"Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the river-bed undisturbed. Then the murmur was prolonged, until it became the continuous trouble of some far-off sea, and at last the wind possessed the ledge itself; driving the smoke down the stumpy chimney of the mill, rattling the sun-warped shingles on the roof, stirring the inside rafters with cool breaths, and singing over the rough projections of the outside eaves. At nine o'clock he rolled himself up in his blankets before ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte
... wrinkled old face beamed as he untwisted a black and stumpy clay from his perforated and pendulous ear-lobe, which hung full down upon his shoulder, and, turning it upside down, tapped the palm of his left hand ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... Reno.], and modern civilization has not crossed the castle moat, to undignify its exterior with any visible touch of the present. To be sure, when you enter it, the magnificent life is gone out of the old edifice; it is no stately halberdier who stands on guard at the gate of the drawbridge, but a stumpy Italian soldier in baggy trousers. The castle is full of public offices, and one sees in its courts and on its stairways, not brilliant men-at-arms, nor gay squires and pages, but whistling messengers going from one office to another with docketed papers, and slipshod serving-men carrying the ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... earth some time since, for a slowworm came forth on a mound for the first time on April 16. He coiled up on the eastern side every morning for some hours, but was never seen in the afternoon. His short, thick body and unfinished tail, more like a punch or the neck of a stumpy bottle, was turned in a loop, the head nearly touching the tail, like a pair of sugar-tongs. Coming out from the stitchwort and grasses, the spiders often ran over his shining dark brown surface, something the colour of glazed ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... briskly as the heat and their weariness would admit of. The Israelite saw them coming, straightened himself out of the half-doze in which he had passed the baking afternoon, stopped down the tobacco in the porcelain bowl of his long-stemmed pipe with stumpy forefinger, and, twisting a cork off his ...
— Stories by English Authors: Africa • Various
... of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit with ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... and rainy; the landscape was a flat dreariness. A buzzard flapped his heavy wings and flew from a dead tree; a yelping dog ran after the train; a horse, turned out to die, stumbled along a stumpy road. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... pulpit side as though to approach the nearer to his victims, would roll a cold and bitter eye upon them, as of a cat watching caged birds. One famous gesture was irresistible, and he never employed it but some poor ruffian fell senseless to the floor. His stumpy fingers would fix a noose of air round some imagined neck, and so devoutly was the pantomime studied that you almost heard the creak of the retreating cart as the phantom culprit was turned off. But his conduct in the pulpit was due ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... sure I am not sorry to leave Darco,' she said. 'Grumpy, frumpy, stumpy, dumpy old German! ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... A stout, stumpy, shrewd-looking labourer, in a short round frock, high buskins, an old wide-awake, short curly hair, and a very large nose, stood in front of the dairy door, mixing a mess of warm milk for ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... got through this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and read them ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... holes through the iron plates of a Nile steamer with one blow. Its eyes are very small, but protruding, and placed on the top of its head. Its body resembles a huge hogshead perched on four short, stumpy legs. A full-grown animal will sometimes measure twelve feet in length and as much in circumference. The hide of this beast is very thick and strong, and is used to make whips. Ordinary bullets, unless they strike near the ear, rattle off the sides of this King of ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their stumps athout scarcely ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... the sharp, low, stumpy pine ridges in haphazard fashion, like a Swiss village. A small brook ran through it, smothered here and there in snow. A sawmill was the largest figure of the town, and the railway station was the centre. There was not an inch of painted board in the village. Everywhere ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... the upper floor in a vast apartment with heavy black beams. But there was no ceiling, and the eye lost itself in the darkness under the high pitch of the roof. The thick shutters stood open. On a long table could be seen a large inkstand, some stumpy, inky quill pens, and two square wooden boxes, each holding half a hundred-weight of sand. Sheets of grey coarse official paper bestrewed the floor. It must have been a room occupied by some higher official of the Customs, because a large ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... heels. Toddle-shankie also came sunburnt, having scarred feet, a broken nose, called Theow. Their children were named: the boys,—Sooty, Cowherd, Clumsy, Clod, Bastard, Mud, Log, Thickard, Laggard, Grey Coat, Lout, and Stumpy; the girls,—Loggie, Cloggie, Lumpy [ Leggie], Snub-nosie, Cinders, Bond-maid, Woody [ Peggy], Tatter-coatie, Crane-shankie. The story seems to present the three classes or ranks as founded in natural facts. Slaves were such by birth, by sale of themselves to get maintenance (esteemed ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... who knows her. You do, don't you, Mike?" added Donald, and the dog beat a tattoo on the rug with his stumpy tail. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... bill, which opens like a little oven. The stork picks up reptiles in the mud of the marshes; its beak is straight-pointed, cutting as a knife, and resembles a long pair of pincers. The sparrow feeds especially on hard grains, difficult to break; accordingly its beak is stumpy, short, and thick, and is arched on the upper side for still further solidity. But I should never end if I began to enumerate all the thousand varieties in the bills of birds. Each variety, too, corresponds with some peculiar sort of ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... waste no time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the wrong way—to ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... apart, those were enjoyable suppers after the toil and grime of the day. The Beadle especially admired Zussmann's hands when the black grease had been washed off them, the fingers were so long and tapering. Why had his own fingers been made so stumpy and square-tipped? Since Nature made herself, why was she so uneven a worker? Nay, why could she not have given him white teeth like Zussmann's wife? Not that these were ostentatious—you thought more of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... spoiled child that had been half whipped. Everybody knew him, and everybody despised him for a low-down, thieving, lazy cur,—everybody except Jonathan. Jonathan loved him,—loved his weepy, smeary eyes, and his rough, black hair, and his fat round body, short stumpy legs, and shorter stumpy tail,—especially the tail. Everything else that the dog lacked could be traced back to the peccadillos of his ancestors,—Jonathan was responsible for ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... was nothing to fear, whether from ghost, goblin, or white face, retired and brought her mistress, a short stumpy old dame, who had seen at least some sixty summers. Her nose was short, squat, and flabby at the end, and her eyes were bald of brows or lashes; but still she retained great energy of manner, and was blessed with an ever-smiling face. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... stock called beaded (fig. 84), has been bred for five years and selected for wings showing more beading. In extreme cases the wings have been reduced to mere stumps (see stumpy, fig. 5), but the stock shows great variability. It is probable here as Dexter has shown, that a number of mutant factors that act as modifiers have been picked up in the course of the selection, and when it is recalled ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... litter of guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook hands with her commander, young, clear-eyed and cheery of mien, who presently led me past a stumpy smokestack and up a perpendicular ladder to the bridge where, beneath a somewhat flimsy-looking structure, was the wheel, brass-bound and highly be-polished like all else about this crowded craft as, notably, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... of his hole among the weeds; how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... masonry and even the chamber at Mycenae from even the rudest and most archaic of the remaining Hellenic works of Greece. The Doric temple at Corinth is attributed, as has been stated, to the seventh century B.C. This was a massive masonry structure with extremely short, stumpy columns, and strong mouldings, but presenting the main features of the Doric style, as we know it, in its earliest and rudest form. Successive examples (Figs. 53 to 53b) show increasing slenderness of proportions and refinement ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... dust off his feathers with an angry "jark;" while Dick, withy staring eyes and his tongue hanging out, ran right between Philip's legs, made a feint at Fred, and then leaped right on Harry, who caught hold of his short stumpy tail as he went down and dragged him ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he is gentler ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... Zack. "Mine's long enough, to be sure; I ought to have got it cut a month ago; but it's so stiff and curly; and Blyth keeps his cropped so short—I don't see what they can do with it (do you?), unless they make rings, or stars, or knobs, or something stumpy, in the way of a cross pattern ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... irregular hump set fixedly on his shoulders so that one almost expected to hear it creak when he moved it. His eyes were little, and curiously stuck on either side of his thick, stumpy nose, as if it were only by the merest accident that they hadn't taken a position back of his ears or up in his forehead or down in his hollow cheeks. His entrance put a sudden and disagreeable stop to the conversation. Mr. O'Royster ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... north-western bay a pointed door, differing only from those of about a hundred years earlier in having twisted shafts. One curious feature is the parapet of the central aisle, which is like a row of small classical pedestals, each bearing a stumpy obelisk. By far the finest feature of the outside is the great west door. On each side are clusters of square pinnacles ending in square crocketed spirelets, and running up to a horizontal moulding which, as so often, gives the whole design a rectangular form. Within comes the doorway ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... produced one and a stumpy pencil. With these materials Beecot wrote a reply saying the brooch would be returned on the morrow. When the boy went away with the answer Paul felt in his breast pocket and took out the old blue case. "I've a good mind to send ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk, with a short stumpy tail, with fins like a bank of oars in ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... suspended from the awning. On the stall are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard, smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms, little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... of something,' Miss Angus saw a walk in a wood or garden, beside a river, under a brilliant blue sky. Here was a lady, very well dressed, twirling a white parasol on her shoulder as she walked, in a curious 'stumpy' way, beside a gentleman in light clothes, such as are worn in India. He was broad-shouldered, had a short neck and a straight nose, and seemed to listen, laughing, but indifferent, to his obviously vivacious companion. The lady had a 'drawn' face, indicative ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... her third birthday she could not talk very well, could not pronounce her r's, and lisped in what her trail of nurses told her was a ridiculous fashion for so big a girl. But, then, she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year. Her eyes were large and black and ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... we met in these interior districts had only partially bound feet, though they were still far from the natural size. It was surprising to see how freely the women walked, especially as several that I saw were carrying babies. But it was rather a stumpy walk. Women of the higher class have smaller feet and never walk in ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther away was an acre of ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Crowhurst for the night. It was not long before they came to it, lying in a hollow, and snugly sheltered by gently rising wooded ground. It was a very little village indeed. There was a small grey church with a stumpy square tower, and a cheerful red-brick inn called the Holly Bush, with a swinging sign in front of it; there were half a dozen little cottages with gay gardens, and, standing close to the road, there was a long, low, many-gabled house which ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... I was about to desist, when suddenly I heard a pattering on the gravel, and turning round I beheld an ugly little black-and-tan mongrel running towards me, wagging its stumpy tail. Not at all prepossessed with the creature, for my own dogs are pure-bred, and thinking it must have strayed into the grounds, I was about to drive it out, and had put down my hand to prevent it jumping on my dress, when, to my astonishment, it had vanished. It literally melted away into ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... already an old woman. I credited her with thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Ramai and Somai came to a village and took some waste land from the headman, and ploughed it and sowed millet; and their plough was only drawn by cows and their ploughshare was very small, what is called a "stumpy share;" and when they had sowed a little the rains came on; and Somai gave up cultivation and took to fishing and for a time he made very good profits by catching and selling fish; and he did not trouble even to reap the millet he had sown; he laughed at Ramai who was toiling ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... pottery seat upon which the unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known of ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... forth a soiled and tattered strip of faded calico which he must have procured some time or other in traffic on the beach—and besought me eagerly to exercise a little of my art upon it. I willingly complied, though certainly so stumpy a needle as mine never took such gigantic strides over calico before. The repairs completed, old Marheyo gave me a paternal hug; and divesting himself of his 'maro' (girdle), swathed the calico about his loins, and slipping the beloved ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... deny that after I had begun to read, no one bothered about the storm." The three girls had encircled the Abbate. For an excellent reason. From his capacious pockets he produced quantities of luscious sweets, and popped them into the children's mouths with his stumpy fingers. Meanwhile Olivo gave the newcomer a circumstantial account of the rediscovery of Casanova. Dreamily Amalia continued to gaze at the beloved guest's ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... be going together over the ship, Captain," said the senior partner; and the three men started to view the perfections of the Nan-Shan from stem to stern, and from her keelson to the trucks of her two stumpy pole-masts. ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... dense unconsciousness; her mother allowed herself a mysterious smile—which, however, speedily vanished when the curate (he was taking lunch with us) observed in a cheerful tone, "Newhaven! oh, I remember the chap at the House—ploughed twice in Smalls—stumpy fellow, isn't he? Not a bad chap, though, you know, barring his ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... the fubsy boys—copied apparently from cherubim—who, with glowing, distended cheeks, are simpering on the ceiling, doing the tenor, with wide open mouths that would shame e'er a barn-door in the village; their red, stumpy fingers sprawling over the music which they are (not) reading. The pale, lantern-jawed youths, in yellow waistcoats and tall shirt-collars, who look as if they were about to whistle a match, are holloing out what is professionally, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... the outer settlement on the west side of Maine. A "squire" from England gave it his name. He bought the tract, named it, inhabited several years, a popular squire-arch, and then returned from the wild to the tame, from pine woods and stumpy fields to the elm-planted hedge-rows and shaven lawns of placid England. The local gossip did not reveal any cause for Mr. Rangeley's ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... batteries at the apex. Davis, and Carlin of his division, endeavored to rally their men here on my right, but their efforts were practically unavailing,—though the calm and cool appearance of Carlin, who at the time was smoking a stumpy pipe, had some effect, and was in strong contrast to the excited manner of Davis, who seemed overpowered by the disaster that had befallen his command. But few could be rallied, however, as the men were badly demoralized, ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... then other fish were netted, but fish that had been surrounded with the mackerel. Several times over little stumpy red mullet were seen—brilliant little fish, and then grey mullet—large-scaled silvery fish with tiny mouths and something the aspect, on a large scale, ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... and Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... the threshold. He was yellow and coarse of hair; flea-bitten, too; and even as he smiled at Ruth and wagged his stumpy tail, he was forced to turn savagely upon one of these disturbers who had no sense of the fitness ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... opened her eyes very wide and looked round, and saw a funny Native Bear on the tree trunk behind her. He was quite clearly to be seen in the moonlight. His thick, grey fur, that looked as if he was wrapped up to keep out the most terrible cold weather; his short, stumpy, big legs, and little sharp face with big bushy ears, could be seen as distinctly as in daylight. Dot had never seen one so near before, and she loved it at once, it looked ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... ruthlessly to pieces. In the first place, Halsey described the man seen on the grass-road as tall and lanky. But according to his grandfather's account, the murdered gamekeeper, on the contrary, was a broadly-built, stumpy man. In the next place—the coughing and the bleeding!—he laughed so long and loudly at these points in the story that Halsey's still black bushy eyebrows met frowningly over a pair of angry eyes, and Betts tried hurriedly to tame ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said the stumpy Hibernian, to herself, as she watched the twinkling retreat of those slim, but vigorous ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... repeating to herself that phrase, "the hands of the successful cocotte," which somehow seemed oddly illuminating. Lady Clifford's hands had a meaning for her now. The soft cushioned palms spelled love of luxury, the stumpy, curving fingers and talon-like nails indicated acquisitive greed. She could ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... at sight of a mere wriggling object. "Fred says it's too early for rattlers to show out of their dens. One was a fair-sized black snake, and the other might have been an adder; he was short and stumpy, and had ...
— Fred Fenton Marathon Runner - The Great Race at Riverport School • Allen Chapman
... Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind—taut, serene, immaculate—were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... turned to go indoors, after their earnest talk. She stood leaning on the old carved railing of the steps, taking one more glance at the peaceful scene before she followed Walter into the darkening entrance-hall, when her eye caught sight of a stumpy figure ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... fingers and toes are details that tell an endocrine tale. Students of hands naturally have grouped them as the long slender and the short, broad, the bony and the well-filled out, the tapering fingers and the stumpy. The character of a hand is determined anatomically by the length and breadth of the bones, the amount and distribution of fat, and the thickness and elasticity of the skin. Over these, the essential control lies in the pituitary and the thyroid. So we find that pituitary types have, when there is ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... there right enough," he said. "It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah, no, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. Now ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... he signed on with me," said the captain, pointing a stumpy forefinger at him. "I made a point of it, and you told me that you had never heard anything ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... select those only whose personal appearance was such as to discourage any approach to familiarity or endearment. Never before or since was youthful beauty surrounded by such moustached duennas, squinting chambermaids, hunchbacked pages, and stumpy maids-of-all-work. This was a real sorrow to her, for she loved beauty; it was a still sadder trial that she could no longer feel it right to indulge herself in the least morsel of arsenic; she sighed for strychnia, and pined for prussic acid. The change of diet was of course at first ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... into the reeking enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... stumpy thistle, like the top of a young pineapple. It did prick.—Yes, it is pretty soft, and it smells nice, and heigh ho hum! ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... scrimp, cut, chop up, hack, hew; cut down, pare down; clip, dock, lop, prune, shear, shave, mow, reap, crop; snub; truncate, pollard, stunt, nip, check the growth of; foreshorten (in drawing). Adj. short, brief, curt; compendious, compact; stubby, scrimp; shorn, stubbed; stumpy, thickset, pug; chunky [U.S.], decurtate^; retrousse^; stocky; squab, squabby^; squat, dumpy; little &c 193; curtailed of its fair proportions; short by; oblate; concise &c 572; summary. Adv. shortly &c adj.; in short ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the storm. Intended by nature to be a rough and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to the whole world: "The storm may have done its best to defeat me—it has failed. I am as I was. I ask charity ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... the surface. Billy interposed, for he saw Theodora's color come, and he knew that the rug, his own contribution to her college room, was one of her dearest possessions. He shook his head at the six-pound culprit who stood before him, waggling his stumpy tail in smug satisfaction over the success of ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... baskets of provisions, a cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her tete-a-tete companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen." The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow seated himself by her, the poor little cockle-shell dipped so with the increased weight that ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... a man named Adam Green?" The bull-head was shaken in sign of ignorance. "Loy-a-bed, does thee?" Lie-a-bed's opportunities of making acquaintance had been rather limited, and she could not resolve the difficulty. Stumpy (a man with a wooden leg), Cowskin, Spindleshanks, Corkeye, Pigtail, and Yellowbelly were severally invoked, but in vain; and the querist fell into a brown study, in which she remained for some time. At length, however, her eyes suddenly brightened, and, slapping one ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... could wade out to her. We knew her intimately from stem to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed up at her stumpy masts—she had been well-nigh dismantled,—and given sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of circumnavigation. She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now pestiferous factories make hideous ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... champagne; whereupon he lifted it, and said, "Here's luck, my dear boy," and somewhat recklessly gulped down the gout-compelling liquid. And after dinner, when Miss Winwood had left them together, he lighted a long Corona instead of his usual stumpy Bock, and discussed with Paul ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... label tied on to him. Forgive me that label, Chum; I think that was the worst offence of all. And why should I label one who was speaking so eloquently for himself; who said from the tip of his little black nose to the end of his stumpy black tail, "I'm a silly old ass, but there's nothing wrong in me, and they're sending me away!" But according to the regulations—one must obey ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... side by side with his father. How that boy can chop! thought Nancy, as she heard the sound of his ax biting into wood. Tree after tree had to be cut down before crops could be planted. With the coming of spring, he helped his father to plow the stumpy ground. He learned to plow a straight furrow. He ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... and he was a stranger to nearly everyone from the President down. He arrived in the city on the 8th of March (1864), taking quarters at Willard's Hotel, where, when he went in to dinner, none knew "the quiet, rather stumpy-looking man, who came in leading a little boy—the boy who had ridden by his father's side through all the campaign of Vicksburg." But soon it was whispered about who was in the room, and there was a loud call ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... for the benefit of the little ones; the intricate mechanical toys that a Dutch youngster tumbles about in stolid unconcern would create a stir in our patent office. Ben laughed outright at some of the mimic fishing boats. They were so heavy and stumpy, so like the queer craft that he had seen about Rotterdam. The tiny trekschuiten, however, only a foot or two long, and fitted out, complete, made his heart ache. He so longed to buy one at once for his little brother ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... formidable-looking character. By his side appeared, when the curtain drew up, a curious-looking clown, with a huge face, with all sorts of twists and curls in it, great big ears, a cock-up nose, and a short stumpy beard. This extraordinary physiognomy was covered with a high cap, which had a tassel and bells. He wore also a party-coloured waistcoat, huge full breeches of all the colours of the rainbow, hose of yellow, and long shoes with rosettes ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... puts down his glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy little black cigar. ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... very shallow and very beamy in proportion to her length; stoutly built, with high quarters, and low but widely-flaring bows, which tossed the seas aside in fine style and enabled her to thrash along with perfectly dry decks. She was rigged with a single stout, stumpy mast, raking well forward, upon which was set—by means of an immense yard of bamboos "fished" together, and twice the length of the craft herself—an enormous lateen or triangular sail, the tack of which consisted of a stout rope leading from the fore-end of the yard to a ring-bolt sunk ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... eighteenth century the beauty of the Samplers distinctly declined. They became squarer, and were bordered with a running pattern, and the whole canvas became more or less pictorial. Inevitably the end of this art came. Ugly realistic bowpots with stumpy trees decorated the picture in regular order. The alphabet still appeared, and moral reflection seemed to be the aim of the worker rather than to make the Sampler show beauty of stitchery. Quaint little maps of ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... crossing the drift with discordant yells. Infantry and mounted infantry pressing on both flanks. Our guns have taken up another position farther on. The Captain asked after the broken whip, and told us we could not have gone into action better. He has been riding about all day on his stumpy little Argentine, radiant and beaming, with his eternal pipe in ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... as ever, nothing to do with human life. The little courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and fruit—these were human and friendly and good, but they had their precarious condition like the ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... graceful flowing style of motion. The elder sister, Lactimel, was of a different form, but yet hardly more fit to shine in the mazes of the dance than her sister. She had her charms, nevertheless, which consisted of a somewhat stumpy dumpy comeliness. She was altogether short in stature, and very short below the knee. She had fair hair and a fair skin, small bones and copious soft flesh. She had a trick of sighing gently in the evolutions of the waltz, which young ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... smoked; and one fool was in the chair, and another fool read letters; and then they worried till I was sick of it as to where such and such fools should go to spout folly the next week; and now and then an old bald-headed fool and a stumpy little fool in blue made jokes, at which they laughed a good deal; but I couldn't understand ...
— The Tables Turned - or, Nupkins Awakened. A Socialist Interlude • William Morris
... always administered by Captain H—— himself. It was in the form of a little sortie from the trench to a stumpy willow in "No-Man's-Land," a willow that bore a striking resemblance to some giant cacti and was called by us the ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... Mr. CHALMERS gives an amusing account of a detailed description of such a tribe by a man who vowed he had lived with them, and related how they were provided with long sticks, with which to make holes in the ground before squatting down, for the reception of their short stumpy tails! I think it is Mr. H. F. ROMILLY who, in his interesting little work on the Western Pacific and New Guinea, accounts for the prevalence of "yarns" of this class by explaining that the natives regard ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... care," said the girl who had freed me; "a crush of one of their horrid stumpy feet might kill ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... Ali, he entered a small boat and was rowed to the shore. They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them. While the vegetables were cooking ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... friend and partner Judkins, as he stands with his hands in his trousers pockets at the door of our house in Friday Street. What can be meaner than his appearance? He is a stumpy, short, podgy man; but then so also was my Arab friend at Suez. Judkins is always dressed from head to foot in a decent black cloth suit; his coat is ever a dress coat, and is neither old nor shabby. On his head he carries a shining new silk hat, such as fashion in our metropolis demands. ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... its hind legs like a dog when it is begging, and had regarded her with such a look of rage, that she had fled in terror. She described the animal as resembling a wolf, but as being shorter and stouter; its hair was red, its tail stumpy, and the head smaller than that of ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... run along the double line of houses, and out into the stumpy street now swarmed men armed with hastily seized weapons. Hands pointed, confused exclamations sounded, and a compact detachment of warriors came jogging toward the newcomers. The three guides drew away from the Mayorunas. The latter promptly fitted arrows ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... so tame that they did not know the fear of man, burying their heads in the sea-kelp while the storm raged, lifting them only to breathe at intervals. This creature was six feet long from the tip of its round, {33} cat-shaped nose to the end of its stumpy, beaver-shaped tail, with fur the colour of ebony on the surface, soft seal-colour and grey below, and deep as sable. Quite unconscious of the worth of the fur, the castaway sailors fell on these visitors to the kelp-beds and clubbed right and left, for skins to protect their nakedness ...
— Pioneers of the Pacific Coast - A Chronicle of Sea Rovers and Fur Hunters • Agnes C. Laut
... there; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is there; if you take—but it is vain to take the wings of the morning, or of anything else, in the hope of flying to a spot where the stumpy little wings of the English sparrow ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... into a set of verses in which there is something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song. The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest. Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to a British ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... Mr. Tressamer made!' ventured a fifth juryman, a short, stumpy watchmaker from Porthstone itself. 'I believe he's ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, presented an ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... over-dressed, too, with a smart hat and spangled feather, a womanly silk mantle and much-trimmed skirt, from which a heavy quilling had detached itself, and was trailing on the ground; her hands were ungloved, and showed red stumpy fingers, but her face had a bright open honest heartiness of expression, and a sort of resolute straightforwardness, that attracted and pleased him; and, moreover, there was something in the family likeness, grotesque as it was, that could not but ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... new one, appears to deserve a particular description. The Wombat (or, as it is called by the natives of Port Jackson, the Womback) is a squat, thick, short-legged, and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength, and somewhat bigger than a large turnspit dog. Its figure and movements, if they do not exactly resemble those of the bear, at least strongly ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... by a short stumpy stalk, sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn case or the receptacle ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... And yet again—would that it did not exist!—the business hand, far more common in England, where the bulk of the people have commercial minds, than elsewhere. It has no redeeming feature, but is short, and square, and fat, with stumpy fingers and hideous, spatulate nails, the very sight of which makes me shudder. Indeed, I have heard it said abroad, and not without some reason, that, apart from other little peculiarities, such as projecting teeth ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... she-ass that had been procured as a nurse.]—the mammal before alluded to—could manage to rear the child. There was something original, independent, and heroic about the plan that pleased the camp. Stumpy was retained. Certain articles were sent for to Sacramento. "Mind," said the treasurer, as he pressed a bag of gold-dust into the expressman's hand, "the best that can be got,—lace, you know, and filigree-work and frills, ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... aunt is a very nice woman anyway," said Minnie with her usual candour. "She looked at me so one day in church, 'cause I laughed right out at a funny little dog with a stumpy tail running in and right up to Mr. Goldthwaite. ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan
... Fox, old boy?" asked Wade, with low voice, as he peered ahead. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to approach close to game without being detected. Fox wagged his stumpy tail and looked up with knowing eyes. Wade proceeded cautiously. The swamp was a rank growth of long, weedy grasses and ferns, with here and there a green-mossed bog half hidden and a number of dwarf oak-trees. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... another word and began to unlace his brogues. Meanwhile from a side-table his wife brought a silver tobacco-box and a stumpy Irish clay. The slippers substituted for his shoes, Kerry lovingly filled the cracked and blackened bowl with strong Irish twist, which he first teased carefully in his palm. The bowl rested almost under his nostrils when he put the ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... at the other end of the room had swung open, and a tall woman swept in, followed by a diminutive figure in green coat and white trousers. A pair of huge spectacles, mounted on a somewhat stumpy nose, peered absently from side to side as ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... to you, my lad, because we knew that if you lost on such a fool play your name would be—well, anything but Thomas 'Stumpy' Warren." The reply to this sally was a boot launched at the center rush, for Tom Warren's middle name was in reality Saalfield, and "Stumpy" was a cognomen rather too descriptive to be relished by the quarter-back. ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... to face with the characters of that mining camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... wounds—and medicated himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... happen to be of such mightily exquisite beauty, that you have a right to judge thus intolerantly? My master from his youth up has been a majestic and stately man; and yet he thinks far otherwise of me and my fellows. What! you little stinted, stunted, stumpy, bile-faced animal, whose nose is for ever running crimson with spite! You with the crooked corners of your seesaw mouth, with the broken ridges and ditches in your shrivelled half-inch forehead, you would make an outcry about my ugliness! Why the bit of a dwarf can hardly peer out of its ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... with bowed head, but he gave one surreptitious flick of his stumpy tail, that to me had the irresistible suggestion of ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... Philip wagged his stumpy tail and frisked about, trying his best to tell the children that he had come out to look for them. Having Philip with them to talk to and pet made the rest of the way home seem shorter, and in less than fifteen minutes Meg and Bobby were shaking ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... ordinary wax-candle, which perhaps does not 'gutter' so much as others, and with wick more innocent of 'thieves' than most, but with nothing more wonderful in appearance than an ordinary candle. A Child's night-light, too, has nothing mysterious in its look. It greatly resembles the thick stumpy end of a magnificent mould, done up in a coloured card-jacket, and with a small thin wick, that gives just a point of flame, and no more, by which to light another candle, if necessary—of admirable service for this and all other purposes of a common-place ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... the beautiful neatness of the case that quite intoxicates me. Oh, Lord, what a happiness it is to be concerned in such a job as this!" cries Mr. Dark, slapping his stumpy hands on his fat knees in a ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... well adapted for running and sprinting—for speed. Now, we do find among the various races of mankind that some have been given long heels, such as the dark-skinned natives of Africa and of Australia, while other races have been given relatively short, stumpy heels, of which sort the natives of Europe and of China may be cited as examples. With long heels less powerful muscular engines are required, and hence in dark races the calf of the leg is but ill developed, ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... that kept faultless time, and announced the fact hourly in a mellow, but convincing, voice. Just below the window and over the desk, was a pipe-rack with pipes to fit every mood and fancy of a lonely man. There were the short stumpy ones, with the small bowls for the brief whiff when one did not choose to keep company with himself for long, but was willing to be sociable for a moment. There were the comfortable, self-caring pipes ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable of to believe it had ever been ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... lying in Monaco harbour a long white boat with a stumpy mast, which delighted in the name of Jungle Queen. It was the property of an impecunious English nobleman who made a respectable income from letting the ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... meaning of the commotion had dawned upon the crowd at large he had fought his way out and was speeding down the street. But fleet-footed men were at his heels, a roar of rage burst from the mob, and in a body it took up the chase. Down the stumpy, muddy trail went the pursuit, and every command to halt spurred the fleeing man to swifter flight. Cabin doors opened; people came running from their tents; some tried to fling themselves in the way of the escaping criminal; packers toiling up the trail heard the approaching ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest. From his station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... attends incipient civilization. Nature has been cleared away to make room for the art of man, and art has not yet got beyond the inchoate unloveliness of bare utilitarianism. The beautiful woods have given place to a charred, stumpy, muddy waste, on which stand the gaunt, new frame-houses. Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what have we to do with sentimental rubbish? This is ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay |
