The phrase "a small but eager" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to describe a group or individual that may not be large in size or number but possesses enthusiasm or willingness.
Example: "The team was a small but eager group of volunteers ready to tackle the community project."
Alternatives: "a modest yet enthusiastic" or "a little but enthusiastic".
In the meantime, he is starting over, equipped with little more than a music studio and a small but eager band of devotees.
A small but eager audience attended the final program in this season's series, a program on Saturday afternoon offering four chamber works, including two premieres.
Following the EMPAC premiere, Lawson and Sheppard emerged in the lobby and were circled by a small but eager crowd.
It is fortunate that Wilson, the most visible exponent of a small but committed movement, is so eager to speak to journalists and that he has, in line with this age of radical transparency and self-fashioned celebrity, taken to chronicling so much of his work on YouTube.
Opposition forces, small but eager to seize power, streamed from all directions toward a city that was effectively under siege, its military occupants unable to flee and subjected to relentless bombing.
Small but eager describes her entire essence.
Hybrids are also pricey because a small but devoted group of buyers are eager to be seen as concerned for the environment, said Alexander Edwards, president of automotive market research at Strategic Vision in San Diego.
He has the excitement of a small boy eager to show his mother his latest piece of schoolwork and begins, unprompted, to read, old poems, new poems, half-finished poems.
The young boy sees me, or rather he sees the car first -- a silver BMW -- and quickly springs up from his spot under a small tree, eager to sell his bunches of bananas and bottles of roasted peanuts.
So he embraced the heady freedom New York offered, leaving his mop-top past behind like a new arrival from a small town, eager to become who he wanted to be.
A composer of disparate works, he is most famous for "Unsilent Night," a postmodern Christmas carol comprising sounds that emanate from portable cassette players toted through city streets by a small army of eager participants.
