"Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... other celibate. He was frugal, discreet, possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would have done honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short, stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband. Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a bewitching expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an income ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... large-faced clock 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 that obligingly kept lighted between long puffs while the master was looking ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... before reaching the shore, and I had no doubt but that they entered the pit through some natural passage known to them beneath the water. And now I was made to understand my thought of the previous night, that I had seen the flicker of tentacles; for these things below us had each two short and stumpy arms; but the ends appeared divided into hateful and wriggling masses of small tentacles, which slid hither and thither as the creatures moved about the bottom of the valley, and at their hinder ends, where they should have grown feet, there seemed other flickering bunches; but it ...
— The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" • William Hope Hodgson
... 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 it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... sat and 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
... second at from two to four times; and in the third at about one and a half times. The straight tails he ascribes to hydrogen because the hydrogen atom is the lightest known; the sword-shaped tails to hydro-carbons; and the stumpy tails to vaporized iron. It will be seen that, if the force driving off the tails is that which Arrhenius assumes it to be, the forms of those appendages would accord with those that Bredichin's theory calls for. At the same time we have an explanation of the multiple tails with which some comets ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... that were about him. Then he thought of Noorna, and that she sang to him and danced, and when he rose to embrace her she was Rabesqurat by the light of the Lily! And he thought of Shagpat, and that in shaving him the blade was checked in its rapid sweep, and blunted by a stumpy twine of hair that waxed in size and became the head of Karaz that gulped at him a wide devouring gulp, and took him in, and flew up with him, leaving Shagpat half sheared. Then he thought himself struggling halfway down the throat of the monstrous Roc, and that, when he was wholly inside ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... stopped speaking. His elbows were on his knees, and he put his face between his hands and shuddered and became still. His hair was troubled. The end of his stumpy moustache and a little roll of flesh stood out at the side of his hand, and made him somehow twice as pitiful. His big atlas, from which papers projected, seemed forgotten by his side. So he sat for a long time, and neither he nor Letty moved or spoke. But they were in the same shadow. ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... when both craft happened to be on the summit of a wave at the same moment that we were able to see her. Yet two facts concerning her gradually became clear to us, the first of which was that she was undoubtedly a slaver—so much her short, stumpy masts and the enormous longitudinal spread of her yards told us,—the second was that she was steadily settling down to leeward at a more rapid rate than ourselves, as was only to be expected from the fact that she was exposing much more top-hamper to the gale than we were. It would not be long, ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... difficulty Hannah sought and found an old inkstand, a stumpy pen, and a scrap of paper. It was the best she could do. Stationery was scarce in the poor hut. She laid them on the table before Herman. And with a trembling hand he wrote out a check upon the local bank and put it in her ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... Hooded Warbler. In a dense undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... a stumpy masted vessel that seemed as still and dead as ocean that rotted around it. She had not a sail aloft nor a plume of smoke in her funnel. For the moment this lifelessness was not observed by the hungry castaways. A joyous medley ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... lay on his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south of ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... 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 ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... 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," christening the baby:— ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... enterprising. The two last qualities were absolutely necessary to take them through the long, wearisome journey to Ohio, the then far West. They took up lands, built cabins, and forced a subsistence from the newly-cleared, stumpy virgin soil. This homogeneous people constituted a practical and thorough democracy. Their social relations were based on personal equality, varied only by the accident of superior talents, address or enterprise, and as yet but little modified by ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... 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 of no man. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... without 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 ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... "Le Gris" and "Souris," two much-vaunted animals, belonging to Paquette, the interpreter. At length, being determined, like most of my sex, by a regard for exterior, I chose "Le Gris," and "Souris" was assigned to young Roy; my own little stumpy pony, "Brunet," being pronounced just the thing for a pack-saddle. My husband rode his own bay horse "Tom," while Plante, the gayest and proudest of the party, bestrode a fine, large animal called "Jerry," which had lately been purchased for my use; ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... majority of them crawl patiently along, with their heads down and with reeking flanks and shoulders, pausing occasionally as the water-bars brace the wheels, and impatient only with the flies that vex their ears, and the insufficiency of their short and stumpy tails to protect their quivering sides. Some of these animals are not so patient, but are nervous and spasmodic and unhappy. I have noticed one among them particularly, that has a very bad time every morning with his first load. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... be productive of lameness—that is, always supposing, of course, that the foot in other respects is of good shape. If lameness is met with at all, then it is where we have a foot that is in other respects unsound, with badly contracted heels and upright 'stumpy' hoof, or where side-bones have occurred in a young animal, and have already reached a large size before the horse is put to labour. In this latter case, the added effects of concussion and the evil influences of shoeing are ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... 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 sweetness of the smile of which they were ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... are very narrow and round-headed, and there is in the 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 ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... wife of Peter the Great and empress of Russia, daughter of a Livonian peasant; "a little stumpy body, very brown,... strangely chased about from the bottom to the top of the world,... had once been a kitchen wench"; married first to a Swedish dragoon, became afterwards the mistress of Prince Menschikoff, and then of Peter the Great, who eventually married her; succeeded ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... 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
... architecture of a more material description. It had, no doubt, a perfect right to be called a castle, as it was entered by a castle-gate which led into a court, the porter's lodge for which was built as it were into the wall; there were attached to it also two round, stumpy adjuncts, which were, perhaps properly, called towers, though they did not do much in the way of towering; and, moreover, along one side of the house, over what would otherwise have been the cornice, there ran a castellated parapet, through the assistance of which, ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... unexpectedly upon 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 ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... 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 ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Fleetfoot wished he would go down the path where he had scattered burrs! But the rabbit took another path and Fleetfoot ran to catch him. He was almost sure he could lay his hands on the rabbit's stumpy white tail. ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... into the hall, where they were placed beside those of one of his murderers. The elder Richards accompanied the doctor, in order to give his testimony. The mad woman and her son were also there, in charge of Sylvanus and Ben Toner. Just as the party prepared to constitute the coroner's court, a stumpy figure on a high stepping horse came riding along. He was well disguised, but several persons recognized him. "Seize him," cried Squire Carruthers. "It's Grinstuns," said the lawyer. "Stop him!" shouted Bangs. But, ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... that!" said Mrs. Stumptail, with a sort of laugh away down in her trunk. "All our family have short, or stumpy tails. That is how we get our name. The Stumptail elephants are very stylish, let ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... shipyards that were to be found on every bay and inlet of New England. They were still owned and sailed by men who ashore were friends and neighbors. Even now you may find during your summer wanderings some stumpy, weather-worn two-master running on for shelter overnight, which has plied up and down the coast for fifty or sixty years, now leaking like a basket and too frail for winter voyages. It was in a craft very much like this that your rude ancestors went ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... hunters, a bull will sometimes turn in desperation on his persecutor. Then, unless the horse is well trained, serious consequences are likely to follow. The plunging thrust of his stumpy horns perhaps rips open the steed, sending the rider flying over the back of the furious bison, who may turn upon him and slay him before ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... his high sun flame and his river billowing ran: And he felt himself in his pride to be nature's crowning race.' There was the ichthyosaurus, a fish-like marine lizard, familiar to us all from a thousand reconstructions, with his long thin body, his strong flippers, his stumpy neck, and his huge pair of staring goggle eyes. The ichthyosaurus was certainly a most unpleasant creature to meet alone in a narrow strait on a dark night; but if it comes to actual measurement, the very biggest ichthyosaurian skeleton ever unearthed does not exceed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... prematurely born; but, as it seemed to me, 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 on in ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... place we found the foresters watching the dachshunde. These I discovered to be long, flat, shallow dogs with stumpy legs—a dog which an American has described as "looking as if he was always coming out from under a bureau." Very cautiously here and there the foresters uncovered a burrow, and a dachshund disappeared. Then ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... middle of next day. Trix affected 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 looks. I'm glad ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... is of considerable size. It is of the last century (1843), and its stumpy tower, which is incomplete, gives it an odd appearance. The church is on the site of the Broadway Chapel, founded by Darrell, a Prebendary of the Abbey, who in 1631 left L400 for its erection. Various subscriptions were added to this sum, including ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... the scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's lot; The grisly, blear-eyed, every one ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... and I prolonged his fast until it was quite dark, when I gave him permission to eat. They all had tolerable stallions for their service, and seemed to live pleasantly enough, in their wild way. The fat, stumpy corporal, with his enormously broad pantaloons and automaton legs, went down to the fountain with his musket, and after taking a rest and sighting full five minutes, fired at a dove without hitting it. He afterwards ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... guarantee that there are flats there?" said Stumpy, the grocer of Merchant Street, alluding to the deposits so ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... brought as a prisoner before a certain paunchy officer, the attempt of the latter to show his dignity was a clumsy failure. The proud and splendid chief, with arms folded across his breast, and head slightly bowed, looked singularly out of place arraigned before the stumpy ...
— Annette, The Metis Spy • Joseph Edmund Collins
... 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 planted ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... 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 ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... now satisfied there 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. The dress she wore consisted of an old barsati, presented ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... by a thick, drooping, yellow mustache, is childishly self-willed and weak, of an obstinate kindliness. A thick neck is jammed like a post into the heavy trunk of his body. His arms with their big, hairy, freckled hands, and his stumpy legs terminating in large flat feet, are awkwardly short and muscular. He walks with a clumsy, rolling gait. His voice, when not raised in a hollow boom, is toned down to a sly, confidential half-whisper with ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... sheep among the hills, and they appear very tame and gentle; though sometimes, like the wicked, they "flee when no man pursueth." But, climbing a rude, rough, rocky, stumpy, ferny height yesterday, one or two of them stood and stared at me with great earnestness. I passed on quietly, but soon heard an immense baa-ing up the hill, and all the sheep came galloping and scrambling after me, baa-ing ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... corner of the fireplace, and resumed his reading of "The Old English Baron," by the light of the burning back-log, pronouncing every word to himself in something between a whisper and a whistle. Gilbert took an account-book, a leaden inkstand, and a stumpy pen from a drawer under the window, and calculated silently and somewhat laboriously. His mother produced a clocked stocking of blue wool, and proceeded to ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... few paces, had seated itself on 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 ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... when questioned, he averred stoutly that he and "Jinny" [Footnote: Jinny: the 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, never ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... the famous Miss Julia Pastrana, Figure 1.185), it will be admitted to represent a higher stage of development. There are still people among us who look especially to the face for the "image of God in man." The long-nosed ape would have more claim to this than some of the stumpy-nosed human individuals one meets. ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... housekeeper: a son, whom we never saw, supposed to be leading the same life that his father had done before him, only we never saw or heard of any pupils; and there was one hard-working, honest little Scottish maiden, square, stumpy, neat, and plain, who might have been any ...
— Round the Sofa • Elizabeth Gaskell
... here!" cried Uncle Wiggily, as he grabbed up his valise and crutch. Then the water came up to his little short, stumpy tail. Next it rose higher, up to his knees. Then it rose still faster up to his front feet and then almost up to ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... poet—crystallised the fight 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 admiral. Great ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... enable the plowman to keep it in proper place, and for convenience in turning. One horse is fastened to this implement, and two rows are prepared for planting at the same time. This utensil would be troublesome to use in an orchard, or on stumpy ground. Peanuts, however, should always be planted on open ground clear of all impediments. Instead of the knocker and dotter combined, many planters omit the wheels, and make a separate implement with one ...
— The Peanut Plant - Its Cultivation And Uses • B. W. Jones
... 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 for three cheers for Ulysses S. Grant, which were given with a will. ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... sight, shaping course for the Fleet Flagship. She was crowded to suffocation with singing, cheering sailor-men, and secured to her stumpy bowsprit was a silver cock. As she approached the stern of the Flagship, however, the uproar subsided, and the densely thronged drifter was white with upturned, ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... case, William—it's 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 sort ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... 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 ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... suggested, as we passed another passenger. And so we went the length of the platform making rough guesses as to the professions of my fellow travellers. Suddenly I noticed a tall man, wearing a tweed cap and a long covert-coat, his hands in his pockets, a stumpy cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. His hair was gray, and his face bore signs of a tough struggle in early youth. His complexion was of that curious gray-yellow one sees frequently in America and occasionally in Denmark—something quite distinct from the bronze-gray ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... casting their sly eyes upwards, to see if we feared them or were friendly to their advances, and, after a moment or two, seemed sufficiently satisfied with the scrutiny to warrant their wagging their short stumpy tails in rude welcome. The room was hung round with cages of the songbirds of England—some content with their captivity, others restless, and passing to and fro in front of the wires, eager for escape. Strong ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... none of the best when she is standing steady on the ground. Molly and Cynthia have got those new plaid shawls just alike, and they trim their bonnets alike, and Molly is grown as tall as Cynthia since Christmas. I was always afraid she'd be short and stumpy, but she's now as tall and slender as any one need be. I'll answer for it, Mrs. Goodenough saw Molly, ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... 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. Greer returned the missile with interest, and the fight grew warm, and boots and ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... however, a variety of minor and less negotiable articles, which he fished out one by one from unknown depths—a curious collection. There was a stumpy German-silver pencil case, a broken prism from a crystal chandelier, a gilded Jew's harp, a little book in which the leaves on being turned briskly, gave a semblance of motion to the sails of a ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... a stumpy lead-pencil from his pocket, tore a leaf out of his pocket-book, and wrote ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... 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, the binnacle and certain brass-bound dials, on the ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... 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 Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... right had produced a hymn-book from his pocket and opened it and found his place with the same air of smug efficiency. Robert had no book. He longed for one. He knew that the clergyman was watching him again. His companion nudged him, and by a stab of a stumpy, inky forefinger indicated the verse which he himself was singing in an aggressive treble. But Robert only stared helplessly. At another time he might have recognized "God—love—dove—" and other words of one syllable, and he liked the tune. But now ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... grandfather." An inconsecutive finish to correct a mistake of Old Jack's. She resumes the chair she had risen from when he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... boots, began running like hares toward the sound. In twenty minutes after that, with the aid of grass ropes and leather thongs, they had hauled the huge carcass to the shore and rolled it out of the water, where it lay glistening in moonlight, stumpy, foolish, legs uppermost. ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... sister, whom he loved. But there were no feelings of that kind to come in the way of the detestation he felt for Lucy. Helen had told him that Lucy had fair hair and wore it in two plaits; and he pictured her to himself as a fat, stumpy little girl, exactly like the little girl in the story of 'The Sugar Bread' in the old oblong 'Shock-Headed Peter' book that had belonged to Helen when ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... in the middle of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was fast ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... of taking forcible possession of one of the mud-houses of the latter. But as the season advances they drift more into the background. Schemes of conquest which they at first seemed bent upon are abandoned, and the settle down very quietly in their old quarters in remote stumpy fields. ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... brother. Moreover, Miss Phipps was conscious that if the Countess was not a disreputable person, she, Miss Phipps, had no compensating superiority in virtue to set against the other lady's manifest superiority in personal charms. Miss Phipps's stumpy figure and unsuccessful attire, instead of looking down from a mount of virtue with an aureole round its head, would then be seen on the same level and in the same light as the Countess Czerlaski's Diana-like ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... Betsy, with a critical air; 'I think she has rather improved. She is plump enough still, in all conscience, but not quite so stumpy as she was last summer. Her figure is a little less ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... 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 ...
— The Stokesley Secret • Charlotte M. Yonge
... feeling of being very awkward and clumsy. He felt, somehow, as if he were a great, coarse behemoth; his arms seemed to him awkward appendages; his hands suddenly appeared to him rough, and his fingers swelled and stumpy. When he thought of asking an introduction, he felt himself growing very hot, and blushing to the ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the area of the sprunk strakes with the stumpy thumb and little finger of an outstretched hand. Then he puckered his forehead and stared out to sea, apparently making mental calculations connected with the "li'l' ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... in front, is 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 ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... away, and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... down his glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy little ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... 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 Europeans as being vastly ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... before us, we were enabled to make but a short stay, so, bidding him and his family a sincere good-bye and good speed, we renewed our journey. We soon came in sight of the black stumpy monuments of one of the most disastrous conflagrations which ever victimized a forest. Some idea may be formed of the ravages of the "devouring element," from the simple fact that it all but totally consumed every stick of timber covering a ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... large rectangular courts with arcades in two or three stories on one or more sides, but rarely surrounding it entirely. In these the segmental arch is more common than the semicircular, and springs usually from short and stumpy Ionic or Corinthian columns. The rooms and halls are arranged en suite, without corridors, and a large and lofty banquet hall forms the dominant feature of the series. The earliest of these regularly planned palaces are of ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Architecture - Seventh Edition, revised • Alfred D. F. Hamlin
... majority flew the Danish flag—your Dane is fond of flying his flag, and small blame to him!—and these exhibited round bluff bows and square-cut counters with white or varnished top-strakes and stern-davits of timber. To the right and seaward, the eye travelled past yet another tier, where a stumpy Swedish tramp lay cheek-by-jowl with two stately Italian barques—now Italian-owned, but originally built in Glasgow for traffic around the Horn—and so followed the curve of the harbour out to the Channel, where sea and sky met in a yellow flood of potable gold. To the left the ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... water were beginning to be touched by the first faint tones of rose, the dawn was bringing its enchantment to this marriage-time of the black and white. Over in the Key West barracks a bugler would soon be blowing reveille; down in the sleeping town stumpy little street cars would squeak from their sheds and clang their discordant gongs through the narrow thoroughfares. But farther yet to the northeast, in the Florida I best knew and loved, a whooping crane would startle the solitude with its uncanny cry, the alligators would croak ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... the other in his frantic efforts. Then he tried to crawl under and then over the dog in front of him. Failing in this, he suddenly sprang forward with such force that he managed to seize hold of the short, stumpy tail of the dog in front of him. This was an unfortunate move on his part, as the dogs that are accustomed to work together will readily fight for each other when one is in trouble. So, before Sam or the Indians ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... 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
... short and thickly set, a man of some fifty years, but hard and firm of make. His face is broad and red, his shiny fat cheeks almost as prominent as his stumpy nose, likewise red and shiny. A fringe of reddish whiskers surrounds his chin like a cropped hedge. The eyes are small and set deeply, a habit of half-closing the lids when walking in the teeth of ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... hairy, snub-nosed face of Vaska Denisov, and his whole short sturdy figure with the sinewy hairy hand and stumpy fingers in which he held the hilt of his naked saber, looked just as it usually did, especially toward evening when he had emptied his second bottle; he was only redder than usual. With his shaggy head thrown ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... clergyman, dressed in a complete suit of black, a long frock coat, fitting him up to the neck and very nearly down to the heels. He had the appearance of a very tame curate. His hair, instead of being short and stumpy, as when the young policeman saw him, was now long, shiny, and carefully brushed over both sides of his forehead, which gave him the appearance so fashionable amongst the saints of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... round and round, stopping to listen and snuff in the sawdust near the bars; the stumpy jaguar, black as ink, with a body like a steel case, was rushing up and down, rubbing its forehead fiercely as it turned; a lion and his mate were rearing themselves one after the other against the walls, half turning from the middle to fall almost backward in that peculiar ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... then sat down to wait events. 'Mark,' he said, 'in twenty minutes Stump'll be a-rushing round, While the other wretched creature lies a corpse upon the ground.' But, alas for William Johnson! ere they'd watched a half-hour's spell Stumpy was as dead as mutton, t'other dog was live and well. And the scientific person hurried off with utmost speed, Tested Johnson's drug and found it was a deadly poison-weed; Half a tumbler killed an emu, half a spoonful killed a goat, All the snakes ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... stumpy, paunchy little old man, with a chubby face of one uniform tint, yet pleasant, with drawn-in lips, and very lively little eyes under high eyebrows. He wore his scanty locks combed to the back of his head; it was only since 1812 that he had given up wearing powder. Alexey Sergeitch invariably ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... verbs—the "braires" and "traires" which were so difficult to remember, and which nobody ever could want to use in polite conversation; the ruined castles and dilapidated windmills, the perpetual stumpy pieces of fallen timber and jagged posts, executed with a BBB pencil; the chalky expanse of sky, with that inevitable flight of crows scudding across it:—why must there be always crows scudding across ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... as iver," said the stumpy Hibernian, to herself, as she watched the twinkling retreat of those ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... look—there was the veil, and the placard, and the disjointed, rattling sash; and in the neighboring court was, sometimes, the tall gentleman picking his way carefully over the stones, and sometimes the stumpy figure of a ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... well along in the afternoon when Timmins and Lone Wolf emerged from the thick woods into the stumpy pastures and rough burnt lands that spread back irregularly from the outlying farms. And here, while crossing a wide pasture known as Smith's Lots, an amazing thing befell. Of course Timmins was not particularly surprised, because his backwoods philosophizing had long ago ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... trampled space. It was flanked by its several sheds and barns on one hand and a woodpile on the other. Beyond the woodpile a rail fence inclosed a corn-field, and beyond the barns and sheds a similar fence defined the bounds of a stumpy pasture-lot. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... 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 of treatment, and are accompanied by sculpture which approaches nearer ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... all sorts and conditions of men. For'ard, there are peasants and soldiers: stumpy, placid-looking little warriors for the most part, smoking feeble cigars and looking quite harmless under their enormous helmets. A poor stunted dull-looking boy of sixteen, staggering before a black-striped sentry-box, with an enormous musket on his shoulder, does ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... through the open windows at his pretty garden. He is a very old man, and is sometimes bewildered nowadays. He calls to Dering, the gardener, who is on a ladder, pruning. Dering, who comes to him, is a rough, capable young fellow with fingers that are already becoming stumpy because he so often uses his hands instead of a spade. This is a sign that Dering will never get on in the world. His mind is in the same condition as his fingers, working back to clods. He will get a rise of one and sixpence in a year or two, and ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... 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 men attributed to her softness of heart, ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... the door like a whipped dog. Moylan was too old to feel any such compunctions, and consequently made what he intended to be taken as a very complaisant bow to his future patron. He was an ill-made, ugly, stumpy man, about fifty; with a blotched face, straggling sandy hair, and grey shaggy whiskers. He wore a long brown great coat, buttoned up to his chin, and this was the only article of wearing apparel visible upon him: in his hands he twirled ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... clear to Priscilla that he had not come to Rosnacree to be her playmate and companion. He had come to fish salmon in company with her father and such other grown men as might from time to time present themselves. Nursery games in stumpy green boats were not consonant with his dignity. He did not want to hurt Priscilla's feelings, but he was anxious that she should understand his position. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... the shape of an obtuse angle, with my three 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, and most of them fell back beyond the Wilkinson pike, where they ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... fingers once to show that he was grateful for what she'd done. But—and this was a big but—she was only a stop-gap. Now—and with another scurry of feet, he was once again jumping round the only one who really mattered. A series of short staccato yelps of joy too great to be controlled; a stumpy tail wagging so fast that the eye could scarcely follow it; ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... for our departure. There was no longer anything to detain us on Endeavour Island. The Ghost's stumpy masts were in place, her crazy sails bent. All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... back on us while she wrote it down with a stumpy pencil he lent her; but Oswald could swear that he heard money chink, and that there was something large and round wrapped up in the paper ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... first one that came along, for above the skirt of purple silk was a Dolly Varden, all but the puffing out, of black silk, spotted over with white needlework. To top off all, this Japanee wore the funniest sort of a thing on the head, like a shiny black wash-bowl, with a hole in it, from which a stumpy black ball stuck up in the air—about the pertest-looking thing you ever saw. Around the edge was a white binding, all curlicued off with queer black figures, and a lot of stiff black stuff streamed down from behind, like a ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... reef, plunging and rolling heavily, was a small steamer. She was stumpy, high bowed, low waisted, with a short black funnel. Her bridge and single deck-house were disproportionately high. She was shabby and rusty. She looked insignificant. She was swept frequently with showers of white spray. On her bow and on her funnel could be seen the white ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and—sucking stumpy pencils—write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... endowed with reason and speech. As in the German tales, certain peculiarities in the appearance and natural habits of animals are frequently accounted for by events that happened 'once upon a time'—for instance, the stumpy tail of the bear, by his misfortune when he went out fishing on the ice—so we find in the American tales, 'that it was when the two principal heroes (Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque) had caught the rat and were going to strangle it over the fire, that le rat commenca a porter une queue sans poil. ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller |
