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More "Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... description. It had, no doubt, a perfect right to be called a castle, as it was entered by a castle-gate which led into a court, the porter's lodge for which was built as it were into the wall; there were attached to it also two round, stumpy adjuncts, which were, perhaps properly, called towers, though they did not do much in the way of towering; and, moreover, along one side of the house, over what would otherwise have been the cornice, there ran a castellated ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... in these interior districts had only partially bound feet, though they were still far from the natural size. It was surprising to see how freely the women walked, especially as several that I saw were carrying babies. But it was rather a stumpy walk. Women of the higher class have smaller feet and never walk in the ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... man, with his coarse, bristling crop of hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... everybody's eye as something eccentric and extraordinary. He was of small size, thick and stumpy, with a body too long, and with short bowed legs; his face was not at all ugly, but good-natured, with round red little cheeks and small grey eyes that were by no means wanting in vivacity. Pursuant to an old obsolete French fashion, he was elaborately curled and powdered every day; ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... lay on his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... rejoicing in the name of Cadger (but whose real cognomen I subsequently ascertained to be Stumpy Walker) proceeded on his walk, whistling shrilly to himself, exchanging a passing recognition with one and another loafer, and going out of his way to kick every boy he saw smaller than himself, which last exertion, by the way, at twelve o'clock at night he did not find ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... feud existed, not less bitter because it was a feud in which nothing was said and nothing done—a silent and implacable mutual resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive luxurious facades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected. The pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and, fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at a meal and suffered no inconvenience; ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... which there is something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song. The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest. Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to a British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her American ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... was called on, to see the prisoner appear in the dock looking like a young clergyman, dressed in a complete suit of black, a long frock coat, fitting him up to the neck and very nearly down to the heels. He had the appearance of a very tame curate. His hair, instead of being short and stumpy, as when the young policeman saw him, was now long, shiny, and carefully brushed over both sides of his forehead, which gave him the appearance so fashionable amongst the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... courses, it should be acknowledged that he was not a bad member of society. He was a thorough-going old Tory, whose proxy was always in the hand of the leader of his party; and who seldom himself went near the metropolis, unless called thither by some occasion of cattle-showing. He was a short, stumpy man, with red cheeks and a round face; who was usually to be seen till dinner-time dressed in a very old shooting coat, with breeches, gaiters, and very thick shoes. He lived generally out of doors, and was almost as great in the preserving of game as in the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... season of incipient preparation for dinner. Dinah, who required large intervals of reflection and repose, and was studious of ease in all her arrangements, was seated on the kitchen floor, smoking a short, stumpy pipe, to which she was much addicted, and which she always kindled up, as a sort of censer, whenever she felt the need of an inspiration in her arrangements. It was Dinah's mode of invoking the ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... forget me." A peculiar old prayer, but I kept on repeating it to myself with great comfort that evening. My men were rather quiet. Perhaps the general calmness was affecting them with kindred thoughts, though an Englishman never shows them. On the left stood the stumpy spire of Bayencourt Church just left by us. On the right lay Sailly-au-Bois in its girdle of trees. Along the side of the valley which ran out from behind Sailly-au-Bois, arose numerous lazy pillars of smoke from the wood fires and kitchens ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... speaking, the square-headed sails of the lugger were run up on her short, stumpy masts. Above them quickly appeared their topsails, almost as big as the lower sails, and away she came bowling after us, at a rate which gave us not the slightest hope of escape, if she should prove an enemy, unless some bigger friend might ...
— Will Weatherhelm - The Yarn of an Old Sailor • W.H.G. Kingston
... the mighty Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk, with a short stumpy tail, with fins like a bank of oars in a ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... refrained from expressing his conviction that, after a winter's chopping, Robert would retract his admiration for timber in any shape, and would value more highly a bald-looking stumpy acre prepared for fall wheat, than the most picturesque maple-clump, except so far as ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... the middle of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was fast asleep in ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... he must, Probos Five would meet his end stoically, and five pairs of stumpy arms folded over five chests in a coordinated gesture ...
— Solar Stiff • Chas. A. Stopher
... had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... feet. A little forward of amidships was a small deck cabin containing a brass wheel and binnacle. Aft of the cabin, in the middle of the open space of the deck, was a skylight, the top of which formed two short seats placed back to back. Forward rose a stumpy mast carrying a lantern cage near the top, and still farther forward, almost in the bows, lay an unexpectedly massive anchor, housed in grids, with behind it a small hand winch for pulling in ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... to the rescue! I'll be bitten to death! Help!" At the same time the boys saw a man quickly climb up the stumpy mast of the lighter and cling there with one hand while he waved his cap ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... have a care," said the girl who had freed me; "a crush of one of their horrid stumpy feet might ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... stumpy tail grew rigid. Nose to the ground, he crawled and wriggled through the undergrowth, Bobby at his heels. And now Bobby saw the trail, footprints. It is true that they resembled those of heavy boots with nails. But on the other ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... staring through the open windows at his pretty garden. He is a very old man, and is sometimes bewildered nowadays. He calls to Dering, the gardener, who is on a ladder, pruning. Dering, who comes to him, is a rough, capable young fellow with fingers that are already becoming stumpy because he so often uses his hands instead of a spade. This is a sign that Dering will never get on in the world. His mind is in the same condition as his fingers, working back to clods. He will get a rise of one and sixpence in a year or two, and marry on it and become duller ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... penetrated into the earth some time since, for a slowworm came forth on a mound for the first time on April 16. He coiled up on the eastern side every morning for some hours, but was never seen in the afternoon. His short, thick body and unfinished tail, more like a punch or the neck of a stumpy bottle, was turned in a loop, the head nearly touching the tail, like a pair of sugar-tongs. Coming out from the stitchwort and grasses, the spiders often ran over his shining dark brown surface, something the colour of glazed earthenware. A snake or an adder would have begun to move ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... know. There is that tall handsome girl, Miss Markham, with real gold hair, next Mr. Logan. We used to call her the Venus of Milo, or Milo for short, at St. Ursula's. She has mantles and things tried on her at Madame Claudine's, and stumpy purchasers argue from the effect (neglecting the cause) that the things will suit them. Her people were ruined by Australian gold mines. And there is Miss Martin, who does stories for the penny story papers at a shilling the thousand words. The fathers have backed horses, and the children's ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... style of motion. The elder sister, Lactimel, was of a different form, but yet hardly more fit to shine in the mazes of the dance than her sister. She had her charms, nevertheless, which consisted of a somewhat stumpy dumpy comeliness. She was altogether short in stature, and very short below the knee. She had fair hair and a fair skin, small bones and copious soft flesh. She had a trick of sighing gently in the evolutions of ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... spoiled by any tameness. Notable is the company of rogues maintained by Einar; they and their ways are well described. There was Geir the thief, son of Thorgerda the liar; he was hanged by the priest Helgi. There was Vidcuth, son of stumpy Lina (these gentry have no father's name to them); he was a short man and a nimble. The third was Thorir the warlock, a little man from the North country. This introduction serves to bring on the story of a moonlight encounter with the robbers in snow; and in this sort of thing ...
— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker
... the fish business, and Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation of ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... description of vessel then much used in [Sidenote: 1768] the Baltic and coal trade, having large carrying capacity, with small draught. A pencil sketch by Buchan (one of the artists who accompanied Cook) of her hull, lying at Deptford, shows the short, stumpy north-country collier, of which even nowadays one may occasionally see specimens afloat. Her great, square stern has a row of four glazed windows, alternated with ornamental panels and surrounded by scroll work, and two square ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... very slight swell was perceived over the place of the explosion, and the water looked rather foamy: then in about a second it began to rise, and there was the most enormous outbreak of spray that you can conceive. It rose in one column of 60 or 70 feet high, and broad at the base, resembling a stumpy sheaf with jagged masses of spray spreading out at the sides, and seemed to grow outwards till I almost feared that it was coming to us. It sunk, I suppose, in separate parts, for it did not make any grand squash down, and then there were ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... a bull will sometimes turn in desperation on his persecutor. Then, unless the horse is well trained, serious consequences are likely to follow. The plunging thrust of his stumpy horns perhaps rips open the steed, sending the rider flying over the back of the furious bison, who may turn upon him and slay him ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... satisfied there was nothing to fear, whether from ghost, goblin, or white face, retired and brought her mistress, a short stumpy old dame, who had seen at least some sixty summers. Her nose was short, squat, and flabby at the end, and her eyes were bald of brows or lashes; but still she retained great energy of manner, and was blessed with an ever-smiling face. The dress she wore consisted of an old barsati, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... could wade out to her. We knew her intimately from stem to stern, her several decks, her cabins, lockers, holds; we had counted all her ribs over and over again, and paced her quarter-deck, and gazed up at her stumpy masts—she had been well-nigh dismantled,—and given sailing orders to our fellows amidships in the very ecstasy of circumnavigation. She has gone, gone to her grave in the sea that lapped her timbers as they lay a-rotting under the rocks; and now ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... the edge of the forest. And the sight of no roofs and spires could have been more welcome than that of these logs and cabins, broiling in the midsummer sun. At a little distance from the fort, a silent testimony of siege, the stumpy, cleared fields were overgrown with weeds, tall and rank, the corn choked. Nearer the stockade, where the keepers of the fort might venture out at times, a more orderly growth met the eye. It was ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... my sorrow, showed what he thought about it by wagging his stumpy tail and whining with satisfaction, so that it would have been ridiculous to attempt to persuade myself that he failed to recognise the ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... of his hock and seltzer and leaned back, watching the fireflies rise above the tall-bladed grass, above the stumpy clumps of shrub, and hang like miniature stars in the clear, ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... look—there was the veil, and the placard, and the disjointed, rattling sash; and in the neighboring court was, sometimes, the tall gentleman picking his way carefully over the stones, and sometimes the stumpy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... from the stumpy masts, pulleys rattled, and heavy cases rose from the holds. The boats, however, could not get abreast of the forward hatch and the cases had to be moved across slippery iron plates to the after derrick that hoisted them overboard. It was exhausting work, and the heat was intolerable. The ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... prink their feathers, undisturbed. Charlemagne is sitting with a mighty two-edged sword upon his knees, and a gilded crown upon his head; but the figure is badly proportioned, and the statue is a good-natured, stumpy affair, that makes one smile rather than admire. The outside of the minster still shows traces of the image breakers of Zwingli's time, and yet the crumbling north portal remains beautiful, even in decay. As for the interior, it has an exceedingly ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... announced the fact hourly in a mellow, but convincing, voice. Just below the window and over the desk, was a pipe-rack with pipes to fit every mood and fancy of a lonely man. There were the short stumpy ones, with the small bowls for the brief whiff when one did not choose to keep company with himself for long, but was willing to be sociable for a moment. There were the comfortable, self-caring pipes that obligingly kept lighted between long puffs ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... as I know there are but two things which, can rouse a woodchuck to strenuous activity; when a dog is in pursuit he can make his stumpy feet fairly twinkle as he flies for his burrow, and when a fox or a man is digging him out, he can literally worm his way through the ground, frequently escaping by means of his wonderful digging power. But when September or October days bring the first chill, he gives one last yawn ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy little black cigar. ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... and we two beat a retreat, lit up our pipes in the passage, and were just turning out when the postman's double knock came, but no showers of letters in the box. Derrick threw open the door, and the man handed him a fat, stumpy-looking roll in ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... distant, and it was very low and marshy and most dreary-looking, and I fancied it was becoming more difficult to keep my footing at the window; and just when Alister had been pointing out a queer red ship with one stumpy mast crowned by a sort of cage, and telling me that it was a light-ship, our own vessel began to creak and groan worse than ever, and the floor under our feet seemed to run away from them, and by the time you had got used to going down, it caught you and jerked you up again, till ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the day succeeding this visit of reconciliation, that Miss Arabel and the stumpy Susannah pursued their way to the shrubbery walk, in a rapid and mysterious manner, as if they hoped ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... for a match, and, to keep his lips straight, clamped them firmly on the amber mouthpiece of his brier, and stumpy, big-paunched Tommy Regan, the master mechanic, who was sitting in a chair by the window, reached hurriedly into his back pocket for his chewing and looked out of the window to hide a grin, as the two ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Campfire Stories • Various
... former may be a corruption of Pettifer, which occurs commonly, along with the intermediate Puddifer, in the same county. But the English Dialect Dictionary gives as an obsolete Northants word the adjective puddy, stumpy, pudgy, applied especially to hands, fingers, etc., and Pudito (puddy toe) occurs as a surname in the Hundred Rolls. As for Pauncefote, I believe it simply means what it appears to, viz. "belly-foot," ...
— The Romance of Names • Ernest Weekley
... unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known of small ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... made way to let me pass. With the impression of fire or robbery in my mind, I entered precipitately, only to find Yuba Bill calmly leaning back in an arm-chair with his feet on the back of another, a glass of whiskey from my demijohn in one hand and a huge cigar in his mouth. Across his lap lay a stumpy shotgun which I at once recognized as "the Left Bower," whose usual place was at his feet on the box during his journeys. He looked cool and collected, although there were one or two splashes of printer's ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... a rock by a short stumpy stalk, sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn case or the receptacle ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... listening, found tears trying to steal into his eyes. He watched the figure before him—a bowed, undernourished little man, with one shoulder lower than the other, a straggly brown moustache stained with coffee, and stumpy black teeth, and gnarled hands into which the dirt and grease were ground so deeply that washing them would obviously be a waste of time. His clothes were worn and shapeless, his celluloid collar was cracked ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... Casanova. "But I will not deny that after I had begun to read, no one bothered about the storm." The three girls had encircled the Abbate. For an excellent reason. From his capacious pockets he produced quantities of luscious sweets, and popped them into the children's mouths with his stumpy fingers. Meanwhile Olivo gave the newcomer a circumstantial account of the rediscovery of Casanova. Dreamily Amalia continued to gaze at the beloved ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... work before us, we were enabled to make but a short stay, so, bidding him and his family a sincere good-bye and good speed, we renewed our journey. We soon came in sight of the black stumpy monuments of one of the most disastrous conflagrations which ever victimized a forest. Some idea may be formed of the ravages of the "devouring element," from the simple fact that it all but totally consumed every stick of timber covering a space of forty-five miles by twenty-five; and the ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... praise of thee; statues would ere now have been erected to thee, had that hunch back and those flabby wings of thine been 'susceptible of artistic treatment.' But ugly thou art in the eyes of the uninitiated vulgar; a little stumpy old maid toddling about the world in a black bonnet and a brown cloak, laughed at by naughty boys, but doing good wherever thou comest, and leaving sweet memories behind thee; so sweet that the trout will rise at the ghost or sham ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... saved a penny now and then, we laid them in a row, The girls they played the same old tunes, and let the new ones go; And when from college came our Jim with laurels on his brow, I led him to the stumpy field and ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... in the lead, the three others drumming along behind him. He was grimly wary. A chill gust of wind hit them, as they entered the depths of the notch between the hills. The straggling growth of cedars and stumpy evergreens loomed up ahead of them, and they crashed through. For several hundred yards they tore their way and found their pace slowed by the difficult going. The trees began to thin out. Then they heard a spring tinkling down among the red rocks, ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... slatternly as ever, but her hair was shining with bear's grease and a strong odor of musk pervaded her garments; a paste diamond of enormous size but of doubtful brilliancy ornamented her breastpin and on her stumpy, grimy fingers were numerous brass rings containing dull imitations of ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... risk in attacking rogue elephants consists in the impracticability of quick movements upon such ground as they generally frequent. The speed and activity of a man, although considerable upon a smooth surface, is as nothing upon rough, stumpy grass wilds, where even walking is laborious. What is comparatively level to an elephant's foot is as a ploughed field to that of a man. This renders escape from pursuit next to impossible, unless ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... had risen from when he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes to ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... basement story is heaviest, and each succeeding story increases in lightness; in the Ducal palace this is reversed, making it unique amongst buildings. The outer walls rest upon the pillars of open colonnades, which have a more stumpy appearance than was intended, owing to the raising of the pavement in the piazza. They had, however, no base, but were supported by a continuous stylobate. The chief decorations of the palace were employed upon the capitals of these thirty-six pillars, and it was felt that the peculiar ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... a stool in the corner of the fireplace, and resumed his reading of "The Old English Baron," by the light of the burning back-log, pronouncing every word to himself in something between a whisper and a whistle. Gilbert took an account-book, a leaden inkstand, and a stumpy pen from a drawer under the window, and calculated silently and somewhat laboriously. His mother produced a clocked stocking of blue wool, and proceeded ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... exceptional best (in a part of South America) form slender stems about thirty feet high, were then forest-trees, four to six feet in circumference and sometimes ninety feet in height. These Calamites probably rose in dense thickets from the borders of the lakes, their stumpy leaves spreading in whorls at every joint in their hollow stems. Another extinct tree, the Cordaites, rivalled the Horsetails and Club-mosses in height, and its showers of long and extraordinary leaves, six feet ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... "It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their stumps athout scarcely ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... Half undressed she stood before the long mirror. She had never before possessed a long looking-glass, and now she seemed to see herself as she really was for the first time. Was she very ugly and unattractive? Yes, she must be with that stumpy body, those thick legs and arms, that short nose and large mouth. And she did not know what to do to herself to make herself attractive. Other girls knew but she had never had any one who could tell her. Perhaps she would make girl friends now who ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit with one ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and read ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... end of the room had swung open, and a tall woman swept in, followed by a diminutive figure in green coat and white trousers. A pair of huge spectacles, mounted on a somewhat stumpy nose, peered absently from side to side as ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... get out of here!" cried Uncle Wiggily, as he grabbed up his valise and crutch. Then the water came up to his little short, stumpy tail. Next it rose higher, up to his knees. Then it rose still faster up to his front feet and then ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... daughter was his housekeeper: a son, whom we never saw, supposed to be leading the same life that his father had done before him, only we never saw or heard of any pupils; and there was one hard-working, honest little Scottish maiden, square, stumpy, neat, and plain, who might have been any age from eighteen ...
— Round the Sofa • Elizabeth Gaskell
... for Jamaica lay to leeward, and I could not very well lose my way, even if I were compelled to go to sea without a chart. It is true that the rig of a felucca—namely, a single latteen-sail, its head stretched along an enormously long, tapering yard, hoisted to the top of a stout, stumpy mast raking well forward—is not precisely the rig that I would willingly choose to go to sea alone with; but beggars must not be choosers, and it seemed to me to be Hobson's choice—that or nothing. I must therefore make up my mind to face the difficulties of the rig and do the best I could ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... marshes we found several palms growing wild. They were stumpy in stature, and ragged in form for want of cultivation, or perhaps of congenial soil. The miasma was strongly perceptible to the smell, and our horses were plagued with flies and gnats. How great was this change from the pure dry ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... made him feel that hating that man was not quite fair to his sister, whom he loved. But there were no feelings of that kind to come in the way of the detestation he felt for Lucy. Helen had told him that Lucy had fair hair and wore it in two plaits; and he pictured her to himself as a fat, stumpy little girl, exactly like the little girl in the story of 'The Sugar Bread' in the old oblong 'Shock-Headed Peter' book that had belonged to ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... The stumpy-footed, two-toed, long-legged, kicking creature has wings that are apparently more useful to man than to itself. In fact, the possession of these apparently superfluous appendages is generally the cause of its being hunted by ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... beautiful. Did you know it?" he said, gently, and led her to a little stumpy rocking-chair with a gay red-and-blue rag cushion that Mrs. Tanner always kept sitting by the front door in pleasant weather. Then he stood off and surveyed her, while the red stole into her cheeks becomingly. "What has Miss Earle been doing to glorify ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... you, my lad, because we knew that if you lost on such a fool play your name would be—well, anything but Thomas 'Stumpy' Warren." The reply to this sally was a boot launched at the center rush, for Tom Warren's middle name was in reality Saalfield, and "Stumpy" was a cognomen rather too descriptive to be relished by the quarter-back. Greer returned ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... expression on ANNA's face, he suddenly changes his tone to one of boisterous joviality.] But I do be thinking, iver since the first look my eyes took at you, that it's a fool you are to be wasting yourself—a fine, handsome girl—on a stumpy runt of a man like that old Swede. There's too many strapping great lads on the sea would give their heart's blood for ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... only component parts of the landscape. At the time I speak of a few small light boats were drawn up on the beach, and two crafts of considerably larger size lay moored in the basin or cove. They were long, low vessels, entirely decked over, and fitted to pull some twenty oars; they had thick stumpy masts, and long tapering yards, for lateen sails, now stowed fore and aft in the boats. The sails were bent, the oars being placed along the thwarts, and they wore an air which showed they would be ready for ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... the steps on which Cosmo was clinging it cut under the legs of one of the giant turkeys, and the latter, making a superphasianidaean effort, half leaped, half flapped its way upon the steps to the side of Cosmo Versal, embracing him with one of its stumpy wings, while its red neck and head, with bloodshot eyes, swayed high ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... of bodily and mental characters, as well as by language. Physically they are without question the finest people of the country. Their skin-colour is decidedly fairer than that of Sea Dayaks or Kayans. They are of medium stature, with long backs and short, muscular, well-rounded limbs; a little stumpy in build, but of graceful and vigorous bearing. They are perhaps the most courageous and intelligent of the peoples; pugnacious, but less quarrelsome than the Sea Dayak; more energetic and excitable than the Kayan; hospitable and somewhat improvident, sociable and of pleasant ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... difficulty Hannah sought and found an old inkstand, a stumpy pen, and a scrap of paper. It was the best she could do. Stationery was scarce in the poor hut. She laid them on the table before Herman. And with a trembling hand he wrote out a check upon the local bank and put it in ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... and subjective wounds—and medicated himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... at a sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... weeds; how to skirt the wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... Dog was valiant, the Dog was vain, He flew at the prickly ball again, Snapping with all his might and main, But, oh! the pain! He sat down on his stumpy tail and howled, Then he laid his jaws on ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "there is nothing extraordinary about that child—no originality whatever. Why, it's exactly like every other baby—bald head, red face, big mouth, and stumpy nose. Why, that's only a weak imitation of the baby next door. It's a plagiarism, that's what that child is. You've been wasting your time, madam. If you can't do anything more original than that, we should advise you to give ...
— Dreams - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome
... me,' said Ian. And they threw their arms round each other, and the giant forced Ian on to his knees; but in a moment he was up again, and crooking his leg round the shoulders of the giant, he threw him heavily to the ground. 'Stumpy black raven, come quick!' cried he; and the raven came, and beat the giant about the head with his wings, so that he could not get up. Then he bade Ian take out a sharp knife from under his feathers, which he carried with him for cutting berries, and Ian smote off the giant's head ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... new one, appears to deserve a particular description. The Wombat (or, as it is called by the natives of Port Jackson, the Womback) is a squat, thick, short-legged, and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength, and somewhat bigger than a large turnspit dog. Its figure and movements, if they do not exactly resemble those of the bear, at least strongly remind one ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her tete-a-tete companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen." The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... were netted, but fish that had been surrounded with the mackerel. Several times over little stumpy red mullet were seen—brilliant little fish, and then grey mullet—large-scaled silvery fish with tiny mouths and something the aspect, on a large ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... size. It is of the last century (1843), and its stumpy tower, which is incomplete, gives it an odd appearance. The church is on the site of the Broadway Chapel, founded by Darrell, a Prebendary of the Abbey, who in 1631 left L400 for its erection. Various subscriptions were added to this sum, including one of L100 from Archbishop Laud. The churchyard ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... wrinkled old face beamed as he untwisted a black and stumpy clay from his perforated and pendulous ear-lobe, which hung full down upon his shoulder, and, turning it upside down, tapped the palm of his left hand ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... did as the Fox had said, and held his tail a long, long the down in the hole, till it was fast frozen in. Then he pulled it out with a cross pull, and it snapped short off. That's why Bruin goes about with a stumpy tail ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... produced one and a stumpy pencil. With these materials Beecot wrote a reply saying the brooch would be returned on the morrow. When the boy went away with the answer Paul felt in his breast pocket and took out the old blue case. "I've a good mind to send it now," he ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... Philip wagged his stumpy tail and frisked about, trying his best to tell the children that he had come out to look for them. Having Philip with them to talk to and pet made the rest of the way home seem shorter, and in less than fifteen minutes Meg and Bobby were shaking the snow off ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... of that mining camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening the baby:— ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... though gradual and easy ascent: the mountains are of no height, and they are not generally precipitous: no limestone, but much clay slate occurs. The ravine up which we passed, or rather watercourse, was well stocked with Xanthoxylon, some of large size as to the diameter of trunk, but very stumpy: water is found not far from the entrance: some cultivation also occurs and one large walled village, Dera Abdoollah Khan, lay to our left. Not much change in the vegetation: Xanthoxylon is almost entirely confined to ravines, Cerasus common, and one or two other prickly shrubs, and a Ruta, Onosma, ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the animal got up and looked about. We remained perfectly quiet, to examine it at leisure. It appeared to be nearly four feet in height, and perhaps six in length, the colour a deep brown, almost black. It had a stiff mane, and a very short stumpy tail, while its body appeared destitute of hair. It was not so, however, as I afterwards found; but the hair could not be perceived in consequence of being closely depressed to the surface. Its legs were short and ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a rudely ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... away, and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called me ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... a clear voice, and a short, stumpy girl with red hair and freckled face calmly entered the room and stood smilingly ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... Object in Life and find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Bonny enjoyed himself madly, making frantic excursions to the woods in search of rabbits, absolutely unheeding call or whistle, and finally emerging dirty and scratched, stopping at all the rabbit holes he met on the way back, and burrowing deep into them until nothing was left but a stumpy little white ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... we soon emerged into a stumpy field, at the head of a steep valley, which swept around toward the west. About two hundred rods below us was a rude log house, with smoke issuing from the chimney. A boy came out and moved toward the spring with a pail in his hand. We shouted to him, when he turned ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... wood-choppers began to come west, out of Vermont. They founded their homes in the Adirondack wildernesses and cleared their rough acres with the axe and the charcoal pit. After years of toil in a rigorous climate they left their sons little besides a stumpy farm and a coon-skin overcoat. Far from the centres of life their amusements, their humours, their religion, their folk lore, their views of things had in them the flavour of the timber lands, the simplicity ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... came to the place we found the foresters watching the dachshunde. These I discovered to be long, flat, shallow dogs with stumpy legs—a dog which an American has described as "looking as if he was always coming out from under a bureau." Very cautiously here and there the foresters uncovered a burrow, and a dachshund disappeared. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... 'Mark,' he said, 'in twenty minutes Stump'll be a-rushing round, While the other wretched creature lies a corpse upon the ground.' But, alas for William Johnson! ere they'd watched a half-hour's spell Stumpy was as dead as mutton, t'other dog was live and well. And the scientific person hurried off with utmost speed, Tested Johnson's drug and found it was a deadly poison-weed; Half a tumbler killed an emu, half a spoonful ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... who was making a gallant fight against a stumpy quarter section, had his only horse lie down and die just as the second corn-plowing season came on, it was Matalette who supplied the money which bought the ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... out, and came back agin shoving in a fat, stumpy Zulu woman wot began to grin and chatter like a poll-parrot the moment ...
— Sailor's Knots (Entire Collection) • W.W. Jacobs
... badly beaten by the storm. Intended by nature to be a rough and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to the whole world: "The storm may have done its best to defeat me—it has failed. I am as I was. I ask charity of no man. I ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... Spion Kop, or carried men into the reeking enteric camps of Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... friendly smile at Tommy, that he was not surprised to find the horse-hair ring in his hand instead of the button. He only smiled back at her then, but when they were going to bed, he offered Nan the best bite of his last apple; she saw the ring on his stumpy little finger, accepted the bite, and peace was declared. Both were ashamed of the temporary coldness, neither was ashamed to say, "I was wrong, forgive me," so the childish friendship remained unbroken, and the ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... for a rogue, and too conscientious for a rake. At Calais he met Harriet, the elder daughter of Sir David Dunder, of Dunder Hall, near Dover, and fell in love with her. Scruple subsequently got invited to Dunder Hall, and was told that his Harriet was to be married next day to Lord Snolt, a stumpy, "gummy" fogey of five and forty. Harriet hated the idea, and agreed to elope with Scruple; but her father discovered by accident the intention, and intercepted it. However, to prevent scandal, he gave his consent to ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... with the high blue beaver hat, is the Popinjay," said Pirlaps. "He's just about the cock of the walk, and he's quite self-important and touchy. The one with the very long bill, and the stiff, stumpy tail that he uses for a cane, is the Redpecker. The one in the checked suit, with the black necktie, yellow satin sleeve-linings, and white patch on his coat-tail, is the Snicker. He's full of fun and a good fellow, but rather crude—for he'll sometimes talk ...
— The Garden of the Plynck • Karle Wilson Baker
... mother, Bob?" he then said, approaching the stumpy urchin, who stood respectfully watching him and awaiting ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... of him as he sat on his horse with rope in hand, it changed, and fled towards me, plunging its long neck, and uttering a short whistle, as though blowing off steam. Even while running, the short, stumpy wings were used to aid its flight and steady its body, which rocked, and rolled, and swayed to and fro like a ship in ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... mouth, overhung by a thick, drooping, yellow mustache, is childishly self-willed and weak, of an obstinate kindliness. A thick neck is jammed like a post into the heavy trunk of his body. His arms with their big, hairy, freckled hands, and his stumpy legs terminating in large flat feet, are awkwardly short and muscular. He walks with a clumsy, rolling gait. His voice, when not raised in a hollow boom, is toned down to a sly, confidential half-whisper with something ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... said the girl who had freed me; "a crush of one of their horrid stumpy feet might kill a very ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... of motion. The elder sister, Lactimel, was of a different form, but yet hardly more fit to shine in the mazes of the dance than her sister. She had her charms, nevertheless, which consisted of a somewhat stumpy dumpy comeliness. She was altogether short in stature, and very short below the knee. She had fair hair and a fair skin, small bones and copious soft flesh. She had a trick of sighing gently in the evolutions ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... to go indoors, after their earnest talk. She stood leaning on the old carved railing of the steps, taking one more glance at the peaceful scene before she followed Walter into the darkening entrance-hall, when her eye caught sight of a stumpy figure which she ...
— Geordie's Tryst - A Tale of Scottish Life • Mrs. Milne Rae
... seaman was, in all outward appearance, the converse of his companion. His stature could not have exceeded four feet. A pair of stumpy bow-legs supported his squat, unwieldy figure, while his unusually short and thick arms, with no ordinary fists at their extremities, swung off dangling from his sides like the fins of a sea-turtle. Small eyes, of no particular color, twinkled far back in his head. His nose remained buried ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields—the farmer in Drury's youth did well to ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... middlin'," grinned the man through yellow, stumpy teeth. "That's why I tote a rope. An' I sure had a ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... flanked by its several sheds and barns on one hand and a woodpile on the other. Beyond the woodpile a rail fence inclosed a corn-field, and beyond the barns and sheds a similar fence defined the bounds of a stumpy pasture-lot. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... am when you have wrestled with me,' said Ian. And they threw their arms round each other, and the giant forced Ian on to his knees; but in a moment he was up again, and crooking his leg round the shoulders of the giant, he threw him heavily to the ground. 'Stumpy black raven, come quick!' cried he; and the raven came, and beat the giant about the head with his wings, so that he could not get up. Then he bade Ian take out a sharp knife from under his feathers, which he carried with him for cutting berries, and ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... Two men were there to wait on us, and it was well provisioned, and we set off about an hour and-half late, but no one minds such a trifle in these parts. At first the line was fairly straight and smooth, but then the country became wonderfully wild, with rocky hills covered with stumpy trees and undergrowth of brilliant colouring, and wooded lakes without end. In and out we wound, sometimes over most light and primitive bridges, and over high embankments, often running along the ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... sky the Rock is as lonely and forbidding a spot as ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When the sky is dull and gray, and the wind whips the ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Thou forget me." A peculiar old prayer, but I kept on repeating it to myself with great comfort that evening. My men were rather quiet. Perhaps the general calmness was affecting them with kindred thoughts, though an Englishman never shows them. On the left stood the stumpy spire of Bayencourt Church just left by us. On the right lay Sailly-au-Bois in its girdle of trees. Along the side of the valley which ran out from behind Sailly-au-Bois, arose numerous lazy pillars of smoke from the wood fires and kitchens of an artillery encampment. ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... sticking out her ugly foot in its broken boot—"too genteel—too neat. No one could make a lydy o' me. Look at my 'ands." She spread out her coarse, stumpy fingers. "Look at my face. Why, yere's a glass; let's stand side by side, an' then let's compare. Big face; no nose to speak of; upper lip two inches long; mouth—slit from ear to ear; freckles; eyes what the boys call pig's eyes; 'air ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... a donkey,' said my aunt; 'and it was the one with the stumpy tail which that Murdering sister of a woman rode, when she came to my house.' This had been, ever since, the only name my aunt knew for Miss Murdstone. 'If there is any Donkey in Dover, whose audacity it is harder to me to bear than another's, that,' said ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... persons whom little Mrs. Timmins was bent upon asking, were Mr. and Mrs. John Rowdy, of the firm of Stumpy, Rowdy and Co., of Brobdingnag Gardens, of the Prairie, Putney, and of Lombard ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... those of the Astraeans in form, though smaller in size, and growing also in solid heads, though these masses are covered with club-shaped protrusions, instead of presenting a smooth, even surface like the Astraeans,—and the P. Clavaria, in which the stocks are divided in short, stumpy branches, with club-shaped ends, instead of growing in close, compact heads; among the Maeandrinas we should have the round heads we know as Brain-Corals, with their wavy lines over the surface, and the Manacina, differing ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... to the lamp-post at the street corner, but, once there, she made herself halt and no one but Mabel will ever know how much making that took. Think of it to stand there, firm and quiet, and wait for those hollow, unbelievable things to come up to her, clattering on the pavement with their stumpy feet or borne along noiselessly, as in the case of the flower-hatted lady, by a skirt that touched the ground, and had, Mabel knew very well, nothing ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... back, but—' She beckoned with a stumpy, triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I always go in and read a chapter to mother at ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... protective covering, a circumstance which added to the hideous animal-like appearance of the men. They all looked alike in their uniform garb, but one figure alone Beale recognized. There was no mistaking the stumpy form and the big head of the Herr Professor, whose appearance in Oliva Cresswell's room had so terrified that ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... Mr. McClosky, seating himself on the extreme edge of the bed, and painfully tucking his feet away under it,—"surely." After a pause, he rubbed a short, thick, stumpy beard, that bore a general resemblance to a badly-worn blacking-brush, with the palm of his hand, and went on, "You had a good ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... main portion of the house opened, and there entered a woman hardly yet past middle age, who had once been undoubtedly handsome, but on whose worn and faded face was the look of patient weariness which so often is the result of a youth spent in helping a husband to overcome the stumpy stubbornness of an American bush farm. When the farm is conquered, the victor is usually vanquished. It needed no second glance to see that she was the mother from whom the daughter had inherited her good looks. Mrs. Howard did not appear surprised to see a stranger standing ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... entering into amicable conversation with him, and crept in at the door like a whipped dog. Moylan was too old to feel any such compunctions, and consequently made what he intended to be taken as a very complaisant bow to his future patron. He was an ill-made, ugly, stumpy man, about fifty; with a blotched face, straggling sandy hair, and grey shaggy whiskers. He wore a long brown great coat, buttoned up to his chin, and this was the only article of wearing apparel visible upon him: in his hands he twirled a shining new ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... wrecks lying a hundred fathoms below water and dart like a rifle bullet in at one porthole and out at another as the fishes ran; how to dance on the top of the waves when the lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all bony; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... mistake of Old Jack's. She resumes the chair she had risen from when he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes to the ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... The geta is a flat piece of hard wood, about the length of the foot but a little wider, with two stumpy pieces fastened transversely below it. The foot maintains an uncertain and, in the case of a novice whose big toe has not been accustomed to separation from its fellows, a painful hold by means of a toe strap of thick rope or cotton. To persons unused from childhood to the ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... faithful Ali, he entered a small boat and was rowed to the shore. They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them. While the vegetables were cooking they ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... boy?" asked Wade, with low voice, as he peered ahead. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to approach close to game without being detected. Fox wagged his stumpy tail and looked up with knowing eyes. Wade proceeded cautiously. The swamp was a rank growth of long, weedy grasses and ferns, with here and there a green-mossed bog half hidden and a number of dwarf oak-trees. Wade's horse sank ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... eighteenth century the beauty of the Samplers distinctly declined. They became squarer, and were bordered with a running pattern, and the whole canvas became more or less pictorial. Inevitably the end of this art came. Ugly realistic bowpots with stumpy trees decorated the picture in regular order. The alphabet still appeared, and moral reflection seemed to be the aim of the worker rather than to make the Sampler show beauty of stitchery. Quaint little maps of England are ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... skill, What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade Appeared the writing implements home-made! What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out, Slit or unslit, with many a various snout, Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby. Stumpy and stubby; Some capable of ladye-billets neat, Some only fit for ledger-keeping clerk, And some to grub down Peter Stubbs his mark, Or smudge through some illegible receipt; Others in florid caligraphic plans, Equal to ships, and ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... as ever, nothing to do with human life. The little courtyards with their woodstacks and their coloured houses, carts and the cobbled squares and the little stumpy trees that bordered the canals and the little wooden huts beside the bridges with their candles and fruit—these were human and friendly and good, but they had their precarious condition like the rest ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... every now and then, while you were reading it, you looked up at me with a hesitating you-would-and-you-wouldn't sort of look. You thought I was looking out of the window all the time; and so I was, being uncommonly interested in the corn-fields we were passing just then, so flat and stumpy and picturesque they looked; but, lor', Mr. Austin, if I couldn't look out of the window and watch you at the same time, I shouldn't be worth my salt to you or any one else. I saw plain enough that you had half a mind to show me that letter; ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... minutes his body was in view, the endless neck flung up, the absurd head and little, stumpy, useless horns prying amidst the leaves, and every now and then slewing round and sweeping the ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... got through this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... his door on the balcony, and expanded his log into a story of his experiences. He had determined to turn author, and to recoup his losses as much as possible by the sale of his manuscript. With a stumpy pencil in hand, he scratched his head, pursed his mouth, and wrote slowly. He would not confide in me. He said he had had sufferings enough to make money out of them, and would talk only ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the dog returned, limping on three legs, his ears drooping, his stumpy tail dejected. He paused in the middle of the walk, and at a sharp clap, as of two hands, he dropped limply on his side, rolled to his back, and stiffened there ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... season of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... at the liquor-shops along the quay; and as for the bridge-there is a crowd of idlers on that, you may be sure, sprawling over the balustrade for ever and ever, with long ragged coats, steeple-hats, and stumpy doodeens. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... coming on, and crossing the drift with discordant yells. Infantry and mounted infantry pressing on both flanks. Our guns have taken up another position farther on. The Captain asked after the broken whip, and told us we could not have gone into action better. He has been riding about all day on his stumpy little Argentine, radiant and beaming, with his eternal pipe ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... observed the tree,' added Frank, who was something of a botanist as well as his mother; 'I noticed that its bark is very rough, dropping off here and there in large curling scales. The branches, too, are very odd-looking; they have blunt, stumpy ends, that give the tree a clumsy appearance. Is it ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... group, sitting and standing on the hill above the creek to watch our house burn to the ground. Navvies of every nation; tall, brawny Scotchmen; jolly-looking Irishmen, their faces a mixture of pity for our misfortune and enjoyment of the "fun;" stumpy little French Canadians; solemn, stupid-looking Icelanders and Mennonites. Carriere was there on his crutches. Poor fellow! standing knee-deep in the lake to cut ice out had brought on such a severe attack of rheumatism, that it was with difficulty he moved ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... a short stumpy stalk, sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... description of such a tribe by a man who vowed he had lived with them, and related how they were provided with long sticks, with which to make holes in the ground before squatting down, for the reception of their short stumpy tails! I think it is Mr. H. F. ROMILLY who, in his interesting little work on the Western Pacific and New Guinea, accounts for the prevalence of "yarns" of this class by explaining that the natives regard Europeans as being vastly superior to them in general knowledge and, when ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... were about him. Then he thought of Noorna, and that she sang to him and danced, and when he rose to embrace her she was Rabesqurat by the light of the Lily! And he thought of Shagpat, and that in shaving him the blade was checked in its rapid sweep, and blunted by a stumpy twine of hair that waxed in size and became the head of Karaz that gulped at him a wide devouring gulp, and took him in, and flew up with him, leaving Shagpat half sheared. Then he thought himself struggling halfway down the throat of the monstrous ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... peals of laughter. She was interrupted by the entrance of four men in khaki, a short, stumpy sergeant of middle age, a young corporal, and two young privates. The woman ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... eldest daughter, who causes her mother the most anxiety. Beatrice is like her mother—a plain but clever-looking girl, with the dark swart features and colouring of the Esterworths, who are not a handsome race. Added to which, she inherits her father's short and somewhat stumpy figure. Such a personal appearance in itself is enough to cause uneasiness to any mother who is anxious for her daughter's future; but when these advantages of looks are rendered still more peculiar by the fact that her hair had to be shaved ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... upon the crowd at large he had fought his way out and was speeding down the street. But fleet-footed men were at his heels, a roar of rage burst from the mob, and in a body it took up the chase. Down the stumpy, muddy trail went the pursuit, and every command to halt spurred the fleeing man to swifter flight. Cabin doors opened; people came running from their tents; some tried to fling themselves in the ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... who knows her. You do, don't you, Mike?" added Donald, and the dog beat a tattoo on the rug with his stumpy tail. ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... in awe-struck tones simultaneously exclaimed, "Why, we are at war!" and "War has been declared!" And then Mrs. Otway, as was her wont, had fallen into eager, impulsive talk. But she had to stop abruptly when the dining-room door opened—for it revealed the short, stumpy figure of Anna, smiling, indeed beaming even more than usual, as she brought in the coffee she made so well. Mother and daughter had looked at one another across the table, an unspoken question in each pair of kind eyes. That question was: Did poor ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... they look short and stumpy in proportion to the rest of the palm—one may be sure that the individual to whom they belong is of an animal nature, possessing coarse instincts, devoid of real intellectuality, and belonging to the lower ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... "in it", flung them off. The intellectual drama had no use for them, no use at all. And so they found themselves (out of it indeed) busking on the pavement, doing tricks and tumbling and singing silly songs to the unresponsive profiles of long lines of ladies (high-nosed or stumpy-nosed ladies), waiting admittance to the matinees of some highly intellectual play. And with glasses on those noses they'd be reading while they waited the book of that same play: so even then our poor gods busked in ...
— The Harlequinade - An Excursion • Dion Clayton Calthrop and Granville Barker
... face to face with the characters of that mining camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening the baby:— ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... hard to move. Sure of his rights, and convinced of the injustice of all legal proceedings, he clung tenaciously to his little property. It was not a place anyone need grieve over losing, an observer might say—a few acres of stumpy, cleared land, an indefinite piece of forest, and an old log cabin. But it was Sandy's home—the only one he had known since he left his father's fisher-hut on the wind-swept shore of Islay. And every stone and tree ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... on growing till then,' said Biddy, whose great ambition was to be as tall as her sister. 'Some girls do, don't they? And I have grown a good deal this year. I don't look as stumpy as I did, do I?' and Biddy looked up in her sister's face with a pleasant smile—a smile that showed her pretty white teeth and shone out of her nice brown eyes. She was not lovely like Alie, but she had a dear honest face—though she was still rather freckled, ...
— The Rectory Children • Mrs Molesworth
... to you, my lad, because we knew that if you lost on such a fool play your name would be—well, anything but Thomas 'Stumpy' Warren." The reply to this sally was a boot launched at the center rush, for Tom Warren's middle name was in reality Saalfield, and "Stumpy" was a cognomen rather too descriptive to be relished by the quarter-back. Greer returned the missile with interest, and the fight grew warm, and boots ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... myself no longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, presented an irresistibly ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... as the Fox had said, and held his tail a long, long time down in the hole, till it was frozen in fast. Then he pulled it out with a cross pull, and it snapped short off. That's why Bruin goes about with a stumpy tail to this ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... letters since conveyed to my mind the fact that there had been any material change since. Therefore I own that you are personally quite different from what I had expected to find you. I had expected to find you, I think, rather stumpy in figure, and square in build, with a very determined and ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... Little Brother had spent the first hours of their acquaintance, and he stood leaning against that same post, looking gloomily down into the water, when a lean, rough dog crept slowly toward him, wagging his stumpy tail and looking into the boy's face with eyes that pleaded for a friendly word. Generally Tode would have responded to the mute appeal, but now he felt so miserable himself, that he longed to make somebody or something else miserable too, so instead of a pat, he gave the ...
— The Bishop's Shadow • I. T. Thurston
... without another word and began to unlace his brogues. Meanwhile from a side-table his wife brought a silver tobacco-box and a stumpy Irish clay. The slippers substituted for his shoes, Kerry lovingly filled the cracked and blackened bowl with strong Irish twist, which he first teased carefully in his palm. The bowl rested almost under his ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... after day, in the mild monotony of the December sunshine, they sat and drank their coffee, and talked of the sights which the peasants in the street, and the tourists in the promenade beyond it, afforded. The rows of stumpy palms which separated the road from the walk were not so high but that they had the whole lift of the sea to the horizon where it lost itself in a sky that curved blue as turquoise to the zenith overhead. The sun rose from its morning bath on the left, and sank to its evening bath on the right, ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... hating that man was not quite fair to his sister, whom he loved. But there were no feelings of that kind to come in the way of the detestation he felt for Lucy. Helen had told him that Lucy had fair hair and wore it in two plaits; and he pictured her to himself as a fat, stumpy little girl, exactly like the little girl in the story of 'The Sugar Bread' in the old oblong 'Shock-Headed Peter' book that had belonged to Helen ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... and the label tied on to him. Forgive me that label, Chum; I think that was the worst offence of all. And why should I label one who was speaking so eloquently for himself; who said from the tip of his little black nose to the end of his stumpy black tail, "I'm a silly old ass, but there's nothing wrong in me, and they're sending me away!" But according to the regulations—one ...
— Once a Week • Alan Alexander Milne
... few paces, had seated itself on its hind legs like a dog when it is begging, and had regarded her with such a look of rage, that she had fled in terror. She described the animal as resembling a wolf, but as being shorter and stouter; its hair was red, its tail stumpy, and the head smaller than that of a ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... exclaimed Stumpy, derisively; "'course, boys, you mus' wait. 'Tain't no use a-hurryin' up the cattle; yer mustn't rush the buck. Jest wait till some feller comes along with a melted rainbow, and lays on the war-paint! and another feller fetches the swans' ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... laughed the small black figure, nowise impressed and cramming her stumpy fingers up to her mouth to keep the laugh in as she saw her young mistress' displeasure. "It's an awful old dirty muss, an' I wish I could do it," ...
— Twilight Stories • Various
... dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... and he made me a present of a ring, and told me a long yarn about it. It was a talisman, it seems, and no one who wore it could ever be lost. So I took it for a keepsake; here it is,' and he extended his stumpy, brown little finger, and showed a thick, coarsely-made ring of gold, with an uncut red stone, of the size of a large cherry ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... tipped with gleaming brass, and a brass buckle on the instep; nearly all the people in Haworth and all the factory-girls in Keighley wore such shoes, but they were always called "clogs." Inside the stall sat an old man with twinkling blue eyes, and a stumpy turned-up nose: he sat and cobbled and mended, and made new clogs out of the old ones which lay in great heaps all round him. Over his stall was the name "T Monk," but in the village he was always known as Tommie; and though he was a silent and somewhat surly character, Tommie's opinion ...
— A Pair of Clogs • Amy Walton
... them. They are fastidiously honest, and strictly upright, though they make mistakes like other human beings. They try to do their whole duty, sometimes under very difficult circumstances, and if other boys may not do exactly as they did in certain cases, they may imitate Leopold and Stumpy in having a high aim, and in striving to reach it. If young people only mean well, they can hardly fail to lead good and true lives, in spite of their errors of judgment, or even their occasional failures ...
— The Coming Wave - The Hidden Treasure of High Rock • Oliver Optic
... soon emerged into a stumpy field, at the head of a steep valley, which swept around toward the west. About two hundred rods below us was a rude log house, with smoke issuing from the chimney. A boy came out and moved toward the spring with a pail in his hand. We shouted to him, when he turned and ran ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs
... middle of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... with his father. How that boy can chop! thought Nancy, as she heard the sound of his ax biting into wood. Tree after tree had to be cut down before crops could be planted. With the coming of spring, he helped his father to plow the stumpy ground. He learned to plow a straight furrow. He planted ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... little books in my friend's library is a thick-set, stumpy old copy of Richard Baxter's "Holy Commonwealth," written in 1659, and, as the title-page informs us, "at the invitation of James Harrington Esquire,"—as one would take a glass of Canary,—by invitation! There is a preface addressed "To all those in the Army ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... that way," said the boot-boy, pointing with his stumpy black forefinger, "and then acrost that way, an' Mister Jenks" Jenks was the gardener "'e've gone about in rings, 'e 'ave. And there ain't no sign nor token, mum, not a ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the fair Vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I saw it not three weeks since—an old single thorn-tree, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... must have penetrated into the earth some time since, for a slowworm came forth on a mound for the first time on April 16. He coiled up on the eastern side every morning for some hours, but was never seen in the afternoon. His short, thick body and unfinished tail, more like a punch or the neck of a stumpy bottle, was turned in a loop, the head nearly touching the tail, like a pair of sugar-tongs. Coming out from the stitchwort and grasses, the spiders often ran over his shining dark brown surface, something the colour of glazed earthenware. ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... ought to attack. When at last it decided upon Brock, it gave me the chance I had been waiting for. I fired instantly at the hollow between neck and shoulder; the brute dropped at once, and save for one or two convulsive kicks of its stumpy legs as it lay half on its back, it never moved again. The second rhino proved to be a well-grown youngster which showed considerable fight as we attempted to approach its fallen comrade. We did ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... getting well along in the afternoon when Timmins and Lone Wolf emerged from the thick woods into the stumpy pastures and rough burnt lands that spread back irregularly from the outlying farms. And here, while crossing a wide pasture known as Smith's Lots, an amazing thing befell. Of course Timmins was not particularly surprised, ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... with her umbrella. The cunning and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and—sucking stumpy pencils—write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left might happen ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... at the scarlet-clad, stumpy warrant officer. He couldn't believe his ears. Suddenly he felt as if he had been lifted off his feet. And then he realized that he was off his feet. Astro was holding him over his head. Then he dumped him in his bunk as easily as if he had been a child. And at ...
— Stand by for Mars! • Carey Rockwell
... we distinguish the regular position (fig. 5b) and designate all forward deviations as acute-angled (long toe and low heel, fig. 5a), and all deviations backward from the regular (steep toe and high heel, fig. 5c) as steep-toed, or stumpy. When the body weight is evenly distributed over all four limbs, the foot-axis should be straight; the long pastern, short pastern, and wall at the toe should have ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... under the dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon where the blackberries grew rankest we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry, and the pitiful stumpy headstones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mulleins. Then with oaths and the sound of rent underwood a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... there is in the north-western bay a pointed door, differing only from those of about a hundred years earlier in having twisted shafts. One curious feature is the parapet of the central aisle, which is like a row of small classical pedestals, each bearing a stumpy obelisk. By far the finest feature of the outside is the great west door. On each side are clusters of square pinnacles ending in square crocketed spirelets, and running up to a horizontal moulding which, as so often, gives the whole design a rectangular form. Within comes the doorway ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... corner of the fireplace, and resumed his reading of "The Old English Baron," by the light of the burning back-log, pronouncing every word to himself in something between a whisper and a whistle. Gilbert took an account-book, a leaden inkstand, and a stumpy pen from a drawer under the window, and calculated silently and somewhat laboriously. His mother produced a clocked stocking of blue wool, and ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... the Adirondacks, forty or fifty years ago, was Henry Clymer, from Brooklyn, who went up to Little Black Creek and tried to make a farm out of the gnarly, stumpy land; but being a green hand at that sort of thing, he soon gave it up and put up the place near Northwood, that is locally referred to as the haunted mill. When the first slab was cut, a big party was on hand to cheer and eat pie in honor of the Clymers, for Mr. Clymer, who ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... seemed to me, already an old woman. I credited her with thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going on ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Adjutants, holding a stumpy pencil in one hand and a burning brow in the other, are composing Operation Orders which shall effect ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... seemed endless, as far as they could see, and try their fortune in Crowhurst for the night. It was not long before they came to it, lying in a hollow, and snugly sheltered by gently rising wooded ground. It was a very little village indeed. There was a small grey church with a stumpy square tower, and a cheerful red-brick inn called the Holly Bush, with a swinging sign in front of it; there were half a dozen little cottages with gay gardens, and, standing close to the road, there was a long, low, many-gabled house which was evidently the ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... ahoy! Come to the rescue! I'll be bitten to death! Help!" At the same time the boys saw a man quickly climb up the stumpy mast of the lighter and cling there with one hand while he waved his cap ...
— Frank and Andy Afloat - The Cave on the Island • Vance Barnum
... own precious hens. How fierce and cruel the brute looked! How Thor hated it! and fairly gnashed his teeth with disgust that now, when his greatest chance was come, he for once was without his gun. He was in not a little fear, too, and stood wondering what to do. The Lynx growled louder; its stumpy tail twitched viciously for a minute, then it picked up its victim, and leaping from the log was ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... an oddly matched pair. The one was a tubby little man with short bristly grey hair and a short bristly grey moustache to match. His stumpy legs looked ridiculous in his baggy golf knickers of rough tweed, which he wore with gaiters extending half-way up his short, stout calves. As he came in, he slung off the heavy tweed shooting-cloak he had been wearing and placed it with his ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... deep of his hock and seltzer and leaned back, watching the fireflies rise above the tall-bladed grass, above the stumpy clumps of shrub, and hang like miniature stars ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin—in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings—the garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... in farewell at his image. High colour, of course. Grizzled moustache. Returned Indian officer. Bravely he bore his stumpy body forward on spatted feet, squaring his shoulders. Is that Ned Lambert's brother over the way, Sam? What? Yes. He's as like it as damn it. No. The windscreen of that motorcar in the sun there. Just a flash like that. Damn ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... she was particularly careful to select those only whose personal appearance was such as to discourage any approach to familiarity or endearment. Never before or since was youthful beauty surrounded by such moustached duennas, squinting chambermaids, hunchbacked pages, and stumpy maids-of-all-work. This was a real sorrow to her, for she loved beauty; it was a still sadder trial that she could no longer feel it right to indulge herself in the least morsel of arsenic; she sighed for ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... terriers began smelling, casting their sly eyes upwards, to see if we feared them or were friendly to their advances, and, after a moment or two, seemed sufficiently satisfied with the scrutiny to warrant their wagging their short stumpy tails in rude welcome. The room was hung round with cages of the songbirds of England—some content with their captivity, others restless, and passing to and fro in front of the wires, eager for escape. Strong inclosures, containing ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... abandoned his cause. The landlord of the "Handsome Man" jeered him when he went there canvassing. "Laws, Mr Vavasor!" said the landlord of the "Handsome Man," "you're not at all the fellow for us chaps along the river,—you ain't. You're afraid to come down with the stumpy,—that's what you are." George put his hand upon his purse, and acknowledged to himself that he had been afraid to come down with ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... was his housekeeper: a son, whom we never saw, supposed to be leading the same life that his father had done before him, only we never saw or heard of any pupils; and there was one hard-working, honest little Scottish maiden, square, stumpy, neat, and plain, who might have been any age ...
— Round the Sofa • Elizabeth Gaskell
... and took us for the same. One of them asked me to let him know when the sun was down, and I prolonged his fast until it was quite dark, when I gave him permission to eat. They all had tolerable stallions for their service, and seemed to live pleasantly enough, in their wild way. The fat, stumpy corporal, with his enormously broad pantaloons and automaton legs, went down to the fountain with his musket, and after taking a rest and sighting full five minutes, fired at a dove without hitting it. He afterwards joined us in a social pipe, and we sat ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... other end of the room had swung open, and a tall woman swept in, followed by a diminutive figure in green coat and white trousers. A pair of huge spectacles, mounted on a somewhat stumpy nose, peered absently from side to side ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... begun to read, no one bothered about the storm." The three girls had encircled the Abbate. For an excellent reason. From his capacious pockets he produced quantities of luscious sweets, and popped them into the children's mouths with his stumpy fingers. Meanwhile Olivo gave the newcomer a circumstantial account of the rediscovery of Casanova. Dreamily Amalia continued to gaze at the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... with a critical air; 'I think she has rather improved. She is plump enough still, in all conscience, but not quite so stumpy as she was last summer. Her figure is a ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... lying in Monaco harbour a long white boat with a stumpy mast, which delighted in the name of Jungle Queen. It was the property of an impecunious English nobleman who made a respectable income from letting ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... field, on the crest of a considerable sand-bluff—elevations looking magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field, which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks, an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form; and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... gather dates, currants, and figs, or to fetch a pitcher of water in order that his parents might quench their thirst. So they went slowly over the rocky land, and when the mule-path led to an eminence over which flat stones lay scattered, and which was thickly sown with stumpy shrubs, the fertile plain of Israel lay before them. It was surrounded by wooded hills, while villages were scattered about its surface, and shining rivers wound through it. Opposite, one range of mountains showed behind the other, and the highest lifted their snowy ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... attacking rogue elephants consists in the impracticability of quick movements upon such ground as they generally frequent. The speed and activity of a man, although considerable upon a smooth surface, is as nothing upon rough, stumpy grass wilds, where even walking is laborious. What is comparatively level to an elephant's foot is as a ploughed field to that of a man. This renders escape from pursuit next to impossible, unless some welcome ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... Loanda struck me as unusually ill-favoured; short, "stumpy," and very dark, or tinged with unclean yellow. Lepers and hideous cripples thrust their sores and stumps in the face of charity. There was no local colouring compared with the carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... "cat-built" ship, of 368 tons burden, a description of vessel then much used in [Sidenote: 1768] the Baltic and coal trade, having large carrying capacity, with small draught. A pencil sketch by Buchan (one of the artists who accompanied Cook) of her hull, lying at Deptford, shows the short, stumpy north-country collier, of which even nowadays one may occasionally see specimens afloat. Her great, square stern has a row of four glazed windows, alternated with ornamental panels and surrounded by scroll work, and two square ports underneath them close ...
— The Naval Pioneers of Australia • Louis Becke and Walter Jeffery
... our departure. There was no longer anything to detain us on Endeavour Island. The Ghost's stumpy masts were in place, her crazy sails bent. All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... creature, scientifically called Demodex folliculorum, hardly visible to the naked eye, with comparatively large fore body, a more slender hind body and eight little stumpy processes that do duty as legs. No specialized head is visible, although of course there is a mouth orifice. These creatures live on the sweat glands or pores of the human face, and owing to the appearance that they give to ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... the narrow path in front of them stood a short, fat, stumpy, unimpressive little man, with a very red face, and a Norfolk ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... the horizon lay a stumpy masted vessel that seemed as still and dead as ocean that rotted around it. She had not a sail aloft nor a plume of smoke in her funnel. For the moment this lifelessness was not observed by the hungry castaways. A joyous medley arose from ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... found several palms growing wild. They were stumpy in stature, and ragged in form for want of cultivation, or perhaps of congenial soil. The miasma was strongly perceptible to the smell, and our horses were plagued with flies and gnats. How great was this change from the pure dry ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... craft, short and squat, with high, upstanding bows, prominent wheelhouses, and stumpy mizzen-masts abaft all. They hailed from many ports and still bore the letters and numbers of their peace-time vocation: F.D. for Fleetwood, G.Y. for Grimsby, B.F. for Banff, and P.D. for Peterhead. They were steam herring drifters in the ordinary, common, ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... buildings the basement story is heaviest, and each succeeding story increases in lightness; in the Ducal palace this is reversed, making it unique amongst buildings. The outer walls rest upon the pillars of open colonnades, which have a more stumpy appearance than was intended, owing to the raising of the pavement in the piazza. They had, however, no base, but were supported by a continuous stylobate. The chief decorations of the palace were employed upon the capitals of these ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
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