"Round-shouldered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... like straightening out a limb which has been twisted by a false attitude or correcting a habit of sitting round-shouldered. ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... electric lamp. Those were sedate, neatly and warmly clad peasants. One of them lay on a bench, face down; another sat at his feet, still another stood, leaning his back against a barrel, while two others seated themselves flat on the deck. Their faces, pensive and attentive, were turned toward a round-shouldered man in a short cassock, turned yellow, and a torn fur cap. That man sat on some boxes with his back bent, and staring at his feet, spoke ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... at all, but becomes exceedingly round-shouldered, and pretends to read his paper with rapt attention. Generally, Sharpeye directs our observation with a look, to the prints and pictures that are invariably numerous on the walls. Always, Trampfoot and Quickear are taking notice on the doorstep. In default of Sharpeye being ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... rings upon his fingers, instead of gloves, you might have almost mistaken him for a gentleman. His companion presented the most striking contrast. His face, shaded by a torn, slouched hat, was dirty and coffee-colored. Of short stature, slight build, and round-shouldered, he followed his master, with an humble, abject look, and from his tread, you would almost have imagined that he was anxious not to leave any track behind, of his footsteps on the gravel walk. A velvet cloak, so worn and patched ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... back is straightened. The whole figure is out of balance, and therefore not harmonious. Not only is the beauty of the figure destroyed, but the internal organs are displaced. Many a mother who sees her daughter thus growing round-shouldered keeps telling her to throw her shoulders back; but to follow this command only increases the difficulty. The shoulders are not primarily at fault, but the trouble originates in non-use of the front waist muscles. ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... spent long periods in mental inactivity. The labors of the other were fitful, and his views of life betray the influence of the same cerebral defect that led to so much domestic woe. The narrow-chested, round-shouldered person, whose lungs barely oxydize blood enough to maintain life, is not expected to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, or to excel as a performer on wind-instruments. We impute to him no fault for this sort of incompetence. We should rather charge him with consummate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... lengthening woodland shadows, "a church or two more, some brick sidewalk, and a few stores and homes—just added on, not improved. I miss Jim Shirley everywhere. The older folks seem the same, but some of the girls are pushing baby-carriages and the boys are getting round-shouldered and droopy-jawed." ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... was falling soft and sweet, as an old man came slowly along the road that led to the village. He was tall and thin, and he stooped as he walked,—not with the ordinary round-shouldered slouch, but with a one-sided droop, as if he had a habit of bending over something. His white hair was fancifully arranged, with a curl over the forehead such as little boys used to wear; his brown eyes were bright and quick as a bird's, and like a bird's, they glanced from side to side, ...
— Melody - The Story of a Child • Laura E. Richards
... guide, Phil Matlack, entered the hall, Mr. Archibald looked at him with some surprise, for he was not the conventional tall, gaunt, wiry, keen-eyed backwoodsman who had naturally appeared to his mental vision. This man was of medium height, a little round-shouldered, dressed in a gray shirt, faded brown trousers very baggy at the knees, a pair of conspicuous blue woollen socks, and slippers made of carpet. His short beard and his hair were touched with gray, and he wore a small jockey cap. With the exception of his eyes, Mr. Matlack's facial features ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... He was a short, round-shouldered man, made still shorter by the bend which he had acquired by the operation of boot-closing; his eyes were small, and sunken in his head; his nose wide and flat, as if in his early youth he had fallen on the edge of a pewter pot, ...
— Captain Bayley's Heir: - A Tale of the Gold Fields of California • G. A. Henty
... were quartered in old Spanish buildings, where the sliding windows of the upper floors disclosed the lanes of white mosquito-bar. Back in the courtyard, where the cook was busily preparing mess, a mangy and round-shouldered monkey from the bamboo fence was looking on approvingly. The cook was not in a good humor. All that the mess had had for three weeks was the regulation beans and bacon, without a taste of fresh ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... the picture that rises to mind is usually one of hill and dale, of peat-hag and heathery knoll, of brimming burns that tumble headlong to meet the embrace of rivers hurrying to their rest in the great ocean. One sees in imagination the solemn, round-shouldered hills standing out grim in the thin spring sunshine, their black sides slashed and lined with snow; later, one pictures these hills decked with heartsease and blue-bells a-swing in the summer breeze, or rich with the purple bloom of heather; and, again, ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... true adventurer, he was on the whole exceeding happy. There was no more use in sailing for Javan and Gadire; but at home there were highways in abundance, and what is your genuine tramp but a dry-land sailor? The Red Man is exhausted of everything but sordidness; but under that round-shouldered little tent at the bend of the road, beside that fire artistically built beneath that kettle of the comfortable odours, among those horses and colts at graze hard by, are men and women more mysterious and more alluring ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... so closely that no one could doubt they were brothers-twin brothers, probably. Both were above middle height; both had olive-brown complexions, black eyes, hooked noses, pointed chins, a slightly projecting lower lip; both were round-shouldered, though this defect did not amount to disfigurement: the whole personality suggested strength, and was not destitute of masculine beauty. So strong a likeness is hardly ever seen; even their ages appeared to agree, for one would not have supposed either ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... hidden it so thoroughly that it took a few minutes to find. As he rustled sundry sheets and stooped over them round-shouldered, Tabs had time to reflect. Terry! Where was she? She was so little and unprotected and white. Would a day ever come when a man would play her false? At this moment he had it in his power to prevent that day ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... an unctuous substance. This hat he keeps for the purpose. A couple of milking pails—they are of large size—form a heavy load when filled. The milker, as he walks back to the farmhouse, bends his head under the yoke—whence so many men are round-shouldered—and steps slowly with a peculiar swaying motion of the body, which slight swing prevents ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... Pichegru, the Marquis de Riviere and four other conspirators. A fisherman called Etienne Horne gave some valuable details of this arrival. He had noticed particularly the man who appeared to be the leader—"a fat man, with a full, rather hard face, round-shouldered, and with a slight ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... most powerful. He was, however, to be outspoken, the coarsest. Woe betide the light and gentle forward who tried to pass Mr. Hugh! He pounced on his man at once, and with raised back—for he was somewhat round-shouldered—gave the excited spectator the idea that he meant to have the ball at any cost. His weight gave him an immense advantage in tackling, and I think old players will be at one with me when I say that ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... yellow story-and-a-half house by the roadside with some queer little sheds and outbuildings, and looked with great interest to see if any one came to the window. "Seth's folks" meant nobody but his mother, who lived alone as Betty knew, and there she was standing in the door, a kind-faced, round-shouldered little creature, who had the patient, half-apprehensive look of those women who live alone in lonely places. She threw her big clean gingham apron over her head and came forward just as Jonathan had got out of the ...
— Betty Leicester - A Story For Girls • Sarah Orne Jewett
... a small, light buggy drawn by one good horse. Beside her the reins were held by a rather tall man, of middle age, gray, dark, round-shouldered, and dressed in the loose blue flannel so much worn by followers of the Federal camp. Under the stiff brim of his soft-crowned black hat a pair of clear eyes gave a continuous playful twinkle. Between this person and Mary protruded, at the edge of ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... old, and above six feet high, dressed in a gray suit; the coat, from its size, appeared to have been made for him some ten years before. He was remarkably narrow-chested and round-shouldered, owing, perhaps as much to the tightness of his garment as to the hand of nature. His face was long, and his complexion swarthy, relieved, however, by certain freckles, with which the skin was plentifully studded. He had strange wandering eyes, gray, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tiptoe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... Osborn got up when his agent and another man came in. Hayes was tall, urbane, and dressed with rather fastidious neatness; Bell was round-shouldered and shabby. He had a weather-beaten skin, gray hair, and small, cunning eyes. Osborn indicated chairs and sat down at the top of the big table. He disliked business and knew the others meant to persuade him to do something he would sooner leave alone. This would ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... after cook came, stayed a day, a week, and one or two held on for two weeks, but never longer. Their course was invariably the same—they would leave without notice; nor could any inducement be offered which would persuade them to remain. The Baron of Peddlington became, first round-shouldered, then deaf, and then insane in his search for a permanent cook, landing finally in an asylum, where he died, four years after the demise of his employer in London, of softening of the brain. His last words were, "Why did you ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... interest of a plump, round-shouldered young German, whose viscous hands had just left a syrup-cask, and whose wide blue eyes stared at this unaccustomed visitor with an honest wonder. He ventured to lead her as far as a door in a grimy glass partition which closed off ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... appearance did not indicate robust health. He was only five feet eight inches tall, round-shouldered, and not at all military in bearing or walk. But his brown hair, blue eyes, and musical voice gave a pleasing impression. He was of a sunny disposition and of singularly pure mind. Never in his life was he known ...
— Stories of Later American History • Wilbur F. Gordy
... heard in the wan twilight but the confused sound, undefined though rapid, of a marching throng, an endless tramping, mingled with the vague clink of tin bowls or swords. The men, bent, round-shouldered, dirty, in many cases even in rags, dragged themselves along, hurried through the snow, with a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the poor white "cracker" population that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, they all looked alike—all looked as ignorant, as stupid, and as lazy as they were poor and weak. They were "low-downers" in every respect, and made our rough and simple. minded East ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... here all your life, my son," he said. "You're a rising man, remember. There's no sense in grizzling, anyhow, and you're getting round-shouldered. Why don't you do some gymnastics? You've got a swimming bath. Go and do a quarter of a mile breast-stroke every day. Jupiter! What wouldn't I give to"—He broke off abruptly. "Well, I'm not going to cry for the moon ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... with a bunch of boy scouts to the top of Mount Wilson! I don't believe that kid ever did wear his legs out having fun, and it's a sure thing he'll never wear them out working! Say goats to him and he actually gets round-shouldered and limps." ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... set were outraged by the irreverence of Degas. What hard sayings were his! Poor Bastien-Lepage, too, came in for a scoring. Barricaded in his studio, it was a brave man who attempted to force an entrance. The little, round-shouldered artist, generally good-tempered, would pour a stream of verbal vitriol over the head of ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... while standing during recitations, often inadvertently assume the attitude represented by fig. 49, and it is the duty of teachers to correct this position when assumed. When a child or adult has contracted a habit of stooping, and has become round-shouldered, it can be measurably, and generally, wholly, remedied by moderate and repeated efforts to bring the shoulders back, and the spinal column in an erect position. This deformity can and should be remedied in our schools. It may take months to ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... was nothing at all formidable or dignified about Mrs. Higgs, who was a round-shouldered, infirm old woman in a brown dress, a black-and-white check shawl, and a rusty ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... out! Come you and drag me out!" And threatening variously with his pistol, Leary pointed directly at what seemed to be a new leader, a man with a revolver. "And let me tell you"—he pointed to the armed man—"whoever you are, you round-shouldered, glue-eyed squid you, whoever goes, you go first. Mind that—whatever happens, you go first. I've got you, you pop-eyed, slit-mouthed dogfish—and now ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... was being fixed. Gustave said it would be ready in a half-hour. He slipped the microscope over his eye and, bending in his heavy round-shouldered way above the small watch, began to pry with his thick fingers. A pair of tiny pincers, a fragile-looking screwdriver and a set of things that looked like dolls' tools ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... were the better or the worse for liquor. There was one fellow,—named Randall, I think,—a round-shouldered, bulky, ill-hung devil, with a pale, sallow skin, black beard, and a sort of grin upon his face,—a species of laugh, yet not so much mirthful as indicating a strange mental and moral twist. He was very riotous in the crowd, elbowing, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is this?" Lady Cecilia repeated to herself as she entered the hall, amazed to find it blazing with light, a crowd on the stairs, and in the anteroom a crowd, as she soon felt, of an unusual sort. It was not the soft crush of aristocracy, they found hard unaccustomed citizen elbows,—strange round-shouldered, square-backed men and women, so over-dressed, so bejewelled, so coarse—shocking to see, impossible to avoid; not one figure, one face, Lady Cecilia had ever seen before; till at last, from the midst of the throng emerged a fair form—a being as it seemed of ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... wintry squalls to the stage line with the laden sacks of mail, and realized that when the winter really set in we would never be able to make it. So Dave Dykstra was appointed mail-carrier. He was a homesteader who taught the McClure school that winter, a slim, round-shouldered chap, rather frail in physique. Dave would never set the world on fire, but he would keep it going around regularly. Blizzard, rain or sun, he came to the post office every morning those short winter days before it was light. At night Ida Mary, as postmistress, would ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... but nobody knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for which names were invented, was easy to pronounce, and therefore was all the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided, slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the little scraps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy and unacquainted with soap as ...
— Bears I Have Met—and Others • Allen Kelly
... man was this new-comer, though he had already passed his sixtieth year. Thin, slightly round-shouldered, of medium stature, with an angular head, smoothly shaven face, thin, pointed nose, small eyes that looked you through and through from behind large spectacles, a forehead generally contracted by a frown, lips too thin for a pleasant word ever to escape them, and long, crooked ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... and there appeared to these two a visitor. He was a young man, and tall,—so tall that, even with his hat off, his head barely cleared the ceiling of the low-studded room. He was slim and fair-haired and round-shouldered. He had the pink and white complexion of a girl; soft, fair hair; dark, serious eyes; the high, white brow of a thinker; the nose of an aristocrat; and he was in ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... simple, round-shouldered Jock you never saw, unless it was his poor old grandfather. He could keep step with the best of them; but unfortunately he had no decent clothes. This was a great drawback, but Mrs. Parlin and Mrs. Lyman took pity on the boy, and made him a ...
— Little Grandfather • Sophie May
... fair over the wide strath of Dee. Cairnsmuir and Ben Gairn stood out south and north like blue, round-shouldered sentinels. Castle Thrieve rose grey in the midst of the water-meadows, massive and sombre in the ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... lack of beauty, my miserable five-feet-one-inch stature, and I looked at the man beside me, small and round-shouldered, and we were both dependent children of indigence. The contrast we presented to the other pair struck me hard, and I laughed a ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... out of a hut half buried in verdure on the edge of a little clearing, there tumbled the quaintest little old black man, cutlass in hand, and, without being asked, went on ahead as our guide. Crook-backed, round-shouldered, his only dress a ragged shirt and ragged pair of drawers, he had evidently thriven upon the forest life for many a year. He did not walk nor run, but tumbled along in front of us, his bare feet plashing from log to log and mud-heap to mud-heap, his gray woolly ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... different kinds of eagles: a Black Eagle, a Bald Eagle, a Fish Eagle, a Golden Eagle, an Eagle-Vulture, and a White-tailed Sea Eagle. Twice as high as the boy they were, each one of them. And they stood on the rail of the ship, like round-shouldered soldiers all in a row, stern and still and stiff; while their great, gleaming, black eyes shot darting glances here ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... was a youth, some of the bones of his skull had to be removed, and from this time forth he never dared to remain long with his head uncovered. When he was fifty-nine he swallowed a certain corrosive poison, which did not kill him, but left him toothless. He was likewise round-shouldered, a stammerer, and subject to constant palpitation of the heart; but in compensation for these defects he had eyes which could see in the dark and which needed not spectacles even ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... a round-shouldered old man with a long white beard that came to a thin point. He wore old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles, the rims forming irregular octagons, and on his head he wore one of the grandest old silk hats that ever saw the light of day in 1865. His principal garment was a frock coat, once black, but ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... walking? It 's a way I 've always had, I have always been round-shouldered, ever since I was a lad. Don't you hate to tie your shoe-strings? Yes, I own it—that is true. Don't you tell old stories over? I am not ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... expressed a hope that I would now make a long visit. About an hour after I had arrived, Colonel Delmar made his appearance: he was a cousin of Lord de Versely's, but I certainly should not, from his appearance, have supposed him to be a Delmar: for he was short, round-shouldered, and with a fat, rubicund face, apparently about forty years of age. I observed, after our introduction, that his eyes were very often directed towards me; but his manner was courteous, and, although his appearance at first sight was not prepossessing, his conversation was very agreeable, ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... one of the school managers, came and sat on a bench near the door. He was a New Englander, a carpenter, round-shouldered, tall ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... imperious tone towards all, save his mother—and whatever he was doing, his keen, black eye was always turning in search of her, he was ever ready to spring to her side to wait on her, to maintain her cause in rough championship, or to claim her attention to himself. Francis was thick-set, round-shouldered, bullet-headed and dull-eyed, in comparison, not aggressive, but holding his own, and not very approachable; Leoline, thin, white-cheeked, large-eyed and fretful-lipped, was ready to whine at Conrade's tyranny and Francis's appropriations, but was grateful for Grace's ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Then he became a librarian in some private library, subsequently following other professions. Finally, after passing examinations in law he became a lawyer, but drink reduced him to the Captain's dosshouse. He was tall, round-shouldered, with a long, sharp nose and bald head. In his bony and yellow face, on which grew a wedge-shaped beard, shone large, restless eyes, deeply sunk in their sockets, and the corners of his mouth drooped sadly down. He earned ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... authorities, asking to have his term remitted and to be allowed to go, and he told me that he had spent over two hundred roubles on telegrams. He sold his land and mortgaged his house to the money-lenders. His hair went grey, he grew round-shouldered, and his face got yellow and consumptive-looking. He used to cough whenever he spoke and tears used to come to his eyes. He spent eight years on his applications, and at last he became happy again and lively: he ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... man, apparently the oldest son, with a fine, frank manner and very broad shoulders. He was so wonderfully developed about the bust that he seemed almost deformed, his breast projecting so far that it gave him the appearance of being round-shouldered in front. This, my practised eye told me, was the result of undue exercise in the direction of chest-expansion. He was a good-natured fellow, and overlooked my not answering several of his questions, owing to the evident want of ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... as half a minute; then turning his round-shouldered big back suddenly he adjusted his cuffs, muttering PROSTITUTES and WHORES and DIRTY FILTH OF WOMEN, crammed his big fists into his trousers, pulled in his chin till his fattish jowl rippled along the square jaws, panted, grunted, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... truth below the middle height, somewhat round-shouldered, with long arms, and small, well-shaped hands. His hair was plentiful, grizzled, and cut short. His head was large and his forehead wide, with overhanging brows; his eyes were small, dark, and brilliant; his nose had a certain look of decision—but ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... deprecatingly but did not speak. He was a tall, lean man, quite round-shouldered and of studious appearance. He wore double eyeglasses, underneath which his eyes were somewhat watery. The smile upon his thin features was a stationary one, not as if assumed, but molded with the features and ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... quick, measured tramp of the soldiers, aroused a furtive enthusiasm. Old men, bearded and bent, men whom one would never suspect of having borne arms, straightened themselves, stood to attention, and saluted the swaying flag. Callow youths, hooligans, round-shouldered slouchers at the best, made shift to lift their heads and keep step. And the torrent caught the human flotsam of the pavement in its onward swirl. If Royson had not utilized that clear space lower down the street, it would have demanded the exercise of ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... The crane resembled a round-shouldered, thin-legged old gentleman with his hands tucked under his coat-tails; and as he came up, tiptoeing and peering slyly at Hamil out of two bright evil-looking eyes, the girl raised her arm and threw a kum-quat at him so accurately that the bird veered off with ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... which the typists worked. They were the correspondence typists; our books and invoicing had long since overflowed into the premises we had had the luck to secure on either side of us. I was, I must confess, always in a faintly cloudily-emotional way aware of that collection of for the most part round-shouldered femininity, but presently one of the girls detached herself from the others and got a real hold upon my attention. I appreciated her at first as a straight little back, a neater back than any of the others; as a softly rounded neck with a smiling necklace of sham pearls; as chestnut hair ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... sitting and standing are practiced under the direction of the teacher of "physical culture," one will probably be innocent of such solecisms as thrusting the feet out to display the shoes; sitting sideways, or cross-legged; or slipping half-way down in the chair; or bending over a book in round-shouldered position; rocking violently; beating a noisy tattoo with impatient toes; or standing on one foot with the body thrown ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... upon them as they sat themselves down before Agamemnon and their lords. Upon all but one did silence fall. Thersites, bandy-legged, round-shouldered, lame of one foot, with ugly head covered with scanty stubble, most ill-favored of all men in the host, would not ...
— Young Folks Treasury, Volume 3 (of 12) - Classic Tales And Old-Fashioned Stories • Various
... are very apt to make themselves flat-chested and round-shouldered by leaning over their desks while writing or studying. This is very harmful. We should always use great care to sit erect and to draw the shoulders well back. Then, if we take pains to fill the lungs well a great many times every day, we shall form the habit of expanding ...
— First Book in Physiology and Hygiene • J.H. Kellogg
... to draw them out on some subject away from logs, all the fresh, leafy, outreaching branches of the mind seem to have been withered and killed with fatigue, leaving their lives little more than dry lumber. Many a tree have these old axemen felled, but, round-shouldered and stooping, they too are beginning to lean over. Many of their companions are already beneath the moss, and among those that we see at work some are now dead at the top (bald), leafless, so to speak, and tottering ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... find some one," said he, "who places the responsibility for trouble where it belongs. I'm round-shouldered with the blame I've had to bear. I didn't invent sin any more than I invented the telephone, and I think it's rather rough on a fellow who lived a quiet, retiring, pastoral life, minding his own business and staying home nights, to be held up to public reprobation for as ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... conversation, then an outburst of talk and laughter. They were talking about the "foreigner" of course, and laughing at him. At the tailor's, where I sent my clothes to be pressed, the tailor himself, a gray-haired, round-shouldered antique, ventured an opinion concerning those clothes. "That coat was not made in England, sir," he said. "We don't make 'em that way 'ere, sir. That's a bit foreign, ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... age, or she never could have endured the long hours of hard work on wet floors in a steaming room and with heavy bundles to lift and carry. As a grown woman her squat figure, large and slightly round-shouldered, betrayed these early years of stooping labor, and her colorless complexion, not a sickly pallor but a neutral white beneath the thick black hair, was the result of years spent in a dark, misty atmosphere, through which even the gas-lights burned dimly. In those ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... Miss Harding was you! Am I dreaming, or is this real life? How did you do it? Why did you do it? But your mouth is a different shape! This beats anything I ever knew! You used to look round-shouldered. Why? Why? Why? How could ...
— The Lady of the Basement Flat • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the level. Mountaineers are said to be as "straight as an arrow," and the reason is because they are obliged to look upward so much. It is simply impossible to stoop in walking if you will heed and practice this rule. You will notice that all round-shouldered persons carry the chin near the breast and pointed downward. Take warning in time, and heed grandmother's advice, for a bad habit is more easily prevented than cured. The habit of stooping when one walks or stands is a bad habit and especially ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... unto him soe goode—he had received manie a Hamper of 'em about Christmasse. After a Time, alle but he and I went up, and out on the Leads, to see the Comet; and we two sitting quite still, and Father, doubtlesse, supposed to be alone, I saw a great round-shouldered mannish Shadowe glide acrosse the Passage, and hearde the Front-door Latch click. Darted forthe, but too late, and then into the Kitchen; with some Warmth chid Betty for soe soone agayn disobeying Orders, and threatened to tell my Mamma. She cryed pertlie, "Law, Miss Deb, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... been heavy enough to turn a thick layer of white dust into a greasy, grey paste of mud. On our left was a sudden drop into the rushing river, on the right a deep ditch, and the road between was as round-shouldered as a hunchback. Seeing this natural phenomenon, and feeling the slightly uncertain step of our fat tyres as they waddled through the pasty mud, the pleasant smile of the proud motor-proprietor which I had been wearing ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... the technic that under Tante had been so tiresome. Mrs. Lee had engaged one of the best masters in the city and Keineth went almost daily to his funny little studio. At first she had been a little afraid of him. He was a Pole, a round-shouldered man with long gray hair that hung over his collar and queer eyes that seemed to look through and through one. But after she had heard him play she lost her shyness, for in his music she heard the voices she ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... eyes of a score of women were turned upon Dan, as he was daily seen, round-shouldered and hollow-chested, toiling along the snowy country roads to and from school, coughing as he went. The topic was not an uncongenial one to the members of the sewing-circle, who had really very little to talk about. So absorbed were they, ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... romantic things, but not trenches and airplanes which were the whole world's property. But he could scarcely fit his neighbour into even his haziest picture of war. The young man was tall and a little round-shouldered; he had short-sighted, rather prominent brown eyes, untidy black hair and dark eyebrows which came near to meeting. He wore a knickerbocker suit of bluish-grey tweed, a pale blue shirt, a pale blue collar, and a ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... couldn't hear what she said, but the movement of her lips and the play of her features were full of charm, full of interest, expressing both audacity and gentleness. She spoke with fire without raising her voice. The man listened round-shouldered, but seeming much too stupid to understand. I could see now and then that he was speaking, but he was inaudible. At one moment Dona Rita turned her head to the room and called out to the maid, "Give me ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... out, and shoulders back is a good slogan for a boy scout who desires an erect figure. One can scarcely think of a round-shouldered scout. Yet there are such among the boys who ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... with the singularity of Caleb's appearance, and later by the expression of his eyes. A very tall, big-boned, lean, round-shouldered man, he was uncouth almost to the verge of grotesqueness, and walked painfully with the aid of a stick, dragging his shrunken and shortened bad leg. His head was long and narrow, and his high forehead, long nose, long chin, and long, coarse, grey whiskers, worn like a beard on his throat, produced ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... hair brushed to one side, back somewhat bent, a handkerchief correctly adjusted on his shoulder under the violin; the flute-player, a flute—very, tall, with a thin, elongated face, and stiff, thin legs, the bass-violinist, a double-bass—stumpy, round-shouldered, lower part of his body very stout, wide trousers. The uncommon effort with which the musicians play is painfully evident. They beat time, swing their heads, and shake their bodies. The tune is the same throughout the ball, a short ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... certainly popular. She had a passion for the little ones; and her grey-blue eyes, over which in general the fringed lids drooped too much, had a charming trick of sudden smiles, when the soft soul behind looked for an instant clearly and blithely out. At home she was a little round-shouldered drudge in her mother's service. At chapel she sat very patiently and happily under a droning minister, and when the inert and despondent Isabella would have let most of her religious duties drop, in the face of many troubles and a scoffing husband, the child of ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... charge of Mr. Curry, an Africander, who lived with his partner on a farm on the border of the Sotik, and who on his return journey home with his wagon had agreed to help us carry supplies. Curry was slight and round-shouldered, with light yellow hair. His face was burned a bright red, excepting his nose, which was white where the skin was peeling. He had a peculiar, slow, drawling way of talking—when he talked at all, which was seldom. Being an inhabitant ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... reason why the little South London side-street was called Baker's Terrace, though it might well seem so; for Baker was the name of the builder, a worthy gentleman whose years and virtues may still be deciphered on a doddering, round-shouldered stone in a deceased cemetery not far from the scene of ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... a singular attitude he was in! Then, all in a moment, Hilda's heart seemed to stop beating, and her breath came thick and short; for she saw that this man before her was not the farmer. The farmer had not long elf-locks of black hair straggling over his coat-collar; he was not round-shouldered or bow-legged; above all, he would not be picking the lock of his own desk, for this was what the man before her was doing. Silent as her own shadow, Hildegarde slipped back into the hall and stood still a moment, collecting her thoughts. What should she do? Call Dame Hartley? The "poor dear" was ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... an intermediate port called San Pedro; and, as we were to lie there a week or two, and the California was to sail in a few days, we lost the opportunity. Just before sailing, the captain took on board a short, red-haired, round-shouldered, vulgar-looking fellow, who had lost one eye and squinted with the other, and, introducing him as Mr. Russell, told us that he was an officer on board. This was too bad. We had lost overboard, on the passage, one of the best of our number, another ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... the place where Lord Leitrim was done to death. Looked down on Milford Bay, dotted with little treeless and shrubless islands. Round it are round-shouldered hills, brown and bare now—purple with heather bells in summer time, I dare say. On a point stretching out into this bay stands his residence, Manor Vaughan. The road leading from Manor Vaughan to Milford is screened by a plantation of trees. On the opposite ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... manifests itself in all their actions: hence it is by no means an uncommon occurrence to see a tall, round-shouldered, woolly-headed, buck-shinned, and inky-complexioned "Free Nigger," sauntering out on Sunday, shading his huge weather-proof face from the rays of the encroaching sun under a carefully-carried silk umbrella! And again, as in many of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... towards midnight. There are several beggars, one of whom is a dirty, round-shouldered old ragamuffin with a long, matted beard. He cringes in front of the inspector's desk, and suddenly his hand flickers upwards with a deft movement. The next instant he is looking as innocent as though butter would ...
— Scotland Yard - The methods and organisation of the Metropolitan Police • George Dilnot
... overcoat on his exceedingly stout, round-shouldered body, with uncovered white head and puffy face showing the white ball of the eye he had lost, Kutuzov walked with plunging, swaying gait into the crowd and stopped behind the priest. He crossed himself with an accustomed movement, bent till he touched the ground with his hand, and bowed ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... bewilderment and sleepy astonishment. "To thunder with it, I say! I've had all the gov'ment jobs I want. Life-savin' service was bad enough, trampin' the condemned beach in a howlin' no'theaster, with the sand cuttin' furrers in your face, and the icicles on your mustache so heavy you got round-shouldered luggin' 'em. But when your tramp was over, you had somebody to talk to. Here, by godfreys! there ain't nothin' nor nobody. I'm goin' fishin' again, where ...
— The Woman-Haters • Joseph C. Lincoln
... there a country school is waking up to the physical needs of country children. "Country boys are not symmetrically developed," asserts Superintendent Rapp, of Berks County. "They are flat-chested and round-shouldered." That is interesting, indeed. Mr. Rapp explains: "It is because of the character of their work, nearly all of which tends to flatten the chest. Whether or not that is the explanation, the fact remains, and with it the no less evident ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... ahead? What else, then, do you need? No. Don't try to talk about it. Just go out and take a good, long walk in the fresh air, and forget your latter end in the more important concerns of deep breathing. You are getting disgustingly round-shouldered. Good bye. And, by the way, I'll tell Olive you will be back ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... trousers, a striped shirt, and a jacket baize—green in parts from the influence of sun and salt. A typical old shell-back, round-shouldered, hooked of finger; a figure with strong hints of a crab ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... seeming to have so much as heard. Rawhide Jones laughed at the cook's discomfiture and went back to the door, where he washed his face and hands at a little basin, plastered his wet hair down as his companions had already done, and dropped into easy conversation with the heavy, round-shouldered, yellow-haired man sitting across the ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... face between Eldara and Twin Rivers. Two pale-blue eyes, set close together, stared out with an endless and wistful pathos; a long nose dropped below them, and his mouth curled down at the sides. He was hopelessly round-shouldered from much and careless riding, and in attempting to straighten he only succeeded in throwing back his head, so that his lean neck generally was in a V-shape with the Adam's apple as the ...
— Trailin'! • Max Brand
... shambling, knock-kneed, round-shouldered, swollen-paunched apology for a man, with blistered, cracked lips, jaundiced pig eyes, and the skin of a terrapin, looked her all over, grunted his approval, and with a side-lunge of his fat empty head, ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... weakened by this unnatural posture, its vertebrae become so sensitive and distorted that they cannot easily support the weight of the body or sustain its equilibrium. It is generally believed that persons of sedentary habits are more liable to become round-shouldered than any other class of individuals. Observation shows, on the contrary, that the manual laborer, or even the idler, often acquires this stooping posture. It can be remedied, not by artificial braces, but by habitually throwing the shoulders backwards. Deformed trunks and crooked spines, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... I to see you Bill, an' to know that your fool head ain't knocked off by a cannon ball.' He shorely jumped up an' down with pleasure an' he called back: 'The good Lord certainly watches over them that ain't got any sense. Dan, you flat-headed, hump-backed, round-shouldered, thin-chested, knock-kneed, club-footed son of a gun, I was never so glad to see anybody before in ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... out of the cathedral and saw the old woman speak to a middle-aged, round-shouldered, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... round-shouldered, queer old fellow with a gray beard and a matted moustache, colored with the brown stain of cigarette smoke. As ugly, I thought, as ugly as—oh, Socrates. And yet with something lovable about him. And his combination of dress was certainly odd enough: ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... we irreverently say,—it happened as we crossed Park Square, so called from its being an irregular pentagon of which one of the sides has been taken away, that I recognized a tall man, plodding across in the snow, head down, round-shouldered, stooping forward in walking, with his right shoulder higher than his left; and by these tokens I knew Tom Coram, prince among Boston princes. Not Thomas Coram that built the Foundling Hospital, though he was of Boston too; but he was longer ago. You must look ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale |
