"Wizened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... rosy apple of a face made one's heart ache to look on now. It made one frightened, too: it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She would sit up in her bed a wizened little goblin, and laugh a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself,—a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the "unwilling sleep" of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... confessed, contrived somehow or other to be popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the reasons. He was not born a bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Elizabeth (though the fact is not generally known) was born a wizened old woman. He was from youth, till he was long past his grand climacteric, a very handsome, powerful, and active man, temperate in his habits, good-humoured, frank and honest in his speech (as even his enemies are forced to confess). He ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... of empire, where Time with ruin sits commissioned? In God's liberal blue air Peter's dome itself looks wizened; ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... was elderly and wizened and the other was a detective. Pike knew it as soon as he glanced at the heavy jowls and the broad face and heard the authoritative footfall. He knew, also, that he was not a bona fide detective, but a municipal detective, who is paid a monthly salary and walks stealthily ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... laughed as if I should never stop: to think of him as he used to be, pale, wizened, with a face full of care, his fingers the only rich part of him, for they had the talents to count,— scraping the money together bit by bit, and all to be squandered in no time by that favourite of Fortune, Rhodochares!—But what are we waiting for now? There will be time enough on ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... read. The train was very full, and the girls had with difficulty found room. Soldiers on leave were returning to the front, and filled the corridor. Dona and Marjorie were crammed in between a stout woman, who nursed a basket containing a mewing kitten, and a wizened little man with an irritating cough. Opposite sat three Tommies, and an elderly lady with a long thin nose and prominent teeth, who entered into conversation with the soldiers, and proffered them much good advice, with ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... to wait with her heart thumping so, and why did it thump? She found herself praying, "O God, show me what to say!" and then the door was open a crack and a sharp wizened face with a striking resemblance to Cherry's bold little beauty, was thrust at her. It must be Cherry's mother. Of ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... Fernando straightened his wizened frame. "Si! As the Senorita says, I shall do. But first I go to look. Perhaps the patron shall not know that the vaquero Corlees was here this morning. It is that I ask the Senorita to say nothing to the patron until I look. Is it ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... a face shrunken and pallid, on which no smile came; great eyes grown wan with gazing into darkness looking out beneath the shaven head, emptily, as the hollow eye-pits of a skull; a wizened halting form wasted by abstinence, sorrow, and prayer; a long wild beard of iron grey; thin blue-veined hands that ever trembled like a leaf; bowed shoulders and lessened limbs. Time and grief had done their work indeed; scarce could ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... instant the wizened man stood as if disbelieving his ears, the enormity of the insult robbing him of speech and motion. Then he uttered a snarl, and Stover was barely in time to intercept the backward fling of his ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... mother was hugely proud of him. She might have been an English duchess, introducing a pretty daughter to a first ball. It was seeing the parent in the child, the most marked form of self-flattery. Actually, tears of joy ran down those black, wizened cheeks. I wouldn't have had it otherwise, and I was glad I stayed for the ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... half an hour the caravans were stopped, and the wonderful Jinx arrived. He was very short, not taller than Rosalie; he was so humpbacked, that he seemed to have no neck at all; and he had a very old and wizened and careworn face. It was hard to tell whether he was a man or a boy, he was so small in stature, and yet so sunken ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... so absorbed in his rage that his talk with the lighthouse keeper seemed vague in his memory, afterward. The keeper was a wizened little Welshman from the Chibut who spoke English with an extraordinary mixture of a Spanish intonation and a Cimbrian accent. Bell listened heavily and spoke more heavily still. At the end he went back to the plane with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... particularly concerned me: because I was picked up from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when the change in my sense of beauty ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... sobbed: 'Ah, it is true! I feel it is all true! Yes, they are calling you, and that is why my soul answered the call. Ah, when I saw you just now lift your head from my breast with a face grey and wizened as an old man's—when I saw you look at me, I knew that something dreadful had happened. Oh, I knew, I knew! but I thought it had happened to me. The love and pity in your eyes when you opened them ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... God help him... What will he be doing when he sees his wife this day? I'm thinking it was bad work we did when we let on she was fine-looking, and not a wrinkled, wizened hag ...
— The Well of the Saints • J. M. Synge
... swiftly across the room, Sir Lyster threw open the door, revealing a gap of darkness into which a moment later slid two figures, a pretty, fair-haired girl and a wizened little Japanese with large round spectacles and ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... run, Lloyd stood thinking. There were no men nearer than the village. Whatever he did, he must do alone. He was tired of acting a man's part and doing a man's work, though the other boys often envied him. His head and bones ached most of the time, and he was getting a sober, old, wizened face. ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... hunter so fair and far: And then she saw in her dreams the deep Where the spirit wailed, and a falling star; Then stealthily crouching under the trees, By the light of the moon, the Kan-e-ti-dan, [31] The little, wizened, mysterious man, With his long locks tossed by the moaning breeze. Then a flap of wings, like a thunder-bird, [32] And a wailing spirit the sleeper heard; And lo, through the mists of the moon, she saw The hateful ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly adjudged a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced and wrinkled, with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small, well-fleshed man, who seemed to my eye the most normal and least unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared. But Mr. Pike's eye was better trained ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... of course," Leonard answered. He felt suddenly contrite. He noticed for the first time in his life that his father looked old and little, almost wizened, and there was something deferential in his manner toward his big son that smote Leonard. It was as if he were saying, apologetically, "You're the bone and sinew of this country now. I admire you inordinately, my son. See, ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... and a motorcycle shot off down the road. In half an hour it came sputtering back with a huge Cadillac roaring in its wake. The car drew up and stopped. From it descended two men. The first was a small, wizened figure with heavy glasses. What hair age had left to him was as white as snow. The second figure, which towered over the first, was ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... country house—they heard a good deal of noise in the passage, and the Prince came in. He was followed by a sturdy boy of eight, and carried in his arms a tiny girl, whose poor small body looked wizened, while in her little arms ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... men; they were his friends, his fellow-workers, boatmen, like himself. All surrounded him, gesticulating. An old man, wizened as a dried plaice, tapped him on the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... with his elbow on the desk and his head propped in his hand, and stared miserably at the floor. He had not had his clothes off for two nights, and he had scarcely taken time from his search to eat anything. His face looked old and wizened and haunted from the strain. Yet here and now he was called upon to make his great decision. On the one hand lay the old, helpless life with Kippy, and on the other a future of dazzling possibility with Guinevere. ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice
... that little wizened old man swung suddenly round. He had the face of a bird of prey, yellow as a louis d'or with a great hooked nose, and a pair of beady black eyes that observed me solemnly. The mouth alone was the redeeming ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... of ale after dinner, which was quite indefensible, for they had had a sufficiency at that bounteous repast. Evidently, the dominie was in for a good time. A wizened old fellow, named Batiste, with a permanent crick in his back, dug the worms, and presented them to the lawyer in an empty lobster tin, the outside of which was covered with texts of Scripture. "It seems almost profane," remarked the recipient, "to carry worms inside so much Bible language." ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... live the peaceful and irreproachable life of a woman with a fair, fixed income. She went to church assiduously, and spoke evil of her neighbors, but gave no handle to anyone for speaking ill of her, and when she grew old she became the little wizened, sour-faced, mischievous woman whom you know. Well, this adventure, which you would scarcely believe, happened ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume IV (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... patient, the little old man who lay sick over the way. Now this little old man bore the name of Mr Stephen Gray, and he was a bachelor, so Dr. Peyton said, a bachelor grown, from some cause unknown to my friend, prematurely old, and wizened, and decrepit. It was long since he had first come to reside in the small house opposite mine, and from the very day of his arrival I had observed him with singular interest, and conjectured variously ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow, with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red and black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn. His face was thin and brown and crafty, with a perpetual ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Lenoble to herself—a wizened, sallow-faced Macchiavellian individual, whose business in England must needs be connected with conspiracy, treason, commercial fraud, anything or everything stealthy ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... woman or child amongst them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs—one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief sorrow was that he could never develop his ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... said, to a wizened and aged man who seemed to be pleading with him earnestly; "am I a dog that these white hyenas should hunt me thus? Is not the land mine, and was it not my father's before me? Are not the people mine to save or to slay? ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard
... said Meg; "it was auld Sim o' Glower-ower-'em, the wizened auld hurcheon [hedgehog], that set a big thruch stane ower his first wife; and when he buried his second in the neist grave, he just turned the broad flat stone. 'Guid be thankit!' he says, 'I had the forethocth to order a stane heavy eneuch to ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... first doll, a ridiculous fat affair constructed of a hank of cotton with shoe buttons for eyes and a red silk embroidered mouth and an enormous braid of string for hair. And it was while she was rapturously contemplating it that she heard the wizened proprietor say, "Do you wish to have the work done by the job or by the day?" Then the Disagreeable Walnut pompously consulted a huge dusty ledger from which she decided that a certain Miss Pease would suit ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... clamour announced that the object of the hunt had been achieved, and a raccoon treed. They made their way to the dim illumination cast on moving forms and a ring of dogs throwing themselves upward at the trunk of a tree. There was a concerted cry for "Ebo," and a wizened, grey negro in a threadbare drugget coat with a scarlet handkerchief about his throat came forward and, kicking aside the dogs, commenced the ascent of the smooth trunk that swept up to the obscure foliage above. There was a short delay, ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... wondered if he knew about it, and if he had any idea who had played that prank. I looked to his pew; yes, there he sat, rosy and beaming, bland as ever! I looked for old Peter Dexter, president of the Dexter Trust Company—yes, he was in his pew, wizened and hunched up, prematurely bald. And Stuyvesant Gunning, of the Fidelity National—they were all here, the masters of the city's finance and the pillars of "law and order." Some wag had remarked if you wanted to call directors' meeting after the service, you could settle all the business ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... taken by Sylvia to be presented to the wise-ones, at whose instigation I had been brought to the island. These I found to be men, if indeed they could be called such, but they were so wizened in appearance as more to resemble monkeys. Their manner of life is so austere as to make it a matter for marvel that body and soul could cling together. They will not kill an animal for food, or for any other purpose, ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... was a little cockney Englishman, a fugitive, like all his countrymen, from the horror which had stricken England suddenly and left her wallowing in her life blood. He looked up at Lance, and a smile broke forth on his wizened, sharp ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... said Mollie, enjoying the sensation she was making. "He was an awfully wizened old man, and when he heard we were from Pine Island—well, he told us some ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... scarcely find a word. The old friends of the student-days were not forgotten, but they did not seem to get on in the new house. The Miss Gandishes came to one of Mrs. Clive's balls, still in blue crape, still with ringlets on their wizened old foreheads, accompanying papa, with his shirt-collars turned down—who gazed in mute wonder on the splendid scene. Warrington actually asked Miss Gandish to dance, making woeful blunders, however, in the quadrille, while Clive, with ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... and with an eye piercing as a diamond-drill. One day he looked almost boyishly young, there would be a smile on his tanned face. And then another day he would be bent in the saddle, huddled up, wizened, an old, old man, crushed with the weight of ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... reminder of some overhanging evil clutch suddenly at our hearts in happy moments of forgetfulness. To let them be happy that day, to leave their feasts free of a death's head, La Boulaye would have withdrawn had he not already been too late. Duhamel had espied him, and the little, wizened old man came hurrying forward, his horn-rimmed spectacles perched on the very end of his nose, his keen little eyes beaming ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... wizened, little man of fifty, tanned to gipsy brown. He had a shrewd thin face, with an oddly flattened nose, and little round moist dark eyes that glittered like diamonds. He wore cloth cap on the back of his ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... by the man's flowery way of talking—so unlike anything which I had ever heard. He had a wizened face, and sharp little dark eyes, which took in me and the house and my mother's startled face at the window all in the instant. My parents were together, the two of them, in the sitting-room, and my mother read the note ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to a good, swift poke in the neck!" exclaimed the voice of wizened old Johnson, who stood in the doorway, and who, since his friendship with Biff Bates, had absorbed some of that gentleman's vigorous vernacular. "Applerod, I'll give you just one minute to get out of this office. If you ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... politely as the great man passed through the office, and Gilray, the wizened senior clerk, opened the outer door. Jefferson Edwards turned as he passed him and clapped him on ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for all that there is an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever meeting. Maybe I've got a husband who is cruel to me. Maybe, biggest obstacle of all, I've got a husband whom I am utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things, I'm a poor, old wizened-up, Shut-In, tossing day and night on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being sick I'm starving poor, and maybe, worse than being sick or poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... this mere carpenter's journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had not spoken to him once—simply the night before last, at the entrainment in Vienna, he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother. How had the confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken little old hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand loose folds from her cheek-bones, had made such an impression on his captain? The man himself certainly did not know how touching it looked when the tiny mother gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... comfortable-looking, stony-hearted man who pulled off his gown the better to rack Anne Askew, of old time; and, behind them all, one of whom they all think but little—a young man of short stature, with good forehead, and small, wizened features—Mr Secretary Cecil, some day to be known as the great Earl of Burleigh, who holds in his clever hands, as he sits in the background with his silent face, the strings that move most of these puppets, and pulls them without the puppets knowing ...
— For the Master's Sake - A Story of the Days of Queen Mary • Emily Sarah Holt
... side of the hill was a little crazy cottage which had marvellously escaped. Three shells had fallen within ten yards of it. Two had not burst, and the other, shrapnel, had exploded in the earth. The owner came out, a trifling, wizened old man in the usual Belgian cap and blue overalls. We had a talk, using the lingua franca of French, English with a Scottish accent, German, and the few words of ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... that," growled an old wizened bowman, with a brown-parchment skin and little beady eyes. "It is better in these days to mend a bow than to bend one. You who never looked a Frenchman in the face are pricked off for ninepence a day, and I, who have fought five stricken fields, can ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... down before a dish of fried eggs at the table in the corner, the favoured table, where Marie herself often sat and chatted, when wizened Madame did not have her eye ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... as if he had seen his guest only the day before. He looked vaguely about for something that Thornton might smoke, then seated himself on a cluttered bench holding a number of retorts, beside which flamed an oxyacetylene blowpipe. He was a wizened little chap, with scrawny neck and protruding Adam's apple. His long hair gave no evidence of the use of the comb, and his hands were the hands of Esau. He had an alertness that suggested a robin, but ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... had always thought of Frenchmen as small men; for there was not one of that first company who could not have picked me up as if I had been a child, and their great hats made them look taller yet. They were hard, wizened, wiry fellows too, with fierce puckered eyes and bristling moustaches, old soldiers who had fought and fought, week in, week out, for many a year. And then, as I stood with my finger upon the trigger waiting for the word to fire, my eye fell full upon the mounted officer with his ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... old man up trembling in every joint. Once in the saddle, he seemed to gather in a moment unnatural vigour; and the figure that went flying to Tergou was truly weird-like and terrible: so old and wizened the face; so white and reverend the streaming hair; so baleful the eye; so fierce the fury which shook the bent frame that went spurring like mad; while the quavering voice yelled, "I'll make their hearts ache. I'll make their hearts ache. I'll make their hearts ache. I'll make their ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take us home. A sorry carriole or patache it proved to be, with the accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... door, and when he heard our business was to sell a jewel, left us in a stone-floored hall or lobby, while he went upstairs to ask whether his master would see us. A few minutes later the stairs creaked, and Aldobrand himself came down. He was a little wizened man with yellow skin and deep wrinkles, not less than seventy years old; and I saw he wore shoes of polished leather, silver-buckled, and tilted-heeled to add to his stature. He began speaking to us from the landing, not coming down into the hall, but leaning ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... of leaving the room out of his proper turn; but the startled pressure of Miss Willoughby's hand on his arm warned him in time. He stopped, to allow the statuesque Miss Chester to sail out under escort of a wizened little man with a horseshoe pin in his tie, whose name, in company with nearly all the others that had been spoken to him since he came into the room, had escaped ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... men, and boys, stalwart burglars and highway robbers, slept side by side with wizened pickpockets or cunning-featured area-sneaks. The forger occupied the same berth with the body-snatcher. The man of education learned strange secrets of house-breakers' craft, and the vulgar ruffian of St. Giles took lessons of self-control from the keener intellect of the professional swindler. ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... pale and tired. She complained of headache, and she looked old and wizened. She told Mrs Macphail that the missionary had not slept at all; he had passed the night in a state of frightful agitation and at five had got up and gone out. A glass of beer had been thrown over him and his clothes were stained and stinking. But a sombre ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... suddenly he seemed to see himself surreptitiously taking the six-shooter from Roth's showcase—and he recalled vividly how he had felt at the time—"jest plumb mean," as he put it. Roth had been mighty decent to him. . . . The Mexican, a wizened little man, cross-eyed and wrinkled, stumbled ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... was their uncle and sole relative, an old man, wizened and dried up like a monkey, to whom India was a land of perpetual delight and novelty of which he could never tire. He was engaged upon a book of Indian mythology, and he was often away from home for the purpose ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... lump of love," called out a mellow voice; and there, close by, sat a wizened old woman, making flowers into nosegays. She had on a quilted hood as soft as her voice, but everything else about her was as hard as the ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... me and held me by both shoulders, and he drew me into the recesses of the rocks and bent his wizened old face ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... looked like a wizened monkey as he screwed up his eyes and chuckled. He was in a good temper this morning—good for him—and he looked well pleased as his eye traveled slowly over the wonderful expanse of garden which lay spread out like a fairy ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... you ever see such a horror?" he asked, pointing it out to his companion; "a curio for ugliness, and just the sort of monster Mrs. Malone would love. I'll try if I can get hold of it. What's the price of the China demon?" he inquired of a wizened old woman, who wore a bashed black bonnet and a pair of ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... the sitting-room. But in Turkey such conveniences are a secondary consideration. The rooms were freshly whitewashed, the board floors were scrubbed, and the view from the windows was one of the most beautiful in the world. A day spent in the bazaar did the rest. I picked up a queer, wizened old Dalmatian cook, and with the help of my servant was installed in the little place eight-and-forty hours after I had made up ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... And when the spring should come and bring her a family of kittens, she would have to take on her own shoulders the whole burden of parental responsibility. Or, rather, the burden was already there, for if she did not find enough meat to keep herself in good health the babies would be weak and wizened and unpromising, with small chance of growing up to be a credit to her or a satisfaction to themselves. So she hunted night and day, and, on the whole, with very good results. To tell the truth, I think she was rather more skilful in the chase than her mate had been, and this seems to ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... that this little white house was the proper destination of the letter, Joshua Hicks administered an authoritative knock on the front door. The response came in the form of a queer little old lady, who wore a very expectant look, a look almost pathetically expectant. She was slight and wizened, and stood straight. But her face was deeply wrinkled and her ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the poor boy, whose thin, wizened face, with large, hungry eyes, was placed on a shrunk and distorted body. His mother was the pest of the court, always drunk, and in her drunken fury beating her wretched offspring. Half-starved and half-clothed, he passed his time on the door-step, gazing vacantly at the passers-by, uncared for, ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... privileged in the house of Dea Flavia. She had nursed the daughter of proud Claudius Octavius at her breast, and between the wizened old woman and the fresh young girl there existed perfect friendship and the confidence born of years. Dea's first tooth was in Licinia's keeping and so was the first lock of hair cut from Dea's head. Licinia had been ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... who was wizened, weathered, and old, with but few teeth, looked up at him from above the curved hands with which he was coaxing the flame of a match into the bowl of his pipe. His brow was wrinkled, and moisture stood at the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... wizened man wanted on Earth. His eyes darted down to the point of the knife that showed under Gordon's sleeve, and he licked his lips, showing snaggled teeth. The wheel hesitated and came to a halt, with the ball trembling ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... for the flower-seller was wizened and unsteady of foot, and she had sent him spinning about in a dizzy fashion. She put out a steadying hand. "Oh . . . !" This time it was in ecstasy; she had spied the primroses in the basket just as the sunshine splashed over the edge of the corner building straight down upon them. Margaret MacLean ...
— The Primrose Ring • Ruth Sawyer
... appeared. He was a man of between forty and fifty, thin and wizened. Petra and he got into conversation, while the boy and a little urchin continued to heap up the old shoes. Manuel was looking on, when the boy ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... were crouching, the one small and wizened, the other large-boned and gaunt, with their legs crossed in Oriental fashion and their heads sunk upon their breasts. Neither of them looked up, or took the smallest notice of ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to spend a long time with the dingy Somers family, much to their enjoyment. After various adventures, their ecstatic friend, the lively Hilda Mason, came to spend a few days. To entertain her, one day, they took her out in a wizened boat to sail over the garrulous bay. They dragged their silent auntie" [a howl] "with them, promising her a talkative day. All went well at first, but suddenly a gruesome storm arose, and beat upon their inky boat, which began to leak. The musical crew were all much frightened, and tried to bail ...
— Cricket at the Seashore • Elizabeth Westyn Timlow
... in the drama loomed in his mind larger for that fateful last act. The tragic sock and the mask enhanced them. What mystery lay behind Manuela's sidelong eyes? What sin or suffering? What knowledge, how gained, justified Esteban's wizened saws? These two were wise before their time; when they ought to have been flirting on the brink of life, here they were, breasting the great flood, familiar with ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... turned to tell the miller what he had seen in the thicket. The dim interior darkened just then, and Crump stood in the door. Old Gabe stared hard at him without a word of welcome, but Crump shuffled to a chair unasked, and sat like a toad astride it, with his knees close up under his arms, and his wizened ...
— The Last Stetson • John Fox Jr.
... The wizened little Legate bowed to the ground as the noisy procession started, for though he wore a clerical dress he was only a layman, and the Nuncio was Archbishop of Kerasund, 'in partibus infidelium,' and returned the Governor's salutations with a magnificent benediction from the window of his ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... drearily backwards and forwards in the summer breeze. We had pulled up our horses, and were gazing in silence at this sign-post of death, when what had seemed to us to be a bundle of rags thrown down at the foot of the gallows began suddenly to move, and turned towards us the wizened face of an aged woman, so marked with evil passions and so malignant in its expression that it inspired us with even more horror than the unclean thing which dangled ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... who seemed to combine the functions of station agent and baggage hustler approached, wheeling a truck. He was a small man, gray-headed, with a wrinkled, wizened face, and eyes of faded blue. To him the engineer ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... The wizened little old man, walking with difficulty by the aid of a staff, but armed in proof, with plumes waving gallantly from his iron headpiece, and with his rapier at his side, ordered a chair to be brought to the river's edge. Then calmly seating ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of the year, which would be sometime in June. On these occasions the adult warriors from far and near assembled at a certain spot, and after a course of festivities, sat down to an extraordinary seance conducted by women—very old, wizened witches—who apparently possessed occult powers, and were held in great veneration. These witches are usually maintained at the expense of the tribe. The office, however, does not necessarily descend from mother to daughter, it being only women credited with supernatural powers who ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... diminutive wisp of humanity, a starved, slender elf with a freckled face, wizened and peaked, which at times looked a thousand years old. It reminded you of the face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed with the sins and sorrows of a hundred centuries. And yet it mustn't ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the smile was reflected with interest in the wizened, mahogany-coloured face that looked up at his own from under the rim of the ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... commissary had left him, Charley Seguis's brow clouded with annoyance as he saw a bent, wizened female figure approaching him. The only woman In the camp, old Maria, had not fallen into obscurity for a moment. She always wanted something, and haggled and nagged until she got it. Seguis, the sterling white ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... was a tall man, with gray, unkempt hair, and long, wizened face. He wore a black suit of clothes, of ancient cut, and a stock which had literally belonged ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Of her Hh hunter so fair and far. And then she saw in her dreams the deep Where the spirit wailed, and a falling star; Then stealthily crouching under the trees, By the light of the moon, the Kan—ti-dan, [31] The little, wizened, mysterious man, With his long locks tossed by the moaning breeze. Then a flap of wings, like a thunder-bird, [32] And a wailing spirit the sleeper heard; And lo, through the mists of the moon, she saw The hateful ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... as soon as a military policeman who was standing at his door, moved on we were placed on chairs at a small table and had our repast. We visited the church which was not unlike the bigger one at Mudros. With her head on the doorstep was a wizened old woman fast asleep, guarding three piles of salt she had laid out to dry in the sun. She got on her haunches, mumbled to us in a friendly way, and showed us how she worked her spinning machine, which she had with her. ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson
... had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman later on. He was a dirty, little, used-up old man with evil eyes and a weak mouth, who swallowed an opium pill every two hours, and in defiance of common decency wore his hair uncovered and falling in wild stringy locks about his wizened grimy face. When giving audience he would clamber upon a sort of narrow stage erected in a hall like a ruinous barn with a rotten bamboo floor, through the cracks of which you could see, twelve or fifteen feet below, the heaps of refuse and garbage of all kinds lying under ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... in the house was the ladies'-maid, a thin and wizened spinster, Madeleine Vivet by name. This Madeleine, in spite of, nay, perhaps on the strength of, a pimpled complexion and a viper-like length of spine, had made up her mind that some day she would be Mme. Pons. But in vain she ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... in charge of a very singular little old woman. Nobody had ever known where she came from. The benevolent lady who founded the institution, had brought her to the door one morning in her coach, and the neighbors had seen the little brown, wizened creature, with a most extraordinary gown on, alight and enter. This was all any one had ever known about her. In fact, the benevolent lady had come upon her in the course of her travels in a little German town, sitting in a garret window, behind a little box-garden ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... Square-head? Drink up and forget it! What's in your bottle? Gin. Dot's nigger trink. Absinthe? It's doped. You'll go off your chump, Froggy! Cochon! Whiskey, that's the ticket! Where's Paddy? Going asleep. Sing us that whiskey song, Paddy. [They all turn to an old, wizened Irishman who is dozing, very drunk, on the benches forward. His face is extremely monkey-like with all the sad, patient pathos of that animal in his small eyes.] Singa da song, Caruso Pat! He's gettin' old. The drink is too much for him. ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... luncheon-time besides, we retraced our steps, but had not gone very far before we suffered a severe disappointment. Some fifty yards below us in the path stood a seeming counterpart of "Madge Wildfire"; a wild, weird, wizened looking creature, whom we immediately recognised as a "witch of the hills." Her hair unkempt, her bodice hanging in tatters from her shoulders, her patched and threadbare petticoat barely fastened round what should ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... weather, and a visit to the shop of Mr. Potts. Tom, alias Betterly, who was trying to sell some mysterious undergarments to a fat old woman, caught sight of me, the Editor aforesaid, and winked. In a shadowed corner of the shop sat Mr. Potts himself upon a high stool, a wizened little old man with a bent back, a bald head, and a hooked nose upon which were set a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles that accentuated his general resemblance to an owl perched upon the edge of its nest-hole. He was busily engaged in doing nothing, and in staring into nothingness ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... was clean and spacious. Four of the six beds in it were empty, each one having its coarse grey coverlet folded neatly, and strangely suggestive of a coffin. On the fifth bed sat a little wizened old man in a dressing-gown, who glanced timidly at the newcomers; and on the sixth bed, beneath a similar coarse coverlet, lay Semenoff. At his side, in a bent posture, sat Novikoff, while Ivanoff and Schafroff ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... duly completed, they got their car. The picturesque garage was no longer useless. A silent, wizened little Frenchman and his wife took possession of the big room over the kitchen, Pierre to manage the garden and the car, Pauline to cook- -she was a marvellous cook. Nancy kept Agnes, and got a little maid besides, who was to make herself generally ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... Shannon was further away than it is, fluttered from the broken windows of the fifth story. All the shops were open; there did not seem to be any buyers, but if there were, they might get supplied. The very old huckster women sat by their baskets of very small and very wizened apples, and infinitesimal pears that had forgotten to grow. Two women, one in a third-story window and one on the street, were exchanging strong compliments. In fact, as our cousins would say, "there ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... was supposed to be Aristide had no ghost of an idea. But as he proceeded with the erection of his airy palace he gradually began to believe in it. He invested the place with a living atmosphere; conjured up a staff of family retainers, notably one Marie-Joseph Loufoque, the wizened old major-domo, with his long white whiskers and blue and silver livery. There were also Madeline Mioulles, the cook, and Bernadet the groom, and La Petite Fripette the goose girl. Ah! they should see La Petite Fripette! And he kept dogs and horses ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... the news until she should decide who was to know it first and how her own advantage could be secured. So there was time, and Adonis swung himself along the dim corridor and up winding stairs that be knew, and roused the little wizened priest who lived in the west tower all alone, and whose duty it was to say a mass each morning for any prisoner who chanced to be locked up there; and when there was no one in confinement he said his mass for himself in the small chapel ...
— In The Palace Of The King - A Love Story Of Old Madrid • F. Marion Crawford
... the open space again farther down. I sat with the bridle rein loose on El Mahdi's neck and my hands resting idly on the horn of the saddle. I think I must have been smiling, for when Ump looked up at me, his wizened face was so serious that I burst ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... fit them for any useful life. But they could creep forth and beg, the woman could stand in the gutter with a little bit of mortality wrapped in her old shawl, for tender-hearted passers-by to see its wizened face, and the father could stand not far away from her with a few bootlaces or matches exposed, as if for sale. They managed ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes
... the wizened skin of his forehead, and retreated from the bar. At a safe distance, he called: "Bad news that about Bob Eccles swallowing a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... violent grey tumult. For two days they had a perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf |
