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More "Blunt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... writer. Even 'the prosperity of a jest,' as Shakespeare tells us, lies less in its own merit than 'in the ear of him that hears it.' If he should happen to be unusually obtuse, the wittiest jest perishes—the most pointed is found blunt. So, with regard to books, should the reader on whom we build prove a sandy and treacherous foundation, the whole edifice, 'temple and tower,' must come to the ground. Should it happen, for instance, that the reader, inflicted upon ourselves for our ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... amiable was advancing each in the opinion of all who had hearts to value anything good. Henry Crawford was as much struck with it as any. He honoured the warm-hearted, blunt fondness of the young sailor, which led him to say, with his hands stretched towards Fanny's head, "Do you know, I begin to like that queer fashion already, though when I first heard of such things being done in England, I could not believe it; and when ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... tells us in this same chapter x., "Many speak and do good, and love not GOD." But that will not suffice his exacting demands. A man is not "good" until his interior disposition be all filled and taken up with pure love of GOD. And as he analyses the Christian Character, there is a pleasant blunt directness about this holy man:—"he that says he loves GOD and will not do what is in him to shew love, tell ...
— The Form of Perfect Living and Other Prose Treatises • Richard Rolle of Hampole
... image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things (Rom. i. 21-23). He invented idolatry, and all those "gay religions full of pomp and gold," in order to blunt the edge of that sharp spiritual conception of God which was continually cutting and lacerating his wicked and sensual heart. Hiding himself amidst the columns of his idolatrous temples, and under the smoke of his idolatrous incense, he thought like ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... days she kept the letter locked in her desk, not having the courage to take it out again and read it. Then she sent for Captain Holt, the only one, beside Martha, with whom she could discuss the matter. She knew his strong, honest nature, and his blunt, outspoken way of giving vent to his mind, and she hoped that his knowledge of life might help ...
— The Tides of Barnegat • F. Hopkinson Smith
... used on Ishi's arrows. One was the simple blunt end of the shaft bound with sinew used for killing small game and practice shots. The other was his hunting head, made of flint or obsidian. ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... thinking, and she thought to some purpose. Her natural disposition was always to obtain results by blunt, matter-of- fact methods. In school her policy was, 'Come along with you now, I'm not going to have any nonsense!' Backed by her position, her strong personality, and her prowess at games it succeeded. But here in the hostel, if she wished to effect any improvements, she must ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... pointing at the little discs, "grows precisely like these little buttons which you see here. It is a species of cactus which rises only half an inch or so from the ground. The stem is surrounded by a clump of blunt leaves which give it its button shape, and on the top you will see still the tuft of filaments, like a cactus. It grows in the rocky soil in many places in the state of Jalisco, though only recently has it become known to science. The Indians, when they go out ...
— The Silent Bullet • Arthur B. Reeve
... lying In a green wood, in a gloomy vale. Toward the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf. Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs; But the wolf enters not the forest, But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale, Moon, moon, gold-horned moon, Cheek the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives, Break the shepherds' cudgels, Cast wild fear upon all cattle, On men, on all creeping things, That they may not catch the grey wolf, That they may not rend his warm skin My ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... been produced at a much less expenditure of intellectual effort? But since it is an unquestionable fact that we are thus totally depraved in taste and feeling, why don't some of our bards, to whom the Muse has not been propitious in other departments of metrical composition, and who, to be blunt, are good for nothing else, such as ——, or ——, and many others you know, come out here among the marble-cutters and open an epitaph-shop? Mournful stanzas might then be procured of every size and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... seemed to come from a great distance as he said: "Here, you see, he was stabbed. The knife went to the heart. Here he was hit with something heavy and blunt; but it had enough of an edge to cut the scalp and lay the cheek open. The skull ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... formidable audience he was M. Chardon. Lucien's courage sank under their inquisitive eyes. He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness. He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more out of humor with himself. He grew impatient to begin the reading, for ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... than to see cousin Nicol Jarvie singe Iverach's plaid, like a sheep's head between a pair of tongs. But my cousin Jarvie," he added, more gravely, "has some gentleman's bluid in his veins, although he has been unhappily bred up to a peaceful and mechanical craft, which could not but blunt any pretty man's spirit.—Ye may estimate the reason why I could not receive you at the Clachan of Aberfoil as I purposed. They had made a fine hosenet for me when I was absent twa or three days at Glasgow, upon the king's business—But I think I broke up the league ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... life might be! I wanted her so badly, so very badly, to be what I needed. I wanted a woman to save me. I forced myself to see her as I wished to see her. Her tepidities became infinite delicacies, her mental vagueness an atmospheric realism. The harsh precisions of the Baileys and Altiora's blunt directness threw up her fineness into relief and made a grace ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... with a sudden round-up, on India. I had been trusting to vague outlines of history; I felt when he began to talk that I was dealing with a man who not only knew history, but had lived it. He talked in the fewest but directest words, and waxed eloquent in a blunt and colossal way. But seeing his wife's eyes fixed on him intently, he suddenly pulled up, and no more did I get from him on the subject. He stopped so suddenly that in order to help over the awkwardness, though I'm not ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... can still recognise him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... eldest son, always called Johnnie, to distinguish him from his father, was ridiculously big for his age, portentously clever and keen-witted, awkward, blunt, rude, full of fun, extremely fond of his father, and exceedingly unlike him in person. His hair was nearly black, his forehead was square and high, his hands and feet almost rivalled those of his parent in size, and his ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... turned round in time to see her husband's blunt, brown features twisted in the grimace which ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... Englishman won her demi-Roman, semi-Grecian heart, and that while he was so smitten with her as to do her will in that business of Arezzo and Messer Simone, she, on her side, was so won by his willingness and his bulk and his blunt love-making, that she cared no longer for the winning of that wicked old wager, and had but one thought in her head, which was to become the lawful wife of Messer Griffo of the Claw. This was an arrangement of their joint affairs which Messer Griffo of ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... reckoned time, exchanged confidences, and arranged experiences, informed him that the night was yet young, and that his friend would not yet be arrived. He sat there so still and so long, that if it had not been for his resolute head and the blunt spires of his ears, he would have appeared to an onlooker below as no more than a humpy finial on an otherwise regularly built wall. Now and again the last inch of his tail twitched slightly, like an independent member, ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Charles II a band of cavaliers, prominent amongst whom are Willmore (the Rover), Belvile, Frederick, and Ned Blunt, find themselves at Naples in carnival time. Belvile, who at a siege at Pampluna has rescued a certain Florinda and her brother Don Pedro, now loves the lady, and the tender feeling is reciprocated. Florinda's father, however, designs her for the elderly ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... some weight with you," added Polly slyly. "Trix told Belle she was going to ask you for the dress, as you would n't care to wear it now. That made Belle fire up, and say it was a mean thing to do without offering some return for a costly thing like that; and then Belle said, in her blunt way, 'I 'll give Fan all she paid for it, and more, too, if it will be any help to her. I don't care for the dress, but I 'd like to slip a little money into her pocket, for I know she needs it and is too good to ask dear Mr. Shaw for anything ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... laughing in his sleeve at the helplessness of the Supreme Council. But they laughed too soon. For the Supreme Council wired to the Food Administrator, Herbert Hoover, who was in Vienna, informing him of the facts of the situation, whereupon Mr. Hoover, who has a blunt and uncomfortably direct way of achieving his ends, sent a curt message to the Rumanian government informing it that, if the orders of the Supreme Council were not immediately obeyed, he would shut off its supplies of food. That message produced action. The troops ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... walks in public view Without of loyalty this token true: Sharp is the knife, and sudden is the stroke; And sorely would the Gallic foeman rue, If subtle poniards, wrapt beneath the cloke, Could blunt the sabre's edge, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... That blunt hint was effective, and, letting the subject drop for the time being, even the professor joined in the hurry for an evening meal, to which one and all felt able to ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... persisted upon barking still. He wouldn't let me touch him, when I tried; and then she beat him. It increased my sufferings greatly to see the pats she gave him for punishment on the bridge of his blunt nose, while he winked his eyes, and licked her hand, and still growled within himself like a little double-bass. At length he was quiet—well he might be with her dimpled chin upon his head!—and we walked away to ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... cubic feet, with pools and waterfalls. A tree that stands all along the banks here must be very fond of water; its roots lie close-packed down the stream, like hanks of guts, so as to make often a corrugated walk, each root ending in a blunt tuft of filaments, plainly to drink water. Twice there came in small tributaries from the left or western side—the whole plateau having a smartish inclination to the east; one of the tributaries in a handsome little web of silver hanging in the forest. Twice I ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... small boy. Then, as Danny approached his ninth birthday, the old man had said, "They're teaching you too much at school, son. Too many wrong things, too many highfalutin' notions, too much just plain old hogwash. Why don't you kind of make yourself scarce for a few years?" It had been blunt and to the point. It had made Danny cry. He hadn't thought of what had happened that last day he'd seen his grand-uncle for years, but he ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... came seemed to be interested in my work, especially in the "Bed of Ferns," of which Rossetti—whose opinion I valued more than any other, for he was very honest and blunt in his criticisms, and not at all inclined to flattery—expressed himself in strong terms of praise. As it was the first thing in which I had attempted to introduce a human interest in the landscape, I was naturally inclined to consider it my most important ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... pulled over the opacity of the swift puddle. They form also an admirable point for viewing the clumsy craft of all types which the falling tide leaves wallowing in the iridescent slime of the shoals, showing their huge flanks, and resting their blunt snouts on the ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... could see would become necessities from a merely military point of view, have had their inevitable result: they have got into the West, and have aided Secession, as in many cases they were intended to do. The plain, blunt man, seeing what must be adopted if the war is to be carried on in earnest, and yet hearing that these inevitable expediencies were all 'abolition,' became confused and disheartened. So that it is as true as Gospel, that in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... listened intently to this recital. Now he deliberately lighted his pipe before replying, and when he did it was to ask a blunt question. ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... good enough," remarked Mrs. Bathurst in her blunt way. "She isn't much to look at. I've done my best to bring her up well, but I never thought of her turning into a fine lady. I question if ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... which carries up a layer of cotton on a spiked apron from which it is removed by a rapidly revolving "doffer" underneath which is a screen which catches some of the dirt. It is next fed between rolls in front of a rapidly revolving blunt-edged knife which throws out more of the dirt through a screen. There is a suction of air through the screen which helps remove the foreign substances. The cotton passes through several of such machines, being formed into a soft web or "lap" which is ...
— Textiles and Clothing • Kate Heintz Watson
... reserved, coy and discreet women much more than blunt, shrewd and boisterous. Falsehood, false hair, false curls, false forms, false bosoms, false colors, false cheeks, and all that is false, men naturally dislike, for in themselves they are a poor foundation on which to form family ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... mine are. Oh, how I wish I could rid myself of them! But it cannot be done. Age will not blunt them,—I am sure of that," said Mrs Broughton. "I wish ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... property in their goods, and that no part of them can be taken but by their own consent in parliament. But that the parliament was instituted to check and control the king, and share the supreme power, would in all former times have been esteemed very blunt and indiscreet, if not illegal language. We need not be surprised that governments should long continue, though the boundaries of authority in their several branches be implicit, confused, and undetermined. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... was two months in its progress through the House of Commons. During this time every exertion was made by the directors and their friends, and more especially by the chairman, the noted Sir John Blunt, to raise the price of the stock. The most extravagant rumors were in circulation. Treaties between England and Spain were spoken of whereby the latter was to grant a free trade to all her colonies; and the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various
... the western horizon the professor was still sound asleep; and Ben Zoof, who was especially anxious that the repose which promised to be so beneficial should not be disturbed, felt considerable annoyance at hearing a loud knocking, evidently of some blunt heavy instrument against a door that had been placed at the entrance of the gallery, more for the purpose of retaining internal warmth than for guarding against ...
— Off on a Comet • Jules Verne
... paler beneath; cheeks nearly black; underside of wings, and interfemoral membrane with lines of hairs; heel bone elongated, slender; ears moderate rounded; tragus oblong blunt; fore-arm bone, 1 10-12; shin bone, 9-12 ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... It was a bold, blunt compliment, yet it was uttered with evident sincerity; but she had turned the locket so that she could see the likeness and did not catch the double meaning of his words. So she only answered calmly and earnestly, "He was a ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... nonexistent, blending the head with the shoulders and trunk, on which the dry skin stretched so thin that Rynason could see the solid bone of the chest wall. Two squat arms hung from the shoulders, terminating in four-digited hands on which two sets of blunt fingers were opposed; Horng kept moving them constantly, in what Rynason automatically interpreted as a nervous habit. The lower body was composed of two heavily-muscled legs jointed so that they could move either forward or backward, and the feet had four stubby but ...
— Warlord of Kor • Terry Gene Carr
... night instead of the darkness of the storm. Perhaps some memory of her first impulsive response to his wooing came to him as he took both of her hands in his. "There's some barrier between us of late," he said. "I'm a plain blunt man, and I don't know what I may have said or done. Have I hurt ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... of home and kitchen, and shop and street and trade, seems to them lacking in due reverence. Do they forget that this is the language of the common people? And of our good old Anglo-Saxon Bible? Has anybody ever yet used as blunt homely, talk as this old Book uses? And has any other book stuck into people's memories and hearts with such burr-like ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... reaching a reasonable conclusion from the premises established was futile. The envoy treated also with the estates, and received from them in return an elaborate report, which was addressed immediately to the King. The style of this paper was bold and blunt, its substance bitter and indigestible. It informed Philip what he had heard often enough before, that the Spaniards must go and the exiles come back, the inquisition be abolished and the ancient privileges ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... of one of the others must have been blunt, for finding that the scalp did not come off as quickly as he wished, seating himself on the ground with his feet against the dead man's shoulders, he pulled it away by main force. So far we had been more successful than we had expected; but our enemies might rally, and, hovering in ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston
... came into the field, and began to dig with a blunt shaftless knife round the root of the dandelion plant, and pulled it up out of the ground. With some of the roots she intended to make tea for herself; others she was going to sell for ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... undertaking, how completely unattainable except by carefully husbanding our time from the start, how impossible it is in the span of a human life to read the great books unless we strictly save the time which so many spend on the little books. Ruskin's words on this subject, almost harsh in their blunt common sense, bring the matter home so well that I cannot refrain ...
— Stained Glass Work - A text-book for students and workers in glass • C. W. Whall
... when professing to accord with Blunt's Lunar Chart, is entirely at variance with that or any other lunar chart, and even grossly at variance with itself. The points of the compass, too, are in inextricable confusion; the writer appearing to be ignorant that, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sense. He is buffalo enough to love the British Raj and his squadron of Jat farmers with all his stupid Sikh heart! There could not be a better for the purpose than this Ranjoor Singh! He is stupid enough, and nearly blunt enough, to be an Englishman. He is just of the very caliber to fool a German! Trust me, sahib—I, who picked the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... premaxillae are in contact or but very slightly separated; the ears are large, with the tragus small; the dental formula is i. 1/1 (1/2 or 1/3), c. 1/1, p. 1/2 (2/2), m. 3/3; and the fibula is strongly developed. In their blunt muzzles and many other features these bats undoubtedly resemble the Emballonuridae, from the typical members of which they differ by the production of the thick tail far beyond the margin of the interfemoral membrane. They are further characterized by their broad and stout feet, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... many limbs and lives? And when they come to an engagement, what service can be done by such pale-faced students, as by drudging at the oars of wisdom, have spent all their strength and activity? No, the only use is of blunt sturdy fellows that have little of wit, and so the more of resolution: except you would make a soldier of such another Demosthenes as threw down his arms when he came within sight of the enemy, and lost that credit in the camp which he gained ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... peeved all the same, for she dearly wanted to talk to Gay and Spiller. At last the modish gadflies got tired of having their smart talk turned against them, and one by one fell off, especially as Huddy, whose blunt speech was not much to their taste, came up and intruded without apology into ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... of all sorts, he loves her, she hates him; and is loathed of him, on whom she dotes." Cupid hath two darts, one to force love, all of gold, and that sharp,—[5840]Quod facit auratum est; another blunt, of lead, and that to hinder;—fugat hoc, facit illud amorem, "this dispels, that creates love." This we see too often verified in our common experience. [5841]Choresus dearly loved that virgin Callyrrhoe; but the more he loved her, the more she hated him. Oenone loved Paris, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... was horrible. And perhaps, after all, he was mistaken; perhaps his dislike of the work had got upon his nerves, and showed him everything in the darkest colours. It could scarcely be as bad as he thought, or human society would be impossible. But argument could not blunt the poignancy of his feelings; he preferred, therefore, to leave them inarticulate, striving to forget. In any case, the ordeal would soon be over; it had to be endured for a few hours more, and then he would plunge ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... Chamberlain was blunt and true, and sturdily said he— 'Abide, my lord, and rule your own, and take this rede from me, That woman's faith's a brittle trust. Seven twelve- months didst thou say? I'll pledge me for no lady's truth beyond the seventh day.'" —Ballad of the ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... Tumbler {212} with its small conical beak, the Pouter with its great crop, long legs and body, the Fantail with its upraised, widely-expanded, well-feathered tail, the Turbit with its frill and short blunt beak, and the Jacobin with its hood. Now, if this same person could have viewed the pigeons kept before 1600 by Akber Khan in India and by Aldrovandi in Europe, he would have seen the Jacobin with a less perfect ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... cader form'd caer, as the Spaniards now use it, by taking away the letter d according to their ordinary custome, when it is seated in the middle of words. There are another sort of people yet more sturdy and blunt in their formes of speech, who would say Car or Ker by a contraction of the two Vowels into one, as is observable among the Peasants of France, and those of Picardy, who retain very much of Antiquity, which seems to be agreeable with ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... rope to shreds With blunt and bleeding nails; We rubbed the doors, and scrubbed the floors, And cleaned the shining rails: And, rank by rank, we soaped the plank, And clattered ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols
... capillary harvest of the past twenty-four hours with a thoroughness, a rapidity, a security, and a facility which were a surprise, almost a revelation. The idea of a guarded cutting edge is an old one; I remember the "Plantagenet" razor, so called, with the comb-like row of blunt teeth, leaving just enough of the edge free to do its work. But this little affair had a blade only an inch and a half long by three quarters of an inch wide. It had a long slender handle, which took apart for packing, and was put together with the greatest ease. It was, in short, a ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... this scene of cozey fuss Was changed to prospects queering The blunt ran shy, and Bobby brush'd, [6] To get more rag not fearing; [7] To Islington he quickly hied, A traveller there he dropped on; The traps were fly, his rig they spied [8] And ruffles soon they popped on. [9] When evening ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... abyss. The warning cry of "back" is challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of social progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defense are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. It limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards of conciliation, and conferences. Society shaken to its base, ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... Sir Richard, after Amyas, in his blunt simple way, had told him the whole story about Rose Salterne and his brother,—"yes, sweet lad, thou hast chosen the better part, thou and thy brother also, and it shall not be taken from you. Only be strong, lad, and trust ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... interpreter if we should care to be operated upon in a similar manner—this being considered a great honour to a guest; and no sooner had we accepted the offer than an old woman made her appearance armed with the necessary implements, and with the aid of a pair of very blunt needles, and a peculiar species of dye obtained from a tree, succeeded, after a good hour's work, in embellishing us—L. with a ring on each shoulder (the sign manual of the tribe), and myself with a bird, whose genus it would puzzle most naturalists to determine, but which was popularly ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... supplied with water by giant windmills which clacked and creaked above the trees in the high-noon breeze. To the left, across the river, back from the long, slow rise of sand from the water's edge, rose five blunt heights like craters long extinct; while above these, arching across the heavens in spotless sheen, curved the turquoise dome of a southwestern midday sky, flooding the dust and dunes below in throbbing heat-rays. It was God's ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... Doctrine in 1823 and continues our historic bipartisan American policy. Franklin Roosevelt said we "are determined to do everything possible to maintain peace on this hemisphere." President Truman was very blunt: "International communism seeks to crush and undermine and destroy the independence of the Americas. We cannot let that happen here." And John F. Kennedy made clear that "Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be negotiated." Some in this Congress may ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... do so?" he repeated savagely. "Do you think I have been raised like a Yankee, to take care of my shoes? That Blunt is just fit to stand behind a counter and ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... be of a somewhat serious character, the blow having been inflicted with some heavy blunt instrument, and producing concussion of the brain; I was, however, well looked after, and as soon as it was safe to move me, I was transferred to my own home, where I was nursed, petted, and made much of to my heart's content, until I was in the greatest danger of being spoiled, through the outrageous ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... such sorrow hallow, ennoble, refine, purify the sufferer, and make him liker his God? 'He for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness.' Is not that God's way of glorifying us before heaven's glory? When a blunt knife is ground upon a wheel, the sparks fly fast from the edge held down upon the swiftly-revolving emery disc, but that is the only way to sharpen the dull blade. Friction, often very severe friction, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... he soon feasts upon frogs as freely and speaks with as accurate an accent as the Parisian, but he cannot quite assume the gay insouciance of the French; if to England, he adores method, learns to grumble and imbibe old ale, yet does not become accustomed to the free, blunt raillery,—the "chaff,"—with which Britons disport themselves; if to China, he lives upon curries and inscribes his name with a camel's-hair pencil, but all Oriental bizarrerie fails to thoroughly amuse him. Wherever he may go, he ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... your good, I wish with all my heart you were not going away, Prissie," said Hattie in her blunt fashion. ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... her the fork. "This is the only way," she said, "and you will notice that the tines are very short and blunt." ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the old York boat. That was the boat which they formerly used on the Saskatchewan and some of these rivers for their up-stream work. It's a good deal like a Mackinaw boat. You'll see here, too, one or two scows with blunt ends, such as they call the 'sturgeon' nose. They tow a little easier than the square-ended scow. But these new square-facers are the best things in the world for going ...
— Young Alaskans in the Far North • Emerson Hough
... know about his ability," was the blunt reply, "is his ability to borrow a few hundreds from any one fool enough to lend it to him, and then invent excuses for not paying it back. He's good at that, if you like. Still, don't let me set you against him, Mr. Phipps. Every shilling he gets out of you and your company is so much ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... held it between his thumb and one finger and drew the edge across the fat boiled meat, which fell into pieces almost at a touch, though it was tough and stringy. The host watched the operation approvingly. At that time it was forbidden to carry such knives in Rome, unless the point were round and blunt. The Roman always stabs; he never cuts his man's throat in a fight or ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... describes this whale as being about twelve yards long, having an oblong blunt head, on which there were two longitudinal furrows, and as many upright ridges. It had small eyes, two semi-lunar apertures, from whence it occasionally spouted the water, and it was mottled all ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... Walter Blunt: there's honour for you! here's no vanity! I am as hot as molten lead, and as heavy too. God keep lead ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... found, through the thick and lustrous hair, that she, too, had been struck a harsh and cruel blow; that one reason, probably, why she had been able to oppose no stouter resistance to so slender a girl as Esther Dade was that she was already half dazed through the stroke of some blunt, heavy weapon, wielded probably by him she ...
— A Daughter of the Sioux - A Tale of the Indian frontier • Charles King
... with bushy red-gray eyebrows, a stubble of roan beard over his blunt, common face. One foot was short in his boot, as if he had lost his toes in a blizzard, a mark not uncommonly set by unfriendly nature on the men who defied its force in that country. He wore a duck shooting-jacket, the pockets of it bulging ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... quiet, Dr. Renaud! You are the blunt well-wisher, I suppose, a type I detest! How can I help myself! I have chosen, and you know the ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... chuckle headed, mutton headed, maggoty headed, grossheaded[obs3]; beef headed, fat witted, fat-headed. weak-minded, feeble-minded; dull minded, shallow minded, lack-brained; rattle-brained, rattle headed; half witted, lean witted, short witted, dull witted, blunt-witted, shallow-pated[obs3], clod-pated[obs3], addle- pated[obs3]; dim-sighted, short-sighted; thick-skulled; weak in the upper story. shallow, borne, weak, wanting, soft, sappy, spoony; dull, dull as a beetle; stupid, heavy, insulse[obs3], obtuse, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... foot iron rod, sharpened at the end. At the blunt end the strip of red flag was wound, near the sharp end the conventional track torpedo was held in place by its ...
— Bart Stirling's Road to Success - Or; The Young Express Agent • Allen Chapman
... same branch of oak he has noted the following variations: (1) In the length of the petiole, as one to three; (2) in the form of the leaf, being either elliptical or obovoid; (3) in the margin being entire, or notched, or even pinnatifid; (4) in the extremity being acute or blunt; (5) in the base being sharp, blunt, or cordate; (6) in the surface being pubescent or smooth; (7) the perianth varies in depth and lobing; (8) the stamens vary in number, independently; (9) the anthers are mucronate or blunt; ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... scientific navigator. He knows the color and taste of the water all along shore from Cape Farewell to the Horn, and can tell the latitude and longitude of any place on the chart without consulting it. Bowditch's Epitome, and Blunt's Coast Pilot, seem to him the only books in the world worth consulting, though I should, perhaps, except Marryatt's novels and Tom Cringle's Log. But of matters connected with the shore Mr. Brewster is as ignorant as a child unborn. ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... practice served to provide the public with convincing proof that a traitor was actually dead, and was very necessary in an age when Rumour, "stuffing the ears of men with false reports" held sway over "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still discordant wavering multitude." Micklegate Bar was so used. In Shakespeare's Henry VI. Queen Margaret makes, with reference to the Duke of York, this ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... Hat remarked, coming out of the kitchen; "see whar de dagger struck him right over de heart! Dat made him howl and fall dead. His froat was not cut dat sudden; it's gashed as if wid somethin' blunt." ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... which it must have speedily become a prey to the opposition. The right of ejection was retained; but what they chiefly needed was the glitter of the naked blade—the edge of it, which they feared, they took care to blunt. Besides the check involved in the nature of the office—under which the lists of the members of the aristocratic corporations were liable to revision only at intervals of five years —and besides the limitations resulting from the right of veto vested in the colleague and the right of cancelling ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... all, lest, to his own disposition, which was naturally timorous, adding now the wariness and caution of old age, by his weighing, as he would do, every particular, that he might not make one step without the greatest security, he should blunt the edge of their forwardness and resolution in a business which required all the dispatch imaginable. As indeed there were also two others that were companions of Brutus, Statilius the Epicurean, and Favonius the admirer of Cato, whom ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... but one, Sir; look, he follows me. Certes, they're neatly cloth'd. I of this mind am, Your only wearing is your grogaram. Not so, Sir; I have more. Under this pitch He would not fly. I chaf'd him; but as itch Scratch'd into smart, and as blunt iron ground Into an edge, hurts worse; so I (fool!) found Crossing hurt me. To fit my sullenness, He to another key his style doth dress, And asks, What news? I tell him of new plays: He takes my hand, and, as a still which stays A semibrief 'twixt each drop, he niggardly As loth to ...
— English Satires • Various
... and awkward phrases which were whispered from the back of her, but there was something in Charles Westmacott's clumsiness of speech which was more moving than the words of the most eloquent of pleaders. He paused, he stammered, he caught his breath between the words, and he blurted out in little blunt phrases all the hopes of his heart. If love had not come to her yet, there was at least pity and sympathy, which are nearly akin to it. Wonder there was also that one so weak and frail as she should shake this strong man so, should have the whole course of his life waiting for ...
— Beyond the City • Arthur Conan Doyle
... was found trod into the bloody mud, scarcely legible, and Sturk's cocked hat, the leaf and crown cut through with a blow of some blunt instrument. His sword they had found by his ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... my lord, at the head of the table, looked only like his lady in a riding-dress. However, he received one mortifying trial of his temper - he had sent to request sailing up the Tamer next day with Sir Richard Bickerton; and he had a blunt refusal, in a note, during our repast. Not an officer in the fleet would accommodate him; their resentment of the dinner ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... early in their acquaintance. Now he was reciting his painful history with the air of a man far more concerned to be scrupulously accurate than aroused in his deepest passions by the memory of past wrongs. What had happened in the interim to blunt these bygone sufferings? Iris clasped her ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... his blunt speech and misanthropic manners, the young heir of Oak Hall, at that period, was not wholly destitute of the art of pleasing. He was sensible and well-read. His figure was commanding, and his carriage good. His stern features were set off by the ruddy glow of health; and the ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... "father" and "mother," or use the more babyish form of "papa" and "mama" is a matter of parental choice, but the preference in some circles is for the former. A blunt "yes" or "no" is not thought polite from a child; he should say "yes, father," "no, mama," "yes, Mrs. Smith." "Ma'am" as a form of address ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... carefully, moving the flame several times across the blunt end. He regarded the results without expression. "A cigar should be ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... neglige, and what plain folk call a wrapper. When it is of shepherd's plaid or snuff-coloured wool it is not an attractive garment, and it is always what the last generation but one, with their blunt tongues, called "slummocking." Most German women are busy in the house all the morning, and when they are not going to market they like to get through their work in this form of dress and make themselves trim for the day later. The advantage claimed for the plan ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... thinking our galleys would leave them, abandoned their string. The Scots, seeing them to retire, left their string. The enemy pursued very hotly; the Englishmen stood to repulse, and are put most to the sword. In this shameful retreat there were slain or drowned to the number of two thousand." The blunt Englishman was justly indignant that an enterprise, so nearly successful, had been ruined by the desertion of its chiefs. "We had cut the dyke in three places," said he; "but left it most ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... always tells the truth, a perfect contrast with the townsfolk; he is blunt in speech addressing his Sultan "O Sa'd!" and he has a hard rough humour which we may fairly describe as "wut." When you chaff him look ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... not, my lady," answered Janet—"doubt not that my father purposes well, though he is a plain man, and his blunt looks may belie ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... Adjutant, in a voice like a blunt saw going through a thick board—"I HEARD there was a new-born puppy ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... powerless. She stared straight before her, shivering, as she went over the scene she had just witnessed, her fingers picking nervously at the jade-green silk of her dress. She longed for some power that would deaden her feelings and blunt her capacity for suffering. She looked at Gaston with hard eyes when he came in. He had approved of what the Sheik had done, would have done it himself if he had been able. They ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... taken but by their own consent in parliament. But that the parliament was instituted to check and control the king, and share the supreme power, would in all former times have been esteemed very blunt and indiscreet, if not illegal language. We need not be surprised that governments should long continue, though the boundaries of authority in their several branches be implicit, confused, and undetermined. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... popularized the philosophers. Without the acute, electric perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of that De Sevigne among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose. In a word, he familiarized his readers with the AEsthetik of Germany. He published in 1830 ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... partizanship confused the two, to the disadvantage of the secretary of state; the usual clatter that attends any important personage in a trivial scrape ensued; Mr. Gladstone's explanations, simple and veracious as the sunlight in their substance, were over-skilful in form, and half a dozen blunt, sound sentences would have stood him in far better stead. 'There was on my part in this matter,' he says in a fugitive scrap upon it, 'a singular absence of worldly wisdom.'[214] To colonial policy at this stage I discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... popular with the little girls." He did not see a single girl playing with a doll, and thinks the articles collected may have been made rather for sale than otherwise. Of the boys, Mr. Murdoch says: "As soon as a boy is able to walk, his father makes him a little bow suited to his strength, with blunt arrows, with which he plays with the other boys, shooting at marks—for instance the fetal reindeer brought home from the spring hunt—till he is old enough to shoot small birds and ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... of Wagner's operas the scene is laid at a time when the festivals, games and religious ceremonies were touched with the thought of beauty. Men were strong, plain, blunt and honest. Affectation, finesse, pretense and veneer were unknown. Art had not resolved itself into the possession of a class of idlers and dilettantes who hired long-haired men and fussy girls in Greek gowns to make pretty ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... as I could bear. The tale reveals the spiritual and moral development of Jim Hartigan. The author assures us that most of the characters are drawn from life, and that some of the main events are historical. All which I can easily believe, for Mr. SETON'S blunt method of describing Jim Hartigan's evolution from an unhallowed stable-boy to a muscular Christian continually suggests reality. It is not a stylish method, but it gets home, and in a tale of this kind that is the main, if not the only, matter of importance. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov 21, 1917 • Various
... which he describes as the gymnastics of war—useful when the ranks are formed, and still more useful when they are broken; creating a general interest in military studies, and greatly adding to the appearance of the soldier in the field. Laches, the blunt warrior, is of opinion that such an art is not knowledge, and cannot be of any value, because the Lacedaemonians, those great masters of arms, neglect it. His own experience in actual service has taught him that these pretenders are useless and ridiculous. ...
— Laches • Plato
... with either of these individuals, for whom I entertained the most sincere attachment. They, like myself, were not in the good graces of Marshal Davoust, who could not pardon the one for his incontestable superiority of talent, and the other for his blunt honesty. On the receipt of M. Bouvier's letter I carried it to the Due de Rovigo, whose situation made him perfectly aware of the intrigues which had been carried on against me since I had left Hamburg by one whose ambition aspired to the Viceroyalty of Poland. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... brilliant visions of the future, he often devoutly wished that Mascarin and his young friend were at the other side of the world; but for all that he never thought of attempting to evade the order he had received. He therefore set himself steadily to his task, endeavoring to form Paul's mind, blunt his conscience, and prepare him for the inevitable part that he would soon ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... Danny was a small boy. Then, as Danny approached his ninth birthday, the old man had said, "They're teaching you too much at school, son. Too many wrong things, too many highfalutin' notions, too much just plain old hogwash. Why don't you kind of make yourself scarce for a few years?" It had been blunt and to the point. It had made Danny cry. He hadn't thought of what had happened that last day he'd seen his grand-uncle for years, but ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... I didn't care for you, and I wasn't hypocrite enough to pretend I did. That's blunt, but you used to admire ...
— Dear Brutus • J. M. Barrie
... Yes, my dear: cows belong to the class Mammalia, but to the fifth order, Pecora, which is known by their having several blunt, wedge-like front teeth in the lower jaw, and none in the upper. Their feet are defended by cloven hoofs. They live entirely upon vegetable food, and all ruminate, or chew ...
— Domestic pleasures - or, the happy fire-side • F. B. Vaux
... Marcoussi, President Bellievre told the Keeper of the Seals in plain terms, that if he continued to treat me as he had done hitherto, he should be obliged in honour to give his testimony to the truth. To which the Keeper of the Seals returned this blunt answer: "The Princes are no longer in sight of Paris; the Coadjutor must not ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... from its bullying key to a toneless melancholy. Mrs. Day, who had been standing hitherto, seated herself in the chair by the chimney corner, and looked at her husband's blunt profile as he sat before the fire with a sick feeling of impending disaster, and a dismayed inquiry in ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... vegetables lying upon it, and the basket hanging from the roof. But not one of these accessories would have been admissible in sculpture. You must carve nothing but what has life. "Why?" you probably feel instantly inclined to ask me.—You see the principle we have got, instead of being blunt or useless, is such an edged tool that you are startled the moment I apply it. "Must we refuse every pleasant accessory and picturesque detail, and petrify nothing but living creatures?" Even so: I would not assert it on ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... imagine the pursuer, the avenger, if a really virulent fellow, actually weeping tears of despite as he stands before his victim and marks the utter unconsciousness of any offence with which his eyes meet his own. Such a look would blunt the very stiletto of a Corsican. What sweetness would there be in vengeance if the avenger, as he plunged the dagger in his victim's bosom, might not hiss in his ear, 'Remember!' As well find satisfaction in torturing ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... difficult to say whether Jerome or Paula presided, the aesthetic mission of woman was seen fully,—perhaps for the first time,—which is never recognized when love of admiration, or intellectual hardihood, or frivolous employments, or usurped prerogatives blunt original sensibilities and sap the elements of inward life. Sentiment proved its superiority over all the claims of intellect,—as when Flora Macdonald effected the escape of Charles Stuart after the fatal battle of Culloden, or when Mary poured the spikenard on Jesus' head, and wiped ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... inflicted with a blunt instrument, there is produced a bruise, or ecchymosis, of which it is unnecessary here to describe the appearance and progress. A bruise may be distinguished from a post-mortem stain by the cuticle in the former often being abraded and raised. When an incision is made into the bruise, ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... had listened in a sort of dumb rage as the man's words stung, and stung again. MacNair's uncouth manner, his blunt brutality of speech, his scornful, even contemptuous reference to her work, and, most of all, his utter disregard of her, struck her to the very depths. As MacNair turned to go, she stayed him with a ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... would be grievous indeed, if absence and absorption in art and that sort of thing were to blunt his ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than this assumption of the discordance between the ancient and existing causes of change. It produced a state of mind unfavourable in the highest degree to the candid reception of the evidence of ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... brave, blunt fellow, and he hated the ways of Loki, his lies and his deceit. He liked best the way of warriors—the thundering charge, the flash of weapons, and the heavy blow; but without the hammer he could not fight the giants hand to hand. Loki's advice ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... was stout and stocky rather than fat. He had the square red face and bushy beard of a beer-nourished Teuton and the spectacles of a Herr Professor. He held up his blunt hands with all ten stubby fingers spread out wide. They seemed ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... safely founded, were its worst propensities. They had been taught and believed that greed and self-seeking were all that held mankind together, and that all human associations would fall to pieces if anything were done to blunt the edge of these motives or curb their operation. In a word, they believed—even those who longed to believe otherwise—the exact reverse of what seems to us self-evident; they believed, that is, that the anti-social qualities of men, and not their social qualities, were what furnished the cohesive ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... more than hopes, Mistress Deborah; for he that lives upon hope will die fasting. To apply one's self right heartily is to do more than hope. Sloth makes all things difficult; but industry all things easy. You are not eating, Mistress Deborah. (She rises.) Have my blunt ways offended you? Have I again displeased you? [Footnote: From "Poor ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... life, inherits, with the beautiful family Domain, no inconsiderable share of that love of literature, which distinguished his venerable grandfather, the Bishop of Carlisle. He one day observed to me, of Dr. Johnson, in a felicity of phrase, 'There is a blunt dignity about him ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... was exceedingly cordial, and in a blunt way he plunged right into the business in hand. "We are very glad to see you; we have some ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... A blunt American journal, commenting on the handiwork of the Conference, gave utterance to views which while making no pretense to courtly phraseology are symptomatic of the way in which the average man thought ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... crashed upwards through the rafters of the hall, like the crash of trees falling in a storm. When the axe came down with a terrific sound all men looked fearfully at Cuchulain. The descending axe had not even touched him; it had come down with the blunt side on the ground, and the youth knelt there unharmed. Smiling at him, and leaning on his axe, stood no terrible and hideous stranger, but Curoi of Kerry, come to give his decision ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... have been sought by blandishments than blows, which, from his known prowess in the latter accomplishment, the youthful aspirant had no necessity to detail in the ears of his mistress. She liked not the coarse blunt manner of her gallant, nor the hard gripe and iron tramp for which he was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... was rather curt in its brevity. Bobby's blunt, kindly questions hurt him; yet, after all, there was a sort of comfort in the hurt. After two years of silence, it was a relief to be able to speak of his trouble. It had grown no more, no less with ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... not have lifted a finger to restore Fay to her husband. The blunt Scotch handmaiden could not abide men—"a puir-hearted, feckless lot," as she was wont to say. Of course the old master and Mr. Fergus were exceptions to this. Jean worshiped her master; and though she held the doctrine of original sin, would never have owned that Mr. Fergus ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... of these people are very bad, their swords being short and blunt at the points. They have arquebusses also, but they shoot very badly with them. The king keeps great state, sitting in public twice every day, having all his nobles, which they call shemines, sitting on each side at a good distance, and a numerous guard on ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... child who owned the doll had driven a tack through it anywhere, so that it only got fastened on. Another remarkable thing in this little old woman was, that the same child seemed to have damaged her face in two or three places with some blunt instrument in the nature of a spoon; her countenance, and particularly the tip of her nose, presenting the phenomena of several dints, generally answering to the bowl of that article. A further remarkable thing in this little ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... the Famine was to harden the hearts of the people, and blunt their natural feelings. Hundreds, remarks this correspondent, are daily expiring in their cabins in the three parishes of this neighbourhood, and the people are becoming so accustomed to death that they have lost all those kindly sympathies for the relatives of ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... his dislike of the work had got upon his nerves, and showed him everything in the darkest colours. It could scarcely be as bad as he thought, or human society would be impossible. But argument could not blunt the poignancy of his feelings; he preferred, therefore, to leave them inarticulate, striving to forget. In any case, the ordeal would soon be over; it had to be endured for a few hours more, and then he would plunge into his books again, ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... you could well afford to stand us drinks,' was Chalks's cheerful commentary. 'We ain't much on book-learning, this side the river, Mr. Blake. We're plain blunt men, that ain't ashamed of manual labour—horny-handed sons of toil, in short. But we're proud to meet a cultivated gentleman like yourself, all the same, and can ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... against it. Bodies in the dissecting-rooms are injected with preservative fluid. These ears bear no signs of this. They are fresh, too. They have been cut off with a blunt instrument, which would hardly happen if a student had done it. Again, carbolic or rectified spirits would be the preservatives which would suggest themselves to the medical mind, certainly not rough salt. I repeat that there is no practical joke here, but that we are investigating ...
— The Adventure of the Cardboard Box • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hard the rock of Sardonix; The steel but grinds, it breaks not, nor grows blunt; Then seeing that he cannot break his sword, Thus to himself he mourns for Durendal: "O good my sword, how bright and pure! Against The sun what flashing light thy blade reflects! When Carle passed through the valley ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... pine-apple-leaf with the hollow side upwards. Sitting at one end of the board, she holds the leaf firmly with her toes, and scrapes its outer surface with a potsherd; not with the sharp fractured edge but with the blunt side of the rim; and thus the leaf is reduced to rags. In this manner a stratum of coarse longitudinal fiber is disclosed, and the operator, placing her thumb-nail beneath it, lifts it up, and draws it away in a compact strip; ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.
... latter, says again Chamisso, upon the fixed piece of wood they place another piece of the same kind, about the length of the palm, and press it obliquely at an angle of about 30 degrees. The extremity that touches the fixed piece is blunt, and the other extremity is held with the two hands, the two thumbs downward, in order to allow of a surer pressure. The piece is given an alternating motion, and in such a way that it shall always remain in the same plane inclined at an angle of 30 degrees, and form, through friction, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 392, July 7, 1883 • Various
... a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... first uncomprehending instant, something in its appearance brought a surge of sick disgust to Garfield's throat. Then the stick bent slowly halfway down its length, forming a sharp angle, and its tip opened into what could have been three blunt, black claws which scrabbled clumsily against the pavement. Very faintly, the squealing began again, and the body's back arched up as if another sticklike arm were pushing desperately against the ground ...
— An Incident on Route 12 • James H. Schmitz
... of the specimen illustrated is 18in. high, but under more favourable conditions this Cowslip has been said to reach a height of 3ft. The leaves are 6in. to 12in. long, wrinkled, unevenly dentate, oblong and blunt; during the time of seeding the leaves increase in length, some becoming spathulate, or broadly stalked; it ripens seed plentifully, from ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... in so much unnecessary slaughter? How can it be right, especially for a country of vegetable abundance like ours, to give daily employment to twenty thousand or thirty thousand butchers? How can it be right to train our children to behold such slaughter? How can it be right to blunt the edge of their moral sensibilities, by placing before them, at almost every meal, the mangled corpses of the slain; and not only placing them there, but rejoicing while we ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... proposed, of serving us as a valet,' said I, 'it is not to be thought of. We are, in spite of my friend's waggishness, but two plain blunt countrymen, and have no more need of a valet than one of those poets which you have spoken of. On the other hand, if you should care to attach yourself to our party, we shall take you where you will see service which shall be more to your taste than the curling of periwigs or the ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you are a gentleman.' 'I am of that opinion too.' 'Well, sir,' says he, 'I know a party as has FOUND a young gent as comes werry nigh your advertisement.' 'It will be a very lucky find to that party,' I said, 'if he is on the square.' 'Oh, WE are always on the square, when the blunt is put down.' 'The blunt for the child, when you like, and where you like,' said I. 'You are the right sort,' said he. 'I am,' replied I. 'Will you come and see if it is all right?' said he. 'In a minute,' said I. Stepped into my bedroom, and loaded ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... volume is the response to that request. It was written by Katharine Blunt, of the University of Chicago, Frances L. Swain, of the Chicago Normal School, and Florence Powdermaker, of the ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... Casas, I. 435, has, "and as word of a palm-tree board which is very hard and very heavy, not sharp but blunt, about two fingers thick everywhere, with which as it is hard and heavy like iron, although a man has a helmet on his head they will crush his skull to the brain with ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... a kurrajong in size, shape, and character of the wood, but with this difference, in leaf, that its leaves were divided into two points, whilst the kurrajong has three. One of these trees had been recently chopped down with a blunt implement, probably a stone tomahawk, and a half-finished piece of work—I think a shield—was lying close by. The wood is soft, and must be easily shaped. It is rather curious that the natives, of whom, ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... the black whale. It is nearly as long as the razor-back, and exceeds it in bulk. In length it may be said to be from 80 to 85 feet, and from 30 to 35 in circumference. Looking at a sperm whale, the stem on its nose or snout appears very thick, and perfectly blunt, like a huge mallet about to strike. The head is a third part of the length of the body. At its junction with the body a hump rises, which we whalers call the bunch of the neck. Behind this is the thickest part of the body, which tapers off till there is another ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... The blunt-faced Etchemin woman, once a prisoner brought from northern Acadia, now the companion of Madockawando's daughter, knew her duty to the strangers, and gave them food as rapidly as the hunter could broil it. The hunter was a big-legged, small-headed Abenaqui, with knees over-topping his tuft ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... for feeble ones. We hear, often, that such and such a man "is not half the man he was when he left home to keep his terms." There may be truth in it all; but it is equally true that a polished instrument is better than a blunt one; that in the hands of a wise man every atom of knowledge means more than an atom of power. Moreover, it can never be proved that a man who comes from college to fail, would not have failed, even more terribly, without ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... not only directly hinders the performance of thorough work, but it has an indirect tendency to blunt the enjoyment of life. Let us consider for a moment one of the psychological consequences entailed by the strain of a too complex and rapid activity. Every one must have observed that in going off for a vacation ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... manage the job. We'll do it, sir, never fear. If this stone was granite it might puzzle us, but it's softer than that by a long way, and I have already cut out some of it with my knife, though, to be sure, it does blunt it considerably." ...
— From Powder Monkey to Admiral - A Story of Naval Adventure • W.H.G. Kingston
... to school, too," declared Dot, with such a positive snap of her blunt scissors that she snipped off a paper ...
— Four Little Blossoms at Brookside Farm • Mabel C. Hawley
... of horse breeding I have been deeply interested in for forty years past. Let me quote to the reader from one of many letters I have received from Sir Wilfrid Seawen Blunt during the past seven years. His practical knowledge of the English thoroughbred race horse and his blood cause, the Arabian, is the equal if not superior to any other one man ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... duel with which Austria rang, in which the best schlager in his brigade fell, horribly mangled, the day after he had whispered a jest about Caroline Mannering, men were very cautious how they even looked askance at her; but the women—who could bridle their tongues or blunt their scornful glances? Briareus, armed to the teeth, would not affright our modern dowagers, or deter them from their prey. Wherever the carcass of a fair fame lies, thither they flock, screaming shrilly in triumph, vulture-eyed, sharp-taloned—the ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence
... gold. But the fact that the poet has slyly changed the word "amber" to "snary" in sonnet xiv., and "golden" to "sable" in sonnet xxxviii., looks as if he desired to shield her personality from too blunt a guess. However, many hints are given; she lives in the "joyful North," ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... to the place of execution upon a sledge, with two robbers, who were executed with him. After Eagles had mounted the ladder, and been turned off a short time, he was cut down, before he was at all insensible; a bailiff, named Wm. Swallow, then dragged him to the sledge, and with a common blunt cleaver, hacked off the head: in a manner equally clumsy and cruel, he opened his body and tore ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... to the quiver a little kind of basket to hold the wild cotton which is put on the blunt end of the arrow. With a quiver of poisoned arrows slung over his shoulder, and with his blow-pipe in his hand, in the same position as a soldier carries his musket, see the Macoushi Indian advancing towards the ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... head monitor at Saint Dominic's—far too blunt and honest ever to be an object of anything but dislike and uneasiness to Loman. Now the uneasiness was the more prominent of the two. Loman replied, confused and reddening, "Oh, that boy? Why—oh, he's a shop-boy from the town, come up about an ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... the west door, is a copy of A Collection of Cases and other Discourses to recover Dissenters to the Church of England, small 8vo., 1718. The Paraphrase of Erasmus may probably be added to the list (see Professor Blunt's Sketch of the History of the Reformation, 10th edit., p. 130.), though I cannot call to mind any church in which a copy of this work may now be found. In the noble minster church at Wimborne, Dorsetshire, is a rather large collection of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 196, July 30, 1853 • Various
... blunt as he said them, but there was no way out, once he had started. And Zezdon Afthen took the question ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... relationship to civilization and citizenship, and its effects upon theme. "War and civilization," said one of the great English ministers, "are contradictory terms, even as Christ and Mars." Particularly damaging is the effect of war upon citizens. For does it not blunt the sensibilities, harden the heart, inflame the mind with passions, and deaden the consciences of men? Said the same great English preacher, "The sword that smites the enemy abroad, also lays bare the primeval savage within the citizen at home." And ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... it as an offensive question," said I. "I was merely reciting a fact, most creditable to Mr. Buckhurst. Mon Dieu, madame, I am an officer of Imperial Police, and I have lived to hear blunt questions and blunter answers. And if it be true that Monsieur Buckhurst desires to atone for—for what has happened, then it is perfectly proper for me, even as a prisoner myself, ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... was plain and blunt. His was an unattractive front. Yet children loved him; babe and boy Played with the strength he could employ, Without one fear, and they are fleet To sense injustice and deceit. No back door gossip linked his name With any shady tale of shame. He did not have to compromise With evil-doers, shrewd ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... already. They took up their wounded companion; and my young man, who had been struck through the cheek by one of their lances, was afraid it had been poisoned, but I did not think that likely. His wound was very painful to him, being made with a blunt weapon; but ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... of cottonwoods. The ranch-houses were infrequent, however; all of them were plentifully supplied with water by giant windmills which clacked and creaked above the trees in the high-noon breeze. To the left, across the river, back from the long, slow rise of sand from the water's edge, rose five blunt heights like craters long extinct; while above these, arching across the heavens in spotless sheen, curved the turquoise dome of a southwestern midday sky, flooding the dust and dunes below in throbbing heat-rays. It was God's own section of earth, and not the least beautiful of its vistas, looming ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... very spot, where the martyr wrought the miracle. The mark is longer than any mortal foot, as if caused by sliding along the stone, rather than sinking into it; and it might be supposed to have been made by a pointed shoe, being blunt at the heel, and decreasing towards the toe. The blood-stained version of the story is more consistent with the appearance of the mark than the imprint would be; for if the martyr's blood oozed out through his shoe and stocking, it might have ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shown by many instances; as the genius of the Italians, which is so much addicted to music and ceremony, has moulded all their words and phrases to those particular uses. The stateliness and gravity of the Spaniards shows itself to perfection in the solemnity of their language; and the blunt, honest humour of the Germans sounds better in the roughness of the High-Dutch than it would in ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... away, and every day The lovers still were wont To meet together, and their shame At meeting had grown blunt; For they were of an age when sin Is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... and then. He posed as "a plain, blunt man," but back of the forthright handgrip, the bluff directness of manner, Frank scented a massive and wily self-interest. He respected the man for his power, his ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... swished over the bows or flew over the quarters, to stream down into the bilge at our feet, foul with fragments of squid and caplin long dead. We were also beginning to listen eagerly for other sounds than the wind hissing in the cordage, the breaking of wave-tops and the hard thumping of the blunt bows ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... brother," said Platon. "Stop, coachman." And he descended from the koliaska, while Chichikov followed his example. Yarb and the strange dog saluted one another, and then the active, thin-legged, slender-tongued Azor relinquished his licking of Yarb's blunt jowl, licked Platon's hands instead, and, leaping upon Chichikov, ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... least I don't possess the malice of a Jew. Now Mrs. Downe Wright has a real heartfelt satisfaction in saying malicious things, and in thrusting herself into company where she must know she is unwelcome, for the sole purpose of saying them. Yet many people are blessed with such blunt perceptions that they are not at all aware of her real character, and only wonder, when she has left them, what made them feel so uncomfortable when she was present. But she has put me in such a bad humour that I must go out of ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the Prince of Wales for Omar, or shall I write? He was most pleasant and kind, and the Princess too. She is the most perfectly simple-mannered girl I ever saw. She does not even try to be civil like other great people, but asks blunt questions, and looks at one so heartily with her clear, honest eyes, that she must win all hearts. They were more considerate than any people I have seen, and the Prince, instead of being gracious, was, if I may say ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... credible that she was kept in ignorance by the traitors and murderers who had enrolled themselves in her service—that one who pensioned the actual murderer of Murray and a would-be murderer of Elizabeth was incapable of approving what her keen and practised intelligence was too blunt and torpid to anticipate as inevitable and inseparable from the general design. In August the conspirators were netted, and Mary was arrested at the gate of Tixall Park, whither Paulet had taken her under pretence of a hunting-party. At Tixall she was detained till ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... peaches—a pretty sight, for the trees were now in full blossom. Many carts were lumbering along the road on their uneven wheels. Just beyond the city there was a noisy altercation in the road for the possession apparently of a blunt adze. Carts stopped to see the row, and all the bystanders joined in with their voices, with much earnestness. It is rare for the disputants to be injured in these questions. Their language on these occasions is, I am told, extremely rich in allusions. It would often ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... her limbs, or the string of pearls around her neck, he does not indicate the least desire to make her happy, but an eagerness to please himself by coming in contact with her. The daintiest poetic conceit cannot conceal this blunt fact. Even the most fanciful of all forms of amorous hyperbole—that in which the lover imagines that all nature smiles or weeps with him—what is it but the most ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... me here," said Florida in her blunt, child-like way, and sank upon the stone seat beside the walk. She clasped her hands together in her lap with some strong, bashful emotion, while Don Ippolito, obeying her command, waited for her to speak. Her voice was scarcely more than a ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... influences which make that which is dark and bleak still darker and bleaker. Black clouds hung low on the horizon, and dull grey sheets of rain swept now and then across the nearer heights. Snaehatten, to the westward, was partly veiled, but we could trace his blunt mound of alternate black rock and snow nearly to the apex. The peak is about 7700 feet above the sea, and was until recently considered the highest in Norway, but the Skagtolstind has been ascertained to be 160 feet higher, and Snaehatten ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... unkindness. At home she would have thought it strange not to hasten to greet cousin Edmund, and she feared he would think she neglected him, yet she could not, in Clara's presence, leave a message for him with her brother. Gerald begged her to remain, but she replied, with, a short, blunt "I can't," and set off with Clara, feeling provoked with everybody. In process of time she recovered candour enough to acknowledge to herself that Mrs. Lyddell was right as far as Clara was concerned, but the struggle kept her silent, her cousin ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... one pencil lengthwise so that an end of it was between my first and second finger and the rubber-tipped end lay across my wrist. The other pencil he thrust crosswise so that the pointed end stuck out between the second and third finger and the blunt end between ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... grimed garage clothes when working; and in tight pants, tight coat, silk shirt, long-visored green cap when at leisure. A rather pallid skin due to the nature of his work. Large deft hands, a good deal like the hands of a surgeon, square, blunt-fingered, spatulate. Indeed, as you saw him at work, a wire-netted electric bulb held in one hand, the other plunged deep into the vitals of the car on which he was engaged, you thought of a surgeon performing a major operation. He wore one of those round ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... connection with the country, or interest in the cause. This was a complaint made by the United States in 1819, in relation to irregularities and atrocities committed by private armed vessels, sailing under the flag of Buenos Ayres. Under the best regulations the business tends strongly to blunt the sense of private right, and to nourish a lawless and fierce ...
— The Laws Of War, Affecting Commerce And Shipping • H. Byerley Thomson
... doors open, and dashed out, but a furious blow fell before he was quite clear of the doorway. With such force was it delivered that the blunt metal cut into the edge of the door like a sword; the jamb was smashed, and even Monckton, who received but one-fourth of the blow, fell upon his hands and knees into the hall and was stunned for a moment, but fearing worse, staggered out of the hall door, ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... The Emperor Napoleon does not make war to employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for the sake of an "idea," more or less generous and disinterested. The soul of mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperor knows this, as he knows most things. This imperial hypocrisy, like every other hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue. There cannot be a doubt that when the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... Fleent. Uncouth fumbling men, slip-shod women, dirty-faced children, were never dumb and suspicious or wholly untruthful and evasive, where the Butterfly Man was concerned. He was one to whom might be told, without shame, fear, or compunction, the plain, blunt, ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... overheard you," he said, with blunt deference. "I was half-asleep at first. Afterwards, I didn't ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... A correspondence was immediately after Mr. Jackson's arrival at the American seat of government, opened with Mr. Madison's Secretary of State, and was as suddenly closed. Mr. Jackson was, as a diplomatist, rather blunt. Repeatedly, he asserted that the American Executive could not but have known from the powers exhibited by Mr. Erskine, that in stipulating, as he had done, he had transcended those powers, and was, therefore, acting without the authority of his government. ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... only be in danger when we go visiting from one little river to another. And as for the great pike, we will leave him alone in the big river to rage hungrily up and down. His teeth will soon grow blunt, for there will be ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... this the whetstone of your sword; let grief Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... not succeed in concealing a certain trepidation at this blunt demand, and it was not lost ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... faithfulness; a courageous sense of justice which impelled him to fight valiantly for a cause that he deemed right, however unimportant or hopeless the cause might be; a reformer's contempt for hypocrisy and shams, and a blunt directness in freeing his mind about wrong of every kind. He had the faults of his virtues, likewise. Sure of himself and of the right of his position, he had the impatience of an unimaginative man with any other point ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... "I have been awkward, but forgive me—the cabin of the Sea Tern, where you asked him to sail on, and when you bade him recall what he said on the stairs at Blanzy.... Your pardon! I have been very blunt." ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... detaching it from the towns in which, until then, I had always imagined it, I could see how, in a particular instance, upon a reef of savage rocks, it had taken root and grown until it flowered in a tapering spire. I was taken to see reproductions of the most famous of the statues at Balbec,—shaggy, blunt-faced Apostles, the Virgin from the porch,—and I could scarcely breathe for joy at the thought that I might myself, one day, see them take a solid form against their eternal background of salt fog. Thereafter, on dear, tempestuous February nights, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... so seriously have interfered with his hopes and wishes. He was very glad that Richard's preference had fallen where it did, and his cheery whistle was heard almost constantly, and after Tim Jones told, in his blunt way, how "Melind was tryin' to train him, and make him more like them dandies at the big tavern in New York," he, too, began to amend, and taking Richard for his pattern, imitated him, until he found that simple, loving Andy, in his anxiety to please Ethelyn, had seized upon more ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... cherished the thought, but never have dared to reveal it, Being a coward in this, though valiant enough for the most part. Go to the damsel Priscilla, the loveliest maiden of Plymouth; Say that a blunt old captain, a man not of words but of actions, Offers his hand and his heart, the hand and heart of a soldier. Not in these words, you know, but this in short is my meaning; I am a maker of war, and not a ...
— The Literary World Seventh Reader • Various
... feeling for melody should be appealed to at every instant. Students should not be permitted to sing anything in a mechanical fashion. Broken scales, "five finger exercises," and mechanical drills of every kind, are altogether objectionable. They blunt the sense of melody, and at the same time they tend to induce throat stiffness. Beauty of tone and of melody should always be the guiding principle in ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... over the river, and like a smoother shadow over the yielding grass. The voice of the falling water, like the voices of the sea and the wind, were as an outer memory to a contemplative listener; but not particularly so to Mr Riderhood, who sat on one of the blunt wooden levers of his lock-gates, dozing. Wine must be got into a butt by some agency before it can be drawn out; and the wine of sentiment never having been got into Mr Riderhood by any agency, nothing ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... always needed her, and more especially to-day, one of the last that she would spend under his roof. He was not tearful about her departure—his senses were too blunt now to feel the grief of separation—he only felt pleasantly excited, because he had been told that Moritz and Jeno and the others were coming over presently and that they meant to carry him in his chair, just as he was, so that he could be present ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... necessary to say that he did not get very far into the crowd, and when his wife and George returned, laughing gayly, they found him standing outside, with a sulky face. "Look here, missus," said he; "you're a enjoying of yourself, but I'm not. You've got the blunt, so just hand over a few coppers, and I'll get a pint at ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... during our Revolutionary war, an active scientific discussion was carried on as to whether the upper end of a lightning-conductor should be sharp or blunt. "The scientific aspect of the question soon became lost in political acrimony, those who, with Dr. Franklin, advocated sharp conductors, being classed with him and the Revolutionary party, while those who advocated blunt conductors were held ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... unseen receiver a little thread of green smoke rose vertically into the quiet air. As I looked, the handling-machine, with a faint and musical clinking, extended, telescopic fashion, a tentacle that had been a moment before a mere blunt projection, until its end was hidden behind the mound of clay. In another second it had lifted a bar of white aluminium into sight, untarnished as yet, and shining dazzlingly, and deposited it in a growing stack of bars that stood at the side ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... in the world that I desire. My experience in that direction in New York quite sufficed me, I assure you. I came here," said he, with rather too blunt an ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... witnessed all these disorders: on his arrival, his blunt honesty kept back none of these details from his chief; but the emperor merely replied, "I am going to strike a great blow, and all the stragglers ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... consulted the Emperor's face, not knowing whether they were to take the intrusive manner of the Varangian's entrance as matter of ill-breeding, and manifest their horror, or whether they ought rather to consider the bearing of the life-guardsman as indicating blunt and manly zeal, and therefore to ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... at your word," hastened Colbert to reply with his blunt bonhomie. "And, apropos of Spain, you have not the 'Golden Fleece,' Monsieur d'Almeda. I heard the king say the other day that he should like to see you wear the ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... we shall suppose a piece of work is about to be started. The first thing the carver will require to do is to sharpen his tools. That is, if we may assume that they have just come from the manufacturer, ground but not yet brought to an edge. It will be seen that each has a long bevel ending in a blunt ridge where the cutting edge should be. We shall take the chisel No. 10 and sharpen that first, as it is the easiest to do, and so get a little practise before we try the gouges. The oilstone and oil have already been described. The first thing is ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... studied those tracks! Those of the sheep could be distinguished by the rounded toe marks of their hoofs, worn blunt by the granite rocks they lived on. This was especially true of the forefeet. They were also wide apart, while the deer tracks were sharply pointed, with the hoofs close together. Days passed and the tracks in the trails ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... daylight gets in and we find that some cold, fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or get poisoned as the case may be. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... heartily. "Emily is blunt and outspoken," he said. "She prides herself on that. But she is as square as a brick. She never says one thing to your face and another ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... so? Do you go by those remains? I have seen them. My child was vaccinated on the left arm, and carried the mark. He had specks on two of his finger-nails; he had a small wart on his little finger; and his fingers were not blunt and uncouth, like that; they were as taper as any lady's in England; that hand is nothing like my son's; you are all blind; yet you must go and blind the only one who had eyes, the only one who really loved him, and whose opinion is worth ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... bonze, of unkempt appearance, cooking his rice. When Y-ts'un perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and as he had lost his teeth, and his tongue was blunt, he made most ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the alternative of being with him on decent and distant terms, or of breaking off with him altogether. The first of these courses might perhaps have been the wisest, but the other was the most congenial to the blunt and plain character of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... governs the least; and I didn't want to hear that kind of talk from a man that was livin' on my money. I couldn't bear it from him. Or I thought I couldn't before—before—" He stopped again, and gulped. "I reckon now there ain't anything I couldn't bear." March was moved by the blunt words and the mute stare forward with which they ended. "Mr. Dryfoos, I didn't know that you understood Lindau's German, or I shouldn't have allowed him he wouldn't have allowed himself—to go on. He wouldn't have knowingly ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... more than a paraphrase of Pope's epistles, or, yet less than a paraphrase, a mere translation of poetry into prose. This is, surely, to attack difficulty with very disproportionate abilities, to cut the Gordian knot with very blunt instruments. When we are told of the insufficiency of former solutions, why is one of the latest, which no man can have forgotten, given us again? I am told, that this pamphlet is not the effort of hunger; what can it be, then, but ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... we now were toiling, with the snow little more than a mantle for the peaks, and a sparkling veil for sunrise, dear Uncle Sam, who had often shown signs of impatience, drew me apart from the rest. Straightforward and blunt as he generally was, he did not seem altogether ready to begin, but pulled off his hat, and then put it on again, the weather being now cold and hot by turns. And while he did this he was thinking at his utmost, as every ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... person who knew it, and was on the point of revealing it, died. This is the sort of thing that Mr. RUDYARD KIPLING has just done in this month's Lippincott's Magazine. It is told in a plain, rough and ready, blunt style, but so blunt that there's no point in it. And the idea,—that is if the idea be that the likeness of the assassin remains on the retina of the victim's eye, and can be reproduced by photography,—is not a novelty. Perhaps this story in Lippincott ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... be my first want and that I should have to grind mine on the stone, as they were blunt and worn with use. But as it took both hands to hold the tool, I could not turn the stone; so I made a wheel by which I could move it with my foot. This was no small task, but I took great pains with it, and at length it ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... HORSE-SHOE BAT, (RHINOLOPHUS AURANTIUS.) t. 1. f. 1.—Ears moderate, naked, rather pointed at the end; nose-leaf large, central process small, scarcely lobed, blunt at the top; fur elongate, soft, bright orange, the hairs of the back with short brown tips, of the under side rather paler, of the face rather darker; female pale yellow, with brown tips to the hair ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... an active, stoutly built man (though far too energetic to be fat), with blunt rounded features, eyes a little protruding, and sandy hair and a reddish complexion which made his age an unguessable secret. He might have been in the thirties or he might ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... an American gentleman who was singularly lacking in tact; he was in China with the intention of obtaining a concession, and he had nearly accomplished his object when he spoilt everything by his blunt speech. He said he had not come to China for any philanthropic purposes, but that he was in the country to make money. We all know that the average business man is neither a Peabody nor a Carnegie, but it was quite unnecessary for this gentleman to announce that his ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... at her escort. "But even if I were, Mr. Pounce, I am in London, not in the dark ages, and as sure of respect here, at the doors of a theatre, as I am in my own drawing-room. I believe, by the way," she added lightly, not liking to hurt him by too blunt a snub, "I believe this is the only big city in Europe of which so much can be said; and English women may thank themselves for it. We demand not protection, but respect. Here is the carriage. Good night!" She stepped in as she spoke, and took ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... night and the following day made a trip up the ravine, where she gathered all the bittersweet berries, swamp holly, and wild rose seed heads she could find. She strung the corn on fine cotton cord putting a rose seed pod between each grain, then used the bittersweet berries to terminate the blunt ends of the branches, and climb up the trunk. By the time she had finished this she was really interested. She achieved a gold star for the top from a box lid and a piece of gilt paper Polly had carried home from school. With ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... this artist exhibited a portrait in the New Gallery; in 1901 a portrait of Bertram Blunt, Esq., at the Royal Academy; and in 1902 a portrait of "Peggy," a little girl ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... the bush, dear Senor Caceres. It's a subject that calls for plain dealing; and I don't mind a blunt word or two. It saves such a lot of time! Come on. You want money, I suppose? Or, ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... enough, your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos'd as things forgot. 575 Without Good Breeding, truth is disapprov'd; That only ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... question, it is true, she gave a somewhat less blunt, but nevertheless a decided negative reply, although it was gilded ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... have tall or rigid stalks. In the brightest places you find three species of gentians with different shades of blue, daisies pure as the sky, silky leaved ivesias with warm yellow flowers, several species of orthocarpus with blunt, bossy spikes, red and purple and yellow; the alpine goldenrod, pentstemon, and clover, fragrant and honeyful, with their colors massed and blended. Parting the grasses and looking more closely you may trace the branching ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... I ate, and before I slept, I thought of that annotated Guide Book which is cried out for by all Europe, and which shall tell blunt truths. Look you out 'Garfagnana, district of, Valley of Serchio' in the index. You will be referred to p. 267. Turn to p. 267. You will ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... very blond, clean-shaved, with gray eyes, extraordinarily smooth yellow hair, and short, determined and rather blunt features, stretched out one large hand to the cigar-box, and glanced ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... shop and street and trade, seems to them lacking in due reverence. Do they forget that this is the language of the common people? And of our good old Anglo-Saxon Bible? Has anybody ever yet used as blunt homely, talk as this old Book uses? And has any other book stuck into people's memories and hearts with such ...
— Quiet Talks with World Winners • S. D. Gordon
... different groups. Thus, although isogamy consists in typical cases of a union of naked motile gametes by a fusion which begins at the beaked ends, and results in the formation of an immotile spherical zygote surrounded by a cell-wall, in Leptosira it is noticeable that the fusion begins at the blunt end; in a species of Chlamydomonas the two gametes are each included in a cell-wall before fusion; and in many cases the zygote retains for some time its motility with the double number of cilia. Again, in oogamous reproduction, while in general only one oosphere ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... looking drowsy. But, when Anderson took hold of him and placed the wounded finger on a block, and Dad faced him with the hammer and a blunt, rusty old chisel, ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... parents, he began life as a dyer's apprentice, enlisted when twenty-three and was a colonel within two years, so astounding were his courage and natural gifts. Detailed to serve under Bonaparte, the two became bosom friends. A plain, blunt man, Lannes was as fierce as a war dog and as faithful. Throughout the following years he followed Bonaparte in all his enterprises, and Napoleon on the Marchfeld, in 1809, wept bitterly when his faithful monitor was shot ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... pointed instruments, as a nail, or in lacerated wounds, as those made by forcing a blunt instrument, as a hook, into the soft parts, there will be no direct and immediate union. In these cases, apply a soothing poultice, as one made of linseed meal, and also keep the limb still. It is judicious to consult a physician ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... neglected the caution that might have enabled him to shelter himself against these blasts. With all his experience of Courts, Hyde never learned the arts of a courtier. He was naively unconscious how little the steadfast honesty of his purpose could render his blunt plainness of diction palatable to a master, the chief feature of whose character was callous selfishness, and whose self-love might for the moment allow him to overlook, but never permitted him to forget, the liberty that presumed to curb his caprices or to criticize ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... although secret, was not immediately pressing—in order that he might visit Jenkinsjoy. It was fortunate that, when he went to ask this brief holiday, he found Mr Merryheart in the office. Had it been his mischance to fall upon Dashope, he would have received a blunt refusal and prompt dismissal—so thoroughly were the joys of that gentleman identified with the woes ...
— The Floating Light of the Goodwin Sands • R.M. Ballantyne
... seeing at his elbow a mere lad, Of a high spirit evidently, though At present weighed down by a doom which had O'erthrown even men, he soon began to show A kind of blunt compassion for the sad Lot of so young a partner in the woe, Which for himself he seemed to deem no worse Than any other scrape, a thing ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... some secret but well-concealed amazement. He saw that she was under the influence of some unusual excitement. Her false front was pushed fantastically away, her rouge and powder were rubbed off in patches, her face looked set and hard. Her first words were abominably blunt. ...
— "Le Monsieur De La Petite Dame" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... too parsimonious with my words in telegrams—a British trait possibly." He spoke deliberately and his keen eyes studied his companion's face as he made the casual remark which set Larry's brain reeling. "See here, Holiday, I'm a blunt brute. I don't know how to break things gently to people. But I am here to tell you if you care to know that Elinor Ruth Farringdon is no more married than you are unless she is married to you. That was her mother's wedding ring. Lord, man, do you always ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... day. Piloted by Malcourt, the Tressilvains, thickly shod and water-proofed, tramped about with rod and creel and returned for luncheon where their blunt criticisms on the fishing aroused Portlaw's implacable resentment. For they sneered at the trout, calling them "char," patronised the rather scanty pheasantry, commented on the kennels, stables, and gardens in a manner ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers
... to hasten death or to court it, was alike cowardice. A typical fighter, when he lost battle after battle and was pursued from plain to hill and from bush to cavern, found himself hungry and alone in the dark hollow of a tree, his sword blunt with use, his bow broken and arrows exhausted—did not the noblest of the Romans fall upon his own sword in Phillippi under like circumstances?—deemed it cowardly to die, but with a fortitude approaching a Christian martyr's, cheered himself ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... Georgetown in South Carolina, and Beaufort in North Carolina, in either of which the vessel could have entered; and in the latter, carrying seventeen feet at low water and obtaining perfect shelter from all winds. [Footnote: Blunt's American Coast Pilot, p. 359 (19th edition.)] But if they really had been unable to find either of them, it is impossible that they should not have discovered the Chesapeake, and entered it, under the alleged circumstances of their search. That it may be seen what exactly is ...
— The Voyage of Verrazzano • Henry C. Murphy
... a circle in the center of which is "It" blindfolded, holding in his hand a blunt stick about 12 or 15 inches long. Those in the circle dance around two or three times, so that the blindfolded player may not know their position. At the command "Stand," given by the one blindfolded, all must stand still. Thereupon, by feeling ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... numerous, the former yellow in upper flowers; usually absent or imperfect in lower pistillate flowers. Leaves: Exceedingly variable; those under water usually long and grass-like; upper ones sharply arrow-shaped or blunt and broad, spongy or leathery, ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... leaving to-day and whatever his feelings, he had so far been outwardly the beneficiary of Tollman's hospitality. Nothing was to be gained, except a sort of churlish satisfaction, by assuming at the eleventh hour a blunt and open hostility ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... there is a praise which is rudeness, and that may be mine. At the same time there is a treatment which is injustice, and that may be yours. Because a plain blunt man, who has never been taught concealment, speaks out his mind without exactly intending it, he's to be snapped off like the son of ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... lady did not speak of her griefs to Harry Esmond, my lord was by no means reserved when in his cups, and spoke his mind very freely, bidding Harry in his coarse way, and with his blunt language, beware of all women as cheats, jades, jilts, and using other unmistakable monosyllables in speaking of them. Indeed, 'twas the fashion of the day, as I must own; and there's not a writer of my time of any note, with the exception of poor Dick Steele, that does not ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... decision of any other judge than my own conscience. Much humor—less wit—has been expended upon the Emperor of Germany's supposed carefulness to reject arbitration because an infringement of his divine rights; a phrase which may well be no more than a blunt expression of the sense that no third party can relieve a man from the obligations of the position to which he is called by God, and that for the duties of that position the man can confidently expect divine guidance and help. Be that as it may, the divine ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... think, Miss Milroy," he said, in his blunt, boyish way. "I think the luckiest walk I ever took in my life was the walk this morning that ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... oratorical jousts; the masters disputed among themselves, and the pupils did likewise. In a time when paper was scarce and parchment precious, disputes replaced our written exercises. The weapons employed in these jousts were blunt ones; but as in real tournaments where "armes courtoises" were used, disputants were sometimes carried away by passion, and the result was a true battle: "They scream themselves hoarse, they lavish unmannerly expressions, abuse, threats, upon each other. They even take to cuffing, kicking, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... walked on again. Brother Archangias sometimes aroused strange scruples in his mind. With his vulgarity and coarseness the Brother seemed to him the true man of God, free from earthly ties, submissive in all to Heaven's will, humble, blunt, ready to shower abuse upon sin. He, the priest, would then feel despair at his inability to rid himself more completely of his body; he regretted that he was not ugly, unclean, covered with vermin like some of the saints. ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... down at last, with a gulp of relief. "It's been an awful evening! Mrs. Cole was detestable. Do you know what she did?" and then came out the whole story pell-mell: all told in Nan's blunt, uncompromising way, and giving Miss Blake a better idea than anything else could have done of just how right she had been in opposing the girl's going under ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... blush at this blunt disclosure of sentiment, Mrs. Blake somewhat formally introduced her husband to the puncher. He shook Blake's hand with like formality and politeness. But as their glances met, his gray eyes shone with the same cold suspicion with which he had regarded ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... died poor. He delighted, in the poverty of his mind, to display his great thick-set person to the most advantage; he was as vain as any fop, without the affectation of that character, for he was always blunt and free-spoken, but, as long as he had enough to satisfy his vanity, he cared nothing for mere wealth. He had generosity, though he neglected the precept about the right hand and the left, and showed some ostentation in his ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... "constrained address of our sullen Nation,"[301] made an impression. It was generally acknowledged that comity and affability had to be fetched from beyond the Seas, for the "meer Englishman" was defective in those qualities. He was "rough in address, not easily acquainted, and blunt even ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... This blunt and ungracious assurance strained the bond between the adopted father and son; the promised letter of application to the Secretary of War, ruthlessly shattered it. That his indulgencies during his year at the University of Virginia, ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... "Mr. Herring's blunt expression of his sentiments was not intended for other ears than ours, I am sure. In confidence, one may say many things to friends which he would prefer to withhold from an indiscriminating public. We are well assured, indeed, that Mr. Herring is a loyal American, with America's best interests ...
— Mary Louise and the Liberty Girls • Edith Van Dyne (AKA L. Frank Baum)
... cutting thing after another.—You have been as noted, all round our town, for being a kind man, as being a blunt one. ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... (Plate 30, Fig. 2) differs in construction from the wooden combs, all made in one piece, which are commonly used in Mekeo. It is made of four, five, or six thin pieces of wood, which are left blunt at one end, but are sharpened to points at the other. These are bound together with straw-like work, sometimes beautifully done, the binding being nearly always near to the blunt ends, though it is sometimes almost in the middle. [45] The combs so made are flat, ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... but Debby was too simple for a belle, too honest for a flirt, too independent for a fine lady; she would be nothing but her sturdy little self, open as daylight, gay as a lark, and blunt as any Puritan. Poor Aunt Pen was in despair, till she observed that the girl often "took" with the very peculiarities which she was lamenting; this somewhat consoled her, and she tried to make the best of the pretty bit of homespun which would not and could not ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... done so in my youth. Bear with me, Euan. You would not want me if there were nothing in me to respond to you. If there ever is, it will not remain silent. But first I want my play-day in the sunshine you have promised me—the sunlight of a comrade's kindness. Be not too blunt with me. You have my heart, I tell you. Let it lie quiet and safe in your keeping, like some strange, frail chrysalis. I myself know there is a miracle within it; but what that miracle may be, I may not ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of a polecat or weasel. The trees over our head abounded with birds of various kinds, among which were many of exquisite beauty, particularly loriquets and cockatoos, which flew in flocks of several scores together. We found some wood which had been felled by the natives with a blunt instrument, and some that had been barked. The trees were not of many species; among others there was a large one which yielded a gum not unlike the Sanguis draconis; and in some of them steps that had been cut at about three feet distance from each ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... their chance of seeing what they could through the forest of human legs; but every one that was portable was snugly lodged in the bend of an elbow, and from this safe perch scores and scores of small serious muzzles, blunt or sharp, smooth or woolly, brown or grey or white or black or brindled, looked out on the scene with the quiet awareness of the Paris dog. It was certainly a good sign that they had not been forgotten ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... wrested a cry of admiration from the aviator? What shades of gold and purple were shed over the scene by the setting sun? His half-sentence is like a confession of love for the joy of living, violently torn from him, and the only avowal this blunt Roland ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... long-limbed, very blond, clean-shaved, with gray eyes, extraordinarily smooth yellow hair, and short, determined and rather blunt features, stretched out one large hand to the cigar-box, and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... a pause of sickening agony, and then that slow, red-hot suffering again, as if a blunt augur was being made to form a channel beneath the teeth, so that the aching pains, as of hot lead, might run round without ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... forward, And Gertrude is too gruff, Yet, coupled with a pretty face, Is pretty name enough' And Adelaide is fanciful, And Laura is too fine, But Emily is beautiful, And Mary is divine Maud only suits a high-born dame, And Fanny is a baby name Eliza is not very choice, Jane is too blunt and Bold, And Martha somewhat sorrowful, And Lucy proud and cold; Amelia is too light and gay, Fit for only a flirt; And Caroline is vain and shy, And Flora smart and pert; Louisa is too soft and sleek But Alice—gentle, ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... of Good Taste, which in such matters practically means Hypocrisy. The Home Secretary and the judges who try the case are usually far more sceptical and blasphemous than the poor men whom they persecute; and their professions of horror at the blunt utterance of their own opinions are revolting to those behind the scenes who have any genuine religious sensibility; but the thing is done because the governing classes, provided only the law against blasphemy ...
— Androcles and the Lion • George Bernard Shaw
... and from its mouth protruded the head and hands of an armed and still living knight whom it had half swallowed and was attempting to carry off. The unhappy victim called on them for help, and they struck the dragon with their swords, but its hide was hard, and Fasold's sword was blunt, and only Theodoric's sword availed aught against it, "Mine is sharper", cried the captive, but it is inside the creature's mouth. Use it, if you can, for my deliverance. Then the valiant Fasold rushed up and plucked the knight's sword from out of the ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... "kindness." Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... manner was perfectly civil and his accents almost silken, Venner glanced keenly from one Scot to the other, and everyone felt that the atmosphere had grown more intense, and that there was latent antipathy between the two men. And even Rooke, a blunt and matter-of-fact Englishman, who having said his say, had been smoking diligently, turned round to listen to MacKay, who had never said a word through all the talk of ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... world can give, can equal in intensity, these complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in comparison—so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and undivided attention—the waking perceptions are so blunt. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... thing—"the race is not to the swift;" the elements of success in life, whatever be the object of pursuit, are very, very different from what we think them at first sight, and so it was with Mr. O'Leary, and I have more than once witnessed the triumph of his homely manner and blunt humour over the more polished and well-bred taste of his competitors for favour; and what might have been the limit to such success, heaven alone can tell, if it were not that he laboured under a counter-balancing infirmity, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... threshin' around and flurryin', but the vicious brute acted just like some kind of a sea-snake. The fisherman brought down the boat-'ook with all 'is might, but the moray just twisted sidewise as the blow came down, and the blunt-pointed 'ead, with its rows of sharp teeth, darted forward for ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... brain for some plan to account for his absence, and finally took refuge unwittingly in ancient wisdom: "When you don't know a thing to do, don't do a thing." Also, "If you can't find the delicate way, go the blunt way." ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... that stick as though it were a club, swinging it like a baseball bat. That would be as silly as using an overhand stab with a dagger. He used it the way a fencer would use a foil, and the hard, blunt end of it sank into the first thug's solar plexus with all the drive of the Duke's right arm and shoulder behind it. The thug gave a hoarse scream as all the air was driven from his lungs, and he dropped to ...
— Nor Iron Bars a Cage.... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... more in the same frantic way. Time will blunt his grief; but it will bring him I fear no other or better comfort. He hopes for oblivion of his loss; but that can never be. He may cease to grieve as he grieves now; but he can never cease to remember. I trust to see him again ere long, and turn his ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... should say "father" and "mother," or use the more babyish form of "papa" and "mama" is a matter of parental choice, but the preference in some circles is for the former. A blunt "yes" or "no" is not thought polite from a child; he should say "yes, father," "no, mama," "yes, Mrs. Smith." "Ma'am" as a form of address is ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... success. 'In all time of wealth, good Lord deliver us!' What prayer can wild, unrestrained, unheeding Genius utter with more fervency? I own Genius is rarely in love. There is an egotism, almost a selfishness, about it, that will not stoop to such common worship. Women know it, and often prefer the blunt, honest, common-place soldier to the wild erratic poet. Genius, grand as it is, is unsympathetic. It demands higher—the highest joys. Genius claims to be loved, but to love is too much to ask it. And yet ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... the continued circumnutation of the peduncle, plays an important part in the act. Considering that the flower-heads are very light, that the peduncles are long, thin, and flexible, and that they arise from flexible branches, it is incredible that an object as blunt as one of these flower-heads could penetrate the ground by means of the growing force of the peduncle, unless it were aided by the rocking movement. After a flower-head has penetrated the ground to a small depth, another and efficient agency comes into play; the central rigid aborted flowers, ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... Chivalrous, brilliant, honest, generous,—neither dissolute, nor bigoted, nor cruel,—he was still a Royalist for the love of royalty, and a soldier for the love of war, and in civil strife there can hardly be a more dangerous character. Through all the blunt periods of his military or civil proclamations, we see the proud, careless boy, fighting for fighting sake, and always finding his own side the right one. He could not have much charity for the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... Captain Charteris, just what he had been when he went away. How different from his stately, dull, wife-ridden elder brother. So brisk, and blunt, and eager, quite lifting his niece off her feet, and almost crushing her in his embrace, telling her she was still but a hop-o'-my-thumb, and shaking hands with his nephew with a look of scrutiny that brought the blood to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... set Merle thinking, and she thought to some purpose. Her natural disposition was always to obtain results by blunt, matter-of- fact methods. In school her policy was, 'Come along with you now, I'm not going to have any nonsense!' Backed by her position, her strong personality, and her prowess at games it succeeded. But here in the hostel, if she wished to effect any improvements, she must go about it ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... bright bald crown, curtained with locks that pended snowy over his coat collar; his weeping, watchful eye; his tottering mien; his high and furrowed brow, lengthening a sharp, corrugated face; his blunt, warty nose, made more striking by a sunken mouth and the working motion of his lower jaw; and his crutch, for he was a cripple. They left a deep impression on my mind. I speak of him as he was in the dawn ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... him about like a shadow, and Dan did not repulse him as rudely as he did others, but said, in his blunt way, "You are all right; don't worry about me. I can stand it ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... frequent the College groves And tributary walks; the last, and oft The only one, who had been lingering there Through hours of silence, till the porter's bell, 70 A punctual follower on the stroke of nine, Rang with its blunt unceremonious voice, Inexorable summons! Lofty elms, Inviting shades of opportune recess, Bestowed composure on a neighbourhood 75 Unpeaceful in itself. A single tree With sinuous trunk, boughs exquisitely wreathed, Grew there; [E] an ash which Winter for himself Decked out with ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... sniffed at the vial, which contained nothing but pure water, and in surprise turned to the emissary for an explanation. But it was too late. The emissary dealt him a blow with a blunt instrument that stunned him and, as he reeled back and grasped at a table, the other thugs rushed from the hall and rained blow after blow on his venerable head and beat him to the floor. A convulsive shudder—a ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... that all lateral flexures probably occurred deep beneath the surface, and have been brought into view by an enormous superincumbent mass having been denuded. If a large and deep box were filled with layers of damp paper or clay, and a blunt wedge was slowly driven up from beneath, would not the layers above it and on both sides become greatly convoluted, whilst those towards the top would be only slightly arched? When I spoke of the Andes being comparatively recent, I suppose that I referred to the absence of the ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... printer of Tahiti, had given the site out of his humble savings. By the sign, in his blunt way, he struck at education which does not teach the simple necessity of ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... from Mission San Francisco stood a little Indian hut, made from the tules and rushes which were found growing with such luxuriance in all parts of Nueva California. It was built in the form of a cone with a blunt apex, was less than ten feet in diameter, and but little more than that in height. An opening near the ground gave communication with the outer air, and a small hole at the top of the hut allowed the smoke from ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... in her expression, for Clare was fighting a hard battle. His blunt simplicity made a strong appeal. She had liked and trusted him when he had with callow but honest chivalry offered her his protection one night in England and he had developed fast since then. Hardship had strengthened and in a sense refined him. He looked resolute and ...
— Brandon of the Engineers • Harold Bindloss
... the humorous aspect of the fable, there is, certainly, a good deal of sound criticism in the piece. It may be brief, it may be inadequate, it may be blunt, but for all that it is truthful, and decidedly just, as far as it goes. Bryant, who was called cold, took umbrage at the portrait drawn of him. But his verse has all the cold glitter of the Greek bards, despite the fact that he is America's greatest poet ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... to know who would be cheerful when his neck is in danger?" answered the cat. "Now that I am old, my teeth are getting blunt, and I would rather sit by the oven and purr than run about after mice, and my mistress wants to drown me; so I took myself off; but good advice is scarce, and I do not know what is ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... He attaches himself much to men younger than himself; and somehow or other I have observed that most of them have come to grief. Besides, a person in whose sagacity I have great confidence warned me against making the Chevalier's acquaintance, and said to me, in his blunt way, 'De Finisterre came to Paris with nothing; he has succeeded to nothing; he belongs to no ostensible profession by which anything can be made. But evidently now he has picked up a good deal; and in proportion ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sanity displayed by me, despite my insane condition, was something this doctor could not comprehend. Remarks of mine, which he should have discounted or ignored, rankled as the insults of a sane and free man would have done. And his blunt and indiscriminate refusal of most of my requests prolonged my ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... in and we find that some cold, fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or get poisoned as the case may be. And so, you see, you can't tell what the thoughts are that you ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... channels than one, you would have thought; but he's a taciturn man, asks no questions, and invites no confidences. I like him the better for it. Next week, come what may, I'll speak to him and tell him the truth, like a plain, blunt man." ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... murmurous stream, like the voice of a persistent talker in a silent company. The old ship looked much too big for her narrow grave at the foot of the green cliff, in which her anchor was deeply sunk and half overgrown with thistles. Her blunt bow and the ragged stump of the figure-head rose, dark and high, above the wet beach where Captain John sat with his absorbed listener. There were rifts about her rail where the red sunset looked through. Her naked sides, that for years had been moistened only by the perennial ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... was brindled, and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thickset, like a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two—being all he had—gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... they faced five thousand British veterans; wherefore they had done what the navy expected of them. On a day so shameful that no self-respecting American can read of it without blushing they had enacted the one redeeming episode. Commodore Barney described this action in a manner blunt and unadorned: ...
— The Fight for a Free Sea: A Chronicle of the War of 1812 - The Chronicles of America Series, Volume 17 • Ralph D. Paine
... whilst it lasts? Does not all such sorrow hallow, ennoble, refine, purify the sufferer, and make him liker his God? 'He for our profit, that we should be partakers of His holiness.' Is not that God's way of glorifying us before heaven's glory? When a blunt knife is ground upon a wheel, the sparks fly fast from the edge held down upon the swiftly-revolving emery disc, but that is the only way to sharpen the dull blade. Friction, often very severe friction, and heat are indispensable ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... retrenchment, and from cader form'd caer, as the Spaniards now use it, by taking away the letter d according to their ordinary custome, when it is seated in the middle of words. There are another sort of people yet more sturdy and blunt in their formes of speech, who would say Car or Ker by a contraction of the two Vowels into one, as is observable among the Peasants of France, and those of Picardy, who retain very much of Antiquity, which seems ...
— A Philosophicall Essay for the Reunion of the Languages - Or, The Art of Knowing All by the Mastery of One • Pierre Besnier
... him in politics. His reasoning is so simple, clear and palpable—so much in the character of what is called common sense—and his style of speaking so unpretending and free from ornament, that superficial observers have set him down as a mere blunt soldier, with a few fixed ideas, and a disposition dogmatically to insist on their adoption. This is altogether a mistake. The Duke of Wellington has as much of the true spirit of the statesman as any man who now affects the destinies of this country. ...
— Maxims And Opinions Of Field-Marshal His Grace The Duke Of Wellington, Selected From His Writings And Speeches During A Public Life Of More Than Half A Century • Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
... aversion for men who are devoted to an absorbing occupation; in spite of superiority, they are all women in the matter of encroachment. Lousteau, a poet and journalist, and a libertine with a veneer of misanthropy, had that tinsel of the intellect, and led the half-idle life that attracts women. The blunt good sense and keen insight of the really great man weighed upon Dinah, who would not confess her own smallness even to herself. She said in her mind—"The doctor is perhaps the better man, but I do not ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... both. One from you. To this I shall pay a very particular Regard, because I am well satisfied you never suffer Prejudices to divert your Attention from the great object—the publick Good. "Manly is a blunt, honest and I believe brave officer.' I observe your Caution; and I admire it because I think it is a proof of your Integrity. Manlys Bravery is an Article of your Beliefe. His Bluntness& Honesty, of Certainty. I have not yet lookd into the Papers; but I recollect, when ...
— The Original Writings of Samuel Adams, Volume 4 • Samuel Adams
... denial of her right to vote, whether that denial be the blunt refusal of the ignorant or the polished evasion of the refined courtier and politician, woman can oppose only her most solemn and perpetual appeal to the reason of man and to the justice of Almighty God. She must continually point out the nature ...
— Debate On Woman Suffrage In The Senate Of The United States, - 2d Session, 49th Congress, December 8, 1886, And January 25, 1887 • Henry W. Blair, J.E. Brown, J.N. Dolph, G.G. Vest, Geo. F. Hoar.
... inches round the neck, one foot eleven inches round the middle of the foreleg, and his talons, five on each foot, were four inches and three eighths in length. It differs from the common black bear in having its talons much longer and more blunt; its tail shorter; its hair of a reddish or bay brown, longer, finer, and more abundant; his liver, lungs, and heart, much larger even in proportion to his size, the heart particularly being equal to that of a large ox; his maw ten times larger; ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... Chester, relaxing his face when he was fairly gone, 'is good practice. I HAVE some command of my features, beyond all doubt. He fully confirms what I suspected, though; and blunt tools are sometimes found of use, where sharper instruments would fail. I fear I may be obliged to make great havoc among these worthy people. A troublesome necessity! I ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... constipation and diarrhea: two affections that derange more lives than all other pathological conditions together. Banish alimentary uncleanliness and you take most of the poisons from the human race—poisons that stunt the body and blunt the mind. ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... is the word, mamma, haw! haw! I have been making the bloke a lot of oak candlesticks, and human heads with sparkling eyes, for walking-sticks, &c. And now I'll go and draw my—protege's—blunt." The lady's hands were uplifted towards pitying Heaven with one impulse. The young workman grinned: "Soyons de notre siecle," said he, and departed whistling in the tenor clef. He had the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... that a huge boar, which, in sporting phrase, had left the sounder five years, had broken into the park the night before, and had been routing amongst the fern. The age and size of the animal were known by the print of the feet, the toes being round and thick, the edge of the hoof worn and blunt, the heel large, and the guards, or dew-claws, great and open, from all which appearances it was adjudged by the baronet to be "a great old ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... had turned back baffled, and all his climbing was done, old Felix had no engrossing object to blunt a sense of many scruples that must be removed before he himself or his family could with honour derive profit from the event; as they would do if Mr. Polymathers's instructions were carried out. For by that document, which he had finished drawing up only ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... fun, Rosy-Lilly would slip from one big woodsman to another, an inconspicuous little figure in the smoke-gloomed light of the two oil-lamps. Man after man would snatch her up to his knee, lay by his pipe, twist her silky, yellow curls about his great blunt fingers, and whisper wood-folk tales or baby nonsense into her pink little ear. She would listen solemnly for a minute or two, then wriggle down and move on to another of her admirers. But before long she would be standing by the bench on which sat Red McWha, with one big knee usually hooked ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the doctrine that the end of the world does not "depend upon the law of nature," and that the growth of human civilisation may be cut off at any moment by a fiat of the Deity, less calculated to "quail the hopes and blunt the edge of men's endeavours?" Hakewill asserted with confidence that the universe will be suddenly wrecked by fire. Una dies dabit exitio. Was the prospect of an arrest which might come the day after to-morrow ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... of his blunt words, it was with the greatest gentleness that Ross handed the lad to a seat in the rough craft where they had played pirates during the preceding summer, and settled down to ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler
... of an older girl who had loitered by the way, and who now came hastily down the valley, crying as she came for her father. Her, too, they seized and beheaded; I know not what they had done with the axe, it was a blunt knife that served their butcherly turn upon the girl; and the blood spurted in fountains and painted them from head to foot. Thus horrible from crime, the party returned to Atuona, carrying the heads to Moipu. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... more. A jay with skyblue shaft Set in blunt wing, skimmed screaming on ahead. She followed him. A murrey squirrel eyed Her warily, cocked upon tail-plumed haunch, Then, skipping the whirligig of last-year leaves, Whisked himself out of sight and reappeared Leering about the ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various
... the table, looked at it, felt the edge, and laid it down contemptuously. In those days all the respectable peasants in the Roman villages had solid silver forks and spoons, which have long since gone to the melting-pot to pay taxes. But they used the same blunt, pointless knives with wooden handles, which they ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... had already begun making campaign speeches in his neatly polished orations which painfully eschewed all show of ornament or passion; and Caesar himself, efficiency personified, had demonstrated that the leader of a democratic rabble must be a master of blunt phrases. But Calvus did not threaten to become a political force, Calidius was too even-tempered, and Caesar was now in the north, fighting with other weapons. Cicero's prestige still seemed unbroken. It was not till Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49, after Hortensius had ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... suggested that he unite the two and strike through the abundant acid juices of the one with the sugar of the other. Thence came all vineyards and orchards. Digging in the soil tired him, but hope suggested that his pet ox might pull his forked stick; when the wooden stick wore blunt hope replaced it with an iron point; when the iron point refused to scour hope suggested steel; when the steel made his burden light and doubled the pace of his steeds, hope suggested a seat on the plow; when the riding-plow gave ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... served she removed her gloves very leisurely and laid them beside her. Then she picked up a magazine and glanced through it, cutting the pages with a blunt edge of her knife. It was all very agreeable. The damask was even more spotless than it had seemed through the window, and the crystal more sparkling. There were quiet ladies and gentlemen, who did not notice her, lunching at the small tables like her own. A ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... pursued Mary, who had a blunt downright sort of manner; "I wonder if India will agree with you; I wonder if you will really ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... by your leave I would exhort you spin and weave Some frugal homely cloth. I warn you, when I lead the tribes Law shall strip you; threats nor bribes Shall blunt the ...
— Ionica • William Cory (AKA William Johnson)
... ripples that lay and moved like silver and golden serpents along the water. Back presently they had turned, approaching once more the stately towers that touched the sky, and this time they had sought a new angle. Over to the Jersey shore their blunt-nosed ferryboat had taken them, and thence north along the river to Twenty-third Street, seeing the gold and velvet-black city slide southward as ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... of Gilmore's band, at Manhattan Beach. After hearing one selection I found myself unable to listen any farther—I could not sit quiet for longer. I rarely allowed myself more than five minutes for shaving, no matter whether the razor were sharp or blunt. They used to tell me that I wore a black bow tie till it was not fit to wear. On the trains I slept a great deal. Sleep is the great storage battery of life. Four days of the week I was on the train. I rose every ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... simple form of roller is a solid or hollow cylinder of wood fastened into a frame by which it is drawn. Some rollers have spikes or blunt attachments fastened to their surfaces for breaking clods. A roller that is quite popular consists of a cylinder ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... was Josiah interested in the welfare of George, that he had totally disregarded his own wet, miserable condition; and, thanking the blunt Irishman, he instantly retired to ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... from a visit to Guaymas and Mazatlan, and he had brought wine of the finest and cigars such as Arizona never had known, and Sancho was manifestly disconcerted at the regrets or refusals, coldly courteous on the part of Loring, blunt and brusque on the part of Blake. The veterans, however, saw no harm in going and were sumptuously entertained by mine host in the best room of the ranch. Blake caused a strong guard to be posted at camp, a most unusual thing, and ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... It cannot be sooth That you talk like an angry illogical girl. Yes, banish the Hebrews, as wholly as ruth. Be cold in your wrath as the Neva's chill swirl, Snub friendly remonstrance, blunt satire's keen blade. With a blot of black ink! Will it carry you far? A CAESAR must not be a fool or afraid; There's no place in earth's round for a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, 13 June 1891 • Various
... destroyed, the glorious Church of "St. Mary under the Chain," and with it the home of the Knights of Malta, suffered the same fate. Of St. Mary's Church there remain the chancel and two stout towers; I can see them from my embowered terrace, the blunt red roofs rising above a glorious riot of fruit blossom. The pageant moves on, giving a flash here and there of some one who stood up above his fellows like George Podiebrad, or the strong men who precipitated the Thirty ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... distribution of a Christmas charity at Millbrook, Southampton, the Rev. A. C. Blunt stated that one of the recipients had nearly reached her 102nd year. She was born in Hampshire, and down to a very recent period had been able to ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... simple in form, there are a few other slight variations in detail which assist in distinguishing them. The rods are sometimes very blunt at the ends, almost as if cut square across, while in other species they are more rounded and occasionally slightly tapering. Sometimes they are surrounded by a thin layer of some gelatinous substance, which ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... received and refreshed before leaving. There is clear evidence that the first post established by the Colonists for trade with the Indians was here where Indians and whites lived together in some number. When, however, Humphry Blunt out of Fort Algernourne, that is Old Point Comfort, was killed by Indians at Nansemond, Sir Thomas Gates used the opportunity to punish the Indians by driving the Kecoughtans away from their cornfields and fishing grounds. It was in the summer of 1610 that he "posseseinge himselfe of the Towne and ...
— The First Seventeen Years: Virginia 1607-1624 • Charles E. Hatch
... was presented by Sir Frederick Wigan, Bart., in memory of his brother-in-law, Arthur Cecil Blunt. It is a triplet, and displays in its central light an allegorical figure of "Poetry," supported by Shakespeare and Spenser in the lights on either hand. Above the Muse the sacred Dove is hovering, symbolical of the divine inspiration which we may presume ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: Southwark Cathedral • George Worley
... left Lalpura and marched to Kulgam, a short distance of some eight or ten miles. Mr. Blunt, the forest officer,[1] had most kindly placed the forest bungalows of the Lolab at our disposal; but, as they all lie on the other side of the valley, we are obliged to camp every night. We have been working along the north side of the Lolab, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... attached to the quiver a little kind of basket to hold the wild cotton which is put on the blunt end of the arrow. With a quiver of poisoned arrows slung over his shoulder, and with his blow-pipe in his hand, in the same position as a soldier carries his musket, see the Macoushi Indian advancing ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... delights, solemnities, honors, and graces, but which can never replace the familiar one that is gone. There was something mournful in the lingering of this aged lady—blind, deaf, and bereaved in her latter years; but she was not mournful, any more than she was insensible. Age did not blunt her feelings, nor deaden her interest in the events of the day. It seems not so very long ago that she said that the worst of living in such a place (as the Lake District), was its making one unwilling to ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... campaign he liked to have Sherman and McPherson meet at his tent, and would manage to set them to discussing the military situation. Sherman would be brilliant and trenchant; McPherson would be politely critical and intellectual; Rawlins would break in occasionally with some blunt and vigorous opinion of his own: Grant sat impassable and dumb in his camp-chair, smoking; but the lively discussion stimulated his strong commonsense, and gave him more assured confidence in the judgments ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... his orders to the men, so that they might row toward the spot where the whale was likely to rise, and so give him a chance to hurl his harpoon before the animal had time to dive again. But this was not easy. Whether the curious blunt-nosed, white-skinned, active creature, with its back clear of all fish-like fin, was on the alert for the coming harpoon or for the meal it was seeking it is impossible to say, but certainly it showed a remarkable activity in keeping just out of reach. It would rise ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... somewhat like that of the tawny Day-lily (Hemerocallis fulva); strings the thickness of the little finger, blunt at the extremity, extending horizontally, if not confined, to ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 4 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... and Polonius thought Hamlet really insane. 8. The President and the Senate appoint certain men ministers to foreign courts. 9. Shylock would have struck Jessica dead beside him. 10. Custom renders the feelings blunt and callous. 11. Socrates styled beauty a short-lived tyranny. 12. Madame de Stael calls beautiful architecture frozen music. 13. They named the state New York from the Duke of York. 14. Henry the Great consecrated the Edict of Nantes as the very ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... said the Englishman, touched in his blunt nature by this extraordinary magnanimity. "I will report your consideration to my ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... took a number of vessels, and arrived eventually at St. Jago. The Portuguese Governor of this island did not take at all kindly to his bold visitor, and was blunt enough to say he suspected Davis of being a pirate. This suspicion his crew took exception to, and they decided they could not let such an insult pass, so that very night they made a sudden attack on the fort, taking and ...
— The Pirates' Who's Who - Giving Particulars Of The Lives and Deaths Of The Pirates And Buccaneers • Philip Gosse
... understand each other's character thoroughly, because they are so closely alike." Michie went on to say that "when either a Russian or a Chinese meets a European, say an Englishman, he instinctively recoils from the blunt, straightforward, up-and-down manner of coming to business at once, and the Asiatic either declines a contest which he cannot fight with his own weapons, or, seizing the weak point of his antagonist, he angles for him until he wearies him into acquiescence. As a rule, the Asiatic ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, these loiterers par ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em,— Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... wimple, his blunt-prowed face, His low forehead, his skinny neck, his long, scaled, striving legs, So striving, striving, Are all more delicate than she, And he has a ...
— Tortoises • D. H. Lawrence
... good-nature was taxed to its utmost, but he fully realized how deeply his old friend was wounded; and the knowledge that his own interest in Allen was in reality a genuine service to Sanford himself served to blunt the force ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... expected with proposals from Percy, and wherein he is received, is treated with, and carries back offers of accommodation from the King, the King's attendants upon the occasion are the Prince of Wales, Lord John of Lancaster, the Earl of Westmorland, Sir Walter Blunt, and Sir John Falstaff.—What shall be said to this? Falstaff is not surely introduced here in vicious indulgence to a mob audience;—he utters but one word, a buffoon one indeed, but aside, and to the Prince only. Nothing, it should seem, is wanting, if decorum would here have permitted, but ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... movements, with a merry twinkle in her bright eyes. He evidently wishes to astonish her by his dexterity, and disappoint her roguish expectations. He holds his plate firmly in his left hand, and proceeds, at once, to cut his peach in halves. Deuce take the blunt silver knife! The tough skin resists its pressure. The knife and plate clash loudly together; the peach is bounding and rolling at the very feet of the young lady, who is in an ecstasy of laughter. Ah! she herself has no small resemblance to a peach, fair, ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... and her eyes fell, but she had never yet succeeded in conquering the blunt independence of her speech. "Nobody else ever says so," she said, uneasily. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... son, always called Johnnie, to distinguish him from his father, was ridiculously big for his age, portentously clever and keen-witted, awkward, blunt, rude, full of fun, extremely fond of his father, and exceedingly unlike him in person. His hair was nearly black, his forehead was square and high, his hands and feet almost rivalled those of his parent in size, and his height was ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... security have spied upon their adopted Mother, I loathe and spit upon. I have taken the police oath of obedience to my superiors, and I have kept it, but I have never sworn allegiance to His Majesty your King, whom I pray that God may preserve though I am his enemy. To your blunt English mind, untrained in logic, my sentiments and actions may lack consistency. But no. Those agents whom we have run down, you and I, were traitors—traitors to England. Of all traitors for whom Hell is hungry the German-born traitor is the most devilish. I would not ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... Boxer, twisting his short, blunt nose into as near an imitation of a sneer as he could manage, "I've told you my story and I've got witnesses to prove it. You can write to the master of the Marston Towers if you like, and other people besides. Very well, then; let's go and see your precious old fortune-teller. You needn't say ...
— Odd Craft, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... yon fair bands shall merry England claim, And with their deeds of valour deck her crown. Hers their bold port, and hers their martial frown, And hers their scorn of death in freedom's cause, Their eyes of azure, and their locks of brown, And the blunt speech that bursts without a pause, And free-born thoughts which league the Soldier ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott
... head with a blunt knife, seized hold of it by the hair, and hastened out with the cry, "Long life to the King of Spain!" The populace stood there thunderstruck; no sound was heard, but none detained the murderers, who ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... and brush are also agents of the toilet by which the hair is kept clean, vigorous, and healthy. The comb should be of flexible gum, with large, broad, blunt, round, and coarse teeth, having plenty of elasticity. It should be used to remove from the hairs any scurf or dirt that may have become entangled in them, to separate the hairs and prevent them from becoming matted and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... the quarrel must be decided at the price of so many limbs and lives? And when they come to an engagement, what service can be done by such pale-faced students, as by drudging at the oars of wisdom, have spent all their strength and activity? No, the only use is of blunt sturdy fellows that have little of wit, and so the more of resolution: except you would make a soldier of such another Demosthenes as threw down his arms when he came within sight of the enemy, and lost that credit in the camp which ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... the daylight gets in and we find that some cold, fishy little negative has been spawning all over our beliefs, and the brood of blind questions it has given birth to are burrowing round and under and butting their blunt noses against the pillars of faith we thought the whole world might lean on. And then, again, some of our old beliefs are dying out every year, and others feed on them and grow fat, or get poisoned as ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... depended upon. He was fond of his profession, and had acquired a considerable knowledge of its details; apart from it he had no very decided tastes; he lived a quiet, regular life, and dined out and went to dances in moderation; his manner, though he was nearly twenty-six, was still rather boyishly blunt. ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... formidable-looking creature, being not more than eighteen inches long and perhaps three inches girth about the thickest part of its body. But it was an ugly, repulsive- looking brute, its head being heart-shaped, and its body almost the same thickness for the greater part of its length, terminating in a short, blunt tail. Its ground colour was a dirty grey, upon which occurred large, irregular blotches or markings of dull black with a few splashes of brilliant red here and there. The fellow who had fallen upon it with such ferocity, and who had evidently been bitten by it, brought the two writhing ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... girlhood. Bertie was the eldest of six, and his father had been a coal porter who broke his back tumbling down a cellar when a little "on." Bertie—he now figured as Mr. Albert Adams in the cricket lists—was a well-grown youth, rather blunt-featured, but with honest hazel eyes, fresh-coloured, shock-haired. Vivie had once derided him for trying to woo his frontal hair into a flattened curl with much pomade ... he now only sleeked ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... struck, but she had been struck, and seemingly by something rather sharp and penetrating than blunt. The shock had been so slight that no one had been alarmed, had it not been for the shouts of the carpenter's watch, who rushed on to the bridge, exclaiming, "We are sinking! we are sinking!" At first the passengers were much frightened, but Captain Anderson hastened to reassure them. The danger ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... the later and larger growth of the cone-scale. With a terminal umbo the margin of the apophysis is free and may be rounded (fig. 49) or may taper to a blunt point (fig. 52), and any extension of the scale is a terminal extension. With the dorsal umbo all sides of the apophysis are confined between other apophyses, and any extension is a dorsal thickening of the apophysis or a dorsal protuberance. The outline ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... replied, with blunt eagerness. "I may as well tell you the truth. I am deeply interested in you, even though you are a stranger, and the bare possibility that we may never meet again fills me with the keenest sorrow ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... let us be fair to George. Mere innocence of guile, of verbal trickery, had not alone sufficed for his passionate bluntness in the present crisis. At a later stage in his career as a husband he might have been equally blunt; yet never again, perhaps, would he have been so emotional in his opposition to woman polluting herself ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... ready art, And had sae fortified the part That, when I looked to my dart, It was sae blunt, Fient haet o't wad hae pierc'd the heart [Devil a bit] O' ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... down into the bilge at our feet, foul with fragments of squid and caplin long dead. We were also beginning to listen eagerly for other sounds than the wind hissing in the cordage, the breaking of wave-tops and the hard thumping of the blunt bows ...
— Sweetapple Cove • George van Schaick
... Axminster. They say up here that the rebels run to nigh twenty thousand, and that they give no quarter. Well, if we must have civil war, I hope it may be hot and sudden, not spun out for a dozen years like the last one. If our throats are to be cut, let it be with a shairp knife, and not with a blunt hedge shears.' ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of topics, admitting to their society Chapelle, a man of less genius, but of greater conversational powers, than either of them—a sort of connecting link between them and the world. Four poets, or four men, could hardly have been more unlike. Boileau was blustering, blunt, peremptory, but honest and frank; Racine, of a pleasant and tranquil gaiety, but mischievous and sarcastic; Moliere was naturally considerate, pensive, and melancholy; La Fontaine was often absent-minded, but sometimes exceedingly jovial, delighting with his sallies, his witty ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... not much time, so let us be off at once," said Ernest. "Nine shall be the game. Are you all provided with blunt-headed arrows? That is right. Twelve a-piece we should have. Let us take half-an-hour's turn round the wood, and then be back for the races. By that time the servants will have the dinner things cleared away and the ponies ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... rix dollars. Item, for Petryes History of the Church, 15 shills. sterl. This is one 100 merks.[662] Item, for Taylor's Cases of Conscience or Ductor, etc., 22 shillings. Item, for Baker's Chronicle of England and Blunt's Animadversions on it, 20 shillings. Item, for Plinius 2dus his Epistles cum notis variorum, 6 shillings. Item, for Cromwell's Proclamations and other Acts of his Counsell from Septr. 1653 till Decr. ...
— Publications of the Scottish History Society, Vol. 36 • Sir John Lauder
... speaking. I once, however, met a remarkable exception to this rule in the person of an American gentleman who was singularly lacking in tact; he was in China with the intention of obtaining a concession, and he had nearly accomplished his object when he spoilt everything by his blunt speech. He said he had not come to China for any philanthropic purposes, but that he was in the country to make money. We all know that the average business man is neither a Peabody nor a Carnegie, but it was quite unnecessary for this gentleman to announce that his ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... feet long, and twenty feet round at the thickest part. Its head, which seemed to me a great, blunt, shapeless thing, like a clumsy old boat, was eight feet long from the tip to the blowholes or nostrils; and these holes were situated on the back of the head, which at that part was nearly four feet broad. The entire head measured about twenty-one ...
— Fighting the Whales • R. M. Ballantyne
... painted iron railing of the cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that pushed ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... ruthlessly carrying out a project which would ruin them. Under these circumstances he looked for no more than tolerance. He now owned frankly to himself that he was in love with Sheila. He had made little progress with his wooing, nor did he expect to make more just then. His blunt assertiveness covered a natural shyness where women were concerned, and he had about as much idea of the fine points of the game as a logger has of cabinet-making. Still, he was drawn to her by a desire which he was ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... other side of the pier, awaiting the signal from the women, their confederates. In going over, his head was quite seriously hurt. At first it was thought that he had struck the edge of the boat in falling, but the doctor says it was a blow from some blunt instrument with a rounded end—some manner of ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... when the comrade of his youth had become the sovereign of three kingdoms. He was a most trusty, but not a very respectful, subject. There was nothing which he was not ready to do or suffer for William. But in his intercourse with William he was blunt and sometimes surly. Keppel, on the other hand, had a great desire to please, and looked up with unfeigned admiration to a master whom he had been accustomed, ever since he could remember, to consider as the first of living ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... him shrink from appearing in any way to condescend, to patronize, to forgive, where perhaps he needed rather to be forgiven. A strange awkwardness had come over him. He felt himself suddenly to be beyond his depth. How unpardonably blunt and masculinely obtuse he had been in dealing with this beautiful and tender thing, which God had once, for a short time, intrusted to his keeping! How cruel and wooden that moral code of his by which he had relentlessly judged her, and often found her wanting! What an effort it must have cost ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... a blunt, honest man, perhaps a little too much inclined to be harsh with his son when he had done wrong. Possibly his views of parental discipline were not altogether correct, but in the main he meant right. He was disgusted at the conduct of ...
— The Boat Club - or, The Bunkers of Rippleton • Oliver Optic
... the plaintiff lounged against the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... race is not to the swift;" the elements of success in life, whatever be the object of pursuit, are very, very different from what we think them at first sight, and so it was with Mr. O'Leary, and I have more than once witnessed the triumph of his homely manner and blunt humour over the more polished and well-bred taste of his competitors for favour; and what might have been the limit to such success, heaven alone can tell, if it were not that he laboured under a counter-balancing infirmity, sufficient ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... Cornelia hesitated slightly. Some little false sprite put a ready excuse into her heart, but she banished it at once, and with the courage of one who fears lest they are not truthful enough, she said with a blunt directness which put all ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... themselves into clubs, called 'chores,' among which a great deal of jealousy and ill feeling prevails. The fights are to avenge insults, to 'see who is the best fellow,' or between representatives of different chores, who battle for the honor of their clubs. The champions fight with blunt swords ground sharp on the two edges. They slash each other, but do not thrust, so that the combats seldom ...
— Down the Rhine - Young America in Germany • Oliver Optic
... voyage; and the young captain headed his craft for the opening, but soon found himself on the rocks. Luckily, the vessel backed off, and the crew set about repairing damages. While thus engaged, the great, blunt head of a whale was seen in the narrow channel; and, after blowing a column of water high in the air, the monster swam lazily through the strait. "If a whale can go through that channel, I can," quoth "Cap'n Nat." ...
— The Naval History of the United States - Volume 1 (of 2) • Willis J. Abbot
... known. Yet to be loved makes not to love again; Not at my years, however it hold in youth. I swear by truth and knighthood that I gave No cause, not willingly, for such a love: To this I call my friends in testimony, Her brethren, and her father, who himself Besought me to be plain and blunt, and use, To break her passion, some discourtesy Against my nature: what I could, I did. I left her and I bade her no farewell; Tho', had I dreamt the damsel would have died, I might have put my wits to some rough use, And help'd her from herself.'" ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... Surprised at the blunt straightforwardness of the question, as coming from him, I replied thoughtlessly, "Oh, my ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... on the point of a blunt promontory, stand the two quarters called Galata and Pera. There Europeans dwell, and there are found Greeks and Italians, Jews and Armenians, and other men of races living in the adjacent countries—in the Balkan Peninsula, in Asia Minor ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... Jim was calm and almost smiling as he answered. Behind him the shrill voices of the crowd sounded, like a background, to the blunt words that ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... has. It is solid ivory, polished like a mirror, and is four or five inches long—round, and as thick as a large man's wrist, with the end squared off flat, for your thumb to rest on; for you grasp it, with your thumb resting on the blunt end—so—and lift it along and strike downward. The Gaikowar showed us how the thing was done when he gave it to Luigi, and before that night was ended, Luigi had used the knife, and the Gaikowar was a man short by reason of it. The sheath is magnificently ornamented with gems of great ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... calling in the form of a wedge; but only too many commence at the blunt end, investing largely at once in everything, and therefore their business soon tapers down to nothing. The wise begin at the point of the wedge and develop their calling naturally, healthfully—learning, by experience and careful observation, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... almost in as bad odour as the Liberals, because of having hob-nobbed too effusively and ostentatiously with the German democratic parties on the eve of the war, exploiting an evangel of universal brotherhood which did not blunt a single Teuton bayonet when the hour came. I suppose in time party divisions will reassert themselves in some form or other; there will be a Socialist Party, and the mercantile and manufacturing interests will evolve a sort of bourgeoise party, and the different religious ...
— When William Came • Saki
... trees, The panels of whitewood, that cuts like cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lip Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was the way ...
— The One Hoss Shay - With its Companion Poems How the Old Horse Won the Bet & - The Broomstick Train • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... is had from Picacho, a long ridge from back in the mountains, ending in a blunt nose almost sheer above the city. Whoever climbs it recognises the reason for the native saying, "He who holds Picacho sleeps in the palace." Its town-side face is almost precipitous, and on every hand spread rolling, half-bare upland mountains. ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... present day when an awkward guest has broken a valuable piece of china. He muttered something about the machines having been long preserved in the Imperial family, as being made on the model of those which guarded the throne of the wise King of Israel; to which the blunt plain-spoken Count expressed his doubt in reply, whether the wisest prince in the world ever condescended to frighten his subjects or guests by the mimic roarings of a wooden lion. "If," said he, "I too hastily took it for a living creature, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... himself upon his ancient descent, I expected he would give me some account of them. We were now arrived at the upper end of the gallery, when the Knight faced towards one of the pictures, and, as we stood before it, he entered into the matter, after his blunt way of saying things, as they occur to his imagination, without regular introduction, or care to preserve the appearance ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... his formidable audience he was M. Chardon. Lucien's courage sank under their inquisitive eyes. He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness. He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more out of humor with himself. He grew impatient to begin the reading, for then he could ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... and put the fatherless to death. His morality was as high as that of the average; his sense of honour far higher. He was generous and kind-hearted. No one ever heard him tell a lie; and he had a blunt honesty about him, half real, because he liked to be honest, and yet half affected too, because he found it pay in the long run, and because it threw off their guard the people whom he intended to make his tools. But of godliness in its true sense—of belief that any Being above cared ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... forests; preys on small birds, is very shy, sleeping during the day, and employing the night in search of food. The fur of the older animals is preferred to the younger. It is taken by snares and traps, and sometimes shot with blunt arrows. Attempts have been made to domesticate it; but it is extremely wild and has ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... offence at words, However broad or blunt; But when maids brought a front to dress, Of course he ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 264, July 14, 1827 • Various
... friends, the boast and pride of the nation. The young and ardent Braves sought her hand in marriage; but she was deaf to all their entreaties and protestations, and refused all their offers. Yet she did it with so much kindness, and said so many sweet words to blunt the severity of the refusal, that all her lovers became her friends, and each, with affectionate kindness, blended with the bold bearing of one who says what he knows he has courage to perform, promised that his love mellowed into friendship should ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... 1909, when a small airship fitted with two 12 horse-power motors and named the 'Baby' was turned out from the balloon factory. This was almost egg-shaped, the blunt end being forward, and three inflated fins being placed at the tail as control members. A long car with rudder and elevator at its rear-end carried the engines and crew; the 'Baby' made some fairly successful flights and gave a good deal of useful data ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... Fate must be met then, but the way in which it was met, that rested with a man himself, that, at least, was in his own power; there he might show his free will; and thus this principle, which might seem at first to be calculated to blunt his energies and weaken his strength of mind, really sharpened and hardened them in a wonderful way, for it left it still worth everything to a man to fight this stern battle of life well and bravely, while its blind inexorable nature allowed no room for any careful weighing of chances ...
— The story of Burnt Njal - From the Icelandic of the Njals Saga • Anonymous
... sea; only the Maison Dieu Road and the big square house in the walled garden. Brown wire blinds half way up the schoolroom windows. An old lady with grey hair and a kind, blunt face, like Jenny; she unpacked your box in the large, light bedroom, folding and unfolding your things with little gentle, tender hands. Miss Haynes. She hoped you would be happy with them, hoped you wouldn't mind sleeping alone the first night, thought ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... her, but it soon over, and so up and with Sir W. Batten and Sir W. Pen to St. James's, and there did our business with the Duke, and thence homeward straight, calling at the Coffee-house, and there had very good discourse with Sir——Blunt and Dr. Whistler about Egypt and other things. So home to dinner, my wife having put on to-day her winter new suit of moyre, which is handsome, and so after dinner I did give her L15 to lay out in linen and necessaries for the house and to buy a ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... split on, first and last. If I had my way, I'd have Cap'n Smollett work us back into the trades at least; then we'd have no blessed miscalculations and a spoonful of water a day. But I know the sort you are. I'll finish with 'em at the island, as soon's the blunt's on board, and a pity it is. But you're never happy till you're drunk. Split my sides, I've a sick heart to sail with the ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... /blunt:/ dull, slow. Or there may be a quibble involved in connection with 'mettle' in the next line. Brutus alludes to the 'tardy form' (l. 296) Casca has just 'put on' in winding so long about the matter before coming ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... axe till it crashed upwards through the rafters of the hall, like the crash of trees falling in a storm. When the axe came down with a terrific sound all men looked fearfully at Cuchulain. The descending axe had not even touched him; it had come down with the blunt side on the ground, and the youth knelt there unharmed. Smiling at him, and leaning on his axe, stood no terrible and hideous stranger, but Curoi of Kerry, come to ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... Captain Charles Blunt's boat at Omaha, Neb., bound for St. Louis, Mo. We played our games during the trip, without anything of notice occurring until we made a landing at a wood station, about twenty miles above St. Joseph, Mo. It was a lonely place in the woods, with nothing but long wood-piles to make ...
— Forty Years a Gambler on the Mississippi • George H. Devol
... as that was unlikely, I pinned my faith in The Wand. It was a seven-column, four-page paper which carried staunchly a strange load of problems and responsibilities. In spite of the New York broker's blunt disbelief in the possibilities of a frontier newspaper, I had become more and more convinced during those weeks that only through some such medium could the homesteaders express their own needs, in their ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... in the world can give, can equal in intensity, these complex joys I had when asleep; waking joys seem so slight, so vague in comparison—so much escapes the senses through lack of concentration and undivided attention—the waking perceptions are so blunt. ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... smug and confident contention: "Medicine is a science, one and indivisible," so impressive and undented as it was. Sir Astley Cooper in his plain, blunt way is reported to have described his own idea of his own calling as "a science founded on conjecture and improved by murder." The State of New York has rudely stepped in and legally and irrevocably recognized ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... Downe Wright has a real heartfelt satisfaction in saying malicious things, and in thrusting herself into company where she must know she is unwelcome, for the sole purpose of saying them. Yet many people are blessed with such blunt perceptions that they are not at all aware of her real character, and only wonder, when she has left them, what made them feel so uncomfortable when she was present. But she has put me in such a bad humour that I must go out of door and apostrophise the sun, like Lucifer. Do come, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... scholarship have no seductions for them, for they are aware that the labour is great and the glory moderate, and that the field is engrossed by clever specialists not too well disposed towards intruders. They see plainly there is no room for them here. The blunt uncompromising honesty of the scholars thus delivers them from undesirable company of a kind which the "historians" proper have still occasionally to put ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... hold, as it is long, and connected with a projecting upper lip, which is almost prehensile in this variety. His experience proved that three dogs were sufficient to hold any bear, as the claws, although dangerous to the tender skin of a man, were too blunt to tear the tough but ...
— Wild Beasts and their Ways • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... the superstition, but his thought had been colored by Scot.[43] His assault, however, was less direct and studied than that of his master. Scot was a man of uncommonly serious temperament, a plain, blunt-spoken, church-going Englishman who covered the whole ground of superstition without turning one phrase less serious than another. His pupil, if so Harsnett may be called, wrote earnestly, even aggressively, but with a sarcastic and bitter humor ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... wind themselves through, pretty much beyond direct shot-range of either d'Eu or Fontenoy. And have actually got into the interior mystery of the French Line of Battle,—which is not a little astonished to see them there! It is over a kind of blunt ridge, or rising ground, that they are coming: on the crown of this rising ground, the French regiment fronting it (GARDES FRANCAISES as it chanced to be) notices, with surprise, field-cannon pointed the wrong way; actual British ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... Lady Charlotte's blunt "Oh!" when he entered her room and bowed upon the announcement of his name, was caused by an instantaneous perception and refection that it would be prudent to keep her grand-daughter Philippa, aged between seventeen and eighteen, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and makes itself felt as far south as Earith Bridge, where the Ouse comes leisurely down with its clear pools and reed-beds. At the extremity of the southernmost of all the fingers of the Isle, a big hamlet clusters round a great ancient church, whose blunt tower is visible for miles above its grove of sycamores. More than twelve centuries ago an old saint, whose name I think was Owen, though it was Latinised by the monks into Ovinus, because he had the ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... trap is set at the side of the beaten path of the tiger and is sprung by the animal pressing against a string in passing. The bow is large and powerful and is secured to two upright posts about eight inches apart. The string is drawn back and a blunt stick is then inserted between the bow string and the inside centre of the bow, thus holding the latter in a bent position. A stout stick, with a flattened end is next inserted between the end of the blunt stick and the inside ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... her. "You are a little unkind to hurry me in this way," he said, trying to smile, "since you compel me to put my request in very plain blunt language. However, that is perhaps the best plan. Twice I have come to you intending to speak, and have been ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... gave off the scent of pomade freely; his slightly thinning brown hair and the pointy tips to a reddish mustache lay sleek with it. There was the merest suggestion of embonpoint to the waistcoat, but not so that, when he dropped his eyes, the blunt toes of his russet shoes were not in evidence. His pin-checked suit was pressed to a knife-edge, and his brocaded cravat folded to a nicety; there was an air of complete well-being about him. Men can acquire that sort of eupeptic well-being in ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... The silence following this blunt statement was sickening. Up to that moment, in spite of every fact brought to my knowledge, I had secretly believed this condition of affairs impossible. Surely somewhere, through some legal form, Judge Beaucaire had guarded the future safety of this young woman, whom he had admitted into ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... hardest to be personally devout. Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner. The name of Renan would doubtless occur to many persons as an example of the way in which breadth of knowledge may make one only a dilettante in possibilities, and blunt the acuteness of one's living faith.[332] If religion be a function by which either God's cause or man's cause is to be really advanced, then he who lives the life of it, however narrowly, is a better servant than he who merely knows about it, however much. Knowledge about life is ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... transaction, that a band actuated by such hellish purposes, should have resisted so feebly, when met by the whites in arms. Desperation alone, one would think, might have led to greater efforts. More than twenty of them attacked Dr. Blunt's house on Tuesday morning, a little before day-break, defended by two men and three boys. They fled precipitately at the first fire; and their future plans of mischief, were entirely disconcerted and broken up. Escaping thence, each individual sought his own safety either ...
— The Confessions Of Nat Turner • Nat Turner
... excitedly appealed to the governor, saying: "Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written." Pilate's action in so wording the title, and his blunt refusal to permit an alteration, may have been an intended rebuff to the Jewish officials who had forced him against his judgment and will to condemn Jesus; possibly, however, the demeanor of the submissive ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... out loud. It was an extended business statement acknowledging the receipt of the book manuscript and Paul's blunt announcement of the terms he was willing to make for it publication; cash down, waiving all royalty rights, the book to be published entirely at the publisher's risk and the plates to be the property of the publishing house, no rights ...
— The High Calling • Charles M. Sheldon
... but much sorrow must also result from his extra intelligence. If he rises higher, he will sink far lower, too. The placid, ordinary youth thinks less, and digests his food better, and has a pleasanter time, on the whole. A sensitive child feels with a keen freshness that only years can blunt. To see some fool of a man crushing a clever child is heart-rending. By curious, misguided instincts, children always look up to their full-grown companions; and the result is, that any adult ass can nip in the bud ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... perplexing. I remember formerly thinking that all lateral flexures probably occurred deep beneath the surface, and have been brought into view by an enormous superincumbent mass having been denuded. If a large and deep box were filled with layers of damp paper or clay, and a blunt wedge was slowly driven up from beneath, would not the layers above it and on both sides become greatly convoluted, whilst those towards the top would be only slightly arched? When I spoke of the Andes being comparatively recent, I suppose ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Galgacus. The extent to which they differed from the Britons is not to be collected from the account of Tacitus. We expect that they will be as brave; but ruder. Still, the details which we get from the life of Agricola are few. They fought from chariots, and their swords were broad and blunt. As the swords of the Bronze period were thin and pointed, this is an argument in favour of iron having become the usual material for warlike weapons as far north as the Grampians. The historical testimony to the inferior civilization of the North Britons, or ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... method that makes it open to doubt, whether the additional stories referred to as printed with the Constantinople edition did really emanate from our author's pen. These additions are sharply misogynist; the poet does not even attempt to blunt their point. They include "The Widow's Vow" (the widow, protesting undying constancy to her first love, eagerly weds another) and "Woman's Contentions." In the latter, a wicked woman is denounced with the wildest invective. She has demoniac ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... of softening the effect of her words, appeared to call attention to the width of the gulf that separated Kesiah's generation from her own. The edge of sweetness to her look tempered but did not blunt the keeness with which it pierced. This quality of independent decision had always attracted him, and as he watched her walking under the hanging garland of the wild grape, he told himself in desperation that she was the only woman he had ever ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... the same.' But when the trustee had made the above-mentioned motion for the mourners to depart, and talked of the house being immediately let, honest Dinmont got upon his feet and stunned the company with this blunt question, 'And what's to come o' this poor lassie then, Jenny Gibson? Sae mony o'us as thought oursells sib to the family when the gear was parting, we may do something for her amang ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... "she is very little the worse. The teeth of the trap had grown blunt, although they were strong enough ...
— The Story of Bawn • Katharine Tynan
... to the slow-worm of Europe. Several species occur at Para. Those brought to me were generally not much more than a foot in length. They are of cylindrical shape, having, properly speaking, no neck, and the blunt tail which is only about an inch in length, is of the same shape as the head. This peculiar form, added to their habit of wriggling backwards as well as forwards, has given rise to the fable that they ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... farmers and there is a general complaint of lack of labour, at a time when there are persistent pleas for oversea expansion, there are in Japan twice or thrice as many people applying for land in the island as are granted entry. The blunt truth is that the State has felt itself compelled to spend so much on military and naval expansion that the claims of Hokkaido for the wherewithal for better roads, more railway line and better credit have ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... and do you not remember afterwards what a piercing bitter feeling came on you? Is not the feeling of a bad conscience different from any other feeling, and more distressing than any other, till we have accustomed ourselves to it? Persons do accustom themselves and lose this feeling; but till we blunt our conscience, it is very painful. And why? It is the feeling of God's displeasure, and therefore it is so painful. Consider then: if God's displeasure is so distressing to us, must not God's approval ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... brisk, obsequious, and insinuating in manner, and usually betraying minute attention to externals. The American is always plain in dress—evincing no more taste in costume than in horticulture—steady, calm, and never lively in manner: blunt, straightforward, and independent in discourse. The one is amiable and submissive, the other choleric and rebellious. The Frenchman always recognises and bows before superior rank: the American acknowledges no superior, and bows ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... the extreme coldness of the air in the uppermost part, and the extreme coldness of the earth in the bottom, the sea there being but of small depth, whereby the one accidental coldness doth meet with the other; and the sun, not having his reflection so near the Pole, but at very blunt angles, it can never be dissolved after it is frozen, notwithstanding the great length of their day: for that the sun hath no heat at all in his light or beams, but proceeding only by an accidental reflection which there wanteth ...
— Voyages in Search of the North-West Passage • Richard Hakluyt
... objection to have Gifted Hopkins about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him. The youthful bard entertained her very innocently with his bursts of poetry, but she was in no danger from a young person so intimately associated with the yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-paper parcel. There was Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any very particular solicitude. Myrtle had evidently found out that she was handsome and stylish and all that, and it was not very likely ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... and freshly gathered, the skins are easiest removed by taking each one in a coarse cloth and rubbing it; a little coarse salt used in the cloth will be found serviceable for this purpose. If almost ripe, scrape with a blunt knife, wash very clean, and rinse in cold water. Boiling is the best method of cooking; new potatoes are not good steamed. Use only sufficient water to cover, and boil till tender. Drain thoroughly, cover closely with a clean cloth, and dry ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg
... signification of words, which is the cause that there are so few exact synonyms. It is this also which renders the dictionary meaning of a word, by universal remark so imperfect an exponent of its real meaning. The dictionary meaning is marked out in a broad, blunt way, and probably includes all that was originally necessary for the correct employment of the term; but in process of time so many collateral associations adhere to words, that whoever should attempt to use them with no other ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... against the trunk. Bobby sat cross-legged on the ground watching her—and him. Kitty and Margaret reclined flat on their backs, gazing up through the leaves. Morris alone showed a trace of activity. He had fished from his pockets the short, blunt stub of a pencil, a penny and a piece of tissue paper. The latter he had superimposed over the penny and by rubbing with the pencil was engaged in making a tracing of the pattern on the coin. Through his preoccupation Bobby at last ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... typical cases of a union of naked motile gametes by a fusion which begins at the beaked ends, and results in the formation of an immotile spherical zygote surrounded by a cell-wall, in Leptosira it is noticeable that the fusion begins at the blunt end; in a species of Chlamydomonas the two gametes are each included in a cell-wall before fusion; and in many cases the zygote retains for some time its motility with the double number of cilia. Again, in oogamous reproduction, while in general only ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... brusquely, "what's this about Rydal?" He pointed with a blunt finger to the card that he had thrown on to ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... not beautiful, he was not good looking. But perhaps I should have loved him if he had been the one, and tolerated him longer if he had been the other. He was aggressive; he was open, direct always; he was not blunt, yet he was free from the all-prevalent use of the preliminary. He loved me! And he very soon told me as much and more. He made no concealment of the fact to me, or indeed to others. He loved me, was proud of it, and glad to have all know of it. Of course this was just what I wanted, for ...
— The Inner Sisterhood - A Social Study in High Colors • Douglass Sherley et al.
... yielded crania and jaws broken by blunt weapons, whilst on other crania have been made out scratches and stripes which could only have been produced after the hair and skin had been removed. In the caves of the Petit-Morin valley, M. ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... you so far from home, that you can't tramp back in time to pat any more of your friends on our track," was the blunt reply. "Another couple of hundred miles, and, if you behave yourself, we'll ...
— Dave Dashaway and his Hydroplane • Roy Rockwood
... quantity; perhaps thirty or forty cubic feet, with pools and waterfalls. A tree that stands all along the banks here must be very fond of water; its roots lie close-packed down the stream, like hanks of guts, so as to make often a corrugated walk, each root ending in a blunt tuft of filaments, plainly to drink water. Twice there came in small tributaries from the left or western side—the whole plateau having a smartish inclination to the east; one of the tributaries in a handsome little web of silver ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... behind the rural, Ramon reined up. Slowly he lowered the muzzle of his gun. The rural called the name of one of his fellows. The answer came in a blunt crash, which rippled its harsh echoes across the sounding hills. The rural flung up his arms and pitched forward, rolling to Waring's feet. The gunman leaped up, and, snatching his carbine from the rock, swung round and took his six-gun from the rural's ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... influenced the courageous ladies, whose names in the present century have been so brilliantly inscribed on the record of Eastern travel; such as Lady Hester Stanhope, Lady Duff Gordon, Lady Baker, Miss Edwards, and Lady Blunt. And this motive it was, strengthened by a naturally adventurous disposition, which induced Mademoiselle Alexina Tinne—of whose career we are now about to speak—to incur the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... under a leaden sky. The yellow undulating sandy plain was like a frozen sea that had no end, and so far as eye could see was only bounded by the dark orb of heaven. Here and there, grey, cleft, cone-shaped rocks and blunt-cornered stone boulders or blocks and flat-topped stones not unlike a table rose out of the sand-ocean. Two such stones were situated close together; one was partly covered by the yellow quicksand, the other stood higher out of the ground. On each of them lay a man stretched ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... Frenchman. The dinner was very cheerful: my lord, at the head of the table, looked only like his lady in a riding-dress. However, he received one mortifying trial of his temper - he had sent to request sailing up the Tamer next day with Sir Richard Bickerton; and he had a blunt refusal, in a note, during our repast. Not an officer in the fleet would accommodate him; their resentment of the dinner slight ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... bitter days of the Rebellion. A great cheer hit the morning silence and echoed over the bay to each transport at anchor. With a smile of genuine pleasure, General Botha brought his hand to the salute. And away we went, the tender steaming full speed ahead, blunt-nosed barges surging in her wake, ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... letter with considerable attention, and it occasioned me many reflections. To my way of thinking it contained a very interesting picture of a blunt, downright, honest mind. "It is a melancholy consideration," said I to myself; "but such is man! To have judged from appearances one would have said, this is a fellow to have taken fortune's buffets and rewards with an incorruptible mind. And yet see where it all ends! This man was ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... would seem, really liked his incorrigible Quaker neighbor, and could enjoy heartily his wit and humor, even when exercised at the expense of his own ecclesiastical dignity. He admired his blunt honesty and courage. Surrounded by flatterers and self- seekers, he found satisfaction in the company and conversation of one who, setting aside all conventionalisms, saw only in my Lord Bishop a poor fellow-probationer, and addressed him on terms of conscious ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... be as well to explain the difference between a tournament and a joust. Jousting, or tilting, was a frequent amusement; in this the knights fought with blunt lances, and each tried to break his opponent's lance or to unhorse him. But in a tournament they engaged with sharp weapons, and the combatants were often wounded, sometimes killed outright. The large open space in St. James's Park, next to the Horse Guards, was at first ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... they had been together. Instantly she had wanted her, and, never hesitating in efforts to get what she wanted, a month after the meeting at the little Inn of Le Bon Laboureur she invited her to be her guest in a trip around the world. The invitation was blunt. She had long wanted to take this trip, had long been looking for the proper companion. She had a dog, but he wasn't allowed to come to the table. Would she go? Her uncle and aunt would not let ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... money," he added with blunt directness. "I want you to tell Mrs. Marvin that I'll lend her enough to take you ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... a minute while I look it up," I begged. Feverishly I turned over the leaves of the telephone directory and, cutting with a blunt finger the page containing the small advertisement that keeps my name before the public eye, at last found and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... silent, for he hardly liked to oppose his reasons to Reginald's blunt speech, and Reginald, dismissing the subject from his mind, began to talk of something else. He ran on very volubly for a little while, without receiving any interruption from his brother, and, looking at him, he saw very plainly that Louis was not paying ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... biting eyes avoided them like those of a sullen child who does not want to see. But Miss Edwards appeared to be not easily depressed. She waved her hand in friendly thanks for the cigarette case which Francey tossed across to her, and, having selected her cigarette with blunt, viciously manicured fingers, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... and the circumstance that he brought the writings of Aristotle from conquered Athens to Rome attests withal his interest in more serious reading. The specific type of Roman character rather repelled him. Sulla had nothing of the blunt hauteur which the grandees of Rome were fond of displaying in presence of the Greeks, or of the pomposity of narrow-minded great men; on the contrary he freely indulged his humour, appeared, to the scandal doubtless ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... forceps. The broad blunt nose will scalp off the growths without any injury to the normal basal tissues. Voice-destroying and stenosing trauma are thus ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... despair, and he grasped and shook the hand of Captain Erskine, who had thus been the means of relieving his conscience, with an energy of gratitude and feeling that almost drew tears from the eyes of that blunt but ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... in his chair and twisted his blunt features into an expression of withering contempt. Then he took up a glass and drank, and discovered too late that in the excitement of the moment he had made free with ...
— At Sunwich Port, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... man with bushy red-gray eyebrows, a stubble of roan beard over his blunt, common face. One foot was short in his boot, as if he had lost his toes in a blizzard, a mark not uncommonly set by unfriendly nature on the men who defied its force in that country. He wore a duck shooting-jacket, the pockets of it bulging as ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... father, "nine disks of wax. You see they are very small, but so they shall serve my purpose the better. Will each of you take one and retire from the table and write upon it the thing he most desires? Now, my dear friends, brevity is ever as the point of the lance. Wit is blunt and Truth half armed without it. I lay ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... appearance, cooking his rice. When Yue-ts'un perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and as he had lost his teeth, and his tongue was blunt, he made ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... to swear fidelity. One after another they came near, kissed the cross, and saluted the usurper. Then it came to the turn of the soldiers of the garrison. The tailor of the company, armed with his big blunt scissors, cut off their queues. They shook their heads and touched their lips to Pugatchef's hand; the latter told them they were pardoned and enrolled ...
— The Daughter of the Commandant • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... the great city; I love the sense of the warm human tide flowing all about me. I love to look into the strange, dark, eager, sensitive, blunt faces. ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... was sluggishly butting waves with her blunt bows in the lower harbor, Cap'n Sproul hanging to the weather-worn wheel, and roaring perfectly awful profanity at the clumsy attempts of ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... inability to hold to the salient points; but he still kept his hand on the rudder of the discussion, avoided the fogs of the supernatural and religious on the one side towards which the little old man persisted in pushing, and, on the other, the blunt views of the butcher and the man who had told the foul stories; and contented himself with watching and learning the opinion of the company rather than ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... the Diamond K ranch, near Manti," said the stranger, with blunt sharpness that made the Judge blink. "I've a case on in the Manti court at ten o'clock tomorrow—today," he corrected. "They are going to try to swindle me out of my land, and I've got to have a lawyer—a real one. I could have got half a dozen in Manti—such as they are—but I want somebody who ...
— 'Firebrand' Trevison • Charles Alden Seltzer
... as the boys could see, was just like a steam launch in shape, only much lighter in weight. It had a sharp bow, and a blunt stern. From the stern there extended a large propeller, the blades being ...
— Through the Air to the North Pole - or The Wonderful Cruise of the Electric Monarch • Roy Rockwood
... and citizenship, and its effects upon theme. "War and civilization," said one of the great English ministers, "are contradictory terms, even as Christ and Mars." Particularly damaging is the effect of war upon citizens. For does it not blunt the sensibilities, harden the heart, inflame the mind with passions, and deaden the consciences of men? Said the same great English preacher, "The sword that smites the enemy abroad, also lays bare the primeval savage within the citizen ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... opinion about anything depends not so much on what he sees, but on how it reacts on himself; and his lasting impression of any object depends less on the object itself than on the point of view from which he regards it. Thus by a sparing use of examples, lessons, and pictures, you may blunt the sting of sense and delay nature while following her ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... down with the ready, Liz? Does he send to make inquiries? A cool hand—cooler than the old man. Won't out with the blunt till he knows what ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... nothing in his memory to warn him of what followed, nothing to put him up to the absolutely diabolical fury of the onslaught he had to meet in the next few seconds. He certainly did his level best with such weapons as Nature had given him, but his blunt, hooked beak and the claws he had not got seemed suddenly meager against the hammering, tearing, stabbing, rending dagger weapons ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... odd noses in vogue, Each nose is turn'd up at its brother; Broad and blunt they call platter and pug, And thus they take snuff at ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 322, July 12, 1828 • Various
... with enjoyment as he unfolded the situation. At the mention of Grimsby, Holloway grunted with disgust—it may have been a variety of professional jealousy. Who knows? However, the problem fascinated the mysterious young woman, who blushed, in spite of herself, when Shirley put his blunt ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks of open-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and armor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces and the twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And, he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder in every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and get ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... he. "So stumpy and blunt. And it has been so very useful always. I could wind it around a stick to hold myself up when my paws were full, and many a time I have rolled eggs across the floor by curling it around them." Then he heard Rat voices and scampered out and down ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... unevenly on the top of her head, as if the child who owned the doll had driven a tack through it anywhere, so that it only got fastened on. Another remarkable thing in this little old woman was, that the same child seemed to have damaged her face in two or three places with some blunt instrument in the nature of a spoon; her countenance, and particularly the tip of her nose, presenting the phenomena of several dints, generally answering to the bowl of that article. A further remarkable thing in this little old woman was, that ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... about the Scarups. But do you suppose he didn't know? Uncle Titus Oldways was as sharp as he was blunt. ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... in his hand. It was a species of blotting-book made of very thin blue paper, and which seemed to be slightly oiled. Between each leaf of blue paper there was a sheet of white paper. He took out of his pocket a sort of blunt bodkin, saying, "The first thing to hand will serve your purpose, a nail or a match," and he traced with his bodkin on the first leaf of the book the word "Republic." Then turning over the leaves, he said, ...
— The History of a Crime - The Testimony of an Eye-Witness • Victor Hugo
... the capillary harvest of the past twenty-four hours with a thoroughness, a rapidity, a security, and a facility which were a surprise, almost a revelation. The idea of a guarded cutting edge is an old one; I remember the "Plantagenet" razor, so called, with the comb-like row of blunt teeth, leaving just enough of the edge free to do its work. But this little affair had a blade only an inch and a half long by three quarters of an inch wide. It had a long slender handle, which took apart for packing, and was put together with the greatest ease. It was, in short, a lawn-mower ...
— Our Hundred Days in Europe • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... she gathered all the bittersweet berries, swamp holly, and wild rose seed heads she could find. She strung the corn on fine cotton cord putting a rose seed pod between each grain, then used the bittersweet berries to terminate the blunt ends of the branches, and climb up the trunk. By the time she had finished this she was really interested. She achieved a gold star for the top from a box lid and a piece of gilt paper Polly had carried home from school. With ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... act on entering the house, was to release White. He was still lying where I had seen him last. He appeared to have made no headway with the cords on his wrists and ankles. I came to his help with a rather blunt pocket-knife, and he rose stiffly and began to chafe ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse
... afternoon there were foot-races, horse-races, and leaping competitions, and the dances about the May-pole were prolonged far into the night. The second day, early in the morning, the barriers were opened, and trials of skill with the blunt sword, jousting with the blunt lance at the quintain, and wrestling began, and continued almost till sunset. Tournament with sharpened lance or sword, when the combatants fight with risk of serious wounds, can take place ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... cheese, But lasts like iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... glanced vaguely at the letter which Oswyn had abandoned, and he wondered—but quite inconsequently, and with no heart to make the experiment—whether any further perusal of those disgraceful lines could explain or palliate the blunt obloquy of the writer's conduct. His concise, legal habit of mind forbade him to cherish ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And the man-eater turned on me. You know the South Seas, and you know that ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... composure and smiling calmness of Count von Hardenberg. It was not given me to weigh the interests and the conduct of friends and foes with prudent tranquillity and magnanimous impartiality. I am no polished courtier, but only a blunt, upright German, and as such your majesty must allow me to speak to you. Well, my honest German heart revolts at what M. Napoleon is pleased to call a treaty of peace, and what, it seems to me, would be ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... his kinsman in great esteem, and had never been on the best of terms with him in the past. Nevertheless, he was very far from suspecting him of what King implied. To convince him that he did Sir Lewis an injustice, Ralegh put the blunt question to ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... in peace, and only be in danger when we go visiting from one little river to another. And as for the great pike, we will leave him alone in the big river to rage hungrily up and down. His teeth will soon grow blunt, for there will be ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... Even the blunt Duke of Wellington wrote as follows to the Count d'Orsay under date of April 9, 1849: "I rejoice at the prosperity of France and of the success of the president of the Republic. Every thing tends towards the ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... spite of the universal character of European decadence there was still a modicum of health, still an instinctive premonition of what is harmful and dangerous, residing in the German soul, then it would be precisely this blunt resistance to Wagner which I should least like to see underrated. It does us honour, it gives us some reason to hope: France no longer has such an amount of health at her disposal. The Germans, these loiterers ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... of that century—a man in whom we recognise a union of Roman, Hebrew, and English qualities—the faith of the Jew, the firmness of the Roman, and the homespun simplicity of the Englishman of his own age—in purpose and in powers "an armed angel on a battle-day;" in manners a plain blunt corporal; and in language always a stammerer, and sometimes a buffoon; the middle-class man of his time, with the merits and the defects of his order, but touched with an inspiration as from heaven, lifting him far above all the aristocracy, ...
— Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham • Edmund Waller; John Denham
... six were armed with sassafras bows, and nicely feathered spruce arrows, with pewter heads, blunt, that they might not stick into and be lost in the trees. Their quivers were of pasteboard rolled in glue, upon a tapering form, and their arm-guards of hard thick leather, securely fastened to their left fore-arms by small straps and buckles. And when, ...
— Harper's Young People, July 6, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... who was a blunt man in spite of his fat. "You want us to keep Jack from fightin', but you don't want us to hurt the other gent. What you want? Hogtie ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... open at a deep brown throat, leggings of some thin material, boots, and a funny little patched brown coat and pointed hood made all in one, and hanging down with a fulness almost of skirts about the small determined legs. The accompanying dog was a very sympathetic, blunt-nosed, round-headed, curly-coated type, whose whiteness, which positively invited the stroking hand, was broken by two great black blotches set all askew on the back, and by a black patch which ringed the left eye ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... Hero and Leander appeared in 1598. The first edition, containing only Marlowe's portion of the poem, is entitled Hero and Leander. By Christopher Marloe. London, Printed by Adam Islip, for Edward Blunt. 1598. 4to. The title-page of the second edition, which contains the complete poem, is Hero and Leander: Begun by Christopher Marloe; and finished by George Chapman. Ut Nectar, Ingenium. At London, Printed by Felix Kingston, for Paule Linley, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... the Unciform bone of the wrist. V was the Vein which a blunt lancet miss'd. W was Wax, from a syringe that flow'd. X, the Xaminers, who may be blow'd! Fol ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... of my drawers there was the first draft of a [p.144] secret paper on this subject, which expressed the views of the Military Members of the Council in blunt terms, and which amounted in reality to a crushing indictment of the Prime Minister and his Cabinet. I have a copy of the draft in my possession, but as it was a secret document it would be improper to give details of its contents; ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Renaud! You are the blunt well-wisher, I suppose, a type I detest! How can I help myself! I have chosen, and ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... does not the habit of frequenting her give rise! To set them forth worthily, the marvellous art which the little printer was to acquire were not too much. One needs the pen of a Michelet; and I have but a rough, blunt pencil. Let us try, nevertheless: even when poorly clad, truth ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... axe be blunt it demands more strength:[293] Only through intelligence doth exertion avail. 11. If the serpent bites before the spell, Then ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... two, to the disadvantage of the secretary of state; the usual clatter that attends any important personage in a trivial scrape ensued; Mr. Gladstone's explanations, simple and veracious as the sunlight in their substance, were over-skilful in form, and half a dozen blunt, sound sentences would have stood him in far better stead. 'There was on my part in this matter,' he says in a fugitive scrap upon it, 'a singular absence of worldly wisdom.'[214] To colonial policy at this stage I discern no particular contribution, and the matters that I have named ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... about his ability," was the blunt reply, "is his ability to borrow a few hundreds from any one fool enough to lend it to him, and then invent excuses for not paying it back. He's good at that, if you like. Still, don't let me set you against him, Mr. Phipps. Every shilling he gets out of you and your company is ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... this must be so in every subject. We are all of us willing enough to accept dead truths or blunt ones; which can be fitted harmlessly into spare niches, or shrouded and coffined at once out of the way, we holding complacently the cemetery keys, and supposing we have learned something. But a sapling ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... in court upon his blunt confession of having misconducted himself with Mme Boursier fifteen days after her husband's death seemed to evoke nothing but surprise in Kostolo. He was then asked if he had proposed marriage to Mme ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... doesn't this shew that there's a lot of rot about modern science? Between ourselves, you know, it's horribly cruel: you must admit that it's a deuced nasty thing to go ripping up and crucifying camels and monkeys. It must blunt all the ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... tree or sugar bag (wild honey) by means of a tomahawk of green stone; the handle is formed of a vine, and fixed in its place with gum. It is astonishing what a quantity of work is got through in the day with these blunt tomahawks." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... a spruce, dapper little gentleman, brisk, obsequious, and insinuating in manner, and usually betraying minute attention to externals. The American is always plain in dress—evincing no more taste in costume than in horticulture—steady, calm, and never lively in manner: blunt, straightforward, and independent in discourse. The one is amiable and submissive, the other choleric and rebellious. The Frenchman always recognises and bows before superior rank: the American acknowledges no superior, and bows to no man ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... rejoined, "The blunt weapon that I carry would surely not cost Caesar his life, even if he were ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... existing strength of the navies of France and Italy, it is not thought to be necessary to discuss at this stage of the proceedings the tonnage allowance of these nations, but the United States proposes that this subject be reserved for the later consideration of the Conference." This somewhat blunt, matter-of-fact way of stating the case gave unexpected offense to the French delegation. During the next four or five weeks, while Great Britain, the United States, and Japan were discussing the case of the Mutsu ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... in the race of life, and revenge ourselves by swearing that he is an idiot still, and that idiocy is a qualification for good fortune? Swift somewhere says that a paper-cutter does its work all the better when it is blunt, and converts the fact into an allegory of human affairs showing that decorous dulness is an over-match for genius. Macaulay was incapable, both in a good and bad sense, of Swift's trenchant misanthropy. ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... is they who will curtail their consumption if the price has fallen and it is they who constitute the seller's problem, and help to keep down prices for the rest of us. The rest of us—it is well to be quite blunt about it—simply do not count in this connection. We have no cause then to plume ourselves that we have disproved the truth of economic laws when we declare that we seldom weigh the utility of anything against its price. All that ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... our hid passion: then, with lifted hands, He begged me, by my father's sacred soul, Not to espouse you, if he died in fight; For, if he lived, and we were conquerors, He had such things to urge against our marriage, As, now declared, would blunt my sword in ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... prince's tent, at the very moment that Missouf was brought before him. Thou wilt doubtless be pleased to hear that the prince thought me beautiful; but thou wilt be sorry to be informed that he designed me for his seraglio. He told me, with a blunt and resolute air, that as soon as he had finished a military expedition, which he was just going to undertake, he would come to me. Judge how great must have been my grief. My ties with Moabdar were already dissolved; ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... now a prisoner within the Federal lines.[517] His capture had been accomplished by strategy only a short time before and not without strong suspicion that he had been in collusion with his captors. Early in August, General Blunt, determined that the country north of the Arkansas should not be abandoned, notwithstanding the retrograde movement of Colonel Salomon, had ordered Salomon, now a brigadier in command of the Indian Expedition, ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... a savage cetacean, probably the same with the "thrasher," about fifteen feet in length, blunt-nosed, strong of jaw, with cruel teeth. On its back is a fin beginning about two thirds the way from tip to tail, running close to the latter, and then sloping away to a point, like the jib of a ship. In the largest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... side porch, a little affair made to shelter the doorway, I saw Beverly Clarenden and Little Blue Flower. He was speaking gently, but with his blunt frankness, as he patted the two brown hands clinging to his arm. The Indian girl's white draperies were picturesque anywhere. In this dramatic setting they were startlingly beautiful, and her face, outlined in the dim light, ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... comrade of his youth had become the sovereign of three kingdoms. He was a most trusty, but not a very respectful, subject. There was nothing which he was not ready to do or suffer for William. But in his intercourse with William he was blunt and sometimes surly. Keppel, on the other hand, had a great desire to please, and looked up with unfeigned admiration to a master whom he had been accustomed, ever since he could remember, to consider as ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... cigarette stump and the charred match which had lighted it. In front lay a scattering of bright metallic fragments. Sheldon recognized their significance. Tudor was notching his steel-jacketed bullets, or cutting them blunt, so that they would spread on striking—in short, he was making them into the vicious dum-dum prohibited in modern warfare. Sheldon knew now what would happen to him if a bullet struck his body. It would leave a tiny ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... I was glad. Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson's care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces. I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to live, I resigned myself to ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... tree a score of long, blunt thorns, tough and black as whalebone, and drove them through a strip of wood in which I had burnt a row of holes to receive them, and made myself a comb, and combed out my long, tangled hair to ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... between her son and herself there was a gulf fixed, spanned by no bridge whatever; there was complete isolation; no boat plied between them at all. All the kindly human things which she loved were unintelligible to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the necessary small-change of existence—somebody's cold, somebody's dress, somebody's marriage or ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... rock of Sardonix; The steel but grinds, it breaks not, nor grows blunt; Then seeing that he cannot break his sword, Thus to himself he mourns for Durendal: "O good my sword, how bright and pure! Against The sun what flashing light thy blade reflects! When Carle passed through ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... underneath greyish or pale brown. "The hinder erect nose-leaf," according to Dobson's description, "equals the horse-shoe and slightly exceeds the sella in width, its free margin forming a segment of the circumference of a circle, with a small blunt projection in the centre and three vertical ridges on its concave front surface; sella large, with a prominent ridge in the centre, forming a small projection above and one smaller on each side; sides of the muzzle with prominent vertical leaves, three on each side; ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... uncommon, though Vergil sometimes quite happily represents the sound of things themselves, their swiftness and slowness, in the sound of his verse. When you hear, for example, the well-known procumbit humi bos, do you not seem to hear the blunt sound of the falling bull? Or when you read the line Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,[2] doesn't the sound of running horses strike your ears? But this effect, as I said, is uncommon, ...
— An Essay on True and Apparent Beauty in which from Settled Principles is Rendered the Grounds for Choosing and Rejecting Epigrams • Pierre Nicole
... Hundred Eighty-three Savonarola was appointed Lenten preacher at the Church of Saint Lorenzo in Florence. His exhortations were plain, homely, blunt—his voice uncertain, and his ugly features at times inclined his fashionable auditors to unseemly smiles. When ugliness forgets itself and gives off the flash of the spirit, it becomes magnificent—takes upon itself a halo—but this was not yet ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... thing at all times and seasons, and I've seen more than one man, or a dozen either, that might just as well have sawed away at their throats with a blunt knife as put the first glass to their lips. But we was both hungry, thirsty, tired, miserable, and pretty well done and beaten, though we hadn't had time to think about it. That drop of brandy seemed as if it had saved our lives. ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... he fears truth as soon as it does not agree with his opinions. Everything tends to render the people devout, but all is opposed to their being humane, reasonable, and virtuous. Religion seems to have for its object only to blunt the feeling and to dull the ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... suddenly, as has been said, where the current had scoured the bank. With the nose of the little boat pulled well up in the mud, the stern sloped almost level with the surface of the stream. The blunt, slanting bow of the pirogue banged into the plank gunwale and slid over it. The force of the blow dragged the cock-boat to one side and wrenched it free of the shore. It floated at the end of a tether but the bow of the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... as soon as they are large enough to handle. They must be lifted carefully with a small trowel, or if they are very small, such as Golden Feather, with a still smaller blunt article, disturbing the roots as little as possible. It should be done when the ground is wet, and preferably in the evening. In dry weather they should be well watered twelve hours before they are disturbed. Shade them from sun for one or ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink
... imaginations, there was something in Shelley's fate to mitigate pangs which yet, alas! could not be so mitigated; for hard reality brings too miserably home to the mourner all that is lost of happiness, all of lonely unsolaced struggle that remains. Still, though dreams and hues of poetry cannot blunt grief, it invests his fate with a sublime fitness, which those less nearly allied may regard with complacency. A year before he had poured into verse all such ideas about death as give it a glory of its own. He had, as it now seems, almost anticipated his own destiny; ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... of the young republic, it was thought, could be found, in spite of his impatience, restlessness, pugnacity, imprudence, and want of self-control; for he was intelligent, shrewd, high-spirited, and quick-sighted. The diplomatists could not stand before his blunt directness, and he generally carried his point by eloquence and audacity. His presence was commanding, and he impressed everybody by his magnetism and brainpower. So Congress, in 1785, appointed him minister to Great Britain. The King forced himself to receive Adams graciously in his closet, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XI • John Lord
... body in order to show its fine cutting. Now the Mocenigo hand, severe and even stiff in its articulations, has its veins finely drawn, its sculptor having justly felt that the delicacy of the veining expresses alike dignity and age and birth. The Vendramin hand is far more laboriously cut, but its blunt and clumsy contour at once makes us feel that all the care has been thrown away, and well it may be, for it has been entirely bestowed in cutting gouty wrinkles about the joints. Such as the hand is, I looked for its fellow. At first I thought it had been broken off, but, on clearing ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin
... alongside. The first lieutenant came up the side, and to Maitland's eager and blunt question, "Have you got him?" he answered in the affirmative. After the lieutenant came Savary, followed by Marshal Bertrand, who bowed and fell back a pace on the gangway to await the ascent of their master. And now came the little great man himself, ...
— The Surrender of Napoleon • Sir Frederick Lewis Maitland
... rows from the stage to the gallery and looks for a lover among the gallery gods at the back." Puffed up with this delightful chatter. "Come now, confess, won't you," I queried, "is this lady who loves me yourself?" The waiting maid smiled broadly at this blunt speech. "Don't have such a high opinion of yourself," said she, "I've never given in to any servant yet; the gods forbid that I should ever throw my arms around a gallows-bird. Let the married women see to that and kiss the ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... initials. In the next book, Poems by the Way, the number of different initials is fifty-nine. These early initials, many of which were soon discarded, are for the most part suggestive, like the first border, of the ornament in Italian manuscripts of the fifteenth century. In Blunt's Love Lyrics there are seven letters of a new alphabet, with backgrounds of naturalesque grapes and vine leaves, the result of a visit to Beauvais, where the great porches are carved with vines, in August, 1891. From that time onwards fresh designs were constantly added, ...
— The Art and Craft of Printing • William Morris
... been looking straight out before him with those fine blue eyes of his. There had been just a touch of sternness in his attitude. A stranger, coming into the room at that moment, would have said that here was a girl trying to coax her blunt, straightforward, military father into some course of action of which his honest nature disapproved. He might have been posing for a statue of Rectitude. As Jill spoke, ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... and sick men," to use her Majesty's tender phrases, kiss her shadow as it falls on them. The Emperor Napoleon does not make war to employ his armies, or to consolidate his power; he does so for the sake of an "idea," more or less generous and disinterested. The soul of mankind would revolt at the blunt, naked truth; and the taciturn emperor knows this, as he knows most things. This imperial hypocrisy, like every other hypocrisy, is a homage which vice pays to virtue. There cannot be a doubt that when the political crimes of kings and governments, the sores ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... by Peter Blunt's shack. Him an' Peter wus gassin' together, while you wus up ther' seein' Eve Marsham," Smallbones replied meaningly. "I 'lows Peter's mostly ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... of atmosphere. Everybody sympathized tacitly with Stephen, and she did not wonder, for there were times when she secretly took his part against herself. Only a few candid friends had referred to the rupture openly in conversation, but these had been blunt in ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... these ships was a spaceboat. The silently landed vessel, which was the smaller of the two, was several times the sizes of the only spacecraft ever seen on Darth outside the spaceport. Its design was somehow suggestive of a yacht. The other, larger, ship was blunt and soiled and space-worn, with patches on its ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... nearer and nearer to the brink of the abyss. The warning cry of "back" is challenged by the eager shout of "forward!" The older methods of social progress are abandoned as too slow. The older weapons of social defense are thrown aside as too blunt. Parliamentary discussion is powerless. It limps in the wake of the popular movement. The "state", as we knew it, threatens to dissolve into labor unions, conventions, boards of conciliation, and conferences. ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... himself under the alternative of being with him on decent and distant terms, or of breaking off with him altogether. The first of these courses might perhaps have been the wisest, but the other was the most congenial to the blunt and plain character of Hartley, vol. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... a pipe Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures; And of so easy and so plain a stop That the blunt monster with uncounted heads, The still-discordant wavering multitude, Can play upon it. 1544 SHAKS.: Henry ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... and tightened round the stem. The upper part is clothed with the curved, leaf-like tubercles, from 3 in. to 6 in. long, grey-green in colour, succulent, with a tough skin, triangular, and gradually narrowed to a blunt point, upon which are half a dozen or more thin, flexuous, horny filaments, neither spines nor hairs in appearance, but almost hay-like; the central one is about 5 in. long, and the others about half that length. The flowers are borne on the ends of the young, partly-developed tubercles, ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... carefully disordered and a big bunch of red flowers was pinned in her bosom stems upwards. Lenehan's eyes noted approvingly her stout short muscular body. Rank rude health glowed in her face, on her fat red cheeks and in her unabashed blue eyes. Her features were blunt. She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth. As he passed Lenehan took off his cap and, after about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute to the air. This he did by raising his hand ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... thereby. And the decisions show that, where a gift had for its object the maintenance and education of poor Jewish children, the statutes sustained the devise. In proof of this he quoted 1 Ambler, by Blunt, p. 228, case of De Costa, &c. Also, the case of Jacobs v. Gomperte, in the notes. Also, in the notes, 2 Swanston, p. 487, same case of De Costa, &c. Also, 7 Vesey, p. 423, case of Mo Catto v. Lucardo. Also, Sheppard, p. 107, ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... men in your position. It is a comparatively easy matter to draw a cheque to alleviate distress, but finding work for anybody to-day is next to impossible. However, as one can never tell what may turn up, let me ask you a blunt question. What are you fit for? ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... occur by spontaneous generation on the day that we took office. It began with the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 and continues our historic bipartisan American policy. Franklin Roosevelt said we "are determined to do everything possible to maintain peace on this hemisphere." President Truman was very blunt: "International communism seeks to crush and undermine and destroy the independence of the Americas. We cannot let that happen here." And John F. Kennedy made clear that "Communist domination in this hemisphere can never be ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was not so bewildering as to blind him to the reason why Nechutes had withheld this news from Ta-meri. The blunt Egyptian was not anxious ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... was diverted by a flutter of white at his elbow. He turned his head. The lonely passenger, a girl, was smiling mischievously into his face. But in her very dark eyes there was a blunt question. ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... handy. Every one uses it. I've seen Lady Loudwater use it to cut flowers, and Lord Loudwater to cut the end off a cigar—cursing, of course, because he couldn't lay his hands on a cigar-cutter, and the knife was blunt—and I've cut all kinds ...
— The Loudwater Mystery • Edgar Jepson
... since the night of the burglary, the night he had held her in his arms, and the blunt question sounded like a mockery set against the aching ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... chief priests, they excitedly appealed to the governor, saying: "Write not, The King of the Jews; but that he said, I am King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written." Pilate's action in so wording the title, and his blunt refusal to permit an alteration, may have been an intended rebuff to the Jewish officials who had forced him against his judgment and will to condemn Jesus; possibly, however, the demeanor of the submissive Prisoner, and His avowal of Kingship above all ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... enough to the fair complexion of Lettice, sat but ill on the Indian girl, accustomed to the free play of her limbs; its colour harmonising worse with her dark skin. Forgetting the progress Pocahontas had made in English, he said with slight caution to Mistress Audley, in his blunt fashion, "You will spoil the little savage, Madam, if she is thus allowed to be made ridiculous by being habited in the dress of a civilised dame. I owe her a debt of gratitude for saving my life; but that does not blind me to her faults, and the sooner she ...
— The Settlers - A Tale of Virginia • William H. G. Kingston
... SUFFOLK. Blunt-witted lord, ignoble in demeanour! If ever lady wrong'd her lord so much, Thy mother took into her blameful bed Some stern untutor'd churl, and noble stock Was graft with crab-tree slip, whose fruit thou art, And never ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... had been bitten by a large dog. There was no wound of the lids, but the eye was protruded from the socket. I first tried whether it could be reduced by gentle pressure, but I could not accomplish it. I then introduced the blunt end of a curved needle between the eye and the lid; and thus drawing up the lid with the right hand, while I pressed gently on the eye with the left hand, I accomplished my object. I then subtracted three ounces ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... Les sauvages fuient. C'est encore du ba teau de Monsieur Blunt qu'on tire. Quel beau courage! son bateau est ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... ahead. He did not impress us as a financier, but as a plain doctor of homely common sense. He said in public many things which threw much instructive light upon our buying and selling. He spoke some blunt but kindly truths even in the United States at whose supremacy in our markets ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... several pounds each. These are often of steel inlaid with gold or silver, and are buckled upon the foot with an elaborate strap and embossed medallion. These spurs do not lacerate the horse, as their points are blunt. The effect of the whole dress is almost dazzling, but the big hat set over the tight trousers and short coat gives ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... with its short broad beak and eye-wattles, the short-faced Tumbler {212} with its small conical beak, the Pouter with its great crop, long legs and body, the Fantail with its upraised, widely-expanded, well-feathered tail, the Turbit with its frill and short blunt beak, and the Jacobin with its hood. Now, if this same person could have viewed the pigeons kept before 1600 by Akber Khan in India and by Aldrovandi in Europe, he would have seen the Jacobin with a less perfect hood; the Turbit ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... be—some few still believe them to be—a "truth-loving nation." They had a passion, we were told, for truth, for accuracy, for scientific exactness. Theirs might be a blunt and brutal frankness, but they were ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... hand, and an iron battery from the shore. We were striving to ram the Ericsson, but we could not get close to her; our iron beak, too, was sticking in the side of the sunken Cumberland—we could only ram with the blunt prow. The Minnesota, as we passed, gave us all her broadside guns—a tremendous fusillade at point-blank range, which would have sunk any ship of the swan breed. The turtle shook off shot and shell, grape and canister, and answered with her bow gun. ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... I admired the blunt independence and practical philosophy of this homeless man. Although he was disagreeable to others, he was on good terms with himself, and seemed quite satisfied with his lot. If, when he had named his price for mending a pair of shoes, anybody ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... rude health yourself," said June in her blunt fashion. She noticed that Harley looked at Esther a great deal, and she made up her mind to tell him at the earliest opportunity that Esther was engaged. ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... no aims; I have only emotions. If we live for aims we blunt our emotions. If we live for aims, we live for one minute, for one day, for one year, instead of for every minute, every day, every year. The moods of one's life are life's beauties. To yield to all one's ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... his feelings came soon after, in the way of a blunt letter from Tom Moore demanding if Lord Byron was the author of "English Bards and ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the uncle you brought that letter from. He was my godfather, you know. This is my sister, Connie." Connie, who was a pretty, fair girl, looked embarrassed at her brother's blunt method of introduction, but he rattled on. "Rather good for a girl. Not so slow as most of them. Can take a turn with the bells or clubs"—by bells and clubs was meant dumb-bells and Indian-clubs—"and she can scout at cricket. Didn't I hear ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... mother, was taking a short stroll just before sundown. As they were about to return they espied the largest and strangest lizard they ever saw. It was nearly two feet long, with a perfectly round body, a broad, flat head, short legs and a short, blunt tail. It was a chunky little animal, all covered with a rough skin like an alligator and dotted with square warts. It seemed very tame and followed Mary into the tent where she made a warm nest for it in the corner near her bunk. It was very ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... against the partition; a man strangely improbable in appearance, with close-cropped grey hair, a young, fresh-coloured face, a bristling orange moustache, and a big, blunt nose. One could have believed him a soldier, a German, anything but what he was, a peasant from the furthest shores of Western Ireland, cut off from what we call civilisation by his ignorance of any language save his own ancient speech, wherein the ideas ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... very brown and parched-looking hill stood the little wooden hut, facing the valley of the Pohru and the Kaj-nag range. Hot and thirsty, we blessed the good Mr. Blunt, the kindly forest officer, who had so courteously given us permission to use the forest huts of the Lolab and the Machipura. Our blessings of Blunt turned swiftly to curses directed towards the chowkidar, who was not to be seen, and who had left ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... observed- -"She has the indifference of an old-world philosopher to the saying of speeches that are merely socially agreeable. She is ardent in soul, but suspicious in mind! She imagines that a pleasant word may often be used to cover a treacherous action, and if a man is as rude and blunt as myself, for example, she prefers that he should be rude and blunt rather than that he should attempt to conceal his roughness by an amiability which it is not his nature to feel." Here he looked up at me from the careful scrutiny of his nearly flayed ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... mountain range, through which we now were toiling, with the snow little more than a mantle for the peaks, and a sparkling veil for sunrise, dear Uncle Sam, who had often shown signs of impatience, drew me apart from the rest. Straightforward and blunt as he generally was, he did not seem altogether ready to begin, but pulled off his hat, and then put it on again, the weather being now cold and hot by turns. And while he did this he was thinking at his utmost, as every full vein of his forehead declared. And being at ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... abundant acid juices of the one with the sugar of the other. Thence came all vineyards and orchards. Digging in the soil tired him, but hope suggested that his pet ox might pull his forked stick; when the wooden stick wore blunt hope replaced it with an iron point; when the iron point refused to scour hope suggested steel; when the steel made his burden light and doubled the pace of his steeds, hope suggested a seat on the plow; when the riding-plow ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... holotype.—Carapace circular, widest at region of bridge; margin entire; dorsal surface smooth; anterior margin of carapace lacking tubercles; blunt vertebral ridge evident anteriorly; maximum length, 53.1 mm; greatest width, 46.3 mm; ...
— Description of a New Softshell Turtle From the Southeastern United States • Robert G. Webb
... the natives search in the forests till they find the sleeping place of this bird, which they know by seeing its dung upon the ground. It is generally in a low bushy tree. At night they climb up the trap, and either shoot the birds with blunt arrows, or even catch them alive with a cloth. In New Guinea they are caught by placing snares on the trees frequented by them, in the same way as the Red Paradise birds are caught in Waigiou, and which has already ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... perhaps, that of Monterey, presented a field which would have been selected by an ambitious captain upon which to gather laurels. So far as fame is concerned, the prospect—the promise in advance—was, "You may lose, but you cannot win." Yet Taylor, in his blunt, business-like view of things, seems never to have ...
— The Life and Public Service of General Zachary Taylor: An Address • Abraham Lincoln
... belief in the profit of knowledge, of information, but it has a suspicion of culture. There is a lingering notion in matters religious that something is lost by refinement—at least, that there is danger that the plain, blunt, essential truths will be lost in aesthetic graces. The laborer is getting to consent that his son shall go to school, and learn how to build an undershot wheel or to assay metals; but why plant in his mind those principles of taste which will make him ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... of this character,—mistakes to which the palaeontologist, however skilful, is peculiarly liable. The teeth of the two genera were essentially different. Those of the Dipterus, exclusively palatal, were blunt and squat, and ranged in two rectangular patches;[22] while those of the Diplopterus bristled along its jaws and were slender and sharp. Their tails, too, though both heterocercal, were diverse in their ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... the fore-and-afters, the Bluenose blunt-prows, came in early before the fog smooched out the loom of the trees and before it became necessary to guess at what the old card compasses had to reveal ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... These blunt words, so terrible if taken literally, were received by the other workmen with a roar of laughter. But Parry withdrew, thinking he ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... suspicion towards others did not make for brotherly love. The amenity of her manners suffered, too: though she kept to her original programme of not saying all she thought, yet what she was forced to say she blurted out in such a precise and blunt fashion that it made a disagreeable impression. At the same time, a growing pedantry in trifles warped both her imagination and her sympathies: under the aegis of M. P., she rapidly learned to be ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... seen the white letters and numbers which proclaimed her proper business. She was a trawler. In peace times she cast nets for fish in the North Sea. Now she flew the white ensign and on her fore-deck, above the high blunt bows, she carried ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... his coat and Christine came close to him and complied with the utmost willingness. The pin was a little blunt or rusted and it took her several seconds to put it in and fasten it. Their faces were almost on a level, and Noel's eyes looked closer than they had ever done before at her youthful loveliness. Hers were bent in complete absorption ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... his hand with frank and somewhat blunt cordiality on the Greek's shoulder, "like the grape of your own Chios, you cannot fail to be welcome at all times. But why would you ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... respond to this especial toast, to "The Ladies," or to women if you please, for that is the preferable term, perhaps; it is certainly the older, and therefore the more entitled to reverence. I have noticed that the Bible, with that plain, blunt honesty which is such a conspicuous characteristic of the Scriptures, is always particular to never refer to even the illustrious mother of all mankind as a "lady," but speaks of her as a woman. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the quarrels of states; and although the republic was then at war with Spain, more than one superb hidalgo might be seen, wrapped in his national gravity as in a mantle, and affecting a total disregard of the blunt or hostile observations made within his hearing by sailors of the Venetian navy, or by individuals smarting under the loss of ships and cargoes captured by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... said emphatically; "not those heavy, clumsy, blunt sabres, but well-made, keen-edged cutting and thrusting swords, something like your tulwars, but with a better hilt and grip. I would make the men perfect with their blades—thorough swordsmen. Let them use them well, and be clever with their guns; that is all that ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... the cove that the girls were loath to go. They climbed with reluctance up the steep sandy little path to the cliff. As they neared the top they could hear voices in altercation—a high-pitched, protesting, childish wail, and a blunt, uncompromising, scolding retort. On the road above stood an invalid carriage, piled up with innumerable parcels, and containing also a small boy. He was a charmingly pretty little fellow, with a very pale, delicately oval face, beautiful pathetic brown eyes, and ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... truth &c (fact) 494; unvarnished tale; light of truth. V. speak the truth, tell the truth; speak by the card; paint in its true colors, show oneself in one's true colors; make a clean breast &c (disclose) 529; speak one's mind &c (be blunt) 703; not lie &c 544, not deceive &c 545. Adj. truthful, true; veracious, veridical; scrupulous &c (honorable) 939; sincere, candid, frank, open, straightforward, unreserved; open hearted, true hearted, simple-hearted; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... estimable gentleman is, in point of being an unscrupulous superprig and fool, worse than Caesar Borgia and General Von Bernhardi rolled into one, and in foreign affairs a Bismarck in everything except commanding ability, blunt common sense, and freedom from illusion as to the nature and object of his own diplomacy. And the permanent officials in whose hands he is will probably deserve all that and something to spare. Thus you ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... now. He belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set like a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two—being all he had—gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... about anyhow instead of being hung up. How much loss there is in a year in the careless use of knives and plate! Whenever possible both of these get into the hands of the cook. Her own tools from neglect or misuse have become blunt or worse, and she takes the best blade and the plated or silver spoon whenever ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... get right out of here," said Merle, stepping toward the fence. Even Wilbur was daunted by the blunt warning from beyond. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... yelled, and swords Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. A craven hung along the battle's edge, And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel— That blue blade that the king's son bears,—but this Blunt thing—!" he snapt and flung it from his hand, And lowering crept away and left the field. Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead, And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, And ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... are often 5 meters long and 2 decimeters wide. The lower part of the older leaves stands up straight, while the upper half droops. The younger leaves are erect with only their tips bent down. The leaf spines are short, blunt, and conical. ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... compromising the entire corps in his Majesty's opinion. This surgeon, M. M——, lodged with General Dorsenne and some superior officers in a pretty country seat, belonging to the Princess of Lichtenstein, the concierge of the house being an old German who was blunt and peculiar, and served them with the greatest repugnance, making them as uncomfortable as possible. In vain, for instance, they requested of him linen for the beds and table; he always ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... hedge of splintered teeth, Yet strangers to the tongue, and with blunt stump Pitch-blackened sawing the air, ...
— Idylls of the King • Alfred, Lord Tennyson
... the party broke up. Rick and Scotty took their guests to Whiteside Pier, where Duke had left his car. As they roared up to the pier Rick had to swerve to avoid a pram, a blunt-ended rowboat, that had been tied carelessly in the place where he usually tied up. He wondered who owned it. Prams were ...
— The Electronic Mind Reader • John Blaine
... man cares less for the mode of reception, when I take mine ease at mine inn, than I do, for old soldiers are not very fastidious, and old travellers still less so; but give me sturdy John Bull, with his blunt plainness and true independence, before the silly insolence of a fellow, who thinks he shows his equality, by lowering the character of a man to that of a brute, in coarse exhibitions of assumed importance, which his vocation ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... by his blunt refusal the doctor had crudely hinted at his deception, he began to understand that he would need deception not only in the remote future, but to-day, and to-morrow, and in a month's time, and perhaps up to the very end of his life. In fact, in order to get away he would have to ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... one of the very last of the old school of Tories, and he occasionally acted as a leader of his party in the town. His extreme opinions, and his blunt speech in relation to these matters, frequently got him into "hot water." He was not a "newspaper politician," for, singularly enough, he was rarely seen to look at a newspaper, even at the news-room (then standing on the site now occupied by the Inland ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that pushed agreeably ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
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