|
|
|
More "Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... compare the membership list of their league with the census of the United States. Whoever has been granted such a moment of insight knows how exquisitely painful it is. To conquer it men turn generally to their ancient comforter, self-deception: they complain about the stolid, inert masses and the apathy of the people. In a more confidential tone they will tell you that the ordinary citizen is a ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... produced a strong effect on Obed, yet no expression of his face told whether that effect was favorable or unfavorable. Earnestly Hilda watched his face as she spoke, so as to read if possible her fate, yet she found it impossible. His face remained stolid and impassive, though she saw this much, that he was listening to her with the deepest attention. What was most perplexing was the fact that Obed did not say one ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... She felt the questioning intentness of Sheriff Munn's eyes on her stolid face and she felt that he did not miss the ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... it half mischievously, but the only effect was a grunt, and a stolid shrug of his shoulders, nor did he vouchsafe another word for the rest of the way before they came through the valley, and through the low brushwood on the bank, and were in sight of the search party, who set up a joyful halloo ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... manoeuvre, the Admiral here ran up against the stolid idea of the old—and still existing—Fighting Instructions concerning the line-of-battle in action, embodied in a typical representative in the senior captain of his fleet. This gentleman, Robert Carkett, had risen from before the mast, and after ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... what should, or should not, be classed as "superstition," we would rejoin by gleefully pointing to a leading article in the Irish Times of Jan. 27, 1914, which gives a short account of a lecture by Mr. Lovett on the folklore of London. Folklore in London! in the metropolis of the stolid Englishman! The fact is that the Irish people are not one whit more superstitious than their cross-channel neighbours, while they are surely on a far higher level in this respect than many of the Continental nations. ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... French are more logical and freer from prejudices than the British; so the difference of attitude is easily explained. Only once in Paris did I have cause to blush for my American citizenship. I had become quite friendly with a young man from Luxemburg whom I had met at the big cafe. He was a stolid, slow-witted fellow, but, as we say, with a heart of gold. He and I grew attached to each other and were together frequently. He was a great admirer of the United States and never grew tired of talking to me about the country ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... holding forth in earnest tones to a group gathered closely round him. From the looks of the spectators it was impossible to say whether or not they took pleasure in the various performances. During the time we remained we beheld not a movement of applause: not a smile relaxed the grave, stolid features; there was but a calm gazing and a quiet puffing of smoke from mouth ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... A stolid, ignorant, and densely superstitious people was at war with a rejuvenated nation keenly alive to the power of education. That is the secret. Man for man, Russia would have won. But the resourcefulness of the little brown man more ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into the earth—is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art, told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply the quality of the stone)—the great feature is the admirable choir, in the midst of which the ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... of evil-doing and tyranny towards the oppressed. Hearing such talk, I rode on half-wondering what England had been doing towards the Irish at home and the Boers abroad, for this was all news to me, and I had never noticed among the Dutch settlers on the veldt anything but a stolid kind of contentment with their prosperous lot; there not being a single case of poverty, as far as I knew, within a hundred miles of our ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peasantry; across the mountains is the solemn, austere German scenery, with savage peaks and gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in common as ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... now a fine-looking, heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him. ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... the room, where I found myself no longer alone. Sir James Barrie's "man" was there; a stolid Londoner, name of Brown, who told me he was visiting America for the ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... pathless woods. But I thought, as I stumbled along in the dismal actuality, that, if I ever got out of it, I would write a letter to the newspapers, exposing the whole thing. There is an impassive, stolid brutality about the woods that has never been enough insisted on. I tried to keep my mind fixed upon the fact of man's superiority to Nature; his ability to dominate and outwit her. My situation was an ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... thin flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... cottages, and had thereby made acquaintance with many of the village boys of his own age. There was Job Rudkin, son of widow Rudkin, the most bustling woman in the parish. How she could ever have had such a stolid boy as Job for a child must always remain a mystery. The first time Tom went to their cottage with his mother, Job was not indoors; but he entered soon after, and stood with both hands in his pockets, staring ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... came from the fishermen's town of Head of Elk, a few hours jog to the southward, to sell fish to the surveying camp. She was a woman of mingled severity of features and bodily obesity, uniting in one temper and frame the Scandinavian and the Low Dutch traits, ignorant good-humor, grim commerce, and stolid appetite. Her baby was the fattest, quaintest, and ugliest in the country; ready to devour any thing, to grin at any thing, go to the arms of everybody, and, in short, it represented all the traits of the Middle State races—the ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... Monarch's" senses, sated with riper beauties and more stolid charms, this unspoiled child of nature was as a wild rose compared with exotic hot-house flowers. She was, he vowed, so "dainty, so fresh, so fragrant," that none but the sourest of anchorites could resist her—and ...
— Love Romances of the Aristocracy • Thornton Hall
... succeeded in making the stolid, uncompromising squareness of mission furniture take on a certain lightness and charm by painting it black and discreetly lining it with yellow and red. Yellow velour is used for the seat pads and heavy hangings, thin yellow ...
— The Art of Interior Decoration • Grace Wood
... number of the psalm, and the precentor, after tapping his tuning-fork and holding it to his ear, burst forth into wailing notes of surprising strength and volume. Margot rose automatically to her feet, to subside in confusion, as the seated congregation gazed at her in stolid rebuke. In this kirk it was the custom to sit while singing, and stand during prayers—a seemly and decorous habit which benighted Southerners had ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... looked on with dread. A wild boar, passing them, then said: "O cowards! cowards! will nought make The courage of your hearts awake? What, with the butcher in your sight, Flaying—ere life be parted quite— Your lambs and dams! O stolid race! Who ever witnessed ...
— Fables of John Gay - (Somewhat Altered) • John Gay
... which look as if they were "stuck on," give them a rather comical aspect. You will find them inquisitive, too. Put your finger in front of their tank, and they will all flock to see what it is. On the contrary, other fishes, such as the pike and carp, will remain stolid and indifferent to any movement you may make, and some, like the timorous trout—for which Isaak Walton loved to angle above any fish,—will be so dreadfully upset at the appearance of your digit that they will dart ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the Duke of Ormskirk sat for a while, tapping his fingers irresolutely against the open despatch-box. He frowned a little, for, with fair reason to believe Tom Langton his son, he found the boy too stolid, too unimaginative, to go far. It seemed to Ormskirk that none of his illegitimate children displayed any particular promise, and he sighed. Then he took a paper from the despatch-box, and began ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... the German's face took on a decided pallor, and then his expression took on a blank, noncommittal look. There was no getting behind that stolid wall. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... hung in the hall, evidently no more than an overflow, was an earnest of packed plenitude within. The room I was ushered into was a back-room, a dining-room, looking on to a good garden. It was, in form and 'fixtures,' an inalienably Mid-Victorian room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its proportions, its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its folding-doors (through which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming mysteriously in the front room), its mantel-piece, its gas-brackets, all proclaimed that nothing ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... because it was too hard for a woman to make her way in Spain. She spoke little English, but with that little she showed that she was kindly disposed and anxious to help all she could. She herself had a stolid, untidy efficiency about her, and all the while, poor thing, suffered with pains ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... he and Jack descended the steps. Half an hour elapsed before they returned, accompanied by a dozen of the natives, stolid, and not exhibiting the signs of surprise over our return which I had expected to see. Edmund had now made so much progress in their strange means of communication that he had little difficulty in causing them to comprehend what was wanted. They easily carried the coffin, and ...
— A Columbus of Space • Garrett P. Serviss
... a group of would-be auditors has collected, waiting with the patience of respectable Peris for a chance of admission to the forensic Paradise within. The Paradise, at present, is full to overflowing, and the doors are guarded by a couple of particularly stern and stolid attendants. Each Peri is trying to wear out the endurance of the rest, and to propitiate the doorkeepers ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... mercilessness toward an enemy. To be told that they must root out this passion and be governed by the Golden Rule was turning themselves into squaws, and spurning that nobility which is the crowning glory of the red man's life. Their demeanor was stolid. The wise Deerfoot plainly saw, however, that his doctrine found favor with only a few. He made his appeal as clear and direct as he knew how, but he did not need to be told that he was ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... and low-grade ore. Giant miners tore and dug and slashed and refined and concentrated. Storage silos by the hundreds were built and were filled. Hundreds upon hundreds of concentrate-carriers bored their stolid ways through hyperspace. ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... efficiency in every line of her body. The other, a tall Polish girl, of perhaps 22, was also extremely neat, but her pretty brown hair was blown around her face and her blue eyes were fairly dancing with eagerness, in contrast to the stolid expression of the other woman. As I faced them, the older woman compressed her lips in a thin line, while the girl smiled at ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... bending down and holding a cup under the spigot. When the man perceived the engineer, he leaped up. The fellow's short, squat figure and stony expression had for Bryant a vague familiarity—that face especially, brown, stolid, brutal, with a fixed, ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... was characteristic of Falconer when once committed to a plan not to open his mind to the objections which besieged it. So that night, at the fall of dark, as the two young men motored forth together, he maintained a stolid resolution which refused to look back. The approach of the danger was tuning up his nerves, and whatever his common sense might think about it, his youth and pluck greeted the adventure with a quickening heart and a rash warmth ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... was one specter which, though laid for intervals, would not entirely down, and returned with stolid persistency: the existence of the Western empire hung on the thread of a single life; the very crowns of France and Italy had no heir. The situation was much discussed in court circles, sometimes even ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... name you will transmit forever, fretted you with his sickness and his scruples, and, he aqui! you stilled him with the same cup you mixed for Betty's husband. His daughter you gave to wife to his apprentice, a strong, stolid man, capable of heroism, Patty, for he died for you, his dear misleader, on the shameful scaffold, though all the crowd knew who his instigator was; but, like a man, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... his little Indian wife into the old muddy buckboard that, hitched to an underbred-looking pony, was to convey them over the first stages of their journey. Then came more adieus, some hand-clasping, old Jimmy Robinson looking very serious just at the last, Mrs. Jimmy, stout, stolid, betraying nothing of visible emotion, and then the pony, rough-shod and shaggy, trudged on, while mutual hand-waves were kept up until the old Hudson Bay Post dropped out of sight, and the buckboard with its lightsome load of hearts deliriously ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... the Hospice came in sight one after the other, and while waiting to change horses one had time to wonder how the people living there managed to be such a stolid, dirty, thriftless-looking set. Mountaineers should be intelligent, active, and hardy; but these men were a most ungainly crew, and Lavinia's theories got ...
— Shawl-Straps - A Second Series of Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag • Louisa M. Alcott
... visited Africa again; I should have become, or I should have endeavored to become, with Mr. Reid's permission, a conservative member of the Lotos Club. [Laughter.] I should have settled down and become as steady and as stolid as some of these patriots that you have around here, I should have said nothing offensive. I should have done some "treating." I should have offered a few cigars and on Saturday night, perhaps, I would have opened a bottle of champagne and distributed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... brutal bluntness of her mind, bemoaning his own fate to be so unequally mated with an ass, and, what touched Anastasie more nearly, menacing the table china by the fury of his gesticulations. But she adhered silently to her opinion; and when Jean-Marie was sitting, stolid, blank, but not unhappy, over his unfinished tasks, she would snatch her opportunity in the Doctor's absence, go over to him, put her arms about his neck, lay her cheek to his, and communicate her sympathy with his distress. "Do not ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... eyes as the whites entered through the narrow opening which served as door, and ranged themselves around the sides of the lodge as best they might. Nor did they answer any questions, not appearing to understand a word of English, their faces remaining as stolid under the remarks of the whites as if nothing had been said; and taking it for granted that the Indians were as ignorant of civilized speech as they appeared, some of the inquisitive pale-faces indulged themselves in quite uncivilized speeches, for they had a traditional ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... mere physical courage, nor was it stolid carelessness of danger. The pioneer knew, perfectly well, the full extent of the peril that surrounded him; indeed, he could not be ignorant of it; for almost every day brought some new memento, either of ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... had prayed many moments Burns was sitting with his face buried in his hands, sobbing. Where were his mother's prayers now? They were adding to the power of the Bishop's. And the other man, harder, less moved, without a previous knowledge of the Bishop, leaned back against the fence, stolid at first. But as the prayer went on, he was moved by it. What force of the Holy Spirit swept over his dulled, brutal, coarsened life, nothing but the eternal records of the recording angel can ever disclose. But the same ...
— In His Steps • Charles M. Sheldon
... was indifferent as to his fate—he looked rather as if he were saying "Kismet." We had some trouble in digging him out, during which operation Luck fared as I had done before; he was pinned beneath the camel, waist deep in clay, and in that position had to emulate the stolid patience of Omerod until I could dig him out. At last they were both free, and after considerable labour we landed on the island, camels, baggage, and all, just as night fell. We WERE cold too, clothes and arms and faces covered with moist ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... concerning herself no more about her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had planned and manoeuvred a long time to accomplish ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... gorgeous bed; He saw the splendor of the sky With unmoved heart and stolid eye; He only knew the West ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... myself in a whisper when tickled by a printed jest, 'What would HE think of it? What would HE see in it?' The point of the jest immediately became a sting, and stung my conscience. For my mind's eye saw him stolid, frigid, perchance taking from its shelf some dreary Greek book, and translating at full length what some dismal sage said (and touched up afterwards, perhaps, for publication), when he banished some ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... to understand the laugh and semi-ironical cheer which greeted his entrance to the smoking-room of the English Club on the following evening. He stood upon the threshold, dangling his eye-glasses in his fingers, stolid, imperturbable, mildly interrogative. He wanted to know what the ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... examination that morning; to which his friend Whalley listens with the same good-humoured smile which he had of old. Henderson is a perfect mimic, but never uses his powers of mimicry in an ill-natured spirit; and his imitation of Bliss's stolid perplexity and Dr Lane's comments are very ludicrous. While he is in the middle of this narrative, Bliss himself appears on the scene and relieves his feelings by delivering the only pun he ever made in his life, and observing, in a solemn ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... immortalized in poetry and prose. Wordsworth sends her with his Peter Bell to enjoy the first flowers of early spring. To express her love of the beautiful "upon the pivot of her skull she turned round her long left ear" while stolid ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... depot at Calgary on its way to Edmonton, then the northern limit of railroad transportation on the American Continent. A part of the train was the sealed baggage car carrying the airship. In the day coach, with their bags in their laps, and still stolid of face, sat Moosetooth Martin and old La Biche. For the moment their pipes reposed in their vest pockets. Each was eating an orange. Far in the rear of the train, Colonel Howell's little expedition was making itself comfortable in a stateroom. Somewhat to the surprise of the younger ...
— On the Edge of the Arctic - An Aeroplane in Snowland • Harry Lincoln Sayler
... improvements will be looked upon as exercising judicial functions of the very highest type. When the important reforms arising from this recognition have been introduced, the forces of collectivism will cease to range themselves on the side of stolid conservatism in industry, as they undoubtedly have done in the nineteenth century even while they inconsistently professed to advance ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare. But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... changed completely since the death of Leo X. in 1521. His successor Adrian was a man of good intentions but limited purview; the great issues at stake were beyond his grasp, and his attempts at disciplinary reforms were made nugatory by the stolid immobility of the hierarchy. After a brief reign he was succeeded by Clement VII., a man of considerable talent and inconsiderable ability: a man shifty and fearful, not fitted to cope with the ...
— England Under the Tudors • Arthur D. Innes
... people to be kind, that is the very thing,' said Arthurine,— 'Oh! Miss Elmore, don't go!—while he is meaning all the time that I have made such a fool of myself! And he is glad, I know he is, he and his hateful, stupid, stolid daughters.' ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... are the days of life in a great school, but it is at college that aspiring talent first enters on its inheritance. Oxford was slowly awakening from a long age of lethargy. Toryism of a stolid clownish type still held the thrones of collegiate power. Yet the eye of an imaginative scholar as he gazed upon the grey walls, reared by piety, munificence, and love of learning in a far-off time, might well discern behind ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... nor Gold Cross Rock, which had the same romantic interest as had this young fellow to the scouts who came in droves and watched him and listened to the talk about him and dreamed of being just such a real scout as he. He moved about unconsciously among them, simple, childlike, stolid, but with a kind of assurance and serenity which he may ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... and selfishness. In time the strongest characters deteriorate with inferior associates and only small interests to occupy their minds. Wills weaken, standards lower unconsciously, ideals grow misty or vanish. Youth, enthusiasm, hope, die together. Ambition turns to bitterness or stolid resignation. Suspicion, meanness, cruelty, are the natural offspring of small intelligences and narrow environment—and they flourish in a town ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... on Barnwell's fetid ooze, Neglected these long years of slaughter, In stolid tubs the Lenten crews Go forth to flog ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... and experience, and in this respect he bears a close analogy to Malibran. Rubini's countenance was mean, his figure awkward, and lacking in all dignity of carriage; he had no conception of taste, character, or picturesque effect. As stolid as a wooden block in all that appertains to impersonation of character, his vocal organ was so incomparable in range and quality, his musical equipment and skill so great, that his memory is one of the greatest traditions ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... challenge, Paul Lessing walked up the room and took his stand before the people. He was clever, and gifted with readiness of speech, but something in the audience baffled him; whether it was the stolid imperturbability of the faces in the back benches, or May Webster's half-amused, half-scornful smile just below him, he could not decide. But he pulled himself together, determining to state his case as shortly ...
— The Village by the River • H. Louisa Bedford
... whispered to a coolie whose face was gaunt and stolid in the flickering red glow ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... peculiarly brilliant passage, he anxiously watched Bud's eye. But the young Philistine kept his own counsel. He listened, but said nothing, and the eyes under his shaggy brows gave no sign. Ralph could not tell whether those eyes were deep and inscrutable or only stolid. Perhaps a little of both. When Monday morning came, Ralph was nervous. He ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... the unfrozen torrent. Nepeese was not here. He whined, and barked again, but this time there was in his signal to her an uneasy repression, a whimpering note which told that he did not expect a reply. For five minutes after that he sat on his haunches in the snow, stolid as a rock. What it was that came down out of the dark mystery and tumult of the chasm to him, what spirit whispers of nature that told him the truth, it is beyond the power of reason to explain. But he listened, and he looked; ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... buoyancy was gone, but he tried to take heart from his comrade's stolid, frowning face and ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... only the white men on the hill and a few lingering folk at the foot, watching the stolid native soldiery with an ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... his face as he pondered, in the hope of seeing some sudden mental illumination light up his stolid countenance: but I watched in vain. I saw that he was at fault: I saw that Margaret Wilmot's conduct was quite as inexplicable to him as ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... unbalanced nerves is of the high-strung, sensitive type, naturally inclining to more rapid vibrations on all planes, capable of greater achievement than the stolid, heavy, slow-vibrating person who doesn't know that he has any nerves, but he is also in greater danger of mental and emotional overstrain and physical depletion as a result of the excessive and uncontrolled expenditure of ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... shrugged his shoulders, and jabbered something which he could make nothing of; and as the group then ceased speaking together, or paying any attention to the stranger, Mr Tompkins put down their excitable demeanour to their being only foreigners, and their natural way of going on, so unlike the stolid British seafaring man, who hardly notices anything except it specially concerns him, and even then keeps what he thinks ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... fears were ridiculous. We hunted over the ship for an hour and a half without coming on any sign of the missing woman or child. Poor Tibbs lost his voice completely from calling her name. Even the sailors, who are generally stolid enough, were deeply affected by the sight of him as he roamed bareheaded and dishevelled about the deck, searching with feverish anxiety the most impossible places, and returning to them again and again with a piteous pertinacity. ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... off. The Rev. Mr. Graham preached. It was an interesting, but touching and saddening sight to look upon the congregation; to wonder why they came, and whether they would come again, and whether under those stolid and hardened faces there yet lay humanity. Many came with babies in their arms, who made themselves very much at home; some were in dirty week-day clothes; "some in rags and some in jags." Coming home we passed ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... advice to taciturnity. It is not a suggestion that you should be stolid and wooden in manner and speech. The reason of it is to prevent you from making mistakes or betraying yourself by foolish and unnecessary utterance. My suggestion to young men that they practise reserve in speech is merely a practical and almost a commercial matter. Do not be "a man full of talk," ...
— The Young Man and the World • Albert J. Beveridge
... looked decidedly sulky as she twitched round on her seat, and resumed her stolid staring into space. Again there was silence, till a hand stretched out to clasp her arm, and a voice ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... Tugela. It must be confessed that his retreat was admirably conducted, and that it was a military feat to bring his men, his guns, and his stores in safety over a broad river in the face of a victorious enemy. Stolid and unmoved, his impenetrable demeanour restored serenity and confidence to the angry and disappointed troops. There might well be heavy hearts among both them and the public. After a fortnight's campaign, and the endurance of great losses and hardships, ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... engaged in work calculated to benefit the world and to save life, he would not for long take out a patent for his inventions, and thus lost immense sums. I can well believe that: it seems quite in keeping with my impressions of the man. There was nothing stolid or selfishly absorbed in him. He bore the marks of deep, true, honest feeling, true benevolence, and open-handed generosity, and despite the son's great pen-craft, and inventive power, would have forgiven my saying ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... as she came in and led her to a chair. Captain Clinton and Mr. Jeffries eyed her in stolid silence. Looking around in a nervous kind of way, Annie said quietly ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, according to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the departments were deserted, wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their lovers; the two bankers dining with their mistresses. Everything ...
— Melmoth Reconciled • Honore de Balzac
... Schenke brutally. We noticed more than one stolid face darkling as they glanced aside. Schenke had the name of a "hard case." "Schweinehunden," he said again. "Dey dond't like de hard vork, Cabtin. . . . Dey dond't like it—but ve takes der Coop, all de same! Dey pulls goot und strong, oder"—he rasped a short sentence in ...
— Great Sea Stories • Various
... opened to them. They were farmers—only farmers—and Madame Lavilette made no remarkable impression. Her dress was florid and not in excellent taste, and her accent was rather crude. Sophie had gone to school at the convent in the city, but she had no ambition. She had inherited the stolid simplicity of her English grandfather. When her schooling was finished she let her school friends drop, and came back to Bonaventure, rather stately, given to reading, and little inclined to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... plain and simple language expressed their unexpurgated opinion of Big Boss, and demanded that he be brought to them. The stolid Mikes and Peters were utterly at a loss to ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... alone during most of the passage,—and the man had with attentive forethought made all arrangements for his companions' comfort. But, somehow, I looked in wonder at her discontented face and heard with surprise her peevish voice. She was just an ordinary stolid nourishing young Englishwoman. But I had been in France, and though I had been travelling for a whole fortnight I had seen nothing like this. She lay back and began reading a novel, which she speedily exchanged for a basin. I fear I felt a certain ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... their natural merits, I took Jack for a good stolid fellow, innately and a little aggravatingly virtuous, and perhaps a trifle ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the contrary, were delighted with my dog; and it was on this ground that we became friendly. My particular affection for Polly was also probably due to the discovery that with an incomparably stolid expression of countenance she was passing highly buttered pieces of bread under the table ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... minutes of exhausting labour on the one hand, opposed to stolid dogged resistance on the other, the monster reptile was dragged so close to the surface that the point of its snout was actually raised above the level or the water, and the whole of the gigantic body, right down to the extremity of the broad-ended ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... strike too hard. The school-master's face grew long with dismay; he sat pulling his mustache in a fashion he had when disturbed. He glanced uneasily now and then at Mr. Lloyd, and at another leading manufacturer who was present. The other manufacturer sat quite stolid and unsmiling beside a fidgeting wife, who presently arose and swept out with a loud rustle of silks. She looked back once and beckoned angrily to her husband, but he did not stir. He was on the school-board. The school-master trembled when he saw that imperturbable face of ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... confounds their sight—and, after the manner of their craft, they abuse what they can't understand. Music is distinctly the language of the emotions,—and they have no emotion. They therefore generally prefer Joachim,—the good, stolid Joachim, who so delights all the dreary old spinsters and dowagers who nod over their knitting-needles at the 'Monday Popular' concerts, and fancy themselves lovers of the 'classical' in music. Sarasate appeals to ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... especially had this effect upon her. The men and women, once as alive as her everyday self, now gazing down at her from their picture frames sometimes made her heart beat as if she stood in the presence of things eerie. Their strange, rich, ugly, or beautiful garments, their stolid or fervid, ugly or beautiful, faces, seemed to demand something of her; at least she had just enough imagination to feel somewhat as if they did. Walderhurst was very kind to her, but she was afraid she might ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... beginning to lose her painful embarrassment, she showed to somewhat better advantage and no longer impressed him, as bovine, stolid, almost stupid; he could not but note again her full young figure, her well-shaped, well-poised head, and her regular features, and the pity of it seemed all the greater by reason thereof. He tried to visualize her perfectly groomed, clad in a smart gown molded over a well-fitting ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... great astonishment, Matty seized with both her hands upon mine, which in my great pity and sympathy I had laid upon her shoulder, and, carrying it to her face, laid her cheek upon it. The next instant she dropped it, and sat looking down with the same stolid expression that she ordinarily wore. Indeed, it had hardly changed even at the moment of that most unusual demonstration, for no trace of any emotion had been visible on the worn, old ...
— Uncle Rutherford's Nieces - A Story for Girls • Joanna H. Mathews
... "What a stolid old beggar you are. To you, she's just the same little girl that used to run about here in short frocks. If she were a horse you'd have a catalogue yards long ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... great and ghastly beauty. There were other grotesque visages, sprinkled here and there over that elaborate roof; but look at that Medusa from what point you might, the painted wooden eyes were cast with a stolid sternness upon you. When I had a bedfellow, it was always some castaway like myself—some poor wretch who could not go home and complain that he was put to sleep in the "haunted chamber." The boys told strange tales of that room, and they all believed that the floor was stained ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... farm. The young gentilhomme as well as the young habitant loved the free life of the forest and river better than the monotonous work of the farm. He preferred too often making love to the impressionable dusky maiden of the wigwam rather than to the stolid, devout damsel imported for his kind by priest or nun. A raid on some English post or village had far more attraction than following the plough or threshing the grain. This adventurous spirit led the young Frenchman to the western prairies where the Red and Assiniboine ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... irrepressible Baldassare. "Pray do not interrupt the count." Even the stolid Adonis ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... over my shoulder? These men, I say, theorize; and their theories are simply corrected, reduced, systematized—cleared, little by little, of their dross of inconsistency—until, finally, a perfect consistency stands apparent which even the most stolid admit, because it is a consistency, to be an ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... be servant and slave to his body, which he would regard only as the prison which holds his liberty in confinement, the glue which smears his wings, chains which bind fast his hands, stocks which fix his feet, veil which hides his view. Let him not be servant, captive, ensnared, chained, idle, stolid, and blind, for the body which he himself abandons cannot tyrannise over him, so that thus the spirit in a certain degree comes before him as the corporeal world, and matter is subject to ...
— Death—and After? • Annie Besant
... expected of Arden Lacey at his age to be cool and experienced. Indeed his light curling hair, blue eyes, and a mobile sensitive mouth, suggested the reverse of a stolid self-poise, or cheerful endurance. Any one accustomed to observe character could see that he was possessed of a nervous, fine-fibred nature capable of noble achievement under right influences, but also easily warped and susceptible to sad injury under ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... artillery. Over rocks slippery with blood, through cruel barbed-wire entanglements and into crowded trenches the human masses dash and scramble. Here, with heavy toll, they advanced; there, and with costlier sacrifice, they were driven back. Fiery Magyars, mechanical Teutons and stolid muzhiks mixed together in an indescribable hellbroth of combative fury and destructive passion. Screaming shells and spattered shrapnel rent the rocks and tore men in pieces by the thousand. Round the Lupkow Pass the Russians steadily carved their ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... of the train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to out-door life—powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, travelling men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient ox-like faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and the perfect purity of that smoky atmosphere peculiar to tavern parlours. Georgy's suspicions were too vague for refutation; but they were nevertheless sufficient ground for all the alternations of temper—from stolid sulkiness to peevish whining, from murmured lamentations to loud hysterics—to which the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... base for the fanciful fabric. All in a moment, disdaining formality, and to the, accompaniment of the polite jeers of two long-suffering friends, I proclaimed "Here shall I live! On this spot shall stand the probationary palace!" and so saying fired my rifle at a tree a few yard's off. But the stolid tree—a bloodwood, all bone, toughened by death, a few ruby crystals in sparse antra all that remained significant of past life—afforded but meagre hospitality to the, ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... doubly spectral; low-browed, sallow, bearded Russians; brawny English sailors, looking down with a grand, indulgent contempt upon those unhappy beings whom an inscrutable Providence has doomed to be "foreigners;" stolid Turks, tramping onward in silent defiance of the fierce looks cast at them from every side; sinewy Dalmatians, with close-cropped black hair; dapper Frenchmen, with well-trimmed moustaches, casting annihilating glances at the few ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... Sing prison for the long term of fourteen years. She was naturally intelligent, active and energetic; and the limitations of a prison had a worse effect upon her, than they would have had on a more stolid temperament. In the course of a year or two, her mind began to sink under the pressure, and finally exhibited signs of melancholy insanity. Friend Hopper had an interview with her soon after she was conveyed to Sing Sing, and found ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... the shaggy coats of Brutus and Cassius, as they idled about the yard, waiting, with steaming mouths and slowly wagging tails, to see the cart drive off. Old Mazey went out alone and used his influence with Dawkes, who, staring in stolid amazement, put a leather cushion on the cart-seat for his fellow-traveler. Shivering in the sharp morning air, Magdalen waited, while the preliminaries of departure were in progress, conscious of nothing but a giddy ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... which I was not prepared. She thought of Kitty, saw the value of my suggestion, and went away at once to consult with the landlady. In the meantime I sent for the gardener, and told him what I was thinking of. He was one of those stolid Englishmen, who possess resources which don't express themselves outwardly. Judging by his face, you would have said he was subsiding into a slumber under the infliction of a sermon, instead of listening to a lawyer proposing a stratagem. When I had done, the man showed the metal he ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... purification, Boodh's annihilation, to jump over the moon, or doing something that will make him candidate for the shaved-head-and-blister treatment. Remember, Ned, his brain is made of finer stuff than that stolid sponge inside your pia mater, that can take in quantum sufficit of beer, fog, and tobacco-smoke, unharmed. He can't stand it, and he's too rare and delicate a machine to go cranky thus soon. You've got the child under your thumb,—bring ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... try to get used to it," said Mrs. Bradford. "You have let it get on your nerves." And she returned at once to the newspaper in which she was reading a minutely-reported divorce case; for though a stolid and intensely respectable woman she loved to read these reports. "It is plain to see that the husband wants to get rid of his wife," she ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... impression upon the judge, his face remaining sleepily stolid until that peculiar gurgling sound, the death-rattle of a dying julep, caused a shade of sadness ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that the kingdom was the wood-pigeons' by right, by reason of their numbers, and because of the wickedness of Kapchack and his court, which wickedness was notorious, and must end in disaster. As you may imagine, he met with little or no response—for the most part the pigeons, being of a stolid nature, went on with their feeding and talking, and took no notice whatever of his orations. After a while the elder ones, indeed, began to say to each other that this agitator had better be put down and debarred from freedom of speech, for such seditious language ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... encouragement of the congregation, the school was in great repute, and it was pleasant to observe the effect of mental and religious culture in subduing the mischievous, tricky propensities of the half-breed, and rousing the stolid apathy of ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... which followed on the old Sparwehr. We were in quest of new lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda—ay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered. And he found head-hunting, tree-dwelling ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... arrival of Pierrette Lorrain in the home of her cousins, who gazed at her with stolid eyes; she was tossed to them like a package, with no intermediate state between the wretched chamber at Saint-Jacques and the dining-room of her cousins, which seemed to her a palace. She was shy and speechless. To ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... gone by the mail train that very night, but Mr. Deyncourt and Mrs. Morton united in persuading him that his strength was not yet equal to such a pull upon it, and he yielded. They hardly knew the man, usually so equable and quiet as to be almost stolid. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... snatched a bite, while Amalia and Larry slung the bags of food and the water on the mule and made all ready for the start. As he ate, he tried to arouse and encourage the mother, but she remained stolid until they were in the saddle, when she rose and followed them a few steps, and said in her deep voice: "Yes, I ask a thing. You will find Paul, my 'usband. Tell him to come to me—it is best—no more,—I cannot in English." Then turning to her daughter she spoke volubly in her own tongue, ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... piano, and many of them had never been close to a foreigner before. I showed them about a hundred slides, explained through an interpreter until I was hoarse, gesticulated and orated to no purpose. They remained silent and stolid. By and by there was a stir, heads were raised, and necks craned. A sudden interest swept over the room. I followed their gaze and saw on the sheet the picture of Christ toiling up the mountain under the burden of the cross. The story was new and strange to them, but ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... up with late arrivals, and round the door hung some of those patient watchers of the London streets who spring up to the call of light or music; their faces, pale and upturned above their black and rusty figures, had an air of stolid watching that annoyed Soames. Why were they allowed to hang about; why didn't ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... fact that the Boncour bungalow was owned by the Posts, and that Halsey Post, as the executor of the estate, was a more frequent visitor than the mere collection of the rent would warrant. Mrs. Boncour maintained a stolid silence that covered a seething internal fury when the newspaperman in question hinted that the landlord and tenant were on ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... Comtesse, her suite or property, being bound by treaty between the Dey and the King of France, but that he required to see her passport. There was a little blundering in the Italian's French rendering, and Madame de Bourke was quick to detect the perception of it in the countenance of the Reis, stolid though it was. She felt no doubt that he was a renegade of European birth, and watched, with much anxiety as well as curiosity, his manner of dealing with her passports, which she would not let out of her own hand. She saw in a moment that though he let the Genoese ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the occupation of Ghent will be peaceful; while of Antwerp I suppose they would say, "C'est triste, n'est-ce pas?" They say the Germans will just march into Ghent and march out again, commandeering a few things here and there. But nobody knows, and by the stolid faces of these civilians you might imagine that nobody cares. Certainly none of them think that the fate of Antwerp can be the fate ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... had to laugh inwardly at himself as two youngsters, running along playing tag in a grown-up world of long legs and stolid pace, all but tripped him up. Head of a snake it might be, but Moscow's people looked astonishingly like those of ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... with the unexpected and to master it. Hans Nelson, immigrant, Swede by birth and carpenter by occupation, had in him that Teutonic unrest that drives the race ever westward on its great adventure. He was a large-muscled, stolid sort of a man, in whom little imagination was coupled with immense initiative, and who possessed, withal, loyalty and affection as ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London
... which was sweeping over the South and West and rapidly developing into something resembling frenzy was difficult for the more stolid East to comprehend. Not merely the politician, but the man on the street and in the store, the school-teacher, the farmer and the laborer, in those portions of the country, fell to discussing the virtues of silver as currency and the effect of a greater volume of circulating medium ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... preparation and recitation are low presents a difficult problem for the teacher in the recitation. In some schools pupils who are diffident about reciting, or who do not care to take the trouble, shake their heads in refusal almost before they hear the question in full. Others sit in stolid silence when called upon, and make no response of any kind. In still other cases the class smile or giggle when several have been called upon and have failed to recite, thus taking the ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... with two chairs before it. He listened to Madison's monotonous reading of the evening exercise with equally monotonous respect. Then they both arose, without looking at each other, but with equally set and stolid faces, and knelt down before their respective chairs, clasping the back with both hands, and occasionally drawing the hard, wooden frames against their breasts convulsively, as if it were a penitential act. It was ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The stolid exteriors of these two hid much that was fine and forceful. Emma Byers' thoughtful forehead and intelligent eyes would have revealed that in her. Her mother was dead. She kept house for her father and brother. She was known ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... houses built for them; so good, indeed, that his political opponents the Tories, whom he, as a staunch Whig detested, made it one of their complaints against him that he built palaces for farmhouses. At first he met with that stolid opposition to progress which seems the particular characteristic of the farmer. For sixteen years no one followed him in the use of the drill, though it was no new thing; and when it was adopted he reckoned its use spread at the rate of a mile a year. Yet eventually he had his reward; his estate ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... tenants. In her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw's native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... three persons came into the hut, and seated themselves opposite to me: I only recognised two of them; namely, the Singtam Soubah, pale, trembling like a leaf, and with great drops of sweat trickling from his greasy brow; and the Tchebu Lama, stolid, but evidently under restraint, and frightened. The former ordered the men to leave hold of me, and to stand guard on either side, and, in a violently agitated manner, he endeavoured to explain that Campbell was a prisoner by the orders of the Rajah, who was dissatisfied with his conduct as a ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the Ottomans began the fight, which was continued for four hours with stolid energy on both sides. The English and French vessels, being foremost, carried on the chief contest with the enemy's shipping; the Russians had to silence the batteries before they could enter the harbour, but then their ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... College—was reclining among vast blue and pink cushions in the bows, pensively twirling a Japanese parasol, one arm flung round the shoulders of her companion—a fellow-student; fair and stolid and good-humoured. Broome summed her up mentally: "Tactless but trustworthy. Anglo-Saxon to the last button on her ready-made Shantung coat and the blunted toe of her white ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... change into his normal clothing did not restore his equanimity. In his office he found Green, with a strange excitement in his usually stolid face. ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... before Beatty became president a man high up in the system predicted that the C.P.R. would spend a million dollars to campaign against Bolshevism. He failed to foresee that the stolid old bulwark of things as they are would never need to do any such thing. All it needed to spend was Beatty who, within six months of the time he changed the sign on his door, had convinced the system that a sort of new optimistic vitality had got hold of it. ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... stolid silence all this while. Perhaps he is out of humor at the change in the arrangements, and fears lest, after all his hard work, the young Chicagoan may carry ...
— Miss Caprice • St. George Rathborne
... seriousness of demeanour from having a full comprehension of the situation and of what might come of it, though not in the least drawing back on that account, and some were all flushed and glowing with eagerness and laughing from sheer delight in danger and daring, and some were like stolid beasts of the field watching the eye of a master, ready at its wink to leap forth to the strain of labour or fury. Many of these last were of our English labourers, whom I held in some sort of pity, and doubt as to whether it were just and merciful to draw them into such a stew kettle, ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... martial build (Her standards set, her brave apparel on) Directed as by madness mere Against a stolid iceberg steer, Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down. The impact made huge ice-cubes fall Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck; But that one avalanche was all No other ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... studying him in the same way that he instinctively studied everybody whom he met, thought that he had never before seen a man who looked quite so ox-like and absolutely comfortable. And yet he never was more completely at fault. The man seemed stolid and cold indeed, but it was the coldness of a volcano. His heart was a-fire. All the human forces in him, all the energies of his sturdy life, had concentrated themselves in a single passion for the woman who was so near and yet so far from him. He had never drawn ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... dilapidated, dirty finery, was leaning over the stenographer's desk, talking about the last big strike and guessing at the chance of there being any fun ahead in the immediate future. But the rest of them waited in stolid, silent patience, sitting quite still in unbroken rank along the wall, their overcoats, if they had them, buttoned tight around their chins, though the office was stifling hot. The dirty man who was talking to the stenographer filled a pipe with some ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... bumpkin's stolid grin (A weakly intellect denoting), He'd rather not invest it in A ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... preservation, and of great and ghastly beauty. There were other grotesque visages, sprinkled here and there over that elaborate roof; but look at that Medusa from what point you might, the painted wooden eyes were cast with a stolid sternness upon you. When I had a bedfellow, it was always some castaway like myself—some poor wretch who could not go home and complain that he was put to sleep in the "haunted chamber." The boys told strange tales of that room, and they all ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... around, on the best of which might have been bestowed the questionable praise that it looked as if a living man had here been changed to wood, and that not only the physical, but the intellectual and spiritual part, partook of the stolid transformation. But in not a single instance did it seem as if the wood were imbibing the ethereal essence of humanity. What a wide distinction is here! and how far the slightest portion of the latter merit have outvalued the ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was imperturbable. "Laws, Mis' L., I nebber done bin nigh dem hens. Mis' Annie, you can go count dem dere eggs." That when counted they were found minus the number she had brought had no effect on her stolid denial. H. has plenty to do finishing the garden all by himself, but the time ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... motor's den; so hot that it was no wonder the deck, which formed the roof, often felt warm underfoot. Chump, chump, went the engine, sounding stolid and Dutch and obstinate, as if nothing on earth or water could induce it to go faster than it chose. It even seemed to me as I gazed that it was slowing down, out of spite. I longed to feel its pulses with a stop-watch in the ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... of childish wonder crossed the Mexican youth's stolid face. Of a certainty it was but this very morning that Montoya's boy had spoken to him! Or was it yesterday morning? Montoya's boy had said it was yesterday morning. It must be so. The youth rose and gazed about him. Pete stood aggressively ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... not been twenty minutes in the settlement before the yurt that we occupied was completely crowded with stolid, brutal-looking men, dressed in spotted deerskin clothes, wearing strings of coloured beads in their ears, and carrying heavy knives two feet in length in sheaths tied around their legs. They were evidently a different class ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... huge old boar, caught sight of the intruders at the same time, and stood for a moment or two grunting in stolid astonishment. ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne
... interesting—a bride of ten days, and the environment so illuminating—and yet there was John smoking an expensive cigar and not saying anything! She did not like people who chattered—and she could even imagine a delicious silence wrought with meaning. But a stolid respectable silence with Tziganes playing moving airs and the romantic background of this Paris out-of-door joyous night life, surely demanded ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... sin hath done this. It is the appropriative words, thine and mine, which make this history different from any other history. This was for me, is the thought which has pierced the apathy of the Greenlander, and kindled the stolid clay of the Hottentot; and no human bosom has ever been found so low, so lost, so guilty, so despairing, that this truth, once received, has not had power to redeem, regenerate, and disenthrall. Christ so presented ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... my mind. Let me select a few. I see a rather fat, stolid little boy in a big airy nursery at the top of the house, sitting in the middle of the floor playing with bricks. Outside it is gusty and wet, and the small boy hopes that he will be allowed to stay in all the afternoon, and play with bricks. ...
— A Student in Arms - Second Series • Donald Hankey
... his two stolid friends for moral support. He noted Morani's hand slide to the waistband of his trousers, and a cold sweat broke out on ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... light of a holiday and festival, devoutly praying that his taskmaster might never come back again. Finally in despair poor Bargrave cast himself on the sympathy of Dorothea, who listened to his bewailings with stolid indifference when sober, and replied to them by surmises of the wildest improbability ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... enthusiasm and romance of his new-found friend, who, coming from a populous and uninteresting border country, was charmed by the unconventional ways of the Welsh coast. He threw a glamour of poetry and romance over the most commonplace incidents; and Cardo, to tease him, would often assume a stolid and unimpressionable manner that ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... most stolid of women have always some lurking tenderness for those who they know have loved them vainly, and Kala, though she had without a demur accepted Sigmund for her husband, yet broke the news to Gabriel with ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... picture. Surprise, astonishment, and confusion followed each other across his stolid countenance; and with quicker pace than he was ever known to use in his life before, he made his way to his seat. No sooner had the reading began again when once more the door clicked. True to his promise, the minister paused and cheerfully announced to his people: ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... spirit of independence and individual self-assertion. The idea of a part of his business machinery making such a jarring tumult in his own house! He proposed to instantly cast away the cause of friction, and insert a more stolid human ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... with the other judges for a moment, then smote the desk before him. "No evidence. The prisoner is discharged. Adjourn the court," he exclaimed. And for once in the history of Puerto Principe the law had been prompt. The accused, who had been stolid and dull throughout the trial, now smiled cunningly to himself, and saying no word to any one, but with a sidelong look at the lawyers, left the building without loss of time, and after investing a few coppers in bad brandy at the least inviting groggery in town, disappeared ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... train was pulling out I explained to Zulime that Dolly's fury was all assumed, "She'll soon be stolid as a stump." ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... hands in his pockets and stood on the hearthrug, looking gloomily at a certain plate, and refusing breakfast altogether; the General was crashing his own mug and plate joyously together; and Bunty was eating bread and butter in stolid silence. ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... followed to the cafe door and stood looking perplexedly after her as she made her way down the rambling street. He was trying to fix in his mind the vagrant, subtle sensation of familiarity which possessed him when he had first caught sight of her face. Stolid and slow of wit as he was, the conviction grew that she or someone very like her had crossed his path before. Then the face of the song-and-dance artiste at Jake's flashed across his memory and the next minute he was pounding heavily after ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... prolific dramatist—a charming place in Paris, a fine estate in the country, capital carriage, handsome pair of horses, "all made, as he says, by his pen." One of the guests the first evening was Auber, "a stolid little elderly man, rather petulant in manner," who told Dickens he had once lived "at Stock Noonton" (Stoke Newington) to study English, but had forgotten it all. "Louis Philippe had invited him to meet the Queen of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and chief engineer turned pale at this significant speech. The rest of the crew looked on in stolid wonder, for they understood ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... last summer I met a man over in South Park, Col., who could repeat page after page of Shakespeare, and yet, when I asked him if he was familiar with the poems of the "Sweet Singer of Michigan," he turned upon me a look of stolid vacancy, and admitted that he had never heard of her in ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... from America, or even—now that national costumes are dying out—from France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the hands of children—not the favoured children reared on the charming fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more meretriciously pretty ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... faced sharp round on me, swinging the little gig almost over, and then twisted himself back again, and put on a true farmer-like look of dogged, stolid reserve. We rolled on ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... long corridor we were conducted past the doors of a number of rooms. At each were two sentries, one a big Abyssinian negro in blue and gold—called an "Araby" in the palace—and the other a stolid Cossack ...
— The Minister of Evil - The Secret History of Rasputin's Betrayal of Russia • William Le Queux
... man in a cloak and slouched hat, and holding in his hands a wire fencing-mask, extinguished with it the red nose. The latter met his fate with stolid fortitude. All were perfectly still, but the twitching cheeks of most of the spectators betrayed a laugh retained with difficulty. The cloak then advanced, like a less beautiful Norma, to a bell in the portico, and struck three tragical strokes. A strong, pealing bass voice came from the interior: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... her own mind, body or future than the larch yonder did about its roots or leaves, and who took praise and blame as indifferently as the tree, the sun or rain, roused in her a feeling of active dislike. She called Jane stolid to other people, but she was by no means satisfied that she was stolid. She was often sorry that she had brought herself measurably under the protection of Captain Swendon and his daughter by renting two of the rooms in their house, though she had planned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... must be confessed that his retreat was admirably conducted, and that it was a military feat to bring his men, his guns, and his stores in safety over a broad river in the face of a victorious enemy. Stolid and unmoved, his impenetrable demeanour restored serenity and confidence to the angry and disappointed troops. There might well be heavy hearts among both them and the public. After a fortnight's campaign, and the endurance of great losses and hardships, both Ladysmith ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her of having wasted her time. They set off at once, Jane agreeing pleasantly that it would be better to walk. Michael Daragh had never seen her more alert and alive to the things about her. Nothing escaped her darting glance,—the lyrical, first grass in the Square, the stolid and patient tiredness of an Italian crone on a bench, the pictorial quality of a hurdy-gurdy man, and yet, for all her chattiness, the smart young person beside him seemed leagues upon leagues away from him. He supposed, miserably, that she was aghast at him ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... counsel together. The chief of the council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent of demeanor—swaggering along as if conscious of there being a full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was accompanied by a whistle, whose neat crispness announced ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... of the scene is missed, no doubt, by most of those who are habituated to it. From time to time weary, stolid-looking girls or old women lift down the trays and run their hands over them in order to pick up superfluous male moths. Sometimes the male moths are walking about the newspaper, sometimes they are torn callously from the embrace of their mates. The fate of the male ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... forward. May-may-gwan, her face stolid and expressionless, but her eyes glowing, stood straight and motionless by the dogs. Together they laid hold of the smoothly spread top blanket and swept it aside. Beneath was a jumble of warmer bedding. In it, his fists clenched, his eyes half ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... and box again and off we trotted. When, after stopping him for the second time, I made an attempt to get into conversation and to thank him, Shock banged down the legs of the barrow, looking as stolid and heavy as if he were perfectly deaf, threw open the gate, and ran the barrow ...
— Brownsmith's Boy - A Romance in a Garden • George Manville Fenn
... picked up his cards, and partially opening them glanced keenly at the index numerals. His stolid face remained unchanged. The doctor glanced at his and "came in." "Poker" John "came in." The dealer remained out. The doctor drew two cards; "Poker" John, one; Lablache drew one. The veteran rancher held four nines. "Lord" Bill gathered up the "deadwood," and, propping ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... was partially burst up by the heat. The three Eskimos, who did not think their dignity affected by haste, leaped down the stair in two bounds, but Nazinred did not alter his walk in the least. Step by step he descended deliberately, and walked in stolid solemnity to the spot on which the community had assembled as ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... up scattered pieces of "jewelry" rock. When all the "color" in sight had been cleaned up, the Desert Rat produced a drill and a stick of dynamite from the pack, put in a "shot" and uncovered a pocket of such richness that even the stolid Cahuilla could not forbear indulgence in one of his infrequent Spanish expletives. It was a deposit of rotten honeycombed rock that was nine- tenths pure gold—what is known in the parlance of the prospector as ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... forward and seizing the pear with two fat hands, when he immediately sank into the depths of the old shawl again, all his teeth quite busy at work. Phronsie set down her basket on the deck, and the rest of the brood emptied it to their own satisfaction. Their mother's stolid face lighted up with a broad smile that showed all her teeth, and very white ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... down beside the way as a line of burros loaded with firewood from the mountains trailed slowly by, with their stolid-looking drivers staring ...
— Vanguards of the Plains • Margaret McCarter
... racecourses, and the perfect purity of that smoky atmosphere peculiar to tavern parlours. Georgy's suspicions were too vague for refutation; but they were nevertheless sufficient ground for all the alternations of temper—from stolid sulkiness to peevish whining, from murmured lamentations to loud hysterics—to which the ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... into the Bowery Boy's face, followed by one of stolid woodenness. He took the sovereign that Jimmy held out to him with a muttered word of thanks, and shuffled out ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... of his age like his brother. His pale blue eyes were gravely vacant under his thick white thatch; his chin dropped; his mouth gaped with stolid patience. There was no mitigation for his dull task; he was not allowed to keep his vigil on a comfortable branch of a tree with the mossy trunk for a support to his back, lest he might be tempted to eat of the cherries, and turn pal of the robins instead of enemy. He dared not pull down ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... eyes were filled with tears; the sight of them put out the flame that had leapt for once from stolid Hugh, and he took her hand in his ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... its attacks and exposures centered on this one mammoth town, against which as a background they seemed the merest pigmies. Three little muckrakers loomed against Wall Street, one small, scoffing suffragette against a hundred and eighty thousand solid stolid Brooklyn wives. They had posed themselves so absurdly close to the world ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... meetings as this, and which is stimulated by such meetings as this, in the club, in all the local associations and places where men meet throughout the country, is at once far removed from the secret and selfish devices of the lobbyist and from the stolid indifference which characterizes a people willing to be governed without themselves ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... man. He is entirely safe, and I have sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one who really does ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hardy race, reared on the hills, and disciplined in the straitest of creeds. Stolid and self-complacent, theirs was an unquestioning faith, accepting, as they did, the Divine decrees as a Mohamedan accepts his fate. What was, was right—all as it should be; elect, or non-elect, according to the fore-knowledge, it was well. Sucking in their theology with their mothers' milk, and ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... Skinner crossroads. An' when the Crittenden yooth returns, he brings with him the Rickett boys an' forty added dogs. Which it's worth a ten-mile ride to get a glimpse of that outfit of canines! Thar's every sort onder the canopy: thar's the stolid hound, the alert fice, the sapient collie; that is thar's individyool beasts wherein the hound, or fice, or collie seems to preedominate as a strain. The trooth is thar's not that dog a-whinin' about our hosses' fetlocks who ain't proudly descended from fifteen different tribes, ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... man beside him: Father and son are they. Old Lothian, Five months ago, was high among the trusted Of our chief bankers; Charles, his only son, By a maternal uncle's death enriched, Kept out of Wall Street; turned a stolid ear To all high-mounting schemes for doubling wealth, His taste inclining him to art and letters. But Lothian had a partner, Judd,—a scamp, As the result made evident; and Judd One day was missing; bonds, securities, And bills, deposits of confiding folk, Guardians, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... expected to see a Hercules, a fiery-faced, fierce-eyed man. This was merely a broad-shouldered, well-built, well-groomed youth, about twenty-three years of age; his face was square and rather stolid, clean-shaven, brown-complexioned, with honest eyes and a firm-set mouth. As he stood at the door he adopted the wooden expression that a University man always wears in the presence of strangers. He said nothing on being introduced to Pinnock; and when the globe-trotter ...
— An Outback Marriage • Andrew Barton Paterson
... the lower half of the parade ground, and at nightfall have seen forty at roost in one tree, with half as many more in the tree adjoining. They grow extremely noisy about sunset, filling the air with songs, cackles, and screams, till even the most stolid citizen pauses a moment to look up at the authors of so ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... two standards of morals: that of the world, and that of the Code. Where the Code is weak, as I admit with our dear Abbe, the world is audacious and satirical. There are so few judges who would not gladly have committed the fault against which they hurl the rather stolid thunders of their "Inasmuch." The world, which gives the lie to the law alike in its rejoicings, in its habits, and in its pleasures, is severer than the Code and the Church; the world punishes a blunder after encouraging hypocrisy. The whole economy of the ...
— Honorine • Honore de Balzac
... general. Mugs flew across the room; the tables were overturned. The peasants woke up; they had old scores to pay off. The men rolled about on the ground and bit each other savagely. Lorchen's partner, a stolid farm-hand, had caught hold of the head of the soldier who had just insulted him and was banging it furiously against the wall. Lorchen, armed with a cudgel, was striking out blindly. The other girls ran away screaming, ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... follow from the popular decision in November, we might be tempted to regard the remarkable moderation which has thus far characterized the Presidential canvass as a guilty indifference to the duty implied in the privilege of suffrage, or a stolid unconsciousness of the result which may depend upon its exercise in this particular election, did we not believe that it arose chiefly from the general persuasion that the success of the Republican ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... counting the lessening distance westward. This was the undercurrent of war. It broke on me as I procured fresh water at Forsythe and made some toilet in their stolid presence. We were drawing nearer the Rawhide station—the point, I mean, where you left the railway for the new mines. Now Rawhide station lay this side of Billings. The broad path of desertion would open ready for their feet when the narrow path to duty and Sunk ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... the pleasant shock of a new experience. Then she remembered that he ought to be on his way, and she shook him gently, then, with all her strength, and called to him quietly all the time, as if her low tones ought to wake him, if nothing else could. But he lay in a deep and stolid slumber. It was no use. She went to her seat and sat down to think. As she did so, her father ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... still greater number of inestimable scholars hereafter if sordidness did not obscure the splendid light, corruption interrupt, and certain truckling harpies and beggars envy them their usefulness. Nor can any one be so blind as not to perceive this—any so stolid as not to understand it—any so perverse as not to acknowledge how sacred Theology has been contaminated by those notorious idiots, and the celestial Muse treated with profanity. Vile and shameless souls (says Luther) for the sake of ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... from Mormon's face, patched his clothes as the heat and his exertions temporarily melted some of his superfluous adiposity. Joe, his mahogany face stolid as a ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... down below. Near the mosque—as is the case with all pilgrimage places in Persia—we find a bazaar crammed with beggars, black bag-like women riding astride on donkeys or mules, depraved-looking men, and stolid-looking Mullahs. There were old men, blind men, lame men, deaf men, armless men, men with enormous tumours, others minus the nose or lower jaw—the result of cancer. Millions of ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... racial suppression that made the Bohemian surly and defiant seem, on the other hand, to have left the Polish peasant stolid, patient, and very illiterate. Polish settlements were made in Texas and Wisconsin in the fifties and before 1880 a large number of Poles were scattered through New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. Since then great numbers have come over in the new migrations until today, it is estimated, at ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... himself to talk further with Matchin, but went away with a growing fire in his breast. He hated himself for having prematurely spoken. He hated Maud for the beauty that she would not give him, and which, he feared, she was ready to give to another. He hated Saul, for his stolid ignorance of his daughter's danger. He hated most of all Farnham, for his handsome face, his easy smile, his shapely hands, his fine clothes, his unknown and occult gifts ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... and the Indian chief glided into the apartment with a grunt of salutation. He spread his blanket in a corner, and sat down, turning a stolid face to the fire. ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... terrible bust of General Jackson, pilloried in a military collar which rose above his ears, and frowning forth immitigably at any Englishman who might happen to cross the threshold. I am afraid, however, that the truculence of the old General's expression was utterly thrown away on this stolid and obdurate race of men; for, when they occasionally inquired whom this work of art represented, I was mortified to find that the younger ones had never heard of the battle of New Orleans, and that their elders had either forgotten it altogether, or contrived to misremember, ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... corner of the low-ceiled and far from spacious mezzanine floor, and at the very end of a passage lighted only by borrowed lights. The office doors along this corridor, each with its label, gave the place the look of a bath-house. At four o'clock the stolid porter had proclaimed, according to his orders, "The bank is closed." And by this time the departments were deserted, the letters dispatched, the clerks had taken their leave. The wives of the partners in the firm were expecting their lovers; the two bankers dining ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... ever resisted Geoffrey McBirney when he pleaded with them. The stolid potentate turned back wondering, and did not know that what he felt stirring the dried veins within him was charm. "Why, sure," he answered slowly, astonished at his own words, "I'll help you if I can. Glad ...
— August First • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews and Roy Irving Murray
... person, and endeavored, in every way, to make the time pass pleasantly to her guests; but all she could say in their favor did nothing toward disposing the mind of her niece to regard them with any toleration. She performed the household duties that fell to her with a stolid indifference, or with an openly expressed reluctance, and her aunt bore all kindly, explaining and smoothing away what she could, promising Lucindy that she should have a nice present of money when the ...
— Our Young Folks at Home and Abroad • Various
... hardly subsided, when the door opened, and a page announced several couriers who had arrived simultaneously from different points. Father Joseph arose, and, leaning against the wall like an Egyptian mummy, allowed nothing to appear upon his face but an expression of stolid contemplation. Twelve messengers entered successively, attired in various disguises; one appeared to be a Swiss soldier, another a sutler, a third a master-mason. They had been introduced into the palace by a secret stairway and corridor, and left the cabinet by a door opposite ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... looked placidly at the spot where Henriques had slain the Keeper and I had stolen the rubies. There was no interest or imagination lingering in my dull brain. My nerves had suddenly become things of stolid, untempered iron. Each landmark I passed was noted down as one step nearer to my object. At Umvelos' I had not the leisure to do more than glance at the shell which I had built. I think I had forgotten all about that night when I lay in the cellar and heard Laputa's plans. ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... joked on my taste in choosing such an elegant equipage. However, we made the inside fairly comfortable with rugs and cushions, and, having paid the inn-keeper, I assisted the ladies to their seats and clambered in after them. The driver, a stolid, thick-headed fellow, cracked his whip, and we started off at a brisk trot, which, however, the horses did ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens
... waiting with the patience of respectable Peris for a chance of admission to the forensic Paradise within. The Paradise, at present, is full to overflowing, and the doors are guarded by a couple of particularly stern and stolid attendants. Each Peri is trying to wear out the endurance of the rest, and to propitiate ...
— Punch, Or the London Charivari, Volume 103, July 16, 1892 • Various
... a blue shirt-waist and black skirt, with the tightest of fair braids packed above a round, pink face, with eyes so blue they looked opaque, tied and wove garlands with the stolid radiance of her kind. Her brother Franz worked as she did. Only the father Blumenfeldt, who was of a more nervous strain, flew about in excitement, his fat form full of vibrations, his fat face ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... which has become a national characteristic, and the craft, dissimulation, the slimness, as it is called, of the Boers is a by-word. I suppose it comes from the political situation, the close neighbourhood of a rival race, stronger and more energetic, which fosters in the stolid Dutchman, by way of buckler, this instinctive reticence and cunning. His one idea is to make what he can out of the situation without troubling his head for a moment about his own candour and sincerity. It is Oriental, the trait you expect to find in a ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... pekingese and the fox terrier are as different as the Slav and Latin are different: because of differences in internal secretion make-up. The Slav peasant is definitely subthyroid in his general effect: round head, coarse features, stubby hands, and his stolid, brooding intellectual and emotional reaction. The Latin shows a pronounced adrenal streak in his coloration, his emotivity, his susceptibility to neurosis and psychosis. H. Laing Gordon, a Scot physician, reported that of 700 cases he studied, more than twice ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... receptiveness of the soil. The sower encounters hard trodden ground, rocky patches, and spots where hardy thorns or thistles drain the soil and where his work produces only empty ears and futile beginnings. So Jesus met the stolid conservative and also the emotional type. But the climax of his difficulties was a mind preoccupied by property worries, or lured by the illusions of wealth. He early found, then, that devotion to property is likely to be a rival to the higher interests ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... everywhere; No rose, I doubt, was ever, like the first, A marvel to the bush it dawned upon, The rapture of its life made visible, The mystery of its yearning realized, As the first babe to the first woman born; 120 No falcon ever felt delight of wings As when, an eyas, from the stolid cliff Loosing himself, he followed his high heart To swim on sunshine, masterless as wind; And I believe the brown earth takes delight In the new snowdrop looking back at her, To think that by some vernal alchemy It ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... fellow-creatures it must always be meaningless; and, for my part, I can see few things more desirable, after the possession of such radical qualities as honour and humour and pathos, than to have a lively and not a stolid countenance; to have looks to correspond with every feeling; to be elegant and delightful in person, so that we shall please even in the intervals of active pleasing, and may never discredit speech with uncouth manners or become unconsciously our own ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... tinted photograph. His gnarled fingers trembled as he handed it over, and there was a suspicious softness in the lines of his wrinkled old face, as he looked fondly at the likeness of the stolid, dark features. ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... the righteous beneath the level of the wicked who is accused. The women make remarks to each other. Many of them had been visitors at the elder's house, yet now they will not so much as say good morning to his wife and family; their children look over the wall with stolid stare. Farther down the road the elder meets the pastor on his road to chapel. The elder looks the pastor straight in the face; the pastor shuffles his eyes over the hedge; it is difficult to quite forget the good dinners, the bottles, and the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized, as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that stolid old ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... was the strain of the hard, and he repeated over and over to himself that what other men could do, he could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs. They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and certitude that ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... M. Berryer advanced another point. As might have been expected of so accomplished an advocate, he had little difficulty in demolishing the elaborate, but specious and unsupported, hypothesis built up by the other side. Hard facts did more with the stolid and unimaginative Rouen jury than did ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... le Docteur," answered Jeanne-Marie with a sort of stolid defiance, "I called you in to tell me what to do for the child, not to put me through a catechism. She fainted away this morning, and when she came to herself again, she began to rave and talk nonsense, so I sent for you. Now tell me what is to ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
