|
|
|
More "Stiff" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... microscope tracing by the pen-nibs are usually easily visible, and they differ with every variety of pen employed. A stiff, fine-pointed pen makes two comparatively deep lines a short distance apart, which appear blacker in the writing than the space between them, because they fill with ink, which afterwards dries and produces a thicker layer of black sediment than ...
— Disputed Handwriting • Jerome B. Lavay
... that he has had worldly experience. The other shepherd, Coridon, having seen nothing, complains of country life. He grumbles at the summer's heat and the winter's cold; at beds on the flinty ground, and the dangers of sleeping where the wolves may creep in to devour the sheep; of his stiff rough hands, and his parched, wrinkled, and weather-beaten skin. He asks whether all men are so unhappy. Cornix, refreshing himself at intervals with his bottle and crusts, shows him the small amount of liberty at court, discourses upon the folly of ambition, lays bare ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... not close his eyelids, stiff with blood,— But, oh, my brother, I had changed with thee For I am still tormented in the flood, Whilst thou hast done thy work, and reached ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... Inauguration, as well as a cold March wind would allow. Mrs. Lee found fault with the ceremony; it was of the earth, earthy, she said. An elderly western farmer, with silver spectacles, new and glossy evening clothes, bony features, and stiff; thin, gray hair, trying to address a large crowd of people, under the drawbacks of a piercing wind and a cold in his head, was not a hero. Sybil's mind was lost in wondering whether the President would not soon ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... was so near to it that he could not hold on any longer. On went the boat, the poor Tin-soldier keeping himself as stiff as he could: no one should say of him afterwards that he had flinched. The boat whirled three, four times round, and became filled to the brim with water: it began to sink! The Tin-soldier was standing up to his neck in ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... stiff with embroidered silk, swam majestically into the lounge, bowed with a certain frigid and deferential surprise to the early guest, and proceeded to an inquiry into dust. In a moment she called, ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... to exculpating Pendennis or Ethel Newcome than any other author, who saw what he saw, would have been. The rare wrath of such men is all the more effective; and there are passages in Vanity Fair and still more in The Book of Snobs, where he does make the dance of wealth and fashion look stiff and monstrous, like a Babylonian masquerade. But he never quite did it in such a way as to turn the course of ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... a stiff climb,' he thought, 'and it's a good thing I am not heavy, or that branch would never ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... importunate with them, but could not prevail. They left me to wait on Providence, which at length brought me another out of the same ship, to whom I made known my condition, craving his assistance for my transportation. He made me the like answer as the former, and was as stiff in his denial, until the sight of my bowl put him to pause. He returned to the ship, and after an hour's space came back again accompanied with another seaman, and for my bowl, undertook to transport me; but he told me I must be contented to lie down in the keel and endure much hardship, ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... Daddy?" she asked, pausing on the threshold. "Mad again?" The Colonel's head twitched in her direction, but he held it stiff. ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... entered, he included the three officials in one cold, stiff bow, waited a moment, and then, finding he was not offered a chair, said with ...
— The Rome Express • Arthur Griffiths
... unless they looked very cross and discontented. Her good qualities were not apparent to Maude, for they consisted of two coronets and an enormous fortune. Her ladies were much more interesting to Maude than herself. The first who entered behind her was a stiff ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... up their stiff right arms, They held them strait and tight; And each right-arm burnt like a torch, A torch that's borne upright. Their stony eye-balls glitter'd on In the ...
— Lyrical Ballads 1798 • Wordsworth and Coleridge
... Skull, its neighbour, seems to have suffered most. To cross from Cape Clear to Skull—partly rowing, partly sailing—in a stiff breeze is very exciting, and might well cause apprehension, but for the crew of athletic Cape men, or Capers, as the people of the mainland call them, in whose hands you have placed your safety. With them you are perfectly secure. Those hardy, simple-minded people ...
— The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) - With Notices Of Earlier Irish Famines • John O'Rourke
... was exhausted, its best crews were much more than decimated, many of its vessels were hopelessly crippled. As it was, the English were content to follow and watch while the Spaniards drove Northwards before a stiff gale; giving up the chase on August 2nd, by which time it was evident that the enemy had no course open to them but to attempt the passage round the North of Scotland, and so to make for home by the Irish coast as best they might; though ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... cry of terror the parson lashed once more at his horse, but without avail. He felt himself growing stiff and dizzy—and ...
— Legend Land, Volume 2 • Various
... worship God after the manner of their fathers. There are also three Roman Catholic clergymen, including a bishop;—good, exemplary men, whose "constant care" is not "to increase their store," but to guide and direct their flocks in the paths of piety and virtue. But, alas! they have a stiff-necked people to deal with;—the French half-breed, who follows the hunter's life, possesses all the worst vices of his European and Indian progenitors, and is indifferent alike to the laws of God ...
— Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory - Volume II. (of 2) • John M'lean
... these seamen undergo for us: the hourly peril and watch; the familiar storm; the dreadful iceberg; the long winter nights when the decks are as glass, and the sailor has to climb through icicles to bend the stiff sail on the yard! Think of their courage and their kindnesses in cold, in tempest, in hunger, in wreck! "The women and children to the boats," says the captain of the "Birkenhead," and, with the troops formed on the deck, and the crew obedient to the word of glorious ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Lake Michigan is frozen stiff. Fancy, O child of a torrid clime, a sheet of anybody's ice, three hundred miles long, forty broad, and six feet thick! It sounds like a lie, Pikey dear, but your partner in the firm of Hope & Wandel, Wholesale Boots and Shoes, New Orleans, ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... had stirred the hearts of sailors no longer even memories with his audience. He sang simply and tunefully in the strong voice of one who knew how to pitch an order in the open air. When it was finished, he acknowledged the tumultuous applause by a stiff little bow and retreated, flushing slightly. The ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... with fishes' or horses' heads; Englishwomen with the figures of angels or of giraffes; Parisian women, daintily attired, sprightly, and coquettish; American women, free in their bearing, and eccentric in their dress, and their men as stiff as the smoke-pipes of steamboats; German women, with languishing voices, drooping and pale like willow branches, fair-haired and blue-eyed, talking in the same breath of Goethe and the price of sausages, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... tir'd with solitary labour, Determin'd to convert his neighbour; 25 So up he sprang and to 't he fell, Like devil piping hot from hell, With indefatigable fist Belabr'ing the poor Lethargist; Till his own limbs were stiff and sore, 30 And sweat-drops roll'd from every pore:— Yet, still, with flying fingers fleet, Duly accompanied by feet, With some short intervals of biting, He executes the self-same strain, 35 Till the Slumberer woke for pain, And half-prepared himself for fighting— That moment that his mad Colleague ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... its home on the desert where you would find it impossible to get food, yet this little bird finds plenty and leads a happy existence. He looks much like a pheasant with broad wings, a long, broad tail and a crest that stands up very stiff and straight. The tail is very flexible, and many people who have lived on the desert a long time, say they can almost tell what the road-runner's thoughts are by the way he holds his tail. If you can make friends with the little bird and get near enough to it you can ...
— Little Tales of The Desert • Ethel Twycross Foster
... passing through his mind, he went back to his old position by the fireplace, standing up stiff and straight and tall, upon the hearth, to ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... in this morning!" she cried, stimulated to pursue in spite of her lover's presence. "They were drove from Spaddleholt Farm only yesterday, where Father bought 'em at a stiff price enough. They are wanting to get home again, the stupid toads! Will you shut the garden gate, dear, and help me to get 'em in. There are no men folk at home, only Mother, and they'll be lost if ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... mosaics. He was working at a table. On one side was a small painting on a card, which was his model. He was copying this painting in mosaic. The bits of glass that he was working with were in the form of slender bars, not much larger than a stiff bristle. They were of all imaginable colors—the several colors being each kept by itself, in the divisions of a box on the table. The man took up these bars, one by one, and broke off small pieces of them, of the colors that he wanted, with a pair of pincers, ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... life I had inserted an account in the Newgate Lives and Trials; it was bare and meagre, and written in the stiff, awkward style of the seventeenth century; it had, however, strongly captivated my imagination, and I now thought that out of it something better could be made; that, if I added to the adventures, and purified the style, I might fashion out of it a very decent tale or novel. On a sudden, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... four of the arrows fired at him by the savages had struck the side of the wagon, and, passing through the flap of his coat, had pinned him down. Booth pulled the arrows out and helped him up; he was pretty stiff from sitting in his cramped position so long, and his right arm dropped by ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... inevitably correct. Not that he was a dandy. Far from it. He was a college man, in dress and carriage as like as a pea to the type that of late years is being so generously turned out of our institutions of higher learning. His handshake was satisfyingly strong and stiff. His blue eyes were coldly blue and convincingly sincere. His voice, firm and masculine, clean and crisp of enunciation, was pleasant to the ear. The one drawback to Freddie Drummond was his inhibition. He never unbent. In his football days, the higher the tension of the game, the ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... ALL FOURS.—The performers stand with hands and feet on the floor, the knees stiff, the hands clinched and resting on the knuckles. The elbows should be stiff. In this position a race is run, or rather "hitched," over a course that will not easily be ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... You know that H.R.H. has a wonderful memory, and particularly for things of that kind. His certificate of Mrs. Delany's veracity will therefore be probably of some weight with you. As to the letter-writing powers of Mrs. Delany, the specimen inclines me to doubt. Her style seems stiff and formal, and though these two letters, which describe a peculiar kind of scene, have a good deal of interest in them, I do not hope for the same amusement from the rest of the collection. Poverty, obscurity, general ill-health, and blindness are but unpromising qualifications for ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... thought I would. You have a pretty stiff-looking burnt piece here to be logged off soon, ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... steam valve bonnet may be removed and the obstruction forced out with a piece of stiff wire, or uncouple the delivery pipe from the injector and unscrew and remove the tubes; the obstruction can then be removed and the ...
— The Traveling Engineers' Association - To Improve The Locomotive Engine Service of American Railroads • Anonymous
... was very laborious in the service of the Parliament, and stiff for them, and had sustained great losses and hatred by adhering in all matters to them. He was learned in his profession, but of more reading than depth of judgement; and I never heard of any injustice or incivility of him. The Parliament ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... Spain; it was brought down by the rivers Tagus and Duoro; and it was plenty in Dacia, Transylvania, and the Asturias. Caligula caused his guests to be helped with gold (which they carried away), instead of bread and meat. The dresses of Nero were stiff with embroidery and gold; he fished with hooks of gold, and his attendants wore necklaces, and bracelets of gold. The Egyptians obtained large quantities of gold from the upper Nile, and from Ethiopia. Among them it was estimated by weight, usually in the form of bulls or oxen. ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 6, March, 1885 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... saw herself detected by an approaching horse while perpetrating stiff and ungainly gambols in the spring sunshine, suddenly assumed a severe gravity of gait, and a sedate solemnity of expression that would have been creditable ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... even with the same roads in the days when Evelyn and Pepys frequently rode along them—and found them exceedingly bad. The cyclist wishing to ride northwards through Hertfordshire has comparatively stiff hills to mount at Elstree, High Barnet, Ridge, near South Mimms, and at St. Albans. He should also beware of the descent into Wheathampstead, of the dip between Bushey and Watford, and of the gritty roadways in the neighbourhood of ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... hawk pounces on fledglings; [1]I will go over thee as its tail goes over a cat;[1] [2]I will pierce thee as a tool bores through a tree-trunk; I will pound thee as a fish is pounded on the sand!"[2] "Truly this is my lot!" spake Fergus. "Who [3]of the men of Erin[3] dares to address these stiff, vengeful words to me, where now the four grand provinces of Erin are met on Garech and Ilgarech in the battle of the Raid for the Kine of Cualnge?" "Thy fosterling is before thee," he replied, "and fosterling of the men of Ulster ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown
... began to crowd the anti-machine element for early adjournment. At that time not far from 2000 bills were recorded in the Senate and Assembly histories. The action had the effect of a good stiff push to a man sliding down hill; the anti-machine forces had the votes to prevent adjournment but the machine's adjournment plans added considerably to anti-machine discomfiture. Senator Wolfe actually gave ...
— Story of the Session of the California Legislature of 1909 • Franklin Hichborn
... contrary, there was an aide-de-camp, a stiff guardsman, and a lady—one of the latest arrivals, a relation of Princess Ligovski on the husband's side—very pretty, but apparently very ill... Have you not met her at the well? She is of medium height, ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... hearth, our deeds forgotten. But stooping still, Odysseus saw her not Nor her brisk tenantry; afar his thought, And after it his vision, crossed the plain And lit on Ilios, dim and lapt in rain, Piled up like blocks which Titans rear to mark Where hero of their breed sits stiff and stark, Spear in dead hand, and dead chin on dead knees; And "Ha," cried he, "proud hinderer of our ease, Now hold I thee within my hollowed hand!" Straightway returning, Troy's destruction planned, He sends for one Epeios, craftsman good, And bids him frame him out a horse in wood, ...
— Helen Redeemed and Other Poems • Maurice Hewlett
... relief from the surface, like the rock-like protuberances that roughen the rustic basements of the architect, from the line of the wall; but I had no open sesame to form vistas through them into the recesses of the past. I saw merely the stiff pastry matrix of which they are composed, and the inclosed pebbles. But the boulder-clay has of late become more sociable; and, though with much hesitancy and irresolution, like old Mr. Spectator on the first formal opening of his mouth,—a consequence, doubtless, in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... so various, that he seem'd to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome; Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts, and nothing long; But in the course of one revolving moon Was ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... from the Rumanian front, thin, tragical and fierce, cried, "Comrades! We are starving at the front, we are stiff with cold. We are dying for no reason. I ask the American comrades to carry word to America, that the Russians will never give up their Revolution until they die. We will hold the fort with all our strength until the peoples of the world rise ...
— Ten Days That Shook the World • John Reed
... Trask of Traskon. The Duke, satisfied that these were persons whom he could address directly, asked if the terms of the marriage-agreement had been reached; both parties affirmed this. Sir Maxamon passed a scroll to the Duke; Duke Angus began to read the stiff ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... of a client than a cleaner of linen; a conclusion which was destined to be confirmed, when the woman, taking up one of the high-backed chairs in the room, placed it right opposite to the man of law, and, hitching her round body into something like stiff dignity, seated herself. Nor was this change from her usual deportment the only one she underwent; for, as soon appeared, her style of speech was to pass from broad Scotch, not altogether into the "Inglis" ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... gripping his right wrist with both hands, and she was strong as most men. Father set the gun beside the door, and bent over them. A minute more and he handed the revolver to Leon, and helped Mrs. Freshett to her feet. Mr. Pryor lay all twisted on the walk, his face was working, and what he said was a stiff jabber no one could understand. He had broken into the pieces ...
— Laddie • Gene Stratton Porter
... it with—"M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator." Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy or religion (e. g., even under Charles X he never concealed his dislike of the priests), drew himself up and answered {2} bluntly, "Je n'avais pas besoin de cette hypothese-la."[2] Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... moment of my life, that confrontation of Semyonov. He stood there as though carved in stone (his figure had always the stiff clear outline of stone or wood). I realised nothing of his body—I simply saw his eyes, that were staring straight in front of him, that were blazing with pain, and yet were blind. He looked past me and, if one ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... centuries; but just as the sweet face looks out from its frame ever girlish, so does perennial youth seem to dwell in the romance of the "Fair Maid of the James." The portrait is by Sir Godfrey Kneller. It shows a beautiful young woman. Her gray-blue gown is cut in a stiff, long-waisted style of the eighteenth century, yet still showing the slim grace of the maiden. The head is daintily poised. A red rose is in her hair and one dark curl falls across a white shoulder. Her face is oval and delicately ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... the clock struck eleven. Her heels clicked on the sidewalk sharply in full sympathy with her state of mind as she walked down the street of the village. And then, as she might have expected, she met the one person whom she least of all desired to meet. An icy stare on her part, a stiff formal bow from the man passing—that was all, but she knew that in that brief interval he had had ample opportunity to observe that she was worried and cross and looked every day of her twenty-nine lonely years; and of course it could not but ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... grew luminous. "Say! he's scared stiff about the banshee that yells down in the Drowned Lands. He'll be comin' up that way soon's it gets dark. If he seen a ghost there, he'd cut an' ...
— Treasure Valley • Marian Keith
... head. What about the other end? The index to a dog's character, as well as to his immediate proceedings, lies, as we all know, in his tail—the angle at which it is held, the way it moves or remains stiff and immovable; its position before a fight, its twist to one side when stalking, its confident carriage when the owner has "got his tail up." All these are so many signals, generally recognised by man and other dogs alike. Granting all this, what was to ...
— 'Murphy' - A Message to Dog Lovers • Major Gambier-Parry
... knife evenly over the cake, and if it seems too thin, beat in a little more sugar. Cover the cake with two coats, the second after the first has become dry, or nearly so. If the icing gets too dry or stiff before the last coat is needed, it can be thinned sufficiently with a little water, enough to make it ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... "Well, I'm getting stiff," said Ned, after an hour or so had passed in silent darkness, the only light being the distant one ...
— Tom Swift and his Wizard Camera - or, Thrilling Adventures while taking Moving Pictures • Victor Appleton
... abominably; the big, stiff shoes, to which he was not accustomed, had chafed the flesh until the blood came. He was not strong; his spinal column felt as if it were one long raw sore, although the knapsack that had caused the suffering ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... at me, sir," said Miss Snubbleston, with tears in her eyes, and exhibiting her ci-devant shoulder-of-mutton sleeves, which, but half an hour before as stiff and stately as starch could make them, were now hanging loose and flabby ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... scale as when applied to large masses of matter, and, therefore, we find that when water freezes in the pores[M] of rocks or stones, it separates their particles and causes them to crumble. The same rule holds true with regard to stiff clay soils. If they are ridged in autumn, and left with a rough surface exposed to the frosts of winter, they will become much lighter, and can afterwards ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... black-thorn sprays; and Lionel was content with the picture as he opened the door and came forward. Vaura was pouring out a cup of coffee for Lady Esmondet, her shapely hands, so soft and white, coming from the cuffs of muslin and lace (she never could be seduced into wearing the odious stiff linen collar and cuff's some women's ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... the core of his being. Physically, he was still stiff and sore from the plank bed. Mentally, he was a volcano. He had been marched up the Haymarket in the full sight of all London by a bounder of a policeman. He had been talked to like an erring child by a magistrate ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Thousands of things there are, no doubt, which cannot be sublimed into poetry, or elevated into history, or treated of with dignity, in a stilted text of any kind, and which are, as it is called, "thrown" into notes; but, after all, they are much like children sent out of the stiff drawing-room into the nursery, snubbed to be sure by the act, but joyful in the freedom of banishment. We were going to say (but it might sound vainglorious), where do things read so well as in notes? but we will put the question in another form:—Where do you so well test an author's learning ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... were you, young person, I'd have a stiff glass of grog before I tumbled into my little bed. Look here, if you like to go up now, I'll have a smoke, and bring you some up presently. You look—well, you look as if you were going to ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... us sheets, a pillowcase, and a gray blanket of the army sort; our first duty was to make our beds. Mattress and pillow were stuffed stiff with what felt like wood chips, and was probably straw and corn-husks; the pillow was cylindrical; the mattress was hillocked and hollowed by the uneasy struggles with insomnia of countless former users. There was a campstool whose luxuries we might share. We had, each, a prison ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... are the valves of the heart, and, more likely still, the muscles of the heart wall and of the walls of the blood vessels. These little muscles are slowly, but steadily, changing all through life, becoming stiffer and less elastic, less alive, in fact, until finally, in old age, they become stiff and rigid, turning into leathery, fibrous tissue, and may even become so soaked with lime salts as to become brittle, so that they may burst under some sudden strain. When this occurs in one of the arteries of the brain, it causes an attack of apoplexy, or a ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... Lion, named 'Stiff-ears,' the brother of King Tawny-hide, came to visit him. The King received him with all imaginable respect, bade him be seated, and rose from his throne to go and kill some ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... little too much walking about at a "week-end." One feels tired and stiff on Monday. I well remember last summer having to take people three times to a distant water garden—talking all the time, too! People are so kind in making it pleasant that they wear ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... "A stiff one, that," said the captain, turning to the doctor, who, with imperturbable nonchalance, was standing near him, holding on to a stanchion with one hand, while the other reposed ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... all that I knew concerning his double dealing with the rebels. The message was carried to him secretly, and his answer was that I should meet him at a certain spot by night. I sent my messenger instead of myself, and he was found in the morning stiff and stark, with more holes in his doublet than ever the tailor made. On this I sent again, raising my demands, and insisting upon a speedy settlement. He asked my conditions. I replied, a free pardon ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... for the gleaming blade that its glory fell. Firm still stood, nor failed in valor, heedful of high deeds, Hygelac's kinsman; flung away fretted sword, featly jewelled, the angry earl; on earth it lay steel-edged and stiff. His strength he trusted, hand-gripe of might. So man shall do whenever in war he weens to earn him lasting fame, nor fears for his life! Seized then by shoulder, shrank not from combat, the Geatish war-prince Grendel's mother. ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... been fitter for thee to have torn the stiff beard, biting hard with thy teeth, than greedily to have drained the bowl of milk ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... cogent enough to justify the request were a mockery), is a piece of abhorrent despotism, and Richard's blossoms withered under it. A strange man had been introduced to him, who traversed and bisected his skull with sagacious stiff fingers, and crushed his soul while, in an infallible voice, declaring him the animal he was making him feel such an animal! Not only his blossoms withered, his being seemed to draw in its shoots and twigs. And when, coupled thereunto (the strange man having ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "leg-irons" named in the list of accoutrements for offence or defence, when it became necessary to chain up the Indian spy of the Neponsets (as narrated by Winslow in his "Good Newes from New England") and other evil-doers. The planters seem to have made stiff "mortar," which premises the use of ...
— The Mayflower and Her Log, Complete • Azel Ames
... sharp mustache Stiff as the sword he slashed in ire; His bald crown, like a calabash, Fringed round with ringlets white as ash, And features scorched with inner fire; Age wore ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... tree-climbing accomplishments are likewise remarkable, when we consider his great size and weight. The grizzlies, and some other large varieties, do not do tree-climbing, except when they are young. A grizzly cub can climb a tree, but his wrists soon become too stiff to permit of their bending ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... that Kibei hated and despised him; as much as he, Iemon, hated and feared Kibei. Kwaiba called sharply to his genial son—"Pray be within call, if needed." He was glad to see the surly fellow's exit. In some things Kwaiba felt fear. The stiff courage of Kibei made him ashamed openly to air his weakness. He broke the news at once to Iemon. "Kakusuke has seen O'Iwa." Iemon looked at him curiously. Was Kwaiba frightened? Said the one-time priest—"What of that? She ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... Garfield seems to have been eminently successful. His genial character and good-natured way of explaining things made him a favourite at once with the rough western lads he had to teach, who would perhaps have thought a more formal teacher stiff and stuck-up. Garfield was one of themselves; he knew their ways and their manners; he could make allowances for their awkwardness and bluntness of speech; he could adopt towards them the exact tone which put them at home at once with their easy-going ...
— Biographies of Working Men • Grant Allen
... woodcutting—Cesario, and old Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and could wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as long as any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut, we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... a nigger boy stole out to see his gal, all dressed up to kill. De patrollers found him at his gal's house and started to take off his coat so dey could whip him; but he said, 'Please don't let my gal see under my coat, 'cause I got on a bosom and no shirt'. (The custom was to wear stiff, white bosoms held up around the neck when no shirt was on. This gave the ...
— Slave Narratives Vol. XIV. South Carolina, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... taking off the Scot's hat and knocking him down with the shock as it fell. The thing had burst in the ground, and it was as good as a Chinese puzzle to fit the great chunks of iron together. At first we could not find the solid base, but we dug it out with a pick from the stiff, black clay. It had sunk 3 ft. 8 in. down from the surface, and had run 7 ft. 6 in. from the point of contact. It was a 45-pounder, thrown by a 4.7 in. gun—probably one of the four howitzers which the Boers possess, standing half-way down Lombard's Kop, about four miles ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... had left him, still bound hand and foot to the bedstead. He had spent a miserable night, he was stiff and sore from his strange position, and they had given him little or no food. But his manner was defiant, and his air exulting, as he ...
— The Thin Red Line; and Blue Blood • Arthur Griffiths
... ears were most open. The two soldiers conversed together in a low voice for a minute or two, and then sat bolt upright and silent, as if they had been made of stone, and had not each carried a pitying heart under his stiff uniform and steady countenance. When the military music was heard coming nearer and nearer, and distant cheers were borne on the breeze, the commanding officer rode by, and saw nothing in the demeanour of these two soldiers to distinguish them from all the rest of the line, who were ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... he had come to the Convent of Portiuncula, as he frequently did, he wished to go at once into the cell where the Saint was at prayer; but scarcely had he seen him in that attitude, when he was pushed back by an invisible hand, his body became stiff, and he was unable to speak. Much astonished at this accident, he made his way back, as well as he could, to the other brethren; God restored his voice, and he made use of it, to acknowledge that he had committed a fault. The Celestial Spouse, ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... their toilsome way up a narrow ravine—which, although the season was autumn, was still filled with snow, that lay in the bottom of the gorge to a great depth. It was snow that had lain all the year; and although not frozen, the surface was firm and stiff; and it was with difficulty they could get support for their feet on it. Here and there they were compelled to stop and cut steps in the snow—as the surface sloped upward at an angle of full 50 degrees, and, in fact, ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... Meadow. I saw three small city boys, with their splendid shining rubber boots and their beautiful bamboo poles. They were on their way home. They had only the one trout between them, and that had been fondled, examined, and poked over and bragged about until it was fairly stiff and brown with those boys—looked as if it had been stolen out of a dried-herring box. They put it reverently back, when I saw it, into their big basket. I smiled a little as I walked on and thought how they felt ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in this guise than when in the glitter of parade uniform or the accurate and irreproachable evening dress of civilization. There is not a man in the group who is not quite at his ease in ball-room attire; most of them have held acquaintance time and again with the white tie and stiff "choker" of conventionality, but the average gallant of metropolitan circles would turn up his supercilious nostrils at the bare suggestion were he to see them now. The —th is in its element, however, for the order has come, and with ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... on the river. For food he would live high indeed. Where will one see such huge glossy blue-black grapes; such enormous Indian River grapefruit; such noble display of fish—scallops, herrings, smelts, and the larger kind with their dead and desolate eyes? There are pathetic rows of rabbits, frozen stiff in the bitter cold wind; huge white hares hanging in rows; a tray of pigeons with their iridescent throat feathers catching gleams of the pale sunlight. There are great sacks of nuts, barrels of cranberries, kegs of olive ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... little over when she gets home! But I am afraid it will be long before she is able to work again! It would be of no use to tell my mother, for somehow she seems to have taken a great dislike to poor Alice. I am positive she does not deserve it. My mother is the best woman I know, but she is very stiff when she takes a dislike. Have you got her address, miss? Arthur would take money from me, I think, but I don't know where he is. I was always meaning to ask her, and ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... without the aid of either hotbed or greenhouse. It will generally be more satisfactory, however, to secure the dozen or two plants needed from some one who has grown them in quantity than to grow so small a lot by themselves. In selecting plants, take those which are short, stiff, hard, and dark green in color with some purple color on the lower part of the stem rather than those which are softer and of a brighter green, or those in which the foliage is of a yellowish green; but in selection it must be remembered that varieties differ as to the color of foliage, so that there ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy
... shall be in Mantua again, I am so anxious to see your Majesty and my son, and also to get away from this place where I find absolutely no pleasure. Your Excellency, therefore, need not envy me my presence at this wedding; it is so stiff I have much more cause to envy those who remained in Mantua." Apparently the noble lady's opinion was influenced by the displeasure she still felt on account of her brother's marriage with Lucretia, but it may also have been due partly ...
— Lucretia Borgia - According to Original Documents and Correspondence of Her Day • Ferdinand Gregorovius
... bear to think of resigning this pleasing anxious being and proceeding to fall into dumb forgetfulness. Men saw their comrades stricken by some dark force that they could not understand. The strong limbs grew lax first, and then hopelessly stiff; the bright eye was dulled; and it soon became necessary to hide the inanimate thing under the soil. It was impossible for those who had the quick blood flowing in their veins to believe that a time would come when feeling would be known no more. This ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... talk, ma! I am glad you don't mean to be imposed upon. I suppose old Wilkins thinks you are soft, and won't see him suffer. You'd better keep a stiff upper lip." ...
— The Tin Box - and What it Contained • Horatio Alger
... and illegal garishness, gives me light enough to examine my watch. It indicates the proximity of midnight. I realize that I am incredibly stiff and cold, and am tormented ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... his expression of face merely denoted supreme contentment with himself and indifference as to others, but now, strange to say, he looked grave and almost solemn. His right leg—the unfortunate limb which had been broken when he fell from his horse in Ireland—seemed stiff, and dragged a trifle more than usual, but this was probably solely due to the influence of the atmosphere. He bowed to Mademoiselle Marguerite with every mark of profound respect, and without seeming to notice the ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... with imitating Byzantine mosaics and enamels. [13] Their work exhibited little knowledge of human anatomy: faces might be lifelike, but bodies were too slender and out of proportion. The figures of men and women were posed in stiff and conventional attitudes. The perspective also was false: objects which the painter wished to represent in the background were as near as those which he wished to represent in the foreground. In the fourteenth century, however, Italian painting abandoned the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... on the Eastern stage. Her imports into the port of Newchang in 1891 amounted to but 22,000 taels; but in 1897 they had increased to 280,000 taels. In manufactured goods, from matches, watches, and clocks to the rolling stock of railways, she has already given stiff shocks to her competitors in the Asiatic markets; and this while she is virtually yet in the equipment stage of production. Erelong she, too, will be furnishing her share to the growing mass of ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... By those stiff shapes in which he drew His soul's exalted cry, When flying down the forest dark He slew and knew not why, When he was filled with song, and strength Flowed to ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various
... hat will be all right when you get down on the ground," said the monument man. "Many people lose their hats up here, and unless it's a man's stiff one, or unless it's raining or snowing, little harm comes to them. I guess your little girl's hat just fluttered to the ground like a bird, and you can pick ...
— Bobbsey Twins in Washington • Laura Lee Hope
... Verdeil (my prison-doctor) and his family. They ran inshore immediately; the body was quickly got out; and M. Verdeil, with three or four other doctors, laboured for some hours to restore animation; but she only sighed once. After all that time, she was obliged to be borne, stiff and stark, to her father's house. She was his only child, and but 17 years old. He has been nearly dead since, and all Lausanne has been full of the story. I was down by the lake, near the place, last night; and a boatman acted to me the whole scene: depositing himself ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Battalion of Artillery from New Orleans had played such havoc on the 30th with the enemy's retreating columns, it resembled some great railroad wreck—cannon and broken caissons piled in great heaps; horses lying swollen and stiff, some harnessed, others not; broken rammers, smashed wheels, dismounted pieces told of the desperate struggle that had taken place. One of the strange features of a battlefield is the absence of the carrion ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... reckon the watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment. They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe and almost intolerable,—they were led out before break of day, and, stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night, were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows and stripes were renewed upon their backs; ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... I believe, too, she curtsied to me; but though I saw the bend, I was too near-sighted to be sure it was intended for me. I was hardly ever in a situation more embarrassing - I dared not return what I was not certain I had received, yet considered myself as appearing quite a monster, to stand stiff-necked, if really meant. ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... would come next. My seat, after several strange tumbling motions, seemed to rise into the air a little way, and then I found that I was astride of a gaunt, bony horse—a skeleton horse almost, only he had a gray skin on him. He began, apparently with pain, as if his joints were all but too stiff to move, to go forward in the direction in which he found himself. I kept my seat. Indeed, I never thought of dismounting. I was going on to meet what might come. Slowly, feebly, trembling at every step, ...
— The Seaboard Parish Volume 1 • George MacDonald
... moment came in for an ounce of tea, and as Mrs Caffyn rose to weigh it, the rector departed with a stiff 'good- morning,' made to do duty for ...
— Clara Hopgood • Mark Rutherford
... sandboots, these clothes that they may wet and dirty and tear as they like, mean deliverance from endless dressings—dressings for breakfast and dressings for lunch, dressings to go out with mamma and dressings to come down to dessert—an escape from fashionable little shoes and tight little hats and stiff little flounces that it is treason to rumple. There is an inexpressible triumph in their return at eventide from the congress by the sea, dishevelled, bedraggled, but with no fear of a scolding from nurse. Then too there is the freedom from "lessons." There ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... liked dancing. There was something obscurely dangerous about it. She was afraid of being lifted off her feet and swung on and on, away from her safe, happy life. She was stiff and abrupt with her partners, convinced that none of those men who liked Connie Hancock could like her, and anxious to show them that she didn't expect them to. She was afraid of what they were thinking. And she would slip away early, running down the garden to ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... open mutiny, and the case demanded violent remedy. He called for silence, telling the mutineers that he was no whit better off than they were; that it was no time to give way to fear, but a time to keep a stiff upper lip, and play the man. He reminded them that, even if the Spaniards had taken the pinnaces, "which God forbid," "yet they must have time to search them, time to examine the mariners, time to execute their resolution after ...
— On the Spanish Main - Or, Some English forays on the Isthmus of Darien. • John Masefield
... right. I know the house. It has only one exit. You, Ramot," he went on, addressing the young woman, "go up to the first floor and take your place at a table; here are ten dollars, order champagne and don't be too stiff with ...
— The Exploits of Juve - Being the Second of the Series of the "Fantmas" Detective Tales • mile Souvestre and Marcel Allain
... that account," said Lewisham, and Bonover with eyebrows still raised and a general air of outraged astonishment left him standing there, white and stiff, and ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... where your feet go sinking deeper and deeper into the mud, and you can't find any stiff firm bit to stand on. Sometimes people sink down and down into a bog till the mud comes right over their head and face and chokes them; but we haven't got any bogs as bad as that here. Now, children, step along in front. Very soon we shall get to the top of the mountain, and then we shall see ...
— Milly and Olly • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... days pursuer and pursued drifted in calms. On the 19th a stiff westerly gale enabled Hawke to overtake Conflans, who was obliged to shorten sail for fear of arriving at his destination in the darkness. The morning of the 20th found the fleets in sight of each other but scattered. All the forenoon the rival admirals made ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... spirals represent all shapes. The spheres may be large or small, and may group themselves in various ways; the rods may be long or short, thick or slender; the spirals may be loosely or tightly coiled, and may have only one or two or may have many coils, and they may be flexible or stiff; but still rods, spheres, and ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... agreed. "Never saw the beat of it. She's scared stiff, too. Makes it all the pluckier. What will you ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... house after dinner. I went over three or four times to inspect the ministry, as I had a presentiment we should end by living there. The house is large and handsome, with a fine staircase and large high rooms. The furniture of course was "ministerial"—stiff and heavy—gold-backed chairs and sofas standing in rows against the walls. There were some good pictures, among others the "Congres de Paris," which occupies a prominent place in one of the salons, and ...
— My First Years As A Frenchwoman, 1876-1879 • Mary King Waddington
... tourist sector was illustrated by the sharp drop in 1991-92 due largely to the Gulf war. Although the industry has rebounded, the government recognizes the continuing need for upgrading the sector in the face of stiff international competition. ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... roared towards us in ranges of dissolving cliffs; the wind screaming and whistling through our grey and frozen rigging; the water washing in floods about our decks, with the ends of the running gear snaking about in the torrent, and the live stock lying drowned and stiff in their coops and pen ...
— The Frozen Pirate • W. Clark Russell
... of starch will, says Captain BATHURST, affect the wearing of starched garments. It is expected that in the House of Lords Lord SPENSER and Lord HARCOURT will join in an impassioned plea that, until the shortage grows more acute, really well-dressed men should be allowed to compromise on stiff dickeys. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 16, 1917. • Various
... the first place, upon how the Blues fight; if they do well, they ought to beat us. In the next place, it depends on whether d'Elbee comes up in time. If he does, I think that we shall hold the place, but it will be stiff fighting." ...
— No Surrender! - A Tale of the Rising in La Vendee • G. A. Henty
... pursued Gideon. "You wears buckskins an' flannels an' a frontier hat; you goes about with your shirt-sleeves rolled up an' a scarf 'stead of a stiff starched collar; but you takes care that thar's allus elegant underclothin' nex' yer skin. You've gotten surprisin' clean habits, too: washes yourself three or four times a day, allus shaves yerself mornin's an' oils an' brushes ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... Charley Devans, a boy three years younger than I, called to tell me a little innocent secret his sister had sent by him, and wasn't there mamma, as straight as a marshal, in one chair, and my governess, stiff as my new parasol-top, in the other, and he couldn't say a word? But you know he met me in the street that day you walked out with me, and told me all ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... dull and bored, and when he reached the club, before going into the billiard-room, went into the bar to have a drink by himself. He had a shyness now about joining the company of white men when there were a lot of them together and needed a stiff dose of whisky to give him confidence. He was standing with the glass in his hand when Miller came in to him. He was in his shirt sleeves and still held his cue. He ...
— The Trembling of a Leaf - Little Stories of the South Sea Islands • William Somerset Maugham
... one thing in the wide world that's throublin' her," said Art, "an' that is, that she hadn't her parents' blessin' when she married me, nor since—for ould Murray's as stiff-necked as a mule, an' the more he's driven to do a thing the less ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton
... night, gloomy are the ways of Zarathustra. Come, thou cold and stiff companion! I carry thee to the place where I shall bury thee with mine ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... question and reply, the latter being repeated, as the boat passed, for the benefit of the coxswain. As she swept by us I looked down and observed that the ten men who formed her crew crouched flat on the thwarts. Only the steersman sat up. No wonder. It must be hard to sit up in a stiff gale with freezing spray, and sometimes heavy seas sweeping over one. I knew that the men were wide awake and listening, but, as far as vision went that boat was manned only by ...
— Battles with the Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... but you are a mean, dirty blackguard, or you wouldn't have treated a girl like that," replied Tommy, standing as stiff as a stake ...
— Poor and Proud - or The Fortunes of Katy Redburn • Oliver Optic
... made in two forms, both with beautifully executed relief (embossed)—the cheaper ones of plain stiff paper similar to drawing paper (these are to be substituted for and used as outline map blanks), the others covered with a durable waterproof surface, that can be quickly cleaned with a damp sponge, adapted to receive a succession of markings and cleansings. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... arrangement and free consent there is a yielding of one to another for a purpose. And so what Jesus means here is simply this—surrender. Bend your head down, bend down your neck, even though it's a bit stiff going your own way, and fit it into this yoke of mine. Surrender to Me as ...
— Quiet Talks on Service • S. D. Gordon
... emptied our pockets, and made the old cap look worse than ever. Then Henrietta, without saying a word to us, bought some orange flannel, and picked the old cap to pieces, and cut out a new one by it, and made it all herself, with a button, and a stiff peak and everything, and it really did perfectly, and looked very well in the sunshine over Rupert's brown ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... ounces of butter in a pint of skimmed milk; let it stand till it is as cold as new milk; then put to it a spoonful of light yest, a little salt, and as much flour as will make it a stiff paste. Work it as much, or more, than you would do brown bread; let it lie half an hour to rise; then roll it into thin cakes; prick them very well quite through, to prevent their blistering, and bake them on tin plates in a quick oven. To keep ...
— The Lady's Own Cookery Book, and New Dinner-Table Directory; • Charlotte Campbell Bury
... plumage, fly from tree to tree, The whole scene vocal with sweet varied song; And here a widespread lawn bedecked with flowers, With clumps of brilliant roses grown to trees, And fields with dahlias spread,[4] not stiff and prim Like the starched ruffle of an ancient dame, But growing in luxuriance rich and wild, The colors of the evening and the rainbow joined, White, scarlet, yellow, crimson, deep maroon, Blending all colors in one dazzling blaze; There orchards bend beneath their luscious ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... most important requisites are to be natural and simple; there should be no straining after effect, but simply a spontaneous out-pouring of thoughts and ideas as they naturally occur to the writer. We are repelled by a person who is stiff and labored in his conversation and in the same way the stiff and labored letter bores the reader. Whereas if it is light and in a conversational vein it immediately ...
— How to Speak and Write Correctly • Joseph Devlin
... mother brace herself against the tree with her stiff tail. Then how her wedge-shaped bill rapped and rapped against the wood. For fully twenty minutes she rapped away at the rotten wood. Then she grew tired and your father took her place at ...
— Stories of Birds • Lenore Elizabeth Mulets
... an old university friend called Mihail Ivanitch Lubkov, a charming man of whom coachmen and footmen used to say: "An entertaining gentleman." He was a man of medium height, lean and bald, with a face like a good-natured bourgeois, not interesting, but pale and presentable, with a stiff, well-kept moustache, with a neck like gooseskin, and a big Adam's apple. He used to wear pince-nez on a wide black ribbon, lisped, and could not pronounce either r or l. He was always in good spirits, ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... some things this boisterous Phil writes in tenderer mood:—how "Rose and Adele are as thick as ever, and Adele comes up pretty often to pass an evening,—glad enough, I guess, to get away from Aunt Eliza,—and I see her home, of course. She plays a stiff game of backgammon; she never throws but she makes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... into the station. Frau Rupius hurried to a compartment, got in, and, looking out of the window, nodded affably to Bertha. The latter endeavoured to respond as cheerfully, but she felt that her wave of the hand to the departing Frau Rupius was stiff and forced. ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... though everything here had gone to sleep for a hundred years," she said, gazing in astonishment at the little hall, with its old clock, its two or three stiff hunting-pictures, its drab-painted walls, ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... regimentation, and can squelch the bragging about how well they're doing on good old whatever. But don't let them kid you. GSM drive is restricted to interstellar transport. Colonists from the nearer systems are picked people, stiff-backed pioneers, who don't sob to come "home" every time their particular planet completes a circuit around its primary; and, when they do return, they're generally too busy lobbying for essentials to bother telling tall ...
— Attrition • Jim Wannamaker
... disappearance of Israel's enemies, one of the great obstacles to her restoration has been removed; but the greatest obstacle is in Israel herself. She has been stiff-necked and rebellious: now that the prophet's words have proved true,[1] each individual for himself must give heed to his warning voice, not merely consulting him, but obeying him (xxxiii.). Then Jehovah will manifest His grace in many ways. He will ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen
... of the leather of some ancient breechin. His mouth was open as far as it could; his lips curled up in rage—a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... penetrated by the snow or wind; their mouths, noses, and eyes were alone exposed to the air, and they did not need to be protected against it; nothing is so inconvenient as scarfs and nose-protectors, which soon are stiff with ice; at night they have to be cut away, which, even in the arctic seas, is a poor way of undressing. It was necessary to leave free passage for the breath, which would freeze at once on anything ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... Pooh! she had by no means resigned herself to have him, though for Fanny's sake it might be well, and was there not a foolish prejudice in favour of married women, that impeded the usefulness of single ones? However, if the stiff, dry old man approved of her for her fortune's sake, that would be quite ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sitting there cramped and stiff when the first faint flush of dawn stole over the hill-crest behind him. Then he rose to wander toward the water-front. As the harbor assumed definite form, he beheld a launch stealing in toward the village, and ten ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... limitations. There is no Schumann, let the fact be emphasised, among the painter-critics, though quite as much discrimination, ardour of discovery, and acumen may be found among the writings of the men whose names rank high in professional criticism. And this hedge, we humbly submit, is a rather stiff one to vault for the adherents of criticism written by artists only. Nevertheless, every day of his humble career must the critic pen ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the newsfac in his prosthetic left hand, which was indistinguishable in appearance and in ordinary usage from the flesh, bone, and blood that it had replaced. Indeed, the right hand, with its stiff little finger, often appeared to be more useless than the left. The hand, holding the glass of rye-and-ginger, gave an impression of over-daintiness because of that ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... there rode a gentle PARDONERE Of Ronceval, his friend and his compere, That straight was comen from the court of Rome. Full loud he sang, "Come hither, love, to me" This Sompnour *bare to him a stiff burdoun*, *sang the bass* Was never trump of half so great a soun'. This Pardoner had hair as yellow as wax, But smooth it hung, as doth a strike* of flax: *strip By ounces hung his lockes that he had, And therewith he his shoulders oversprad. Full ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... they reached Delmonico's it was half past ten, and they were surprised to see a stream of taxis driving up to the door one after the other and emitting marvelous, hatless young ladies, each one attended by a stiff ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... this bread in the same manner as that for the Aelkaandt except that the corn is baked instead of parched. The yeast is then mixed with meal into a stiff dough and baked in corn husks, four pats ...
— Eighth Annual Report • Various
... afternoons we stood about on the sidewalk jeering and fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... up," said the frontiersman. "Boys, I'm afraid we now have a stiff piece of work cut out for ourselves. A third party is coming from the rear, and there is no telling but what there may be still more. We must do our best and fight to a finish, for they are on the war-path for fair, ...
— For the Liberty of Texas • Edward Stratemeyer
... to relate it here mainly in the words of the chief engineer of a certain steamship which, after bunkering, left Lerwick, bound for Iceland. The weather was cold, the sea pretty rough, with a stiff head wind. All went well till next day, about 1.30 p.m., then the captain sighted a suspicious object far away to starboard. Speed was increased at once to close in with the Faroes and good lookouts were set fore and aft. Nothing further was seen of the suspicious object, but about ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... the front door opens, and a young man—not the one what's your friend, but the other—comes sailing out, and through the gate, and down the road, as stiff and upright as a grenadier,—I never see anyone walk more upright, and few as fast. At his heels comes the young man what is your friend, and it seems to me that he couldn't make out what this other was a-doing of. I says to myself, "There's been a quarrel between them two, and him ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... The farmers were stiff to move in some cases and especially disliked the idea of having to train the women. "They weren't going to run after women all day—they had too much to do to go messing round with girls!" This objection was met by the Board of Agriculture ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... that the strange creatures in the tree began to move oftener, and to draw their limbs up as if they were growing stiff, and then their long-drawn howl grew longer and more ferocious than ever; the game, tired out, would soon drop into their mouths. But it did not, the two creatures made sounds as if they were again encouraging each other, and the hearts of the wolves filled ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Limited was limbered up that Christmas morning, Henry leaned from the window, leaned back, tugged at the throttle again, smiled over at the fireman, and said, "Now, Billy, watch her swallow that cold, stiff steel at about a mile ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... that he awoke, stiff, and chilled. The dryness of pre-dawn gave partial light and somewhere a bird was twittering. There had been birds—or things whose far off ancestors had been birds—in the "hot" forest. Did they also sing to greet ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... to be attacked by any but a very numerous body of horse; and if they should attempt it, you may be sure that we can render a very good account of ourselves. We have beaten off the French horse once, and, as since then we have had some stiff fighting, I have no fear of the men being unsteady, even if all Franceschi's cavalry came down upon us. Of that, however, there will be little chance; the French have their hands full for some days, ...
— With Moore At Corunna • G. A. Henty
... George Bentinck. He was lying on his face; his arms were under his body, and in one hand he grasped his walking-stick. His hat was a yard or two before him, having evidently been thrown off in falling. The body was cold and stiff. ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... lady does," corrected the boy glibly. "The one who wears the queer lace cap and sits in the big chair by the hearth all day—and all night, too, Tommy Spade says, 'cause he peeped through once at midnight and she was still there, sitting so stiff that it scared him and he ran away. Well, Aunt Mehitable sold her a dozen, and she got a side of bacon ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... "O only worthy, whom the earth all fears, High God defend thee with his heavenly shield, And humble so the hearts of all thy peers, That their stiff necks to thy sweet yoke may yield: These be the sheaves that honor's harvest bears, The seed thy valiant acts, the world the field, Egypt the headland is, where heaped lies Thy fame, worth, justice, ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... scorns to "take the pledge," And keep the promise fast, May be, in spite of fate, a stiff Cold-water man, at last! J. ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... so, finding a little path which led upward, she commenced to climb. Great boulders strewed the ground here between the trees, and although by the sound she knew herself to be near the river, she could not see it until after a stiff climb of twenty minutes or so she emerged on an open space above the falls. Here indeed was beauty enough to satisfy even her desire for it. The undulating ground all about and below her was mostly forest-clad, the larches showed in their vivid green against the sombre hue of the pines, while ...
— A Countess from Canada - A Story of Life in the Backwoods • Bessie Marchant
... season. Silk underclothing I regard as dangerous, because silk is a non-conductor. Good Lisle thread or flannel giving proper aeration is excellent. No one should be more careful about their clothing than New Yorkers, because of the sudden changes in temperature there. Stiff, high collars are injurious, because they are irritants to blood-vessels and nerves and are non-conductors. Collars should be worn from a quarter to half an inch away from the skin, for the less the Adam's apple—the ...
— The Voice - Its Production, Care and Preservation • Frank E. Miller
... three sailed in the Swordfish. Having ascertained that the midshipmen intended visiting Barbuda, they first steered for that island. There was a good stiff breeze, and as the Swordfish was a fast craft, she rapidly ran over the thirty miles of water which intervenes between Antigua and its small dependency. It was not, however, all plain sailing, as numerous shoals, reefs, and rocks surround the island mostly below the surface, some only ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... heaven, not your psalm-smitin', knock-me-down, ten-commandment, cussin' God. I'm grawin' very auld an' I knaw what I knaw. Your God's a devil, fisherman—a graspin', cruel devil; an' them the devil saves is damned. 'Tis Christ as you've turned your stiff back 'pon—Christ as'll let this poor lass into heaven afore ever you gets theer! You ban't in sight o' the gates o' pearl, not you, for all your cold prayers. You'm young in well-doin'; an' 'tis a 'ard road you'll ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... held out his band to Cynthia, and she climbed, with unbending dignity, to the driver's seat. "You know you've got that dress to turn, Lila," she said, as she settled her stiff skirt primly over ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... back from the gravelwalk, through a side-door into the pompous solitude of the stately house; across long chambers, where the mirrors reflected her form, and the huge chairs, in their flaunting damask and flaring gold, stood stiff on desolate floors; into her own private room,—neither large nor splendid that; plain chintzes, quiet book shelves. She need not have been the Marchioness of Montfort to inhabit a room as pleasant ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... French frigate to action. Now the manner in which the Hermione's helm had been manipulated on the occasion in question had excited the admiration of, and extorted frequent favourable comments from the officers; there was a stiff breeze blowing at the time; and the frigate, when heavily pressed upon a taut bowline, had a most unhandy knack of griping; notwithstanding which, as I have before stated, her wake had been as straight as though ruled upon the water. But Captain Pigot ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... stair, Eleanor shook out her plumes, the attendant lady arranged her veil over her yellow hair, and drew out her short train and long hanging sleeves, a little behind the fashion, but the more dignified, as she swept into the ball, and though her heart beat desperately, holding her head stiff and high, and looking every inch a princess, the shrewd Scotch lady behind her flattered herself that the two Barons did look a little daunted by the bearing of the creature they ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... There are times when a man has to tell things to a woman. That's what women are for. When you feel you've got to tell things to a woman, you come and tell them to H lne. Don't be afraid of that peacock of a doorman; push him over. He's so stiff he'll topple easy." ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... English. Its body is usually covered with a substance much resembling a shawl, sometimes red, sometimes blue, often plaid, and, strange to say, they frequently change skins with one another. On their heads they have a horn very like a stiff brown paper lamp-lighter. Wings of the same substance flap upon their shoulders when they fly; this is never very far from the ground, as they usually fall with violence if they attempt any lofty flights. They browse over the earth, but can sit up and ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... man will have a stiff leg for life as it is, and he would have died if you hadn't ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... diplomatic immunity. Here the ideologies could rant and rave against each other, seeking a rendering of a final decision in men's age-old arguments; but elsewhere such discussions were verboten, and subject to swift, stiff penalties. ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... bloody wood When Agamemnon cried aloud, And let their liquid droppings fall To stain the stiff ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... Sonnets. Have just finished Casa Guidi Windows, a grand poem and so fitting to our terrible struggle.... I wish the government would move quickly, proclaim freedom to every slave and call on every able-bodied negro to enlist in the Union army. How not to do it seems the whole study at Washington. Good, stiff-backed Union Democrats would dare to move; they would have nothing to lose and all to gain for their party. The present incumbents have all to lose; hence dare not avow any policy, but only wait. To forever blot out slavery is the only possible ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... Garlands, a green worsted mat, hopefully designed to imitate moss, and on the depression in its center the astral lamp. On the wall opposite were pictures of Tenney's father and mother, painful enlargements from stiff photographs, and on the neighboring wall a glazed framing of wax flowers and a hair wreath. The furniture was black walnut upholstered with horsehair. Tenney was of the more prosperous line of farmers. And yet he had not begun so. All this represented ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown
... for an hour and a quarter. Then the alarum roused me, and I sprang up before I was thoroughly awake. Had I hesitated, the desire to relapse into perfect sleep would have overpowered me. Although the muscles of my neck were painfully stiff, and my hands unsteady from my nervous disturbance, produced by the interruption of my first slumber, I dressed myself resolutely, and, after taking a draught of cold water, stole out of the house. It was exceedingly dark; and I had some difficulty in finding the cow-house, ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... time Mithridates appears to have assumed the tiara, or tall stiff crown, which, with certain modifications in its shape, had been the mark of sovereignty, both under the Assyrians and under the Persians. Previously the royal headdress had been either a mere cap of a Scythic type, but lower than ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 6. (of 7): Parthia • George Rawlinson
... scenic rendering of it. His dramatic methods, however, so far elaborated from the simplicity of Tasso's, had a vast influence over subsequent work, and it is highly important to obtain a clear idea of their nature. We shall, therefore, be condemned to follow Guarini, part-way at least, through the stiff artificiality ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... parents' roof as "Narra-Mattah," the devoted wife of a Narraganset warrior-chief, and the young mother of his little son. This book draws a strong picture of pure family devotion; even the old grandfather's heart, beneath his stiff Puritan garb, beats an unforgettable part. Sorrow for the lost child gave the story its name—"The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish" (then thought to mean in the Indian language, "Place of the Whip-poor-will")and it has been ...
— James Fenimore Cooper • Mary E. Phillips
... tranquil as we proceeded north, and from Lausanne to Vevey we actually had smooth water. I saw vessels becalmed, or with baffling winds, under this shore, while the bise was blowing stiff, a few leagues farther down the lake. When I got home I was surprised to hear that the family had been boating the previous evening, and that there had scarcely been any wind during the day. This difference was owing to the sheltered position of Vevey, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... leg-band somewhat similar in make to armlet No. 5, and between half-an-inch and an inch in width, though the colour of this leg-band is a dull brown. But the usual form of leg-band and anklet is made by women only out of thread fibre by a process of manufacture quite distinct from the stiff plait work adopted for some of the belts and for the armlets. They make their thread out of fine vegetable fibre as they proceed with the manufacture of the band, rolling the individual fibres with their hands upon their thighs, and then rolling these fibres into two-strand threads, and ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... were very informal and exceedingly enjoyable. There were many who gladly entertained us by their accomplishments. Champney the artist, sent after blackboard and chalk, and did wonderfully clever things. Some one described a stiff and stupid reception where everyone seemed to have left themselves at home. Those who came to me brought their best. Mrs. Barnard, wife of President Barnard of Columbia College, urged me to give three lectures in her parlour. I could not find the time, but her house was ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... ourselves on your French courtiers; but for some time, thanks to your changing loves, you have kept us so often in the field, in harness, that our voices are hoarse from the cold night air, and our stiff knees can no longer bend in our armour: you must then take me just as I am, madam; since to-day, for the welfare of Scotland, you are no longer at ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... running yet," He cried in hopeful tone, Alas, the hydrant too, was froze, As stiff ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... cried. "How? For Heaven's sake, man, tell me all!" He went to a cupboard, got out some brandy and drank a stiff portion. ...
— The Mansion of Mystery - Being a Certain Case of Importance, Taken from the Note-book of Adam Adams, Investigator and Detective • Chester K. Steele
... nodded, showing all their teeth, and the mother took the littlest baby, for there seemed to be a very generous number of the smaller members of the family, and sat down with it in her lap on the rickety step. Then they all drew up stiff as ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... glad I am not in the kingdom of heaven; though, if one dies like Christina, one escapes purgatory. Roberto, when I rise I am very stiff: I think, indeed, I have ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... especially in knee and arm staking, are required in the stretching, which is the essential feature of these operations. Breaking is first resorted to. The break beam, which is armed at each end with a knife edge, oscillates up and down. In a frame beneath it the operator stretches the dried and stiff skin. The break beam comes down upon the skin, stretches and softens it, and removes much surplus custard. The operator presents a new surface to each stroke of the break beam, and in a very short space of time the entire skin ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 794, March 21, 1891 • Various
... son," said His Holiness, dismissing him at last, "for I would wear the button myself before I die." Then, raising a beaming face, "Wouldst thou aught further with me, Fra Giuseppe? Ah, I recall! Thou yearnest to preach to thy stiff-necked kinsmen. Ebbene, 'tis a worthy ambition. Luigi, remember me ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... do either. She was terribly stiff and she had slept near a bed of May-apple blossoms. In the twilight she had not noticed them, and they ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... stock—Robert Hunter, Sheriff of Dumbarton,[34] and author of an excellent law-book still re-edited and republished. Whether he was originally big or little is more than I can guess. When I knew him he was all fallen away and fallen in; crooked and shrunken; buckled into a stiff waistcoat for support; troubled by ailments, which kept him hobbling in and out of the room; one foot gouty; a wig for decency, not for deception, on his head; close shaved, except under his chin—and for that he never failed to apologise, for it went sore against the traditions of his life. ...
— Essays of Robert Louis Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... waited for nearly a quarter of an hour. She had placed herself on one of the least comfortable chairs, and sat there in a very stiff attitude, holding her umbrella across her knees. After a rather nervous survey of the room, (it had changed very little in appearance since her last visit six years ago), she fell into uneasy thoughtfulness, now and then looking impatiently towards the door. When the ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... respecting the Fall of Man; which he understands, not of an allegorical, but a real tumble, by which the whole body of humanity became, as it were, lame to the performance of good works. Pride he will have to be nothing but a stiff neck; irresolution, the nerves shaken; an inclination to sinister paths, crookedness of the joints; spiritual deadness, a paralysis; want of charity, a contraction in the fingers; despising of government, a broken head; the plaster, a sermon; the lint to bind it up, the text; the probers, the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... his manager. He was dressed in dimity; and his stiff figure and mutton-chop whiskers gave him at the same time the air of a magistrate and a dandy. Even when he was speaking, his features did not ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... cigar, and he searched in the pockets of the overcoat for a box of matches he had placed there before leaving his bedroom. The box had gone, but in the right-hand pocket his fingers closed on a long, narrow envelope, made of stiff linen paper, which somehow seemed unfamiliar. He drew it out, and examined it, standing in front of a well-lighted ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... fearful thing; but these fears were nothing compared to the sense that haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels. He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along. He could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of wind came laden with that last low cry. If he stopped it did the same. If he ran, it followed—not running too: that would have been a relief: but like a corpse ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... hearts. Praise is comely when flowing from a heart full of love, but a wild hurrahing is unseemly. All unseemly conduct in modes and forms of worship—such as tossing the head to and fro, swaying the body, the loud stamping of feet, rolling on the floor, lying stiff and rigid, shouting until the face reddens and veins distend and exhaustion overcomes, are disgracing to God and disgusting to refined ears ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... there would be no time—he had appealed to Caesar. He must send a letter to her telling that he had started out for Jericho. A dangerous journey he knew it to be, but he was without strength to resist the temptation of one more effort to save the Jews: a hard, bitter, stiff-necked, stubborn race that did not deserve salvation, that resisted it. He had been scourged, how many times, at the instigation of the Jews? and they had stoned him at Lystra, a city ever dear to him, for it was there he had met Eunice; the memories that gathered round her beautiful name ...
— The Brook Kerith - A Syrian story • George Moore
... in regard to the finish in necks of dresses for morning wear. Plain colors have rather a stiff appearance, tulle or crepe lisse frilling are expensive and frail, so it is a good idea to purchase a few yards of really good washing lace, about an inch and a half in depth; quill or plait and cut into suitable lengths to ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... that it swarms with fish, such as pike, trout, perch, barbel, and other kinds not easily identified. Apparently there is also a form of gar-pike found here (see p. 74); this is described as having scales of a very large and stiff kind, and being a beautiful bright silver in colour. The size of these gar-pike range from two feet to four feet in length. Their flesh was delicately white and soft, but so foul and rank in taste that even the Indians would not eat it. The trout in Lake Athabaska seem ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... was nervy work waiting for that thing to come. Then, suddenly, I was aware of a little, cold wind sweeping over me, coming from behind. I gave one great nerve-thrill, and a prickly feeling went all over the back of my head. Then I hove myself 'round with a sort of stiff jerk, and stared straight against that queer wind. It seemed to come from the corner of the room to the left of the bed—the place where both times I had found the heap of tossed bedclothes. Yet, I could see nothing ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... black night in the mid-Atlantic, when we were beating up against a stiff breeze, coming on deck near midnight, just as the ship was put about. When a ship is tacking, the tacks and sheets (ropes which confine the clews or lower corners of the sails) are let run, in order that the yards may be swung round to meet the altered position of the ship. They must then be hauled ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... poets, orators, and historians, and the modern."—Id. "To violate this rule, as the English too often do, shows great incorrectness."—Id. "It is impossible, by means of any training, to prevent them from appearing stiff and forced."—Id. "And it also gives to the speaker the disagreeable semblance of one who endeavours to compel assent."—Id. "And whenever a light or ludicrous anecdote is proper to be recorded, it is generally better to throw it into a note, than ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of Germany had been built upon those of other countries. There was a case I recalled, that of the Australian cordial manufacturer, who desired to introduce his stuff into Germany. He was met with a stiff tariff, but informed that if he established a factory there there would be no need to import it. Why, now I came to remember it, even the original "Rush-on-Paris" plan was stolen. Hilaire Belloc, the Anglicised ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... the book and its position. Then he resolved that he would not look at the book again, would not turn a glance on it unless it might be when he had made up his mind to reveal its contents. His neck became absolutely stiff with the efforts necessary not to look ...
— Cousin Henry • Anthony Trollope
... what I mean. I knew you'd understand and I am so relieved that you are not angry about the chapel and things. We can leave it all to you and we'll have the times of our lives. Billy Harvey says his ankles are getting stiff, it's been so long since he has fox-trotted. Do call Mammy or Sallie and let's look at your clothes." With which Letitia descended from her spiritual heights into the realm of the material and plunged with both Mammy and Sallie ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Master Pothier reflectively, "the best bond I could draw would not bind him more than a spider's thread! They are stiff-necked as bulls, these De Repentignys, and will bear no yoke but what they put on of themselves! Poor lad! Do they know at the Manor House that he is here drinking and dicing with ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... at Cockermouth, told me that she once said to her, that the only one of her five children about whose future life she was anxious, was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable either for good or for evil. The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so that I remember going once into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in hand, but ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... less than it would be with George Brattle. The ironmonger was connected with the unfortunate young woman only by marriage; and what brother-in-law would take such a sister-in-law to his bosom? And of Mrs. Jay he thought that he knew that she was puritanical, stiff, and severe. Mr. Jay he found in his shop along with an apprentice, but he had no difficulty in leading the master ironmonger along with him through a vista of pots, grates and frying pans, into a small recess at the back ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... enclose a winged beetle, or scarabaeus, bearing a disc or emblem of the sun. The other main division of the field is spotted in regular order with open blossom forms. There is decided order in the repetition and arrangement of these details, which gives a rather stiff and formal look to ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... fashioning a sword for Siegfried,—still another sword, after ever so many,—realising even as he works that no sword he can forge but will break in the lad's strong hands. "The best sword I ever forged, which in the hands of a giant would stand stiff, the insignificant stripling for whom it was shaped he whacks and snaps it in two, as if I had made him a child's plaything!" It is sober fact to Mime that he cannot use Siegfried for his purposes until he have equipped him with a sword. "A sword there is," he ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... not to see an enterprising reporter cheated out of his rightful "space." Then I hired a sleigh and drove home through the storm, wet through—"I can hear the water yet running out of your boots," says my wife—wet through and nearly frozen stiff, but tingling with pride ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... now from heat or from boiling, now from the act of a noisy breaking, now from shivering. Discouragement and despair are expressed by the melting of the heart, fear by the loosening of the reins. Pride is portrayed by the holding high of the head, with the figure straight and stiff. Patience is a long breathing, impatience short breathing, desire is thirst or paleness. Pardon is expressed by a throng of metaphors borrowed from the idea of covering, of hiding, of coating ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... hand, Martin stiff-armed him out of the way and ran for the side. Someone jerked the rope-ladder out of reach and someone else leaped on Martin. For, he was Martin now, Martin Pinzon. His own identity seemed submerged far below the surface, as if somehow he could look on all this without risking anything. ...
— My Shipmate—Columbus • Stephen Wilder
... the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the poor girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the Old Year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little corpse! The child sat there, stiff and cold, with the matches, of which one bundle was burned. "She wanted to warm herself," the people said. No one imagined what a beautiful thing she had seen, and in what glory she had gone in with her grandmother to the New ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... yield. J'y suis; j'y reste. Not an inch should anybody else yield. Well, thank me, Roger, for having given you this little glimpse into the great big world. It's full of interest." He rose suddenly, stiff and straight and slender as some young fir-tree. "Come, Roger, put on your hat and go ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... know what to make of him. Of all the hallucinations I ever had witnessed, this was the most strange and unaccountable. Cutts, with great coolness, manufactured a stiff tumbler of brandy and water, which he placed at the elbow of the ex-potentate, and exhorted him to make a clean ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... wife, he bowed with composed ease and a somewhat military grace to the multitude. His tall, thin, bony frame, surmounted by a venerable, weather-beaten, strongly-lined and original countenance, with stiff, upright, gray hair, changed the opinion which some had previously formed. His military services were important, his career undoubtedly patriotic; but he had interfered with many and deep interests. There was much ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth were smudged all over with cinnabar, like fetish-stones in India or Africa.(1) As a rule, however, the statues of historic times were beautiful representations of kindly and gracious beings. The older works were stiff and rigid images, with the lips screwed into an unmeaning smile. Older yet were the bronze gods, made before the art of soldering was invented, and formed of beaten plates joined by small nails. Still more ancient were the wooden images, which ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... stop at all, let's sleep a while," said the Very Young Man. "A little rest only gets you stiff. It's a pretty exposed place out here though, isn't it, to sleep?" he added, thinking of the ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the usual time. The passengers had ridden all night, and now descended glum and stiff to stretch their limbs for breakfast. A nice double wagon stood waiting. It was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... noises, which immediately begin to sing, and sigh, and sob, and shriek—and to smite with sledge-hammers, airy but ponderous, in some distant chamber—and to tread along the entries as with stately footsteps, and rustle up and down the staircase, as with silks miraculously stiff—whenever the gale catches the house with a window open, and gets fairly into it. Would that we were not an attendant spirit here! It is too awful! This clamor of the wind through the lonely house; the Judge's quietude, as ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... nearer view, Don Pedro proved to be a tall, lean, dry man, not unlike Dore's conception of Don Quixote. He must have had Indian blood in his veins, judging from his very dark eyes, his stiff, lank hair, worn somewhat long, and his high cheek-bones. Also, although he was arrayed in puritanic black, his barbaric love of color betrayed itself in a red tie and in a scarlet handkerchief which was twisted loosely round a soft slouch hat, It was the hat and the brilliant red ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... several weeks a barrier stood between them. When they met by chance Sara looked the other way, and Ermengarde felt too stiff and embarrassed to speak. Sometimes they nodded to each other in passing, but there were times when they did not even exchange ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... with age, and half charred with the smoke of the destruction it had escaped, fluttered down from the table through the open casement, and fell in the balcony by my side. There were words on the paper, written in stiff German characters, orthodox and methodical in every turn and upstroke and formal pothook. They were these:— "I distinctly refuse to give my daughter in marriage to a man who is so great a fool as to throw away his chances of wealth and fame for the sake of a mere whim. Yesterday ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... be thankful, and she would naturally exaggerate in her own mind the horror which he would feel at such a revelation. Then the husband endeavoured to lighten the effect of what he had said. 'Offence, perhaps, is the wrong word. But he was stiff and masterful, if you know what ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... waiting, it is merely to stretch his legs a little. The adversary, on the contrary, is stiff from riding; they place themselves in proper order, and my friend kills his opponent, and the affair ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... down to the dory, and put his fishing-gear on board. He did it as a man goes to a funeral. He had been a fisherman in his younger days, but it was a bitter necessity, in his view, which now compelled him to resume it when he was old and stiff. While he was stowing the bait and lines in the skiff, Dock Vincent came down to see him. He had laid aside his suit of black, and now wore a full ...
— Freaks of Fortune - or, Half Round the World • Oliver Optic
... said Lord Dreever, "this is boring me stiff. Let's have a game of something. Anything to pass away the time. Curse this rain! We shall be cooped up here till dinner at this rate. Ever played picquet? I could teach ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... do with those rigid prelates who made it a matter of conscience to give you the least indulgence, but kept you at an uncharitable distance, and even to your most reasonable scruples continued stiff and inexorable, the argument might be fairer on your side; but since the common danger has so laid open that mistake, that all the former haughtiness towards you is for ever extinguished, and that it hath turned ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... with caps plaited on the caul with silver, or gold, or both, bordered round with stiffened lace, which stood out before their eyes, but not lower, so that the eyes sparkled through it—the Hanoverian with the fore part of the head bare, then a stiff lace standing up like a wall perpendicular on the cap, and the cap behind tailed with an enormous quantity of ribbon which lies or ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... house not far back; but a fierce dog, by his barking, had deterred him from the application. The road was lonely, and he had seen no other house since. Finally, exhausted by the effort of dragging himself through the deep snow, and, stiff with cold, he sank down by the side of the road, and would doubtless have frozen had not the doctor made ...
— Phil the Fiddler • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the top of the office to the bottom, and her morning had been a levee. Even poor little Mrs. Jardine, whose boy had been killed before he had been over two weeks, had spoken to Marjorie brightly, and said how glad she was, and silent, stiff Miss Gardner, who was said never to have had any lovers in her life, had looked at her with an envy she tried to hide, and said that she ...
— I've Married Marjorie • Margaret Widdemer
... had consented to undertake the root and branch reform of the War Office. He had sallied forth into that tropical jungle of festooned obstructiveness, of intertwisted irresponsibilities, of crouching prejudices, of abuses grown stiff and rigid with antiquity, which for so many years to come was destined to lure reforming Ministers to their doom. 'The War Office,' said Miss Nightingale, 'is a very slow office, an enormously expensive office, and ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... fell from my lips, as, stiff with horror, I let my eyes travel from his determined face, first to the windows high over my head and then to the opening of the door, which, though but a few steps from where I stood, was as far as possible from the room into which my ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... none that pointed the way to a low cliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went up the hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. It bore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and patches of hazel, out of which he stirred ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... delicious it would be to treat Miss Evelyn in the same way, and to revel with my stiff-standing prick in her delicious quim, which in my mind's eye I saw before me as I had viewed in on her rising from the bidet, when I lay hid under the bed. Then I thought of my sister Mary's smaller, although attractive little quim, and I resolved, as that was the easiest to ...
— The Romance of Lust - A classic Victorian erotic novel • Anonymous
... lines,—and also to maintain in that border-strip a resident peasantry, armed and loyal,—these are not matters of sentiment, which may be postponed to a more convenient season, but they are essential to the stiff, steady, and successful prosecution of our campaigns. It is not, therefore, simply for charity Boards of Education to discuss such subjects. It is for the Government to determine its policy, and for the people, who make that Government, to compel it so to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... the frozen moat, where the osiers, stood stark and stiff in their winter nakedness, was a group of dark figures waiting for them with horses. In the pallid moonlight Myles recognized the well-known face of Father Edward, the Prior ...
— Men of Iron • Ernie Howard Pyle
... him, in the same place where we had seen him before, but not in the same position. He was sunken now to the ground; but his face was pressed against the rails, and in his stiff, cold hand was clutched a letter which afterwards ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Lundy Race is one of the wildest and grandest portions of the Cornish coast, and on it there is always somewhere a tossing sea, a stiff breeze above, and a sucking tide below. Great cliffs hundreds of feet high guard it, and from the top of them the land rolls away in long ridges, brown and bare. These wild and rocky moors, full of pagan altars, stone crosses, and memorials of the Jew, the ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... trees lying parallel to each other with the branches pointing in the general direction of approach and interlaced. All leaves and small twigs should be removed and the stiff ends ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... wire. Stout, stiff, and surprisingly springy wire of the same peculiar metal. It was that metallic ammonium which chemists have deduced must exist because of the chemical behavior of the compound NH3, but which Denham alone had managed to procure. Tommy deduced that it was an allotropic modification of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... out of contempt not to study equity and righteousness towards him, and it makes another man impatient of receiving and bearing an injury or disrespect. While every man seeks to please himself, the contention arises. Pride in both parties makes both stiff and inflexible to peace and equity, and in this there is a great deal of folly. For, by this means, both procure more real displeasure and dissatisfaction to their own spirits. "But with the well advised is wisdom." They who have discretion and judgment will not be so wedded to their own conceits, ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... he sought the Burmese landlady. She greeted him with a smile and a stiff little shake of the hand. He owed her money, but that was nothing. Had he not sent her drunken European sailor-man husband about his business? Had he not freed her from a tyranny of fists and curses? It had not affected her in the least to learn that her sailor-man had been negligently ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... Moultrie, of the defence of Fort Sullivan; and in that of Washington, of the battle of Trenton. The actions from the skirmish at Lexington to the surrender of Cornwallis, are all admirably and graphically told in a style animated without being florid, and chaste without being stiff. The straight forward honesty of the diction, leaves the mind of the reader to be carried on with the simple but intense spirit of the action, as if he were a spectator rather than reader. The description of the battle of Trenton is the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... her catcher. Curly strove to wipe out the intervening two years and to imagine himself back at college, pitching for his class in the final championship game. But alas! his arm was stiff and muscle-bound, and creaked in the socket every ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... power. They represented to the sovereigns, that it seemed like insensibility to the goodness of Providence, which had delivered the infidels into their hands, to allow them any longer to usurp the fair inheritance of the Christians, and that the whole of the stiff- necked race of Mahomet might justly be required to submit without exception to instant baptism, or to sell their estates and remove to Africa. This, they maintained, could be scarcely regarded as an infringement of the treaty, since the Moors would be so great gainers ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... summer full of voices, and therefore it does not so need the sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways in one warm gale, like the many ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... Cooper; the former of whom, indeed, before he asked M'Linnie a question, gave him confidence in his peculiar way, by requesting him "not to be a frightened fool, for Mr. Abernethy was not the brute the world was pleased to make him out;" and after a stiff and rough examination shook the student heartily by the hand, and pronounced him "not an ass, like all the world, but a sensible shrewd fellow, who, instead of muddling his head with books, had passed his days, very properly, where real life was only to be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... to ask the vice chancellor for a pretty stiff annual sum for my client, for I know Larch is rich, when, to my surprise, she would not permit it. She said if she left him it was for good and all, and that she wanted none of his bounty. She had some means of her own, she declared, and ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... at all the 'crushes' and big functions,—in London, in Paris, in New York, in St. Petersburg, in Vienna,—always 'ce cher Roxmouth'—as Aunt Emily said;—money no consideration, distance no object,—always 'ce cher Roxmouth,' stiff as a poker, clean as fresh paint, and apparently as virtuous as an old maid,—with all his aristocratic family looming behind him, and a long ancestry of ghosts in the shadow of time, extending away back to some Saxon 'nobles,' who no doubt ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... passed on to the consumer or deducted from the farmer, and, besides, it is not just that a family living by giving productive service to the community should pay the same as a family that contributes nothing by way of effort. A stiff tax on these latter families might send them to work, and certainly would induce economy. Moreover, the earner of income must provide for old age and dependents while the unearned income taxpayer has this provision already. Altogether, it would ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... in every detail to the facts. The medical examiners and inspectors become exceedingly expert in detecting disease, disability, or deception. If an overcoat is carried over the shoulder, they look for a false or stiff arm. The gait and general appearance indicate health or want of it to them, and all who do not appear normal are turned aside for further examination, which is thorough. The women have a special ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... Lady de Brantefield proved wonderfully correct; she gave me back the image I had in my mind—a stiff, haughty-looking picture of a faded old beauty. Adhering religiously to the fashion of the times when she had been worshipped, she made it a point to wear the old head-dress exactly. She was in black, in a hoop of vast ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... and ends of patches—old socks, old trowser-legs, and the like—I bedarned and bequilted the inside of my jacket, till it became, all over, stiff and padded, as King James's cotton-stuffed and dagger-proof doublet; and no buckram or steel ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... had not been killed. No sooner had he mastered the German and seized the paper than bullets showered upon him like rain, and yet beyond these two slight flesh wounds he was wholly untouched. It was true he was very stiff and sore, but he knew that he would soon be ...
— Tommy • Joseph Hocking
... completely and instantaneously his whole bearing is reversed. Instead of walking upright, the body sinks downwards or even crouches, and is thrown into flexuous movements; his tail, instead of being held stiff and upright, is lowered and wagged from side to side; his hair instantly becomes smooth; his ears are depressed and drawn backwards, but not closely to the head; and his lips hang loosely. From ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... popularity which greeted him on his return—if he had advertised his fame and, amid high circles, played the part of Chinese Gordon in a becoming manner— the results would have been different. But he was by nature farouche; his soul revolted against dinner parties and stiff shirts; and the presence of ladies— especially of fashionable ladies— filled him with uneasiness. He had, besides, a deeper dread of the world's contaminations. And so, when he was appointed to Gravesend to supervise the erection of a system of forts at the mouth of the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... interview. Lord Fawn became more than ever convinced that the member for Bobsborough was his determined enemy, and Frank was more convinced than ever that Lord Fawn was an empty, stiff-necked, self-sufficient prig. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... Germain pursued them a short distance but with his usual want of success so that we made a meal off the muscles and sinews we had dried, though they were so tough that we could scarcely cut them. My hands were benumbed throughout the march and we were all stiff and fatigued. The marching of two days weakened us all very much and the more so on account of our exertion to follow the tracks of our Commander's party, but we lost them and concluded that they were not before us. Though the weather was not ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... body is soon absorbed, and the negative pressure thus produced increases the impaction. A ring of edematous mucosa quickly forms and covers the presenting part of the object, leaving visible only a small surface in the center of an acute edematous stenosis. A forceps with narrow, stiff, expansive-spring jaws may press back a portion of the edema and may allow a grasp on the sides of the foreign body; but usually the attempt to apply forceps when there are no spaces between the presenting part of the foreign body and the bronchial wall, will result only in pushing the foreign body ...
— Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy - A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery • Chevalier Jackson
... was watching his chance. Much state was kept up also. Whenever the major appeared, 'Commanding officer; guard, present arms,' was called down the line of men on duty, and the guard hastened to obey, the major acknowledging the salute with stiff precision. By day and by night sentinels paced the walls. True, the walls were crumbling, and the whole force was constantly engaged in propping them up, but none the less did the sentinels pace with dignity. What was ...
— Castle Nowhere • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... him too hard! Why, man, he's stiff, right now. He's ready for the coroner! Gad—and I ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... of the stiff-necked dame with the straight nose and the gun-metal hair. No, both eyes, it was; and a cold, suspicious, stabby look is what they shoots my way. No wonder I chokes off the feeble-minded remarks and turns sort of panicky to Vee, half expectin' to find her blushin' painful or signalin' me to ...
— The House of Torchy • Sewell Ford
... broad window sill, and when I had waited a few minutes, Mademoiselle de Chaumont darted around a corner, bare armed and bare necked. She collapsed to the floor at sight of me, and then began to dance away in the opposite direction with stiff leaps, as ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the doors were flung open, and a magnificent Princess swept into the room. Never was such a beauty seen before. Her golden hair fell almost to the floor and was bound about with jewels. Her robes were stiff with embroidery and gems. The other Princesses paled before her as stars ...
— Tales of Folk and Fairies • Katharine Pyle
... miserable troops from Upper Egypt-ground down by the long war, and bought over by Ani—were carried away by the universal enthusiasm, and joyfully hailed the hero and king who had successfully broken the stiff ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been the putrid flesh of their lacerated backs, for days after the infliction, that they would be kept out of the house—the smell arising from their wounds being too horrible to be endured. They were always stiff and sore for some days, and not in a condition ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... he came to be called, was clearly a victim of the sudden affability of Duchess Susan. The transformation of a stiff military officer into a nimble Puck, a runner of errands and a sprightly attendant, could not pass without notice. The first effect of her discriminating condescension on this unfortunate gentleman was to make him the champion ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Germany in Belgium and to the Belgian consuls in prison in Tabora, gripped their vitals. Hastily they sent their women and children at all speed east along the line to Tabora, the new Provincial capital, and planned to put up the stiff rearguard actions that should delay the enemy, until the English might take Tabora and save their women from Belgian hands. For the English, those soft-hearted fools, who had already so well treated the ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... the ear, with a kind of honeyed, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain, and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual vigilance. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the ladies in their quaint gowns of stiff brocade, and at the men in their lace frills, and ...
— Princess Polly's Gay Winter • Amy Brooks
... Knowledge implies the possession of these attributes, for without Sympathy and Knowledge you have nothing to control but your physical body. To practise Poise as a mere gymnastic exercise, or a study in etiquette, is to be self-conscious, stiff, preposterous and ridiculous. Those who cut such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make angels weep are men void of Sympathy and Knowledge trying to cultivate Poise. Their science is a mere matter of what to do with arms and legs. Poise is a question of spirit ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... wary as a gray old badger that has often been hunted. To see him on Sunday, so stiff and starched in his demeanor; so precise in his dress; with his daughter under his arm, and his ivory-headed cane in his hand, was enough to deter all graceless youngsters ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... "I feel stiff," she said; "but that will soon wear off, when I have run about a little. Oh, how tired you must be, after carrying me all ...
— The Tiger of Mysore - A Story of the War with Tippoo Saib • G. A. Henty
... either! Where was it? Who could have taken it? Suddenly her heart failed her utterly, and she clutched at the edge of the coffin to keep herself from falling. It seemed to her that under the stiff, pallid, rigidly clasped hands of the dead general something gleamed white through the transparent muslin of the covering, something like ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... from the stock. A bud stick of the same size is selected, and from it a similar ring with a good bud on it is removed by cutting around the bud stick and slitting down the back or side opposite the bud. This bud is then placed in position on the stock. After the buds are in place, a piece of stiff wrapping paper should be tied around the stock just above the bud and allowed to flare out over the bud to protect it from the sun and wind. Preferably all buds should be ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... off up the board-walk, her back as stiff as a ramrod. Any one with half an eye could see that she was resolved not to drop the parasol again. No savage warrior on battle bent ever gripped his ...
— Anderson Crow, Detective • George Barr McCutcheon
... it," bluntly. "That's why you're good for me." Unconsciously his glance travelled to the mantel, and shifted hurriedly. "I'm a kind of clinging vine, I guess. To change the figure of speech, I need a stiff rudder to keep me headed straight to windward. ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... still early when he awoke, weary, stiff, and unrefreshed, but with a conviction in his mind that had grown plain and strong in the mysterious way notions sometimes seem to gather force in hours of unconsciousness, and surprise us with their mature vigor when we awake. "I must go!" he kept muttering to himself; "I must ...
— Father Stafford • Anthony Hope
... soles and longer the tops the better. His pants were stuffed inside the tops of his boots, of course. A double-breasted coat, heavily wadded, with two rows of big brass buttons and a long skirt, was considered comfortable. A small stiff cap, with a narrow brim, took the place of the comfortable "felt," or the shining and towering tile ...
— Detailed Minutiae of Soldier life in the Army of Northern Virginia, 1861-1865 • Carlton McCarthy
... in a land which is exposed to a winter cold below the freezing-point of mercury, and where the animal cannot seek protection from it by creeping down to a stratum of earth which never freezes, presupposes that either the insect itself, its egg, larva, or pupa, may be frozen stiff without being killed. Only very few species of these small animals, however, appear to survive such a freezing test, and the actual land-evertebrate-fauna of the Polar countries is therefore exceedingly scanty in comparison with that ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... where a pretty woman was concerned, entered and took possession of him. He would succeed where Alick Corfield had failed, and Leam, who refused her old friend, should gratify her new. He had been guiding Adelaide over the ice, but she was rather too stiff in her movements, not sufficiently pliant nor yielding to be a very pleasant skating companion. And he had been pushing Josephine along the slide, but Joseph was too stout and short-breathed to be an ideal convoy; also ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... was not possible for me to turn this man away and tell him I had nothing for him to do, and therefore I must devise employment for him. I found that he wrote a fair hand, a little stiff and labored, but legible and neat, and as I had a good deal of copying to do I decided to set him to work upon this. I procured board and lodging for him in a house near by, and a very happy being ...
— Amos Kilbright; His Adscititious Experiences • Frank R. Stockton
... standing up out of the sand. I do not mean the tubes of the Terebella, so common in all sands, which are somewhat flexible, and have their upper end fringed with a ragged ring of sandy arms: those I speak of are straight and stiff, and ending in a point upward. Draw them out of the sand - they will offer some resistance - and put them into a vase of water; you will see the worm inside expand two delicate golden combs, just like old-fashioned back-hair combs, of a metallic lustre, which will astonish you. With these combs ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... Hartmann's journal.' Upon which Kant would reply—'Eh! what?—What's that you say? Hartmann's journal? I tell you, it is not Hartmann, but Hartung: now, repeat it after me—not Hartmann, but Hartung.' Then Lampe, looking sulky, and drawing himself up with the stiff air of a soldier on guard, and in the very same monotonous tone with which he had been used to sing out his challenge of—Who goes there? would roar—'not Hartmann, but Hartung.' 'Now again!' Kant would say: ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... cried the bachelor, as the light of this new illustration broke in, "yes, yes; and now that I think of it, how often I've sadly watched my Indian corn in May, wondering whether such sickly, half-eaten sprouts, could ever thrive up into the stiff, stately spear ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... changed instantly. Evidently the subject of a governess was not an acceptable one to her. "I hate governesses; they are stiff and proper. Do you get cross and ill-natured when little girls ...
— His Heart's Queen • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... sought the pavement to balance himself and aid in locomotion; the other arm, the right, was twisted out from his body in the shape of an inverted V, the palm of his hand, with half curled, contorted fingers, almost touching his chin, as his head sagged at a stiff, set angle into his right shoulder. Hair straggled from the brim of a nondescript felt hat into his eyes, and curled, dirty and unshorn, around his ears and the nape of his neck. His face was covered with a stubble of four days' growth, his body with rags—a ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... smile. He never spoke again, but to the end held my hand close, so close that when he was asleep at last, I could not draw it away. Dan helped me, warning me as he did so, that it was unsafe for dead and living flesh to lie so long together; but though my hand was strangely cold and stiff, and four white marks remained across its back, even when warmth and color had returned elsewhere, I could not but be glad that, through its touch, the presence of human sympathy, perhaps, had lightened that ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... in, gives a start of surprise, and then shrivels, but the next one is a real good sport, and won't desert a friend, so he walks in and shrivels, and the next one is no piker, so walks in, too. Who would be a stiff? They stop coming when there are no more lizards in the lake or the fire is full. There does not seem to be much reason for their action, but, of course, it is a social custom. You may have been disposed to despise the humble lizard with his open countenance and foolish smile, but you ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... backward in't himself; The Gentry do await it, and the people Against their nature are all bent for him, And like a field of standing Corn, that's mov'd With a stiff gale, their ...
— Philaster - Love Lies a Bleeding • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... cows' dung, completely naked, more dried-up than a mummy. His joints form knots at the extremities of his bones, which are like sticks. He has clusters of shells in his ears, his face is very long, and his nose is like a vulture's beak. His left arm is held erect in the air, crooked, and stiff as a stake; and he has remained there so long that birds have made a nest ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... consented to see him he would take it as a permission to press his claim, and the idea was not to be borne. She wrote him therefore a stiff letter, telling him the house was at his service, but he ...
— The Elect Lady • George MacDonald
... he feels himself exhausted, but a glorious view opens out before him and he goes on with new zest. He has merely increased his rate of repair and drawn on a new stock of energy. That night he is tired, and the next day he is likely to be stiff and sore. There is a little fatigue left in him, but it takes only a day or two for the body to be wholly refreshed, especially if he hastens the process by another good walk. Up to a certain point, far beyond our usual limit, the more we do, ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... twenty years old, perhaps. There were few pictures of any merit painted in New England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what artist—could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from life. It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the early Florentine painters. She must have been of some consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... that comes from Capua, dashing in To Rome, all splashed and wetted to the skin, Though in a tavern glad one night to bide, Would not be pleased to live there till he died: If he gets cold, he lets his fancy rove In quest of bliss beyond a bath or stove: And you, though tossed just now by a stiff breeze, Don't therefore sell your vessel ...
— The Satires, Epistles, and Art of Poetry • Horace
... that out. Deacon Meakin isn't at the barn and I might go there, but he's spoiled the barn for me. I feel just as if I was in somebody's parlor, some Marsden body's parlor, that's so much in order it makes everybody who goes into it as stiff as itself. I've found that out, too, going calling with Aunt ...
— The Brass Bound Box • Evelyn Raymond
... fire, and my gold turned to earthenware, and my pictures turned to splotches. In my hand everything I touch feels awkward. A pen—a pen—to talk of that? If one could use it while in the land of the Singing Mouse—then it might do. I think the pens there are not of wood and iron, stiff things of torture to reader and writer. I have a notion—though I have not examined the pens there—that they are made from plumes of an angel's wing; and that if they chose they could talk, and say things which would make ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... following day, after having sent word to the tribe that I wished to have a council with them. The Indians all met me in council, as I had desired, and I then told them that the men who had taken part in shooting the woman would have to be delivered up for punishment. They were very stiff with me at the interview, and with all that talent for circumlocution and diplomacy with which the Indian is lifted, endeavored to evade my demands and delay any conclusion. But I was very positive, would hear ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... want with me?" Korvin said. The Tr'en speech—apparently there was only one language on the planet—was stiff and slightly awkward, but easily enough learned under drug hypnosis; it was the most rigorously logical construction of its kind Korvin had ever come across. It reminded him of some of the mathematical metalanguages he'd dealt with back on Earth, in training; but it was more closely and carefully ...
— Lost in Translation • Larry M. Harris
... ceremonies. To moulder under marble, or to moulder under clay, 'tis still to moulder. To have around one's bier children in red and children in blue, or to have not a creature, what matters it? And then, look at this wrist, it was stiff as the devil; the ten fingers, they were so many sticks fastened into a metacarpus made of wood; and these muscles were like old strings of catgut, drier, stiffer, harder to bend than if that they had been used for a turner's ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... Ardan, also sitting down the better to bask in the vivifying rays, "his light no doubt brings them to life and keeps them alive. Without light or heat during all that dreary winter, they must freeze stiff like the frogs or become torpid like the bears. I can't imagine how they ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... possibly hesitate now; that bow is a summons to their box. I can tell you also that you are highly honoured; for, if it had been in Paris, you could not have got a sight of the bride except under the surveillance of a pair of chaperons as grey and watchful as cats, or a couple of provincial uncles as stiff as their own forefathers ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... upon us was the old boat, that identical, weather-beaten tub of a boat which Lisbeth and I had come so near ending our lives together, the which has already been told in these Chronicles. On the rowing-thwart sat Peter, the coachman, and in the stern-sheets, very grim and stiff in the back, her lorgnettes at ...
— My Lady Caprice • Jeffrey Farnol
... long after years in stately Christian Spain, Don Ruy was a silent man when his serene lady in stiff brocades and jewelled shoes would mock at court pageantry and sigh for the reckless days when she had worn the trappings of a page and followed his steps into the ...
— The Flute of the Gods • Marah Ellis Ryan
... removed her collar and opened her dress at the throat. She took the fan from Madame Ratignolle and began to fan both herself and her companion. It was very warm, and for a while they did nothing but exchange remarks about the heat, the sun, the glare. But there was a breeze blowing, a choppy, stiff wind that whipped the water into froth. It fluttered the skirts of the two women and kept them for a while engaged in adjusting, readjusting, tucking in, securing hair-pins and hat-pins. A few persons were sporting ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... And Spot and Silver and Song and Knipe, the wolf-hound, were our train, though not as decorous as rigid etiquette demanded, since they were forever running after the butterflies. On we went through the stiff, box-bordered walks of the garden, past the weather-beaten sundial and the spinning-house and the smoke-house to the stables. Here old Harvey, who had taught me to ride Captain Daniel's pony, is equerry, and young Harvey our personal attendant; old Harvey smiles as we go in and out of the stalls ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... barefooted and carried their shoes in their hands, and, like myself, stopping almost every hundred yards to rest a few minutes. We were afraid to stop long at a time. We would have become too sore and stiff to move. ...
— A Soldier in the Philippines • Needom N. Freeman
... say, why cannot he drink like other animals, by going right into the stream till he gets his mouth into the water? Because his mouth is so high up, and his neck is so stiff, that he would have to go quite two or three yards deep into the stream before he could get his mouth into the water, and then his heavy feet would stir up the mud in the stream where he was standing, and so dirty the very water ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle - Book One • Prince Sarath Ghosh
... with shrill French voices, from the two youths and their abbe tutor down to the little four-year-old Lolotte in her high chair. But to Anne, after the tedious formality of the second table at the palace, stiff without refinement, this free family life was perfectly delightful and refreshing, though as yet she was too much cramped, as it were, by long stiffness, silence, and treatment as an inferior to join, except ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in his prosthetic left hand, which was indistinguishable in appearance and in ordinary usage from the flesh, bone, and blood that it had replaced. Indeed, the right hand, with its stiff little finger, often appeared to be more useless than the left. The hand, holding the glass of rye-and-ginger, gave an impression of over-daintiness because of ...
— The Unnecessary Man • Gordon Randall Garrett
... pasted on wood, to render them sufficiently stiff, are put into the grooves of the lesson-post; and can then be placed in any position which is most convenient, and adjusted to any height, as the ...
— The Infant System - For Developing the Intellectual and Moral Powers of all Children, - from One to Seven years of Age • Samuel Wilderspin
... tag goin' back to the house," she said, with her lip stiff again. Oh, she had a heart in ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... was bob-tailed (at least, so Watty described it within my hearing) and curiously double-breasted, caught together at the waist with a single button, thus revealing a shining expanse of very stiff shirt-bosom; which creaked, for some reason. With this Roland wore a ribbed white-silk waistcoat, very brilliant low-cut patent leather shoes, and white-silk socks. The trousers were strikingly cut, as to each leg, ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... south-west, and we could neither set the lines, nor spear sting-ray, whilst the supply we had before obtained was now nearly exhausted. One of the horses was taken ill, and unable to rise, from the effects of the cold; his limbs were cramped and stiff, and apparently unable to sustain the weight of his body. After plucking dry grass, and making a bed for him, placing a breakwind of boughs round, and making a fire near him, we ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... to carry his head even higher, and to be more dignified, stiff, and reserved, than usual. With an invitation in his pocket to visit the greatest statesman in Belgium, he felt like a very exalted personage; for not even Mr. Lowington had been so highly favored. Mr. Hamblin was puffed ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... the lads got under way at once. As they emerged from the lee of the island they could see that seaward the ocean was being rapidly lashed into choppy, white-crested waves by the advancing storm, and that the wind was freshening into a really stiff breeze. ...
— The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol • Howard Payson
... scales of metallic appearance; mouth forming a rolled proboscis, produced by an elongation of the jaws, upon the sides of which are found the rudiments of mandibles and downy palpi; the inferior wings retained to the superior by a stiff hair; antennae in the form of an elongated club, prismatic; abdomen pointed, The Death's—headed Sphinx has occasioned much terror among the vulgar, at times, by the melancholy kind of cry which it utters, and the insignia of death which it wears ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... said musingly, "but until now I never realized how stiff and unreal the daub is. ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... you know. [He acknowledges the information by a stiff bow. She interests herself in her glove-buttons.] You—you've chosen to drop out of my—out of our lives so completely that I hardly like to ask you to ...
— The Big Drum - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur Pinero
... quality is sold, brut, for one hundred and twenty livres the piece; but it is then thick, and must have a winter and the fouet, to render it potable and brilliant. The fouet is like a chocolate-mill, the handle of iron, the brush of stiff hair. In bottles, this wine costs twenty-four sous, the bottle, &c. included. It is potable the April after it is made, is best that year, and after ten years begins to have a pitchy taste, resembling it to Malaga. It is not permitted to ferment ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Western horse means. The wild horse probably learned it from the antelope, for the latter does it the same way, i.e., he jumps straight up into the air, at the same instant curving his back and coming down stiff-legged, with all four of his feet in a ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... gutturals and halting throat notes in which they have been handed down from generation to generation of Chilkat and Chilkoot, blame not Zachook, who told them to me, and forbear to blame me who tell them to you as best I may in this stiff English tongue. They were many months in the telling and many weary miles have I had to carry them in ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... to roast an ox at the very least. Round the room hang I don't know how many generations of Crawleys, some with beards and ruffs, some with huge wigs and toes turned out, some dressed in long straight stays and gowns that look as stiff as towers, and some with long ringlets, and oh, my dear! scarcely any stays at all. At one end of the hall is the great staircase all in black oak, as dismal as may be, and on either side are tall doors with stags' heads ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... clustered all about their chief, kept straight faces, but their eyes popped round and their mouths grew stiff with the ...
— Hira Singh - When India came to fight in Flanders • Talbot Mundy
... not know, friend. The matter is one upon which my father keeps his own counsel, even from the Princess Userti. Perhaps it is because he will not change the policy of his father, Rameses; perhaps because he is stiff-necked to those who cross his will. Or it may be that he is held in this path by a madness sent of some god to bring ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... comfort in talking to you—this writing is stiff, ineffectual work. Pen is very well, cheerful now,—has his little horse here. The place is singularly unspoiled, fresh and picturesque, and lovely to heart's content. I wish you were here!—and if you knew exactly what such a wish means, you ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... couched, close by the foeman's wall, The river-plain was ever dank with dews, Dropped from the sky, exuded from the earth, A curse that clung unto our sodden garb, And hair as horrent as a wild beast's fell. Why tell the woes of winter, when the birds Lay stark and stiff, so stern was Ida's snow? Or summer's scorch, what time the stirless wave Sank to its sleep beneath the noon-day sun? Why mourn old woes? their pain has passed away; And passed away, from those who fell, all care, For evermore, ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... singular desire to sit down whenever opportunity should offer; but he had always been found standing on the hearthrug by the butler, and, hard old aristocrat that he was, he would not yield to the somewhat angular blandishments of the stiff-backed chair. ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... comments had-been made. "I reckon the water was some cold, and the air colder; at any rate I happened along in my wagon just as they were draggin' them out, and before I could get them up to Smith's father's house the whole bunch of them was frozen so stiff that I had to pack 'em into the kitchen ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... remember Main Street of a little village locked up in the snow this spring?[2]—had given up the business of life, and an American flag with some politician's name printed across the bottom hung down across the street as stiff as a board. There were men with fans and alpaca coats curled up in splint chairs in the verandah of the one hotel—among them an ex-President of the United States. He completed the impression that the furniture ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... earned incomes tends in certain cases to be passed on to the consumer or deducted from the farmer, and, besides, it is not just that a family living by giving productive service to the community should pay the same as a family that contributes nothing by way of effort. A stiff tax on these latter families might send them to work, and certainly would induce economy. Moreover, the earner of income must provide for old age and dependents while the unearned income taxpayer has this provision already. Altogether, it would seem the part of wisdom at ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg
... I found the villa inhabited by Miss Hephzibah Judson very easily, and found it one of those stiff square dwelling-houses with brass curtain-rods, prim flower-beds, and vivid green palings, only to be discovered in full perfection in the choicer suburb ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... turning stiff, and he is getting used up," said Childers. "He has his points as a Cackler still, a speaker, if the gentleman likes it better—but he can't get a living out of that. Now it's a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper to know that his daughter knew ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... are my little girl's betrothed!" he said with rather stiff courtesy. "Ah—yes. I ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... preponderance of his weight was outside the bed. Then, with vast caution, he tilted himself upward gently until he found himself sitting upon the bed's edge, his feet just touching the floor, and the crippled member refusing to bear weight. Markham bore down upon the right foot. It was stiff and seemed as if it would break before it bent, while the pain was exquisite, but the man could not stay where he was. He got down upon the floor and crawled toward his clothing. He contrived, somehow, ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... taken down and well brushed every night, This removes dirt and makes it glossy. Use a brush with bristles as stiff as you can use without irritating the scalp too much, and keep it clean. Don't drag a fine comb through the hair. The proper comb has regular and even teeth, rounded, not sharp. If a tooth becomes ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... for his mother was examining bank bills and pawn tickets. Then he rushed back in memory to the days of his own childhood, when he had wondered why it was that his mother occasionally wept as she turned over these mysterious slips of blue paper and small pieces of stiff card. The abject failure of his life never appeared to him so clearly as it did at that moment, and the sense of complete disaster was aggravated by the awful feeling that he had made others suffer even more bitterly than himself. And for a moment it seemed, too, as ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... still tell the colonel of my misfortune, and leave him to infer that it had happened after our interview; but the poodle was fast becoming cold and stiff, and they would most probably suspect the ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... fortune of starting in life as a graduate," explained Tzu-tsing as he smiled, "and yet are not aware of the saying uttered by some one of old: that a centipede even when dead does not lie stiff. (These families) may, according to your version, not be up to the prosperity of former years, but, compared with the family of an ordinary official, their condition anyhow presents a difference. Of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... Sipiagin called his wife into the library. He wanted to have a talk with her alone. He seemed worried. He told her that the factory was really in a bad way, that Solomin struck him as a capable man, although a little stiff, and thought it was necessary to continue being aux petits ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... brother the attache, and his daughter," answered Consul Garman, while with a movement peculiar to himself he adjusted his smoothly shaven chin in his stiff neckcloth. ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... name in history, and he fully deserves it. But he had this merit: he held the Norman barons in check with a stiff hand, and so, in one way, ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... probability, if the thing were so, he had neglected to cut up the carcasses. Now in the north it is very necessary that this should be done as soon as a kill is made. If not, the meat freezes so solidly as to turn the edge of the sharpest knife, and a three-hundred-pound bear, frozen stiff, is no easy thing to put upon a sled and haul over the rough ice. But arrived at the spot, they found not only the kill which they had doubted, but that Keesh had quartered the beasts in true hunter ...
— Brown Wolf and Other Jack London Stories - Chosen and Edited By Franklin K. Mathiews • Jack London
... embalmed in a man's book, simply because an attractive woman once wore something like it when she fed the novelist. Unbalanced by the joy of the situation, he did not accurately observe the garb of the ministering angel, and hence we read of "a clinging white gown" in the days of stiff silks and rampant crinoline; of "the curve of the upper arm" when it took five yards for a pair of sleeves, and of "short walking skirts" during the reign ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... the contrary, the fixed, wooden expression of his countenance betokened some deeply- seated mental obstinacy, and he faced his Royal master with the utmost composure, lifting the slouched hat he wore with his usual stiff and soldierly dignity, though carefully avoiding the amazed stare of his friend, Sir ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... him, and returning to his friends reported that he hadn't made much out of the chap. He wasn't from New York, nor Boston, nor Chicago, and "I don't know where in thunder he is from, nor his name nuther. I forgot to ask it, he was so stiff and offish. He was in college with Tom Hardy and visited him years ago; that's all I know," the planter said, and after that the stranger was left mostly to himself, while the passengers busied themselves with gossip, and the scenery, ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... made up her mind to administer a lesson, and to make it as stiff a piece of terrorism ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... Pottpetschmidt in the carriage and Schulz and Kunz on the step were making a deafening noise, they were marveling at their encounter. They climbed into the train as it was going. Schulz introduced Christophe. Pottpetschmidt bowed as stiff as a poker and his features lost all expression; then when the formalities were over he caught hold of Christophe's hand and shook it five or six times, as though he were trying to pull his arm out, and then began to shout again. Christophe was able to make ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... poetry, or elevated into history, or treated of with dignity, in a stilted text of any kind, and which are, as it is called, "thrown" into notes; but, after all, they are much like children sent out of the stiff drawing-room into the nursery, snubbed to be sure by the act, but joyful in the freedom of banishment. We were going to say (but it might sound vainglorious), where do things read so well as in notes? but we will put the question in another form:—Where do you so well test an ...
— Notes And Queries,(Series 1, Vol. 2, Issue 1), - Saturday, November 3, 1849. • Various
... as to surprise him. I saw him raise one paw slowly, cautiously, high above his head. Down it came, souse! sending up a shower of mud and water. And Chigwooltz the restful, who could sit still thirty-two hours without getting stiff in the joints, and then dodge the sweep of Mooween's paw, went splashing away hippety-ippety over the lily pads to some water grass, where he said K'tung! ...
— Wilderness Ways • William J Long
... begun to let go and were straightening stiff on both sides of her. In a moment she tilted sideways and lay still. They saw a twinkle of black, legs and the ant making off in the stubble. They picked up the spider's body; it was now only an empty shell. Her big stomach had been torn away and lay in little strips ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... Until he woke the next morning to find her sitting by his bedside, Harry thought he had been dreaming all the time that Rachel Bond had come to him, dressed in quaint country garb, and loosed with gentle, painless fingers the stiff, blood-encrusted bandage about his head, and replaced it with something that soothed and ...
— The Red Acorn • John McElroy
... both the onlooking hosts on either hand Stood in broad daylight, and the sky was pure, And the sun sparkled on the Oxus stream. But in the gloom they fought, with bloodshot eyes And laboring breath; first Rustum struck the shield Which Sohrab held stiff out; the steel-spiked spear Rent the tough plates, but failed to reach the skin, And Rustum plucked it back with angry groan. Then Sohrab with his sword smote Rustum's helm, Nor clove its steel quite through; but all the crest He shore away, and that proud ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... immediate cure and its immediate result. The 'back bowed down always' for eighteen weary years is not too stiff to be made straight at once. The Christ-given power obliterates all traces of the past evil. Where He is the physician, there is no period of gradual convalescence, but 'the thing is done suddenly'; and, though ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... knickerbockers of the same material beneath, approach the ideal of dress for comfort, health and decency more nearly than white petticoat and drawers. Indeed, the skirt is best when it is a part of a blouse, which is also a suitable dress for a boy. A child should never be tortured with a large or stiff hat. The heads of children come up to the middles of men and women, and such a hat will be crushed in a crowd, and its poor little wearer placed in mortal terror. Indeed, children should be allowed to go bareheaded as much as ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... there was little danger of the yawl capsizing with such a weight in her. It was also an advantage to have swift way on, to prevent the combing waves from shooting into the boat, though the wind itself scarce outstrips the send of the sea in a stiff blow. As the yawl cleared the brig and began to feel the united power of the wind and waves, the following short dialogue occurred between ...
— Jack Tier or The Florida Reef • James Fenimore Cooper
... Parkway in this city, but it is seldom offered by nurserymen. Caragana frutex, formerly called Caragana frutescens, is a somewhat taller shrub and not quite so floriferous. It makes a fine screen. Both of these shrubs are addicted to root sprouting, and might not please those who care for a stiff, formal garden. Both may be ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... a simple bruise, or it may be a severe wound. There is always swelling, heat and pain present. The joint becomes stiff and interferes with the movement of the leg. Under careful treatment the ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... The door was unlocked and angrily jerked open by a short, squarely formed, beetle-browed, stern-looking woman, clothed in a black stuff gown and having a stiff muslin cap upon ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... temples tear The laurel, which he best deserves to wear. But does not Dryden find even Jonson dull? Beaumont and Fletcher uncorrect, and full Of lewd lines, as he calls them? Shakespeare's style Stiff and affected? To his own the while Allowing all the justice that his pride So arrogantly had to these denied? And may not I have leave impartially To search and censure Dryden's works, and try If those gross faults his choice pen doth commit, Proceed from want of judgment, or of wit? Or if his ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... intrust it to the officer, and, if it were found to compare properly with the other, both would be immediately sent home, and Madame would have only a trifling fee to pay. The bracelet was given willingly, and, with the stiff courtesy inseparable from official dignity, the officer took his leave, and at the next cafe joined his fellow, the gentleman of elegant mien and graceful manner. The bracelets were not found to compare properly, and therefore were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... it his duty to comply; that he, and the government of which he was the head, would resist Mr. Roebuck's motion, which he considered a vote of censure upon the ministry. The premier's address was cold, stiff, haughty, and quietly defiant, but did not appear to make the least impression upon the peers, who were, like the rest of the public, burning with impatience to know the terms and result of Lord John's explanation in the commons. We did not remain in the house of peers, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... to the parts of the figure to which it is united, is often transformed into a shape, and transplanted to a place which deprives it of its original beauty and harmony with the rest of the person. This deforming metamorphosis is effected by means of stiff stays, or corsets, which force the part out of its natural position, and destroy the natural tension and firmness in which so much of its beauty consists. A young lady should be instructed that she is not to allow ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... whose feet begin to move in unison with the lively tune, as if she were loth that music should be wasted without a dance. But where would Annie find a partner? Some have the gout in their toes or the rheumatism in their joints; some are stiff with age, some feeble with disease; some are so lean that their bones would rattle, and others of such ponderous size that their agility would crack the flagstones; but many, many have leaden feet because their hearts are far heavier than lead. It is a sad thought that I have chanced upon. ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... a near thing. Had the ridge fallen the town must have followed, and history perhaps have been changed. In the old stiff-rank Majuba days we should have been swept in an hour from the position. But the wily man behind the rock was now to find an equally wily man in front of him. The soldier had at last learned something of the craft of the hunter. ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... their previous success Bartlett always provided stiff opposition against Pennington and much interest as well as excitement was manifested over contests between the two colleges although at the present time, Pennington seemed to have had the best of the argument. To venture a statement that Pennington did ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... closed on account of the cold draft that entered every crack. McTavish had been under guard since the morning of his arrest, and the watchers were grown careless. Now, the piece of wood was not turned full across the edge of the entrance—in fact, it just managed to keep it shut. A good stiff ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... of the ancient drawing—the feathering hair on the deer's breast, his head, his horns, the very grasses at his feet, are touched with the graver of a true artist (Fig. 14). The design is like a hasty memorandum of Leech's. Then compare the stiff formality of the modern Eskimo drawing (Fig. 13). It is rather like a record, a piece of picture-writing, than a free sketch, a rapid representation of what is most characteristic in nature. Clearly, if the ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... love; the dear, meek, little wife, who was so proud of her husband's few poor talents, so indulgent to his many failings, who ever had an excuse ready to answer his self-reproaches, whose weak, thin hand was always strong enough to pluck him back from ruin and dishonor, till it grew stiff and cold. She knew it, too, for he remembered the wail that burst from her lips when she thought she was alone, the night before she died—"Ah! who will save him now that I am gone?" How miserable and lonely he was long after they buried her! How incessantly he used to repeat those ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... scalp was not vigor, but the black varnish with which Mrs. Mix decorated her shoes. However, Mix didn't perceive the mistake, but darted down stairs, put on his hat and walked off to the courtroom. It was a very cold morning, and by the time Mix reached his destination the varnish was as stiff as a stone. He felt a little uncomfortable about the head, and he endeavored to remove his hat to discover the cause of the difficulty, but to his dismay it was immovable. It was glued fast to the skin, and his efforts to take it off gave ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... 'n forty-leven times," said Mr. Harum, looking up over his paper, "that I thought we was goin' to make a hitch of it, an' he cert'nly hain't said nuthin' 'bout leavin', an' I guess he won't fer a while, tavern or no tavern. He's got a putty stiff upper lip of his own, I reckon," David further remarked, with a short laugh, causing Mrs. Bixbee to look up at him inquiringly, which look the speaker answered with a nod, saying, "Me an' him had a little ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... motionless. Outside, the blackness changed to grey, and the grey to white. He got up. He felt very stiff and cold. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... set down in a street where the sand was over the instep, before a stiff, graceless brick building, standing close up in one corner of an acre lot. On one side, in view from the front gate, was a dilapidated hen-house—on the other, a more unsightly stable with a pig-sty attached. All the space between the house and vineyard, in every direction, was strewn with ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... witches' bridles from its mane before he saddled. As his foot found the stirrup the cinnamon rose into the air, humped its back, and came down with all four legs stiff. The quirt burned its flank, and the animal went up again to whirl round in the air. The boy stuck to the saddle and let out a joyous whoop. The battle ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine
... egg, add milk, salt, and soda. Stir in the meal. Beat well. Add melted lard and baking powder. Bake in hot greased pan. Cut in squares and serve. Do not have batter too stiff. ...
— Everyday Foods in War Time • Mary Swartz Rose
... windows.... And then at the end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kinematograph film, one last picture jerked into place and stopped and stood still, a white wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for the first time ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... appearance was very forbidding; he was then lean and lank, so that his immense structure of bones was hideously striking to the eye, and the scars of the scrofula were deeply visible. He also wore his hair, which was straight and stiff, and separated behind; and he often had, seemingly, convulsive starts and odd gesticulations, which tended to excite at once surprise and ridicule. Mrs. Porter was so much engaged by his conversation that she overlooked ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... the night leaning against a good-sized tree, which his weight had pushed out of the perpendicular. They had not long left this place, and could not be very far ahead, especially as the wounded bull was now again so stiff after his night's rest that for the first few miles the other two had been obliged to support him. But elephants go very quick, even when they seem to be travelling slowly, for shrub and creepers that almost stop a man's progress are no hindrance to them. The three had now turned ...
— Maiwa's Revenge - The War of the Little Hand • H. Rider Haggard
... reluctant to admit that any ship could equal his own. In the mean time, there was every appearance of a change in the weather. Just about the time the Plantagenet braced up, the wind freshened, and in ten minutes it blew a stiff breeze. Some time before the admiral spoke the vessels outside, he was compelled to take in all his light canvass; and when he filled, again, after giving his orders to the frigate and sloop, the topgallant sheets were let fly, a single reef was ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the one snake into a fold of his robe and bent down, making passes with his hands above the serpent on the ground. And as his hands moved so the rattlesnake gradually straightened out its body till it lay stiff and straight as ...
— The Fiery Totem - A Tale of Adventure in the Canadian North-West • Argyll Saxby
... found their way blocked. It was impossible to advance any further; a mass of flowers, a huge sheaf of plants stopped all progress. Down below, a mass of brank-ursine formed as it were a pedestal, from the midst of which sprang scarlet geum, rhodanthe with stiff petals, and clarkia with great white carved crosses, that looked like the insignia of some barbarous order. Higher up still, bloomed the rosy viscaria, the yellow leptosiphon, the white colinsia, and the lagurus, whose dusty green bloom contrasted ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... saloon, crowded by religious personages of all kinds, the old Dowager Countess Ignatieff, in stiff black silk, came forward to receive the popular Starets as the newest star in Russia's religious firmament. With Stuermer behind him to advise and to plot, aided by an obscure civil servant named Protopopoff—who afterwards became ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... grandfather could not do without his company. Our way of treating each other may surprise you, perhaps annoy you. Even when I was a child he called me his colonel, and flew anywhere at a wink from me; and he does so still, though his movements have been rendered more tardy by his stiff legs and rheumatism. Fishing is his favourite amusement since he has been obliged to give up shooting. I employ him as my gamekeeper; and when the cook is ill, he prefers frying a beefsteak and making the soup himself, to going on short commons. In fact, he is a gastronome, and since he obtained ...
— Major Frank • A. L. G. Bosboom-Toussaint
... classed as a hardy annual, though it is sometimes biennial. Stem two feet high; the leaves are oval, alternate, and, in common with the stalk and branches, thickly set with stiff, bristly hairs; the flowers are large and showy,—they are red, white, or blue, and often measure more than an inch in diameter; the seeds are large, oblong, slightly curved, and retain their germinative ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... would like to keep, out the truth is what you said about taking a stretch, man and beast, seemed to me to be just about as wise a thing for me and my beast also. We've been lying by so long that I was getting a little stiff in my joints, and Flipflap, my nag here, was getting stiff in his neck, as they say was the case with the Jews in old times, so I took your idea and put after you, thinking that you'd agree with me that bad company's ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... Macready dead and gone; not in the least like her otherwise. She is perfectly satisfactory, and exceedingly winning. Quite perfect in her manner with him and in her ease with his children, sensible, gay, pleasant, sweet-tempered; not in the faintest degree stiff or pedantic; accessible instantly. I have very rarely seen a more agreeable woman. The house is (on a smaller scale) any house we have known them in. Furnished with the old furniture, pictures, engravings, mirrors, tables, and chairs. Butty is too tall for strength, I am afraid, but handsome, ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... his master; and let it be observed how completely and instantaneously his whole bearing is reversed. Instead of walking upright, the body sinks downwards or even crouches, and is thrown into flexuous movements; his tail, instead of being held stiff and upright, is lowered and wagged from side to side; his hair instantly becomes smooth; his ears are depressed and drawn backwards, but not closely to the head; and his lips hang loosely. From the drawing back of the ears, the eyelids become elongated, and the ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... among their own number, for terms either definite or indefinite, and recognised by statute as vested in certain powers of examination and inquiry. But though a mere name be but a small matter, we are inclined to regard the term Board as somewhat too formidable and stiff. Let us, at least for the present, substitute the term Committee; and as large committees are apt to degenerate into little mobs, and, as such, to conduct their business noisily and ill, let us suppose educational committees to ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... besides. The young gentlemen complained of the patches of starch grimed to their collars, and the streaks of black coal ironed into their dickies, while one week every pocket-handkerchief in the house was starched so stiff that you might as well have carried an earthen plate in your pocket; the tumblers looked muddy; the plates were never washed clean or wiped dry unless I attended to each one; and as to eating and drinking, we experienced a variety that we had not ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... on the Gospel that they saw and handled the child dead. The King's Crowners (Stephen Ganny and William Nottingham) were presently called and went down into the moat. They found the child's body cold and stiff, and white with hoar-frost, stark dead, indeed. While the Crowners, as their office requires, began to write what they had seen, one John Syward, a near neighbour, came down and gently handled the child's ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... Scarecrow carefully oiled each joint the little Wizard moved the joints gently back and forth until they worked freely. After an hour of this labor the Tin Woodman was again on his feet, and although still a little stiff he managed to walk ...
— Little Wizard Stories of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... Oh, bon Gyu!" and he stood stiff and stark, as the great ship narrowed as she turned towards them suddenly, and came threading her way through the bristling rocks, in a way that passed belief and set the hair in the nape of the boy's ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... not true houses. The village is usually fairly well built, and surrounded with a living hedge of stakes. The houses inside this are four-cornered, the walls made of logs of wood stuck in edgeways, and surmounted by a roof of thatch pitched at an extremely stiff angle, and the whole is usually surrounded with a dug-out drain to carry off surface water. These houses, as usual on the West Coast, are divisible into two classes—houses of assembly, and private living houses. The first are much the larger. The latter are very low, and sometimes ridiculously ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... foremost truncheon came up and asked his business, he showed Mother Carey's pass; and the truncheon looked at it in the oddest fashion; for he had one eye in the middle of his upper end, so that when he looked at anything, being quite stiff, he had to slope himself, and poke himself, till it was a wonder why he did not tumble over; but, being quite full of the spirit of justice (as all policemen, and their truncheons, ought to be), he was always in a position of stable equilibrium, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... moments petrified with terror; he heard the last struggle of John; his agony was short. Rutler heard him make several convulsive shudders and that was all. His companion was dead. Then Rutler advanced and seized the sailor's leg. The leg was already cold and stiff; for the venom ...
— A Romance of the West Indies • Eugene Sue
... difference did it make? It would never be published. Probably it would be filed with a Department of Defense code number as Research Report DDNE-42 dash-dash-dash. And there it would remain, top-secret, guarded, unread, useless. Somewhere in the desk drawers was the directive worded in the stiff military manner describing the procedures for clearing papers for publication. When he had first come here, ...
— Security • Ernest M. Kenyon
... blacks were running from all parts of the camp toward the silken tent of Mohammed Beyd, and when Werper entered he found a number of the raiders crowded about the corpse, now cold and stiff. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bleak and savage picture. Everywhere was wrecked gear, and everywhere was ice. The sails, ropes, and spars of the mainmast, which was still standing, were fringed with icicles; and there came over me a feeling almost of relief in that never again should I have to pull and haul on the stiff tackles and hammer ice so that the frozen ropes could run through the frozen shivs. The wind, blowing half a gale, cut with the sharpness that is a sign of the proximity of icebergs; and the big seas were bitter cold to look upon ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... light and dexterous cast, over the place where you observe the fish rise. Dapping or Dibbing, or perhaps more properly Dipping,—this is another method of using the natural flies, and a very killing way too; your rod for this fishing must be of a good length, with a stiff top; your line composed solely of good, fine, strong gut, must be about but not less than a yard in length,—put your flies on the same sized hooks, and after the same way as you are directed to adopt in the other method ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... a roadmender; the stretch of white highway which leads to the end of the world will know me no more; the fields and hedgerows, grass and leaf stiff with the crisp rime of winter's breath, lie beyond my horizon; the ewes in the folding, their mysterious eyes quick with the consciousness of coming motherhood, answer another's voice and hand; while ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... the blacksmith, "that's the first time I've heard about it." He went on more seriously: "I got something to tell you, Ronicky. Ever hear the story about the gent that took pity on the snake that was stiff with cold and brought the snake in to warm him up beside the fire? The minute the snake come to life he sunk his fangs in the gent that ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... himself that your lover deserved to be taken into his confidence, on the delicate subject of Eunice's sentiments. He arrived at a favorable conclusion. I can repeat Philip's questions and the Governor's answers after putting the young man through a stiff examination just as they passed: 'May I inquire, sir, if she has spoken to you about me?' 'She has often spoken about you.' 'Did she seem to be angry with me?' 'She is too good and too sweet to be angry with you.' 'Do you think she will forgive me?' 'She has forgiven you.' 'Did she say so ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... But her gentility withered at the touch of the sweet air. The wind was rising, scattering the straw and ruffling the tails of the ducks as they floated in families over Evie's pendant. One of those delicious gales of spring, in which leaves stiff in bud seem to rustle, swept over the land and then fell silent. "Georgia," sang the thrush. "Cuckoo," came furtively from the cliff of pine-trees. "Georgia, pretty Georgia," and the other birds joined in with nonsense. The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... Bill Klemm rubbing his calf and talking to Jay Tweedle; yes, and when they walked off I thought each of them seemed to have a stiff leg. How about that; were they to see the doctor?" asked the captain of ...
— The Boys of Columbia High on the Gridiron • Graham B. Forbes
... my cap some inches off my head; my mouth opened to an extent which I did not conceive it could possibly reach; I thought my eyes shot out from their sockets, and my fingers spread out and became stiff, though powerless. The "obstupui" was perfectly realized in me, for, with the exception of a single groan, which I gave on first seeing the object, I found that if one word would save my life, or transport me to my own fireside, I could not utter it. I was also rooted to the ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... at first ridden him with the snaffle, and Brutus had gone off at a long easy gait, with rather a stiff neck and projected head; but as soon as I let him feel the curb, he changed with extraordinary rapidity and suppleness, drawing his head back to his breast, and champing his bit noisily; then at the same ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... me; but though I saw the bend, I was too near-sighted to be sure it was intended for me. I was hardly ever in a situation more embarrassing - I dared not return what I was not certain I had received, yet considered myself as appearing quite a monster, to stand stiff-necked, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... from political motives and for political services rendered, it is impossible to expect that while in office the appointees will not regard their tenure as more or less dependent upon continued political service for their patrons, and no regulations, however stiff or rigid, will prevent this, because such regulations, in view of the method and motive for selection, are plainly inconsistent and deemed ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... tore the paper into bits, and then strode slowly up and down the room. Presently he took down his hat, rubbed it abstractedly with the sleeve of his coat, and went out, remarking that he might not be back that day. He felt like a criminal as he stepped upon the sidewalk. But he was stiff, and merely nodded to the tradesmen who bowed to him cringingly. He was looking for Sawyer, but was afraid to inquire after him. He went to the wagon yard where Sawyer stabled his mules, and looked about, but did not find him. The owner of the place, hard in the presence of the farmers, ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... light failed, and the night had come down on the claims like a black curtain let fall suddenly, the men left the ground, and stiff with cold, their muscles almost rigid, plodded slowly and silently back to the cabin. The hired men dispersed in different directions, some going down town and some to their cabins near. When Stephen and Talbot entered they found the fire leaping and crackling as if it had just been tended, and ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... cormarants consume, Whose bones, defrauded of a regal tomb And common turf, lie naked on the plain, Or doom'd to welter in the whelming main. Should he return, that troop so blithe and bold, With purple robes inwrought, and stiff with gold, Precipitant in fear would wing their flight, And curse their cumbrous pride's unwieldy weight. But ah, I dream!-the appointed hour is fled. And hope, too long with vain delusion fed, Deaf to the rumour of fallacious fame, Gives to the roll ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... field, the moon was shining clear, the wind was blowing a stiff gale from the north, and the sheaves of corn, where any moisture had attached to them, were frozen as hard as iron. There was only one of the working horses now serviceable: to supply the place of another, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... ledge. On the tug's forward deck, hat off and jacket swinging loose, stood Captain Joe Bell in charge of the submarine work at the site, glorious old Captain Joe, with the body of a capstan, legs stiff as wharf posts, arms and hands tough as cant hooks and heart twice as big as ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... quantity of euphuism about "classic shades," "groves of Academe," et cetera. Trollope had his fling at the square brick buildings; but it was a fling that they richly deserved, for they are in very deed as ugly as it is possible to conceive,—angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky,—and the farther in you go, the worse it grows. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by Class-Day, is it necessary for boys' schools to be placed without the pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of life that they can safely dispense ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... running bowline, and do a variety of things peculiar to the web-footed gentry. Some of them also tried hard, by precept and example, but in vain, to induce me to chew tobacco and drink grog! Indeed, they regarded the ability to swallow a stiff glass of New England rum, without making a wry face, as one of the most important qualifications ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... cane, beholding the advancing current, bends to it. The others do not act in that way. After the current has passed away, the cane resumes its former posture. The cane knows the virtues of Time and opportunity. It is docile and obedient. It is yielding, without being stiff. For these reasons, it stands where it grows, without having to come with us. Those plants, trees, and creepers that bend and rise before the force of wind and water, have never to suffer discomfiture (by being taken ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... la Mode, concerning which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age. Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture—types of cast-off fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve—we contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... stage was more like a king than His Majesty was when he spoke it, if he had but kept his wig and robe on. And yet you know he is rather stiff and wrinkled for so great a monarch; and his eyes, I am afraid, are beginning to fail him, he looks so close ...
— English Satires • Various
... as we have, two years nex' October, an' I've yet to hear her give a friendly word to anyone in the house. When little Miss Smith up on the third was sick las' winter did her nex' door neighbor lend a hand? She did not. She was just worried stiff for fear she'd catch somethin'. She gave me no peace till Miss Smith was out of the house an' into a hospital. Peace! I've forgot there was such a word. They won't stand for any kid in the house when the lease says no childern, ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... the old mansion of their earliest friends, The chapel of their first and best devotions; When violence or perfidy invades, Or when unworthy lords hold wassail there, And wiser heads are drooping round its moats, At last they fix their steady and stiff eye There, there alone—stand while the trumpet blows, And view the hostile flames above its towers Spire, with a ...
— Count Julian • Walter Savage Landor
... terms as are charged to the fullest with significance—this would seem to be the aim and end of Mr. Meredith's ambition. Of simplicity in his own person he appears incapable. The texture of his expression must be stiff with allusion, or he deems it ill spun; there must be something of antic in his speech, or he cannot believe he is addressing himself to the Immortals; he has praised with perfect understanding the lucidity, the elegance, the ease, of Moliere, and yet his aim in art (it would appear) is ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley
... dawned upon Polly and Eleanor what all this meant! They could see Jeb coming from behind the lilac bushes, some ten feet away from the swinger. He seemed ill at ease, and loosened his stiff collar, pulled down his vest, and ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... if with one consent, they all made up their minds to relieve the tedium of the contemplative life by an exhibition of humor, and, scrambling out of the water, proceeded to canter along the bank with stiff raised tails, with an artificial noose sustained with difficulty just ...
— Red Pottage • Mary Cholmondeley
... watches of the night by periods and intervals of torment. They were then led out, in the severe depth of winter, which there at certain seasons would be severe to any, to the Indians is most severe and almost intolerable,—they were led out before break of day, and, stiff and sore as they were with the bruises and wounds of the night, were plunged into water; and whilst their jaws clung together with the cold, and their bodies were rendered infinitely more sensible, the blows and stripes were renewed upon their ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... it briskly across the hearth, a tiny fluff of down detached itself from one of the stiff quills, and floated to the rug. When she picked it up it clung to her fingers, and only after repeated attempts did she succeed in dislodging it, and in ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... creatures which lived in former ages; and the array of books on the shelves of a library stores up in like manner the errors of the past and the way in which they have been exposed. Like those creatures, they too were full of life in their time, and made a great deal of noise; but now they are stiff and fossilized, and an object of curiosity ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Religion, A Dialogue, Etc. • Arthur Schopenhauer
... journalism naturally care for writing, but in an art to "care" is little and most have never had the personal environment, the training, or the personal command of English to enable them to do more than write a stiff prose with a narrow vocabulary and no sense of style. Even those who have some such capacity are hampered by the family heritage already outlined. College writing is in the same condition; but the average college man is not expecting to earn his living by his typewriter. In order to receive ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... of voices, and therefore it does not so need the sound of rushes; but they are most sensitive to the stealthy breezes, and betray the passing of a wind that even the tree-tops knew not of. Sometimes it is a breeze unfelt, but the stiff sedges whisper it along a mile of marsh. To the strong wind they bend, showing the silver of their sombre little tassels as fish show the silver of their sides turning in the pathless sea. They are unanimous. A field of tall flowers tosses many ways ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... on, the muscles of the face twitch, the body is stiff, immovable, and then in a short time, in a state of twitching motion, the head and neck are drawn backwards and the limbs violently bent and stretched. Sometimes these movements are confined to certain muscles or are limited to one ...
— The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases • Charles West, M.D.
... castle of Chantelle, and headed southward in the direction of Spain. The leader was dressed in armor, and carried sword by side and battle-axe at his saddle-bow. Of his followers, some fifteen of them were attired in a peculiar manner, wearing thick jackets of woollen cloth that seemed as stiff as iron mail, and jingled metallically as they rode. Mail they were, capable of turning arrow or spear thrust, but mail of gold, not of iron, for in those jackets were sewed up thirty thousand crowns of gold, and their wearers served as the ambulatory treasury of ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... remarked Chimp's apprentice at breakfast one morning, 'although I must admit that many impulses and movements that come naturally to you are acquired by me with difficulty. Last evening's attempt at leap-frog, for example, has left me so stiff that I can hardly move, and I assure you that it has never before occurred to me to climb that tree all the years I have known it. Perhaps in a week or so, when my hands are healed, I may try again. But I can see, Sim, that it must be very good ...
— The Flamp, The Ameliorator, and The Schoolboy's Apprentice • E. V. Lucas
... was the first that applied it, together with experiment, to natural philosophy. The former rejected, with the most positive disdain, the system of Copernicus: the latter fortified it with new proofs, derived both from reason and the senses. Bacon's style is stiff and rigid: his wit, though often brilliant, is also often unnatural and far-fetched; and he seems to be the original of those pointed similes and long-spun allegories which so much distinguish the English ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... grass, taking off the Scot's hat and knocking him down with the shock as it fell. The thing had burst in the ground, and it was as good as a Chinese puzzle to fit the great chunks of iron together. At first we could not find the solid base, but we dug it out with a pick from the stiff, black clay. It had sunk 3 ft. 8 in. down from the surface, and had run 7 ft. 6 in. from the point of contact. It was a 45-pounder, thrown by a 4.7 in. gun—probably one of the four howitzers which the Boers possess, standing half-way down Lombard's Kop, about four miles away, and is identical ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... the chest, which was opened by the key. As everybody knows, if we once begin to think we soon begin to do, and it was not very long before the key was no longer in the maiden's hand but in the lock of the chest. But the lock was stiff and resisted all her efforts, and in the end she had to break it. And what was inside after all? Why, nothing but a serpent's skin, which her husband, who was, unknown to her, a magician, put on when he was at work; ...
— The Pink Fairy Book • Various
... voices, he moves unconsciously along the edge of the woodpile. With stiff steps—his one hand leaning on the hoe, his other reached as to unseen hands, that draw him—he totters toward the sunlight and the green lawn, at back. As he does so, his thin, cracked voice takes up the battle-hymn where ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... good father," said she, "how shall I discharge all my obligations to you? Alas, I cannot now. I can only thank you for all the words, for all good advice I received from your dear lips, now sealed in death. Your hand, which is now cold and stiff, I kiss with gratitude, and remember that that hand has bestowed upon me many benefits, and has all my life laboured for my good. Oh, if I could at this moment follow you into the heavenly kingdom, ...
— The Basket of Flowers • Christoph von Schmid
... could pitch him overboard, but he butted and kicked so they could not lay hands on him. No more hands could be spared from the crew to help, as it required all the rest to manage the ship. Stubby and Button also put up a stiff fight as the men chased them all over the dirigible from under chairs and tables in this stateroom and that, where they upset things generally as the aviators tried to hit them with brooms, ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... which makes the resemblance to twigs very close indeed. Some of these quaint insects rest through the day and have the remarkable habit of putting themselves into a sort of kataleptic state. Many creatures turn stiff when they get a shock, or pass suddenly into new surroundings, like some of the sand-hoppers when we lay them on the palm of our hand; but these twig-insects put themselves into this strange state. The body is rocked from side to side for a short time, and then it stiffens. An advantage may ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... in the Chim del Manro, brother," said Antonio; "at the gallop and at the speedy trot, there is no one to match him. But he is eighteen years old, and his joints are stiff, especially of a morning; but let him once become heated, and the genio del viejo comes upon him, and there is no holding him in with bit or bridle. I bought that horse for ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... coquetted with the fear of punishment. By terror you may drive men long, but not far. Here, in Apemama, they work at the constant and the instant peril of their lives; and are plunged in a kind of lethargy of laziness. It is common to see one go afield in his stiff mat ungirt, so that he walks elbows-in like a trussed fowl; and whatsoever his right hand findeth to do, the other must be off duty holding on his clothes. It is common to see two men carrying between them on a pole a single bucket of water. To make two bites of a cherry is good enough: to make two ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... petition granted only encourages him to another. Six times he pleads, and God waits till he has done before He goes away; He cannot leave His friend till that friend has said all his say. What a contrast the fiery fervour and unwearying pertinacity of Abraham's prayers make to the stiff formalism of the intercessions one is familiar with! The former are like the successive pulses of a volcano driving a hot lava stream before it; the latter, like the slow flow of a glacier, cold and sluggish. Is any part of our ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... Expedition embraced her; and she very soon had her gloves on, and was on her way to John Peerybingle's in a state of unimpeachable gentility; with a paper parcel at her side containing a cap of state, almost as tall, and quite as stiff, as a mitre. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... are like our routs, or rather worse, for the women sit in a semi-circle by the lady of the mansion, and the men stand about the room. To be sure, there is one improvement upon ours—instead of lemonade with their ices, they hand about stiff rum-punch—punch, by my palate; and this they think English. I would not disabuse them of so agreeable an ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... spectators even seemed to feel pity and sympathy for the unfortunates, as they saw them carried along, some covered with blood, others paralysed by the sudden cold, with faces pale as death and limbs stiff and rigid. But as the fury and violence of the combatants augmented, the bystanders forgot every other feeling in the excitement of the fight, about the result of which they seemed as anxious as ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... his delighted concurrence; Mr Delvile forced himself to make a stiff inclination of the head; and Lady Honoria gaily exclaimed, "Dr Lyster, when you say the best and the most faultless, you should always add the rest ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... about to explain when a halloo from the stables cut him short. "There's Frank now. I ought to be out helping him this minute; we've got a good stiff drive ahead of us. You ask Gertie about it, she'll explain ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... obtained it at a public sale in Paris, against a very stiff commission left for it by myself. A copy of equal beauty is in the Library of the Right Hon. ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... young author will naturally differ from what he has settled by practice at an advanced period of life. This has been observed in many eminent writers, and in none more than Lipsius himself. His language, in the outset, was easy, flowing, and elegant; but, as he advanced in years, it became stiff, abrupt, and harsh. Tacitus relates a conversation on a literary subject; and in such a piece, who can expect to find the style of an historian or an annalist? For these reasons Brotier thinks that this Dialogue may, with good reason, be ascribed ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... Boer had known; for he could not allow the Rooinek to get to the point where his own position would be threatened or commanded. When Kruger's men did discover the truth, there would be fighting as stiff as had been seen in this struggle for half ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... spectacle which met their view; but at the next instant they advanced to the couch, and contemplated with mournful attention the scene presented to them. For there—upon that couch—side by side, lay Fernand Wagner and Nisida of Riverola—stiff, motionless, cold. ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... he was aware that a tall, lanky cowboy in chaps, woollen shirt, and stiff, broad-brimmed hat was pounding his cayuse over the ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... on the deck of the sloop, and before light the next morning Dan was awakened by the groaning of the chain as the anchor was hauled up, and the flapping of the sails as Timothy hoisted them to catch a stiff breeze which was blowing from the northeast. The second day passed like the first. The weather was fine, the winds favorable, and that evening they rounded Duxbury Point and entered Plymouth Bay just as the sun sank behind the hills ...
— The Puritan Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... I can use my stiff little wings. A dinner now and then and a luncheon occasionally when I know enough nice women to make a decent showing. Clothes and women, when adopted late in life, are difficult. But oh! Brace, it is great—this blessed ...
— The Man Thou Gavest • Harriet T. Comstock
... the Claiborne place had broken free and run away; so that he must now trudge back afoot to report to his masters. He had made a mess of his errands and nearly lost his life besides. The bullet from Oscar's revolver had cut a neat furrow in his scalp, which was growing sore and stiff as it ceased bleeding. He would undoubtedly be dealt with harshly by Chauvenet and Durand, but he knew that the sooner he reported his calamities the better; so he stumbled toward Lamar, pausing at times to clasp ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... Their hands had clasped in leave-taking and her eyes were lifted to his, when some plea with which "the entire man" seemed overcharged to the very lips was suddenly, subtly, and not this time by disconcertion, but by self-mastery, withheld. Irby put in a stiff good-by, and as he withdrew, Hilary echoed only the same threadbare word more brightly, and was gone; saying to himself as he looked back from the garden's ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... become suspicious of her, and would have left her after many vacillations. He did not instinctively recognise humility and nobility when he met them, because they bore but slight resemblance to the stiff lay figures which represented those qualities in his mind. To meet them in reality would have been to him ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... introduction; during which the young barrister published two books or pamphlets on the Laws of Nations, married a sister of Lady Mulgrave, and was slowly working his way at the bar. In 1802, Pitt, in a stiff enough letter, offered Mr. Ward a seat for Cockermouth, one of the Lowther boroughs; and when he returned to power, his protege became Under-Secretary of State for the Foreign Department, (his brother-in-law, Lord Mulgrave, being Principal Secretary,) after he had published a pamphlet ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Of Literature, Art, and Science - Vol. I., July 22, 1850. No. 4. • Various
... tight but I didn't button it, and I'd just got a stiff little hat perched on my head when I heard the tramp of men on the sidewalk, and in the dusk saw the ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... Lady Ludlow; and now and then we rode out with her in her coach and four. She did not like to go out with a pair of horses, considering this rather beneath her rank; and, indeed, four horses were very often needed to pull her heavy coach through the stiff mud. But it was rather a cumbersome equipage through the narrow Warwickshire lanes; and I used often to think it was well that countesses were not plentiful, or else we might have met another lady ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... here that I removed his pocket-book and slipped it into my great-coat. Not daring to examine it openly, I fingered it cautiously, and felt the stiff softness of bank-notes. I was so carried away with pleasure that I was quite surprised to hear his voice returning from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 25th, 1920 • Various
... over and peering into my eyes was the face, the fleshless, mouldering face of a foul and barely recognisable corpse! With a shriek of horror I rolled backwards, and, springing to my feet, prepared to fly. I glanced at the mummy. It was lying on the ground, stiff and still, every bandage in its place; whilst standing over it, a look of fiendish glee in its light, doglike eyes, was the figure ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... is in good hands," she wrote, "and it is so pleasant here that I really do want to stay a little longer. Pray write to me just how Hugh is, and if I must come home. What a delightful lady that Mrs. Richards is—not one bit stiff as I can see. I don't know what people mean to call her proud. She has promised, if mamma will leave me here, to be my chaperon, and it's possible we may visit New York together, so as to be there when ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... hated, because less despised than the King. Attired in cloth of gold—for silk and satin were grown too coarse a material for them—with their little velvet porringer-caps stuck on the sides of their heads, with their long hair stiff with pomatum, and their heads set inside a well-starched ruff a foot wide, "like St. John's head in a charger," as a splenetic contemporary observed, with a nimbus of musk and violet-powder enveloping ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the man at that post. But the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up adoring him as his savior. And when he stammered, "I take the liberty of wishing you good luck, Captain," standing in stiff military attitude, but in a voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor, such ardent devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly felt a strange emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... a school being placed within the reach of Tom Hicks, he gave up every thought to the acquirement of knowledge. And now came a serious difficulty. His bent, stiff fingers could not be made to hold either pen or pencil in the right position, or to use them in such a way as to make intelligible signs. But Tom was too much in earnest to give up on the first, or second, or third effort. He found, after a ...
— After a Shadow, and Other Stories • T. S. Arthur
... so short that he stands on a platform at the side, to bring his figure into harmonious relation to the group. His dress is blue satin, of stiff, full skirt, which, with the close white cap on his head, makes him a quaint little figure. A chubby, innocent looking baby, he is nevertheless a personage who fully realizes the important place he occupies ...
— Child-life in Art • Estelle M. Hurll
... an' he throws a ball, Just like a boy, with the curves an' all, An' he knows the kids by their first names, too, An' says they're just like the boys he knew. Some of the fellers are scared plumb stiff When their fathers are near 'em an' act as if They wuz doing wrong if they made a noise, But my pa seems to be one ...
— All That Matters • Edgar A. Guest
... how I love it, and how I wish for you to see me in it. I plans to put it on a little while everyday and pretend that I am a real nurse like I am going to be. I done it yesterday, and somehow when I shet my eyes and run my hands over its crackely stiff whiteness, it seemed to me that the room was full of sweet little babies for me to ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... of the poets of the Cancionero de Baena is mainly historical. In spite of many an illuminating side-light on manners, of political invective and an occasional glint of imagination, the amorous platitudes and wire-drawn love-contests of the Galician school, the stiff allegories of the Italianates leave us cold. It was a transition period and the most talented were unable to master the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... quite dark, with a stiff breeze blowing right abaft. The night, a moonless and very black one, favoured us altogether for the run which, I did not doubt, we had to make against some Government vessel that would follow us. ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... my boy? I knew how it would be. Tired out? Stiff with so long a ride? Lean over this way and ...
— Ahead of the Army • W. O. Stoddard
... "Stiff breeze—short sea," returned the bluff old seaman; "great risk in making land—boats heavily laden with women and children will be swamped. Not a soul goes on shore ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... unmistakable dismissal, one arm pointing gracefully aloft from its enveloping foam of draperies, that same too-intense smile upon the Greek face that even Nancy, in moments of humane expansion, had admitted to be all but faultless. And the latter, wondering not a little at the stiff disposition to have her quickly away, which she had somehow divined through all the gushing cordiality of Mrs. Wyeth's manner, went on upstairs. As she rapped at Mrs. Eversley's door, the bell of the street door sounded ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... servant,' she said, very stiff; 'I'm her aunt, and her guardian, and I allow no messages to pass ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... factious times With public zeal to cancel private crimes. (THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM) Some of their chiefs were princes of the land; In the first rank of these did Zimri stand, A man so various, that he seemed to be Not one, but all mankind's epitome: Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong, Was everything by starts and nothing long; But, in the course of one revolving moon, Was chymist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon; Then all for women, painting, rhyming, drinking, ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... with the outline of the Parrot will fail to recognize any member of that Family by a general form which is equally common to the diminutive Nonpareil, the gorgeous Ara, and the high-crested Cockatoo. Neither will any one, who has ever observed the small head, the straight bill, the flat back, and stiff tail of the Woodpecker, hesitate to identify the family form in any of the numerous Genera into which this group is now divided. The family characters are even more invariable than the generic ones; for there are Woodpeckers which, instead of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... under the aegis of diplomatic immunity. Here the ideologies could rant and rave against each other, seeking a rendering of a final decision in men's age-old arguments; but elsewhere such discussions were verboten, and subject to swift, stiff penalties. ...
— Where I Wasn't Going • Walt Richmond
... not free his style from what are called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms. To unpractised eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predecessors. It is only after careful comparison that we discover, in this picture of the Rucellai for example, a distinctly fresh endeavour ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... jollier and more radiant little soul than she all through the opening exercises. She listened to the speaking and the singing with the greatest appreciation and delight. She sat up perfectly straight in her prim and stiff basque; she folded her small red hands before her; her two tight braids inclined stiffly towards her ears, and her face was ...
— Young Lucretia and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... sought him out an' indeavored to intherview him on th' Nicaragooan Canal, th' Roomanyan Jews, th' tahriff an' th' thrusts. Th' comin' statesman rayfused to be dhrawn on these questions, his answer bein' a ready, "Go chase ye'ersilf, ye big stiff!" Afther a daylightful convarsation th' rayporther left, bein' followed to th' gate be his janial young host who hit him smartly in th' back with a brick. He is a ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... certainly had never been seen on ice before. It made the most extraordinary bounds on its long hind legs, with its little fore legs tucked up in front of it as if it wanted to carry a muff; and its long, stiff tail sticking out straight behind, to balance it itself with apparently. The children at first started with surprise, and then burst out laughing, for it was the funniest creature, and had the funniest ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... you you will study harder than you ever did in your precious life," whispered he. "I know Bob. He can be stiff as any college professor. He tutored me in Latin once to pull me through my exams and I barely lived. I don't envy ...
— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett
... He was plain-featured and yet assuming in manner. He hobbled in walking from lameness of tell-tale origin,—a cleaver falling on his foot in childhood, compelling him to wear an artificial heel—and he was morbidly sensitive over it. His prim formality of manner, his sword and stiff-curled wig, his small and sickly face trying to maintain an expression impressively dignified, made him a ludicrous figure, which his contemporaries never tired of ridiculing and caricaturing. Henderson, the actor, said that "Akenside, when he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... refines, but does not relieve it. I was at Stirling Castle not long ago. It gave me no pleasure. The declivity seemed to me abrupt, not sublime; for in truth I did not shrink back from it with terror. The weather-beaten towers were stiff and formal: the air was damp and chill: the river winded its dull, slimy way like a snake along the marshy grounds: and the dim misty tops of Ben Leddi, and the lovely Highlands (woven fantastically of thin air) mocked my embraces and tempted my longing eyes like her, the ...
— Liber Amoris, or, The New Pygmalion • William Hazlitt
... those last words as her head fell back against her chair, all the light fading out of her eyes, and then she slipped away into unconsciousness. When she came to herself again she was cold, and stiff, and ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... city, bent on various quests, went the victorious Federals. Not so the old sailor. The revered flag, flaunting the colors so joyously above his head once more, was far too weather-beaten, he feared, to withstand long the stiff breeze blowing about the elevated site. Torn to ribbons it must not be, howsoever good ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... especially liable to produce tones untrue to the pitch. Stiff-throated singers almost invariably exhibit this faulty tendency. An excessive tension of the throat hampers the vocal cords in their adjustments, and the result is an impure tone. This is more often the cause of an artist singing out of tune than a deficiency of the sense of hearing. ...
— The Psychology of Singing - A Rational Method of Voice Culture Based on a Scientific Analysis of All Systems, Ancient and Modern • David C. Taylor
... invasion continues, we and the other nations of the world cannot conduct business as usual with the Soviet Union. That's why the United States has imposed stiff economic penalties on the Soviet Union. I will not issue any permits for Soviet ships to fish in the coastal waters of the United States. I've cut Soviet access to high-technology equipment and to agricultural products. I've limited other commerce with the Soviet Union, and I've asked our ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... my word or take something else," came the stiff response. "Be quick, now, and say which ...
— The Boy Land Boomer - Dick Arbuckle's Adventures in Oklahoma • Ralph Bonehill
... rising "so very high, that there is often a greater length from his chin to the top of his head than to the sole of his foot. One would believe that we thought a great man and a tall man the same thing." Then he describes the embarrassment of the actor, forced to hold his neck extremely stiff and steady all the time he speaks, when, "notwithstanding any anxieties which he pretends for his mistress, his country, or his friends, one may see by his action that his greatest care and concern is to keep the plume of feathers from ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... away. They breathed and thought, and that was all. At length the chill air began to tell, and he plainly heard the chatter of her teeth, the rustling of her dress as her body shivered. He arose, stiff and cold, drew off his coat and threw it about her shoulders. She resisted at first, but he was master. Later his waistcoat was wrapped about her throat and the warm lantern was placed at her feet, but she never gave him one ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... 'ead," he grunted as he stamped off below. He went to a small cupboard in the corner of the cabin, and mixed himself a stiff "go" of gin and water, which he tossed off ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... somewhat stiff and uninteresting. Gore's Bampton Lectures on much the same subject are far more interesting to my mind, far more human. Lectures IV, V, VI of Gore would perhaps interest and educate you on ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... Mulga Scrub. Feel very stiff and ill. Started at daylight, and passed through three belts of thick mulga scrub, between which there were low stony hills. At three miles passed a small gum creek, emptying itself into the scrub. At ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... going to," she answered, smiling through her tears, "but it's a blessed privilege to have a nice stiff collar and a new tie to ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... to each person. Beat the whites to a stiff froth. Heap them into individual dishes, make a nest, or hole, in the center. Drop into this a whole yolk. Stand the dish in a pan of water, cover, and cook in the oven about two or three minutes. Dust ...
— Many Ways for Cooking Eggs • Mrs. S.T. Rorer
... brown tousled hair. A man of thirty-five, though the decision of his manner, the quiet dominance of his voice made him seem older. He stood up now, surveying the blue lit glassite room with its low ceiling close overhead. He was bow-legged; in movement he seemed to roll with a stiff-legged gait like some sea captains of former days on the deck of his swaying ship. Odd looking figure! Heavy flannel shirt and trousers, boots heavily weighted, and bulky metal-loaded belt ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... turns up his nose at. He abuses the leaders of the people, and only reads conservative newspapers, and on election days he votes against all his parish. The farmer maintains and pays him, but his conviction is that he is better than any farmer. What, therefore, can be more stiff-necked of him than to refuse to serve his country with his own, reverend person? Off with his black coat and clap on a red, and let the corporal teach him. He is a learned fellow, but, ...
— A Danish Parsonage • John Fulford Vicary
... sons of Dichu, lest any of them should raise the head to defend themselves, or the heel to offend him. For he, being rooted in the errors of idolatry, strenuously favored the magicians and the soothsayers; and his neck was stiff and his head was stubborn against the true religion. But when he understood that Dichu, with all his household and kindred and people, had turned unto Christ, and renounced the gods of their country, even the devils, his mind and ...
— The Most Ancient Lives of Saint Patrick - Including the Life by Jocelin, Hitherto Unpublished in America, and His Extant Writings • Various
... Epic Poem be Perspicuous, unless it be also Sublime. To this end it ought to deviate from the common Forms and ordinary Phrases of Speech. The Judgment of a Poet very much discovers it self in shunning the common Roads of Expression, without falling into such ways of Speech as may seem stiff and unnatural; he must not swell into a false Sublime, by endeavouring to avoid the other Extream. Among the Greeks, AEschylus, and sometimes Sophocles, were guilty of this Fault; among the Latins, Claudian and Statius; and among our own Countrymen, Shakespear and Lee. In these Authors the Affectation ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... answer, and, vexed with himself decided that action was more efficient than speech. So he stepped between her and the wind and drew her so that she stood close in the shelter of him. An unusually stiff squall blew about them and thrummed overhead in the tree-tops and both paused to listen. A shower of flying leaves enveloped them, and hard on the heel of the wind came driving drops of rain. He looked down on her and on her hair wind-blown about her face; and because of her closeness to him ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... "I was not sitting in the sun, but under the shade of a peach tree. Also, I was working out the sums that Monsieur Leblanc set me on my slate. See, here they are," and she held up the slate, which was covered with figures, somewhat smudged, it is true, by the rubbing of my stiff hair and of ...
— Marie - An Episode in The Life of the late Allan Quatermain • H. Rider Haggard
... man became aware of their presence, he straightened himself up with the slow movement of one stiff with age or rheumatism and threw them a tentatively friendly look out of a pair ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... hall. Long and rough was the road I trod, and wearisome was the way. Will no one bid me welcome? Will none give me a seat at the feast? Will none offer me a drink of the precious mead? Why are you all so dumb? Why so sulky and stiff-necked, when your best friend stands before you? Give me a seat among you,—yes, one of the high-seats,—or else drive me from your hall! In either case, the world will never forget me. I ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... Cubano or an Havanero. The appellations are as mutually offensive as were in the olden times those of Southron and Scot, although Cuba is eternally making a boast of her loyalty. The manner of a Cuban is as stiff and hidalgoish as that of any old Spaniard; in fact, so far as my short acquaintance with the mother country and the colony enables me to judge, I see little or no difference. Some of them, however, have a dash of fun ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... stood about on the sidewalk jeering and fleering, jigging and singing, talking loud, horse-laughing, and hungrily eyeing the girls and women that passed by, who tried hard to seem, as they went, not self-conscious and stiff-stepping because of our observation ... and sometimes we whistled after them or called out to them ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... first gray glimmer of the wintry dawn, Noll was awake. He felt stiff and lame after his adventure of the previous evening, and not at all inclined to stir. But a sudden recollection of Dirk and his child, and the aid which he had promised them, came to him almost as soon as he was conscious of the day's dawning, and he got up and limped to the window to see ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... yourself behind my chair. But you're not to stand so, with your hands in your pockets. Take your hands from your pockets, Roger; and from your head, you blockhead you! See how Diggory carries his hands. They're a little too stiff, indeed, but ...
— Standard Selections • Various
... loquacity, or with the sharp remarks of Lady Flora Hastings, one of her maids of honour, who had no love for the Baroness. The subject lent itself to satire; for the pastor's daughter, with all her airs of stiff superiority, had habits which betrayed her origin. Her passion for caraway seeds, for instance, was uncontrollable. Little bags of them came over to her from Hanover, and she sprinkled them on her bread and butter, her cabbage, and ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... of the grade school dressed as Uncle Sam. He led them to the pot. He directed them up the steps to the rim, and inside. He called them out again on the other side. They came, dressed in derby hats, coats, pants, vest, stiff collar and polka-dot tie, undoubtedly, said my friend, each with an Eversharp pencil in his pocket, and ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... between the two schools is all off, then," yawned Martin. "You fellows don't want to go into it, for you know you'd be beaten stiff. That's why you try to hedge ...
— The Grammar School Boys in Summer Athletics • H. Irving Hancock
... until her own fair, warm cheek rested against the icy cold face of the dead man she loved, here she neither wept nor moaned, but in silent, tearless anguish mourned over her departed friend. She gently chafed the stiff, cold hands with hers, and smoothed back the silver hair from his marble brow, there was a load of crushing weight and pain and care down deep in her poor heart, but still no tear would come to her burning eyes. By and bye, when she had spent nearly an ...
— Honor Edgeworth • Vera
... said the Captain: and bending to Pendennis, he added, "Rejuiced in circumstances, sir, I was for some time a fencing-master in Dublin (there's only three men in the empire could touch me with the foil once, but Jack Costigan's getting old and stiff now, sir), and my daughter had an engagement at the thayater there; and 'twas there that my friend, Mr. Bows, who saw her capabilities, and is an uncommon 'cute man, gave her lessons in the dramatic art, and made her what ye see. What have ye done ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of their shooting. Thus the arrows pierced an oak door four inches thick; they had been left there as a curiosity, and Gerald saw them with their iron points coming through on the inner side. He describes these bows as "made of elm—ugly, unfinished-looking weapons, but astonishingly stiff, large, and strong, and equally useful for long and short shooting." Add to this that the longbow was not a characteristic English weapon till the latter part of the thirteenth century, that the first battle in which an English king made effective use of archery (at Falkirk, ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... Hayes. You hold that Packard is not the legal governor of Louisiana, and President Hayes has no title." And the other leaders of the Republican party, for the most part, held this view. To these and their followers Blaine applied the name "Stalwarts," stiff partisans, who did not believe in surrendering the hold of the ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... hijious thing—a very hijious thing if, when I come a-gatherin' watercress in the marnin', I should find you a-danglin' on t' stapil, cold and stiff—like t' other, or lyin' a corp wi' your throat cut; 'twould be a hijious—hijious thing, Peter, but oh! 'twould mak' a ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... not keep the corners of her mouth quite stiff, but she still said, "You do not know what ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he said, "art thou better off for being pope?" At first she sat as stiff as a post, without stirring. Then he said, "Now, wife, be content with being pope; higher thou canst ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... Obviously he was scared stiff. "They were empty," he said. "All of them. Empty! Honest! And in one I found this." He handed Rick the scrap of ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... courtesy her governess had taught her. Were we not king and queen returned to our summer palace? And Spot and Silver and Song and Knipe, the wolf-hound, were our train, though not as decorous as rigid etiquette demanded, since they were forever running after the butterflies. On we went through the stiff, box-bordered walks of the garden, past the weather-beaten sundial and the spinning-house and the smoke-house to the stables. Here old Harvey, who had taught me to ride Captain Daniel's pony, is equerry, and young Harvey our personal attendant; old Harvey smiles as we go in and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... much as we can do, sir, if we could do it at all," he answered. "The brig is not particularly stiff, or she would not have heeled over as sharply as she ...
— Paddy Finn • W. H. G. Kingston
... that no breath drove in from the outside, and the air of the chamber was heavy and earthlike. The place was bone-dry. I picked up the billiard chalk, and felt that the green paper wrapping was crisp and stiff. The name of Rolandi et Cie. was printed upon it, but there was nothing which told me whence it came or how long it had been there. Only that scribbled word Hereingefallen on the newly-scraped plaster seemed to fix a date on the ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... righteousness towards him, and it makes another man impatient of receiving and bearing an injury or disrespect. While every man seeks to please himself, the contention arises. Pride in both parties makes both stiff and inflexible to peace and equity, and in this there is a great deal of folly. For, by this means, both procure more real displeasure and dissatisfaction to their own spirits. "But with the well advised is wisdom." They who have discretion and judgment will not ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and far-seeing, and radiantly handsome!" There the picture was of a high, haughty, and overbearing woman, in velvet, or brocade, or poplin-yes, something stiff and overbearing, like grey poplin. Kitty looked at herself suddenly in the mirror-the half- length mirror on the opposite wall—and she felt her hands clench and her bosom beat hard under her pretty and inexpensive calico frock, a thing for Chloe, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a change came o'er the spirit of his red mustaches. They ceased to sport about his nose. They were distinctly less playful than they had been, and by degrees they became positively stiff. In the mean time, Mr. Gallivant had returned to his law office. He had also gone back to live in Harlem, and one night last December he shut himself in his room—a hall bed-chamber on the third floor, rear—sat himself upon the only chair at hand, stretched his legs in front ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... most kind to Lord Clarendon, and make a marked difference between their marked cordiality to him and the stiff etiquette with which ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... back against her cushions, looking so white and exhausted that Ann was thoroughly alarmed and despatched Marie in search of the doctor, who promptly prescribed rest and quiet. By the following morning Lady Susan found herself too stiff even to wish to move. She had tripped and fallen suddenly, without being able to save herself at all, and she was more bruised and shaken than she or any one else ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... the same manner as a witch does, but employs the spirit of the dead person in casting out other evil spirits by which his clients may be possessed. One of the miracles performed by the Baiga is to make his wet cloth stand in the air stiff and straight, holding only the two lower ends. He can cross a river walking on leaves, and change men into beasts. Witches are not very common among the Dhanwars. A witch, male or female, maybe detected by a sunken and gloomy appearance of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... resemblance to it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it. Husband and wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed. It is a common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... farm on the ridge road five miles out of Cleveland, he entered with zeal into the business of scientific farming. Here he demonstrated that a stiff clay soil derived from the underlying Devonian Shales may be made highly productive in fruit. His success stimulated others along the ridge road, until the old pastures and meadows on that side of the city have ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... approached each other, I saw that he wore a plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in steel, but bore a curious addition also—a stiff square garment like a herald's tabard. However, I had to smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and read this ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... or arm is broken, straighten the limb gently and if necessary pull upon the end firmly to get the bones in place. Then bind the limb firmly to a splint to hold it in place. A splint may be made of any straight, stiff material—a shingle or piece of board, a bayonet, a rifle, a straight branch of a tree, etc. Whatever material you use must be well padded on the side next to the limb. Be careful never to place the bandages over the fracture, but ...
— Manual for Noncommissioned Officers and Privates of Infantry • War Department
... not amiss. But when the sigh with its attendant murmurs had passed away it was necessary that some initiative step should be taken. "Dr Tempest," said the bishop, "what are we to do about this poor stiff-necked gentleman?" Still Dr Tempest did not speak. "There is no clergyman in the diocese," continued the bishop, "in whose prudence and wisdom I have more confidence than in yours. And I know, too, that you are by no means disposed to severity where severe measures are not necessary. ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
