"Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and happy? To go out of this poor old life with its pinches, and the sordid economies to a lovely home! She read Mrs. Searing's letter over and over again. These were the things that appealed to her, that she enjoyed in every fibre of her being. She glanced at her mother. Why the face was almost stolid! Oh, that was wicked! She had been so good and kind. Was it not the hard grind of poverty and hopeless work, never making any advance, that quenched the vitality of soul and brain? She must make her mark before hope dropped ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the other fateful telegram came, Laban Keeler was the first of the office regulars to learn its contents. Ben Kelley himself brought this message, just as he had brought that telling of Albert Speranza's death. And the usually stolid Ben was greatly excited. He strode straight from the door to the ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... a shadow of meaning in his face—not a quiver to denote that he knew anything of what had passed. To judge by the stolid indifference of his manner, one might have supposed that the delivery of caskets full of watches and valuables was an event of daily occurrence in the house of Dr. Cheron. His coolness silenced me. I ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... himself been converted to the truth. He immediately broke ground. His mother and Laneta were very much astonished at his doctrine, but they would not acknowledge that he was right. Father Nicholas had scarcely a word to say in return, so he put on the stolid look of a schoolboy brought up unwillingly to receive ...
— Count Ulrich of Lindburg - A Tale of the Reformation in Germany • W.H.G. Kingston
... those equals in wonder, Of BRADSHAW (the expert on trains), Who have torn the Hun's fiction asunder— That our City's a mass of remains; Here's our proof that we're plainly not undone, That, although every night she lies hid, Our stolid undaunted old London Still stands ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... Stolid and seemingly indifferent, so far as outward evidence gave any demonstration, of the many tender associations surrounding him, he left his native village and set off upon the long journey that was to end in his death. Speeding away from ...
— Bucholz and the Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... The stolid Christina listened entranced to all of Lorena's songs, charmed by the melody not less than she was awed by her sister-wife's superior gifts of language. The husband, too, listened not without resignation, ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... Morley sauntered across Union Square with a pitying look at the hundreds that lolled upon the park benches. They were a motley lot, he thought; the men with stolid, animal, unshaven faces; the women wriggling and self-conscious, twining and untwining their feet that hung four inches above ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... Peden Penwith, where there is another curiosity; in the smooth green middle of a narrow promontory, surrounded and terminated by the boldest rock-scenery, strangely drops down for a perpendicular hundred feet, a circular chasm, not ill named the Funnel, and which not even a stolid Borlase can pretend was dug by the Druids: at the bottom there is communication with the sea by means of a cavern, and in stormy weather the rush up this gigantic earth's chimney-must be something terrible: will this convey a rough idea? the scenery all round is really magnificent, and ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... had been looking on with heavy, stolid face, now brightened up on seeing that all was right, and gave Dennis a double portion of the steaming pot-pie, and a huge mug of coffee. When Dennis had finished these and crowned his repast with a big dumpling, Jacob came to him with a face as long and serious as his harvest ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... want to be editress. I can't think why they suggested it," she said, in her stolid, ...
— The Leader of the Lower School - A Tale of School Life • Angela Brazil
... to Gwinnie, dressed in their uniform, khaki tunic and breeches and puttees, her fawn-coloured overcoat belted close round her to hide her knees. Gwinnie looked stolid and good, with her face, the face of an innocent, intelligent routing animal, stuck out between the close wings of her motor cap and the turned-up collar of her coat. She would go through it all right. Gwinnie ...
— The Romantic • May Sinclair
... In stolid silence the German "Herr Kommander" signaled for the conning tower hatch to be thrown open and turned to find that Commander McClure had taken a crouching position directly behind him in the conning tower, a huge automatic gripped in one hand. Bonte had been ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... spring fanned the brows of the wayfarers, and told of the health and freedom of woodland life; the magnificence of the forest, the summits of the mountains, tinged with blue, the sparkling waters of lake and stream, must have given joy to even the most stolid of those households. But emotions of this description soon became strangers to ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent of demeanor—swaggering along as if conscious of there being a full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... now four to one, concluded that discretion was the better part of valor and ceased to struggle, though now and then I could see he glanced at Kennedy out of the corner of his eye. To every question he maintained a stolid silence. ...
— The War Terror • Arthur B. Reeve
... shrugged his shoulders, and jabbered something which he could make nothing of; and as the group then ceased speaking together, or paying any attention to the stranger, Mr Tompkins put down their excitable demeanour to their being only foreigners, and their natural way of going on, so unlike the stolid British seafaring man, who hardly notices anything except it specially concerns him, and even then keeps what he thinks ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you will be too stolid to perceive ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... ordinary teacher's table, with the ordinary teacher (in an extraordinary state of coma) behind it; and rather rude desks and seats for the children, but not a single ornament, picture, map, or case of objects and specimens around the room. The children were nice, clean, pleasant, stolid little things with braided hair and pinafores. The sole decoration of the apartment was a highly-coloured chart that we had noticed on the walls of all the other schoolrooms. Feeling that this must be a sacred relic, and that it probably illustrated ...
— Penelope's Postscripts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... is missed, no doubt, by most of those who are habituated to it. From time to time weary, stolid-looking girls or old women lift down the trays and run their hands over them in order to pick up superfluous male moths. Sometimes the male moths are walking about the newspaper, sometimes they are torn callously from the embrace of their mates. The fate of the male moths is to ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... dishonourable dramatist. J'en passe et des meilleurs. I could have lived in Calcutta or in Clerkenwell, been received in Belgravia or in Boulogne. Good Lord! the parts one woman is supposed to be fit for, while the man remains his stolid, stupid self. Talk of the variety stage! Or is it that they all want the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... taciturnity. It is not a suggestion that you should be stolid and wooden in manner and speech. The reason of it is to prevent you from making mistakes or betraying yourself by foolish and unnecessary utterance. My suggestion to young men that they practise reserve in speech is merely ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... of the attempted burglary. Before the magistrates, the man who had been apprehended said not a word. He seemed to accept his position with stolid fatalism. The cross-examination as to his associates, and the motive of the ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... her breath: "Are those the Rocky Mountains?" she suddenly asked, appealing to the stolid porter. She told Belle long afterward, she knew her ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... the zigzag-cornered fence Where sassafras, intrenched in brambles dense, Contests with stolid vehemence [41] The march of culture, setting limb and thorn As pikes against the army ...
— Select Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... some one to occupy two more of these numberless chairs; two more for the stolid family portraits to eye; two voices, nay three, for I shall speak then, to drown ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... strength; and, looking forward, saw a thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... the small boy. He was standing on the top step of a flight of stairs leading to the organ-loft of the Hofchapel, peering in. His round, stolid face and short, square legs gave no hint of the excitement that piped ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... tramp of feet attracted her attention then, and she looked away from her companion. Driven by the railroad officials, and led by an interpreter, a band of Teutons some five or six hundred strong filed into the station. Stalwart and stolid, tow-haired, with the stamp of acquiescent patience in their homely faces, they came on with the swing, but none of the usual spirit, of drilled men. They asked no questions, but went where they were led, and the foulness of the close-packed ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered— an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call the result delightful, and ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of high attainments, unless their coffers brim with lucre, affect him no more than the company of the most unlettered oaf. He becomes, in other words, the typical Wall Street man, and he becomes this with a stolid indifference to all known motors ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... into such dingy reality as this. The tragedy queens were the same coarse and homely women and girls that surrounded me on the green. Some of the people had evidently been drinking more than was good for them; but their drunkenness was silent and stolid, with no madness in it. No ebullition of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... The stolid boatman gave the command; the man at the bow paddled one way, while the man at the stern paddled another, and the ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... stream of consciousness over which she had no control. This dreary woods was deserted. No birds, no squirrels, no creatures such as fancy anticipated! In another direction, across the canyon, she saw cattle, gaunt, ragged, lumbering, and stolid. And on the moment the scent of sheep came on the breeze. Time seemed to stand still here, and what Carley wanted most was for the hours and days to fly, so that she would ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... there is nothing about the survivors of the disaster that strikes one so forcibly as their evident inability to comprehend their misfortune and the absence of sympathetic expressions among them. It is not because they are naturally stolid, but the whole thing is so vast and bears upon them so heavily they cannot ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... expected to see a Hercules, a fiery-faced, fierce-eyed man. This was merely a broad-shouldered, well-built, well-groomed youth, about twenty-three years of age; his face was square and rather stolid, clean-shaven, brown-complexioned, with honest eyes and a firm-set mouth. As he stood at the door he adopted the wooden expression that a University man always wears in the presence of strangers. He said nothing on being introduced to ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... girl did not talk with other women about what happened in the community. Dead saints crowded her mind to the exclusion of living sinners. All that she heard came by way of her companion, the stolid Etchemin, and when it was unprofitable talk it was silenced. They labored together all the chill April afternoon, bringing the chapel out of its winter desolation. The Etchemin made brooms of hemlock, and brushed down cobwebs and dust, and laboriously swept the rocky earthen floor, ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... out its weary life to its weary end. Spring came, and with it the soft green of the new born grass, and the lighter shoots of crocus, and lily, and the buds of the trees. Spring grew; and the stolid phalanx of city homes began to don their summer armor of boards, and blinds and ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... her. Miss Welsh, LL.A., thus describes the household: "Jean, the ever-cheerful and willing helper; Annie the drawer of water and hewer of wood, kind willing worker; Mary the smart, handsome favourite; Alice the stolid dependable little body, and Maggie the fusionless, Dannie the imp, and Asoquoe who looked with his big innocent eyes a wee angel, and who yet was in constant trouble, chiefly for insisting on sharing the cat's meals. Then there were the babies—a lovely wee twin-girl, whom their mother was nursing, ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone
... dismay from Magdalena's eyes before her face settled into its most stolid expression. He felt genuinely sorry for her, but his only part was to get out and hand these radiant visions into ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... went to the theatre. The piece performed was "Les Femmes Terribles"—and a terribly Gallic flavour there was diffused over the whole performance—a kind of haut gout, for which we stolid islanders have, happily, ...
— Notes in North Africa - Being a Guide to the Sportsman and Tourist in Algeria and Tunisia • W. G. Windham
... the required order, and then sat in stolid patience to await his wife's coming. She did not keep him long. Very soon she came lightly out and joined him, an impudent smile on her sallow little face, dancing ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... opportunity which may be used to unlock whole Empires. The great body of the people in Brazil (and this is especially true of the educated classes) are as indifferent to the gospel as people are most anywhere else. It is the weight of this stolid indifference which tries the endurance of the missionary. It fills the very atmosphere he breathes and hangs a dark cloud over his horizon, which only his faith in God and the winning of occasional converts graciously tinge with a silver lining. It is indifference, slowly ...
— Brazilian Sketches • T. B. Ray
... says 'little 'un,' and more times it's 'girly.' I ain't particular about names, ma'am, suit yourself," she said, without a change of expression, which was one of stolid earnestness. ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... upon parents. Sheila is the first-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, and bestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at the age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a little German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a feminine reproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, and they named him Hans, in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired, gray-eyed and Irish ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... that kind of opposition which we dread the most, which takes the courage out of the most courageous, and the heart out of the most earnest, is the opposition of utter insensibility, of stolid indifference, which the mass of women exhibit, not only to this question, but to any question that does not touch their immediate personal interests. If I had a cause, of whatever kind, to advocate on its ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... recovering his stolid composure; "I was but trying my new string. There! I'll unstring my ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... a glorious moment. They had weathered the perils of a city, and stood where they could best face the crisis of the pursuit. It was a spectacle to move the most stolid apathy: the sight of a couple of hundred demoniacal figures lighted by the great white wave of light from the enemy's ship, their faces upturned as they waited Black's orders, their hands flourishing knives and cutlasses, ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... rapidly made; Amos Green was thrust in beside De Catinat, and the carriage was soon toiling up the steep incline which it had come down so precipitately. The American had said not a word since his capture, and had remained absolutely stolid, with his hands crossed over his chest whilst his fate was under discussion. Now that he was alone once more with his comrade, however, he frowned and muttered like a man who feels that ...
— The Refugees • Arthur Conan Doyle
... kept by a little Jew, who sold me cigarettes on credit; then by a fat peasant woman, who liked the students because "every one of them has a mother"; now there is a red-haired shopkeeper sitting in it, a very stolid man who drinks tea from a copper teapot. And here are the gloomy gates of the University, which have long needed doing up; I see the bored porter in his sheep-skin, the broom, the drifts of snow.... On a boy coming fresh from the provinces and imagining that the temple of science ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... stolid, obtuse, sluggish, inept, bovine, beef-witted, beetle-headed, besotted, fat-witted, doltish, undiscerning; prosaic, vapid, prosy, humdrum, uninspiring tame; lethargic, comatose, stupefied, torpid, insensible. Antonyms: shrewd, sharp, apt, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... into the office—a stolid-faced, quiet-mannered, soberly attired person, who might have been a respectable tradesman out for a stroll, and who gave the inspector a sidelong nod as he approached his desk, at the same time extending his hand towards ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... Lord Hull was a man with a red face and a grey head on whom coarse indulgence and the selfish negligence of a country life had already conferred a shapeless form; and who, dressed something like a groom, sat at dinner in stolid silence by Lady Hampshire, who, whatever were her complaints, had certainly the art, if only from her questions, of making her neighbours communicative. The countess examined Lord Hull through her eye-glass with curious pity at so fine a fortune and so good a family being ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... was still panting from his late exertions, and was more or less diluvial in eye and nostril, but neither eye nor nostril bore the slightest tremor of other expression. His face was stolid and perfectly in keeping with ...
— By Shore and Sedge • Bret Harte
... said. "They charge a cent apiece for them up there, assorted colors, and there's something stolid and British about a Canadian worm. The fish aren't crazy about 'em. On the other hand, our worms here are—er—vivacious, animated. I've seen a really brisk and on-to-its-job United States worm reach out and clutch a bass ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... has perhaps helped off more slaves than any man in the country. I doubt whether Garrick himself had greater power to disguise his countenance. If a slaveholder asks him about a slave, he is the most stolid-looking creature imaginable. You wouldn't suppose he understood anything, or ever could understand anything. But if he meets an Abolitionist a minute after, his black face laughs all over, and his roguish eyes twinkle like ...
— A Romance of the Republic • Lydia Maria Francis Child
... into a ruminating silence. A full minute elapsed before he spoke again. Then: "You don't like taking advice I know," he said, in his stolid, somewhat gruff fashion. "But if you're wise, you'll swallow a stiff dose of quinine ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... many dollars invested, or so many years of labor in prospect! So all persons imported into the colony of Maryland, "Negroes, slaves, and white persons," were taxed as any other marketable article. A swift and remorseless civilization against the stolid forces of nature made men indiscriminate and cruel in their impulses to obtain. Public sentiment had been formulated into law: the law contemplated "servants and slaves" as chattel property; and the political economists of the Province ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... say: "Come, come! aren't you almost ready to clear out!" But Germinie would look up at her with a smile, a smile so sad and sweet that it checked the impatient exclamation on the old maid's lips. And so she stayed on with her, going about with a sort of fascinated, divinely stolid air, in the impassibility of profound adoration, buried in almost ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... as they gaze are swelling fast. An afflatus of heroism given forth by this host of self-devoted men communicates itself to the most stolid spectators. The booming of the drum fills the brain, and the blood in the veins leaps to its rhythm. The unearthly gayety of the fife, like the sweet, shrill song of a bird soaring above the battle, infects the nerves till the idea of death brings a scornful smile to the lips. Eyes ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... the St. Louis Agricultural Fair. And what memories of its October days the mere mention of at brings back to us who knew that hallowed place as children. There was the vast wooden amphitheatre where mad trotting races were run; where stolid cattle walked past the Chinese pagoda in the middle circle, and shook the blue ribbons on their horns. But it was underneath the tiers of seats (the whole way around the ring) that the chief attractions lay hid. These were the church booths, where fried oysters and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the day was passed in calculations and in conversations. I remained a steadfast adherent of the opinions of Professor Liedenbrock, and I envied the stolid indifference of Hans, who, without going into causes and effects, went on with his eyes shut wherever ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... rafters of the ceiling. Before him the tallow candle flared red and straight, sending up a slender thread of smoke. The light lay on the rough, sunburnt skin of his throat; the sunk cheeks were like patches of darkness, and his aspect was mournfully stolid, as if he had ruminated with difficulty endless ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... accused she was imperturbable. "Laws, Mis' L., I nebber done bin nigh dem hens. Mis' Annie, you can go count dem dere eggs." That when counted they were found minus the number she had brought had no effect on her stolid denial. H. has plenty to do finishing the garden all by himself, but the time rather ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... fellow is rather a nuisance. His bright, chatty way and deference please the Rajah; and I suppose you are right, for he's always proposing something that amuses the stolid Malay, while my prosing about business matters must ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn
... stone, like those on a clock-face, let into the earth—is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art, told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply the quality of the stone)—the great feature is the admirable ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... women were haunched about the fire, above which simmered several pots with the savory odor of cooking meat. I do not think a soul of the company as much as turned a head on our approach. Though they saw us plainly, they sat stolid and imperturbable, after the manner of their race, waiting for us to announce ourselves. Some of the squaws and half-breed women were heaping bark on the fire. Indians sat straight-backed round the circle. White men, vagabond trappers from anywhere and everywhere, lay in all ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... pillars and arches springing from the green turf, the large carved window, empty of glass, the broken walls; and, looking up to the blue sky, she tried to imagine the time when the Gothic roof closed overhead, and music sounded through the arches, and trains of stolid monks paced through them, where now the very pavement was not. Strange it seemed, and hard, to go back and realize it; but in the midst of this, the familiar face of the sky set Ellen's thoughts off upon a new track, and suddenly they were at ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... country. He had all the {9} love for Hanover that the cat has for the hearth to which it is accustomed. The ways of the place suited him; the climate, the soil, the whole conditions of life were exactly what he would have them to be. He lived up to the age of fifty-four a contented, stolid, happy, dissolute Elector of Hanover; and it was a complete disturbance to all his habits and his predilections when the expected death of Anne compelled him to ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... in astonishment at the speaker, then around the room. Mr. Jamison's wooden countenance looked stolid surprise. ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... "broadhorns," sometimes applied to the boats. Such a boat the settler would fill with household goods and farm stock, and commit himself to the current at Pittsburg. From the roof of the cabin that housed his family, cocks crew and hens cackled, while the stolid eyes of cattle peered over the high parapet of logs built about the edge for protection against the arrow or bullet of the wandering redskin. Sometimes several families would combine to build one ark. Drifting slowly down the river—the voyage from Pittsburg to the falls of the ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... for fear of submarines. The landing would have had to take place in the inner portion of the Gulf of Iskanderun, Ayas Bay, where there were no facilities, where the surroundings were unhealthy, and where it would be particularly easy for the Turks to put up a stolid resistance. Our view was that for any operation of this kind to be initiated with reasonable safety, a very large body of troops would be necessary, that as far as Egypt was concerned the Nile Delta could be rendered absolutely secure with a much smaller expenditure ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was known as "that smart Byers girl." Her butter and eggs ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... of the settlement, as we have seen, had been deprived of their arms at the taking over of Detroit by Robert Rogers; and for the most part the settlers maintained a stolid attitude towards their conquerors, from whom they suffered no hardship and whose rule was not galling. The British had nothing to fear from them. But the Indians were a force to be reckoned with. There were three Indian villages in the vicinity—the ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... A stolid, ignorant, and densely superstitious people was at war with a rejuvenated nation keenly alive to the power of education. That is the secret. Man for man, Russia would have won. But the resourcefulness of the little brown man more than offset the Russian's physical ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... and glanced reprovingly at the governess, who had lowered her book to her lap and was regarding the scene with stolid unconcern. ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... movement, with which the eye had no sympathy; for its wild and dreamy expression, the preternatural lustre, without transparency, remained unaltered, as if rebuking, with its cold, strange glare, the mockery around it. He sat before me like a statue, whose eye alone retained its stony and stolid rigidity, while the other features were moved by some secret ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... way down the narrow stairs to the lower deck. Their progress was slow and uncertain. The southeaster was tearing across the open spaces and bending everything before it; the lumbering boat dipped sideward in a stolid encounter with ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... into the gloomy, smoky, dingy room. Bare yellow benches framed an empty square of brown linoleum. A labouring man with his wife and a child sat waiting with the stolid patience of the poor in one corner. They were starting on some Saturday afternoon excursion, and had mistimed their train. Maude Selby and Frank Crosse took the other corner. He drew a jeweller's box from his pocket and removed the lid. Something ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... with Endymion on one side, and on the other the individual "who might one day be a peer." Mr. Rodney and some others, including Mr. Vigo, faced a couple of grooms, who sat with folded arms and unmoved countenances, fastidiously stolid amid all the fun, and grave even when they ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... patriotic garrulage, and that is the black ignorance in which I grope about everything, as, for example, when I gave yesterday a full and, I fancy, a startlingly incorrect account of Scotch education to a very stolid German on a garden bench: he sat and perspired under it, however, with much composure. I am generally glad enough to fall back again, after these political interludes, upon ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had to translate its mysteries and sublimities into a very material and crude ceremonial. It brought in penalties of a substantial sort,—penance and excommunication, the rack and the stake. It constantly appealed to fear. And after all, there remained always an enormous amount of stolid and mostly silent indifference and unbelief. The priest said these things were so,—the priests all said so,—and the priest was backed by the bishop, and the bishop by the Pope. Well, perhaps they knew—and perhaps they did n't. The chance ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... a shocking outrage, the captain of U.S.S. Adirondack concurred, and so the cruiser, with the injured, stolid-faced 'Reo on board, steamed off to Leone Bay and gave the astounded natives twelve hours to make up their minds as to which they would do—pay 'Reo one thousand dollars in cash or have their town burnt. They paid ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... yet forbidden to forget their affliction for a moment. The peasant was gone from the land—only the old and infirm were left to look after the flocks, to till and sow the field. Madame Sand notes, and with a kind of envy, the stolid patience and industry, the inextinguishable confidence, of poor old Jacques Bonhomme when things are at the worst. "He knows that in one way or another it is he who will have to pay the expenses of the war; he knows next winter will be a season of misery and want, ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... however, melancholy and monotonous. So many young and generous hearts beating themselves forever against the sharp stones of the baldest utilitarianism; so many bright minds drifting into despair in the surrounding chaos of obstinate, stolid, and perverse ignorance! It is a sadder book than 'The Mill on the Floss,' of which it reminds us. How the aspiring and imaginative must suffer in an atmosphere so cold ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... stood viewing these attentions to the other baby with stolid imperturbability, but as Rose Mary turned away to her table he licked out his pink tongue and bobbed his head toward the milk crocks, while his solemn eyes conveyed his desire without words. Peter's vocabulary was both new and limited, and he was at all ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... outside, the stolid Prussians joke over their beer, as they learn of the wholesale murder finishing red Bellona's banquet. "The French are all ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... side of that wall is Italy, with her vines, her mulberry-trees, her whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peasantry; across the mountains is the solemn, austere German scenery, with savage peaks and gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in common ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... attributed it to religion, would be dismayed and even, if it persisted, angered. Maggie had not, after all, the excuse and defence of being a dreamy child. With her square body and plain face, her clear, unspeculative eyes, her stolid movements, she could have no claim to dreams. With a sudden desolate pang Maggie suspected that Uncle Mathew was the only person who would ever understand her. Well, then, she ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... especially had this effect upon her. The men and women, once as alive as her everyday self, now gazing down at her from their picture frames sometimes made her heart beat as if she stood in the presence of things eerie. Their strange, rich, ugly, or beautiful garments, their stolid or fervid, ugly or beautiful, faces, seemed to demand something of her; at least she had just enough imagination to feel somewhat as if they did. Walderhurst was very kind to her, but she was afraid she might bore him by the exceeding ignorance of her questions about people ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... comprehensive and uplifting view of our spiritual environment," she remarked to Miss Philura when the two ladies found themselves on their homeward way. Her best society smile still lingered blandly about the curves and creases of her stolid, high-colored visage; the dying violets on her massive satin bosom gave forth ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... married. She felt that the arrangement would be perfectly ideal in every way. Marion was such a dear girl, so sweet-tempered and light-hearted; just the temperament that Fred needed in a wife, to save him from becoming mentally heavy and stolid and too unemotional. Fred was so matter-of-fact! Her eagerness to have Marion come into the mining-claim scheme had not been altogether a friendly desire for companionship, as she pretended. Deep in the back of her mind was the matchmaker's belief that propinquity would ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... is sometimes indispensable, especially where there has been any thing mean, dishonest, or cruel. But anger is very different from loss of temper. [Footnote: My Aunt Millicent is always saying, "I am grieeeved with you." But the announcement begets no sign of responsive grief on the face of the stolid child before her. She never whipped a child in her life. If she had, and it had but roused some positive anger in the child, instead of that undertone of complaint which is always oozing out of every one of them, I think ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... moment, however, there rose one of those five silent, stolid shareholders, who had excited Soames' sympathy. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... no longer regarded her as an Indian, but referred to her now as "that Russian governess," nevertheless she could retreat behind a baffling air of stolidity—almost of sullenness—when she chose, and that was precisely the mask she wore for Bill. In reality she was far from stolid and ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... powerful drama of the flare-up of a stolid and apparently unfeeling nature in the flame of the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... civilization. Given natural resources, the other great factor in industry is labour. In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls—one quarter of the then total population of the earth. Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers—if they were properly managed. Needless to say, Japan was ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... five days Hedin worked under Wentworth's direction, while the engineer ran his levels and established his contour. In the evenings as they sat by the campfire smoking, Hedin preserved the same stolid silence that he had studiously observed since ...
— The Challenge of the North • James Hendryx
... still till the officer motioned him to the gate, behind which the prisoners sat in stolid rows. Then he walked dejectedly back into the pen, and sat down by another drunkard. His look touched me, and I went around and talked to the magistrate privately. But he was inexorable; he said he ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... Elza and Maida at the palace with Georg and me. My heart was heavy with foreboding. Amid all this laughter and music—pleasure of the senses reigning supreme here in the Great City tonight—I could not miss a sense of impending evil. The slaans propelling the boats were stolid and grim. Not for them, this dalliance. Not for their women, this music and laughter, these daring costumes to display their beauty. The slaan women, drab with work, were slinking about unnoticed. Often I would see a boat of them slip by, furtively, ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... beating out their lives against the hot chimney; but save this and the soft voice there was no other sound. The man at the right held his pipe in his hand; to the left the boys had ceased whispering; one and all were listening to the speaker with the stolid, expressionless gaze ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... and commercial activity. The Government of Italy helped the Government of Austria in so far as was possible. And in so acting, I felt I was working better for the greatness of my country than I could possibly have done by any kind of stolid persecution. I felt that over and beyond our competition there existed the human sorrow of nations for whom we must avoid fresh shedding of blood and fresh wars. Had I not left the Government, it was my intention not only to continue in this path, but also to ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... the terrible thoughts which were working, beneath that stolid face, in that always eager-working brain. They never fancied what a terrible demon now occupied that fiery heart which they supposed was wholly surrendered to the consciousness of shame. Could they have heard that voice of the fiend whispering in her ears, while ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... to the room, where I found myself no longer alone. Sir James Barrie's "man" was there; a stolid Londoner, name of Brown, who told me he was visiting America for ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various |
