"Nondescript" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... property from the natives of the plains," he said. I took occasion to tell him, however, that if he would look after the people of his own village, I would take care of those from the plains, pointing, as I spoke, to the nondescript "merchant" who had already stolen my revolver and several small articles from my cabin, which by a bold front I had recovered. The chap was not a native Uruguayan. Here, as in many other places that I visited, the natives themselves were not the ones discreditable ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... We had only gone a few paces when a rather wretched- looking setter-dog ran out from behind a bushy willow to meet us, and behind him appeared a man of middle height, in a blue and much-worn greatcoat, a yellow waistcoat, and pantaloons of a nondescript grey colour, hastily tucked into high boots full of holes, with a red handkerchief round his neck, and a single-barrelled gun on his shoulder. While our dogs, with the ordinary Chinese ceremonies peculiar to their species, were sniffing at their new acquaintance, who was obviously ill at ease, ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... 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 ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... first boarding a large and populous ship at sea, especially a foreign one, with a nondescript crew such as Lascars or Manilla men, the impression varies in a peculiar way from that produced by first entering a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land. Both house and ship—the one by its walls and blinds, the other by its high bulwarks like ramparts—hoard from view ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... from one point to another, turning occasionally to her friend for support or confirmation. This friend is a meek, subdued-looking person of uncertain age, somewhat washed-out and bedraggled in appearance. Her attire is nondescript, and seems to consist of oddments bought solely because they were cheap and bearing no relation whatever one to the other. Mrs. Smuts, growing more and more absorbed in the course of her harangue on the great cat question, states that ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith
... 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 ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... like Cynthia Farrow would never have given a 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 ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... from the veranda of the Paris Restaurant, when that establishment was in its glory, one could sit for hours and watch the bustling river life below. The thatched tops of the huddled cascos formed a compact roof that extended half across the stream. Upon these nondescript craft hundreds of Filipinos dwelt, doing their washing and their cooking on the decks. The scanty clothes are hanging out to dry on lines, while naked brats are splashing in the dirty water, clinging ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... a stepdaughter of the Earl of Dorminster, was one of those young women who had baffled description for some years before she had commenced to take life seriously. She was neither fair nor dark, petite nor tall. No one could ever have called her nondescript, or have extolled any particular grace of form or feature. Her complexion had defied the ravages of sun and wind and that moderate indulgence in cigarettes and cocktails which the youth of her day affected. Her nose was inclined to be retrousse, her mouth tender but impudent, her grey eyes mostly ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that ever I have tasted. The trees—pines, spruces, hemlocks, balsams, cedars—are to me about the pleasantest of all, both in taste and odour, and though the spruces and pines taste and smell much alike at first, one soon learns to distinguish them. The elm has a rather agreeable, nondescript, bitterish taste, but the linden is gummy and of a mediocre quality, like the tree itself, which I dislike. Some of the sweetest flowering shrubs, such as the lilac, have the bitterest of leaves and twigs or, like certain kinds of clematis, have a seed that when green ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... glad, too, for it was my busy season, and I had to be much from home. There was, indeed, a certain nondescript Mistress McGrier, who came to help with the heavier duties of the house. She was the daughter of one janitor at the college, the wife of yet another (presently suspended for gross dereliction of duty), and she did some charing to earn an honest penny. But there was little human to be found about ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... power' when they found fresh regiments and batteries pouring in on their flank and rear. I believe that retreat was then the proper thing. The wild panic that ensued resulted naturally from the condition of the men and officers, and especially from the presence of a lot of nondescript people that came to see the thing as a spectacle, a sort of gladiatorial combat, upon which they could look at a safe distance. Two most excellent results have been attained: I don't believe we shall ever send out another mob of soldiers; and I am sure that a mob of men and women from Washington ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... his own 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 at her house is ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... book,—I will send it on the instant to the formidable man; but I will not repeat to him every month, that there are no news. Thank me for my resolution, and for keeping it through the long night.—One book, last summer, came out in New York, a nondescript monster which yet had terrible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indisputably American,—which I thought to send you; but the book throve so badly with the few to whom I showed it, and wanted good ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... extract is strained off, the "washed" pomatum or oil is still useful, if remelted, in the composition of pomatum for the hair, and gives more satisfaction to a customer than any of the "creams and balms," &c. &c., made up and scented with essential oils; the one smells of the flower, the other "a nondescript." ...
— The Art of Perfumery - And Methods of Obtaining the Odors of Plants • G. W. Septimus Piesse
... in front which 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, which seemed to be ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... justification, at least a sort of explanation of that formidable reticence. They accord fairly well with the strange, inconsistent, whimsical and disconcerting character of the unknown entity within us that seems to live on nothing but nondescript fare borrowed from worlds to which nor intelligence as yet has no access. It lives under our reason, in a sort of invisible and perhaps eternal palace, like a casual guest, dropped from another planet, ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Year's party was a nondescript young and old together; a goodly number of both were gathered from Randolph and the neighbouring country. There were games for the young, dancing for the gay, and a superb supper for all; and the big, ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of the State until a few years ago were of a somewhat nondescript type, very few farmers having realised the necessity of improving the butter-yielding capacity of their stock. Recently, however, great improvements have taken place, as the dairying industry has advanced, until now many Tasmanian dairymen own herds of the highest standard. The ...
— Australia The Dairy Country • Australia Department of External Affairs
... around Hugo Mallin that the group had formed. Groups were always forming around Hugo. He could spring the unexpected and incongruous and make people laugh. Slight but wiry of physique, he had light hair, a freckled and rather nondescript nose, large brown eyes, and a broad, sensitive mouth. Nature had not attempted any regularity of features in his case. She had been content with making each one a mobile servant of his mind. In repose his face was homely, and ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... satisfy the "pious millions"), that 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 ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... letters sealed for the post, and a coach-parcel addressed to James Ballantyne, which he dropt at the turnpike-gate as we drove to Melrose. Seeing it picked up by a dirty urchin, and carried {p.285} into a hedge pot-house, where half-a-dozen nondescript wayfarers were smoking and tippling, I could not but wonder that it had not been the fate of some one of those innumerable packets to fall into unscrupulous hands, and betray the grand secret. That very morning we had seen two post-chaises drawn up at his gate, and the enthusiastic travellers, seemingly ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... where that brigantine was built, Captain Ludlow. It may be here, it may be there; for I look upon her as a nondescript, as old Admiral Top used to call the galliots of the north seas—but, concerning these new American fashions, of what use are they, I would ask, Captain Ludlow? In the first place, they are neither English nor French, which ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... 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, ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... 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 the banks of a river in the Flowery ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dingy and bare, washed down with some grayish color, which had long since been defaced by the grime and dust of London. Thick curtains of a nondescript hue fell in straight folds before each window, and facing these there was another door—double paneled—which apparently led to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... in my life I went into a rage and cursed that nondescript kind of messenger, sent by I know not whom, in language that I think he will not forget. Then, realising the futility of swearing at a mere tool, I went up to the Great House and demanded an audience with Panda himself. Presently the inceku, or household servant, to whom ...
— Child of Storm • H. Rider Haggard
... sneak-thief. Not a soul in New York was to know where he had gone. Not a soul in Hunston must dimly suspect what he had come for. It must be gum-shoe work from start to finish, and the Cypriani's motto would be the inspiring word, "Sh-h-h." Though he had to find a nondescript child whom he did not know from Eve, he was forbidden to do it in a natural, easy, and dashing way. He could not ring her mother's door-bell, ask for her, throw a meal-sack over her head, and whip his waiting horses to a gallop. No, he must beat the tall grasses before ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and a little out of breath but he seemed, after the first uncomfortable minute, collected enough. He mounted the running-board and directed the chauffeur to drive on across the bridge and fork to the right with the main road up to a small nondescript building on the far side ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... holiday as Pinkster. There are few blacks in Connecticut, I believe; and those that are there, are so ground down in the Puritan mill, that they are neither fish, flesh, nor red-herring, as we say of a nondescript. No man ever heard of a festival in New England, that had not some immediate connection with the saints, or ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... Turkey. Kipling, who knows the East so well, portrayed Port Said as the dwelling place of concentrated wickedness. He is right, but I do not think he has ever visited Stamboul. In Stamboul there is with no exception the most conglomerate mixture of nondescript nationalities on the face of the earth. Not only are all nationalities represented but breeds of men that defy all pathological research, hideous in their conglomerate intermixtures. If an Albanian bandit, himself a mixture of Greek and Nubian mulatto, has issue by an Arab ...
— The Secrets of the German War Office • Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves
... in such respects, but even our intellectual sex often degrade pets into nuisances by absurd idolatry. There are the gushing young ladies who, having read "David Copperfield," have thereupon sought out a small, longhaired dog of nondescript breed, possessed of an irritating habit of criticising a man's trousers, and of finally commenting upon the same by a sniff indicative of contempt and disgust. They talk sweet girlish prattle to this animal (when there is ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... misunderstanding between them. The curate was not what is known as a gentleman by birth; he had the misfortune to count among his near kinsfolk not only very poor, but decidedly ungenteel, persons. His only sister had married an uneducated man, who, being converted to some nondescript religion, went preaching about the country, and unluckily, in the course of his apostolate, appeared at Hollingford. Here he had some success; crowds attended his open-air sermons. It soon became known that the preacher's wife, who was always at his side, was a sister of Mr. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... upon the shabby red sofa and looked about her. What a horrible room! Its darkness was tainted with a creeping coldness that seemed to steal in wavering gusts from wall to wall. The carpet was faded to a nondescript colour and was gashed into torn strips near the fireplace. No pictures were on the walls from which the wall-paper was peeling. He had done nothing whatever to make ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... showed all the fire of youth, and seemed to have no part in the seventy years which had bent the tall form, and rounded slightly the broad and massive shoulders. The Captain wore a rough pea-jacket and long boots, while his head was adorned with a nondescript covering which might have begun life either as a hat or a cap, but would now hardly be ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... brown loamy earth, and a yellowish sandy clay. Marine shells, and other substances, in a fossil state, are found at the depth of eighteen or twenty feet below the surface of the ground. Some of these are of very extraordinary description. In the year 1712, several bones and teeth of a vast nondescript quadruped, were dug up at Albany in the state of New York. By the ignorant inhabitants these were considered to be the remains of gigantic human bodies. In 1799 the bones of other individuals of this animal, which has ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Half a dozen nondescript members, looking considerably the worse for wear, loafed about moodily or snored in deck chairs. Two or three were writing letters. It was the sulkiest hour of the day. Mr. Heard noticed a slender young Indian and ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... arrived first, having chartered the station hack for the evening. As the minds of both were above such minor details as clothes, their attire was of the nondescript variety, but their exuberant youth and high spirits gallantly concealed all defects and the tact of their hosts quickly set them ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... many of the guests having no idea to what sex this nondescript animal really belonged, the conversation after dinner happened to turn on the manly exercise of fencing. Heated by a subject to him so interesting, the Chevalier, forgetful of the respect due to his assumed garb, started from his seat, and, pulling up his ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... found 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 ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... up to the scene of the 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 ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... mother's shout of "Harris!" shivered the tranquil air, and reminded her that she had told a lie and had never put it right. Such a senseless lie, too, yet it shattered her nerves and made her connect these Emersons, friends of Cecil's, with a pair of nondescript tourists. Hitherto truth had come to her naturally. She saw that for the future she must be more vigilant, and be—absolutely truthful? Well, at all events, she must not tell lies. She hurried up the garden, still flushed ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... window and looked out. She was waiting for her guests, Lettice and Mrs. Campion, in the soft dusk of a sweet May evening, and she was a little impatient for their arrival. She had had a comfortable, nondescript meal, which she called dinner-tea, set ready for them in the dining-room, and as this room was near the hall-door, she had installed herself therein, so that she could the more easily watch for her visitors. Mr. Graham, a tall, thin man, with coal-black beard, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... on the "pitching-track," in the forest, or on the prairies—in all sorts of places, they could not say exactly where—and when they were born was often a matter of doubt as well. [With reference to these nondescript birthplaces, the wonderful ease of parturition among Indian women may be referred to here. This is common, probably, to all primitive races, but is perhaps more marked amongst Indian mothers than any other. The event may happen in a canoe, on the trail, at any place, or at any moment, without ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... une pauvre 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: "How does he keep them from falling ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... was an inevitable evil. The Mexicans would have mescal. Belding had kept the little border hamlet free of an establishment for distillation of the fiery cactus drink. A good many Americans drifted into Forlorn River—miners, cowboys, prospectors, outlaws, and others of nondescript character; and these men, of course, made the saloon, which was also an inn, their headquarters. Belding, with Carter and other old residents, saw the need of a sheriff for ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... of small boats surrounded the yacht, native boats of curious build, and manned by dark-skinned natives of the Rock, in nondescript attire—a noisy, pushing, quarrelsome lot, eager to do business, gesticulating wildly, and jabbering loudly in many strange tongues. Here was a pure Spaniard, with a red sash round his waist, and a velvet cap, round as a cartwheel, on his head, with a boatful of vegetables and ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... in the center of a circle of dusky Indians who were squatting on the ground. Some of the braves were clothed in nondescript garments, while others were attired in gaudy blankets. These were ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in New Mexico • Frank Gee Patchin
... Mr. Henry James lately brought out a volume of essays on "French Poets and Novelists." Mr. E. C. Stedman recently published a series of monographs on "The Victorian Poets." Are these books French and English, or are they nondescript, or are they American? Not only are they American, but they are more essentially American than if they had been disquisitions upon American literature. And the reason is, of course, that they subject the things of the old world to the tests of the new, and thereby vindicate and illustrate the ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... silks of Titian's Lilac Lady, in the Pitti, the embroidered hems of Boccaccini da Cremona, the crimson velvet of Raphael's Joanna of Aragon, Veronese's cloth of silver and shot taffety, are replaced by one monotonous nondescript stuff, differently dyed in dull or glaring colors, but always shoddy. Characteristic costumes have disappeared. We shall not find in any of their Massacres of the Innocents a soldier like Bonifazio's Dall'Armi. In lieu of gems with flashing facets, or of quaint jewels ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... 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 harvest ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and was consigned to the care of a gentleman holding a Civil employment with a Military title, viz. that of "Officer" to the Sheriff of Middlesex, with strict injunctions to the said—anything but Civil or Military—nondescript "officer," to secure and keep the person of Hannibal Fitzflummery Fitzflam till such time as the debt due to Messrs. Moleskin and Corderoy, and the legal charges of Messrs. Gallowsworthy and Pickles, should be discharged, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... Lucy, if history's going on forever repeating itself," he said. "I wonder if 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 same, ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... ultimate attainment; and surreptitiously I continued to nourish it with small bets made in a small tobacconist's. Well do I remember that shop, the oily-faced, sandy-whiskered proprietor, his betting-book, the cheap cigars along the counter, the one-eyed nondescript who leaned his evening away against the counter, and was supposed to know some one who knew Lord ——'s footman, and the great man often spoken of, but rarely seen—he who made "a two-'undred pound book on the Derby"; and the constant coming ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... 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 ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... opera glasses on the door of the bookshop. It brought the place tantalizingly near. He could see the table at the front of the shop, Roger's bulletin board under the electric light, and one or two nondescript customers gleaning along the shelves. Then something bounded violently under the third button of his shirt. There she was! In the bright, prismatic little circle of the lenses he could see Titania. Heavenly creature, in her white V-necked blouse and brown skirt, there she was looking at ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... while she was cutting rice her little boy was carried off by a wolf. About a year afterward a wolf, followed by several cubs and a strange, ape-like creature, was seen about ten miles from Chupra. After a lively chase the nondescript was caught and recognized (by the mark of a burn on his knee) as the Hindoo boy that had disappeared in the rice-field. This boy would not eat anything but raw flesh, and could never be taught to speak, but expressed ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... was 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 ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... breakfast, while Dick looked after the sick boy. Breakfast was not sumptuous; all my energies were reserved for dinner, and Dick had to make out as best he might on damper left from the night before, and the cold remains of a nondescript joint of mutton. He came back just as I had got the rough meal ready, reporting poor Wilson as a little better and awfully hungry. Then he tipped the tea—post and rails we used to call it—into our tin pannikins, and ...
— The Moving Finger • Mary Gaunt
... The language and the name were both derived (that is, were immediately so derived, for remotely the Ziph language may ascend to Nineveh) from Winchester. Dr. Mapleton, a physician in Bath, who attended me in concert with Mr. Grant, an eminent surgeon, during the nondescript malady of the head, happened to have had three sons at Winchester; and his reason for removing them is worth mentioning, as it illustrates the well-known system of fagging. One or more of them showed to the quick medical eye of Dr. Mapleton ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... bizarrerie[obs3], oddity, je ne sais quoi[Fr], monster, monstrosity, rarity; freak, freak of Nature, weirdo, mutant; rouser, snorter* [U.S.]. individuality, idiosyncrasy, originality, mannerism. aberration; irregularity; variety; singularity; exemption; salvo &c. (qualification) 469. nonconformist; nondescript, character, original, nonesuch, nonsuch[obs3], monster, prodigy, wonder, miracle, curiosity, flying fish, black sheep, black swan, lusus naturae[Lat], rara avis[Lat], queer fish; mongrel, random breed; half-caste, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... once Gore's careless and derogatory progress was halted, and he stared with terrifying intentness at the girl who had until that day managed to escape his notice. Gore had torn off a nondescript black cape that had covered her head and face, and the golden silk robe she wore. To Quirl, watching from a space of some sixty feet, her beauty came like a shock. He remembered her as Lenore Hyde, whom he had seen only once before as she emerged ...
— In the Orbit of Saturn • Roman Frederick Starzl
... eye of Dr. Silence, and stopped. He put his pipe back into his pocket and began to hum softly—that underbreath humming of a nondescript melody I knew so well and ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... square massive tower stands up out of the body of the church. A purist may find fault with the mixture of styles this tower incorporates. The bulk of its structure is Gothic; at the base of the superstructure appears a nondescript medley of styles (nondescript at least in the eyes of a dilettante) out of which arises a concern of domes and cupolas one above the other, supported at each corner by little pinnacles crowned with onion-shaped tops. The copper coating of these domes and cupolas gives a distinctive ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... than 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, ...
— Twenty-four Little French Dinners and How to Cook and Serve Them • Cora Moore
... hurdy-gurdy—but there was music, and it was loud, and there was a platform laid over the cobble-stones of the street, and on that platform ten or more couples were "ragging," their shoulders working like the walking beams of side-wheelers. The men were of that nondescript type one would expect to see in a fifteen-cent dancing place, but the women were of curious appearance, for all were dressed alike, the costume being a fringed khaki suit with knee-length skirt, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... as he tucked in the last end of a nondescript frill over a group of tiny cabbage plants, "there's not even a smack of frost in the air! It's all ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... masquerading in a French commis-voyageur's modest garb, was seated at ease in Etienne Garcin's death-trap at the Cor d'Abundance, in foggy Granville. His darkened locks and nondescript garb thoroughly effaced the "officer and gentleman." One of the old French villain's wickedest and prettiest woman decoys was coquettishly serving Hawke's breakfast as he read the burning words of Justine Delande's message from the heart. The last greeting, tear-blotted, ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... windows on the upper story were, like the entrance, Moorish; but the principal ones below were square bays, mullioned. The castle was considered grand by the illiterate; but architects and readers of books on architecture condemned it as a nondescript mixture of styles in the worst possible taste. It stood on an eminence surrounded by hilly woodland, thirty acres of which were enclosed as Wiltstoken Park. Half a mile south was the little town of Wiltstoken, accessible by rail from London ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Sarah, with some exasperation, as she saw the pony and cart, with its nondescript crew, start off one afternoon for a jog around the Parade Ground. "I do declare! What riffraff Tess manages to pick up. For she certainly must be the biggest influence in gathering every rag, tag and bobtail child in the neighborhood. I never did ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... powers, she owes none to any 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
... me of 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, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 24th of June the Monarch, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Alfred W. Ellet, arrived in the reach above Vicksburg. This was one of the nondescript fleet of rams, planned, built, equipped, and manned, under the orders of the War Department, by Ellet's elder brother, Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr., but now acting under the orders of the Commander of the Mississippi fleet. Ellet promptly sent a party of four volunteers, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... refused him, an involved tortuous epistle, which implied that the daughter was seriously attached to him, and hinted that if he were to come forward again he would not be refused a second time. There was also a short, wavering, nondescript note with nothing in particular in it from the girl herself. The mother ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... 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 to ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... which he milked twice a day, and drove in a curricle to visit the Queen of Madagascar. Doctor Lyall is writing a quarto from Madagascar, to deny the statement in toto; admitting, however, that there is a rumour of the being of some nondescript of the kind in the mountains, somewhat between the size of the elephant and the Shetland pony; but that he and we think the subject-matter will turn out asinine. But now a Mr. Ruppell, after a long sojourn in the north-east of Africa, comes at once to cheer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 387, August 28, 1829 • Various
... austere work and resolved that he would seek his entertainment elsewhere in future. It was to this theatre that John went on the day after his arrival in Cottenham. The town itself depressed him immeasurably. It was the most shapeless, nondescript, undignified town he had ever seen, and yet it was one of the richest places in England. There was no seemliness in its main streets; little huckstering shops hustled larger and more pretentious shops, ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the average. The "mode" in any class of objects or of individuals is the one that occurs oftenest, the one most frequently met with. And so this inactive, nondescript sort of person is often thought of as the typical teacher. He has no very high standing either financially or socially, and so has no great influence on the individuals around him or on the community in general. This conception has become so well established in the public mind, and is so ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... turned, beckoned hastily to one invisible to the observer, and furtively moved on. As furtively his signal was answered by a fellow who wore the nondescript garments of a peasant. And as suddenly as they had come into sight, the two slipped round a rocky shoulder, and the street of monoliths ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... 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 ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English
... the hall poured 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
... sat at a high desk, high as any pulpit, and in the benches the congregation crowded—every shade of nondescript, the waste ground one meets in a city: poor Jews and dealers from the outlying streets, with here and there a possible artist or journalist. As the pictures were sold the prices they fetched were marked in the ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... intonation. Piero, whose rugged Neptunian features, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough water-life, boasts a bass of resonant, almost pathetic quality. Francesco has a mezza voce, which might, by a stretch of politeness, be called baritone. Piero's comrade, whose name concerns us not, has another of these nondescript voices. They sat together with their glasses and cigars before them, sketching part-songs in outline, striking the keynote—now higher and now lower—till they saw their subject well in view. Then they ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... 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 their ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... office resounded to the hum of its varied labors. Mr. Jarvis, dictating letters to a typist, smiled occasionally as he pictured the arrival of this over-favored young man in the drawing-room of Mrs. Weatherley, attired in the nondescript fashion which his words had suggested. One or two of the clerks ventured upon a chaffing remark. To all appearance, the person most absorbed in his work was the young man who had been singled ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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 a little shifting of his position he can frequently bring ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... a great variety of sources. There are the stereotyped three brothers of German and Russian stories; the dragons, giants, were-wolves, wicked magicians, and beautiful girls married to bears, of all Aryan folk-lore; and sundry nondescript personages with superhuman powers which have no exact analogues among the other Aryan races, and seem to be original products of Caucasian fancy. Among the latter are karts, female ogres with cannibalistic tastes; narts, or ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... other foreigner belongs the 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 ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... crazy nondescript slopped across the ocean. Fair winds helped her and, at last, she entered the harbor of Nukahiva, over twelve hundred miles away. And there—"Hammond's luck," the sailors called it—was a United States man-of-war lying ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... feet; while the other three also have their eyes upon it, though with very different expressions. That upon the face of the Irishman is of sadness, as if for the loss of an old shipmate; the Malay looks on with the impassive tranquillity peculiar to his race; while in the sunken orbs of the nondescript can be detected a look that speaks of a ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... was rather long, low, and nondescript; scarlet flock paper; curtains and sofas green Utrecht velvet; woodwork and pillars white and gold; two windows looking on the street; at the other end folding-doors with scarcely any wood-work, all plate-glass, but partly hidden by heavy curtains of the same color ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... of strangers was 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 of honor was ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... view now possible old facts took on a new meaning. It was recalled that Cuvier had been obliged to establish a new order for some of the first fossil creatures he examined, and that Buckland had noted that the nondescript forms were intermediate in structure between allied existing orders. More recently such intermediate forms had been discovered over and over; so that, to name but one example, Owen had been able, with the aid of extinct species, to "dissolve by gradations ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... are not near enough to be disenchanted!" Nattie replied to "C." "Your mind's eye is very unreliable. Tall! why, I'm only five feet! never was guilty of a dimple, and my eyes are of some dreadfully nondescript color." ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... it was beyond the power of doing any more harm. They saw that both of their bullets had struck the skull, though not at the precise points at which they aimed. One had passed near the right eye of the nondescript, and must have inflicted serious injury, but its toughness would have enabled it to keep up the fight, and to have slain both of the boys before they could have reloaded and fired a ...
— The Hunters of the Ozark • Edward S. Ellis
... old fellow, with a wind-blown face and beard and hair enough to make his head look to be as big as a bushel basket. He was dressed in a long, faded "duster" over his other nondescript garments, and his battered hat was after the shape of those worn by Grand Army men. He limped, too, and was slow in his movements ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... the way; 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 ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis
... twenty-story modernity stands side by side with a dwarfish, Dutch anachronism, but neither possesses any right of precedence over the other. They are equal in the eyes of the proletary. Classic and nondescript, marble and brick, granite and iron, unite to form the most heterogeneous collection of fashions the earth's surface anywhere exhibits. Even Milton's blind eyes pictured nothing so fantastic as this architectural chaos of Manhattan, so hopeless of eventual order. And yet are there not ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... syrens blowing "Farewell," we 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 ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... Acton, drifting towards the wide and gloomy spaces of the Park. He crossed the great roadway and went into the Park, too. Attracted by a small gathering of dark figures he joined them, and standing among nondescript loungers he listened for a few minutes to a narrow-chested man with a long, haggard face, a wispy beard and protruding, decayed teeth, who was addressing those about him on the mysteries ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... and skirt of a soft, mouse-coloured velvet, very quiet and nondescript in hue, and the hat, with its curling brim, was covered with the same material. So far, very douce and quiet; but entirely round the hat, and curling gracefully over one side, was a magnificent ostrich plume, which ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... nondescript hood, giving the statue crowning the dome its appearance, in some views, of a wild Indian, was ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... doorsteps, and were soaked. They stood apart from the men, who seemed unconscious of their existence. The men were exactly such as one would have expected to find there—beery and restless as to the eyes, quaintly shod, and with nondescript greenish clothes which for the most part bore traces of the yoke of the sandwich board. Only one ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... her lodgers, but when he rolled in, with the book under his arm, there was a certain resemblance between himself and it, for both were broad and slightly dilapidated—the one from gout, the other from wear, and the red cover had faded into a nondescript whity-brown, or browny-white, not unlike the complexion of a close-shaven face. He was carefully arrayed in evening costume, and was very choice in his language, being, in fact, much grander than all his aristocratic ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... atmosphere has congealed on its surface into an oily black mud; while in the middle of the side streets one can see relics of the blizzard in the shape of little grubby glaciers slowly oozing away. The prospect is not enlivening; nor do the low brick houses, given up to nondescript longshore traffic, and freely punctuated with gilt-lettered saloons, add to its impressiveness. Squalid it is without doubt, this particular aspect of New York; but what is the squalor of West-street to that of Limehouse or Poplar? ...
— America To-day, Observations and Reflections • William Archer
... trees, clear pools for the bath, delighted and recruited the summer visitor. Never was so brilliant a lecture-room as his evening banqueting-hall; highly connected students from Rome mixed with the sharp-witted provincial of Greece or Asia Minor; and the flippant sciolist, and the nondescript visitor, half philosopher, half tramp, met with a reception, courteous always, but suitable to his deserts. Herod was noted for his repartees; and we have instances on record of his setting down, according to the emergency, both the one ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... in the same set with the modiste who made it up; whilst the merchant changed hands with the wife of his master-drayman, and the wealthy planter's daughter footed to her brother's schneider, himself tricked out in some nondescript uniform of his own making. Yet were all perfectly well conducted, and equally happy: nor is it found that any ill consequence or undue familiarity continues after these public occasions restore each to his, or her, own ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... are of the rudest character, mere brush shacks in summer, and in winter, nondescript structures of brush, old boards, railroad ties, tin cans, barrel-staves, old carpet, canvas, anything that will sustain a roof and keep out wind, rain and as much of the cold as possible. Their name for this structure is campoodie. ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... Anderson's fiercely 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 ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... rapturously; he was glad to feel the rain beating upon his face, and took a childish pleasure in ducking his head suddenly and seeing the little stream of water spouting from his hat-brim. How healthy they looked, these East-end workers, these Italian dock-hands, these Jewish tailors, these nondescript, greasy beings who sometimes saw the sun. Many of them, he knew well, labored in cellars; but he had learnt that there are cellars and cellars. Ah! it was glorious, this ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... deal of good do those inward conversations produce, such mollifiers of the temper are they. "So, so," said I to myself, "my Aunt Lina's paragon is a 'lady-help.' Of all kinds 'of help' the very one I have endeavored most to avoid; it is such a nondescript kind of creature that lady-help;" and as I soliloquized, recollections of specimens of the kind I had been afflicted with, came in sad array before my memory—maids with slip-shod French kid slippers, that had never been large enough for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... like a rope. It seemed to be made of all kinds of things tied together, trunk straps, clothesline, bed sheets, and something that Flannigan pointed to with rage and said he hadn't been able to keep his clothes on all day. He refused to explain further, however, and trailed the nondescript article up the stairs. We could only gaze after him and wonder ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... skill common to the Mexican Indian, even among those unable to read a note. On the whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as fitted such an institution, except the women's ward, into which a vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at sight of the comandante's order. A silent, nondescript woman of forty took me in charge with all too evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on which opened the rooms of female inmates, while the fifty or more of them left off their cooking and washing for the male prisoners and stood at disgruntled attention in sullen silence. Their quarters ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... well-spoken he was a nondescript individual, and the flash of his dark eyes was not reassuring. Yet the man was so ill that Brett forthwith dismissed him from his thoughts, though he took care to occupy the centre seat himself, thus placing Captain Gaultier ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... called The Gerrymander was published in March 1843, which contained a series of cartoons exhibiting the monstrosities of this apportionment. The Fifth District is called "the Nondescript."] ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... newspapers were premature. Scotland Yard refused to prejudice 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 offences 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 friends and keepers. The number of ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... guess; commercial travellers, all-modern, spinning, prone, to whom the sea was an insignificant and conquered thing; engineers; capped enthusiastic Germans, going forth to conquer; publishers, ladies, lords, all the nondescript prosperous: and all ran there blithe, sublime, and long drawn-out; and they toyed with oranges, nuts; and they looked abroad to see the Boodah—ship's-surgeons and officers with them—jesting, ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... was speaking to a tall, bareheaded girl, about whom half a dozen nondescript children crowded. She was holding herself against the wind, and from her long, clean limbs her woolen dress was whipped, rippling. The sun had gleamed suddenly, and under the shaft of brightness her hair shone back a golden answer. Her eyes, hardly raised to those of ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... pair were accompanied by a band of music: fortunately, this remained in the regal barge. It consisted of a flute with four holes, a nondescript instrument, seemingly made of stones; a drum made out of the hollow trunk of a tree, covered at each end with skin, of what kind it is needless to inquire. The sounds emitted by this orchestra were of an ear-rending nature, and of a kind graphically ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... 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, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... a nondescript craft," replied the officer, laughing. "It is something like a whaleboat, but it ...
— Fighting for the Right • Oliver Optic
... two 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 ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl
... the wagons, the carts, the nondescript vehicles of every description; but a moment before she had been there,—so near; he had caught beneath filmy white the glitter of gold,—her hair, the only bright thing in that murk and gloom. He recalled how he had once sat beside ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... once set out with our guns and game-bags, accompanied by the doctor's dog, Jumbo, who was almost as curious-looking as was his master—a perfect nondescript; but the doctor boasted that he had not his equal, was afraid of neither quadruped nor biped, and would face a jaguar, a bear, or a tamanoir (the large ant-eater), while he would stand to his point till he died of starvation, provided the bird chose to ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... without you like it. I suppose you have your house full of silly women, prating scandalous things. Have you ever received my picture in oil from Sanders, London? It has been paid for these sixteen months: why do you not get it? My suite, consisting of two Turks, two Greeks, a Lutheran, and the nondescript, Fletcher, are making so much noise, that I ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... set down the date of the month in the same pecuniary partitions, and to add it up glibly with the rest, calendar and coin together. But Aaron, although he was not averse from honestly misrepresenting the value of goods, drew the line at trickery, and so he was kicked out. It took him a year of nondescript occupations to amass a little stock of mock jewellery wherewith to peddle, and Manchester he found a more profitable centre than the metropolis. Yenta dead, profit and holy learning divided his thoughts, and few of his fellows achieved less of the former or more ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the crowd until the last sweating nondescript had obediently disappeared, and then returned into the temple ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... Four waiters from the Hotel Mathis; c) Six waiters from the Hotel Previtali; d) Six chambermaids from the Hotel Mathis; e) Five chambermaids from the Hotel Previtali; f) The proprietor of the Hotel Mathis; g) The proprietor of the Hotel Previtali; h) A street cleaner; i) Eleven nondescript loafers; j) Twenty-seven children; ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... vegetation of waste, barren lands, grew all over his cheeks and chin (a negro with an ample, honest beard is an anomaly), and a huge bush of wool—unkempt, I dare swear, from earliest infancy—seemed to repel the ruins of a nondescript hat. Whether he was really uglier than his fellows I cannot remember—I was so absorbed in contemplating and realizing his surpassing squalor—but the expression of the uncouth face (if it had any whatsoever) was, I think, neither ferocious nor sullen. There is generally a "colored car" attached ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... able to be moved in the afternoon; and it soon appeared that nature would take more revenge than a day's sleep for the rough handling she had had the past week. Fleda could not rise from her bed the next morning; and instead of that a kind of nondescript nervous fever set in; nowise dangerous, but very wearying. She was nevertheless extremely glad of it, for it would serve to explain to all her friends the change of look which had astonished them. They would make it now the token of coming, not of past, ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... the house would be north of Clinton, so of course the horses took the road south. Then I decided on a white cottage to the left of the road, and about two miles out, found that it was to the right, not painted, and no cottage at all, but a nondescript building, besides. "'Twas ever thus from childhood's hour!" When did I ever fancy anything exactly as it was? But the appearance does not affect the house, which is really very comfortable, though apparently ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... is a nondescript animal; singing from some unknown region, his voice possesses no natural character, but its tones are forced, strained, and artificial. Our tenors and counter-tenors—a sort of musical hermaphrodite, almost peculiar to this country, and scarcely recognized ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... 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 8. The Monitor had been constructed at Greenpoint, ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... plodded up the railway track toward the Big House. Presently these might have been discovered to be a man and a woman; the former tall, thin, dark and stooped; his companion, tall as himself, quite as thin, and almost as bent. The garb of the man was nondescript, neutral, loose; his hat dark and flapping. The woman wore a shapeless calico gown, and on her head was a long, telescopic sunbonnet of faded pink, from which she must perforce peer forward, looking neither to the right nor to ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... shown to the Polynesians; the plate representing Laughter never failed of exciting sympathy. A caricature representation of one of the fashionable belles of 1828 puzzled them exceedingly; some thought it "a bird," others that it was a nondescript of some kind, but when they were told that it was a Haina London, or English lady, they laughed, and said Parora, "you are in joke," so incredible did it seem ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 579 - Volume 20, No. 579, December 8, 1832 • Various
... in all his Hebraic fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing that he composed. All that he really attained by ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... roaring, maned, with rampant paws, And bleatingly withdraws; March,—'tis the year's fantastic nondescript, That, born when frost hath nipped The shivering fields, or tempest scarred the hills, Dies crowned with daffodils. The month of the renewal of the earth By mingled death and birth: But, England! in this latest of thy years Call it—the Month ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... deserve a 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 ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... aspiring, and usually don on Sundays a blue coat and brass buttons, white pantaloons, white gloves, and a good fur cap in winter, or a neat straw hat or brilliant beaver in summer. The waistcoat is nondescript, but the boots are irreproachable. A cigar has nearly replaced the pipe in ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... band composed of two cymbal-players and two performers on the lyre. A slab of Sennacherib's exhibits four harpers arranged in two pairs, all playing with the plectrum on the antique harp. Another of the same date, which is incomplete, shows us a tambourine-player, a cymbal-player, a player on the nondescript instrument which has been called a sort of rattle, and another whose instrument cannot be distinguished. In a sculpture of a later period, which is represented above, we see a band of four, composed of a tambourine-player, two players ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson
... apparently, to the number of several thousands, were running pell-mell to loot the granary. Men also joined in plundering the Khalifa's storehouse. They ran against our horses, tripped over each other and fell in their crazy haste to fill sacks, skins, and nondescript vessels of all sorts—metal, wood and clay—with grain. Women staggered under burdens that would assure their households of food for months. It became a saturnalia and jubilee for the long, half-starved slaves, men ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... would be destitute of meaning. But according to Hume's principle, the simple elements in an image, at least, are derived from prototypes-except possibly in very rare exceptional cases. Often, in such instances as our image of a friend's face or of a nondescript dog, an image is not derived from one prototype, but from many; when this happens, the image is vague, and blurs the features in which the various prototypes differ. To arrive at the meaning of the image in such a case, we observe that there are certain respects, notably associations, in which ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... mother. The other two would represent her children. They had been taken suddenly ill. "Waterworks," as I had christened him, was to hold his hands to his middle and groan. His face brightened up at the suggestion. The nondescript had the toothache. It took up its part without a moment's hesitation, and set to work to scream. I could be the doctor ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... preposition and participle into I know not what; and it may be observed, in passing, that the want of it, in such as "the going on," leaves us a loose and questionable word, which, by the conversion of the participle into a noun, becomes a nondescript in grammar. I dissent also from Dr. Murray, concerning the use of the preposition or prefix a, in examples like that which he has here chosen. After a neuter verb, this particle is unnecessary to the sense, and, I think, injurious to the construction. Except in poetry, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... honour of her arrival; along with a lean, side-whiskered Tongan, dimly supposed to be Lafaele's step-father; and they have been having a good time; in the end of my verandah, I hear Simi, my present incapable steward, talking Tongan with the nondescript papa. Simi, our out-door boy, burst a succession of blood-vessels over our work, and I had to make a position for the wreck of one of the noblest figures of a man I ever saw. I believe I may have mentioned the other day how I had to put my horse to the trot, the canter and (at last) the gallop ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and a thousand pardons for such rough treatment. What the—!" And he stopped short, too surprised to finish; for, instead of the petite form of the fascinating Violet, there shambled out on to the road the slouching figure of a disreputable tramp, clothed in nondescript garments of uncertain age and colour, terminating in a pair of broken boots, out of which protruded sockless feet. He had a rough shock of hair, surmounted by a soft hat full of holes, and a fat German face, whose ugliness was further enhanced by the ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells |
