"Stony" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the grass fields and stubbles are generally as dry as a bone. There is but a small percentage of clay in the soil, but a good deal of lime, and five inches down is the hard rock; therefore this light, stony soil never holds the rain, but allows it to percolate rapidly through, even as a sieve. When the sun is hot after a frost the ploughs "carry" certainly, but this is because they dry so quickly; they seldom ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... vast rolling plains, clothed with thin brown grass, we rode: no other vegetation was visible but the prickly pear, white thistle and yucca, or Spanish bayonet—stiff, gray, stern plants, suited to the stony, arid soil. The road was good, the vehicle comfortable, the air sweet and cool: along the many ruts in the sand grew long rows of sunflowers, which fill every trail on the plains for hundreds of miles, and give a little color to the colorless scene. The season ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... the occasion on which Mrs. Rose, being pressed by a mischievous fellow-guest, had accepted a cigarette under the impression the other ladies were about to do likewise—an impression quickly dispelled by the stony glare of her hostess and the ominous whispers ...
— The Making of a Soul • Kathlyn Rhodes
... island-dotted lake of grass four or five miles long by two or three wide to which slope regular shores of stony soil planted with trees. Imagine on the very edge of that lake an especially fine grove perhaps a quarter of a mile in length, beneath whose trees a dozen different outfits of cowboys are camped for the summer. You must place a herd of ponies in ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... apprehension of servile insurrections?—or, in other words, to the existence of slavery in the slave states? Again, when our guiltless brothers escape from the southern prison-house, and come among us, we are under constitutional obligation to deliver them up to their stony-hearted pursuers. And is not slavery in the slave states, which is the occasion of our obligation to commit this outrage on humanity and on the law of God, a matter of "just concern to us?" To what too, but slavery, in the slave states, is to ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... a sacred elephant, snow-white. Upon his back a huge pagoda towered Full of brass gods and food of sacrifice. Upon his forehead sat a golden throne, The massy metal twisted into shapes Grotesque, antediluvian, such as move In myth or have their broken images Sealed in the stony middle of the hills. A peacock spread his thousand dyes to screen The yellow sunlight from the head of one Who sat upon the throne, clad stiff with gems, Heirlooms of dynasties of buried kings,— Himself the likeness of a ...
— Gloucester Moors and Other Poems • William Vaughn Moody
... light, and reflect least, are most heated when exposed either to solar or terrestrial rays. Black bodies are, in general, more heated than red; red more than green; green more than yellow; and yellow more than white. Metals are less heated than earthy or stony bodies, or than animal or vegetable matters. Polished surfaces are ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... gentlemanly, magnificent Charles I.; and certainly one could get no more splendid idea of him than by seeing him stately, silent, and melancholy on his white horse, at the end of this long corridor. There he sits, facing the calm, stony, sleeping face of Oliver, and neither question or ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... of desolation! Fast descending as thou art, Say, hath mortal invocation Spells to touch thy stony heart?" ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... to join Burgoyne, collected about 2000 men, and hastened with them towards Verplank's Point to obstruct his march. Leaving a third portion of his troops, however, on that spot, Clinton passed over with the rest to Stony Point, on the western shore, where, in two simultaneous attacks, he carried Forts Montgomery and Clinton. This success obliged the Americans to burn their navy, consisting of five ships, which were lying in that part of the river, and which were ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... southern side of the range, west of Overlook, are two wild and beautiful clefts, the one known as the Stony Clove, and the other as West Kill or Bushnell Clove. The first begins as a narrow gorge with lofty hemlock and moss-clad mountain sides, and gradually opens out, at Phoenicia, upon the hills of Ulster and Esopus Creek. It is watered by a trout ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... The Stony Creek lower reservoir dam of the Geelong water supply, Fig. 16, colony of Victoria, is interesting as being constructed of concrete, in the proportion of 1 to 81/2. Its erection occupied eighteen months, and cost about L18,000. It is curved in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... voice, some distance ahead, interrupted Dodd's soliloquy, and, hoisting the beetle-shells upon their backs, they started along the rough trail that they could feel with their feet over the stony ground. It was still as dark as pitch, but soon they found themselves traveling up a sunken way that was evidently a dry watercourse. And now and again Haidia's reassuring voice would come from in front ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... French battleships, hospital ships, transports, colliers, and all sorts of cargo ships down to the little native sailing boats, and the steam cutters which tore up and down all day looking very busy. The island itself looked very uninviting, stony, barren, and inhospitable, and a route march only confirmed our opinions—the race ashore in the ship's boats, however, ...
— The Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - and 14th (F. & F. Yeo.) Battn. R.H. 1914-1919 • D. D. Ogilvie
... constantly doubling to throw the dogs out; but Killbuck never overshot his game, and as the buck doubled, he was round after him in fine style. I now followed him, leaving Bran and Lena to do their best, and at a killing pace we crossed the plain—through a narrow belt of trees, down a stony hollow, over another plain, through a small jungle, on entering which Killbuck was within a few yards of ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... November, wind north-east, a poor old woman with a wooden leg was seen struggling against the fitful gusts of the bitter breeze, along a stony zigzag road, full of deep and irregular cart-ruts. Her ragged petticoat was blue, and so was her wretched nose. A stick was in her left hand, which assisted her to dig and hobble her way along; and in her other hand, supported also beneath her withered arm, was a large rusty iron sieve. Dust ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... impurity—into our weakness and infuse strength. 'A reed shaken with the wind,' and without substance or solidity to resist, may be placed in what is called a petrifying well, and, by the infiltration of stony substance into its structure, may be turned into a rigid mass, like a little bar of iron. So, if Christ comes into my poor, weak, tremulous nature, there will be an infiltration into the very substance of my being of a present power ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... the earnest recital of a wrong so gigantic as his. Poor Alfred learned this to his cost, that to put small men into great places is to create monsters. When he had realised the bitter truth, he put the stony-hearted paper in his pocket, crept into the yard, and sat down, and, for all he could do, scalding tears ran down ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... too small and weak for the weight, and then go on, from week to week, suffering anxiety and irritation as he sees them swelling and splitting under the burden, and finding fault with the wood instead of taking it to himself; or as if a plowman were to attempt to work a hard and stony piece of ground with a poor team and a small plow, and then, when overcome by the difficulties of the task, should vent his vexation and anger in laying the blame on the ground instead of on the inadequate and insufficient ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... unaccustomed pedestrians had to tramp, sometimes up-hill, sometimes down dale, through marshy lands and over stony boulders that blistered their feet; and all the while they had to drag after them that terrible Frankenstein-like monster, the jolly-boat mounted on its carriage, which seemed to the worn-out men sometimes a ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the grass, hugged his legs with his arms, and, resting his chin on his knees, stared before him in stony silence. ...
— The Happy Adventurers • Lydia Miller Middleton
... of men, very well armed; Mr Cumming, my first lieutenant, following in the six-oared cutter.[18] When we came within a little distance of the shore, we saw, as near as I can guess, about five hundred people, some on foot, but the greater part on horseback: They drew up upon a stony spit, which ran a good way into the sea, and upon which it was very bad landing, for the water was shallow, and the stones very large. The people on shore kept waving and hallooing, which, as we understood, were invitations to land; ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... stony hearts, those dull imaginations—not even this pretty picture, so simply drawn, of the wounded girl-soldier hanging her toy harness there in curious companionship with the grim and dusty iron mail of the historic defenders of France. No, there was nothing in it for them; nothing, unless ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... braying I was a long time before I came upon him quite down upon the stony shore, with not a blade of grass nor even a thistle for him to nibble at. How he got there is to me a problem to this day; but how I laboured to get him up again will ever remain in my mind, for it makes me feel sore all ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... malignity of his nature, derived a fierce pleasure from ill-treating and outraging that frail, but to him inoffensive woman. Her defenceless situation might have excited compassion in the breast of a less brutal ruffian; but when had his stony heart ever known compassion? ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... presents more of life to divert the mind. The very rushing and splash of the wheels, the bounding waves, the bustle of bending or reefing sails, and the crowding of people on the steamer, brings varied pictures to temper the monotony around. Even the ride through the stony deserts which I had traversed in Syria has not so much sameness, for there we at least hear the tramp of the horse and the sound of many a rolling stone; the traveller's attention is, besides, kept continually on the stretch in guiding each step that his horse takes, to avoid ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... be found there but the statues of scholars and soldiers and statesmen, posted in a circle around the old race-course. If you strolled thither about dusk on such a day as this, you might see the statues unbend a little from their stony rigidity, and in the failing light nod to each other very pleasantly through the trees. And if you stayed in Padua over night, what could be better to-morrow morning than a stroll through the great Botanical Garden,—the oldest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... is used as a thoroughfare, up which the hay is carted, from the meadows on the opposite bank of the river, a shallow and stony bedded back-water meeting it at its junction with the main stream. Down this back-water in July the heavy cart-horses drag the sweet-scented haywains knee deep and axle deep in water, leaving feathery wisps of hay hanging from ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... coax a smile of reciprocal kindliness from the drawn curtains and half-closed shutters of the austere dwellings and the equally sealed and hard-set churchgoing faces of the people, at last settled down into a blank stare of stony astonishment. On this chilly March evening of the year 1850, that stare had kindled into an offended sunset and an angry night that furiously spat sleet and hail in the faces of the worshippers, and made them fight their way to the church, step by step, with bent heads and fiercely compressed lips, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... here I am, who scarce could gain this place, Through stony mountains and a dreary waste; Through cliffs, whose sharpen'd stones tremendous hung, Where ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero
... were spoken by the resolute men. The stony pavement echoed their measured, heavy tread. Turning into Broadway they saw the enemy but a block and a half away, a howling mob, stretching northward as far as the eye could reach. It was sweeping the thoroughfare, thousands in line. Pedestrians, stages, vehicles of all kinds, ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... Arbuthnot a day. St. John himself will scarce forbear To bite his pen, and drop a tear. The rest will give a shrug, and cry, "I'm sorry—but we all must die!" Indifference, clad in Wisdom's guise, All fortitude of mind supplies: For how can stony bowels melt In those who never pity felt! When we are lash'd, they kiss the rod, Resigning to the will of God. The fools, my juniors by a year, Are tortur'd with suspense and fear; Who wisely thought my age ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... These were colored cavalry, and are now holding our advanced pickets toward Richmond. General Kautz, with three thousand cavalry from Suffolk, on the same day with our movement up James river, forced the Blackwater, burned the railroad bridge at Stony Creek, below Petersburg, cutting in two Beauregard's force at that point. We have landed here, intrenched ourselves, destroyed many miles of railroad, and got possession, which, with proper supplies, we can hold out against the whole of Lee's army. I have ...
— The Black Phalanx - African American soldiers in the War of Independence, the - War of 1812, and the Civil War • Joseph T. Wilson
... scrutinized at leisure by the child, pulled apart, and even wasted. This can be done with the objects discussed in this book; they are under the feet of childhood—grass, feathers, a fallen leaf, a budding twig, or twisted shell; these things cannot be far out of the way, even within the stony limits ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... 'they themselves are old'. What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it show: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... must have presented the poverty-stricken aspect still characteristic of villages in the East. We see to-day the streets where Jesus played as a child in the stony paths or little lanes which separate the dwellings from each other. No doubt the house of Joseph much resembled these poor domiciles, lighted only by the doorway, serving at once as workshop, kitchen, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... Look to right: beyond the summits of Megara lifts a noble cone. It is an old friend, Acro-Corinthus. The plain within the hills is sprinkled with thriving farmsteads, green vineyards, darker olive groves. The stony hill-slopes are painted red by countless poppies. One hears the tinkling of the bells of roving goats. Thus the more distant view; while at the very foot of the hill of vision rises a temple with proud columns and pediments,—the fane of Demeter the "Earth Mother" and the ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... looked up sharply as Garrison entered. He was a small, hard man, with a face like an ice-pick and eyes devoid of pupils, which fact gave him a stony, blank expression. In fact, he had been likened once, by Jimmy Drake, to a needle with two very sharp eyes, and the simile was merited. But he was an excellent flesh handler; and Waterbury, an old ex-bookie, knew what he was about when he appointed him head ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... to imagine how ugly a woman would have to be to make me repel her advances with stony coolness. Every woman, the least attractive even, could make me stumble, simply by humbling herself. As by an excess of chivalry, I could not refuse a woman's request nor even await it. It was as though I must prevent her casting off her modesty at all costs by my own ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... with my waking thoughts Bright with thy praise, Out of my stony griefs Bethel I'll raise; So by my woes to be Nearer, my God, to thee, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... of Miles's voice the woman had started slightly, and her cheeks had flushed; she was trembling now. She stood still, during an impressive pause of several moments; then slowly lifted up her head and looked into Hendon's eyes with a stony and frightened gaze; the blood sank out of her face, drop by drop, till nothing remained but the grey pallor of death; then she said, in a voice as dead as the face, "I know him not!" and turned, with a moan and a stifled sob, and tottered ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... fast, so the breakfast was of oatmeal porridge, flavoured with honey, and washed down with mead, after which Brother Shoveller mounted his mule, a sleek creature, whose long ears had an air of great contentment, and rode off, accommodating his pace to that of his young companions up a stony cart- track which soon led them to the top of a chalk down, whence, as in a map, they could see Winchester, surrounded by its walls, lying in a hollow between the smooth green hills. At one end rose ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... into madness. It is good, too, that those crimes should be remembered, and freshly pondered; but it is equally wholesome to study the opposite picture. Tyranny, ever young and ever old, constantly reproducing herself with the same stony features, with the same imposing mask which she has worn through all the ages, can never be too minutely examined, especially when she paints her own portrait, and when the secret history of her guilt is furnished by the confessions of her lovers. The perusal of her traits will not make us love popular ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... intense, for the Indians declared that the owner of the coat was alive, and the one who was wearing it, and who seemed to exercise some authority over the others, began an explanation in signs. He pointed to a cliff that overhung the stony beach at the mouth of the river, and, lifting his hand high above his head; brought it down with a violent gesture, as if to simulate a fall. He next motioned toward the canoes, talking volubly all the while, though his language was unintelligible to anyone except ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... evening, with a rather sad heart, Finn turned his back on the familiar trails, and hunted west and by south from the little gully in which he slept, heading toward the back ranges and the stony foot of Mount Desolation, that is. For a mile or more, even in this direction, he found that his evil fame preceded him, and no good hunting came his way. But presently a flanking movement to the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... tempest stalks the stormy sea, The lightning leaps with lurid light, The glad gull calls from lea to lea, The whistling whirlwind fills the night; Bears each a message to my love, Whose stony ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed
... morning we set off again. The weather proved extremely bad the whole day. We went down the river at an amazing rate, and just before night they put ashore upon a stony beach. They hauled the canoe up, and all disappeared in a moment, and I was left quite alone; it rained violently, and was very dark. I thought it was as well to lay down upon the beach, half side in water, as to get into a swamp under a dropping ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr
... life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children things they had much better not know. I have lived here, here in Detton Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly, and death is fearsome. And now you see what I have chosen—not in a moment's folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment's passion, either, because until now the ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... mentioned instances of stony bodies having been seen to fall from the sky. The Chinese and Japanese carefully note down the most striking and remarkable phenomena of nature, believing them to have some connexion with public affairs; and the chronicles ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... cooler than oil, although it be different in nature. Such herbs defend the throat from the sharpness of rheums, the stomach from corrosive humours of disease or acrimonious medicines; the ureters from sharp, choleric, or acid urine, and lubricate the passage for the stony gravel. Their crude parts cool the heat of scorbutic blood, lessen its violent motion, and sheathe ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... Philippines our problem is larger. They are very rich tropical islands, inhabited by many varying tribes, representing widely different stages of progress toward civilization. Our earnest effort is to help these people upward along the stony and difficult path that leads to self-government. We hope to make our administration of the islands honorable to our Nation by making it of the highest benefit to the Filipinos themselves; and as an earnest of what we intend to do, we point to what we have done. Already a greater measure of material ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Supplemental Volume: Theodore Roosevelt, Supplement • Theodore Roosevelt
... these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and pain... We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting down under a bush resting a little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was standing up watching to see if I could tell ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... the aforesaid stony crests of Puebla the white town and church towers of Vitoria can be descried on a slope to the right- rear of the field of battle. A warm rain succeeds the fog for a short while, bringing up the fragrant scents from fields, vineyards, and gardens, ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Chakoras of eyes furnished with black corners, and the birds that love their young. And he saw the mountain abounding in lotus plants growing in delightful reservoirs of water. And the cranes rendered it charming with their sounds; and the Kinnaras and the celestial nymphs were seated on its stony slabs. And the elephants occupying the cardinal points had everywhere robbed its trees with the end of their tusks; and the demi-gods of the Vidyadhara class frequented the hill. And it was full of various gems, and was also infested by snakes bearing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... that down thy Giants' Stair Shall thy old giants bring with thundering tread— The blind crusader standing stony there, And him, the latest of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... bandages close and tight as a nun's coif. They framed a face hardly less white and set in a stony insensibility. ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... Without contains in chief the Borough, or Long Southwark, St. Margaret's Hill, Blackman Street, Stony Street, St. Thomas's Street, Counter Street, the Mint Street, Maiden Lane, the Bankside, Bandy-leg Walk, Bennet's Rents, George Street, Suffolk Street, Redcross Street, Whitecross Street, Worcester Street, Castle Street, Clink Street, ...
— London in 1731 • Don Manoel Gonzales
... thing he had meant, Keller returned to the porch and leaned against the door jamb while he opened his letter. His appearance immediately sandbagged conversation. Stony eyes were focused upon him incuriously, with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... moved even your stony heart to compassion," returned Leonard, getting up and quitting the lodge. Followed by Wingfield, and scarcely knowing where he was going, he forced his way through the crowd, and dashing down Snow-hill, did not stop till he reached Holborn Conduit, where, seizing ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... voices soar softly and mournfully over the suffocating heat of our narrow ditch. And suddenly a few more voices take up the song—and the song bubbles up like a wave, growing stronger, louder, as though moving asunder the damp, heavy walls of our stony prison. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... width of the canyon. Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage to civilization. I found and followed it, ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... repetition presented the appearance of a churchyard inscription viewed through a multiplying glass; but what most astonished us was that the Gothic heads, carved by pairs beside the labelled windows, opened wide their stony lips from time to time, and shouted aloud, in a voice somewhat resembling that of the domestic duck when she breaks out into sudden clamour in a hot, dry day, 'Clark, Clark, Clark!' We stood not a little ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... modern conditions were instituted, it became imperatively necessary to provide additional protection for the feet. We find the Greeks, in the classic time, wrestling with this problem. Xenophon, in his treatise on the care of horses, advises that they be reared on stony ground, he having observed that, in a natural way, the hoof becomes somewhat adapted to the necessities of its conditions. The Romans found the difficulty from the tender foot of the horse yet more serious on their ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... to call up all my resources. To allow her to remain now, with my feelings towards her all changed and my father's eyes fully opened to her stony nature, was impossible. Nor could I appeal to law. An open scandal was my father's greatest dread and divorce proceedings his horror. The child would have to go unless I could find a way to influence her through her own nature. I knew of but one—do not look at me, Miss Strange. ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... But it seems to me that it must have been so. When I was in Switzerland I used to look with astonishment at the many ruins of feudal castles perched on the top of steep and rocky heights, half a mile at least above sea-level, so that to reach them one had to climb many miles of stony tracks. A castle, as you know, is, a kind of mountain of stones—a dreadful, almost an impossible, labour! Doubtless the builders were all poor men, vassals, and had to pay heavy taxes, and to keep up the priesthood. How, then, could they provide for themselves, and when had they ...
— The Idiot • (AKA Feodor Dostoevsky) Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... wood of tall, straight pine-trees. We follow the steady, slow footsteps of Joseph, the chief guide, up the winding path that turns and twists, and turns again, but rises, always rises, until we are clear of the wood, past the rough, stony ground, and on to the snow, firm and hard to the feet before the sun has melted the night's frost. When we reach the rocks, and before we rope, Aloys removes his ruecksack and proceeds to lay out our luncheon; for if one breakfasts at two one is ready for the next ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... the course of the great stream. Such are the Hazem and the Qassaim, in the country between the Bahr-i-Nedjif and the Persian Gulf, low pebbly ridges which skirt the valley from the Bahr to below Suk-es-Sheioukh. Further west the desert becomes more stony, its surface being strewn with numerous blocks of black granite, from which it derives its appellation of Hejerra. No permanent streams water this region; occasional "wadys" or torrent-courses, only ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... of the History of Woman Suffrage, which bring the record to twenty years ago, represent the seed-sowing time of the movement. They do far more than this, for seeds sown in the early days which they describe would have fallen upon ground so stony that if they had sprung up they would soon have withered away. The pioneers in the work for the redemption of women found an unbroken field, not fallow from lying idle, but arid and barren, filled with ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... thought, "they has to be cwacked dus 'ike nuts." And she proceeded to crack, not the stones, but her own little, eager, blundering fingers, instead. O stony, stony-hearted stones and pebbly-hearted pebbles! Tot's cup of bitterness seemed to flow over. She stood up, sobbing. A sudden ...
— Connor Magan's Luck and Other Stories • M. T. W.
... six cows to lift. We struggled manfully, and got five on their feet, and then proceeded to where the last one was lying, back downwards, on a shadeless stony spot on the side of a hill. The men slewed her round by the tail, while mother and I fixed the dog-leg and adjusted the ropes. We got the cow up, but the poor beast was so weak and knocked about that she immediately fell down again. We resolved to let her have a few minutes' spell before making ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... solitary way toward the capital of Normandy, till night overtook him ere he was aware. Clouds so obscured the sky, that not a star was visible; and his horse, terrified at the impenetrable darkness, and the difficulties of the path, which lay over a barren and stony moor, suddenly stopped. This aroused Wallace from a long fit of musing to look around him; but on which side lay the road to Rouen, he could form no guess. To pass the night in so exposed a spot might be dangerous, and spurring the animal, ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... improving him. He was an exceedingly holy man, almost entirely covered with white hair. You could see nothing but his eyes, and he seemed to talk with them. A monk of immense learning and acute intellect he had made himself happy in a little stone hut and a little stony garden in the Balkans, chiefly by writing the most crushing refutations of exposures of certain heresies, the last professors of which had been burnt (generally by each other) precisely 1,119 years previously. They were ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... handed down. The consequence of them is, that scarce one of the classical pictures exhibited is worth much more than two-and-sixpence. Borrowed from statuary, in the first place, the color of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to participate in it; they are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue, as if they had been painted in a world where no color was. In every picture, there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns, white statues—those oblige accomplishments of the sublime. There are the endless ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies between Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow.... To me, Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth: its mountains were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in the grassy ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... the granite Lion lies And gazes toward the East, with woman's eyes That read the riddle of the undying sun, Bearing within her breast the stony germ Of continents, but—lasting no less firm— The memory of those marvels done, The battles fought, the words that wrought To free a race, and chasten one. We leave him where the river slowly winds, A broken chain; The river that so late its hero finds, Without a stain, Whose name ...
— Rose and Roof-Tree - Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... nothing; but he took wine with a decorous persistency that was almost pious and seemed like a religious rite. It should be observed that while he drank twice as much as did any other gentleman, not excepting Mr. Harley himself, it in no whit altered the stony propriety of his visage. There came no color to his cheek; nor did the piscatorial eye blaze up, but abode as pikelike as before. Also, with every bumper Mr. Gwynn became more rigid, and more rigid ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... drooping head, his gray sides heaving. He seemed to be "all in," but to our amazement he was off again like the wind even before the car had started. During the last three miles the ground had been changing rapidly, and we soon reached a stony plain where there was imminent danger of smashing a front wheel. The wolf was heading directly toward a rocky slope which lay against the sky like the spiny back of some gigantic monster ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... to learn to read and write under the personal superintendence of the Emperor. He now began to take him into the private apartments, among others, of the Koki-den, saying, "The mother is gone! now at least, let the child be received with better feeling." And if even stony-hearted warriors, or bitter enemies, if any such there were, smiled when they saw the boy, the mother of the heir-apparent, too, could not entirely exclude him from her sympathies. This lady had two daughters, and they found in their half-brother a pleasant playmate. Every one was pleased ...
— Japanese Literature - Including Selections from Genji Monogatari and Classical - Poetry and Drama of Japan • Various
... to march inland and take the town; 'but,' he says, 'besides that I knew it would offend his Majesty, I am sure the poor English merchant should have been ruined, whose goods he had in his hands, and the way being mountainous and most extreme stony, I knew that I must have lost twenty good men in taking a town not worth two groats.' The Governor of Lanzarote continued to be in a craven state of anxiety, and would not hear of trading. We cannot blame him, especially ...
— Raleigh • Edmund Gosse
... a stony mass of insensibility. There was no logic in my attitude; I see it now. Appearances were all against me, and her belief no more than justified. I overlooked all this, and instead of saving time by recounting how I came to be there and thus delivering her from the ...
— The Suitors of Yvonne • Raphael Sabatini
... have given to the Bravi, I found them beyond the borders of truth in the delicious Gardens of Irresponsibility, where many strange people dwell together, who might be real, and may be alive some day, but who have not yet made up their minds to exchange the flowery paths of fiction for the stony roads and dusty ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... elevation of the Hakone Pass is extremely beautiful, the white-tipped cone of the magnificent Fuji towering over all, like a presiding genius. Near the hamlet of Yamanaka is a famous point, called Fuji-mi-taira (terrace for looking at Fuji). Big cryptomerias shade the broad stony path along much of its southern slope ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... the discomforts of drowning. As will be remembered, the obstructionist nature of the Irish soil prevented the City of Chicago from proceeding farther inland than was necessary to keep her well balanced amidships upon a convenient and not too stony bed; and that after a brief sojourn on the rocks she was finally disposed of to the Styx Navigation Company, under which title Charon had had himself incorporated, is a matter of nautical history. The change of name to the Gehenna was the act of ...
— The Pursuit of the House-Boat • John Kendrick Bangs
... received the name of Trochites, and gave rise to much discussion. Naturalists puzzled their brains about them, called them star-shaped crystals, aquatic plants, corals; and to these last Linnaeus himself, the great authority of the time on all such questions, referred them. Beside these stony stars, which were found in great quantities when attention was once called to them, impressions of a peculiar kind had been observed in the rocks, resembling flowers on long stems, and called "stone lilies" naturally enough, for their long, graceful stems, terminating either in a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the valley below with the keen glance of those whose eyes are never dimmed by printed page or city lights. Dressed in the rude garb of those to whom clothes are a necessity, not a means of display, tall and lean with hard muscles, tough sinews and cruel stony faces, they seemed a part of the wild life about them; and yet withal, there was a touch of the mountain grandeur in their manner, and in the unconscious air of freedom and self-reliance, as there always is about everything that remains ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... ghost-like form, in a fluttering dress, on the skirts of the forest? The wheels creak, and rattle along the stony road—no sounds can be distinguished in the confusion. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... distinguished sister. As my movements are necessarily secret, pray write only in the utmost confidence to Mademoiselle Justine. I hope to soon return and enjoy once more the hospitalities of your intellectual circle." The address given for India was "Bombay Club." Miss Euphrosyne gazed up at the stony lineaments of Professor Delande, her marble-browed and flinty-hearted sire, locked in the cold chill of a steel engraving. He was as neutral as the busts of Buffon, Cuvier, Laplace, Humboldt, and Pestalozzi, which coldly furnished forth her sanctum. She thought of ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... drew near the island, we found it was at a place where there could be no landing, there being a great surff on the stony beach. So we dropt anchor, and swung round towards the shore. Some people came down to the water edge and hallow'd to us, as we did to them; but the wind was so high, and the surff so loud, that we could not hear so as to understand each other. There were canoes on the shore, ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... silent old sea-dog, Jonas Wegg, had come into this secluded wilderness to locate was a problem the Millville people had never yet solved. Certainly it was with no idea of successfully farming the land he had acquired, for half of it was stony and half covered by pine forest. But the house he constructed was the wonder of the country-side in its day. It was a big, two-story building, the lower half being "jest cobblestones," as the neighbors sneeringly remarked, while the upper half was "decent pine lumber." ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... it every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to be unvisited except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. Behind the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, to join the Stony Creek waters and empty into ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... I thought of the wire," Mac added cheerfully, and slipped into reminiscences of the Wet, drawing the Maluka also into experiences. And as they drifted from one experience to another, forced camps for days on stony outcrops in the midst of seas of water were touched on lightly as hardly worth mentioning; while "eating yourself out of tucker, and getting down to water-rats and bandicoots," compared favourably with a day or two spent in trees or on stockyard ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... foray through the rest of the house, when the door opened slowly and a lady-abbess entered. She was stiff and stately, with the most formal neckerchief folded precisely over her straitened bust, a clear-muslin cap concealing her hair, and her face, stony, blue-eyed and cold—a pale, frozen woman ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... Our replies, however, might have been condensed into a few simple statements. We had, we related, been over five months on the trail; after the first month, tender-footed cattle began to appear from time to time in the herd, as stony or gravelly portions of the trail were encountered,—the number so affected at any one time varying from ten to forty head. Frequently well-known lead cattle became tender in their feet and would drop back to the rear, and on striking soft or sandy footing recover and resume their position in the ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... fortunes were now at their lowest ebb. Burdened with a wife and child, he had found it necessary to return, after a second futile attempt to gain a living by his calling in a country town, to Milan, his "stony-hearted step-mother." If he had reckoned on his mother's bounty he was doomed to disappointment, for Chiara was an irritable woman, and as her son's temper was none of the sweetest, it is almost certain that they must have quarrelled occasionally. ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... building like a good stable with a litter of straw on the floor, guarding his bundle amongst a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they were all led down to the stony shores of an extremely broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed immense. There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it packed tight, ...
— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad
... clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows
... was spread; a huge fire blazing in the stony cavity removed all appearance of damp or discomfort, and shed a warm, ruddy light on the groups within. It was a rude home for the King of Scotland and his court, yet neither murmuring nor despondency was marked on the bold brows of the warriors, or the gentler and paler features of ...
— The Days of Bruce Vol 1 - A Story from Scottish History • Grace Aguilar
... partially obscured in the hall, behind Mrs. Williams. Penrod's eyes, with a veiled anguish, conveyed a pleading for help as well as a horror of the position in which he found himself. Sam, however, pale and determined, seemed to have assumed a stony attitude of detachment, as if it were well understood between them that his own comparative innocence was established, and that whatever catastrophe ensued, Penrod had brought it on and must bear the ...
— The Boy Scouts Book of Stories • Various
... all these charms was cold, Though well he saw her bosom's gentle fire, Stern is the soul that worships fame or gold, To all that softer ecstacies inspire. A stony heart these tyrants e'er require, Brave Smith ne'er thought of Pocahontas' love, But only that his name would glitter higher In coming centuries, others' names above, Whose soon contented souls ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley
... himself or with the world, for exploring these barren rocks seemed a useless whim of the Admiralty, and he could not conceive of any incident rising from the monotony of duty to lighten the darkness of this very brilliant day. His was not the nature to enjoy the stony detail of his profession. Excitement and adventure were as the breath of life to him, and since he had played his little part at the Jersey battle in a bandbox eleven years before, he had touched hands with accidents of flood ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... forth. Surely that broke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were foiled at every turn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in their attempt to find ground for laying an information against Him. But neither His gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these hearts, made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that their contact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility, and to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... the unhappy Queen's despair; she became stony with grief, and fears were felt for her reason. Josephine's grief was boundless. She did not dare to leave the Empire without the Emperor's authorization, and so did not go to The Hague, but went in all haste to the Castle of Laeken, near Brussels, whence she wrote to Hortense in the evening of May ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... together of Particles. Hardening by Exposure to Air. Concretionary Nodules. Consolidating Effects of Pressure. Mineralization of Organic Remains. Impressions and Casts: how formed. Fossil Wood. Goppert's Experiments. Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on. Sources of Lime and ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... valleys and the friend of the little frame-house hamlets that are linked across its waters by a spidery bridge of wooden trestles. At times beneath the hills it is swift and combed by a thousand stony fingers, and at other times it is an idler in Arcadie, a dilettante stream that wanders in half a dozen feckless channels over a desert of white stones, with here and there the green humpback of an ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... other parts of the hill country were opened to summer sojourn, the region of Lion's Head remained almost primitively solitary and savage. A stony mountain road followed the bed of the torrent that brawled through the valley at its base, and at a certain point a still rougher lane climbed from the road along the side of the opposite height to a lonely farm-house pushed back on a narrow shelf of land, with a meagre acreage ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... high they ride, 670 Then downward plunge beneath the involving tide; Till one, who seems in agony to strive, The whirling breakers heave on shore alive: The rest a speedier end of anguish knew, And press'd the stony beach—a lifeless crew! Next, O unhappy chief! the eternal doom Of Heaven decreed thee to the briny tomb: What scenes of misery torment thy view! What painful struggles of thy dying crew! Thy perish'd hopes all buried in the flood 680 O'erspread with corses, red ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... Edward began to find the exercise, to which he was unaccustomed, more fatiguing than he expected. The lingering twilight served to show them through this Serbonian bog, but deserted them almost totally at the bottom of a steep and very stony hill, which it was the travellers' next toilsome task to ascend. The night, however, was pleasant, and not dark; and Waverley, calling up mental energy to support personal fatigue, held on his march ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott
... up falsehoods to the skies!—WHO WILL BELIEVE THE TALE OF PROBABILITY? Brethren! behold the man whose cause I pleaded with you—for whom my feelings had well-nigh mastered my better judgment. Behold him, and learn how hard it is to pierce the stony heart of him whose youth has passed in dissolute living, and in adultery. Shall I approach thy ear with the voice of her who cries from the grave for justice on her seducer? Look, my beloved, on the man whom I found discarded by mankind, friendless and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... on tears shall we some day owe that most touching of all elegies,—the tale of tortures borne silently by souls whose tender roots find stony ground in the domestic soil, whose earliest buds are torn apart by rancorous hands, whose flowers are touched by frost at the moment of their blossoming? What poet will sing the sorrows of the child whose lips must suck a bitter breast, whose smiles are checked by the cruel fire ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... run away. He must not look at her professionally. Despair imparted to his countenance a look of stony vacuity which sat ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... her need, Mary Goffe did not plead with this stony- hearted man for shelter and protection, nor ask anything whatever for her own sake. All her ...
— The Man of Adamant - (From: "The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as wild a spot as imagination could picture. No wonder that the builder had abandoned the construction of this solitary dwelling; why it had ever been commenced passes my comprehension. It was just at the entrance of a mountain valley, treeless, stony, and rugged, through which there were at intervals the semblance of a track—a desolate, God-forgotten-looking place. On consulting the map I found that the "road" led to Moldavia. I resolved it should not lead me there. ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... cut him short, "Don't talk that way, Mr. Starbuck. He comes to me a religion typified, and I would rather walk over a stony road with him than to ride in a chariot ...
— The Starbucks • Opie Percival Read
... while she was speaking the woman regarded her with a hard, stony gaze; then replied, coldly and decisively, "You are wrong, miss"—how that title grated on Alida's ears!—"I am neither insane nor drunk. I do know what I am saying and where I am. You are playing ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... clearly, as a final idea, a conception of the last vividness. He might have been signifying by it the sharp corners and hard edges, all the stony pointedness, the grand right geometry of his spreading Palladian church. Just so, he was insensible to no feature of the felicity of a contact that, beguilingly, almost confoundingly, was a contact but with practically yielding lines and ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... sat two English ladies and a tall gentleman, who eyed the two young men fixedly, with a "stony ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... the effects of the storm, and the men, still suffering from a 'dissiness in the Heads after they had been so long toss'd at Sea,' had extra burdens to carry. The weather was wet and stormy, the roads were 'extreme rough and stony,' and when they encamped and lay down for the night, 'their Heads, Backs and Arms sank deep into the Clay.' Further, their rations were so spare that when they came on an inclosure with turnips they felt they ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... throat was dry and parched and aching; she had wept till her tears were all exhausted in their fountains; she was so weak that she could not stand upright on the floor, and she could only lie like a stony image of despair on her bed and wait ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... had warned them, the way proved both long and difficult, leading as it did up and down wild ravines, along the dry and stony beds of mountain torrents, through rough and narrow passes, and by the edge of dizzy precipices where a single false step would have meant a fall of hundreds of feet through space; but after ten days of arduous ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood |
