Free translatorFree translator
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




More "Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books



... was through rows of tall wooden or brick structures, along streets traveled by everything from the latest European cars to plodding donkey carts. The people were dressed in a variety of costumes, from suits and dresses that would have been suitable in New York, to traditional Arab dress with flowing robes and the cloth headdress that is held in place by ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... pine-needles of last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm nursery. And down that narrow foot-path, meandering around the boulders and disappearing among the thickets, see what big loads of brushwood are moving towards us. Beneath them my swarthy and hardy peasants are plodding up the hill asweat and athirst. When I first descended to the wadi, one such load of brushwood emerging suddenly from behind a cliff surprised and frightened me. But soon I was reminded of the moving ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... counted too soon, and there was to be no hatching. Colin grew uneasy, and began to sniff up wind. I was maybe a quarter of a mile from the glen foot, plodding through the long grass of the hollow, when the behaviour of the dog made me stop and listen. In that still air sounds carry far, and I seemed to hear the noise of feet brushing through cover. The noise came both ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... rest as his well-considered project was from forwarding him to his inn. Yet I see we persevere. Fatigued with our former course, too listless to explore a new one, kept in action by inertness, moving only because we have been in motion, with a sort of plodding perseverance we resolve to measure back again the very same joyless, hopeless, and inglorious track. Backward and forward,—oscillation, space,—the travels of a postilion, miles enough to circle the globe in one short stage,—we have been, and we are yet to be, jolted and rattled ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... from Malines provided a spectacle which I shall never forget. For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers, and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been used to mask their position from German aeroplanes. Gendarmes in giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of green and yellow, carabineers with their shiny ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell

... immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... to the horses, while several passengers, who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage toiled on, plodding ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... table with food secured by his own hands direct from nature should feel a strong incentive to do his best. The coarse, unvaried diet, common to many farmers' homes, is the result of stolid minds and plodding ways. A better manhood and womanhood will be developed when we act upon the truth that varied and healthful sustenance improves blood and ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe

... talk about political means and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want maybe staring him in the face, yet—if he be a true man—with ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... me to a small picture of Jesus and his disciples leaving the upper room at Jerusalem after the Last Supper. This, too, was painted in the most realistic manner. The disciples, simple-minded fishermen, rude in features and dress, were plodding homeward, while Christ himself gazed at the stars and drew the attention of his nearest companions to some of the brightest. Tolstoi expressed especial admiration for this picture, saying that at times it affected him like beautiful music,—like music which draws tears, one can hardly tell ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... John earl of Rochester; two of which, sent to the duke of Buckingham, have particular merit, both for the archness of the turns, and the acuteness of the observations. He gives his lordship a humorous description of some of the Germans, their excessive drunkenness; their plodding stupidity and ostensive indelicacy; he complains that he has no companion in that part of the world, no Sir Charles Sedleys, nor Buckinghams, and what is still worse, even deprived of the happiness of a mistress, for, the women there, he says, are so coy, and so narrowly watched by their relations, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... getting all the sections with their guns, ammunition and various extras finally collected together in the dark a mile back, ready to put all the stuff in the limbers, and so back to billets. When all was fixed up I gave the order and off we started, plodding along back down the narrow, dreary road towards our resting-place. But it was quite a cheerful tramp, knowing as we did that we were going to four days' ...
— Bullets & Billets • Bruce Bairnsfather

... make farther progress toward the setting sun. The individual who had determined to start for the new, but delusive, western mountainous El Dorado, must perforce make his wearisome journey by slowly plodding ox-teams, pack-mules, or the lumbering stage-coach. Such means of travel had just been inaugurated by Mr. W. H. Russell (then the senior partner of the firm of Russell, Majors, & Waddell) and a Mr. John S. ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... the plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... Patty. I'm not that sort. You know very well I've only a plain, plodding sort of a mind, and I can't keep up with this repartee and persiflage that you carry ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells

... would like it. Don't stand; we can talk while we go. Well, my boy, there is a great deal of hard work, patient plodding, uninteresting study to be gone through, and as many failures and tumbles as days in the year, before you reach even the first step of the ladder. Do you think you could go ...
— Thankful Rest • Annie S. Swan

... his poems (June 9,1808), "that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he could not walk." Scott could certainly run very well, though averse to a plodding motion. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... far-sighted men,—a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under the most favourable circumstances of early education. Hence, nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... whom one will be admitted to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... weakest part," and this is as true in book-making as in shipbuilding. I am sorry to say your Register has, in my opinion, a great many weak parts. It is for nobody's use; it is too popular and trivial for the learned, and too abstruse and plodding for the multitude. The preface is not English, nor yet Scotch or Irish. It must have been written by Lady Morgan. In the body of the volume, there is not one new nor curious article, unless it be Lady Hood's ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles

... the poet sat, as he revolved those lines which the world has got by heart. Just then came the cry of the cattle, and I knew why Gray wrote: "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea," nor did I fail to encounter a plowman homeward plodding ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey

... look on the fame and fortune brought to him by his book as his chief reward. It had been his desire to be helpful to the plodding, discouraged men and boys. As he expressed it himself: "It seemed to me that the most important results in daily life are to be obtained, not through the exercise of extraordinary powers, but through the energetic use of simple means, and ordinary qualities, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various

... Senor Nobody had given explicit enough direction. Clear of all buildings, he drew rein and took bearings. Here was the stream, the stump of a burned mill, the mountain-going road, narrower and rougher than the way of main travel. He followed this road; the horses fell into a plodding deliberateness of pace. The sunshine streamed warm around, but there was little human life here to feel its rays. After a time there came emergence into a bare, houseless, almost treeless plain or ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... cabin the chronometer was again approaching the hour of twenty-two; for nearly twenty-four hours the ship had been on her plodding way. And, lacking the A.D.D.—the Automatic Destination Detector—and other refinements of instrumental installations of the passenger ships, Pilot O'Malley had to work out ...
— The Finding of Haldgren • Charles Willard Diffin

... this scrap of suffrage were soon to be undeceived. New Orleans was at this time a city of 300,000 with absolutely no sewerage system; an inadequate water supply, and what there was of this in the hands of a monopoly; an excellent drainage system plodding along for the want of means at a rate which would have required twenty years to complete it. The return of yellow fever, the city's arch-enemy, after a lapse of eighteen years, created consternation. Senseless quarantines prevailed on all sides; business was paralyzed; property values had fallen; ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went, he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went, he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and, choosing a street at random, stepped ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... as thorough-going an Englishman as any of his class in the island. Methodical, plodding, industrious, and regular in all his habits, he was honest by rule, and had no leisure or inclination for any other opinions than those which were obtained with the smallest effort. In consequence of the limited sphere in which he dwelt, in a moral ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper

... was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens

... was on his way home from a westward trudge, plodding along the remoter part of Fulham Road, when words spoken by a woman whom he passed caught ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called upon. The fable teaches better than an essay can that the dullness which perseveres will arrive at success sooner ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... about the white face of a brown-haired, red-lipped girl, he fell asleep from sheer fatigue. But with unaccountable perversity his dreaming mind dwelt not upon the beautiful vision he had come to love in fifteen seconds, but on the whispering firs and twinkling streams of Mendocino, and on a plodding ten-horse jerkline team hauling tanbark over the mountains to ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins

... straight as the arrow flies they will come, though mountains and deserts and hurrying rivers bar their way. And the plodding, law-abiding citizens who kiss their wives and hold close their babies and fling hasty, comforting words over their shoulders to tottering old mothers when they go to answer the hunting call—they will be your savages when the gold lust ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower

... manifested in much sharpness," and finally to reply to the arguments to the contrary brought forward in Milton's book. Nine pages having sufficed for the first two divisions, the remaining thirty-five are devoted to Milton. They are dull and plodding, the punctuation and expression showing that the author was ill-educated and little accustomed to write; and, from the frequent use of scrivener- like or attorney-like phrases and illustrations, one soon comes to conjecture the pamphlet to have been written by ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... the winking weary policemen, and the roofs all shining gray in the gray dawn. They passed through the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now, and through the turn-pike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester

... Twicestaff: he was not very rich, so he put his children out to trades; and the Distaffs have ever since been employed in the woollen and linen manufactures, except myself, who am a genealogist. Pikestaff, the eldest son by the second venter, was a man of business, a downright plodding fellow, and withal so plain, that he became a proverb. Most of this family are at present in the army. Raggedstaff was an unlucky boy, and used to tear his clothes getting birds' nests, and was always playing with a tame ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... the morning of the 24th to find six inches of snow on the ground and the storm still raging, with the temperature down to 28. Soon after we began plodding through the snow on a pea-soup breakfast, George left us to hunt geese. The night before he had told Hubbard he would kill a goose in the morning, if he were permitted to go on with a rifle. He had heard the ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace

... partner. "Well," ha continued, "I think we had better put the screws on to our workwomen and journeymen at once. I am tired of plodding on ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur

... interests him, and in mere wanton carelessness, for he certainly has no idea of offering marriage, he gains her affection, neither meaning, in any definite way, to do anything good nor anything bad with it. There is another man who loves Lizzie, a schoolmaster, who, in his dull, plodding way, has made the best of his intellect, and risen in life. He naturally, and we may say properly, for no good can come of them, resents Wrayburn's attentions, as does the girl's brother. Wrayburn uses the superior advantages of his position to insult them in the most offensive ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... in silence, for Breezy eagerly joined his stable companion, and in a short time they were up to, and then passed Jack with his plodding oxen, which were drawing a rough sledge, something similar to that which a farmer at home uses for the conveyance of a plough from field ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn

... count the scarred glades on their wooded sides. The light-footed Caribs were swiftly gliding to their tasks at the waterside. Already along the bosky trails from the banana groves files of horses were slowly moving, concealed, except for their nodding heads and plodding legs, by the bunches of green-golden fruit heaped upon their backs. On doorsills sat women combing their long, black hair and calling, one to another, across the narrow thoroughfares. Peace reigned in Coralio—arid and bald peace; but ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry

... broad glade or ride, and stretching himself out 'neath a tree, lay there staring up at the leafy canopy, pondering upon Sir Pertolepe his sins, and the marvellous ways of God. Lying thus, he was aware of the slow, plodding hoof-strokes of a horse drawing near, of the twang of a lute, with a voice sweet and melodious intoning a chant; and the tune was plaintive and the words ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol

... Fortresses to do; and the thing is finished. Let the King, one to three, and Loudon in command against him, try if he can hinder it!" This is the Program in Vienna and in Petersburg. And, accordingly, the Russians have got on march about the end of May; plodding on ever since, due hereabouts before June end: "junction to be as near Neisse as you can: and no fighting of the King, on any terms, till the Russians come." Never were the Vienna people so certain before. Daun is to do nothing "rash" in Saxony (a Daun not given that way, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... was standing behind the chair with the strangest look on his face. Suddenly, just as I came in he bent down and I heard him say: 'Won't you stop the beastly thing?' 'Certainly,' said Semyonov, and he went across in his heavy plodding kind of way and stopped it. I went off to my room and then, upon my word, five minutes after I heard it begin again, thin and reedy through the walls. But when I came back into the dining-room there was no one there. You can't think how that tune irritated me, and I ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... little interest in lingering over the long, laborious, monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck

... aurae, and conceived a dim idea, that in some time, manner, and degree, I might come to know. Even then, as I had really no instructor, my efforts at Eton, down to 1827, were perhaps of the purest plodding ever known.' ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley

... but she was deeply grateful to Betty for that last sentence. "You and I"—as if there was something in common between them. The other girls set her apart in a class by herself and labeled her "dig." If one was born slow and conscientious and plodding, was there any hope for one,—any place among these pretty girls who worked so easily and idled so gracefully? Helen shut her lips firmly and resolved to ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton

... the Baking Powder clerk had read about in the newspapers, this envy increased. Dresser's evolution impressed Miss M'Gann also; Sommers noticed that she was readier to accept Dresser's condescending attentions than the devotion of the plodding clerk. Webber was simple and vulgar, but he was sincere and good-hearted. He was striving to get together a little money for a home. Sommers told Alves that she should influence Miss M'Gann to accept the clerk, instead of beguiling herself with ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... he paused. He went a little distance up the hedge on both sides and held up his light, but did not detect the cowering boys, and at last giving up the search in despair, went slowly home. They heard him plodding back over the field, and it was not until the sound of his footsteps had died away, that Eric cautiously broke cover, and looked over the hedge. He saw the man's light gradually getting more distant, and said, "All right ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar

... have an intense devotion to their own customs. For nearly 5,000 years, while other empires have risen, flourished and fallen, they have lived apart, sufficient unto themselves, cherishing their own ideals, plodding along their well-worn paths, ignorant of or indifferent to the progress of the Western world, mechanically memorizing dead classics, and standing still comparatively amid the tremendous onrush of modern civilization. I say comparatively still, for if we ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... in every footing, through desolate country where the scrub was low, the land slightly rolling, bleak, uninhabited. The road ran mostly straight; as it dipped you could see ahead the two lines of men swiftly plodding on and on. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French

... distinguish between the important and the unimportant. Minor details and incidental aspects of the topic often receive the same degree of stress that is given to more important points. This results in a state of monotonous plodding through so much material without responding to its varying shades of meaning and value. Not only does this type of teaching fail to lodge in the mind of the pupil the larger and more important truths which ought ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... on it had almost dispersed his gloom. But the after-reflection that for all he knew his services might not be required on the Eleven, that very possibly his brand of football was not good enough for Brimfield, had caused a relapse into depression. Thrice he had told himself that as soon as the plodding horse reached the further turn he would get up and go back to his room, and thrice he had failed to keep his promise. He wondered who his room-mate was to be and whether that youth had yet arrived, but his curiosity was not strong enough to get him up. Now, however, ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour

... besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... round again to the window that was no window, the rumble of wheels, the plodding of a horse's hoofs. Beyond the low arch—or was it a pent?—shone a star or two, and against their pale radiance a shadow loomed—the shadow of the Princess, still seated, still patient, still with her hands in her lap. The rumble of the wheels, the slow rocking ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... treacherous. Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... hills and narrow, crooked streets of this old town during three hours, yesterday, in a sleigh, in a driving snow-storm. The people here don't mind snow; they were all out, plodding around on their affairs—especially the children, who were wallowing around everywhere, like snow images, and having a mighty good time. I wish I could describe the winter costume of the young girls, but I can't. It ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... had reached the woods before St. Pierre, found the directions on the tree and turned off toward the beach to follow the shore to the Point of Pines. But after plodding through the thick, soft sand for a while they decided that that mode of traveling was altogether too fatiguing, and went back into the woods where they found a path which ran in the general line of the shore ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey

... the driveway and out on the white pike, lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars. On the highway he hung undecided for a moment; but an hour later, William Layne, driving homeward from South Tredegar, overtook him plodding slowly southward far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the Deer Trace and Woodlawn gates and holding his way down the pike ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde

... and the cow at last allowed herself to be led away, but when she had been plodding along for a little distance, he slowly followed. He pressed the Jews' money in ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... were. First came the Spurt, of Tromso, a Norwegian tramp of dissolute and chastened appearance, whose deliberate, plodding gait and general air of senility belied her name, or at any rate the English meaning of it. Her rusty black hull was decorated with three large squares painted in her national colours, red, with a vertical white-edged stripe ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling

... hundreds founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... About this Melmotte really did know something and he pricked up his ears. It seemed to him that a gentleman whom he knew very well in the city,—and who had maliciously stayed away from his dinner,—one Mr Brown, who sat just before him on the same side of the House, and who was plodding wearily and slowly along with some pet fiscal theory of his own, understood nothing at all of what he was saying. Here was an opportunity for himself! Here was at his hand the means of revenging himself ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... written to discredit Carnegie's work and to picture him as the man who has stolen success from the labor of greater men. Yet Carnegie is the one member of a brilliant company who had the indispensable quality of genius. He had none of the plodding, painstaking qualities of a Rockefeller; he had the fire, the restlessness, the keen relish for adventure, and the imagination that leaped far in advance of his competitors which we find so conspicuous in the older Vanderbilt. Carnegie showed ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick

... plodding our way through the darkness for about four hours, I thought, when Grilly gave a loud shriek, and, running back to us, led us hurriedly forward; light became faintly visible; we ascended a few steps through a very narrow passage; we came abruptly ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 4, February 1878 • Various

... myself with books, pictures, talk? No, because it is all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet occupations have become ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson

... afternoon their concert was cut short before its finish. Commandant Balliot came back to the launch with satisfaction on his streaming face, and two armed black soldiers plodding at his heels. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... with a dull, heavy head, the consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,—wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect than ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... the middle ages is La France au temps des Croisades, by M. Vaublanc, which has lately made its appearance at Paris, in four handsome octavo volumes. It is the fruit of long and conscientious researches, and is written in a style of seductive elegance. The author is no dry chronicler, or plodding statician, but an artist, fully alive to the picturesqueness of his topic. He carries his reader with him into the time and the scenes he describes, and makes him a participant in the romantic and adventurous life of the period. His book is thus as ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various

... the work which lay to his hand, whether as mason, tax-collector, or king. Such diligence often rectifies the balance between two men of unequal ability. The plodding tortoise still beats the hare, who believes herself to be so swift that she can afford time to sleep. Any one who looks back on his classmates will see that the cleverest have not proved the most successful, but that the prizes of life have usually ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... maps—a glorious sight with its oaken frame and its rich-coloured design in silk. Life moved to a chivalrous music, lessons went more easily, in presence of its proud pomp: 'twas like marching to a band instead of painfully plodding. ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... puberty. The gelding, on the other hand, develops into an animal that is in every respect a neuter. Physically this animal develops a body almost identical with that of the female of the same species. Temperamentally the gelding is a patient, plodding, beast of burden, and though under good grooming he may show considerable life, while under the control of his driver, he seldom shows any interest in other members of the horse family, either male or female, ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall

... Mary Bateman. Mary has not as brilliant an intellect as Kitty, and in some ways is not as scholarly as you are, Florence, but she is very plodding and persevering, and as a rule gets to the head of her class. Mary is neither rich nor poor, but she would be very glad of the Scholarship, and says that it would give her father and mother great happiness if she obtained it; so you see, dear, ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade

... genteel helplessness for them. But Mariquinha is taught to read, write, and sew; she is as carefully looked after as if the world wished to steal her; she wears shoes and stockings and an embroidered kerchief and a hooded cloak; and she never steps outside the door alone. You meet her, pale and demure, plodding along to mass with her mother. The sisters will marry laborers and fishermen; Mariquinha will marry a small shop-keeper or the mate of a vessel, or else die single. It is not very pleasant for the poor girl in the mean time; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various

... to stop at Antelope, but it did so grudgingly and left with a snort of disdain for the cow-town of the high mesa. Curious-eyed tourists had a brief glimpse of a loading-chute, cattle-pens, a puncher or two, and an Indian freighter's wagon just pulling in from the spaces, and accompanied by a plodding cavalcade of outriders on ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... glanced at the likeness of his own staid and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a great genius, which, especially considering the hare-brained element in him, might easily ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... through it, partly that the greater glory might redound on him who had conquered it at last, and issued from its portals a fat and prosperous alumnus. Stupid men who have mastered a system, not by intuition but by a plodding effort of slow years, always exaggerate its importance—did it not take them ten years to understand it? Whoso has passed the system, then, is to their minds one of a close corporation, of a select and intellectual few, and entitled to pose before the uninitiate. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... before he learned to keep to anything approaching a straight line. Ploughing, Bob reflected, was clearly an art which needed long apprenticeship before you learned to appreciate it, and he developed a new comprehension and sympathy for the ploughman described by Gray as "homeward plodding his weary way." He also wondered if Gray's ploughman had to milk and get his own tea after he ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... slowly along the street at the foot of Terrace Hill. She looked up at the beautiful home where she had spent the previous evening, and as she saw the velvet lawn and terraced walks bordered with bright flowers, she half pitied herself because she was only a plodding music teacher. She was not envious, but she had such longing aspirations to be somebody in the world; she wanted so many things, needed so much to complete her education, and starved herself in so many ways for the sake of completing it, that sometimes she grew ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson

... had been for several years a student; but he was one of the plodding sort, who make but slow progress. The principal barrier to his improvement arose from one defect in his character; and that was the habit in which he constantly indulged, of deploring the past, without making any very strong efforts ...
— The Path of Duty, and Other Stories • H. S. Caswell

... The rule of the pump was "last come last served," and frequently a long string of men, women, and children might be seen waiting their turn. Many of us can recollect the old Digbeth men, with their shoulder-yoke and two buckets, plodding along to find customers for their "Warta;" and certain elderly ladies are still in existence who would fear the shortening of their lives were their tea-kettles filled with aught but the pure Digbeth water, ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell

... he was quite himself, plodding at the lessons, suddenly furious at the servants, and giving me fretful histories of his wrongs when brandy and water were not put by his bedside at night, or a warming-pan was not passed ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... am to go on plodding through classes and camp without knowing whether or not I am ever going to be rewarded!" grumbled John, so discouraged that every ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... he fell fainting on the skirt of the duchess's robe, who let him lie there and promptly bade them throw water in his face. This was done, and he came to himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels reached the spot. It was drawn by four plodding oxen all covered with black housings; on each horn they had fixed a large lighted wax taper, and on the top of the cart was constructed a raised seat, on which sat a venerable old man with a beard whiter than the very snow, and so long that ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... for deviltry than from entertaining any real hope of overtaking him, I chucked my rifle to the nearest of the farmers, touched old Bob with the spur, and went away on a hard gallop after the wounded fugitive, who was now plodding onward at the usual long loping canter of his tribe. For about half a mile the wood was open, and sloped gently upward, until it joined the open country, where it was bounded by a high rugged fence, made in the usual snake fashion, with a huge heavy top-rail. This we soon reached; the wolf, which ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)

... "The plodding housekeeper, whose picture you drew just now—humble, even mean in your regard though she be—sinks to peaceful sleep when her tasks are done, and rises refreshed at coming dawn. If she is happier than your fine lady, whose dainty hands ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur

... his goat-skin cap and coat, valise in hand, was plodding through the rain in search of the elusive phantom, Fortune; gloriously certain that he had assured Jean's future, yet with such a heartache as he had never had in his ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... hole a few seconds before the crystal turned into the sunlight again. Rip told him to keep the torch going. There might be some last minute cutting to do. Then the lieutenant hurried off at an angle to where Dominico was plodding along with ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin

... down a narrow entry, at the end of which a key was turned, and a strong door was opened from within. It admitted them into a lodge or lobby, across which they passed, and so through another door and a grating into the prison. The old man always plodding on before, turned round, in his slow, stiff, stooping manner, when they came to the turnkey on duty, as if to present his companion. The turnkey nodded; and the companion passed in without being asked whom ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... "This plodding team seems fitting in such a peculiar place," remarked one of the quartet in our sled. "Although it is not rapid transit, it is comfortable. But look, there is a more luxurious mode of traveling." As he spoke he pointed to two Portuguese ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob

... playing your favorite pieces—jazz, ballads, classics. No private teacher could make it clearer. Little theory—plenty of accomplishment. That's why students of the U.S. School of Music get ahead twice as fast—three times as fast as those who study old-fashioned, plodding methods. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various

... two pretty white beds, side by side, in this nice, large, cheerful bedroom. Ermengarde was completely mistress, but she did not object to Marjorie's company, for Marjorie was very plodding and useful and self-forgetful, and Ermie liked to be waited on, and her complaints listened to, and ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... fighting, rollicking Irish crew of the hamlet,—set them apart, so to speak, to act upon each other. Carrol, with one of his sons, worked in a saw-mill, and the other boys, as they grew old enough, easily found jobbing, being known as honest, plodding fellows. The little drama of their lives bade fair to be quiet, and the characters wrought out of it commonplace enough, had not Death thrust his grim face into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various

... to be done, however, was to get a definite idea of whereabouts they were; it was obviously useless to continue plodding on, they knew not whither; besides, it was frightfully fatiguing and painful work, this marching through the forest, and George felt that it would be a positive advantage even to deviate somewhat from their direct course, if by so doing they could earlier gain the open ground once more. So, looking ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood

... thought it worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more easily ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... reply, "I wasn't looking for anything; I was just walking, walking through the storm, not knowing or caring where I went. I can't say how far I came, but it must have been a number of miles. I was still plodding on, when I set my foot on vacancy and down ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis

... not justified in extolling the virtue of repentance on the part of the prodigal above the faithful, plodding service of his brother, who had remained at home, true to the duties required of him. The devoted son was the heir; the father did not disparage his worth, nor deny his deserts. His displeasure over the rejoicing incident to the return of his wayward brother ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing to you. The ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank

... her, that she always somehow made people feel like smiling too, and put them into a good temper in spite of themselves. She was neither dull nor particularly clever, only possessed of average abilities, able to remember lessons when she tried hard, and gifted with a certain capacity for plodding, but not in the least brilliant over anything she undertook. She was never likely to win fame, or set the Thames on fire, but she was one of those cosy, thoughtful, cheery, lovable home girls, who are often a great deal more pleasant to live with than some who have greater talents; ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil

... will give me credit for sincerity when I say, that it never entered into my head to blazon forth any acquisition of my own. All that I have accomplished, or expect, or hope to accomplish, has been, and will be, by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap,—particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact. And if ever I was actuated by ambition, its highest and warmest aspiration reached no further than the hope to set before the young men of my country ...
— The Bobbin Boy - or, How Nat Got His learning • William M. Thayer

... shaven, his intelligent blue eyes half concealed beneath his hat brim, which had been drawn low to shade them from the glare, one hand pressing upon his saddle holster as he leaned over to rest. No insignia of rank served to distinguish him from those equally dusty fellows plodding gloomily behind, but a broad stripe of yellow running down the seams of his trousers, together with his high boots, bespoke the cavalry service, while the front of his battered campaign hat bore the decorations of ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried plodding about from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my knapsack, sought counsel with my carriers as to ways and means, crossed the river and took the Ruins road. A motor-car hurtled past me when I was within two miles. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps

... impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnelmen, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpet-bag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "civilization and refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various

... to use it this year, and he had better wait and see if Limus' seine was all right. Moreover, entre nous, I don't believe it will do him any good to spend his time a-fishing. It has a sort of excitement, like gold-digging, which unfits a man for steady, plodding industry, witness Limus. Now the present demand for fish will not be permanent. After the war the negroes will have to fall back upon field-labor for a living, and it will be better for them if in the ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... gradually became irksome to Erasmus. 'For some months already', he writes to Ammonius in November 1513, 'we have been leading a true snail's life, staying at home and plodding. It is very lonely here; most people have gone for fear of the plague, but even when they are all here, it is lonely.' The cost of sustenance is unbearable and he makes no money at all. If he does not succeed, that winter, in making a nest for himself, he is resolved ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. Only ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... the procession was again plodding, Indian file, through the still, dew-fragrant, midnight woods. The little raccoon, its heart now beating quietly, nestled in secure contentment under the young schoolmaster's arm, untroubled even by the solemn and deep-toned menace of a horned-owl's cry from the spiky top of a dead hemlock ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... nightfall, as he hurried back to his bright rooms in the parish house from some of the many errands that absorbed his time, he had a feeling of self-accusation as he avoided women wearily treading the pavements, or girls and children plodding homeward through the wet, wintry streets. Some glanced at him with heavy eyes, others passed sullenly, with bent heads. At such moments his sense of helplessness was overpowering. He could not follow them to the dreary dwellings where ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... affections and the utterances of the lips, by which some theme, doctrine, or topic is proclaimed aloud and exultingly before and in the presence of others. It is the divinity in man rising to God. It is the better and higher nature of man springing forward and leaping heavenward. It is the soul plodding the deep blue sea upon its fiery pinions in search after God, its Maker, "who giveth songs in the ...
— Sparkling Gems of Race Knowledge Worth Reading • Various

... I. Happy, happy liver! With a soul as strong as a mountain River Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver, Joy and jollity be with us both, Hearing thee or else some other As merry as a Brother I on the earth will go plodding on, By myself, cheerfully, till the day ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... excursion, And into a lily or hollyhock dodging With quiet assurance he takes up his lodging. With a snug little fortune invested in honey, Young Bumble Bee lives like a prince, on his money, And, scorning some plodding relations of his, he Leaves hard labor to them,—his ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various

... A Plodding Student is a kind of alchemist or persecutor of Nature, that would change the dull lead of his brain into finer metal, with success many times as unprosperous, or at least not quitting the cost, to wit, of his own oil and candles. He has a strange forced appetite to learning, and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] The Duke of Bridgewater started a scheme for ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... Poor Janetta, plodding away at her music lessons and doing the household work of her family, never guessed that she was about to become a bone of contention. But such she was fated to be, and that between persons no less distinguished than Lady Caroline Adair and ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... for Peter or bottle-green hat for Vic—what did it matter if neither of them ever again owned a hat, if Helen May must stay here in the city and face the doom that had been pronounced upon her? What did anything matter, if Babe died and left him plodding along alone? Vic did not occur to him consolingly. Vic was a responsibility; a comfort he was not. Like many men, Peter could not seem to understand his son half as well as he understood his daughter. He could not see why Vic should frivol away his time; why he should have all those funny little ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower

... no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together—a miserable few—often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wonderful stories concerning the Sample Gentry; relating, perhaps, to a Spunkville merchant, who, having retreated precipitately down his cellar stairs several tunes during the day, to avoid "them confounded drummers, with their everlasting samples," was, while plodding his lonely way homeward, seized upon by these commercial freebooters, conveyed forthwith to the Half-Way House, and there deluged with such a perfect torrent of brow-beating eloquence as to reduce him to an imbecile ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various

... decided on its own evidence, and not on analogy, if our conclusions in this way are to be of real value. Of course we must often jump at conclusions from imperfect evidence. I should like to write an essay on species some day; but before I should have time to do it, in my plodding way, I hope you or Hooker will do it, and much better far. I am most glad to be in conference with Hooker and yourself on these matters, and I think we may, or rather you may, in a few years settle the question as to whether Agassiz's or Hooker's views are correct; ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... suspected him a poet-musician; as little could even such a glance have failed to see in him an honest man. He was powerfully built, over the middle height, but not tall. He spoke very fair old-fashioned English, with the Yorkshire tone and turn. His walk was rather plodding, and his movements slow and stiff; but in communion with his violin they were free enough, and the more delicate for the strength that was in them; at the anvil they were as supple as powerful. On his face dwelt ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald

... the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... air was filled with floating rime, which shimmered and sparkled in the sunshine, and Jimmy's garments were covered with it, but, plodding disconsolately on and on, his heart heavy with the tragedy and his thoughts filled with Bobby and the happy years of comradeship that were ended, he did not feel or heed the cold or dazzling glitter of the snow, until in mid-afternoon ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace

... hurried inspection, even from a distance. He strode slowly along, looking intently at each house. None of them seemed to him to hold the object of his search. As his steps carried him farther and farther into the beautiful avenue he began to smile to himself and his plodding spirit wavered. After all, thought he, no one but a silly ass would attempt to find a person in a great city after the fashion he was pursuing. He was deciding to board a tramcar and return to the hotel when, at some distance ahead, he saw a young lady run hurriedly down the ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon

... That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith

... has an unbounded range, can scarcely conceive of the immense value of a limited space to his equally acquisitive though less favored brother. Thousands, whose feet had wandered amid all the wonders of the earth, came back to their every-day plodding life with vacant brains and unexpanded souls, while Archibald Mackie, in his non-suggestive hovel, gathered big thoughts and exalted ideas, and grew majestic in intellect, even as he was diminutive in his outward frame. Not a stone upon the waste ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith

... the serene, haughty house, the repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road. "This is your birthright," whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said: "You have sold it for a ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke

... to his horse and started him plodding up the hill. Every time a wheel struck a stone Miss Kitty gritted her teeth. She never did enjoy riding in a wagon, anyhow. And this one was ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey

... O'Sullivan Addicks was born in Philadelphia in 1841, and was in the eighties plodding along the ordinary, uneventful path of a seller of flour to the people of that city which since the death of William Penn holds the record for the highest and densest percentage of sleep per ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson

... her best at gathering firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps almost ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle

... falls into idle, drinking habits, and so is obliged eventually to sell his property: or he finds, if more shrewd and adventurous, that the "beck" running down the mountain-side, or the minerals beneath his feet, can be turned into a new source of wealth; and leaving the old plodding life of a landowner with small capital, he turns manufacturer, or digs for coal, or ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell

... Amos was glad. Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch. The base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing. The dining-room was fragrant ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... on, that much was certain; but the uproar was so distributed that one could hardly tell whether it was in front or behind. However, the transport was steadily advancing—horse-wagons, mule-wagons, motor-wagons, all plodding patiently, paying no heed to the shell-bursts. And then Jimmie took a look behind, and saw that infernal red-headed Orangeman! He imagined a raucous voice, shouting: "C'mon here! Whatcher waitin' fer?" Jimmie bounced on to his machine and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... she heard the landlord's refusal and the miner's angry profanity. A moment later she saw the traveller plodding ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach

... significance in that time of blood and pain. In these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters, but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They looked up as one woman ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... a little unequal, isn't it, aunt?" she said. "One feels inclined to wonder what we have done that we should have exemption from the charge laid upon the first tiller of the soil that we, and the men who are plodding through the dust there, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss

... aware of her status in Fairbridge, and she was not without a steady, plodding ambition of her own. That utterly commonplace, middle-aged face had some lines of strength. Mrs. Sturtevant was a member of the women's club of Fairbridge, which was poetically and cleverly called ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... native home of speculation. In this respect they were as remarkably contrasted to the English as they are now, though, in those ages, England was as devoted to the Holy See as it is now hostile. The Englishman was hard-working, plodding, bold, determined, persevering, practical, obedient to law and precedent, and, if he cultivated his mind, he was literary and classical rather than scientific, for Literature involves in it the idea of authority and prescription. On the other hand, in Ireland, the intellect ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman

... of beauty, and the graceful white heath growing up its sides loaded the air with a sweet scent. The wide expanse of the Argeles valley, with the busy farmers ploughing, sowing, or cutting the heavy clover crop; the lazy oxen ever patiently plodding beneath their heavy burdens; the Chateau de Beaucens—where the orchids grow—perched up on the hillside; the surrounding peaks throwing off their snowy garb; and the beautiful young leaves and tints, everywhere ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... toiling to support a surviving parent, sisters toiling for their brothers. And all done not only without a murmur, but with cheerfulness and thankfulness to God that their condition was no worse. I have heard hopeful accents from the plodding charwoman, that have made me ashamed, as Wordsworth stood rebuked before the 'leech-gatherer, upon the lonely moor.' Let England look to it. These women, mothers of men, are abandoning her shores for foreign lands. When good and dutiful children desert the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... said the principal occupant of the boat, merrily, "you shut yourself up so much in your bungalow, and lead such a serious plodding life over your merchandise and cargoes, that you see danger in a paddle ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn

... Marjorie slept in two pretty white beds, side by side, in this nice, large, cheerful bedroom. Ermengarde was completely mistress, but she did not object to Marjorie's company, for Marjorie was very plodding and useful and self-forgetful, and Ermie liked to be waited on, and her complaints listened to, and ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... slope where the trail seemed tunneled through deep green, so thick stood the young spruce. Cash was swinging his arms in that free stride of the man who has learned how to walk with the least effort. He did not halt when he saw Bud plodding slowly up the trail, but came on steadily, his keen, blue-gray eyes peering sharply from beneath his forward tilted hat brim. He came up to within ten ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower

... to this task in his own queer, plodding, English way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, cumbrous, Latin-English, but idiomatic way—there is little selection or self-suppression, but ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James

... for which was furnished from a superior kind of clay underlying the land all around them, and thenceforward maintained themselves from the products of the soil, then, as now, proverbial for its fruitfulness. It descended to their children, most of whom were equally plodding and unambitious with themselves. All continued the old occupation of looking to the soil for subsistence; and so long as the forty acres were kept together, they lived well. But as descendants multiplied, and one generation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... "there are times when I conceive a sort of respect for your commonplace and plodding intellect. Now, let me have my little inning. I used to commute—on the Jersey and Delaware Short Line. There's a station on that line, Pearlington by name, that's a combination of Mosquitoville, Lonesomehurst and Nutting ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of miracle or revelation in his action than when he ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... still, as ever, Time's a jewel in its loss; But, possessed in plenty, never Held as ought but worthless dross. Like lost truant-boys we linger Whimpering in Life's mazy wood, Heedless of the silent finger Ever pointing for our good; Each, in plodding darkness groping, Clothes his day in dreamy night, 'Stead of boldly climbing, hoping, Up the steeps towards the light, Where, as metal plucks the lightning Flashing from the lofty sky, Sturdy purpose, ever heightening, Grasps an Immortality. Let not future peals remind thee, Then, of wasted ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning

... in the morning, from various tenement homes near by, sturdy 'longshoremen and laborers might have been seen plodding silently from their respective homes, careful not to disturb their wives and families, and heading straight for the new kitchen on the corner. From trains running along "Death Avenue" came blackened trainmen after their night's work. They, too, stopped at the corner kitchen. By the time the attendant ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... the average girl in college who determines the character and reputation of that college. It is not the brilliant girl, it is not the girl whose earnest plodding barely carries her through, it is not the failure, it is the average girl. If the average girl should leave her college a good athlete, interested in everything athletic, that fact would determine the general character of the college. If the average ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery

... greeted Teddy, as he espied Mr. Sparling plodding about with a keen eye to the safety of ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington

... two girls,—plodding over the sharp stones, splashing through the puddles,—Rebecca beating the old drum with might and main; Sarah blowing the fife with ...
— The Junior Classics • Various

... their ornamental labels or covers. To accomplish this operation with necessary speed, much practice and dexterity in the handling is required. The coolies—a thousand of whom are employed on the establishment—are, however, great adepts at the art, and patient and plodding as beasts of burthen. But among the celestials there is one master-hand who distinguishes himself above all the others by his superior skill. Piles of loose cigarettes and gummed labels are before him. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman

... out of breath. Her heart labored. An unreasonable antipathy seemed to attend her efforts. Only her ridiculous vanity held her to this task. She wanted to please Glenn, but not so earnestly that she would have kept on plodding up this ghastly bare mound of cinders. Carley did not mind being a tenderfoot, but she hated the thought of these Westerners considering her a weakling. So she bore the pain of raw blisters and the miserable sensation of staggering ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey

... think wistfully of the police, now plodding over the hills after my wraith. They at any rate were fellow-countrymen and honest men, and their tender mercies would be kinder than these ghoulish aliens. But they wouldn't have listened to me. That old devil with the eyelids had not taken long to get rid of them. I thought he probably ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan

... Visioned the herd huddled together in the night while the heavens were split with lightning, and the rain came down in white-lighted streamers of water. Visioned the cattle humped in the snow, tails to the biting wind, and the riders plodding with muffled heads bent to the drive of the blizzard, the fine snow packing full the wrinkles in ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower

... just as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, at the old ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens

... interfere with Stone and Robinson, was a mild, rather timid-looking youth—not unlike what Mr. Outwood must have been as a boy—but he knew how to keep balls out of his wicket. He was a good bat of the old plodding type. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... Earth, absorbed my mind with more than passing interest. Looking carefully into one of these canon depressions, I saw a class of human beings in a low state of civilization; nevertheless, they were expert in agriculture and seemed to labor contentedly with a dull, plodding ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... husband to take one of the glebe fields on a long lease in order to start a hamper trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers. Dolly, the one of her three step-daughters whom she liked least, was fond of gardening, in a dull plodding way, and might be ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

... did. Suddenly she tossed her head and flung out her curls to the breeze, and swung Merry Roger's bridle-rein, and was away at a gallop and I after her, measuring the ground with wide paces on my tall thoroughbred. In this fashion we soon left the plodding blacks so far behind that they became a part of the distance-shadows. Then, all at once, Mistress Mary swerved off from the main road and was riding down the track leading to the plantation-wharf, whence ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins

... saddle, looking back past Neb—who swayed in his seat, with head lolling on his breast as though asleep, his horse plodding after the others—along the slight trail they had made across the desert. So far as eye could reach nothing moved, nothing apparently existed. Fronting again to the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish

... believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... his own genius for languages, his unconquerable plodding directed by a divine motive, his colleagues' co-operation, the encouragement of learned societies and the public, and the number of pundits and moonshees increased by the College of Fort William, would have failed to open the door of the East to the sacred Scriptures ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes were ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray

... men,—a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under the most favourable circumstances of early education. Hence, nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... weeks back, when T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had made his memorable speech, explaining to his fellow-students the "Billon-Dollar Mystery," and arousing in them a vast admiration for the slow-minded, plodding John Thorwald, every collegian had done his best to befriend the big Freshman. Upperclassmen helped him with his studies. Despite his almost rude refusal to meet any advances, the collegians always had a cheery greeting for him, and his class-mates, in fear and trembling, invaded his den at ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... are frequently upbraided by the industrious and plodding sons of care, with passing too great a part of their life in a state of inaction. But these defiers of sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly awake; they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... a question which we had not been bright enough to ask. We had been plodding on with the vague idea that it was a delightful book. Certainly the subject was agreeable. The writer was taking us on a ramble through the less frequented parts of Italy. He had a fine descriptive power, and made us see the quiet hill towns, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers

... picked me up was nothing but a tramp, plodding along with a general cargo from London to Dundee, and its accommodation was as rough as its skipper was homely. But it was a veritable palace of delight and luxury to me after that terrible night, and I was soon hard ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher

... political means and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... but know! I would sacrifice everything to her except my duty and my conscience. Yes, if God exacted of me, in order to spare her this pain, that I should extinguish my thought and condemn myself to a plodding, vulgar existence, I would submit. Many a time I have endeavoured to deceive myself, but it is not in human power to believe or not to believe at will. I wish that I could stifle within me the faculty of self-examination, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... appear to be affected by her want of knowledge. As to forms, Mrs. Margaret had her own, and she was very attentive to them, but she had very small opportunity of public worship, as there was no church within some miles of the Tower. In the meantime, whilst the old lady went plodding on in her own quiet way, teaching the little girl all she knew herself, Mr. Dymock was planning great things by way of instruction for Tamar. He was to teach her to read her native language, as he called the Hebrew, and to give her various accomplishments, ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]

... assurance was that four days and forty-one dollars would carry us to our first objective point. His helpers were a lively young half-breed, son-in-law of the murdered chief Hole-in-the-Day, another big mongrel, fat, plodding and reticent, and a young Indian who could speak a few English words, but was destitute of ideas in either English or Chippewa. Their motive-power was grazing on the open prairie back of the ragged village. The Reservation Indian, denied liquor at home, reckons upon a trip out of bounds as fair ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various

... ever saw!" he exclaimed. Then "like mother, like son," he, too, sat down on the doorsill and laughed as only youth and health and joy can laugh, for, heading straight for the door was the fat young Shorthorn, saddled with an enormous feather-bed, and plodding at her heels was ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson

... civil," said Godolphin, impatiently. "Allow me to tell you that it is your objects I consider baubles. Your dull, plodding, wearisome honours; a name in the newspapers—a place, perhaps, in the Ministry—purchased by a sacrificed youth and a degraded manhood—a youth in labour, a manhood in schemes. No, Radclyffe! give me the bright, the glad sparkle of existence; and, ere the sad years of age and sickness, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... was a stout one, Sandy could easily have gnawed his way through it if he had not been too frightened to try. And there he stayed, while all the time old Ebenezer kept plodding along toward ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey

... with the brilliant scarlet berries of the cassena, and on some of the oaks we observed the mistletoe, laden with its pure white, pearl-like berries. Out of the woods the roads are generally bad, and we found it hard work plodding through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... * * * * Thus through life with thee I'll glide, Happy still what'er betide, And while plodding sots complain Of ceaseless toil and slender gain, Every passing hour shall be Worth a golden ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... As Goodenough was plodding at his accustomed pace in his morning's work, he met Wright on horseback, who asked him if he had any commissions that he could execute in York, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... thrives and waxes fat. He would fain be a soldier, and swagger like his neighbors; but his domestic, quiet-loving, uxorious nature continually gets the upper hand; and though he may mount his helmet and gird on his sword, yet he is apt to sink into the plodding, painstaking father of a family; with a troop of children at his heels, and his womenkind hanging ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving

... understand. There were plodding lines of people, disciplined, carrying burdens, no bigger than ants at this distance. There was an ominous horror about the quiet beauty of the place. It was somehow like a beautiful woman lying just slain. Yet I could see no wounds of war, no reason for ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell

... the desolate scene was a large, hulking boy. He had been plodding heavily with a sack upon his back. As he stopped, he set this upon the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall

... evening, as the travellers were plodding onward, Ketch walked for a time at the head of Aunt Amanda's mule. Aunt Amanda leaned forward and ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... say he was plodding along? A reactionary is immovable except in the wrong direction. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... of his whip to the spreading, graceful arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White

... of war; yet even in the stubble we may judge what the wheat has been. From my youth up I lived amidst the clash of shield and spear, and loved battle and ambush, siege and foray. But I cared not for plodding industry, which gives increase unto a house, and fills it with the bright faces of children. Such I was as Heaven made me, a ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... Esther North floated across the snowy fields to the hill where the children of Glendour were coasting. Her brother Daniel, plodding up the trampled path beside the glairy track with half a dozen other boys, dragging the bob-sled on which his little sister Ruth was seated, heard the call with vague sentiments of dislike and rebellion. His twelve years rose up in arms against being ordered ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... or bring us back to our starting point. But, with only right living in view, there is no mistaking the way; for there has always been a straight road ahead of us, which we could follow if we would. It is hard to keep plodding along the narrow path, when fields of wealth and power stretch away on either side, but, happily for us, these are about all fenced in, even the great Sahara desert is fenced in. We cannot be tyrants ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook

... existence, and there was very little probability that they would make farther progress toward the setting sun. The individual who had determined to start for the new, but delusive, western mountainous El Dorado, must perforce make his wearisome journey by slowly plodding ox-teams, pack-mules, or the lumbering stage-coach. Such means of travel had just been inaugurated by Mr. W. H. Russell (then the senior partner of the firm of Russell, Majors, & Waddell) and a Mr. John S. Jones of Missouri, who conceived ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... to grow dark, and we were still plodding along. I was foot-sore, discouraged, and woe-begone. All the former trials of my life, which had seemed at the time so hard to bear, now appeared like ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor

... behind one of those low hemlocks, or even a cross old "lucivee" to rush out from some of those thick cedar clumps. For thoughts of these things had begun to pop into my mind. I was but seventeen then, and hadn't quite outgrown my fear of the dark. And thus plodding timorously onward, thinking on many things injurious to a boy's courage, I had begun to think I should have to make a night of it there, somewhere, when the red gleam of a fire, from the crest of the ridge before me, suddenly burst ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various

... behind glass doors, stood some hundred more or less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been arranged, in the same form they had presented in life—peon carriers bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of haggling, arrieros plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support, like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers, in ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... stayed aloof, the problem of a national American music has been solving itself. Aside from occasional attentions evoked by chance performances, it may be said in general that the growth of our music has been unloved and unheeded by anybody except a few plodding composers, their wives, and a retainer or two. The only thing that inclines me to invade the privacy of the American composer and publish his secrets, is my hearty belief, lo, these many years! that some of the best music in the world is being written here at home, and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... before we reached Buffalo River, the column plodding along in the wooded ravine. I had turned out from the road to wait for the brigades to pass, and have a word with the commanders in turn, and was picking my way to the head of column again, when I overheard ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox

... Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb

... greatness. The vast landed estates which now acknowledge lordly owners were then only in inception. The Lenox estate was a range of wild land, far away even from the suburbs of the city, and owned by a plain, plodding merchant, whose son is the munificent and benevolent James Lenox, of whom New York may be justly proud. A strong-minded German of unpolished aspect, and with something of a foreign accent, kept a fur store at the corner of Pearl and Pine Streets, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... "Yet these plodding and undramatic notes arouse in Germany a feeling very different from one of ridicule. The resentful respect for our notes is there admirably summed up by a member of the Reichstag who to the correspondent of the United Press exclaimed bitterly: 'Our present ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman

... to mould your brilliant life to my plodding one," he said wistfully, as if he were reading my thoughts. "But I don't mean to be selfish. I love you—and—you're drifting away ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark

... he wrote to Lady Abercorn about his poems (June 9,1808), "that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he could not walk." Scott could certainly run very well, though averse to a plodding motion. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... letters he ever wrote. Where, for example, is the literary correspondence in which he engaged so enthusiastically with his Kirkoswald schoolfellows? "Though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger." Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then "a youth and all ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns

... well, and does what he is expected to do. But it does not enter into his mind to do anything beyond what is required, nor to enlarge his capacities by reading or reflection. He is, at the best, a steady plodding man, who will go forward, if at all, very slowly, and will rise, if at all, to no great elevation. He is not the sort of person who is looked for to occupy a higher position. One opportunity of advancement after ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon

... of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way—the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running—the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the homestead, and beyond, the long low cowshed, with a group of Shorthorns and Herefords ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world is one ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath

... his wife were plodding through life in a routine affection, reminding Dona Luisa, in her limited imagination, of the yokes of oxen on the ranch who refused to budge whenever another animal was substituted for the regular companion. Her husband certainly was quick tempered, holding her responsible for all the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... things as opposed to ideas; incidents as opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called upon. The fable teaches better than an essay can that the dullness which perseveres ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster

... of tea that had come across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for Nizhni Novgorod. They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to a mile in length, and in every such caravan there were from fifty to two hundred sledges. As the tea-horses went at a slow, plodding walk, their drivers were required, by law, to turn out for private travellers and give the latter the road; but they seldom did anything of the kind. There were only twelve or fifteen of them to a caravan of a hundred sledges; and as they usually curled up on their loads at ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... over large unenclosed tracts, not graced with trees, or at least very sparingly enlivened by them, and the half-formed roads seemed to demand the landmarks, set up in the waste, to prevent the traveller from straying far out of his way, and plodding through the ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft

... crucifix as it hung there beside my portrait. It was twilight; outside the wall the bell was tolling heavily in the invisible church, calling the believers together; in the distance, over the deserted field, overgrown with high grass, an unknown wanderer was plodding along, passing into the unknown distance, like a little black dot. It was as quiet in our prison as in a sepulchre. I looked long and attentively at the features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev

... into his saddle and galloped away. A few minutes later the whole column was plodding on silently toward its bloody goal. To a civilian, unaccustomed to scenes of war, the tranquillity of these men would have seemed very wonderful. Many of the soldiers were still munching the hard bread and ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest

... jolting of the wheels. At the Neuilly bridge a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas had joined the eight waggons of carrots and turnips coming down from Nanterre; and the horses, left to themselves, had continued plodding along with lowered heads, at a regular though lazy pace, which the ascent of the slope now slackened. The sleeping waggoners, wrapped in woollen cloaks, striped black and grey, and grasping the reins ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola

... Nature's surface. I name not The servile copyists of the greater masters, Or of th' archangels, Raphael and Michael; But such as paint our cheap and daily marvels. Sometimes I fear lest they degrade our art To a nice craft for plodding artisans— Mere realism, which they mistake for truth. My soul rejects such limits. The true artist Gives Nature's best effects with far less means. Plain black and white suffice him to express A finer grace, a stronger energy Than ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus

... out of the office, and the sheriff was given his mount. The Indians swung the pack-horses into line, and the men settled themselves in their saddles as they began the long, plodding journey to the blue hills in ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... confess. I quite approve of it. It's just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they'll make it very useful. But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort. Perhaps I have grown out of it. Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower classes, but I feel that my own work ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing

... The cart was plodding along through the smooth lanes at the rate of less than a mile an hour, the oxen swaying from side to side with their slow, patient steps. The level country around lay sleepily still under the hot afternoon sun; it was rarely that any human stir was to be seen, save only ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner

... reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... earl of Rochester; two of which, sent to the duke of Buckingham, have particular merit, both for the archness of the turns, and the acuteness of the observations. He gives his lordship a humorous description of some of the Germans, their excessive drunkenness; their plodding stupidity and ostensive indelicacy; he complains that he has no companion in that part of the world, no Sir Charles Sedleys, nor Buckinghams, and what is still worse, even deprived of the happiness of a mistress, for, the women there, he says, are so coy, and so narrowly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber

... hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his coming at me like a spear, but ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... differ very much. The tame Ass is gentle, and generally fond of the society of man; the wild Ass is one of the shyest creatures in the world; even when caught it is almost impossible to tame him. The tame Ass is slow, plodding, dull, and lazy; the wild Ass is as swift as a race-horse and as wild as a Deer. The best mounted horsemen can seldom approach him, and it is generally necessary to send a rifle-ball after him, if he is wanted very much. His flesh ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... shoulders sprang a white figure, weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a spear; and underneath was written, "At last he knoweth what he made." In the second, the figure which grovelled and that which sprang from its shoulders were plodding along a high-road at night, chained together by the wrist. The white figure halted behind, the other pressed on; and underneath was written, "They know each other not." In the third the figures marched level, that which ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... Devil's Playground, and when convinced had looked upon Payne and Higgins with the admiration of experts for masters. Higgins had remained at Citrus Grove to organize ox-team transport for the material and labor which had been ordered, and Payne had started southward at once. A sure, plodding ox team had carried him in a wide circuit through the flooded lands east of Devil's Playground to Deer Hammock. Signs on the hammock told that it had been visited several times during their absence. Payne found tracks of a size which he ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen

... on this occasion, as she had done at Christmas, but in the rest of the merry-making she naturally could take no part. Austin, however, proved the most enthusiastic reveller of all, put through his work like chain lightning, and was out and off before the plodding Thomas had fairly begun. Manlike, it did not occur to him to give up any of these festivities because Sylvia could not join in them. For years he had hungered and thirsted, as most boys do, for "a good time"—and done so in vain. For years his work had seemed so endless and yet so futile—for ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes

... bias was for Greek and Latin, but Mr. Hayes had recommended her to take up modern languages as well, and she was steadily plodding through the French and German, for which she had not so strong a liking as for her beloved classics. Prissie was a very eager learner, and she was busy now looking over her notes of the last lecture and standing close to the ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade

... forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service

... thickets lies couched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughmen's weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening casements light them on towards home, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.

... nature and art, and, during three years' travel in foreign parts, had so improved upon these natural advantages, as to stand acknowledged one of the most elegant and accomplished young men of his country. But it often happens that such high-wrought natures are but poorly versed in the plodding concerns of this nether world. And thus it was with him. Alive to every lofty feeling and generous impulse, he fancied others like himself. Low cunning and artifice were unknown to his bosom, and consequently he would fall the easier victim to Hardin's scheme ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton

... and all the village boys and girls. So he said the answers after her and she explained them, which she certainly did very brightly and very well, and on week-days Angel taught him the earlier ones, in her gentle, plodding way, till he knew them by heart. He had done what his Aunt Betty required of him by the time Angel had taken two more turns, and was having his reward in the story which he called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite of all Betty's tales, and it was the sort she liked best to ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham

... eye brethren of our own Mission with whom I was associated—Buyers, with his intimate acquaintance with the native languages, his large knowledge, and his kindly disposition; Shurman, the keen, impetuous, plodding German scholar, whose great monument is his translation of the Old Testament into Hindustanee; Mather, first of Benares and afterwards of Mirzapore, one of the most enterprising and devoted missionaries ever sent to India, whose peculiarity ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... my Lord, or you, or you, Haue found the ground of studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the attention of the English public to those elements in the national literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably defined fairly enough the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... think, girls, I would have you always prosaic, plodding, self-satisfied, unambitious? Oh, no! do not understand me so. Why, I believe that even dreaming about doing, and seeing, and having things is sometimes very helpful, and not at all inconsistent with the commonplace. It is almost necessary ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder

... a quarter of a minute he was drenched to the skin. So fiercely it went howling inland along the ridge that he half expected to see the horse urged into a gallop before it. But the rider, now standing high for a moment against the sky-line, went plodding on. For a while horse and man disappeared over the rise; but Taffy guessed that on hitting the cross-path beyond it they would strike away to the left and descend toward Langona Creek; and he began to slant his course to the left ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... original. There is a talent in industry which every industrious man does not possess; and even taste and imagination may lead to the deepest studies of antiquities, as well as mere undiscerning curiosity and plodding dulness. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... Love should seek its match; and that is, love Or nothing! Station—fortune—find their match In things resembling them. They are not love! Comes love (that subtle essence, without which Life were but leaden dulness!—weariness! A plodding trudger on a heavy road!) Comes it of title-deeds which fools may boast? Or coffers vilest hands may hold the keys of? Or that ethereal lamp that lights the eyes To shed the sparkling lustre o'er the face, Gives to the velvet skin its blushing glow, And burns as bright ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles

... o'clock we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... impotently as in the madman; once fairly started on any subject whatever, they have no power of self-control; they passively endure the succession of impulses which are evolved out of the original exciting cause; they are passed on from one idea to another and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering from it in endless digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as is very certain, no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of his conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... fertile valley, Tracing all its winding ways, Plodding on with dogged patience Through a score of weary days, Camping in the lonely timber, Sleeping on the scorching plain, Bearing heat and thirst and hunger, Sore fatigue and wind and rain— Halting only when the telltale Mark was missing in the track; Only when he called a greeting, As he passed ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker

... it seemed a very probable contingency, and she was beginning to weary of plodding over the boggy land, alternately slapped by outstanding branches or—when a little puff of wind raced overhead—drenched by a shower of garnered raindrops from some tree which seemed to shake itself in the breeze just as a dog may shake himself after a plunge in the sea, and with apparently ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... wave of immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth

... veteran troops, covered with scars and thoroughly inured to War, we must not compare the self-esteem and vanity of a standing Army,(*) held together merely by the glue of service-regulations and a drill book; a certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can never create it; these things therefore have a certain value, but must not be over-rated. Order, smartness, good will, also ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz

... before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,—wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect than that of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... crusty state of mind set forth upon his long walk home to Springhaven. As Harry Shanks had said, and almost everybody knew, an ancient foot-path, little used, but never yet obstructed, cut off a large bend of the shore, and saved half a mile of plodding over rock and shingle. This path was very lonesome, and infested with dark places, as well as waylaid with a very piteous ghost, who never would keep to the spot where he was murdered, but might appear at any shady stretch or woody corner. Dan Tugwell knew three courageous men who had ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore

... entertaining any real hope of overtaking him, I chucked my rifle to the nearest of the farmers, touched old Bob with the spur, and went away on a hard gallop after the wounded fugitive, who was now plodding onward at the usual long loping canter of his tribe. For about half a mile the wood was open, and sloped gently upward, until it joined the open country, where it was bounded by a high rugged fence, made in the usual snake fashion, with a huge heavy top-rail. This we soon reached; the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)

... mill lane, and a shaggy dog that lay in a wagon shed pursued me about a mile. The road was full of mire; no dwellings adjoined it, and nothing human was to be seen in any direction. I came to a crumbling negro cabin after two plodding hours, and, seeing a figure flit by the window, called aloud for information. Nobody replied, and when, dismounting, I looked into the den, it was, to my ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend

... vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, from ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... a packed burro nipping patiently along in front of him and this same, seductive dream beckoning him over the next horizon. Burros had been slow. While he hurtled down the road from Pinnacle to Lund, Casey pictured himself plodding through sand and sage and over malapai and up dry canyons, hazing a ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower

... day's drive out from Eddyville was a short one. When we got to plodding along over the Plains, we made from fifteen to twenty miles a day. That was counted a good day's drive, without unusual ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker

... a big battle on, that much was certain; but the uproar was so distributed that one could hardly tell whether it was in front or behind. However, the transport was steadily advancing—horse-wagons, mule-wagons, motor-wagons, all plodding patiently, paying no heed to the shell-bursts. And then Jimmie took a look behind, and saw that infernal red-headed Orangeman! He imagined a raucous voice, shouting: "C'mon here! Whatcher waitin' fer?" Jimmie bounced on to his machine ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his way ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... I know I am only dangling about the theatre-lobbies, coffee-houses, ridottos, pleasure-haunts, fair-booths, and feasting- and fiddling-rooms of life; that, meanwhile, the great serious past or present world is plodding in its chambers, toiling at its humdrum looms, or jogging on its accustomed labours, and we are only seeing our characters away from their work. Corydon has to cart the litter and thresh the barley, as well as to make love ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... and that's just the point. George is devoted to Bob, and is as nice as he can be himself, in his own sober, honest, plodding way. He may not have the temper, he certainly has not the tact, but he worships Bob and ...
— No Hero • E.W. Hornung

... I was speeding townwards along the rails Judkin would be plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow and a basketful of dahlias. The basket ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)

... them. Galen might goe shop the gander for anie good he could doe, his secretatyes had so long called him diuine, that now he had lost all his vertue vpon earth. Hippocrates might well helpe Almanack makers, but here he had not a worde to saie, a man might sooner catch the sweate with plodding ouer him to no end, than cure the sweat with any of his impotent principles. Paracelsus with his spirit of the butterie, and his spirits of minerals, could not so much as say, God amend him, to the matter. Plus erat in artifice ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... driving along back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling the baby into the mud. ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... o'er in vain, Nor taste one beauty they contain, And plodding on in one dull tone, Gain ancient tongues and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck

... reasoning, which would enable us to advance with incredible rapidity and certainty into the arcana of those departments which he was then obliged to explore with the most tedious research, the most plodding patience, and the most destructive intellectual tension, in order to accumulate a limited array of ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various

... speed toward our night's lodging at Mount Morris. The oak-trees gloomed denser on our right as we plowed along a villainously sandy road. Labourers homing from the day's work greeted us now and again in the dimness, and presently one of these, plodding up behind us, broke forth ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... the woods before St. Pierre, found the directions on the tree and turned off toward the beach to follow the shore to the Point of Pines. But after plodding through the thick, soft sand for a while they decided that that mode of traveling was altogether too fatiguing, and went back into the woods where they found a path which ran in the general line of the shore and which was much easier ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey

... snakes, nevertheless had no poison-fangs that even after the most minute examination we could discover. Miller and one of the dogs caught a sariema, a big, long-legged, bustard-like bird, in rather a curious way. We were on the march, plodding along through as heavy a tropic downpour as it was our ill fortune to encounter. The sariema, evidently as drenched and uncomfortable as we were, was hiding under a bush to avoid the pelting rain. The dog discovered it, and after the bird valiantly repelled him, Miller was able to seize ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... our journey will now be soon over, for the broad vale is crossed, and the chalk hills and downs beyond. Larks quiver up by us, "higher, ever higher," hastening up to get a first glimpse of the coming monarch, careless of food, flooding the fresh air with song. Steadily plodding rooks labour along below us, and lively starlings rush by on the look-out for the early worm; lark and swallow, rook and starling, each on his appointed round. The sun arises, and they get them to it; he is up now, ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... briskly at the end of an hour, "it is time to mount;" and we were soon plodding on as patiently ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens

... riding small animals were moving along behind the cart, Martians in long robes, their faces hidden by sand masks. On each animal was a pack, carefully tied on with rope. And beyond the merchants, plodding dully along, were peasants and farmers in an endless procession, some riding carts or animals, ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick

... Keverne discovered that his cup was missing, and he guessed at once that his saintly friend had taken it. In great heat he hastened after the guest, and while passing Crowza Downs he pocketed a few large stones for future use. Presently he saw St. Just plodding along in the distance, and shouted after him. St. Just was too deeply absorbed in religious meditation to notice the cries. Finding shouts were useless, Keverne began to throw his stones, and these proved more effectual. St. Just dropped the chalice and hurried ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon

... stern and sterling stuff our men are made of, notwithstanding all that cavillers will say against our modern army system and its soldiers." During that bitter march Baden-Powell asked a young soldier, gripped by fever but manfully plodding on with the rest, whether his kit was not too heavy for him, whereat, says Baden-Powell, he replied, with tight-drawn smile and quavering voice, "It ain't the kit, sir; it's only these extra rounds that I feel the weight of." "These ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie

... imbecile. Early called into public notice, probably before their moral habits are formed, they are extolled for some play of fancy or of wit, as Bacon calls it, some juggler's trick of the intellect; they immediately take an aversion to plodding labour, they feel raised above their situation; possessed by the notion that genius exempts them, not only from labour, but from vulgar rules of prudence, they soon disgrace themselves by their conduct, are deserted by their ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth

... ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone, to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit? Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must, who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens

... professed to be utterly overcome and exhausted by the physical effort of writing for three whole hours without a let-up. If Leslie could have seen her meagre paper, through which a much-tortured professor was at that moment wearily plodding, she would have been astonished. Leslie herself was keen and thorough in her class work, and had no slightest conception of what a lazy student could avoid when she set herself to ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill

... Mr. Longface, that God made horses as they are, and gave them such grandeur of appearance and action, and put such an eaglelike spirit between their ribs, so that, quitting the plodding motions of the ox, they can fly like that noble bird and come sweeping down the course as ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... ado) to horse, 45 And to the Castle bent their course, In which he to the Dame before To suffer whipping duly swore; Where now arriv'd, and half unharnest, To carry on the work in earnest, 50 He stopp'd, and paus'd upon the sudden, And with a serious forehead plodding, Sprung a new scruple his head, Which first he scratch'd, and after said — Whether it be direct infringing 55 An oath, if I should wave this swingeing, And what I've sworn to bear, forbear, And so b' equivocation swear, Or whether it be a lesser sin ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... know nothing so humiliating: to see a rational being in such mechanical motion! with no knowledge upon what principles he proceeds, but plodding on, one foot before another, without even any consciousness which is ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... Ahead of me, plodding along the pike under the moonlight, were Bunch and his cadaverous captor, the former bowed in sorrow or anger, probably both, and the latter with head erect, haughty ...
— Back to the Woods • Hugh McHugh

... that little old man was abundantly evidenced later. John Stanchfield, Elias Palmer, Harold Ormthwaite, and Nathan Ridge, all farmers or market-gardeners of the Colcord district, testified to frights and "spooky feelings" on being accosted by a dim gray figure plodding along the Colcord road in the lonely interval between midnight and morning. The dim gray figure seemed to have recognized the different "teams" by the section of the road through which they jolted or by ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... don't mean to propose any violent incongruity. You must excuse my blundering; I understand but little of the etiquette of young ladies. 'Tis a science too intricate to be learned without more study than we plodding men of business can well spare time for. However, when I have done writing prescriptions, I will set about reading them, provided you will ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... Ursus, a vagabond, is fatherhood in its sweet nobleness; and Gwynplaine, disfigured and deserted—a little lad set ashore upon a night of hurricane and snow, who, finding in his wanderings a babe on her dead mother's breast, rescues this bit of winter storm-drift, plodding on through untracked snows, freezing, but no more thinking to drop his burden than the mother thought to desert it—Gwynplaine is a hero for whose deed an epic is fitting. Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, found, after long years, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle

... pitied. We know how radically different Watt was in his nature to Boulton, whose judgment of men was said to be almost unerring. He recognised in Watt at their first interview, not only the original inventive genius, but the indefatigable, earnest, plodding and thorough mechanic of tenacious grip, and withal a fine, modest, true man, who hated bargaining and all business affairs, who cared nothing for wealth beyond a very modest provision for old age, and who was only happy ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie

... after my arrival, in company with a friend, the latter pointed out to me a stranger, on the opposite side-walk, and desired me to guess who and what he might be. The subject of my examination was a compact, solidly-built man, with a plodding rustic air, and who walked a little lame. After looking at him a minute, I guessed he was some substantial grazier, who had come to Paris on business connected with the supplies of the town. My friend laughed, and told ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper

... Semyonov was sitting in the armchair reading the newspaper, Markovitch was standing behind the chair with the strangest look on his face. Suddenly, just as I came in he bent down and I heard him say: 'Won't you stop the beastly thing?' 'Certainly,' said Semyonov, and he went across in his heavy plodding kind of way and stopped it. I went off to my room and then, upon my word, five minutes after I heard it begin again, thin and reedy through the walls. But when I came back into the dining-room there was ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole

... no reply to this adjuration; only plodding doggedly down the wooden steps, and halting, before an apartment which, from that halt and the superior quality of its furniture, I conjectured to be the best one. There was a carpet—a good one, but the pattern ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte

... life on the road would build up knowledge for me of my people and my country. I should not be studying it in any obvious, guide-book way, and I should learn more of real Spain in a few weeks than in months of conscientious railway plodding ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow—a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails, and ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson

... ribs, and the gleam of his yellow eye. When the dog was wholly baulked by the water trick it was comical to see:—he could not sit still, but rocked up and down in glee, and reared on his hind feet to get a better view of the slow-plodding hound. With mouth opened nearly to his ears, though not at all winded, he panted noisily for a moment, or rather he laughed gleefully just as a dog ...
— Lobo, Rag and Vixen - Being The Personal Histories Of Lobo, Redruff, Raggylug & Vixen • Ernest Seton-Thompson

... now again, and we trekked at night, seldom riding, but plodding doggedly through the endless succession of dunes, with the spiritless horses strung out behind us. Their hooves were splayed to an enormous size through this incessant trekking through the sand; yet, though broken and enfeebled, they had become more inured to the conditions, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... Walk by the Ilissus.—Nevertheless occasionally this inborn love of the glorious outer world must find its expression, and it is of these very groves along he Ilissus that we have one of the few "nature pieces" in Athenian literature. As the plodding steeds take their way let us recall our Plato—his "Phoedrus," written probably not many ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis

... urging me to have my name remembered among the illustrious of Rome. I have, on reaching the fortieth year of my age, to publish a work at which I have been plodding the past eighteen years. An ocean of grief would overwhelm me if then I had to vindicate my character: how, under the hospitality of the British flag, I was put in the felon's dock of a British Supreme Court to be tried ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello

... later, as I was plodding wearily along beside the cart, thinking over the events of this tragic day, I was startled by a white face peering from beneath the upraised curtain out into the darkness. It was the stricken man within, who was surveying the remnant of that gallant army which, a few short hours before, had passed ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson

... with gauzy and unseasonable wings wet and bedraggled in the first rains, homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see Captain Jim returning from a visit to him, slowly plodding along the trail ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... can be on the monotonous side, nine-tenths of the time. When a Stanley goes to find a Livingston, he doesn't spend twenty-four hours a day killing rogue elephants or fighting off tribesman; most of the time he's plodding along in the swamps, getting bitten by mosquitoes, or through the bush getting bitten by tsetse flies. So, as a people, we turned it over to the movies, and Telly, where they can do ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared forty thousand pounds by his speculations. The Duke of Bridgewater started a scheme for the improvement of London ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... morning with a dull, heavy head, the consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,—wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... O Diogenes of the plodding hoofs! O creaking wheels, O tinkling pots and pans, had I but possessed the wisdom to understand your oft-repeated message, how much of doubt, of grief and pain I ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol

... a rare stroke of luck on the voyage across the North Sea this time. Our packet was plodding peacefully along on a hazy, grey forenoon, about half-way to the Tyne, when the faint silhouettes of a brace of destroyers were descried racing athwart our course a good many miles ahead. We were watching them disappear far away on the starboard ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... little notice of this exuberant display of affection, beyond running beneath the charger's belly, and playfully trying to plant her tiny heels in his lofty side. When they have been twice round the paddock, "Ninette" plodding gamely on, a long way in the rear, the couple halt at the shed entrance, and look at us with exuberant curiosity, the donkey's long ears shooting backwards and forwards with ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... with memory), the name may originally have been written Munnins, and nn changed into gg for the sake of euphony. Should this conjecture, for it is nothing else, be well founded, one of the most poetical ideas in the whole range of mythology would, in this plodding, practical, spilling-jenny age of ours, have thus undergone a most ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various

... the driving, never more so than when he held the reins, not of four plodding workhorses, but of four fast driving animals, his foot on the powerful brake, and swung around curves and along dizzy cliff-rims to a frightened chorus of women passengers. And when it came to horse judgment and treatment ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... every hand arose confused sounds from the streets, now filled with a populace merry as though some pleasant carnival were just beginning. Shopkeeper called across to his neighbor, tradesman gossiped with gallant. Even the stolid faces of the plodding peasants, fresh past the gate-tax and bound for the markets to seek what little there remained after giving to the king, bore an unwonted look, as though hope might yet succeed ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, of common every-day industry! ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden

... appearance, they differ very much. The tame Ass is gentle, and generally fond of the society of man; the wild Ass is one of the shyest creatures in the world; even when caught it is almost impossible to tame him. The tame Ass is slow, plodding, dull, and lazy; the wild Ass is as swift as a race-horse and as wild as a Deer. The best mounted horsemen can seldom approach him, and it is generally necessary to send a rifle-ball after him, if he is wanted very much. His flesh is considered a great delicacy, which is another ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton

... on the sky, a waggon of clover Slowly goes rumbling, over the white chalk road; And I lie in the golden grass there, wondering why So little a thing As the jingle and ring of the harness, The hot creak of leather, The peace of the plodding, Should suddenly, stabbingly, make ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes

... been much caricatured, satirized, and abused, but the soldier had no more faithful or indispensable servant than this same patient, plodding, hard-pulling, long-eared fellow of the roomy voice and nimble heels. The "boys" told a story which may illustrate the mule's education. A "tenderfoot" driver had gotten his team stalled in a mud hole, and by no amount of persuasion could he get them to budge an inch. ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock

... along here, ain't it, father?" called Sereno, as they passed a sterile pasture where two plodding men and a yoke of oxen were redeeming the ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown

... Mr. Morris Brown, under the shelter of that admirable umbrella of sea-green silk, to which we have before had the honour to summon the attention of our readers, was, after a day of business, plodding homeward his weary way. The obscure streets through which his course was bent were at no time very thickly thronged, and at the present hour the inclemency of the night rendered them utterly deserted. It is true that ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Mr. Frisky Squirrel, old Mr. Plodding Turtle, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, and many others; but never until yesterday did she make the acquaintance of the gray goose, and then it was owing to Master Teddy's mischief that she found a new friend among the dwellers on ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice

... it worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more easily ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... wage-strugglers it is all of England. There are workshops hereabout in which one may mingle one's copious sweat with the grime of machinery and have fourteen shillings a week into the bargain—if one is properly skilled and muscular and bovinely plodding. Walthamstow is not the place where one would deliberately choose to live if bread could be earned elsewhere with equal certainty. But for all its dirt and dullness it has a spot on the map and a meaning in the dull souls of its inhabitants, and here, within half ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various

... had! And what changes time has made! The old Wahrendorff house has been rased to the ground, and stores stand in its place. Where domestic peace and happiness reigned—where flowers bloomed—where childhood held its sports and holidays, now is seen the busy mart of this bustling, plodding world. The merry little magnet of that grass-covered spot is now the mother of four children; and the beloved father, upon whom her mother fondly hoped to lean, as she tottered down the hill of life, lies low, at ...
— A Biographical Sketch of the Life and Character of Joseph Charless - In a Series of Letters to his Grandchildren • Charlotte Taylor Blow Charless

... man's pretty far gone when that happens to him—but that trip across the desert was the worst I've ever taken. By day it was all right, just swaying in your saddle, half asleep a good part of the time, the smell of warm dust in your nose, the three pack-mules plodding along behind; but the nights!—I tell you, I've sat about camp-fires up the Congo and watched big, oily black men eat their food, and I once saw a native village sacked, but I'd rather be tied for life to a West Coast nigger ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... concert was cut short before its finish. Commandant Balliot came back to the launch with satisfaction on his streaming face, and two armed black soldiers plodding at his heels. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne

... mile orbit. How comes she so far east as this? And coming back too! Having been how much farther? She is a rare spectacle in this neighbourhood. I receive intelligent information to this effect from a dog—a lop-sided mongrel with a foolish tail, plodding along with his tail up, and his ears pricked, and displaying an amiable interest in the ways of his fellow-men,—if I may be allowed the expression. After pausing at a pork-shop, he is jogging eastward ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens

... one place however, by a green, fertile valley, full of rice and kalo patches, and native houses, with a broad river, the Hanapepe, flowing quietly down the middle, which we forded near the sea, where it was half-way up my horse's sides. After plodding all day over stony soil in the changeless sunshine, as the shadows lengthened, we turned directly up towards the mountains and began a two hours ascent. It was delicious. They were so cool, so green, so varied, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... on the road; so much was gain. Except in the villages, and once or twice where a slow, rattling wagon was plodding along on the wet mirror-like asphalt, Rachael might make her own speed. The road lay straight, and was an exceptionally good road, even in this weather. She need hardly pause for signboards. The rain still fell in ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris

... our number, scarcely able to travel, thought the best course to pursue would be to divide the company; one portion to press on, the weaker ones to proceed by easier stages, and when the advance arrived at the settlements, they were to send back a relief for those plodding on wearily behind them. Soon a few who were stronger than the others reached Independence, Missouri, and immediately sent a party with horses to bring in their comrades; so, at last, all ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... the two bronzed railroad men at her side were like pilot guides to Gertrude. When she lost the wayfarers in the gullies or along the narrow defiles that gave them passage between towering rocks, their eyes restored the plodding line. Callahan was the first to detect the change from the expected course. "They are working east," said he, ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman

... knees was devoting all her attention to keeping the sufferer's feet in a tub filled with a brown liquid. Hearing a footstep and the clank of spurs, which sounded strangely in ears accustomed to the plodding pace of country folk, the man turned to Genestas. A sort of surprise, in which the old woman shared ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... stooked and stood in silvery sheaves, ready for the thrasher; the great stretch of wheat had melted down to a narrow oblong, round which the binders were working. Gertrude stopped to watch them. The plodding horses, the bent figures of the men, the play of light on falling grain, and the revolving arms of the machines fixed her eyes; the rustle of sheaves, the crackle of stubble, and the musical tinkle of metal, fell pleasantly on her ears. The mornings and evenings were cold now, but the ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss

... assist in the district, afforded me a little more leisure time, and I was enabled occasionally to spend an evening at Walworth. In passing to and from my friend's house, I now and then met, and ever with renewed interest and surprise, the dark PAIR still plodding their melancholy, interminable rounds. The last time I beheld them, I remember calculating, as they passed me, the number of years they had been thus incomprehensibly associated, and speculating on how many more should elapse ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... entered the kitchen with a cloud upon her brow, and in one of those rare flashes of insight which are vouchsafed to plodding mortals, a plan of action presented itself to Ruth. "Aunty," she said, before Mrs. Ball had time to speak, "you know I'm going back to the city to-morrow, and I'd like to send you and Uncle James a wedding present—you've been so good to me. ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed

... were plodding on by starlight, and by midnight had reached, unmolested, a road that seemed to lead due north. They went around all villages, and learned to consider dogs a nuisance in so doing. At first they were unduly nervous. Faint moonlight played strange games with ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll

... as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of the truth ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service

... the slow, plodding gait of the packer again, finding it easier now that they were on the crest of a divide where the trail was less obstructed and firmer, and the yellow lines on the peak, their goal, came more plainly into view. The cross resolved itself into a peculiar slide of oxidized ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... beast-story in which the characters are, as a rule, conventionalized animals, and which points out some practical moral. The fox may represent crafty people, the ass may represent stupid people, the wind may represent boisterous people, the tortoise may represent plodding people who "keep everlastingly at it." When human beings are introduced, such as the Shepherd Boy, or Androcles, or the Travelers, or the Milkmaid, they are as wholly conventionalized as the animals and there is never any ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... and a conscious power, And craved for more than reading could supply. Then, through the night (all dark, except the moon Shone frosty o'er the heath, or the white snow Gave back such motes of light as else had sunk In the dark earth) he bent his plodding way Over the moors to where the little town Lay gathered in the hollow. There the student Who taught from lingering dawn to early dark, Had older scholars in the long fore-night; For youths who in the shop, or in the barn, Or at the loom, had done their needful work, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... the villages we passed by a primitive flour-mill moved by a small stream playing upon a horizontal wheel beneath the floor; or, more primitive still, by a blindfolded donkey plodding ceaselessly around in his circular path. In the streets we frequently encountered boys and old men gathering manure for their winter fuel; and now and then a cripple or invalid would accost us as "Hakim" ("Doctor"), for the medical work of the missionaries ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... It was Alcatraz plodding towards the line of starters, his languid hoofs rousing a wisp of dust at every step. He went with head depressed, his sullen; hopeless ears laid back. On his back sat Manuel Cordova, resplendent in sky-blue, tight-fitting jacket. Yet he rode the spiritless ...
— Alcatraz • Max Brand

... my friend, what I endure, In slavish, plodding work, from day to day, Which work should be in its own nature pure, And lifted high, from ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young

... Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... of genius understood by the "painstaking" ones. They cannot conceive the suddenness of inspiration—the almost instantaneous grasp of essentials that precedes the plodding mechanical work necessary ...
— The Bow, Its History, Manufacture and Use - 'The Strad' Library, No. III. • Henry Saint-George

... upon the old, familiar way to Fontenoy. All the hills were brown, winter earth and winter air despite the brightness of the sunshine. A blue stream rippled by, pine and cedar made silhouettes against a tranquil sky, and crows were cawing in a stubble-field. Cary rode slowly, plodding on with a thoughtful brow. The few whom he met greeted him respectfully, and he answered them readily enough, then pursued his way, again in a brown study. The Fontenoy gates were reached at last, and ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston

... a story, hasn't it? This summer, I mean. A beautiful story! In the beginning you came to the office—to prison, you said. And I was plodding along, trying to make myself believe that I liked bookkeeping. A pair of lame ducks we were, with broken wings. I'm a little sorry for us yet—aren't you? But now we— Do you think it would hurt you if I raised the shades? It's such a glorious ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller

... troops of stooping bean-setters, women and children, in all varieties of costume and colour; and ploughs and harrows, with their whistling boys and steady carters, going through, with a slow and plodding industry, the main business of this busy season. What work beansetting is! What a reverse of the position assigned to man to distinguish him from the beasts of the field! Only think of stooping for six, eight, ten hours a day, drilling holes in the earth with a little stick, and then dropping ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford

... fog, who suddenly finds himself on a sunlit crag between blue leagues of sky and dizzy depths of valley. And the odd thing was that all the people about her—the whole world of the Passy pension—were still plodding along the same dull path, preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious of the ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... realized how resentful she was. Were they all like that? How about the workers toiling in the factories, day and night, endlessly? The pale, stooped men and women, plodding back and forth to work, blinking in the colorless light, ...
— The Defenders • Philip K. Dick

... taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of black Diana, who pranced and ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner

... head of Outwood's, he who preferred not to interfere with Stone and Robinson, was a mild, rather timid-looking youth—not unlike what Mr. Outwood must have been as a boy—but he knew how to keep balls out of his wicket. He was a good bat of the old plodding type. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... It was old Mr. Crow, whose keen eyes had caught sight of the hand-organ man plodding along with his precious load. Major Monkey whistled. And just for a moment, as he watched Mr. Crow sailing lazily overhead, he almost wished that he hadn't been quite so fond of sugar. For he knew that he could no longer wander through Pleasant ...
— The Tale of Major Monkey • Arthur Scott Bailey

... said Lacy, with astonishing courtesy and forbearance under all the circumstances, as he overtook the other man plodding along the shaded street, "you don't seem to be in much greater favor with the ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... on steadily. Soon the track became soft and sticky. She sank ankle deep in mire. Then gradually the morass grew deeper and she was in mud and water up to her knees. Later she was plodding ...
— Ruth Fielding at the War Front - or, The Hunt for the Lost Soldier • Alice B. Emerson









Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org




Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |