United States or Equatorial Guinea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Carter bent over the plotted page anxiously while his man stood at his elbow. "Germany won't do," said Calvert. "I hate the very sight of a wasp-waisted, self-sufficient Prussian subaltern. They're everywhere. Imperial arrogance seems to pervade even their beer gardens." His voice trailed off into silence again, as in a preoccupied manner his finger wandered over the map.

Here, mingled together, may be seen soldiers of the Swiss guard, with their shining helmets, long halberds, and party-colored uniforms, designed by Michel Angelo, chamberlains of the Pope, all in black, with their high ruffs, Spanish cloaks, silken stockings, and golden chains, contadini from the mountains, in their dully brilliant costumes and white tovaglie, common laborers from the Campagna, with their black mops of tangled hair, forestieri of every nation, Englishmen, with long, light, pendant whiskers, and an eye-glass stuck in one eye, Germans, with spectacles, frogged coats, and long, straight hair put behind their ears and cut square in the neck, then Americans, in high-heeled patent-leather boots, a black dress-coat, and a black satin waistcoat, and wasp-waisted French officers, with baggy trousers, a goat-beard, and a pretentious swagger.

Knock him down, I say." "You tend to your own business and I'll tend to mine. Go away from here, and don't say anything to make him madder, you wasp-waisted errand boy," said Si savagely, as he thrust himself in between the Aid and Shorty. "I've got enough to do to take care of him. Go off, if you don't want him to mash you." Little Pete had an idea.

Here, just off Broadway, was a famous barber- shop a spotless place with white interior and tiled walls. Six Italians in stiff duck coats practised their arts at a row of well-equipped chairs. A wasp-waisted girl sat at the manicure- table next the front windows.

It is a little startling at first to see women walking about in what, to our perverted tastes, look like calico or black stuff night-gowns; but the dress grows on you as you become accustomed to it; it lends itself readily to bright ornamentation; it is eminently fit for the climate; and a stately Hawaiian dame, marching through the street in black holaku as the dress is called with a long necklace, or le, of bright scarlet or brilliant yellow flowers, bare and untrammeled feet, and flowing hair, surmounted often by a low-crowned felt hat, compares very favorably with a high-heeled, wasp-waisted, absurdly-bonneted, fashionable white lady.

But it was borne in upon me that if these gold-braceletted, monocled, wasp-waisted exquisites could go jauntily forth for flirtations with death as afore-time I had seen them going, then also they could be marvelously modest touching on their own performances in the event of their surviving those most fatal blandishments.

If the dress of the male portion of the populace was simple, that of the female was the reverse. An elaborate and tight-fitting bodice, cut excessively low at the neck, covered, or affected to cover, the upper part of the body, which is so wasp-waisted as to suggest universal tight-lacing.

"A wasp-waisted West Pointer, raw from school; thinks he's learned all there's to know about war out of a book on triggernometry. Has no more feelin' for a private soljer than I have for a mule. Calls 'em 'my men, roared Jerry. "And as he's only a Second Lieutenant he'll have the first vote," sighed the Orderly. "And Lieut. Bowersox is to be the Judge-Advocate. He'll have to do the prosecuting.

At dinner hour thirty-odd basement dining rooms reverberated, not uncheerfully, to the ironstone clatter of the canary-bird bathtub of succotash, the three stewed prunes, or the redolent boiled potato, and on Saturday mornings, almost to the thirty-odd of them, wasp-waisted, oiled-haired young negro girls in white-cotton stockings and cut-down high shoes enormously and rather horribly run down of heel, tilted pints of water over steep stone stoops and scratched at the trickle with old broom runts.

The whole country was a network of deep lanes, sunk between impenetrable hedgerows, inclosing small fields, orchards, and thickets, and gently undulating in low hills and shallow valleys, interspersed with tall wasp-waisted windmills airily waving their arms on the top of lofty masts.