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scanty
in a sentence

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  • Backing away, she left the feather and ran to the shack and locked the screen door, which she seldom did since it offered scant protection.†   (source)
  • 'I fear there is not, my friend, and that you would receive scant encouragement from further encounters with my writing.†   (source)
  • — and we're a scant fifty yards downstream.†   (source)
  • Quite a few of the rest were shamelessly bawdy, painted with scantily clad and unclad women.†   (source)
  • "Don't worry, my dear," she said, in a tone that indicated scant hope.†   (source)
  • But Claude paid those files scant attention.†   (source)
  • She noticed a drowsy hush overtaking Kabul Traffic became languid, scant, even quiet.†   (source)
  • Thomas had a hard time adjusting to the brightness, shielding his eyes and squinting as they walked close to the wall to stay in the scant shade.†   (source)
  • By no means were those two scant meals enough to satisfy my hunger, but they were more than I had ever been given in Plaszow, more than I'd had at one time in nearly two years.†   (source)
  • My grandmother observed that television was draining what scant life remained in the old people "clean out of them"; yet she instantly craved a TV of her own!†   (source)
  • THE HERMES crew enjoyed their scant personal time in an area called "the Rec."†   (source)
  • The odor of old age, of dust, of unwashed clothes and stale food intensified as the unwound a moth-eaten black shawl, revealing a head of scant white hair through which the scalp showed clearly.†   (source)
  • MOLLY'S OWN CHILDHOOD MEMORIES ARE SCANT AND PARTIAL.†   (source)
  • The family allowed Nat scanty nods of acknowledgment, but William did not alter a muscle of his tight-clenched jaw.†   (source)
  • But after eighteen years of Gogol, two months of Nikhil feel scant, inconsequential.†   (source)
  • There was scant warmth to be found in Castle Black; the walls were cold here, and the people colder.†   (source)
  • A scantily clad woman rubs herself against a quacking duck to sell furniture.†   (source)
  • I'm sure the clique of giggling girls behind me that are scantily, yet expensively clad, are expecting my reaction to be to drop my things and run to the nearest restroom crying.†   (source)
  • V. QUITE HONESTLY, MY DECK ER grandparents were the last thing on my mind, which was just as well since Social Services was unable to run them down right away on the scanty information I had given them.†   (source)
  • He had whirled Danny around to spank him, his big adult fingers digging into the scant meat of the boy's forearm, meeting around it in a closed fist, and the snap of the breaking bone had not been loud, not loud but it had been very loud, HUGE, but not loud.†   (source)
  • Subsequently Nelson began each day by standing with his face three inches from the framed mirror and laboriously combing his scant hair in our living room, while smiling so broadly we feared his molars would pop out.†   (source)
  • My mom and I had pooled our resources to supplement my winter wardrobe, but it was still scanty.†   (source)
  • For Burnham, each lost moment was a theft from the already scanty fund of time allotted to build the exposition.†   (source)
  • Her job was to be a lonely housewife and invite him in, scantily clad and desperate for company.†   (source)
  • They had brought scraps from garbage pails and even tidbits from their own scanty plates smuggled past watchful mothers, and Mr. Hashbaz had remained sleek and fat.†   (source)
  • A peasant from one village may be completely incapable of conversing with a peasant from another village only scant miles away.†   (source)
  • Dunlop managed a scant shrug when I asked him not to discuss the lessons with anyone.†   (source)
  • Moments like these the twins treasured, and threaded like precious beads, on a (somewhat scanty) necklace.†   (source)
  • It was like we were doing one of those elaborate Modegan court dances, where the partners stand scant inches apart, but—if they are skilled—never touch.†   (source)
  • Nathaniel descended a circular staircase to the basement, then walked down a long hall and into a carpeted space with one belowground window that threw scant light into the room.†   (source)
  • When the banns were announced at High Mass in the Cathedral, Fermina Daza received anonymous letters again, some of them containing death threats, but she took scant notice of them because all the fear of which she was capable was centered on her imminent violation.†   (source)
  • Her figure was good but scant: tall and with its curves gone to slimness.†   (source)
  • Like me, he's tired and content just to sit under the scant shade of these trees.†   (source)
  • After a night or two, a string of folks complained about the scantily clad female sales team in his booth, and a couple of concerned citizens finally had to get on him and tell him the lemonade girls needed to put on more clothes.†   (source)
  • In appearance he was tidy and meticulous, storklike and slender—though not so thin as Art Moran—and wore his starched trousers high on his narrow waist and his scant hair slicked from right to left with pomade.†   (source)
  • Quinn held herself to one scant spoon of sugar.†   (source)
  • Scant trees, especially after Mirebalais.†   (source)
  • The ones closer to the float were all looking at the scantily clad girls.†   (source)
  • I blinked several times in succession, helping my eyes hurry and adapt to the scant light.†   (source)
  • Eragon's own wards were scant.†   (source)
  • A herd of several hundred Hereford bore the Clutter brand, though one would not have suspected it from the scant contents of the livestock corral, which was reserved for ailing steers, a few milking cows, Nancy's cats, and Babe, the family favorite-an old fat workhorse who never objected to lumbering about with three and four children astride her broad back.†   (source)
  • Josie sat on the hood of Matt's Saab in the student parking lot, thinking that it was closer to summer than it was to the start of this school year, that in a scant three months, she would officially be a member of the senior class.†   (source)
  • The driveway curved around to the back, to a yard populated by a large dirty barking mongrel and scantily clad barefoot children running in the snow.†   (source)
  • But it's not Alex's black eyes staring at my scantily clad body.†   (source)
  • He smiles, revealing a scant handful of teeth.†   (source)
  • Cresting the top, time moves into overtime as you wait for that scant hesitation, just before you drop knowing you can't turn back.†   (source)
  • A rock path and a scanty one at that.†   (source)
  • She'll turn that dial to a dead stop and freeze the sun there on the screen so it don't move a scant hair for weeks, so not a leaf on a tree or a blade of grass in the pasture shimmers.†   (source)
  • It was a dripping-sweet spring morning, dew-drenched, and with the air so full of moisture that it gathered and pattered from the scant leafage.†   (source)
  • Aside from the fact that selling a house is typically the largest financial transaction in your life, and that you probably have scant experience in real estate, and that you may have an enormous emotional attachment to your house, there are at least two pressing fears: that you will sell the house for far less than it is worth and that you will not be able to sell it at all.†   (source)
  • It was true that the man was a dreadful gossip, and a gossip, moreover, who had scant materials to work with.†   (source)
  • The grass was scanty, coarse, and grey; and the leaves in the thickets were faded and falling.†   (source)
  • For a scant few minutes, that twinkling bathroom became a world unto itself; a cocoon far away from trouble and war.†   (source)
  • He lived a scant two years with his wife, and they had a son.†   (source)
  • He checked their papers with the scantest of scrutiny.†   (source)
  • At length Lieutenant Awn slept again, and by the time she woke I had hired boats to take us to the mouth of the river, near Kould Ves, and loaded them with our scant luggage, and my dead segment.†   (source)
  • But for men with scant clothing and broken shoes, or no shoes, it was again an extreme ordeal.†   (source)
  • And since this was obviously the case, it might be profitable for the scum to pursue a little knowledge, for as the bromide declared, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing-frequently more so in the eyes of the beholder than in the one possessing scant tidbits of information, so slanted as to appear many times more.†   (source)
  • This year, the hay stooks are few and the woodpile scant, and neither matters much to me.†   (source)
  • One was fair, a little scantily dressed, in a glittering short skirt and spangled top.†   (source)
  • Her trust in outsiders is scant.†   (source)
  • They knew and we knew that we were a scant two weeks away from being upperclassmen.†   (source)
  • The big man in the striped shirt was now standing, though his broad black hands still clung to the two women's scantily clad breasts.†   (source)
  • His neatly clipped black hair, silvery about the temples with scant patches of grayness, reminded me of my father's head ten years before, those dense shines of hair.†   (source)
  • Fortunately, vegetables were cheap in a farming area, and we purchased what we could with our scanty means from the Biondos, an Italian family that had a commercial truck farm a few miles down the road.†   (source)
  • The next place they passed had no sign naming its location, and the scant number of buildings and few people they saw didn't seem enough to justify a name.†   (source)
  • Most planets are not at this level of advancement when contacted and most would not have had the ability to respond within a scant seven years of first contact.†   (source)
  • Out of all that time, time aching itself away, his memory sputtered around those scant hours of horror.†   (source)
  • When his phone made strange noises, and the operator would not respond, he listened to the scanty, thirty-second local news broadcasts.†   (source)
  • From scanty facts and suppositions such as these, scientists had concluded that the Overlords came from a world of low gravity and very dense atmosphere.†   (source)
  • I said with scant interest.†   (source)
  • Now, though, I reviewed what scanty knowledge I did possess on the subject.†   (source)
  • Germany had surrendered that spring, and what scant news filtered into the backwoods of Florida that summer told of a Japan so devastated that its only effective resistance was the suicide of kamikaze pilots.†   (source)
  • Sir, reverse is nine six, miles twelve scant.†   (source)
  • She was very large; her hair was scant, stretched over her head to a bun at the nape of her thick neck.†   (source)
  • A few scant moments still remain And then a silence as of the grave will fall.†   (source)
  • Nathan at first paid scant attention to her: he had wanted a son to continue his line and walk beside him on the land, not a puling infant who would take with her a dowry and leave nothing but a memory behind; but soon she stopped being a puling infant, and when at the age of ten months she called him "Apa," which means father, he began to take a lively interest in her.†   (source)
  • The wind had shaken loose their gray and scanty hair.†   (source)
  • the scanty light afforded by the old man's lamp   (source)
    scanty = small in amount
  • his father, prospering now, would have paid his way--for the precarious advantage of attending an older and more famous university in the East, where he was bothered by his scanty funds.   (source)
    scanty = small in amount -- often inadequate
  • In the next to last unit, there was the scantest flicker of light.†   (source)
  • We must value ourselves however and wherever we appear, even in the scantest proportion.†   (source)
  • He scants Viserys shamefully, in my view.†   (source)
  • Just now I can hear the scantest inflection of her Chinese, that rampant hyawr sound.†   (source)
  • Only a flickering of candles provided the scantest hint of illumination in the church.†   (source)
  • We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. how subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls.†   (source)
  • I had a quarter tank of gas, half a can of iced tea, nothing to eat, no warm clothes, a map that scanted the details.†   (source)
  • But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned.†   (source)
  • My initial impulse is to tell Veronica how she's absolutely right, how in this world (or the one we've made) beauty is the scantest blessing, and how, despite the appearance of ever-bestowed glory and celebration, it is mostly malice and misery that are returned to the bearer.†   (source)
  • The nuns stand outside the van watching the kid finish the last scanted word and then see him yanked skyward in the cutting wind.†   (source)
  • There was also a scant amount of yellow fat.†   (source)
  • What I'd really like to do is talk with the women, but I see scant chance of that.†   (source)
  • Crake was among the scant handful of Jimmy's friends that his mother liked.†   (source)
  • A cloud of dust fogged its way toward them, choking off the scant light from the food room.†   (source)
  • That long-standing peace and safety will be over in a scant handful of years.†   (source)
  • Would Mercy's scant strength be equal to this burden?†   (source)
  • The central authorities were allotting scant food to Ofuna, but this wasn't the half of it.†   (source)
  • Dothraki customs had scant appeal for him.†   (source)
  • On her scalp, carefully hidden by her scanty hair, Mammachi had raised, crescent-shaped ridges.†   (source)
  • The body's water is scant enough 'thout gushing a wasteful lot of it into the air.†   (source)
  • This intelligence was scant, but provided a pretext upon which the entire tale could be rehashed.†   (source)
  • Tyrion Lannister had scant experience with other dwarfs.†   (source)
  • The scant delay, the stay in time that lasts a hairsbreadth.†   (source)
  • She had paid scant attention to his reports.†   (source)
  • We will find scant shelter here, Jon thought gloomily.†   (source)
  • The islands are stern and stony places, scant of comfort and bleak of prospect.†   (source)
  • I paid scant attention to the lights in my rearview mirror.†   (source)
  • Rivers was a ruddy man with scant resemblance to his half brothers.†   (source)
  • My sleep is fitful and scanty, haunted by the Commandant's threat.†   (source)
  • As I pass the stable tent, I see Kinko standing in its scant shade.†   (source)
  • Suddenly, she caught the sheen of something down the road between the scant greenery.†   (source)
  • It had been a cruel year of scant harvest, and many women miscarried.†   (source)
  • Victarion wants a kingdom, not a few scant yards of earth.†   (source)
  • A scant fifty feet separated Thorn and Saphira by then.†   (source)
  • The boy screamed and tottered, a windmill again, arms gyrating through the scant air.†   (source)
  • Only a scant amount of daylight filtered down to the base of Tronjheim.†   (source)
  • The people were gone, vanished with their scant possessions and whatever animals they may have had.†   (source)
  • Much has been written about Eyam—books, plays, even an opera—yet facts remain scant.†   (source)
  • Summed up like that, his life seemed a rather scant and mingy thing.†   (source)
  • The light was so dim that Jaime could scarcely see her, though they stood a scant few feet apart.†   (source)
  • This was the third club we'd stopped at and my scant sense of bearing lay in ruins.†   (source)
  • Jaime's own page was scant by comparison.†   (source)
  • The storm raged about him, but he took scant notice of its fury.†   (source)
  • The cracked and warped wooden door of apartment 2792 looked like it had been put there a thousand years ago, only a few scant remnants of faded green paint remaining.†   (source)
  • Their knowledge of the deadly effects of extreme altitude was scant, and their equipment was pathetically inadequate by modern standards.†   (source)
  • Enquiries such as mine are ineffective, unless the trust of the subject may be gained; but judging from my knowledge of penal institutions, I suspect Grace has had scant reason to trust anyone at all for a very long period of time.†   (source)
  • For now, the white on the ground was scant, pocked from here to the steep hillsides with pale brown blotches of earth.†   (source)
  • To Laila, it is a blur of yellow dust and black tents and scanty structures made of corrugated-steel sheets.†   (source)
  • Certainly this volume was of scant interest to Winifred, nor had Richard ever been found leafing fondly through it.†   (source)
  • Gerald and Lydia are tanner, leaner, a bit scantily dressed, Lydia in a white tank top and a denim wrap skirt, Gerald in wrinkled blue shorts, a green polo shirt faded with use.†   (source)
  • Her belongings, all that she brought with her from the Thibodeaus', fill a scant three shelves in the closet.†   (source)
  • Consumed by the great drive toward wealth and power that had begun after the end of the Civil War, America seemed to have scant interest in celebrating its distant past.†   (source)
  • It was as if another Overlook now lay scant inches beyond this one, separated from the real world (if there is such a thing as a "real world," Jack thought) but gradually coming into balance with it.†   (source)
  • He douses his head in the scant basin of lukewarm water brought by the chambermaid, who doubles as the scullery maid downstairs; the water smells of onions.†   (source)
  • He'd paid scant attention to superficial traits like coat color, but bones mattered, and straight fronts, which meant bad angulation in the dog's forelegs, were hard to eliminate from a line.†   (source)
  • This scant news made Harry want to see Ginny so badly it felt like a stomachache; but it also made him think of Ron again, and of Dumbledore, and of Hogwarts itself, which he missed nearly as much as his ex-girlfriend.†   (source)
  • But the Rev. Mr. Merrill was a man who took to wallowing in guilt; his remorse, after all; was all he had to cling to—especially after his scant courage left him, and he was forced to acknowledge that he would never be brave enough to abandon his miserable wife and children for my mother.†   (source)
  • Two hundred years later, they were joined by runaway slaves, who escaped into the marsh and were called maroons, and freed slaves, penniless and beleaguered, who dispersed into the water-land because of scant options.†   (source)
  • I see emaciated arms dangling over the sides, dark matchstick legs protruding from stained sheets, scant-toothed mouths open.†   (source)
  • Molly e-mailed the link for the application form to herself at school, where she printed it off for Vivian to fill in, a scant two pages, with the names of the town, the hospital, the adoption agency.†   (source)
  • I used to hang around her school at day's end, positioning myself on park benches, in spots where I might waylay her — no, where I might have been recognized by her, though there was scant chance of that.†   (source)
  • And although Grandmother was perfectly tolerant of my solitary disruption of the adult life at 80 Front Street—and even moderately tolerant of the games I would play in that old house with Owen—she had scant patience for the disruption caused in any house by all her grandchildren.†   (source)
  • From below the scanty curtain that was stretched across the doorway that led directly onto the street came the relentless slip-slap of disembodied feet in slippers.†   (source)
  • He waved off the rickshaw coolies clustered near the dock and walked all the way from the naval base, following the scant directions he'd been given, through the crowds in the Kweng Li market square, past the vendors selling roosters in crude rattan crates and pigs' heads and poisonous-looking fish lying blue and gutted and gaping on racks, past gray octopi in glass jars, past old women hawking kimchee and bulgoki, until he crossed the Tong Gang on the Bridge of Woes, the last landmark…†   (source)
  • Six hundred here, two hundred in the Shadow Tower, even fewer at Eastwatch, and a scant third of those fighting men.†   (source)
  • And the one small window was so high, it was almost touching the ceiling, as if the room were so deeply underground that the window had to be that high in order to reach ground-level light—scant little of which could ever penetrate to the faraway floor of the room.†   (source)
  • The Rev. Mr. Foster is all for opening a mission on Jarvis Street—and counseling hookers on the subject of sexually transmitted diseases—and he's up to his neck in volunteer projects for the West Indians on Bathurst Street, the very same people so verbally abused by Deputy Warden Holt; but the Rev. Mr. Foster offers scant sympathy for my worries, which, he says, are only in my mind.†   (source)
  • She was a woman who'd once wished she'd grow taller than her scant five three, and curvier than the slim, teenage boy body the fates had granted her.†   (source)
  • But it was the features of his face that I could not look away from, his brush of hair, his nose, his tender, scant mouth.†   (source)
  • The scant information was so electrifying that all concentration was riveted on the crisis, and Catherine Staples telephoned her consulate telling the High Commissioner that she was not well and would not attend the strategy conference with the Americans that afternoon.†   (source)
  • For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land.†   (source)
  • Eragon's rearing-limited as it was by Garrow's scant tutelage-had exposed him only to the knowledge needed to run a farm.†   (source)
  • At the entrance to the court he turned to the right, stepped over the stream, and strode away southwards along the feet of great tumbled slopes where trees were scanty.†   (source)
  • When a soldier became weary he fell out, ate his scanty rations—if indeed, he had any to eat—rested, rose, and resumed the march when the inclination dictated.†   (source)
  • Bryan grabbed Shade's arm and swung him around to see a life-size poster that gave her lavish curves and scant cover as she was being strapped into what looked like a homemade electric chair.†   (source)
  • This beer parlor has a dingy red carpet and cheesy black tables and plastic-upholstered chairs and scant lighting, and reeks of car ashtray; the other beer parlors we drink in are similar.†   (source)
  • Even without snow, the steep angular mountain brings back memories of stepping off cornices and hanging, midair, for a scant second before dropping down long, deep black-diamond runs.†   (source)
  • I was so pleased to show the other women that I had recovered my form a scant four months following Adam's birth!†   (source)
  • Though deep down she knew she should pace herself, she found herself trying to keep up with the scantily clad, surgically enhanced, mascara-wearing woman next to her.†   (source)
  • I'd taken to wearing some of Alice's lingerie collection to sleep in at night—which weren't so revealing compared to the scanty bikinis she'd packed for me when it came right down to it.†   (source)
  • The wolves were there before us …. the four-legged sort, but they showed scant reverence for their two-legged kin.†   (source)
  • No other trace; the wind, razor-sharp, had of course filed away even what scant tracks the hard-pan held.†   (source)
  • Don Apolinar Moscote, the benevolent ruler whose activity had been reduced to the maintenance from his scanty resources of two policemen armed with wooden clubs, was a figurehead.†   (source)
  • 132): The White Commission's stand on the trigger of the whole affair-two buckets of pig blood on a beam over the stage seems to be overly weak and vacillating, even in light of the scant concrete proof.†   (source)
  • She made some headway—a few scant miles, dearly won and with great effort retained—but every time she extricatedherself from one of the looping currents, she found herself trapped in another.†   (source)
  • The Captain followed Caroline to the kitchen and rinsed his hands by pouring a scant dipper of our precious fresh water over them.†   (source)
  • A scant few moments later, the red-faced lord shoved the table over in fury, scattering the pieces across the carpets to the sound of Yunkish laughter.†   (source)
  • Judging from the scanty but mounting evidence now available to us, if the universe was created with a fiat lux, that fiat must have been expressed, not in Latin, but in the one truly universal language: mathematics.†   (source)
  • "Naturally," Blomkvist said in a tone that indicated he had scant trust in the prime minister's assurances.†   (source)
  • Food grows scant.†   (source)
  • It was in those moments that you might have heard the first scant formalities arising between us, that careful polite mildly acidic phrasing Lelia grew up with and that I so naturally adopted, maybe even took advantage of, the kind of things Stew and Alice must have plied each other with, the I'm sure I don't know what you mean, or the I must not have heard you correctly, darling.†   (source)
  • At the supper table, whose scanty fare was well cooked, Uncle Pros and Johnnie had to tell again, and yet again, the story of that miraculous healing which both husband and wife could see was genuine.†   (source)
  • How many soldiers were left, it was impossible to tell in the throng of flailing bodies, but Roran could see that they still outnumbered the scant twenty-five or so of the remaining Varden.†   (source)
  • But when she returned softly to the interior, after laving face and hands out at the wash-basin, and ordering her abundant hair, she found the little woman up and clad, slicing bacon and making coffee of generous strength from their scanty store.†   (source)
  • His practice was healthy, built up now for many years, and I could tell it was all adding up to the prime of his life, that noble time, a period that my father seemed to squeeze down to a few scant minutes around midnight, sitting with a beer in front of his projection TV, absently chuckling at wrestlers and clowns.†   (source)
  • I blush, Anna, to say this to you, knowing what you have made of yourself from such scant stuffs as your life has provided.†   (source)
  • Even devilgrass grew scant; horses dropped in their tracks, leaving so few that some of her people must trudge along on foot.†   (source)
  • And so I look there now, with the impulse of asking Liv to turn into the lot, simply to drive slowly past the columned entrance, to peer at the scant activity inside.†   (source)
  • The corporal had perhaps a score of these, each featuring a different scene, replete with detailed settings and whatever scant costume, and he slowly shuffled through them with an unswerving awe and reverence that made me believe he was a Christian.†   (source)
  • She would get scant comfort there.†   (source)
  • This I hid away, embarrassed by my weakness, and gathered up my scant stuff to consign to the flames.†   (source)
  • The young woman looked at him with a hopeless drawing of scant, light eyebrows above bulging gray eyes.†   (source)
  • There's a ripple in the pavement or the air and a scant second in a woman's face nearby—her eyes shift to catch what's happening behind him.†   (source)
  • I kept a good hold on him as I lifted the bar to the stable door, though I knew well enough that if he wanted to bolt I would have scant chance to keep him.†   (source)
  • Not for her were the flaring, coarse, scant garments whose lack of seemliness was supposed to be atoned for by a profusion of cheap, sleazy trimming.†   (source)
  • It was a hybrid apartment, between a large closet and a small room; one four-paned window gave scant light and ventilation; all the broken or disused plunder about the house was pitched into it, and in the middle sat a tumbled bed.†   (source)
  • No matter how urgent her business, she would have to wait until Mr. Mompellion broke his fast, since that scant serving of oatcake and brawn was the only meal I knew with any certainty that he would take.†   (source)
  • And he wets his thumb with a flourish and tries to remove a scant trace of tar, because Cotter must have bounced the ball in the street, but he only succeeds in smudging the area and has to wonder why he is doctoring the ball at all.†   (source)
  • She was a scant, stringy-looking creature, despite her height; the narrow back was hooped like that of an old woman and the shoulders indrawn, so that the chest was cramped, and sent forth a wheezy, flatted voice that sorted ill with her inches; her round eyes had no speculation in them; her short chin was obstinate without power; the thin, half-gray hair that wanted to curl feebly about her lined forehead was stripped away and twisted in a knot no bigger than a walnut, at the back of…†   (source)
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