"Nondescript" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, in the ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... "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 with ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... not a big man, but was evidently very strong and active. His dress was of the most nondescript character, consisting mainly of a tattered fur cap, with a woolen muffler tied over his ears; a patched and parti-colored coat belted at the waist with a frayed rope. His legs disappeared into the wide tops of a pair of boots evidently too big for him, with the feet ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... This nondescript personage was pitched upon by government as the very man to command a vessel fitted out to cruise against the pirates, since he knew all their haunts and lurking-places: acting upon the shrewd old ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... was vaguely directed to proceed up-stairs by the nondescript maid-servant who admitted him. The place was dark, the day sultry, the steps numerous. Tom climbed them leisurely, hat in hand, wondering why people couldn't live on the ground-floor, and not a little absorbed in preparation of such a plausible ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... if you keep it up it just ruins your hair. You have such nice hair, Kate!" She picked up a sterilized brush and began stroking Kate's hair soothingly. It was not such nice hair. It was very ordinary hair of a somewhat nondescript color; but Kate was her dearest friend, and praise is a part of the profession. "What do you want?—a scalp, shampoo, or just dressed, ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... that I should enjoy the shelter and repose of a habitation. As we went along, indications of the new power, which had already effected the easy transit of the desert, were visible in small patches of coal, scattered upon the sand; presently we saw a dark nondescript object, that did not look at all like the abode of men, civilized or uncivilized; and yet, from the group hovering about an aperture, seemed to be tenanted by human beings. This proved to be an old boiler, formerly belonging to a steam-vessel, and appearing, indeed, as if some black and ...
— Notes of an Overland Journey Through France and Egypt to Bombay • Miss Emma Roberts
... temple, some two hundred worshipers—a few substantial citizens in gold-fringed tunics, artisans in tunics without gold fringe, soldiers in mail hauberks and plain steel caps, one officer in ornately gilded armor, a number of peasants in nondescript smocks, and women of all classes—were beginning to prostrate ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper
... patient was put to bed Cutty changed. A nondescript suit of the day-labourer type and a few deft touches of coal dust ...
— The Drums Of Jeopardy • Harold MacGrath
... that this young Jack Smith (to keep for him the nondescript name he had for unknown reasons chosen to assume) should be the first man to awaken in the misanthropic Adrian the charm of human intercourse, was singular indeed; one who followed from choice the odious ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... their humble disciple. Once you get into it you never want to get out, and once out you are miserable until you get back again. On one bank stretches a row of rookeries—a maze of hanging clothes, fish-nets, balconies hooded by awnings and topped by nondescript chimneys of all sizes and patterns, with here and there a dab of vermilion and light red, the whole brilliant against a china-blue sky. On the other is the long brick wall of the garden—soggy, begrimed, streaked with moss and lichen in bands ...
— Outdoor Sketching - Four Talks Given before the Art Institute of Chicago; The Scammon Lectures, 1914 • Francis Hopkinson Smith
... 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 and deliberate ...
— Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall - or Solving the Campus Mystery • Alice B. Emerson
... was simply a double row of buildings facing each other across a wagon road. Two stores, a blacksmith shop, a feed stable, certain other nondescript buildings, and a few dwellings, mostly of logs, was all. Probably not more than a total of fifty souls made permanent residence there. But the teams of ranchers stood in the street, and a few saddled cow ponies whose listlessness was mostly assumed. Before one ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... died to a whimper. A wide stain spread over his nondescript coat just above the belt, and Drew knew that his first shot had found that target. But he was in charge of the situation once again. Both Hatch and Jas' had subsided, the one eyeing the threat of Drew's weapon, ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... of the church tolled the hour, and a man wrapped in a nondescript garment, between a cloak and an overcoat, stole along the moonlit street to where Nino stood, in front ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... la-de-da Willies hanging about her, yet who, absolutely cut off from contact with any others, either gradually fades into a peripatetic old maid, wandering over Europe, or marries an eligible, turkey-trotting nondescript—"a mimmini-pimmini, Francesca ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... a lad he amused himself by inventing machines for swimming, diving, and flying, as well as a compass, a hygrometer, etc. etc. In a combination from the attributes of the toads, lizards, bats, etc. etc., with which his studies in natural history had made him familiar, he painted a nondescript monster, which he showed suddenly to his father, whom it filled with horror. But the horror did not prevent the old lawyer selling the wild phantasmagoria for a large sum of money. As something beyond amusement, Lionardo ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... silence by saying to the Red Queen, "I invite you to ALICE's Party—which used to be neutral ground—to explain, if you can, that nondescript nonsense of yours about National Councils as a substitute ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, July 18, 1891 • Various
... 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, led by his young nephew, ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... slowly extracted from Theophilus the startling story. A year before, just as the Gold and Green practiced for the Ham game, T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., one afternoon, had arrayed his splinter-structure in a grotesque, nondescript athletic outfit, and had jogged out on Bannister Field. The gladsome youth's motive had been free from any torturesome purpose. He intended to round up the Phillyloo Bird, Shad Weatherby, and other non-athletic collegians, and with them boot ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... Two nondescript Pagan gentlemen of Titanesque proportions had joined the watch of the conventional leonine twins, and the big gate now stood hospitably open, over it swinging the new sign in gallant crimson and white, that announced to all the world that Outside ...
— Outside Inn • Ethel M. Kelley
... 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 with no more strength than a spring chicken," but for the ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner
... pal. A chunky, beefy nondescript. I was meditating a jump across "the desert." The older hoboes had warned me against it, saying it was a cruel trip ... the train crews knew no compunction against ditching a fellow anywhere out in the ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... jets hissing and spluttering in the draught from the door, for they were entirely innocent of shades or mantles. Wooden tables, their surfaces stained with the marks of countless wet glasses, were ranged about the place, cafe fashion; and many of these tables accommodated groups, of nondescript nationality for the most part. One or two there were in a distant corner who were unmistakably Chinamen; but my slight acquaintance with the races of the East did not enable me to classify the greater number of those whom I now saw about me. There ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... 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 ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... purpled 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. ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... and syrup flew in every direction! The obstacle beneath my feet made me stagger; I grasped the folds of a window-curtain in the hope of saving myself, but my equilibrium was too far gone—down came the curtain—over I went, head first, against a flower-stand, on which were a nondescript array of flowerpots, a canary bird in a cage, and a big Maltese ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... and stone-roofed niche with statue over the round-arched door, transom windows filled with stained glass, and carvings of shields, animal heads, colonnettes and other devices between and above these windows. The council-house or town-hall has a beautiful colonnade supporting arches, and a quaint nondescript creature whose abyss-like maw opens wide and gapes horribly at the beholder each time the clock strikes. A bas-relief in the hall represents a curious incident in the civic history of the town, the successful struggle of Burgomaster Gryn with a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... seeming to be no medium sizes among them, while the women were the most wooden-featured lot that Bobby had ever encountered, and the entire crowd was swathed in gay but dingy clothing of the most nondescript nature. Really, had Bobby not been assured that they were grand opera singers he would have taken them for a lot of immigrants, for they had that same unhappy expression of worry. The principals could be told from the chorus and the ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... withheld from the dark-skinned children of the race. "'Possum Jim" spent most of his existence on the same street corner, waiting for a job, which invariably had to come to him. His outfit consisted of an express wagon strung together with telegraph wire, and a nondescript four-footed creature that once bore the similitude of a horse. Whenever Field had an odd job to be done about his household he would go out of his way to let "old 'Possum Jim" earn the quarter—partly ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... unqualified grey, a complexion suggesting sea-air, splendid teeth in a humorously inclined mouth, and a nicely rounded chin. Very few people have beautiful noses; on the other hand, not the most beautiful nose will redeem an otherwise unattractive countenance, whereas an ordinary nondescript nose in a charming face simply becomes part of it. Marjorie's was nondescript, but did not turn up or droop excessively. Without being guilty of stoutness, she lacked the poorly nourished look of so many young women ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... A nondescript meal, half tea and half dinner, was already prepared, and Mrs. Hanshaw, grave but self-possessed, presided at ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... through and a hanging of some pleasing character put in its place. A bay-window could be built to replace the two present oblong windows—a bay which would come down to the floor and open out on the lawn via swiveled, diamond-shaped, lead-paned frames. All this shabby, nondescript furniture, collected from heaven knows where—partly inherited from the Semples and the Wiggins and partly bought—could be thrown out or sold and something better and more harmonious introduced. He knew a young ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... 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, ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... not better bag some of the birds that were fluttering over my head, and get out of the swamp as fast as I could, when I heard the distant report of a gun, and said to myself, "Well, I'll give the nondescript five minutes more, and if it doesn't turn up by then, I'll blaze away at the pigeons." Half the allotted time had barely elapsed, when another report broke the stillness of the morning, and immediately afterwards I heard a rustling among the mangrove-leaves, and a slight crackling, as ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... it in the glances, the deference and the ready make-way which attended upon our progress. Frankly to say, possibly I strutted—as a young man will when "fortified" within and without and elevated from the station of nondescript stranger ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... 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 her at the opera. How different was this babel, this grinding ...
— Half A Chance • Frederic S. Isham
... commerce of the North would be at the mercy of this novel and terrible engine of destruction. The telegraph carried the news everywhere, and in dread and anxiety the people awaited the fate of another day. When morning came at Hampton Roads a small nondescript vessel, looking like an oval raft with a turret, interposed between the Merrimac and its prey. It was the Monitor, the invention of Captain John Ericsson, and it had arrived during the night of March 8. The Monitor ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... come back. Then we went to the house of the Blazers, in 'Cow Bay,' and used to lodge there with Yellow Bill. They said Bill was a thief by profession; but I wasn't old enough to be a judge. Little Lizza Rock, the nondescript, as people called her, used to live at the Blazers. Poor Lizza had a hard time of it, and used to sigh and say she wished she was dead. Nobody thought of her, she said, and she was nothing because she was deformed, and a cripple. She was about four feet high, had a face ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... 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 ...
— The Friendly Road - New Adventures in Contentment • (AKA David Grayson) Ray Stannard Baker
... Wheler Club, perhaps some other—has his tea, newspaper, and gossip there, and then back to his small bungalow, [where he turns out his servants for swearing parade. Each one gets it pretty hot; and then breakfast]. After breakfast he arrays himself for the day in some nondescript white uniform, and with a forage cap stuck gaily on one side of his head, a cheroot in his mouth, and a large white umbrella in his hand, he again sallies forth to the Club. An old ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... of some two and twenty, A- by name, goes out in a nondescript capacity as part purser, part telegraph clerk, part generally useful person. A- was a great comfort during the miseries [of the gale]; for when with a dead head wind and a heavy sea, plates, books, papers, stomachs were ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which is enough to ruin the healthiest appetite, and a certain barbaric uniformity in the bill of fare which would throw even a Diogenes into despair. May the devil take your leathery beef-steaks, as tough as the prose of Tacitus, your tasteless, nondescript buckwheats, and your heavy, melancholy wines, and I swear it would be the last ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... cerebral or at least nervous mechanism with ourselves; in their degree, I say; for a zooephyte and a caterpillar have brains, though not in the head; and to this day Waterton does not know whether he shot a man or a monkey, so closely is his nondescript linked with either hand to the grovelling Australian and the erect orang outang. Brutes are nerved as we are, and uncivilized man possesses instincts like them: all we can with any show of reason deny them is moral sense, and in our arbitrary refusal of this, and our summary disposal ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... cottages indicated their approach to the outskirts of a country town or settlement. Here the team halted, as if the belligerent-looking teamster had felt his appearance was inconsistent with an effeminate civilization, and the oxen were turned into an open waste opposite a nondescript wooden tenement, half farmhouse and half cabin, evidently of the rudest Western origin. He may have recognized the fact that these "shanties" were not, as the ordinary traveler might infer, the first rude shelter of the original pioneers or settlers, but the later makeshifts ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... half life in parts of the Magazine to which the writer had already contributed several of his German essays, and it was even then published with reluctance, and on half pay. The reception of this work, a nondescript, yet among the finest prose poems in our language, seemed to justify bookseller, editor, and readers alike, for the British public in general were of their worst opinion. "It is a heap of clotted nonsense," pronounced the Sun. "Stop that stuff or stop ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... their stations in the field with a new supply of empty baskets. Some of the pickers were drifting away to other fields, a few seeking work late in the day; more, bargaining with the itinerant venders of pies, made to last all summer if not sold, gingerbread, "pones," and other nondescript edibles, at which an ostrich would hesitate in well- grounded fear of indigestion, but for which sable and semi-sable pickers exchange their berry tickets and pennies as eagerly as we buy Vienna rolls. Two or three barouches and buggies that had brought visitors ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... bethought 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, which seemed to answer all the purposes of legs. For arms there dangled from the upper ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at work the dress of the North Russian peasant is, after five years of wartime, rather a nondescript collection of garments, often pitiful. In the winter the clothing problem is somewhat simplified because the four items of apparel which are customary and common to all for out-of-doors wear are made so durably ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... 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 common ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... into decay: it was of immense size, with two rows of windows, with an old-fashioned ceiling covered with gilt carving, with a gallery with mirrors on the walls, red and white draperies, marble statues (nondescript but still statues) with heavy old furniture of the Napoleonic period, white and gold, upholstered in red velvet. At the moment I am describing, a high platform had been put up for the literary gentlemen who were to read, and the whole hall was filled with chairs like the parterre ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... remained over night and on the twenty-fourth instead of the twenty-eighth escorted a nondescript sort of party up to Severndale, for wearing apparel had to be ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... A nondescript-clad figure came out of the brushwood into the open clearing, walking towards the spot where the mountain-sheep lay stretched on the sward, which was partly covered with the snow that remained unmelted under the lee of the cliff; and a voice, without ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... cut off upon both sides; behind me the murderers, before me this lurking nondescript. And immediately I began to prefer the dangers that I knew to those I knew not. Silver himself appeared less terrible in contrast with this creature of the woods, and I turned on my heel, and looking sharply behind me over ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... she had brass guns on her forward deck, and a considerable force of soldiers or sailors. But she was a nondescript craft, and he was unable to make her out accurately, though by this time she was not more than half a mile distant. No immediate danger was to be apprehended from her, unless she opened fire with the field-pieces on her deck. As the Leopard was in the service of the forts, she ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... him. Who the devil was he? What was he, Morrison, doing there, talking like this? Morrison knew no more of Heyst than the rest of us trading in the Archipelago did. Had the Swede suddenly risen and hit him on the nose, he could not have been taken more aback than when this stranger, this nondescript wanderer, said with a little bow ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... more unlike than were the host and his guest. A poet was to my father a sort of nondescript: yet whatever added grace to the Unitarian cause was to him welcome. He could hardly have been more surprised or pleased, if our visitor had worn wings. Indeed, his thoughts had wings; and as the silken sounds rustled round our little wainscoted parlour, my father threw back his spectacles ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... in spite of his melodramatic speeches and his strong personal resemblance to Danny Man in the "Colleen Nawn," is, Chiltern says, really one of the gentlest and most docile of men, straightway abandoned the nondescript hat and sacrificed his inclinations and principles to the extent of buying what he calls "a top hat." But he has not taken kindly to it, and never will. It is always getting in his way, under his feet or between his knees, and he is apparently driven to observe the precaution ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... 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 the door and welcomed the arrivals, as to make the neighbors affirm—and that ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... back. 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 ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Works of Ivan Turgenev, Vol. I • Ivan Turgenev
... that a small crowd had collected round the aeroplane. Mr. Daventry and Mr. Van Kloof were there, with several other Englishmen, and a number of Chinese coolies and nondescript natives stood at a little distance, gazing in wondering silence. Rodier had his watch in his hand, and looked reproachfully at his employer. Smith pressed through the crowd, shaking hands with the Englishmen one ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... striking river will still afford great sport for many generations. There are long stretches which are never touched except by a stray Indian or Chinaman with a grasshopper or bit of salmon roe on a string tied to a long willow pole. Some years ago a nondescript individual who said he was a Cherokee half-breed turned up at Savona's Ferry and earned a living by fishing. Every day he caught more fish than he could carry, though he never revealed his secret. Some believed that he used set lines. ...
— Fishing in British Columbia - With a Chapter on Tuna Fishing at Santa Catalina • Thomas Wilson Lambert
... cosy and bright the little cabin looked when I settled down for a nondescript meal, half-tea, half-dinner, ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... circus; monkeys with black beads for eyes, and long tails; lions, tigers, and leopards, with large, savage, black, glass eyes, with manes or tails suited to each, and properly crooked by a wire extending to the tip. And finally he laid the bogi-boo, a nondescript with a head on each end much like the head of a lion or tiger. When not used as a plaything, this served the ...
— The Chinese Boy and Girl • Isaac Taylor Headland
... earnestly and kindly into the affairs of others, and totally repudiates self. From early manhood he had roughed life in the very roughest and wildest scenes of the wilderness, and was now returning to those scenes after a short visit to his native land. The doctor was a nondescript; a compound of gravity, fun, seriousness, and humbug—the latter predominating. He had been everywhere (at least, so he said), had seen everything, knew everybody, and played the fiddle. It cannot be said, I fear, that he played it well; but, amid the various vicissitudes ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... with a projection 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 propelled by some sort of chemical-explosion engine, was dingy and mud-splattered; ...
— Flight From Tomorrow • Henry Beam Piper
... pass on to the Exhibition. 'Ere (indicating a pair of lop-sided Orientals in nondescript attire) we 'ave two life-sized models of the Japanese villagers who caused so much sensation in London on account o' their peculiar features—you will easily reckernise the female by her bein' the ugliest one o' the two. (Compassionate titters ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... by war had reason to ride into Tubacca, Arizona, a nondescript town as shattered and anonymous as the veterans drifting through it. So when Drew Rennie, newly discharged from Forrest's Confederate scouts, arrived leading everything he owned behind him—his thoroughbred ...
— Rebel Spurs • Andre Norton
... warlike weapons; musical instruments of several different kinds; a silver crucifix, a sepulchral antique vase, and several of the little brazen Penates of the ancient heathens, with other curious nondescript articles, some of which, in the superstitious opinions of that period, seemed to be designed for magical purposes. The library of this singular character was of the same miscellaneous description with its other effects. Curious manuscripts ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... reflection Michael saw in its warped mirror would have made any boy with a particle of vanity actually suffer. Michael, however, was not vain. He thought little about himself, but this room was depressing. The floor was covered with a nondescript carpet faded and soiled beyond redemption, and when his trunk was placed between the bureau and the bed there would be scarcely room for the one wooden chair. It was not a hopeful outlook. The boy took off his coat and sat down ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... 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
... waited outside. Putting on his hat and taking a coat over his arm, he turned out; when just before the door he saw a man muffled up in a great military cloak, and a glazed hat, endeavouring to back a nondescript double-bodied carriage (with lofty mail box-seats and red wheels), close to the pavement. "Who-ay, who-ay," said he, "who-ay, who-ay, horse!" at the same time jerking at his mouth. As the Yorkshireman made his exit, a ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... train, by a parvenu of colossal wealth, in great haste to enjoy himself. Although there was no sign of a woman's dress about the table, no bit of light and airy material to enliven the scene, it was by no means monotonous, thanks to the incongruity, the nondescript character of the guests, gathered together from all ranks of society, specimens of mankind culled from every race in France, in Europe, in the whole world, from top to bottom of the social scale. First of all, the master of the house, a sort of giant—sunburned, ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... was still safely on the street corner. He was just opposite, and now that the eddy of the crowd had left a little clear space around him she saw with whom he was talking. It was a small, very small, shabby, nondescript man—possibly only a boy, so short he seemed. His back was toward her. His clothes hung upon him with an odd un-Anglo-Saxon air. He was foreign with a foreignness no country could explain—Italian, Portuguese, Greek—whatever ...
— The Coast of Chance • Esther Chamberlain
... had failed him once or twice, for in communities of the description of Meadeville social life was more or less democratic and nondescript. When he had thought himself secure on certain occasions, he had bumped right into the McLaughlins and then it behooved him to stick pretty close to Honey ...
— Skinner's Dress Suit • Henry Irving Dodge
... material found about the farm. She was to represent a country maid of a generation past—and very pretty she looked, too, in her wide skirts and poke bonnet, covered with roses. Quite in contrast to the long and lanky figure Mr. Bunn, who in a nondescript suit, rode the mule that drew the cart, after the fashion of an English postillion. The play was a comic one without much rhyme or reason, but it was found that audiences occasionally liked things of that sort, so the films ...
— The Moving Picture Girls at Oak Farm - or, Queer Happenings While Taking Rural Plays • Laura Lee Hope
... from the great ribbed beams of oak and barren interspaces, graceful Peri floated on snow-white clouds and roguish Cupids swam through the azure depths, to the edification of nondescript prodigies, who constituted the massive molding, or frame, to the decorative scene. The ancient fireplace, broad and deep, had given way to an ornate mantel of marble; the capacious tankard and rotund pewter pot of olden times, suggestive of mighty butts of honest beer, ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... 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 ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... 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, bright rooms were full of bright faces. It was a very happy evening to Ellen. For a good part ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... seventeenth century was fairly packed away with its lavender in the store chest of the past, a score or more bands of freebooters were cruising along the Atlantic seaboard in armed vessels, each with a black flag with its skull and crossbones at the fore, and with a nondescript crew made up of the tags and remnants of civilized and semicivilized humanity (white, black, red, and yellow), known generally as marooners, ...
— Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates • Howard Pyle
... down to the bunk-house, through the open door of which Buck presently observed the arrival of the remainder of the outfit. They came from the east, and Kreeger and Siegrist were with them. As Buck expected, the former rode the sorrel with distinctive white markings, while the latter bestrode a nondescript bay. The second of the two riders he had watched that afternoon had been mounted on just such a bay, and if there had been a lingering touch of doubt in Stratton's mind as to the identity of the two criminals, ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... felt it rather an unnatural process to marry so lovely a girl to "such an ugly stork of a man as Whitecraft was, and a knave to boot. I cannot forget how he took me in by the 'Hop-and-go-constant' affair. But then he's a good Protestant—not that I mean he has a single spark of religion in his nondescript carcass; but in those times it's not canting and psalm-singing we want, but good political Protestantism, that will enable us to maintain our ascendancy by other means than praying. Curse the hound that keeps him? Is this a day for him to be late on? and it now half past ten o'clock; ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... 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 ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... only cow in the place, who is descended from the scriptural lean ones, was munching the discarded tail of a large codfish which probably still held a faint flavor of the salt with which it had been preserved. Nondescript dogs, bearing very little resemblance to the original well-known breed, wandered ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... imaginative paintings, into which, to use Pater's phrase, "the soul with all its maladies has passed." In his pictures he draws on the effects of earlier art, and throws his sitters back until they seem to belong to some nondescript mediaeval country, like the Bohemia of the dramatists; and he darkens and shuts out the light of day that this starlight of soul may be more clearly seen, and destroys, as far as he can, all traces of the century they live in, for the mind lives in all the ages, ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... establishments were names that Sophia did not know. The character of most of the shops seemed to have worsened; they had become pettifogging little holes, unkempt, shabby, poor; they had no brightness, no feeling of vitality. And the floor of the Square was littered with nondescript refuse. The whole scene, paltry, confined, and dull, reached for her the extreme of provinciality. It was what the French called, with a pregnant intonation, la province. This—being said, there was nothing ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... stables, the covered cart-shed that surrounded two sides of the court, were all crowded by idle people, partly belonging to Sir Daniel's establishment, and attired in his livery of murrey and blue, partly nondescript strangers attracted to the town by greed, and received by the knight through policy, and because it was the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 8 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle. It will recall to you the nondescript inhabitants now so widely scattered:- the two horses, the dog, and the four cats, some of them still looking in your face as you read these lines; - the poor lady, so unfortunately married to an author; - the ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... after this, Legree was sitting in the old sitting-room, by the side of a flickering wood fire, that threw uncertain glances round the room. It was a stormy, windy night, such as raises whole squadrons of nondescript noises in rickety old houses. Windows were rattling, shutters flapping, and wind carousing, rumbling, and tumbling down the chimney, and, every once in a while, puffing out smoke and ashes, as if a legion of spirits were coming after them. Legree had been casting up accounts and reading newspapers ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... an inverted V, the palm of his hand, with half curled, contorted fingers, almost touching his chin, as his head sagged at a stiff, set angle into his right shoulder. Hair straggled from the brim of a nondescript felt hat into his eyes, and curled, dirty and unshorn, around his ears and the nape of his neck. His face was covered with a stubble of four days' growth, his body with rags—a coat; a shirt, the button long since gone at the neck; and trousers gaping in wide ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... hotel for breakfast, stopping on the way for a plunge in the great Ballarat Swimming Aquarium. After breakfast we were driven to the Barton Gold Mines, situated on the edge of the town, going down to a depth of ii,000 feet after we had attired ourselves in overalls, slouch hats and other nondescript disguises. From the mine we were driven to the Town Hall, of West Ballarat, Ballarat being divided into two municipalities, West and East, where we met with the usual Australian welcome at the hands ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... 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 ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... of raw ham, eggs (oh, those everlasting eggs!), and a peculiar and nondescript kind of meat, about which we asked no questions, the village captain called on us and bore us off to ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... would lie sleepily in the sun, dreaming of the days of splendour long by. In the square before the wonderful cathedral there would be stillness—here and there, perhaps, a pigeon would come fluttering down from the ledges and cornices of the Gothic facade; sometimes a nondescript dog would raise a lazy head to snap at the flies; occasionally the streets would send back a nasal echo as a group of American tourists, with their Baedekers and maps, came hurrying along to "do" the town before the next train left ...
— Mud and Khaki - Sketches from Flanders and France • Vernon Bartlett
... universities in the United States is most instructive in this respect. Nearly every one of them has suffered greatly from the want of some such general plan. One has but to visit almost any one of them to see buildings of different materials and styles—classical, Renaissance, Gothic, and nondescript —thrown together in a way at times fairly ludicrous. Thomas Jefferson, in founding the University of Virginia, was wiser; and his beautiful plan was carried out so fully, under his own eyes, that it has never been seriously departed from. At Stanford University, thanks to the ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... a point on the outskirts where streets appeared, sharply defined thoroughfares, interlacing one with the other. And as they advanced vehicles began to turn in upon the trail, a nondescript collection ranging from an Indian farm-wagon off the Navajo reservation to the north to a stanhope belonging to some more affluent American in the suburbs. With them came also many strange sounds—Mexican oaths, mild Indian commands, light man-to-man greetings of the day. Also there was much ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... tenor 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... up housekeeping in our berline, and putting all "to rights," the whips cracked, bells jingled, and away we thundered by the arrowy Rhone. I had had the idea that a diligence was a rickety, slow-moulded antediluvian nondescript, toiling patiently along over impassable roads at a snail's pace. Judge of my astonishment at finding it a full-blooded, vigorous monster, of unscrupulous railway momentum and ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... was a quaint structure, half gothic, and half of a nondescript architecture peculiar to itself. Leaving the vestibule we entered at once the main audience-room, large, and sufficiently commodious, but somewhat dark and gloomy. The pulpit was high, and looked like an upright octagonal vase perched on a square pedestal. This was unoccupied at ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... resembled the well-fed plutocrat. He scarcely seemed the same man who, nearly two years before, had absently bestowed upon MacRae a dollar for an act of simple courtesy. He wore nondescript trousers which betrayed a shrunken abdominal line, a blue flannel shirt that bared his short, thick neck. And in that particular moment, at least, the habitual sullenness of his heavy face was not in evidence. He looked ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... 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, ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... in the White homestead was a large, low room whose southward windows were shaded at this season with a cloud of gold-green young grape leaves. The paper was a nondescript pattern, a large satin scroll on white. The room was wainscoted in white, and the panel-work around the great chimney was beautiful. A Franklin stove with a pattern of grape-vines was built into the chimney under the high mantel. ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... giving the visitor a fairly good view of the interior. The front room was large and fairly well furnished with light inexpensive furniture, grass rugs and an assortment of nondescript, "catch-as-catch-can," but not unattractive, art upon the walls. Langford, who was not a sleepy schemer, was able to get a good view of the room before any one ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... always found 'Vanitas Vanitatum' written on the bottom of the pot." This is the mind in which Don Juan interprets the universe, and paints the still living court of Florizel and his buffoons. A "nondescript and ever varying rhyme"—"a versified aurora borealis," half cynical, half Epicurean, it takes a partial though a subtle view of that microcosm on stilts called the great world. It complains that in the days of old "men ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... Edgeware Road. The house of Margaret's aunt was plainly enough indicated to me, as soon as I entered the street where it stood, by the glare of light from the windows, the sound of dance music, and the nondescript group of cabmen and linkmen, with their little train of idlers in attendance, assembled outside the door. It was evidently a very large party. I hesitated about ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... and a silk gown, and fine bonnet, gloves, and a white pocket-handkerchief. The men are not so 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
... a head and face that must in years gone by have caused many a flutter in feminine hearts: But now the eyes were bleary and sunken from alcohol, the high forehead was hidden under a mat of dirty, nondescript hair that was once undoubtedly a glorious tawny blond. The wide shoulders stooped, the back bent forward from the waist, and the hands, yet retaining hints of care, trembled at the ends of bony, jerky arms. And, in the half-light of the veranda, the sodden features smirked ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... a change began to come over his complexion. His verdant brilliancy was "sicklied o'er with a pale cast of thought," whitish, yellowish, nondescript. A foolish human mother would have been alarmed and would have hurried to the medicine closet for a remedy for biliousness. Not so Tom's wise parent. She knew that the time had come for him to grow red. She let him have his own way now about being out in the sunshine. She ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... city was not to be distinguished from a working-woman. Her friends, indeed, said that she had not the least care for her personal appearance, and unless she was watched, she was sure to go out in her shabbiest gown and most battered hat. She wore tonight a brown ulster and a nondescript black bonnet drawn close down on her head and tied with black strings. In her lap lay her leathern bag, which she usually carried under her arm, that contained medicines, lint, bandages, smelling-salts, a vial of ammonia, and so on; to her patients ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a dance hall. Ninety-five per cent. were men, of whom the majority were young men. A year ago the percentage would have been nearer one hundred, but now a certain small coterie of women had drifted in, most of them with a keen eye for prosperity. The red or blue shirt, the nondescript hat, and the high, mud-caked boots of the miner preponderated. Here and there in the crowd, however, stood a man dressed in the height of fashion. There seemed no middle ground. These latter were either the professional gamblers, ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... who in the beginning of King William's war, commanded a privateer in the West Indies, and by his several adventurous actions, acquired the reputation of a brave man, as well as an experienced seaman. But he had now become notorious, as a nondescript animal of the ocean. He was somewhat of a trader, something more of a smuggler, but mostly a pirate. He had traded many years among the pirates, in a little rakish vessel, that could run into all kinds of water. He knew all their ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... were almost nonexistent, and his chin receded so far that Rick wondered why he didn't conceal it with a beard. He seemed like a complete non-entity. In contrast to the white-haired man's style of dress, the nondescript man wore a rumpled black suit of synthetic fabric, a regular white shirt, and a tie that a color-blind old aunt might have given him for ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... cloaks, hung upon frames or stuffed figures. Here Mrs. Laval sat down on a sofa and made Matilda sit down, and called for something that would suit the child's age and size. Velvet, and silk and cloth, and shaggy nondescript stuffs, were in turn brought forward; Matilda saw no satin. Mrs. Laval was hard to suit; and Matilda thought Judith was no help, for she constantly put in a word for the articles which Mrs. Laval ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... the entirely different contrast between what I will call the classic-academic and the romantic type of imagination. The former has a fondness for clean pure lines and noble simplicity in its constructions. It explains things by as few principles as possible and is intolerant of either nondescript facts or clumsy formulas. The facts must lie in a neat assemblage, and the psychologist must be enabled to cover them and "tuck them in" as safely under his system as a mother tucks her babe in under the down coverlet on a winter night. Until quite recently all ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... comfort, his health, and his freedom from pestilence, plague and disease. Unthinking people laud and praise some upstart whose ability lies in his faculty to fool the gullible, or they will rush to seek the false aid of some nondescript science, because it is popular and well advertised, while they pass by or ignore the men whose labors have made the world what it is, and who alone possess the ability to intelligently wage the battle in the interest of ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague
... so recently 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 had ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... in the summer of 1862, a party of Colorado miners, lost on their way to Gold Creek in the Deer Lodge Valley, discovered the first rich placer diggings of Montana. A mining town grew up straightway; and ere winter a nondescript crowd of two thousand people—miners from the exhausted gulches of Colorado, desperadoes banished from Idaho, bankrupt speculators from Nevada, guerilla refugees from Missouri, with a very little leaven of good and true men—were gathered in. Few of them speak with pleasant memories ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... I had exceptional abilities. Only a fool underestimates his capabilities. My brain power was greatly above the average. I know that I was born to succeed. My appearance was the only thing against me. I was quiet and insignificant—utterly nondescript.... ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... so saying, he slipped down through the embrasure into a canoe that lay beneath, and in a trice we saw him jump on board of a long low nondescript kind of craft that lay moored within pistol-shot ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... Auct.)[TN-10] With the possible exception of one or two figures, monkeys (Maya, maa[vs] or baa[c]) are not represented in the Maya codices examined. In Tro-Cortesianus 88c (Pl. 39, fig. 4) occurs a curious nondescript animal with what seem to be hoofs on the forefeet, a somewhat bushy tail of moderate length, and a head that appears to be distinctly bonneted, somewhat as in the representations of the capuchin. Stempell regards this as a monkey, though recognizing that the short bushy tail is unlike that ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... this is hot work!" exclaimed Lawless, flinging himself down on a sofa so violently as to make an old lady, who occupied the farther end of it, jump to an extent which seriously disarranged an Anglo-Asiatic 123nondescript, believed in by her as a turban, wherewith she adorned her aged head. "If I have not been going the pace like a brick for the last two hours, it's a pity; what a girl that Di Clapperton is to step out!—splendid action she has, to ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... doors. Both of them have round arches, deep and curiously wrought, and the pillars of one of the two are formed of a peculiar knot or twine in stone-work, such as I cannot well describe, but it is both ingenious and simple. These pillars rest on two nondescript animals, which look as much like walruses as anything else. The pillars of the other door consist of two figures supporting the capitals, and themselves standing on two handsomely carved lions. The work is curious, and evidently very ancient, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to our black sheep. Look where he stands. As he grows weary, he grasps the straps on either side to steady him. His attitude is a cunningly devised mode of tormenting his fellow-passengers. Either elbow of our nondescript just reaches the hat of your opposite neighbor or yourself. With each jolt of the stage, by a little dexterity of movement, or want of it, he can knock the hats over the eyes of two persons at a time, and by a little shifting of his position he can frequently bring down four by a single spasmodic ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 6, May 7, 1870 • Various
... house would have been flung away, but which were so artistically and scientifically handled by the young ladies, and so tossed up, and titivated, and eked out with gravies, and sauces, and strange devices of nondescript pasty, that Happy Jack, feasting upon these wonderful creations of ingenuity, used to vow that he never dined so well as when there was nothing in the house for dinner. To their wandering, predatory life the whole family were perfectly accustomed. A sudden turn out of quarters they cared no more ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 422, New Series, January 31, 1852 • Various
... Bishop's letter, which I had still in my possession, and on the influence which his last communication to the "President" would of necessity exercise; so I decided to visit Fort Garry, upon the conditions that my baggage was restored intact, Mr. Dreever set at liberty, and the nondescript flag taken down. My interviewer said he could promise the first two propositions, but of the third he was not so certain. He would, however, despatch a message to me with full information as to how they had been received. I gave him until five o'clock the following evening, at which hour, ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... orang-utan, youthful but large. The boy was a Dyak in light cotton drawers, with the upper part of his body naked, brass rings on his arms, heavy ornaments in his ears, and a bright kerchief worn as a turban on his head. The man was a sort of nondescript in a semi-European shooting garb, with a wide-brimmed sombrero on his head, black hair, a deeply tanned face, a snub nose, huge beard and moustache, ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... they are, such my present tale is, A nondescript and ever-varying rhyme, A versified Aurora Borealis, Which flashes o'er a waste and icy clime. When we know what all are, we must bewail us, But ne'ertheless I hope it is no crime To laugh at all things—for I wish to know What, after all, are ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... rate. But the constant small expenses entailed by the first setting on foot such an establishment as the F. U. E. E. were a heavy drain on her private purse, as she insisted on all accounts being brought to her, and then could not bear that these small nondescript matters should be charged upon the general fund, which having already paid the first half-year's rent in advance, and furnished the house, must be recruited by some extraordinary supply before she could ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... ejaculations—a vast 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 ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... at him, and made no answer, feeling none due. He came out into the open, followed by a nondescript dog, which had the lack of decency—and also of discretion—to attack my dog Partial with no parley or preliminary. I wot not of what stock Partial came, but somewhere in his ancestry must have been stark fighting strain. Mutely and sternly, ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... after the torpedo had struck the ship she had disappeared beneath the surface of the sea. "Above the spot where she had gone down," said one of the men who escaped death, "there was nothing but a nondescript mass of floating wreckage. Everywhere one looked there was a sea of waving hands and arms, belonging to the struggling men and frantic women and children in agonizing efforts to keep afloat. That was the most horrible memory and ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... directions. The porches of Bourges, Amiens, Notre Dame of Paris, and Notre Dame of Dijon, may be noted as conspicuous in error: small models of feudal towers with diminutive windows and battlements, of cathedral spires with scaly pinnacles, mixed with temple pediments and nondescript edifices of every kind, are crowded together over the recess of the niche into a confused fool's cap for the saint below. Italian Gothic is almost entirely free from the taint of this barbarism ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume I (of 3) • John Ruskin
... at Bruges spend the summer, and which, as the coast of Flanders becomes better known, is visited every year by increasing numbers of travellers from the other side of the Channel. Knocke is in itself one of the least attractive places on the Flemish littoral. The old village, a nondescript collection of houses, lies on the Vicinal railway about a mile from the sea, which is reached by a straight roadway, and where there is a digue, numerous hotels, pensions, and villas, all of which are filled ...
— Bruges and West Flanders • George W. T. Omond
... their bloom." Next is a campanile of Sweden, and near it are the Swedish and Norwegian houses, armed against winter. Then the Japanese cottage with sides all open, mats on the floors and no furniture to speak of. Then comes a Moorish pavilion of Spain with nondescript ornaments, the bulbous domes and pinnacles supporting the flags of yellow and red—of barbaric ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... shaggy eyebrows 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 ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... 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 eyes were kind. ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... Book as to understand that the Reformation, if not a crime, was at least a blunder, and therefore, like other plain Englishmen, he was not prepared to admit the pretensions and assumptions of a new race of nondescript priests. Thirteen prelates took the unusual course of requesting the Prime Minister to reconsider his decision, but Lord John's reply was at once courteous and emphatic. 'I cannot sacrifice the reputation of ...
— Lord John Russell • Stuart J. Reid
... 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 ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... gentleman and an artist, with almost as much notion of work as I have of piano playing; and Allan, who has more brains than the rest of you put together; and Carrie, who is half a saint and slightly hysterical; and your poor little self; and then comes that nondescript article Jack. Why in the world do you call a feminine creature Jack? And poor little Dot, who will never earn a penny for himself—humph, six of ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... the gallant commander of the Orient was secretly amazed by the metamorphosis effected in Robert's appearance since he scrutinized him through his glasses. Iris, too, unaccustomed to the constraint of high-heeled shoes, clung to the nondescript's arm in a manner that shook the sailor's faith in Lord Ventnor's pretensions as her ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... architecture. To Miss Balfour these composites and their owners would have been joys unalloyed except for the microbe of society ambition that was infecting the latter, and transforming them from simple, robust, self-reliant Westerners into a class of servile, nondescript newly rich, that resembled their unfettered selves as much as tame bears do the grizzlies of their own Rockies. As she had once complained smilingly to Hobart, she had not come to the West to study ragged edges of the social fringe. She might have done ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... over yonder," said the man, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at a nondescript building some ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy
... 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 ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... the afternoon as he was returning, he noticed a nondescript figure sitting solitary on the bank, which, as he approached resolved itself into the superb outline of his Indian love. Unconscious of observation she threw herself backward, in an attitude as remarkable for its beauty as for its ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... sympathies were with the South. He hurried up to Hannibal and enlisted with a company of young fellows who were recruiting with the avowed purpose of "throwing off the yoke of the invader." They were ready for the field, presently, and set out in good order, a sort of nondescript cavalry detachment, mounted on animals more picturesque than beautiful. Still, it was a resolute band, and might have done very well, only it rained a good deal, which made soldiering disagreeable and hard. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a lyrical ballad, The Gardener; a song, Waly, waly, gin love be bonny; and the nondescript Whummil Bore. The Appendix contains a ballad, The Jolly Juggler, which would have come more fittingly in the First Series, had I known of ...
— Ballads of Scottish Tradition and Romance - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Third Series • Various
... evening following her interview with Mohammed Beyd, Jane Clayton sat for some time at the opening of her tent watching the rough activities of the camp. She had eaten the meal that had been brought her by Mohammed Beyd's Negro slave—a meal of cassava cakes and a nondescript stew in which a new-killed monkey, a couple of squirrels and the remains of a zebra, slain the previous day, were impartially and unsavorily combined; but the one-time Baltimore belle had long since submerged in the stern battle for ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... brought forward his hand. In it was a nondescript little wad, well soaked and shapeless; but once he had untied the kid, such a ray of rosy light burst from his outstretched palm that I doubt if a single woman there noted the clatter of the retiring ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... Historical-Descriptive, and a Philosophical-Speculative: but falls, unhappily, by no firm line of demarcation; in that labyrinthic combination, each Part overlaps, and indents, and indeed runs quite through the other. Many sections are of a debatable rubric or even quite nondescript and unnameable; whereby the Book not only loses in accessibility, but too often distresses us like some mad banquet, wherein all courses had been confounded, and fish and flesh, soup and solid, oyster-sauce, lettuces, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... it 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, ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... matter at the same time! How commonplace and amusing love is, always the same and always different! And the beggar who gives his sweetheart twenty sous gets as much return as I would for ten thousand francs from some Obardi, no younger and no less stupid perhaps than this nondescript. What nonsense!" ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... Maxon was incarcerated, his quarters consisting of a small room with a grille door and a barred window too high for anything but light and ventilation. The only additional deterrent to his escape was to be found in the person of a nondescript elderly man who received a dollar a day from the town funds to act as jailer when the lockup was in use. His name was Moody, his chief characteristic the determined grouch he had cherished ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... the striking appearance of Dickens and Pickwick in 1837 can hardly be said to have turned it distinctly: for the Dickensian novel is a species by itself—neither strictly novel nor strictly romance, but, as Polonius might say, a picaresque-burlesque-sentimental-farcical-realist-fantastic nondescript. Not till Vanity Fair did the novel of pure real life advance its standard once more: while the historical novel-romance of a new kind may date its revival with—though it should scarcely trace that revival to—Esmond, ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the nondescript tribes of South-western North America, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had tried to scatter the seeds of Christianity,—at least, they claimed to have done so. The monks of the order of St. Francis then represented the "working church" in Mexico. One of their number, Fray Marcos ...
— Historical Introduction to Studies Among the Sedentary Indians of New Mexico; Report on the Ruins of the Pueblo of Pecos • Adolphus Bandelier
... past along the platform, all huddled-up with hands in pockets, George beheld a ragged nondescript of a man whose appearance confirmed Master Jerry's previous assertion ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... Waverley upon the mind of a young enthusiast of his own time is too delightful to pass over without quotation. "He has no eccentric sympathies or antipathies"; wrote J.L. Adolphus, "no maudlin philanthropy or impertinent cynicism; no nondescript hobby-horse; and with all his matchless energy and originality of mind, he is content to admire popular books, and enjoy popular pleasures; to cherish those opinions which experience has sanctioned; ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... "Script" from which the pupil gets his first and most lasting impressions should be of large size and accurate form, and not of the nondescript character usually found in books of this class. That it should be free from superfluous line and flourish, and yet have grace and beauty. That it should be adapted for ...
— New National First Reader • Charles J. Barnes, et al.
... 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 red ...
— His Lordship's Leopard - A Truthful Narration of Some Impossible Facts • David Dwight Wells
... that I want between fifty and sixty hands, ef yew kin lay me onto 'em; but, kem along, every dreep's a drop, an' yew seem likely enough." With that he turned and led the way until we reached a building around which were gathered one of the most nondescript crowds I had ever seen. There certainly did not appear to be a sailor among them. Not so much by their rig, though that is not a great deal to go by, but by their actions and speech. One thing they all had ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... either impartially, according to his knowledge, for he was neither a Jew nor a Muslim, but a little of both, as he used to say, and not too much of either. For such a hybrid in a land of intolerance there must have been no place save the dungeons of the Kasbah, but that this good nondescript was a privileged pet of everybody. In his dark cellar, down an alley by the side of the Grand Mosque in the Metamar, he had sat from early morning until sunset, year in year out, through thirty years ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... subdued excitement amongst the nondescript group gathered upon the pavement. Despite the efforts of a constable on duty, men, women and children persistently gathered before the gates of the drive peering up at the empty house as if they anticipated seeing the face of the murderer or an apparition of the victim appear behind one ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... not deny, that had Pope never written any thing else, his name would not have been known as a name even of promise, but would probably have been redeemed from oblivion by some satirist or writer of a Dunciad. Were a man to meet with such a nondescript monster as the following, viz.," Love out of Mount Mlna by Whirlwind"he would suppose himself reading the Racing Calendar. Yet this hybrid creature is one of the many zoological monsters to ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... is supplemented by the fires in the heater and on the snow outside, round which the waiting coachmen warm themselves, with Rembrandtesque effects of chiaro-oscuro second only to the picturesqueness of dvorniki in their nondescript caps and shaggy coats, who cluster round blazing fagots in less aristocratic quarters when the ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood |
