' and if it is, why of course we ought to cultivate it. Certainly, well-dressed men and women are more agreeable objects than rude and unkempt ones. There must be somebody whose mission it is to preside over the agreeable arts of life; and I suppose it falls to 'us girls.' That's the way I comfort myself, at all events. Then I must confess that I do like dress; I'm not cultivated enough to be a painter or a poet, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... led to the Scarrowmania's forward deck, and a stream of frowsy humanity that had just been released from overpacked emigrant boarding-houses poured up it. There were apparently representatives of all peoples and languages among that unkempt horde—Britons, Scandinavians, Teutons, Italians, Russians, Poles—and they moved on in forlorn apathy, like cattle driven to the slaughter. One wondered, from the look of them, how they had raised their passage money, and how many years' bitter self-denial ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... as a rule of action and as a comfort and consolation in suffering and death, it accomplishes perhaps just as much as the truth itself could achieve if we possessed it. Don't take offense at its unkempt, grotesque and apparently absurd form; for with your education and learning, you have no idea of the roundabout ways by which people in their crude state have to receive their knowledge of deep truths. The various ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... unkempt as he was, appeared in the great hall of the castle before its grey-headed commander, seated ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... night, but there was no pay forthcoming from the head of the house, who was still in Duke Street Prison. Walter looked at his mother fixedly for a moment, and the shadow deepened on his face. She was certainly an unlovely object in her dirty, unkempt gown, her hair half hanging on her neck, her heavy face looking as if it had not seen soap and water for long, her dull eyes unlit by any gleam of intelligence. Of late, since they had grown more dissipated in their habits, Walter had fallen on the plan of keeping ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... them spoils the other; the art is natural, and the nature artistic. I have found the oasis that you and I have dreamed of when reading novels,—nature luxuriant and adorned, rolling lines that are not confused, something wild withal, unkempt, mysterious, not common. Jump that green ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... quick of eye and gesture; quick of step, too. He seems always on the alert, as if surrounded continually with spirits. He is young, withal, or keeps so, at least, through the grace and ministration of Allah and the Virgin. His long unkempt hair and beard are innocent of a single white line. And his health? "Through my five and twenty years of seclusion," said he, "I have not known any disease, except, now and then, in the spring season, when the sap begins to flow, I am visited by Allah with chills and fever.—No; I eat ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... quarters of the town, they found broad, unkempt, and as yet unlevelled avenues and streets, where modest houses straggled, perched on high banks with an air of having found themselves there quite by accident. The banks were usually grass-covered, and ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thought the sexton; and he was frightened. He opened the doors carefully and stood back, peering into the darkness. Out past him rushed the figure of a man in tattered, scanty clothes, with unkempt hair and white, wild face. The sexton did not know that he had ever seen him before, but he looked long after him, wondering at ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... Sue, by dint of many and anxious inquiries, found him out, and put her queer little unkempt head ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... Indian peon, in coarse woollen tilma, tanned sheepskin trousers reaching only to the knee, bare legs below, guaraches upon his feet, and a straw hat upon his head; his long black hail hanging unkempt over his shoulders; his mien humble and looks downcast, like all of his tribe. Yet it might be seen that, on occasion, his eyes could flash forth a light, indicative of danger—a fierce, fiery light, such as may have shone in the orbs of his ancestors ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... lowering horizons. The long winter within doors. Faces appeared to him, faces of old, an endless procession of faces clear-cut as ever . . . his brother monks, bearded and unkempt . . . debauched acolytes . . . pilgrims from the Holy Land . . . glittering festal robes . . . vodka orgies, endless chants and litanies, holy lamps burning, somber eikons with staring eyes . . . the smell of greasy lukewarm cabbage soup, of unwashed ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... could hardly have had vis enough to move a Roman muscle.—He had two wigs, both pedantic, but of differing omen. The one serene, smiling, fresh powdered, betokening a mild day. The other, an old discoloured, unkempt, angry caxon, denoting frequent and bloody execution. Woe to the school, when he made his morning appearance in his passy, or passionate wig. No comet expounded surer.—J.B. had a heavy hand. I have known him double his knotty fist at a poor trembling child (the maternal milk hardly dry upon ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... and answered something in a low, moaning voice. Gemma came across to look, and saw a child of about six years old, ragged and dirty, crouching on the pavement like a frightened animal. The Gadfly was bending down with his hand on the unkempt head. ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... Vallombrosa, I may say at once, are Nature's, not man's. The monastery, which is now a Government school of forestry, is ugly and unkempt; the hotel is unattractive; the few people one meets want to sell something or take you for a drive. But in an instant in any direction one can be in the woods—and at this level they are pine woods, soft underfoot and ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... a separate table, sits Man, his gray, unkempt head leaning on his arms. In this position he remains throughout the scene, except during the one moment when he speaks. He is ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... the best they could expect to find for the little rent they were able to pay. Situated in one of the cheapest parts of Harlem, the flat was in a row of tenement-like buildings, facing a street always filled with noisy, unkempt children. The corridors and staircases were gaudily decorated and the narrow halls and small rooms, shut off from proper light and air, gave one a sense of suffocation. The furnishings were of the scantiest. Jimmie having incurred certain heavy debts, reckoning that the palmy days ...
— Bought and Paid For - From the Play of George Broadhurst • Arthur Hornblow
... 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 ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens
... upon her arms; useless tears started. Before that day she had had some joy in this cottage. There were glorious sunrises from the lake and sunsets over the desolate marshes. The rank swamp grasses were growing long, covering decently the unkempt soil. At night, alone, she had comfort in the multitudinous cries from the railroads that ribbed the prairie in this outskirt of the city. The shrieks of the locomotives were like the calls of great savage birds, raising their voices melodiously as they fled to and fro into the roaring ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... curiosity, and of gamblers of all grades from the professional expert to the "tin-horn," Houston found his way around the corner of the building, down into an alley, dark, dismal and reeking with filth. Here were groups of slatternly, unkempt women, some of whom stared at him with brazen faces, while others slunk away, not ...
— The Award of Justice - Told in the Rockies • A. Maynard Barbour
... interminable way, had left me ill-suited for the place, and I was ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, opposite the cathedral, watching its pinnacles of light; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the master a hurt by sitting there in his fine great cafe, unkempt, in such clothes, like a tramp; but he was courteous in spite of his riches, and I ordered a very expensive drink for him also, in order to make amends. I showed him my sketches, and told him of my adventures in French, and he was ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... the Twilight Country People I had seen, was a thick-set woman of perhaps thirty-five, although she might have been older, for her black hair, which fell in an unkempt mass to her waist, was beginning to gray. She wore a single garment, a pair of silken trousers, drab with dirt. Her clipped wings were ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... Capital of that Gau,—part of which, now under Christian or quasi-Christian circumstances, you have just been traversing, with Elbe on your right hand. Innocent rural aspects of Humanity, Boor's life, Gentry's life, all the way, not in any holiday equipment; on the contrary, somewhat unkempt and scraggy, but all the more honest and inoffensive. There is sky, earth, air, and freedom for your own reflections: a really agreeable kind of Gau; pleasant, though in part ugly. Large tracts of it are pine-wood, with pleasant Villages and fine arable ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Ferdinand of Bulgaria, coming up the gang-plank into the steerage, with their boxes on their backs. They looked so different in their rough clothes. Uncle William is wearing an old blue shirt and a red handkerchief round his neck, and his hair looks thin and unkempt, and his moustache draggled and his face unshaved. His eyes seem watery and wandering, and his little withered arm so pathetic. Is it possible he was ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... excuse for being was the huge bull-throat which supported it. It had been cast in a mould of elemental generousness, and everything about it partook of the asymmetrical crudeness of the elemental. The hair, rank of growth, thick and unkempt, matted itself here and there into curious splotches of gray; and again, grinning at age, twisted itself into curling locks of lustreless black—locks of unusual thickness, like crooked fingers, heavy and solid. The shaggy whiskers, almost bare in places, and in others massing into bunchgrass-like ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... recognized him. His frame was emaciated from sickness; his head was drawn back by the torture which he had suffered; he limped upon feet that had been distorted by the firebrands in McKee's hands; and his face was overgrown by an unkempt beard. ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... ports of French Indo-China there were but two—the Bonite, a French packet slightly larger than a Hudson River tugboat, which twice monthly makes the round trip between the Siamese capital and Saigon; and a Danish tramp; the Chutututch, an unkempt vagrant of the seas which wanders at will along the Gulf Coast, touching at those obscure ports where cargo or passengers are likely to be found. The Bonite swung at her moorings in the Menam, opposite my hotel windows, so, made cautious by previous ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... tall and handsome man, well-made, and bearing on his face the signs of pain which come of inward strength and secret endurance of sorrow. He wore one of those tight, frogged overcoats which were then called "polonaise." Thick, black hair, rather unkempt, covered his square head, and Clementine noticed his broad forehead shining like a block of white marble, for Paz held his visored cap in his hand. The hand itself was like that of the Infant Hercules. Robust health flourished on his face, which was divided by ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... with pride when she saw him in a duke's robe, with gold and lace and precious stones. Don Quixote thought so, too, but admonished him that he would have to shave his beard oftener, as it was most unkempt. Sancho replied that would be an easy matter, for he would have a barber of his own, as well as an equerry; he knew that all men of fame kept such a man, for once in Madrid he had seen a gentleman followed by a man on horseback as if he had been his tail. He inquired why ...
— The Story of Don Quixote • Arvid Paulson, Clayton Edwards, and Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... book to every one of them, but they have paid me scarce enough to purchase poison for them all," said the little poet scowling. The cheekbones stood out sharply beneath the tense bronzed skin. The black hair was tangled and unkempt and the beard untrimmed, the eyes darted venom. "One of them—Gideon, M.P., the stockbroker, engaged me to teach his son for his Bar-mitzvah, But the boy is so stupid! So stupid! Just like his father. I have no doubt he will grow up to be a Rabbi. I teach him his Portion—I sing the words ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in this epigram, as characteristic of the American point of view, than its author intended or would, perhaps, allow. In private life this is seen in the preference shown for diamond earrings and Paris toilettes over neat and effective household service. The contrast between the slatternly, unkempt maid-servant who opens the door to you and the general luxury of the house itself is sometimes of the most startling, not to say appalling, description. It is not a sufficient answer to say that good servants are not so easily obtained in America as ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... living-room; his wide, spraddled legs seemed rooted through the big feet into the floor. Big-framed and bony, with startlingly black restless eyes and a three or four days' growth of wiry beard no less lustrously black, he was ragged, unkempt, and unthinkably dirty. His eyes roved all about the room; they came back to Gratton, sped up the steps, came back to Gratton with a leer in them, and all the while he turned and turned his black dusty hat like a man doing a job he ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... these—sick and wounded—that were led or tramped up to the front of the Hakim's tent, and there paused or were set down, a dreadful row, horrible of aspect, bandaged, unkempt, vilely dirty, feeble, and hopeless. They made no complaint, sent up no appeal, but sat or lay there gazing at the handsome, polished gentleman seated blandly before them, the mark of all those pleading, imploring ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... The little unkempt figure, in its soiled knickerbocker suit, the sunny hair all uncared for, the gay plaid tie draggled and limp, rushed into my arms with ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... school. About the school I remember very little, only that there was a large room with a blackboard, stifling air in spite of the fact that the windows were always open, and an endless number of boys in baize and linen jackets, unkempt and barefoot, or in wooden shoes, which made a fearful noise. It was very sad. But even then, as unfortunately in later years, I had so few pleasing illusions about going to school that the conditions previously described to me did not ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... our greetings with good fellowship, I am afraid we regarded them a little enviously, for the value of some of their horses would have sown us a crop, and even Harry seemed unkempt beside them. We lived and dressed very plainly at Fairmead that year. Then amid a grinding of brakes, with lights flashing, a long train rolled in, and the group stood, fur cap in hand, about the ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... those two weeks had produced in that handsome American youth! Unwashed, unkempt, dazed by the light of day he had been kept from so long, his most intimate friends would not have ...
— The Boy Nihilist - or, Young America in Russia • Allan Arnold
... rough exterior of the little school vied with the unkempt school grounds. Both supplied subjects for artistic treatment. To the consternation of the poet and the romancer, the modern one-room school is painted, and the school yard, instead of being filled with ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... knowed it!" a voice at once fond and threatening called to Reverdy's quailing figure. The owner of the voice was a young woman unkempt as to the pale hair which escaped from the knot at her neck, and stuck out there and dangled about her face in spite of the attempts made to gather it under the control of the high horn comb holding its main strands together. The lankness of her ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells
... spoke, a lean, unkempt figure invested with a curious dignity, and I found it almost impossible to believe that this was the same man who had sat in the bar of the Lavender Arms, sipping whisky and water. The resemblance to the portrait in Harley's office became ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... grow here in great abundance—the finest in the world—with their lower leaves pendent, sere and yellow; the figs, lemons, apricots and pomegranates clustering in savage meshes of unpruned boughs among which the vine, likewise unkempt, writhes and clambers liana-fashion, in crazy convolutions—all these things conspire to give to certain parts of the oasis, notwithstanding its high cultivation, a bearded, primeval look. The palms, particularly the young ones, are assiduously tended and groomed by half-naked gardeners ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... rubbing with a good nailbrush in the morning before your meals and before you go to bed at night. The nail file and nail scissors must be used as often as possible. Remember, dirty finger nails betray the vulgar and the unkempt. A man with dirty ...
— The Complete Bachelor - Manners for Men • Walter Germain
... was not of European blood, he was handsome, but not of European beauty. His face white—not of a Northern whiteness; his eyes protruding somewhat, and rolling in their grief. Those eyes had seen the Orient sun, and his beak was the eagle's. His lips were full. The beard, curling round them, was unkempt and tawny. The locks were of a deep, deep coppery red. The hands, swart and powerful, accustomed to the rough grasp of the wares in which he dealt, seemed unused to the flimsy artifices of the bath. He came from the Wilderness, and its sands were on his robe, his cheek, his tattered sandal, ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... able seamen (or "full-marrows"), the ordinary seamen (or "half-marrows") never dreamed of signifying their pleasure to him save with a kick or an open-handed blow. His only time of peace came when it was his watch below, and he could lay his poor little unkempt head easily in his hammock. In bad weather he took his chance with the men. The icy gusts roared through the rigging; the cold spray smote him and froze on him; green seas came over and forced him to hold on wheresoever he might. ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... Manning's lonely house he discovered that Rude Boreas could be as keen a sharpshooter as any in the rifle-pits around Richmond. A hard walk up-hill for a quarter of an hour brought him to the brow of the cliff on which stood the forlorn and wind-swept house where John Manning lay. An unkempt and hideous old crone as black as night opened the door for him. He left in the hall his hat and overcoat and a little square box he had brought in his hand; and then he followed the ebony hag up-stairs to Colonel Manning's room. Here at the door she left him, after giving ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... before was efficacious in preserving the eyes from disease. So the plant was collected, dipped in oil, and thus transformed into a balm for every wound." Here it is a naturalized, not a native, immigrant. A blooming plant, usually with many sterile shoots about its base, has an unkempt, untidy look; the seed capsules and the brown petals of withered flowers remaining among the bright yellow buds through a long season. No nectar is secreted by the St. John's-worts, therefore only pollen collectors visit them ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... ragged-looking rabble, those traders from mountain fastnesses and the Arctic circle. With long white hair, hatless some of them, with beards like oriental patriarchs, and dressed entirely in skins of the chase, from fringed coats to gorgeous moccasins, the unkempt monarchs of northern realms had the imperious ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... Lancers kept straight on for five or six hundred yards, until they encountered their regimental quartermaster and camping party. Then they wheeled to the right, passed through a thin belt of shade trees, across a splendid marl drive and a vast unkempt lawn. Beyond this they skirted a typical planter's house of the better class, with its white galleries, green blinds, quarters, smoke houses, barns, and outhouses innumerable; and halted, each troop moving to a point a little in the rear of ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... to the taffrail, decided that this unkempt pirate was not so absurd as he appeared. There was the strength of a giant in those hulking shoulders and in the long arms which bulged the coat-sleeves, and the man moved with a quickness which made that clumsy air deceptive. The ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... receive him. From boots to Stetson his khaki trousers and rough shirt were stained with mud and grime, his eyes were sunken in dark hollows, his worn face was unshaven and his hair, when he removed his hat, was unkempt. He did not look like a hero; he looked more like some ruffian just from a prolonged debauch. But the little party burst ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... streams, alive with trout. Kit Carson was the first white man to look down upon its beautiful valleys. Others soon followed: Joel Estes, for whom the Park was eventually named; "Rocky Mountain Jim," a two-gun man, living alone with his dogs, looking like a bearded, unkempt pirate, taciturn, yet not without charm, as later events proved, unmolesting and unmolested, enveloped in a haze of respected mystery. There was also that noted lady globe-trotter, Miss Isabella Bird, an Englishwoman of undoubted refinement, highly educated—whose volume, "A Lady's Life in the ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... a glance caught sight of no one else, but of a very aged bonze, of unkempt appearance, cooking his rice. When Y-ts'un perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... it with Mr. Moggridge, to whose lodgings his steps were bending. The Poet, as Sam entered, was seated as nearly as possible on the small of his back before the breakfast table. If mental anguish can be expressed by unkempt hair and a disordered cravat, that of Mr. Moggridge was extreme; and the untasted bloater, pushed aside and half concealed by the newspaper, ...
— The Astonishing History of Troy Town • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... certain willfulness and impatience in her attitude. Being in the shadow, she had the advantage of the others, particularly of Jack, as his figure was fully revealed in the moonlight against the snowbank. Her eyes rested for a moment on his high boots, his heavy mustache, so long as to mingle with the unkempt locks which fell over his broad shoulders, on his huge red hands streaked with black grease from the wagon wheels, and some blood, stanched with snow, drawn from bruises in cutting out brambles in the brush; on—more awful than all—a monstrous, shiny ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... glaucous-green; ridges about eight, broad, prominent, obscurely tubercled; spines in bundles of nine, radiating, straight, less than 1 in. long, and pale yellow. Upon the growing part of the stem, the spines are intermingled with long, white, cottony hairs, often matted together like an unkempt head; these hairs fall off as the stem matures. Flowers funnel-shaped, resembling Canterbury Bells, borne in a cluster on the summit of the plant; ovary short and scaly; petals joined at the base, and coloured a rosy-purple, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... angry again. "They're horrible men! rude, unkempt, low-down, common men! I won't have them in my house! You have no right to insist on it. They'll be all over the rooms, prying into everything, looking here, there and all over! They'll ask impertinent questions; they'll assume all sorts of things that aren't true, and they'll wind ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... a sound. All the riders were still. Slone fastened his eyes on Creech. He saw a gaunt, haggard face almost black with dust—worn and sad—with big eyes of terrible gloom. He saw an unkempt, ragged form that had been wet and muddy, and was ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... to bring them in, not telling him that we suspected the character of the strangers. As they approached we anxiously examined their appearance, which was certainly not in their favour. They were savage-looking fellows with long beards, their unkempt hair hanging over their shoulders. They pulled up suddenly when they saw us standing with our backs to a couple of large trees, our baggage and saddles piled on the ground, ...
— Adventures in Australia • W.H.G. Kingston
... unoccupied—there was some one in it lying straight across the seats, with face turned upwards to the sky—and, walking noiselessly to a better post of observation, Errington's heart beat with some excitement as he recognized the long, fair, unkempt locks, and eccentric attire of the strange personage who had confronted him in the cave—the crazy little man who had called himself "Sigurd." There he was, beyond a doubt, lying flat on his back with his eyes closed. Asleep or dead? He might have been the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... watching the old man, as he tipped the great bowl toward his face, as though it were some wild animal feeding. The clothes were patched and worn, the coat-front was spattered with stains of all kinds, the hair and beard were unkempt and long, giving him what would have been the look of a mangy lion but that the face had the expression of some beast less honorable. The eyes, however, were malignantly intelligent; the hands, ill-cared for, were long, well-shaped, ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... Nerval, not to mention others, there is something which is at once "weird and wanting," as the admirable Captain Mayne Reid says at the beginning of The Headless Horseman, though one cannot say here, as there, "By Heavens! it is 'the head!'" There is head enough of a kind—a not at all unkempt or uncomely headpiece, very well filled with brains. But it has no aureole, as the other preferred persons cited in the last sentence and earlier have. This aureole may be larger or smaller, brighter or less bright—a full ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... officer, whose flat face was surmounted by an immense white plume, and whose person was adorned by an enormous white scarf, and a sword with elaborate hilt. This dignitary was considerably excited when he beheld the strangers; he clapped his hat more firmly on his head, stroked his unkempt beard, and began to give audience. After a few preliminary remarks, the travelers told him that they had weighty business to transact with the heads of the government. They refused, however, to give any account of its purport. This statement wounded the dignity of the authority ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... ill and failed to drive home. That is what I have come down now to do my best to make plainer. This age of confusion is Democracy; it is all that Democracy can ever give us. Democracy, if it means anything, means the rule of the planless man, the rule of the unkempt mind. It means as a necessary consequence this vast boiling up of collectively ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... 'compassion.' Then the king on the throne called him to come forward, and, as he went, he caught sight of himself reflected in the polished steel shield of the bodyguard, and started back in horror! He was old, decrepit, dirty, and ragged! His long white beard and locks were unkempt, and straggled all over his chest and shoulders. Only one sign of royalty remained to him, and that was the signet ring upon his right hand. He dragged it off with shaking fingers and held ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... softly through the most crowded thoroughfare, far below the speed limit, with a sigh of gentle satisfaction in its own harmlessness, and, "like the sweet South, taking and giving odor." The streets that he saw so filthy and unkempt in 1893 are now at least as clean as they are quiet. Asphalt has universally replaced the cobble-stones and Belgian blocks of his day, and, though it is everywhere full of holes, it is still asphalt, and may some time be ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... he speaks again," cried Mr Raydon, coolly, as the rough-looking men clustered together, dirt-stained, unkempt, and drenched with water some of them, and all anxiously handling their pieces. There was a low angry murmur from the ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... girl who, like Augusta, was fond of the uncommon, and hated smooth, facile and well-tailored young men, with the labels of society and fashion upon their coats, their mustaches, and their speech. And Strand, with his large sun-burned face, his wild-growing beard, blue woolen shirt, top boots, and unkempt appearance generally, was a sufficiently startling phenomenon to satisfy even so exacting a fancy as hers; for, after reading his book about the Wading Birds, she had made up her mind that he must have few points of resemblance to the men who had hitherto formed part of her own small world, ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... himself was obnoxious to Trent. His immaculate fatigue-uniform, his calm superciliousness, his obvious air of belonging to a superior class, were galling to Trent beyond measure. He himself felt the difference—he realised his ignorance, his unkempt and uncared-for appearance. Perhaps, as the two men walked side by side, some faint foreshadowing of the future showed to Trent another and a larger world where they two would once more walk side by ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... most thrilling moment in that sensational trial was reached on the second day, when David Graham, looking wretchedly ill, unkempt, and haggard, stepped into the witness-box. A murmur of sympathy went round the audience at sight of him, who was the second, perhaps, most deeply stricken victim of ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... time they had reached the apple tree it was quite dark. Large drops of rain, the roar of thunder, and the glare of lightning told Tom that he was none too soon. He ran through the unkempt garden, and was quickly at the door. A sinister looking place it was even in daylight, and now revealed by an occasional lightning flash, the house seemed but a wreck of former stateliness. Not a light was visible within, and to Tom's loud and ...
— The Dare Boys of 1776 • Stephen Angus Cox
... of this same tenth of August, Charles Langholm, the minor novelist, never lifted his unkempt head from the old bureau at which he worked, beside an open window overlooking his cottage garden. A tumbler of his beloved roses stood in one corner of the writing space, up to the cuts in MSS., and roses still ungathered ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung |
