"Nondescript" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... such as might have been predicted for the owner of the nondescript bed resting on the cabin floor. His neck, grimed, red and wrinkled as that of an ancient turtle, rose above his bare brown shoulders and his upper chest, likewise exposed. His only body covering was an undershirt, or two undershirts. Their flannel over-covering had left them apparently some time ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... premature. Scotland Yard refused to prejudge the case despite the penny-a-liners. Several arrests were made, so that the later editions were compelled to soften "Suicide" into "Mystery." The people arrested were a nondescript collection of tramps. Most of them had committed other offenses for which the police had not arrested them. One bewildered-looking gentleman gave himself up (as if he were a riddle), but the police would have none of him, and restored him forthwith to his ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... desirableness of their vineyards. Yet I rejoice that some earnest Protestants have been made by this war,—I mean those who protested against it. Fewer they were than I could wish, for one might imagine America to have been colonized by a tribe of those nondescript African animals the Aye-Ayes, so difficult a word is No to us all. There is some malformation or defect of the vocal organs, which either prevents our uttering it at all, or gives it so thick a pronunciation ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... recognized by the mind as 'the beginning of the alphabet.' It is the fate of every impression thus to fall into a mind preoccupied with memories, ideas, and interests, and by these it is taken in. Educated as we already are, we never get an experience that remains for us completely nondescript: it always reminds of something similar in quality, or of some context that might have surrounded it before, and which it now in some way suggests. This mental escort which the mind supplies is drawn, of course, from the mind's ready-made stock. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... began to think that she would be thrown down and trampled under foot, when timely relief arrived in the shape of two policemen and a gentleman volunteer, who managed to rescue her and get them into a hansom cab, which started for Hanover-square, pursued by a shouting crowd of nondescript individuals. ...
— Mr. Meeson's Will • H. Rider Haggard
... efforts to speak English, and became on the strength of that an universal favourite- -it takes so little in this world of shipboard to create a popularity. There was, besides, a Scots mason, known from his favourite dish as 'Irish Stew,' three or four nondescript Scots, a fine young Irishman, O'Reilly, and a pair of young men who deserve a special word of condemnation. One of them was Scots; the other claimed to be American; admitted, after some fencing, that he was born in England; and ultimately proved ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... our black sheep. Look where he stands. As he grows weary, he grasps the straps on either side to steady him. His attitude is a cunningly devised mode of tormenting his fellow-passengers. Either elbow of our nondescript just reaches the hat of your opposite neighbor or yourself. With each jolt of the stage, by a little dexterity of movement, or want of it, he can knock the hats over the eyes of two persons at a time, and by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... now, and we are more than ready for suggestions of alimentation. There is a sheltered table with benches just out of doors before the hospice, and here we seat ourselves, flanked by with two massive dogs, and soon are discussing a nondescript repast which is too late for lunch and too early for dinner but which is remarkably appetizing in either view. An hour later, we are again in Luchon, greeted by the deferential head-waiter of the Richelieu, whose starchy ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... so great now at Gumbolt that there was a stream of vehicles running between a point some miles beyond Eden, which the railroad had reached, and Gumbolt. Wagons, ambulances, and other vehicles of a nondescript character on good days crowded the road, filling the mountain pass with the cries and oaths of their drivers and the rumbling and rattling of their wheels, and filling Mr. Gilsey's soul with disgust. But the vehicle ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... he found Doret and the trader in conversation with a man he had not met before, a ragged nondescript whose overalls were blue and faded and patched, particularly on the front of the legs above the knees, where a shovel-handle wears hardest; whose coat was of yellow mackinaw, the sleeves worn thin below the elbows, where they had rubbed ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... represent earthly governments. These are found chiefly, if not entirely, in the books of Daniel and Revelation. In Dan 2, a symbol is introduced in the form of a great image. In Dan 7, we find a lion, a bear, a leopard, and a great and terrible nondescript, which, after passing through a new and remarkable phase, goes into the lake of fire. In Dan. 8, we have a ram, a he goat, and a horn, little at first, but waxing exceeding great. In Revelation 9, we have locusts like unto horses. In Rev. 12, we have a great red ...
— The United States in the Light of Prophecy • Uriah Smith
... substance, I received the following information from Mr. Campbell, in a letter dated in November, 1803: "You may remember a trailing plant with a small yellowish flower and a seed vessel of an oblong form, containing one seed; the whole plant resembling much the caout-chouc. To this, finding it wholly nondescript, I have taken the liberty to attach your name. It has no relationship to a genus yielding a similar substance, of which I sent a specimen to Dr. Roxburgh at Bengal, who published an account of it under the name of urceola. It is called jintan by the Malays, and of its three species ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... should not have looked twice at him: long, spare, and stooping, a shabby figure, he crouched over a cup of coffee in a corner of the dingy restaurant, at fretful enmity with the world; typical, I should have said, of the furtive London nondescript. But that white hair startled me; it gleamed out, unnaturally cleanly in those not overclean surroundings, and although I had propped my book up against the water-bottle at my own table, where I sat over my ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... the others of Edgemere Cottage, attired in a nondescript collection of garments hastily donned. Will, in his bath robe, had his collar and tie in his hand, though it is doubtful if he wore an article of dress to which it could be attached. From the servants' rooms came frantic demands to know if ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... sketch of Ararat, when a peasant happens along with a bullock-load of cucumbers which he is taking to the Koordish camps; he is pretty badly scared at finding himself all alone on the Aras Plain with such a nondescript and dangerous-looking object as a helmeted wheelman, and when I halt him with inquiries concerning the nature of his wares he turns pale and becomes almost speechless with fright. He would empty his sacks ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... others pricked me with pins or the points of compasses. These arguments were not without effect. I sprang from my seat, and endeavoured to escape along a double line of benches, thronged with boys of all ages, from the urchin of six or seven, to the nondescript of sixteen or seventeen. It was like running the gauntlet; every one, great or small, pinching, kicking, or otherwise maltreating ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... cit, when that nondescript animal condescends to be affected, are more varied and interesting than those of their brethren here. He has a taste for the fine arts—he talks about the opera—likes to know artists and authors—and, though living ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... procession of various-hued women had worn a path during the forty years of his taking in marriage one month and taking leave the next. Dad wasn't nervous over his prospects, but calm and calculative, as became his age. Mackenzie went smiling now and then as he thought of the team the black nondescript and the old ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... steamed out, S.S. Duchess of Argyle leading. The Captain of the ship asked us to post a signaller to read any signals, Serjt. Diggle was told to keep a look out and assist the official signaller, a sort of nondescript Swede or other neutral, like the rest of the crew. We soon sighted some war vessel, and asked if they had any orders, the reply being, according to Serjt. Diggle, "No go"—according to the Swede, "No no." The Captain preferred to believe ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... the pupil gets his first and most lasting impressions should be of large size and accurate form, and not of the nondescript character usually found in books of this class. That it should be free from superfluous line and flourish, and yet have grace and beauty. That it should be adapted ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... house on the bay was a nondescript, jumbled, dilapidated-looking assemblage of structures, rather than one house. It was known simply as Morris's. It stood a few hundred yards west of the end of the canal which opened into the bay and was about a quarter of a mile from ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... indescribable prosperity that rose off Mr. Becker, in the nondescript but excellent quality of the gray suiting, the polished, square-toed, custom-made shoes, the little linen string of necktie, one for each day, the kind, despite family suasion, he had always worn. ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... cases besides the ones labeled "Camp Outfit," "Medical," "Armory Chest," "Grub Chest," and several nondescript ones containing the odds and ends that an expedition of the kind they planned would find indispensable. In some smaller boxes also were packed yards and yards of bright-colored cloth and calico, spangles, cheap jewelry and brass ornaments for use among the natives. In making up their ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... state apartments, is supplemented by the fires in the heater and on the snow outside, round which the waiting coachmen warm themselves, with Rembrandtesque effects of chiaro-oscuro second only to the picturesqueness of dvorniki in their nondescript caps and shaggy coats, who cluster round blazing fagots in less aristocratic quarters when the thermometer ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... seventeenth century was fairly packed away with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or more bands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in armed vessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at the fore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants of civilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and yellow), known generally as marooners, swarming upon ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... whistle by appearing at the door, and he and Jack Belding jumped down from the sleigh to greet them. Jack Belding was a school friend of Peter's. He had come to Old Chester several days before. He was a tall, lanky youth with nondescript hair and eyes, but a sense of humor that would have assured him a welcome in ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... simply frightful. And if you keep it up it just ruins your hair. You have such nice hair, Kate!" She picked up a sterilized brush and began stroking Kate's hair soothingly. It was not such nice hair. It was very ordinary hair of a somewhat nondescript color; but Kate was her dearest friend, and praise is a part of the profession. "What do you want?—a scalp, shampoo, or just dressed, or a curl, ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript inhabitants now so widely scattered:- the two horses, the dog, and the four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines; - the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author; - the China boy, by this time, perhaps, baiting his line by ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... only cow in the place, who is descended from the scriptural lean ones, was munching the discarded tail of a large codfish which probably still held a faint flavor of the salt with which it had been preserved. Nondescript dogs, bearing very little resemblance to the original well-known breed, wandered aimlessly ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... arm of the service,"—and whining a little—"still very far from well. Now I'll state my case to you, for your satisfaction, and to prevent any little mistakes. I was lately afflicted with a sort of nondescript atrophy, a stagnation of the fluids, a congestion of the small blood-vessels, and a spasmodic contraction of the finitesimal nerves, that threatened very serious consequences. At the survey, two of the surgeons, ignorant quacks ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... second glance, if, indeed, she thought him worthy of a first. He was short and squarely built; his hair was undeniably red and ragged; his features were blunt, but he had a nice smile, and his small, nondescript eyes were kind. ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... Baletan."[790] This cylinder was found recently in the Lebanon.[791] Nos. 3 and 4 come from Salamis in Cyprus, where they were found by M. Alexandre Di Cesnola,[792] the brother of the General. No. 3 represents a robed figure holding two nondescript animals by the hind legs; the creatures writhe in his grasp, and turn their heads towards him, as though wishing to bite. The remainder of the field is filed with detached objects, scattered at random—two human forms, a griffin, two heads of oxen, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... than about half a dozen to a dozen flies every month, was forced to spend his whole time cutting and dropping his useless captures from the web. As a rule Merton did not talk in this strain: the editors had cut away too many of his own nondescript dipterous contributions to their webs for him to love them; but for some mysterious reason it suited him just now to take the side of the enemy in the old quarrel of author ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... unconcernedly. Of a sudden, without apparent cause, he turned back, took us in possession and led us undissuadably along a by-path to the river's edge. There, in a nook of the most attractive amenity, he bade us to sit down: the stream splashing at our elbow, a shock of nondescript greenery enshrining us from above; and thither, after a brief absence, he brought us a cocoa-nut, a lump of sandal-wood, and a stick he had begun to carve: the nut for present refreshment, the sandal-wood for a precious gift, and the stick—in the simplicity of his vanity—to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... their bloom." Next is a campanile of Sweden, and near it are the Swedish and Norwegian houses, armed against winter. Then the Japanese cottage with sides all open, mats on the floors and no furniture to speak of. Then comes a Moorish pavilion of Spain with nondescript ornaments, the bulbous domes and pinnacles supporting the flags of yellow and red—of barbaric ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... back with them for the vacations Pinky's room had been done over in cream enamel and rose-flowered cretonne. She said the chromos in the hall spoiled the entire second floor. So the gold frames, glittering undimmed, the checks as rosily glowing as ever, found temporary resting-places in a nondescript back chamber known as the serving room. Then the new sleeping porch was built for Ted, and the portraits ended ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... whose house it was, and what was the cause of this splendid display? Some one said, he supposed it was in consequence of peace with America, which had just been announced.—"No, no;" said the coachman, "it is on account of the restoration of Buonaparte." "O, a vile Jacobin!" exclaimed a nondescript with a whistling, piping voice, "I wish somebody would break all his windows." The coachman cracked his whip, and can they passed; but as there was the mail, and four other coaches to pass, I sent my servant out to stand at the gate, to inform those that might inquire, that my house was ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... their blankets upon the floor and joined the speaker. They were all armed, and clothed in the nondescript uniforms of Villistas. Billy's back was toward them as they sneaked from the hut in which they were intending to spend the night and crept ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... this town's going on building up things and rolling over them, as poor father once said it was rolling over his poor old heart. It looks like it: here's the Amberson Mansion again, only it's Georgian instead of nondescript Romanesque; but it's just the same Amberson Mansion that my father built long before you were born. The only difference is that it's your father who's built this one now. It's all the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... Euston. It was a muggy, slushy night, with a thin brown fog wreathing the houses and fading away above their tops into a dull, slate-blue sky. The wet street looked like a black canal; the blurred forms, less like vehicles than nondescript boats, moving over its inky surface, were indistinctly reflected therein; the gas-lights flared redly through the murky haze. It was not a pleasant evening in which ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... other universities in the United States is most instructive in this respect. Nearly every one of them has suffered greatly from the want of some such general plan. One has but to visit almost any one of them to see buildings of different materials and styles—classical, Renaissance, Gothic, and nondescript —thrown together in a way at times fairly ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson, in founding the University of Virginia, was wiser; and his beautiful plan was carried out so fully, under his own eyes, that it has never been ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... looking immediately before my nose, and there, sure enough, confronting me at the table sat a personage nondescript, although not altogether indescribable. His body was a wine-pipe, or a rum-puncheon, or something of that character, and had a truly Falstaffian air. In its nether extremity were inserted two kegs, which seemed to answer ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the moment when a sickening crash would herald the final dissolution of the ship, they proceeded with their work methodically. In half an hour they had reached the end. All the injured men—seven nondescript sailors and firemen—were carried to the saloon and placed under Christobal's care. Walker dived below to the engine-room, where he had already disconnected the rods broken or bent by the fracture of a guard ring, which, in its ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... substantial, has long since taken to itself the nondescript hue to which the Australian sun soon reduces the unpainted surface of hard-wood slabs and shingles. A square, heavy chimney, smoke-stained and clumsy at the base, rises above the sloping roof at one end, and a roughly fashioned verandah runs along the front of the house, ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... they are, such my present tale is, A nondescript and ever-varying rhyme, A versified Aurora Borealis, Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime To laugh at all things—for I wish to know What, after all, are ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... tincture of European blood. Her voice is truly wonderful, both in its compass and truth. A more correct intonation, so far as our ear can decide, there could not be. She strikes every note on the exact centre, with unhesitating decision.... She is a nondescript, an original. We cannot think any ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... his arrival at Stafford becomes dull, shadowy, and unconvincing—a strong argument against its truth; for while Borrow easily lived the life romantic, he seems to have lacked the power to imagine it. He describes himself as accepting a somewhat nondescript office at the posting-inn on the Great North Road, where he remains for an undefined but considerable period, and meets again with Francis Ardrey and the Rev. Mr. Platitude. On leaving the inn he refuses to accept the landlord's offer of an honorarium of 10 pounds, and sets off with his horse ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... of the whole box of masks it had been the Bengal Tiger's fiercely bewhiskered visage that had fascinated Flame the most. Regretfully from its more or less nondescript companions, she picked up the Bengal Tiger now and pulled at its real, bristle-whiskers. In one of the chairs a dog stirred quite irrelevantly. Cocking her own head towards the wood-shed Flame could not be perfectly ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... early days of the Western Railroad it was far otherwise, and the locomotive which should successfully and economically operate the hitherto unheard of grade of over 80 feet to the mile was yet to be seen. The Messrs. Winans, of Baltimore, had built some nondescript machines, which had received the name of "crabs," and had tried to make them work upon the Western road. But after many attempts they were given up as unfit for ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 586, March 26, 1887 • Various
... but large. The boy was a Dyak in light cotton drawers, with the upper part of his body naked, brass rings on his arms, heavy ornaments in his ears, and a bright kerchief worn as a turban on his head. The man was a sort of nondescript in a semi-European shooting garb, with a wide-brimmed sombrero on his head, black hair, a deeply tanned face, a snub nose, huge beard and ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... central rib. The stalks and leaves of this spray are also worked in needlepoint, and on the top sits a bullfinch, worked in many colours in the same way, but fastened down close to the satin all round. In the corners are a beetle, a nondescript flower, a bud, and a butterfly with coloured wings in needlepoint, with replicas of them closely appliques just underneath, on the satin. On the lower board is a spray of a five-petalled blue flower, the petals of which ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... month, a girl of nondescript and nomadic habits. Someone had casually passed her on to Anthony, who considered her amusing and rather liked the chaste and fairylike kisses she had given him on the third night of their acquaintance, when they had driven in a taxi through the Park. She had a vague family—a ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... die, studebat in coenae tempus". "After taking the air he bathed; after that he broke his fast on a bit of biscuit, and took a very slight siesta: which done, as if awaking to a new day, he set in regularly to his studies, and pursued them to dinner-time." Gustabat here meant that nondescript meal which arose at Rome when jentaculum and prandium were fused into one, and that only a taste or mouthful of biscuit, as ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... causa' of all 'belli'- Thou gate of life and death—thou nondescript! Whence is our exit and our entrance,—well I May pause in pondering how all souls are dipt In thy perennial fountain:—how man fell I Know not, since knowledge saw her branches stript Of her first fruit; but how he falls and rises Since, thou ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... A nondescript-clad figure came out of the brushwood into the open clearing, walking towards the spot where the mountain-sheep lay stretched on the sward, which was partly covered with the snow that remained unmelted under the lee of the cliff; and a voice, ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... bete qui ne fait de mal a personne, pour s'amuser?" Madame found that rather difficult to answer, and turned the conversation to her life on the barge. The minute little cabin looked clean, with several pots of red geraniums, clean muslin curtains, a canary bird, and a nondescript sort of dog, who, she told me, was very useful, taking care of the children and keeping them from falling into the water when she was obliged to leave them on the boat while she went on shore to get her provisions. I asked: ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... while before her lodgers got courage enough to come back. Then we went to the house of the Blazers, in 'Cow Bay,' and used to lodge there with Yellow Bill. They said Bill was a thief by profession; but I wasn't old enough to be a judge. Little Lizza Rock, the nondescript, as people called her, used to live at the Blazers. Poor Lizza had a hard time of it, and used to sigh and say she wished she was dead. Nobody thought of her, she said, and she was nothing because she was deformed, and a cripple. She was about four feet high, had a face like a bull-dog, ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... anything of the sort to the probably hypnotic or automatic consciousness of the cricket? What does it really represent, as seen from below? A twig, terminating in a bud, with two branching twigs growing from it, and a harmless nondescript fly or butterfly perched on the back of it. The combination of a familiar sight and a threatening sound would very plausibly result in cautious immobility. As for its instantaneous assumption of the pose, to move instantaneously ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... and only slightly retouched hair, her dashing big hat and smart little gown, her red lips and black eyes, was an extremely handsome woman, but Mr. Venable even now could not seem to move his eyes from Mary's nondescript gray eyes, and rather colorless fair skin, and indefinite, pleasant mouth. Mamma's lines were all compact and trim. Mary was rather long of limb, even a little GAUCHE in an attractive, unself-conscious sort of way. But something fine and high, something fresh and young ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... rule had failed him once or twice, for in communities of the description of Meadeville social life was more or less democratic and nondescript. When he had thought himself secure on certain occasions, he had bumped right into the McLaughlins and then it behooved him to stick pretty close to Honey all ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... received a blow, a curse, and an insult, from the maccudam or foreman of the gang that worked in the boat which he steered. Neither blows nor curses were of any particular account to Moussa, but this man Sulemani, a nondescript creature of no particular race, and only a man in the sense that he was not a woman nor a quadruped, had called him "Hubshi" Woolly One. Had called Moussa Isa of the Somal a Hubshi, as though he had been a common black ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... this young Jack Smith (to keep for him the nondescript name he had for unknown reasons chosen to assume) should be the first man to awaken in the misanthropic Adrian the charm of human intercourse, was singular indeed; one who followed from choice the odious trade of legally chartered corsair, who was ever ready to barter the chance of life ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... was sordid and squalid in London life, at the period John Crondall's letter recalled, but as yet there had been no sordidness in my own life. All that was far otherwise now, I felt. Cambridge and Dorset were a long way from the office of The Mass. I thought of the greasy Teuton nondescript for whom I had kept Miss Grey waiting, and I felt colour rise in my face as ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... flurried. His attenuated back is rounded off with a stoop between the neck and shoulders. He can hardly keep his hands from shaking. His signature is a work of art. He can stick at his desk for six hours without stirring. While we lunch at a restaurant, he consumes at the office some nondescript provisions which he brings in the morning in a paper bag. On Sundays he fishes, for a change; his rod takes the place of his pen, and his can of ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... discovered. From one we may learn all. The parent of Marquis Wheat on the male side was the mid-Europe Red Fife—a first-class cereal. The parent on the female side was less promising, a rather nondescript, not pure-bred wheat, called Red Calcutta, which was imported from India into Canada about thirty years ago. The father was part of a cargo that came from the Baltic to Glasgow, and was happily included in a sample ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... infallibility. His wife writes novels which have a SLIGHT leaning toward Zolaism,—she is an extremely witty woman sarcastic, and cold-blooded enough to be a female Robespierre, yet, on the whole, amusing as a study of what curious nondescript forms the feminine nature can adopt unto itself, if it chooses. She has an immense respect for GENIUS,—mind, I say genius advisedly, because she really is one of those rare few who cannot endure mediocrity. Everything ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... to that which describes nothing, and which means nothing? Imagination has given figure and character to centaurs, satyrs, and down to all the fairy tribe; but titles baffle even the powers of fancy, and are a chimerical nondescript. ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... fight them, of course," Jeff urged. "They're all women, in spite of their nondescript clothes; nice women, too; good strong sensible faces. I guess we'll ...
— Herland • Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman
... was the sight of an old woman, bent nearly double, who was busily at work in the garden. Not far from her was an old man, who, from his motions while at work, appeared to be blind. Their costume being nondescript, besides ragged, did ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... he was quite different from the traditional tramp. He walked with far too lively a step, too jauntily, and he had with him a small, shaggy, nondescript dog, a dog as shabby as he, trotting close at his heels. He carried a light stick, which he occasionally twirled over in his hand. As I drew nearer I could hear him whistling and even, from time to time, breaking into a lively bit of song. What a devil-may-care chap he seemed, ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... abruptly away from the thicket and looked about him. A few yards back there was a deep depression in the ridge, fringed with a growth of nondescript weed. He approached this and peered into it. Quite recently a horse had been there. He could plainly see the hoof-prints—where the animal had pawed impatiently. He returned ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the night, which the morning light explained by the covered wagons, prairie schooners we would call them at the West, which had come in and camped out near the spring. As the hour approached a perfect string of nondescript vehicles bringing the whole family, and many others on muleback or on foot, came pouring in from near and far, until by 10 A.M. nearly one thousand people had gathered in and around the arbor; some of them coming from ...
— American Missionary, Volume 50, No. 8, August, 1896 • Various
... pleasure in them, and were clear and brown, while something in the man's sinewy pose suggested that he would have been at home in the saddle. Indeed, it was in the saddle that Hetty Torrance remembered him most vividly, hurling his half-tamed broncho straight at a gully down which the nondescript pack streamed, while the scarcely seen shape of a coyote blurred by the dust, streaked the prairie in front ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... to the castle, which we reached by going across the causeway that bridges the valley, and has some edifices of Grecian architecture on it, contrasting strangely with the nondescript ugliness of the old town, into which we immediately pass. As this is my second visit to Edinburgh, I surely need not dwell upon describing it at such length as if I had never been here before. After climbing up through various wards of the castle to the topmost battery, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... individuals were ever more unlike than were the host and his guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings. Indeed, his thoughts had wings; and as the silken ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... sexes, there is no exception to the law, that their greatest power and largest attainment lie in the perfect development of their organization. "Woman," says a late writer, "must be regarded as woman, not as a nondescript animal, with greater or less capacity for assimilation to man." If we would give our girls a fair chance, and see them become and do their best by reaching after and attaining an ideal beauty and power, which shall be a crown of glory and a tower of strength ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... we are disappointed by the contrast between the exterior and the contents. It would probably be far from easy to fill a small case with examples where a really valuable book was enshrined in a covering of corresponding character. It is our ordinary experience to meet with some obsolete nondescript classic, or some defunct theological treatise of alike infinitesimal worth, in a sumptuous morocco garb, bestowed on it by the author as a compliment to his sovereign, or by the sovereign as an ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... string of people already straggling in, whom it was not difficult to identify as the nondescript messengers, go-betweens, and errand-bearers of the place. Some of them had been lounging in the rain until the gate should open; others, who had timed their arrival with greater nicety, were coming up now, and passing in with damp whitey-brown paper bags from the grocers, loaves of bread, lumps ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... wistful little face was growing more and more like that of the little statue in the grounds behind the church—the stone face of John Anderson's frail bride of a year—long since turned a dull, nondescript gray by the sun ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... him in the morning twilight by sprinkling over him the foam of the sea. The foam of the sea is just such an object as a savage might choose to put his life in, because it occupies that sort of intermediate or nondescript position between earth and sky or sea and sky in which primitive man sees safety. It is therefore not surprising that the foam of the river should be the totem of a ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... Historical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through the other. Many sections are of a debatable rubric or even quite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... had dispersed into their different lodgings. As soon as the men of the various regiments began to disperse among the wealthy and deserted houses, the army was lost forever and there came into being something nondescript, neither citizens nor soldiers but what are known as marauders. When five weeks later these same men left Moscow, they no longer formed an army. They were a mob of marauders, each carrying a quantity of articles which seemed to him valuable or useful. ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... sat with me in the dining-room of a hotel which faced The Hoe. His nondescript garments were discarded, and he was now clothed in decent British attire. That he had a good upbringing, and was accustomed to the polite forms of society, was more than ever evidenced while we were together at ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... probability, the man who wore that hat," chirped Furneaux, taking a nondescript bundle from a coat pocket, and ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... more definite classification than the nondescript paranoid state cannot be doubted. These paranoid manifestations are distinct reactions to a definite situation, in this instance, conviction and imprisonment, of individuals whose peculiarly degenerative make-up makes ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... at a respectful distance, a number of swarthy individuals of both sexes in nondescript garments smoked and stared at the trio with the interest always accorded strangers by the dwellers of the Out Places. They eyed the uncompromising back of the tall one, the easy lounge of the red one, the thoughtful attitude of the light one. The copper-faced men peered at the rifles ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... with a screen. A man in just such a rig attracted no end of comment in a fashionable hotel. The caricaturing effect of his trousers and coat were unspeakably comical. The wearer had a face as grave as an undertaker's and the air of a serious-minded college professor; but he had the nondescript look of a scarecrow composed of whatever available garments could be obtained from the cast-off wardrobe of summer boarders ...
— What Dress Makes of Us • Dorothy Quigley
... somewhat mitigated. The room on the right hand, as one entered the small passage that served as hall, was of fair size, though low-ceiled. The paint of the wall-panelling, like the name above the outer door, had long ago been worn to a dirty and nondescript hue, and the floor was innocent of carpet; yet in the middle of the room stood a fine old Cromwell table, and on the plain deal book-shelves and along the mantel-piece were some valuable books—political and historical. There were no curtains on the windows, and a common reading-lamp ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Not that I have been reduced to eat dog. I have fed on the emblematical animal, which, in the language of the volatile Gauls, is called la vache enragee; I have lived on ancient salt junk, I know the taste of shark, of trepang, of snake, of nondescript dishes containing things without a name—but of the Lithuanian village dog—never! I wish it to be distinctly understood that it is not I, but my granduncle Nicholas, of the Polish landed gentry, Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... of the other house, so that I patch up again, at a stroke, that early scene of her double guardianship at which my small wonder assisted. It even then glimmered on me, I think, that if Albert was, all so romantically, in charge of his aunt—which was a perfectly nondescript relation—so his uncle Henry, her odd brother, was her more or less legal ward, not less, despite his being so very much Albert's senior. In these facts and in the character of each of the three persons involved resided the ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... of this novel and terrible engine of destruction. The telegraph carried the news everywhere, and in dread and anxiety the people awaited the fate of another day. When morning came at Hampton Roads a small nondescript vessel, looking like an oval raft with a turret, interposed between the Merrimac and its prey. It was the Monitor, the invention of Captain John Ericsson, and it had arrived during the night of March ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... suggested, a blind man's buff among the laws? a ruse among the elements? a trick of Dame Nature? Has any scholar defined luck? any philosopher explained its nature? any chemist shown its composition? Is luck that strange, nondescript fairy, that does all things among men that they cannot account for? If so, why does not luck make a fool speak words of wisdom; an ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... second day after the opera she was sitting at her Sheraton desk in the small nondescript room which opened off the dining-room. In front of her lay a large tablet with innumerable names of things printed on it in three columns; opposite each name a little hole had been drilled, and in many of the holes little sticks of wood stood upright. Leonora uprooted a stick, exiling it to ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... sitting up, in a nondescript invalid's attire of an old cloak and a summer waistcoat; and warm as the day was, with a little fire burning, which was not unnecessary to correct the damp of the unused sitting-room. He was, as he said, "fallen away considerable, and with no more strength than a spring chicken," but for the rest ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... from his body in the shape of an inverted V, the palm of his hand, with half curled, contorted fingers, almost touching his chin, as his head sagged at a stiff, set angle into his right shoulder. Hair straggled from the brim of a nondescript felt hat into his eyes, and curled, dirty and unshorn, around his ears and the nape of his neck. His face was covered with a stubble of four days' growth, his body with rags—a coat; a shirt, the button long since gone at the neck; and trousers gaping in wide rents ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... Snooks had made from material found about the farm. She was to represent a country maid of a generation past—and very pretty she looked, too, in her wide skirts and poke bonnet, covered with roses. Quite in contrast to the long and lanky figure Mr. Bunn, who in a nondescript suit, rode the mule that drew the cart, after the fashion of an English postillion. The play was a comic one without much rhyme or reason, but it was found that audiences occasionally liked things of that sort, so the films ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... regretted his act. Later on he walked out, with the strange sense of being a man who, from one having a large professional undertaking in hand, had, by his own act, suddenly reduced himself to an unoccupied nondescript. From the upper end of the town he saw in the distance the grand grey towers of Stancy Castle looming over the leafless trees; he felt stupefied at what he had done, and said to himself with bitter discontent: 'Well, well, what is more ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... attended for a brief time, some ten years before, after his arrival in Hampton. The building, indeed, was symbolic of a decadent and bewildered Puritanism in its pathetic attempt to keep abreast with the age, to compromise with anarchy, merely achieving a nondescript medley of rounded, knob-like towers covered with mulberry-stained shingles. And the minister was sensational and dramatic. He looked like an actor, he aroused in Edward Bumpus an inherent prejudice that condemned the stage. Half a block from this tabernacle stood a Roman ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... festivities, the moon, as though specially engaged to do duty on this honored occasion, stood right over farmer Charest's house, and with jovial countenance beamed into the faces of the arriving guests, and threw such a kindly light over the farmer's rough, nondescript garments as to make them look almost like good, soft broadcloth. It also paid flattering attention to Madame Charest, and so beautified her thin face and silvered her grey hair, as she stood in the door and welcomed the arrivals, as to make the neighbors affirm—and that ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... straight for Sam Carr's house. While still some distance away he made out two men seated on the porch. As he drew nearer a couple of nondescript dogs rushed noisily to meet him. Thompson's general unfamiliarity with the outdoor world extended to dogs. But he had heard sometime, somewhere, that it was well to put on a bold front with barking curs. He acted upon ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a great difference is felt between the two plays: that "The Medal" in comparison with "The Hare" seems something clean, artistic, and having form and semblance. There you have it! Literary men are swept out of the theatre, and plays are written by nondescript people, old and young, while the journals and newspapers are edited by tradesmen, government clerks, and young ladies. But there, the devil take ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... as he went on his way, he saw at various points large bodies of men standing silent in their ranks, waiting the call of duty and the word of command. Here were the vigorous journeymen of the different trades, and the stalwart country-people; there the trusty miners, some with nondescript weapons, others armed with pick-axes, mattocks, and long guns, or provided with ladders and great buckets of water, in readiness for an alarm of fire. In the streets adjoining the Erbis and Kreuz Gates, bustling activity was the order ...
— The Young Carpenters of Freiberg - A Tale of the Thirty Years' War • Anonymous
... their humble disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches a row of rookeries—a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long brick wall of the garden—soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and lichen ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... herself with a start, rubbing her eyes. Gaunt and grey in the first dim light of morning, Aunt Matilda stood over her, clad in a nondescript dressing-gown. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... petrol prevailed over horseflesh and drove him into black; a striped waistcoat, of the old-fashioned waspish, horsey favour, partly buttoned over a grey army shirt and loosely covered by his own Norfolk jacket, with a knotted bandanna in place of collar, made of him an odd, but wholly credible nondescript ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... at any price: a very neat room, for instance, for three francs daily; an English breakfast of eternal boiled eggs, or grilled ham; a nondescript dinner, profuse but cold; and a society which will rejoice your heart. Here are young gentlemen from the universities; young merchants on a lark; large families of nine daughters, with fat father and mother; officers of dragoons, and lawyers' clerks. The last time we dined at ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Howland remained over night and on the twenty-fourth instead of the twenty-eighth escorted a nondescript sort of party up to Severndale, for wearing apparel had to be indiscriminately ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel," a grotesque and nondescript production, founded, probably, on some prior romance or traditionary tale of giants. The narrative of Rabelais is a tissue of adventures shocking every idea of verisimilitude, and serving only as a ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... a leggy, weedy chestnut, half-racehorse, half-nondescript, ridden by a terrified amateur, who went at the fence with a white, set face. The horse raced up to the fence, and stopped dead, amid the jeers of the crowd. The rider let daylight into him with his spurs, and rushed him at it again. This ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... proclivities of its inmates has it aught to do with the centuries when our English tongue was otherwise written or spoken than it is to-day. Ye Hutte is a vast, barn-like building, plain and bare save for an inviting vine-grown porch vaguely Gothic in reminiscence, although nondescript in fact. It was erected by some dissenting society for public worship: hence its interior is one immense vaulted room, with cathedral-like windows and choir-gallery across one end. "The body of the house," to speak ecclesiastically, is cumbered with easels ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... is visited every year by increasing numbers of travellers from the other side of the Channel. Knocke is in itself one of the least attractive places on the Flemish littoral. The old village, a nondescript collection of houses, lies on the Vicinal railway about a mile from the sea, which is reached by a straight roadway, and where there is a digue, numerous hotels, pensions, and villas, all of which are filled to overflowing in the season. The ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... little made-dishes were mere scraps and fragments, which in any other house would have been flung away, but which were so artistically and scientifically handled by the young ladies, and so tossed up, and titivated, and eked out with gravies, and sauces, and strange devices of nondescript pasty, that Happy Jack, feasting upon these wonderful creations of ingenuity, used to vow that he never dined so well as when there was nothing in the house for dinner. To their wandering, predatory life the whole family were perfectly ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... would lie sleepily in the sun, dreaming of the days of splendour long by. In the square before the wonderful cathedral there would be stillness—here and there, perhaps, a pigeon would come fluttering down from the ledges and cornices of the Gothic facade; sometimes a nondescript dog would raise a lazy head to snap at the flies; occasionally the streets would send back a nasal echo as a group of American tourists, with their Baedekers and maps, came hurrying along to "do" the town before the next train left for Paris—beyond ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... a fanfare) towards the gates where the horses were to enter from their stalls in the basement was a hussar-like shape that filled my romantic soul with joy; and the other figures of the management I thought very fortunate compromises between grooms and ringmasters. At any rate, their nondescript costumes were gay, and a relief from the fashions in the boxes and the promenade; they were costumes, and costumes are always more sincere, if not more effective, than fashions. As I have hinted, I do not know just what costumes ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... girl who is a thousand times too good for her de-luxe surroundings and the crew of vacuous la-de-da Willies hanging about her, yet who, absolutely cut off from contact with any others, either gradually fades into a peripatetic old maid, wandering over Europe, or marries an eligible, turkey-trotting nondescript—"a mimmini-pimmini, Francesca da Rimini, ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... registering an instinctive dislike because it is not familiar. With a little applied education, Americans can bring the charm of the French table to their own homes rather than when they are, as they say, tired of the same old round of "eats," seeking out a nondescript table d'hte restaurant and eagerly consuming what is set before them, grateful ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... certain directions— as ethnology, drugs, and zoology—it had totally blind spots. Thus the Leopard Woman kept invariably on her table the bowl of fresh flowers; and she manifested an unfailing liking to investigate such strange shrubs, trees, flowers, or nondescript growths as flourished thereabouts. ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... registered 26.10, which, compared with the simultaneous observations kept at Champion Bay by Mr. H. Gray, gives an elevation of 3,480 feet above the level of the sea; the last 500 feet of the summit being clothed in thickets of melaleuca, amongst which grew a nondescript variety of red gum-tree, the only new thing observed in this locality. The air was fortunately very clear, enabling us to take bearings to almost every remarkable summit within eighty miles, and in two instances to hills more than a hundred ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory
... probably housed the engine and a cab for the operator. The body of the vehicle was simply an open rectangular box. There were two men in the cab, and about twenty or thirty more crowded into the box body. These were dressed in faded and nondescript garments of blue and gray and brown; all were armed with crude weapons—axes, bill-hooks, long-handled instruments with serrated edges, and what looked like broad-bladed spears. The vehicle itself, ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... a nondescript medley of dialogue and dance and song a revue, when revue in French is the exact equivalent of 'review' in English? Why should we call an actress of comic characters a comedienne and an actress of tragic characters a tragedienne, ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients it was a sort of conjurer's bag, out of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sojourn the Gorgeous Girl went in for Hanover society and proved herself a valuable asset. She was nearly twenty-four, almost as slight of figure as a child, as dainty as Watteau's most delicate imaginings, with tiny, nondescript features, lovely sunshine hair, and big dove-coloured eyes with pale-gold lashes. Meantime, the question of a husband for this lovely young person was before the household. She had had a dozen offers of marriage but accepted none of them because she had ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... stood a large and rather nondescript gray structure built by Flood, the Comstock millionaire. It had served for varied purposes, but now it housed the Palais Royal, an immense saloon and gambling rendezvous. In the massive, barn-like room, tile-floored ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... minutes after we had first glimpsed this nondescript he was one of us, and with his coat ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... turned into one of the nondescript thoroughfares, half incipient street, half decaying lane, which dismally linked the mill-village to Hanaford. Bessy looked out on the ruts, the hoardings, the starved trees dangling their palsied leaves in the radiant October light; then she sighed: "What a good day for ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... seemed, cut off upon both sides; behind me the murderers, before me this lurking nondescript. And immediately I began to prefer the dangers that I knew to those I knew not. Silver himself appeared less terrible in contrast with this creature of the woods, and I turned on my heel, and, looking sharply behind me over my shoulder, began to retrace ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which we slept. The question of arms was more obscure. We had a good many tools, indeed, which we employed in the manufacture of our toys; but they were none of them suited for a single combat between civilised men, and, being nondescript, it was found extremely hard to equalise the chances of the combatants. At length a pair of scissors was unscrewed; and a couple of tough wands being found in a corner of the courtyard, one blade of the scissors was lashed solidly to each with resined twine—the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... from the neat, well-groomed Peterby of a week ago, what with the rough, ill-fitting clothes he wore and the fur cap pulled low over his brows; the gentleman's gentleman had vanished quite, and in his stead was a nondescript character such as might have been met with anywhere along the River, or lounging in shadowy corners. He carried a bundle beneath one arm, and cast a swift look round the room before turning to ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... never agreed with the minister, and he never could make anything out of her. They did not quarrel, but she thought nothing of his sermons, and he was perplexed and uncomfortable in the presence of a nondescript who did not respond to any dogmatic statement of the articles of religion, and who yet could not be put aside as "one of those in the gallery"—that is to say, as one of the ordinary unconverted, for she used to quote hymns with amazing fervour, and she ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript inhabitants, now so widely scattered:—the two horses, the dog, and the four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines;—the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author;—the China ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Street seemed "No Thoroughfare," Bond Street looked weird, inhuman; The spectres of past fashions were Around that lonely Woman. Some were the work of native hands, Some had arrived from foreign lands, Nondescript jumbles some! Pall-Mall had now nor sound nor tread, Park Lane was silent as the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 11, 1893 • Various
... favourite ribbon, and Patty looked at her in wonderment, that she should be so sensitive to colour and texture. But her taste in colours did not seem to extend to her clothes. Jenny was a pale little thing, with ashy blonde hair, and large, light blue eyes. She wore a nondescript tan-coloured dress, without tone or shape; and she had a weary, exhausted air, ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... dowager—in a nondescript head-dress this morning, adorned with an upright tuft of red feathers and voluminous skirts of brown net, a jacket and flounces to match—betook herself to ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood
... this "matter" was all ready (if I may so speak) to spring into organized form and being to take shape on earth—what shape should it take? Why (e.g.) an elephant? Why not any other animal, or a nondescript—a form which no zoologist could place, recognize, or classify? The form, the ideal structure, the formula, of the genus elephant must somehow have come into existence before the obedient materials and the suitable forces of nature could work themselves ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... not only to punish, but, with animals especially, to punish at once. He ran to the conflicting parties. They separated the moment they heard the sound of his coming. One came cringing and crawling to his feet; the other—it was the nondescript Tadpole—stood a little way off, wagging his tail, and cocking his head up in his master's face. He gave the one at his feet several pretty severe cuts with the whip, and sent him off. The other drew nearer. His master turned away and took no ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... that I should enjoy the shelter and repose of a habitation. As we went along, indications of the new power, which had already effected the easy transit of the desert, were visible in small patches of coal, scattered upon the sand; presently we saw a dark nondescript object, that did not look at all like the abode of men, civilized or uncivilized; and yet, from the group hovering about an aperture, seemed to be tenanted by human beings. This proved to be an old boiler, formerly belonging to a steam-vessel, and appearing, indeed, as if some black and ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... stork of a man as Whitecraft was, and a knave to boot. I cannot forget how he took me in by the 'Hop-and-go-constant' affair. But then he's a good Protestant—not that I mean he has a single spark of religion in his nondescript carcass; but in those times it's not canting and psalm-singing we want, but good political Protestantism, that will enable us to maintain our ascendancy by other means than praying. Curse the hound that keeps him? Is this ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... with which he had locked the door below, Byrne threw open one after another the doors in the corridor. All the rooms were empty except for some nondescript lumber in one or two. And the girl seeing what he would be at stopped every time, raising the smoky light in each doorway patiently. Meantime she observed him with sustained attention. The last door of ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... numerous, of a nondescript species, and exceedingly beautiful: the most singular are termites, destructive to houses and fences built of wood; ants, causing ruin to provisions; cockroaches and crickets, destroying leather, linen, and clothes; musquitos, sand-flies, centipedes, scorpions; ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... hours before they reached the fisherman's hut, a nondescript, low-ceilinged shelter of logs, driftwood and untarnished metal plates off some wreck. Several times they were hailed by other fishermen, who addressed the old man as "Deacon" and asked jocularly about what kind of a fish ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... hero of my dreams may have varied from time to time, but never has it included even the smallest of the characteristics of William Rawlings. He reminds me of nothing so much as the very shaggiest bear I have ever seen at the Zoo—not even a nice white Polar bear, but one of those nondescript, snuff-coloured kinds that are all ragged ends from top to toe. That a man with such a rough exterior could be capable of such sickening sentimentality as Elizabeth had just described quite nauseated me. It made me dislike ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... the torpedo had struck the ship she had disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. "Above the spot where she had gone down," said one of the men who escaped death, "there was nothing but a nondescript mass of floating wreckage. Everywhere one looked there was a sea of waving hands and arms, belonging to the struggling men and frantic women and children in agonizing efforts to keep afloat. That was the most horrible memory and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... fair size, furnished in a nondescript, boarding-house fashion, and with two windows overlooking the little back yard of the house and those of the other adjoining it. Each yard contained an assortment of ash cans, and there was an astonishing number of clothes lines, each fluttering a variety ...
— Cap'n Warren's Wards • Joseph C. Lincoln
... honor of turning the tide of the Taiping Rebellion. A soldier of fortune, he offered to throw his sword into the government scale if it were paid for with many times its weight in gold. Gathering a nondescript force of various nationalities, he recaptured the city of Sungkiang, and followed this up by such a series of successes that his little troop came to be known as the "Ever-victorious Army." Falling before the walls of Tseki, he was interred ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... not sober. Six weeks later all the bills against the estate were in. Florence had some of the family jewels and the family silver, Rachael had some, some was put away for Billy; the furniture was sold, the house rented for a men's club, and a nondescript man, calling upon young Mrs. Breckenridge, notified her that the stone had been set in place as ordered. They never saw it; they paid a small sum annually for keeping the plot in order, and the episode of Ada Martin Langhorne Breckenridge's life ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... sharp featured; the little pointed chin protruding into space to quite a dangerous extent. Her large dark eyes were her one redeeming feature. But the level brows above them were much too ready with their frown. A sallow complexion and nondescript hair deprived her of that charm of colouring on which youth can generally depend for attraction, whatever its faults of form. Nor could it truthfully be said that sweetness ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... swarm of brown and yellow humanity filling a thoroughfare, that by contrast with the vast and empty avenue he had left seemed as narrow as a lane and absolutely riotous with life. The walls of the houses were blue; the shops of the Chinamen yawned like cavernous lairs; heaps of nondescript merchandise overflowed the gloom of the long range of arcades, and the fiery serenity of sunset took the middle of the street from end to end with a glow like the reflection of a fire. It fell on the bright colors and the dark faces of the bare-footed crowd, on the pallid yellow backs of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... watching the crowd until the last sweating nondescript had obediently disappeared, and then returned into the temple to ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... and as he pushed open the green-baize doors, which worked on springs, he saw they had entered one of those nondescript shops, so numerous in certain parts of New York, where a person can obtain any kind of alcoholic drink, a cigar, a lunch, a "square meal," or a ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... as she silently made way for him, and stood at Tuesday's head, stroking his neck with one small, gloved hand while Haig adjusted the blanket, fitted the saddle firmly, and tightened the double cinch. He was dressed in the nondescript costume he had worn at their first meeting. That same hat, uniquely insolent, soiled and limp and disreputable, was stuck on the back of his head, revealing a full, clean-moulded brow, over which, at one side, ...
— The Heart of Thunder Mountain • Edfrid A. Bingham
... of Madame Filomel was heard at the door, and Herr Hippe replied with a hoarse, guttural cry. The next moment two men entered. The first was a small man with very brilliant eyes. He was wrapt in a long shabby cloak, and wore a strange nondescript species of cap on his head, such a cap as one sees only in the low billiard-rooms in Paris. His companion was tall, long-limbed, and slender; and his dress, although of the ordinary cut, either from the disposition of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... plain, blue, cotton blouse and skirt; her not over-tall figure swelling plumply beneath their starched folds. Her hair was of a nondescript brown, beautified by a glint of gold, so that her uncovered head looked bright in the sunlight. Her face was such as may be seen any day in the villages which nestle beneath the Sussex Downs, under whose shadow she was born; her forehead ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... to the tips of his fingers. But far from being that he was in danger of remaining a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life. He had pushed the habit of universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature. To be suddenly selected for the executive member of the patriotic small-arms ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad |
