"Wizened" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see a poor, ragged, diminutive, wizened, yet jolly race of human beings,—a race of beings who wear hairy garments, sup reindeer's milk with wooden spoons, and dwell in big bee-hives,—he has only got to go to Lapland ...
— Chasing the Sun • R.M. Ballantyne
... table, which was covered with a "watered" oilcloth of a bright walnut tint. At her back stood Sarah Jane with a plate of corn bread in one hand and a glass pitcher containing buttermilk in the other. She was a slight, flaxen-haired child, with wizened ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... made her scramble out of bed and rush into the back room where she gathered a hot, squirming bundle into her arms and peered anxiously into its wizened face. She knew the trick babies had of dying when the weather was hot! Two other beloved scraps of humanity had been taken away from her, and she was fiercely determined to keep this one. Lugging the baby to the window, she ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... was so firm, you could trust it to tell no secrets; and his eyes (they were dark and deep set) looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... to slide over the side through the open entry port; and a moment later it began to quiver as the occupant of the boat left his craft and proceeded to scramble up, hand over hand. Presently there appeared on deck a little, thin, wizened man, who might have been any age over sixty. He was clothed in nothing but a length of brown cotton material swathed round his body, and round the upper part of each leg, the end being drawn up between the thighs so as to form a kind ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... tree of Castile is the encina, a kind of live-oak that grows low with dense bluish foliage and a ribbed, knotted and contorted trunk; it always grows singly and on dry hills. On the roads one meets lean men with knotted hands and brown sun-wizened faces that seem brothers to the encinas of their country. The thought of Unamuno, emphatic, lonely, contorted, hammered into homely violent phrases, oak-tough, oak-twisted, is brother to the men on the roads and to the encinas on the hills ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... man, very thin and meagre in aspect—so meagre as to conceal in part, by the general tenuity of his aspect, the shortness of his stature. He was not even so tall as Nina, as Nina had discovered, much to her surprise. His hair was grizzled, rather than grey, and the beard on his thin, wiry, wizened face was always close shorn. He was scrupulously clean in his person, and seemed, even at his age, to take a pride in the purity and fineness of his linen. He was much older than Nina's father—more than ten years older, as he would sometimes boast; but he was still strong and active, while ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... bidden, and as he opened the door a flash of lightning showed him, standing at the threshold, a little wizened old man with a small harp under ...
— Irish Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy
... the poor boy, whose thin, wizened face, with large, hungry eyes, was placed on a shrunk and distorted body. His mother was the pest of the court, always drunk, and in her drunken fury beating her wretched offspring. Half-starved and half-clothed, he passed his time on the door-step, gazing vacantly at the passers-by, ...
— Little Pollie - A Bunch of Violets • Gertrude P. Dyer
... of the student-days were not forgotten, but they did not seem to get on in the new house. The Miss Gandishes came to one of Mrs. Clive's balls, still in blue crape, still with ringlets on their wizened old foreheads, accompanying papa, with his shirt-collars turned down—who gazed in mute wonder on the splendid scene. Warrington actually asked Miss Gandish to dance, making woeful blunders, however, in the quadrille, while Clive, with something like one of his old smiles on his face, took ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... carts and the merry whistle of the drivers—the red-faced market woman is arranging fruit temptingly in front of her stall; the shopman in a small street is lowering shutters from his windows; the little old wizened woman has seated herself on the curb stone with a small supply of apples and candy; the one armed beggar has taken his accustomed place; the shop girls are hurrying to their places behind the counters, the brawny workman with ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... found him. Delgrado was astounded at first. Stampoff, shorn of his immense mustache, ceased to be a General. In fact, the wizened, keen faced old man bore a striking resemblance to a certain famous actor of the Comedie Francaise; but he was not seated in Alec's compartment ten seconds with the door closed ere he showed that the loss of his warrior aspect had in no ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... you, or over-tax your digestive powers; it is on the days you do not sing you ought more particularly to exercise your judgment and self-denial. I do not offer the pinched-up pilgarlic who dines off a wizened apple and a crust of bread as a model for imitation; at the same time, I warn you seriously against following the example of the gobbling glutton who swallows every ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... the desk, separated from the liturgy and sermon by such renderings of Tate and Brady as the unruly gang of volunteers with fiddles and wind instruments in the gallery pleased to contribute. The clerk, a wizened old fellow in a brown wig, repeated the responses in a nasal twang, and with a substitution of w for v so constant as not even to spare the Beliefs; while the local rendering of briefs, citations, and excommunications ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... Iskwao—who was born on New Year's Day, 1793, at Lesser Slave Lake, and had spent all her life there since. She had a numerous progeny which she bore to Kisiskakapo, "The man who stands still." She was now blind, and was partly led, partly carried into our tent—a small, thin, wizened woman, with keen features and a tongue as keen, which cackled and joked at a great rate with the crowd around her. It was almost awesome to look at this weird piece of antiquity, who was born in the Reign ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... the top end of Miss Buffum's table when I first saw his good-natured face with its twinkling eyes, high cheekbones and broad, white forehead in strong contrast to the wizened, almost sour, visage of our landlady. Up to the time of his coming every one had avoided that end, or had gradually shifted his seat, gravitating slowly toward the bottom, where the bank clerk, the college professor and I hobnobbed over our soup and ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As to countenance—a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek locks of scanty gray hair; as to character—an incredible mixture of homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband who is almost entirely led by his wife, ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac
... no more about that," growled an old wizened bowman, with a brown-parchment skin and little beady eyes. "It is better in these days to mend a bow than to bend one. You who never looked a Frenchman in the face are pricked off for ninepence a day, and I, who have fought five stricken fields, ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... squares of white paper; some are brilliant blue, others flashing crimson, others sombre in hue, but showing a glitter of living light whichever way you turn them. The odd thing is that the visitors are handling them and turning them over, and examining them quite freely, while the owner, a wizened old man in ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... with thin grey hair, which stood upright from his narrow head—what his age might have been it was impossible to guess; he was wizened, and dry, and grey, but still active enough on his legs when he had exchanged his slippers for his shoes; and as keen in all his senses as though years ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... David. The faces of children who sleep with their grandparents (a bad practice now waxing obsolete in England), of a young wife married to an old man and of a young man married to an old woman, show a peculiar wizened appearance, a look of age overlaying ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... don't you leave her alone? A little wizened monkey like that!" It was thus that Madame Socani expressed her opinion of her rival. "A creature without an ounce of flesh on her bones. Her voice won't last long. It never does with those little mean made apes. There was Grisi and Tietjens,—they had something of a body for a voice to ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... vagrant by bringing him under the eyes of the great soldier Nobunaga, who was attracted by his wizened, monkeyish face and restless eyes and gave him occupation among his grooms. As he grew older his love of war became pronounced, he took part in the numerous civil turmoils in which his patron was ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 12 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... wizened face was thrust inside Oliver's bedroom door. He was shaking with terror, his eyes almost ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Bentham, for our sakes, begged that we come to a sea-anchor. He knew that we continued to run only in the hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out. He was a noble man. So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had wizened to points of steel. And in such noble company how could I be less noble? I thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of peril, for the privilege of having known two such men. God and the right dwelt in them and ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... nodded his head in a knowing way, but said nothing. He was a strange-looking individual, with clothing which was made of all sorts of odds and ends pieced together; while so lean and wizened was he that it made the Prince hungry ...
— Prince Vance - The Story of a Prince with a Court in His Box • Eleanor Putnam
... and they came to a little clearing. On one edge of it stood a hut before which was an old man—so old in fact that to the outdoor girls he seemed like a wizened monkey. ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... his caution, was within a step of leaving the room out of his proper turn; but the startled pressure of Miss Willoughby's hand on his arm warned him in time. He stopped, to allow the statuesque Miss Chester to sail out under escort of a wizened little man with a horseshoe pin in his tie, whose name, in company with nearly all the others that had been spoken to him since he came into the room, had escaped ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... himself surreptitiously taking the six-shooter from Roth's showcase—and he recalled vividly how he had felt at the time—"jest plumb mean," as he put it. Roth had been mighty decent to him. . . . The Mexican, a wizened little man, cross-eyed and wrinkled, stumbled from ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... none of your tobacco-spitting, wizened-up little runts like you'll see hangin' on ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... Sokala was wizened and lined of face, and across his forehead were many deep furrows, and it seemed that he lived in a state of perplexity as to what should become of all his riches when he died, for he was cursed ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... The wizened creature immediately hid the revolver under the folds of the blanket and began to play nervously with the chessmen. Both of us waited, listening to the approach of the footsteps which came so cautiously behind ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... said Mr. Bell, turning his back upon the wizened old financier. "I have seen to it that the money taken from them has been returned ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... the drama loomed in his mind larger for that fateful last act. The tragic sock and the mask enhanced them. What mystery lay behind Manuela's sidelong eyes? What sin or suffering? What knowledge, how gained, justified Esteban's wizened saws? These two were wise before their time; when they ought to have been flirting on the brink of life, here they were, breasting the great flood, familiar with death, hating ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... was brightly lighted, evidently a young lady's boudoir. This much his first glance showed Jack. It showed him also two women—one young and very beautiful, the other wizened and monkey-like, both terrified and speechless. They were Don Fernandez' daughter, Rafaela, and her duenna or ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge
... or sundered far, I am thy guard, and to thine enemies Implacably oppose me: look on them, These greedy fiends, beneath my craft subdued! See, they are fallen on sleep, these beldames oid, Unto whose grim and wizened maidenhood Nor god nor man nor beast can e'er draw near. Yea, evil were they born, for evil's doom, Evil the dark abyss of Tartarus Wherein they dwell, and they themselves the hate Of men on earth, and ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... who seemed to combine the functions of station agent and baggage hustler approached, wheeling a truck. He was a small man, gray-headed, with a wrinkled, wizened face, and eyes of faded blue. To ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... be), he would say, "In two minutes you will see the loveliest of her sex. A little dainty creature, perfect in feature, perfect in shape, who might have stepped bodily out of the frame of a Greuze. A perfect dream of loveliness." They were considerably astonished when a little wizened woman, with a face like a withered apple, entered the room. He was fond, too, of descanting on Mrs. Pritchard's wonderfully virtuous temperament, notwithstanding her amazing charms. Visitors probably reflected that, given her appearance, the path of duty must ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... there by himself, counting piles of pelf Of a counterfeit gamboge hue. He's wizened and dried like old Arthur Gride, That the novelist DICKENS drew. In the midst of his heaps, He conveniently sleeps With his glass at ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... woman. Nobody had ever known where she came from. The benevolent lady who founded the institution, had brought her to the door one morning in her coach, and the neighbors had seen the little brown, wizened creature, with a most extraordinary gown on, alight and enter. This was all any one had ever known about her. In fact, the benevolent lady had come upon her in the course of her travels in a little German town, sitting in a garret window, behind a ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... Lenoble to herself—a wizened, sallow-faced Macchiavellian individual, whose business in England must needs be connected with conspiracy, treason, commercial fraud, anything ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... had seen his guest only the day before. He looked vaguely about for something that Thornton might smoke, then seated himself on a cluttered bench holding a number of retorts, beside which flamed an oxyacetylene blowpipe. He was a wizened little chap, with scrawny neck and protruding Adam's apple. His long hair gave no evidence of the use of the comb, and his hands were the hands of Esau. He had an alertness that suggested a robin, but at the ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs—one of the boys who had known him a long time ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... doubt that this little white house was the proper destination of the letter, Joshua Hicks administered an authoritative knock on the front door. The response came in the form of a queer little old lady, who wore a very expectant look, a look almost pathetically expectant. She was slight and wizened, and stood straight. But her face was deeply wrinkled and her ...
— Roy Blakeley in the Haunted Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge; and when he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of study. It was not in the personal appearance of the little, dry, wizened old man that the interest lay, for he was precisely like dozens of other church-guardians in France, but in a curious furtive or rather hunted and oppressed air which he had. He was perpetually half glancing behind him; the muscles of his back and shoulders seemed to be hunched in a continual nervous ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James
... boy! That's George's mother. You know my husband. No, there she is—the wizened up one in black. . . . And she's going on to the Mainwarings' too—so you'll have ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... boot on the ground, and the slime and slush oozed out of it and formed a puddle. "That's pretty stuff to stand in for a man of sixty-four, yent it, John?" With a volubility and energy of speech little to be expected from his wizened appearance, the hedger and ditcher entered into details of his job. He began work at six that morning with stiff legs and swollen feet, and as he stood in the mingled mire and water, the rheumatism came ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... her, with the look of a hunted creature in her eyes. Her son, who followed her, was more at his ease, but he also had a worried and careworn look. Both were warmly but very poorly clad, and both worn and weatherbeaten of aspect. The old woman might have passed anywhere for a witch, so wizened and weird she was, of small stature, and bent nearly double by years and rheumatism. Her small hands were withered away into claws, and her head was covered with a thick and tangled mat of hair, half dark, half grey, which gave her the look almost of the Fuegian savages who come off from ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... dark forest where people seldom went, lived a wizened old Alan. [70] The skin on her wrinkled face was as tough as a carabao hide, and her long arms with fingers pointing back from the wrist were horrible to look at. Now this frightful creature had a son whose name was Sayen, and he was as handsome as his mother was ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole
... right with your poorest and sickliest "Supposing I don the marriage vestiment: "So shut your mouth and open your Testament, "And carve me my portion at your quickliest!" Accordingly, as a shoemaker's lad With wizened face in want of soap, And wet apron wound round his waist like a rope, (After stopping outside, for his cough was bad, To get the fit over, poor gentle creature, And so avoid disturbing the preacher) —Passed in, I sent my elbow spikewise At the shutting door, and entered likewise, ...
— Christmas Eve • Robert Browning
... they were his friends, his fellow-workers, boatmen, like himself. All surrounded him, gesticulating. An old man, wizened as a dried plaice, tapped him on the ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... were full, but their occupants were silent, too sick or too weak to move. Nor were there any romping children. There were, to be sure, vast numbers of undersized figures in the square, but one needed to look twice to realize that they were not pygmies or wizened little old folks. It was not strange that Jacket had compared them to gourds with legs, for all were naked, and most of them had bodies swollen into the likeness of pods or calabashes. They looked peculiarly grotesque with their spidery ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... counted on a train which (as is not uncommon in France) existed only in the "Indicateur des Chemins de Fer;" and instead of waiting for another we engaged a vehicle to take us home. A sorry carriole or patache it proved to be, with the accessories of a lumbering white mare and a little wizened, ancient peasant, who had put on, in honour of the occasion, a new blouse of extraordinary stiffness and blueness. We hired the trap of an energetic woman, who put it "to" with her own hands; women in Touraine and the Blesois appearing to have the best of it in the business of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... wiry, almost wizened, little man of fifty, tanned to gipsy brown. He had a shrewd thin face, with an oddly flattened nose, and little round moist dark eyes that glittered like diamonds. He wore cloth cap on the back of his head, showing in front a thick mass of closely cropped hair. His collarless shirt was open at ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... a man confess such things?" my companion asked me, and we stood looking at each other in the midst of the gardens until an ape, cattling prettily, ran towards me and jumped into my arms, and looking at the curious little wizened face, the long arms covered with ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... little wizened man wanted on Earth. His eyes darted down to the point of the knife that showed under Gordon's sleeve, and he licked his lips, showing snaggled teeth. The wheel hesitated and came to a halt, with the ball trembling in ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey
... the wizened little old man steadying his fat klootch along her uncertain way. Down on the lake the chastised logger stood out in his boat, resting once on his oars to shake a fist at Benton. Then Charlie faced about on his ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... atrocious, seemed to him too great for persons clearly guilty of enormous crimes. I have already referred to his defence of the horrible Boiling Act which disgraced the reign and the parliament of Henry VIII. The account of Mary Stuart's old and wizened face as it appeared when her false hair and front had been removed after her execution may be set down as an error of taste. But what is to be said, on the score of humanity, for an historian who in the nineteenth century calmly ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... distinguish it from the trunk that goes to the theatre, when you are travelling or en route), with its dents and scars, will be the only friendly object to greet you in your desolate boarding-house, with its one wizened, unwilling gas-burner, and its outlook upon back yards and cats, or roofs and sparrows, its sullen, hard-featured bed, its despairing carpet; for you see, you will not have the money that might take you to the front of the house and four burners. Rain or shine, you ...
— Stage Confidences • Clara Morris
... or child amongst them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and go on ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... anything which could help the most active man to climb it. More puzzled than ever, I retraced my steps to Kensington. I had not been in my study five minutes when the maid entered to say that a person desired to see me. To my astonishment it was none other than my strange old book collector, his sharp, wizened face peering out from a frame of white hair, and his precious volumes, a dozen of them at least, wedged ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes • Arthur Conan Doyle
... inch of this oak floor, when the frenzy for dancing seized him and the tunes were particularly irresistible. The bar-room gave him his only taste of Kaskaskia society, and he took it with zest. Little wizened black-eyed fellows clapped their hands, delighting, while their priest was not by, in the antics of a disreputable churchman; but the bigger and colder race paid little attention ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... I heard two people—two wizened city clerks—discussing the war in the train. "When and how will the Germans be beaten?" asked the first. The other shrugged his shoulders and declared solemnly, while pulling at his pipe: "The Germans? They have been beaten a long time ago! They were beaten ...
— Through the Iron Bars • Emile Cammaerts
... the extent of his certificated wisdom, was yet so singularly servile of habit and disposition that he might have won a success on the stage as Chief Toady in a burlesque of Court life. He was a pale, thin old man, with a wizened face set well back amid wisps of white hair, and a scraggy throat which asserted its working muscles visibly whenever he spoke, laughed or took food. His way of shaking hands expressed his moral flabbiness in the general dampness, looseness ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... over his head since I saw him last? The face that tried to smile at us from the pillow was strangely wizened and old. It was as though a withering blight had touched it. Only the eyes were the same. They glowed in the sunken face, beneath the shock of black hair, with a startling luster ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... demanded at first you had to give. He would have his throat cut rather than come down in price. He had the reputation of being fond of roaming on the far side of the Kuban with the Abreks; and, to tell the truth, he had a regular thief's visage. A little, wizened, broad-shouldered fellow he was—but smart, I can tell you, smart as the very devil! His tunic was always worn out and patched, but his weapons were mounted in silver. His horse was renowned throughout Kabardia—and, ...
— A Hero of Our Time • M. Y. Lermontov
... Princess, high-priestess of Hathor, Lady of the West, Goddess of Love and Nature. She wore Hathor's vulture headdress, and on it the disc of the moon fashioned of silver. Also were present Roi the head-priest, clad in his sacerdotal robes, an old and wizened man with a strong, fierce face, Ki the Sacrificer and Magician, Bakenkhonsu the ancient, myself, and a company of the priests of Amon-Ra, Mut, and Khonsu. From behind the statues came the sound of solemn singing, though who sang we could ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... wait with her heart thumping so, and why did it thump? She found herself praying, "O God, show me what to say!" and then the door was open a crack and a sharp wizened face with a striking resemblance to Cherry's bold little beauty, was thrust at her. It must be Cherry's mother. ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... wizened, twisted like a vine-shoot, with long, dust-coloured hair and a melancholy, impassive face that seemed carved out of old oak. He put in an appearance at Saint-Elophe once every three or four months. He knocked at the doors of the houses ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... "Why not?" The professor's wizened face screwed up wisely. "A year ago, when he was back from one of those mysterious long excursions he takes in that weirdly different aircraft of his, about which he is so secretive, he told me that he was conducting experiments to prove his belief that the human brain generates ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... Davie, a wizened, clean-shaven, dark-visaged little man, appeared with a scuttle of coal. "Ay, Davie; that's it! ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... his mind occupied with vague garrison rumors connected with this odd personality. The name had long been a familiar one, and he had often had the man pictured out before him, just such a wizened face and hunched-up figure, half crazed, at times malicious, yet keen and absolutely devoid of fear; acknowledged as the best scout in all the Indian country, a daring rider, an incomparable trailer, tireless, patient, and as tricky and treacherous as the wily savages he ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... Murata. The little wizened man was full of smiles. "She left Japan when she was not two years old. ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... held me by both shoulders, and he drew me into the recesses of the rocks and bent his wizened ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... o'clock to know if Mr. Soule wished to go out gunning in the morning, he found the old man still standing with his back to the fire, talking sharply of the Little Miami Railroad shares, then beginning to go up. "A thorough old Shylock," thought Starr, waiting, scanning the acrid, wizened face with its protruding black eyes, the dried-up figure in a baggy suit of blue, a white collar turned down nearly to the shoulders, and the gray hair knotted in a queue. He looked at the landlord, scowling at the interruption: M. Soule, on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... shrunk back into his clothes until he was but a little, wizened man. His face was ghastly and clammy perspiration glittered on his forehead ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... highly privileged in the house of Dea Flavia. She had nursed the daughter of proud Claudius Octavius at her breast, and between the wizened old woman and the fresh young girl there existed perfect friendship and the confidence born of years. Dea's first tooth was in Licinia's keeping and so was the first lock of hair cut from Dea's head. Licinia ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... little three-cornered hat on his head, and a blue long-skirted coat and waistcoat, richly laced. He had on also, I afterwards saw, knee-breeches, and huge silver buckles to his shoes. His countenance seemed wizened and dried up like a piece of parchment. Some of the younger passengers especially seemed to think him, by their remarks, a fair subject for their ridicule. The person who pulled was a huge negro. He must have been as tall ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston
... South, by the waste without sail on it, Far from the zone of the blossom and tree, Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it, Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea. Weird is the mist from the summit to base of it; Sun of its heaven is wizened and grey; Phantom of life is the light on the face of it— Never is night on it, never is day! Here is the shore without flower or bird on it; Here is no litany sweet of the springs— Only the haughty, harsh ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... they were feeling at home in their new quarters. At the table they met the usual group of village boarders: the Brann brothers, newsdealers; old man Troutt, who ran the livery-stable—and smelled of it; and a small, dark, and wizened woman who kept the millinery store. The others, who came in late, were clerks in the stores ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... already struck twelve when his old servant entered the room, a being thin, wizened, grey and noiseless as the ghost of a greyhound. He stood still a moment before his master, expecting that he would look up, then bent anxiously over him ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... seventy— upon this couch! Oh, I shall go mad—I am going mad—I can't bear it a moment longer. The last ten months have seemed like a life-time, but if it goes on year after year; oh, Babs, year after year until I am old—an old, old woman with grey hair and a wizened face, left alone, with no one to care for me! Oh, yes, yes, I know what you would say, but father and mother will be dead, and you will be married in a home of your own, and Spencer very likely at the other end ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... most preposterous wrinkles. If he leaned against a tree in the cour, with a very old and also fragile pipe in his pocket—the stem (which looked enormous in contrast to the owner) protruding therefrom—his three-sizes too big collar would leap out so as to make his wizened neck appear no thicker than the white necktie which flowed upon his two-sizes too big shirt. He always wore a coat which reached below his knees, which coat, with which knees, perhaps someone had once given him. It had huge shoulders which sprouted, ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... was announced Anthony had gone up to Tarrytown to see his grandfather, who, a little more wizened and grizzly as time played its ultimate chuckling tricks, greeted the news ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... sparer, more wizened and sinewy than ever as he stooped to open the sideboard. 'Where on earth do they keep everything?' he ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... Venus, since their friends are smit With a base passion—miserable dupes Who seldom mark their own worst bane of all. The black-skinned girl is "tawny like the honey"; The filthy and the fetid's "negligee"; The cat-eyed she's "a little Pallas," she; The sinewy and wizened's "a gazelle"; The pudgy and the pigmy is "piquant, One of the Graces sure"; the big and bulky O she's "an Admiration, imposante"; The stuttering and tongue-tied "sweetly lisps"; The mute girl's "modest"; and the garrulous, ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... quiet enough, till a day or two before her flittin', and then she took to rabblin', and sometimes skirlin' in the bed, ye'd think a robber had a knife to her throat, and she used to work out o' the bed, and not being strong enough, then, to walk or stand, she'd fall on the flure, wi' her ald wizened hands stretched before her face, and ...
— Madam Crowl's Ghost and The Dead Sexton • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... which he proposed to use for his purpose. All his life the penitentes had been to him a well-known fact of life. For the past week he had spent much of his time with the maestro de novios of the local chapter, a wizened old sheep herder, who had instructed him monotonously in the secrets of the order, almost lulling him to sleep with his endless mumblings of the ritual that was written in a little leather book a century old. He had learned that if he betrayed the secrets of the order, he would be buried alive ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson
... him. She had liked him for five years, ever since her mother had pointed him out on the platform of Knype Railway Station. She saw him closer now. He was older than she had been picturing him; indeed, the lines on his little, rather wizened face, and the minute sproutings of grey-white hair in certain spots on his reddish chin, where he had shaved himself badly, caused her somehow to feel quite sad. She thought of him as "a dear old thing," and then as "a dear old darling." Yes, old, very old! Nevertheless, she felt maternal ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett
... St. Louisian puffed its way into the big smoke-begrimed station in Missouri's largest city I looked about me for Bill, who was going to meet me at the station. We had not met since our prep. school and college days when Bill had been a thin, wizened little fellow, so hollow-chested that he had to be sent to Colorado for almost two years for his health. He came back to school looking better but before his diploma was handed to him announcing to the world that he was a full-fledged Bachelor of ...
— The Story of The American Legion • George Seay Wheat
... Daniel." That exhibition, which most people, who know anything about painting in its highest style of religious and monumental art, thought a most interesting display of a painter's career, is described by this most genial of critics as "acres of pallid purple canvases, with wizened saints ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... means fond of his elder apprentice, it was but seldom that he spoke to him. Robert Ashford was between eighteen and nineteen. He was no taller than Cyril, but it would have been difficult to judge his age by his face, which had a wizened look; and, as Nellie said one day, in his absence, he might pass very well ...
— When London Burned • G. A. Henty
... voice, and a wizened little man appeared suddenly, having evidently waited outside the door ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... hesitating French to the Marquis de Potachre, an old fellow of venerable and burlesque appearance. His fierce little white mustaches were curled ceilingward, but his voice was as timid as honey. He flourished his wizened hand ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... and upon churches and school-houses all too large, while in some hamlets the voices of young children were altogether wanting. This nation, with its elaborate governmental machinery, its churches and institutions, has to me the mournful aspect of a shrivelled and wizened old man dressed in clothing much too big, the garments of his once athletic and vigorous youth. Nor can I divest myself of the idea that the laughing, flower-clad hordes of riders who make the town gay with their presence, are but like butterflies fluttering out their short ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... across the room, Sir Lyster threw open the door, revealing a gap of darkness into which a moment later slid two figures, a pretty, fair-haired girl and a wizened little Japanese with large round spectacles and an ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... you thief of the Church! Do you think what isn't fit for your pig is good enough for your priest? Bring better, or never let me look on your wizened ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine
... enough for me just to tell you once for all that there is an insuperable obstacle in the way of our ever meeting. Maybe I've got a husband who is cruel to me. Maybe, biggest obstacle of all, I've got a husband whom I am utterly devoted to. Maybe, instead of any of these things, I'm a poor, old wizened-up, Shut-In, tossing day and night on a very small bed of very big pain. Maybe worse than being sick I'm starving poor, and maybe, worse than being sick or poor, I am most horribly tired of myself. Of course if you are very young and very prancy and reasonably good-looking, and still ...
— Molly Make-Believe • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... colonel's desk sat, or rather lounged, another officer, encased in a uniform so brilliant that it arrested the eye before one could discover its contents. These were a wizened, weather-beaten man of advanced age, yet rugged as hickory. His eyes had a periodical squint; his brows wore a persistent frown. There was a broad scar on his left cheek and another across his forehead. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne
... perfect rest from their old emotions. Rachel had just enough consciousness to suppose herself a donkey on the summit of a moor in a hail-storm, with its coat blown into furrows; then she became a wizened tree, perpetually driven back by the salt ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... the sitting-room. But in Turkey such conveniences are a secondary consideration. The rooms were freshly whitewashed, the board floors were scrubbed, and the view from the windows was one of the most beautiful in the world. A day spent in the bazaar did the rest. I picked up a queer, wizened old Dalmatian cook, and with the help of my servant was installed in the little place eight-and-forty hours after I had ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... been wanting to see you for a month." Captain Morton spoke all but in a whisper. The Adam's apple kept strangling him. The Judge saw that the old man was wrestling with some heavy problem. He turned, and looking down at the little wizened man, asked: ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... alias Betterly, who was trying to sell some mysterious undergarments to a fat old woman, caught sight of me, the Editor aforesaid, and winked. In a shadowed corner of the shop sat Mr. Potts himself upon a high stool, a wizened little old man with a bent back, a bald head, and a hooked nose upon which were set a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles that accentuated his general resemblance to an owl perched upon the edge of its nest-hole. He was busily engaged in doing nothing, and in ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard
... did live and got well, though she never grew a mite from that time. A little wizened-up thing she was, always; but I tell you folks 'round here thought a nawful lot of Aunt Debby! And Eddie, if you'll believe it, never took the sickness at all. They say, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... inspectors at Ventimiglia is a small, wizened Frenchman, with a face as cold and impassive as the sand-blown Sphinx. He possesses among other accomplishments a nose, peculiar less for its shape than for its smell. He can "smell out" tobacco as a witch doctor in Zululand smells out a "devil." Fate directed ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... a face shrunken and pallid, on which no smile came; great eyes grown wan with gazing into darkness looking out beneath the shaven head, emptily, as the hollow eye-pits of a skull; a wizened halting form wasted by abstinence, sorrow, and prayer; a long wild beard of iron grey; thin blue-veined hands that ever trembled like a leaf; bowed shoulders and lessened limbs. Time and grief had done their work indeed; scarce could I think ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... young leddy's tired," said he; "and that little lassie there (pointing to Jessie) looks as pale and as wizened as an old woman of seventy—the sooner they ...
— A Lady's Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852-53. • Mrs. Charles (Ellen) Clacey
... humiliations—ah, in a moment, how they had grown shrunken, and wizened, and old! For out of the radiance of revelation, as Christ of old spoke to His disciples, so now the spirit of Alleghenia ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the rendezvous. With him were two men whom Theydon had never before seen. One, a bulky, stalwart, florid-faced man of forty, had something of the military aspect; the other supplied his direct antithesis, being small, wizened and sallow. ...
— Number Seventeen • Louis Tracy
... did Charteris come that the colonel was not aware of his entrance until the novelist had coughed gently. He was in a dressing-gown, and looked unusually wizened. ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... that the old man was very old. And then memory stirred. He began to surmise that he had met the wizened face before, that he knew something about it. And the face brought up a picture of the shop door and of his father standing beside it, a long time ago. He recalled his last day at school. Yes, of course! This was the old man named Shushions, some sort ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... Archie, and though the hermit assured us he was only a baby when he bought him in Central Africa for about sevenpence halfpenny in Indian coin, he had now the wrinkled face of an old man of ninety—wrinkled, wizened, and weird. But his eye was singularly bright and young-looking. In his hand he carried a long pole from which he had bitten all the bark, and his only dress was a little petticoat of skunk skin, which the hermit called his kilt. He was, ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... in the shades of their complexions, moved to and from with the peculiar aimlessness of a Brazilian crowd. A stout and pompous negro politician from Bahia, wearing an orchid in his button-hole, rubbed elbows with a striking blonde lady of the sidewalks on his left, and forced a wizened little silk-hatted parda—approximately an octoroon—to dodge about him in order to progress. A young and languid person, his clothes the very last expiring gasp of fashion, fingered his stick patiently. He wore the painstakingly cultivated expression of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... sell a jewel, left us in a stone-floored hall or lobby, while he went upstairs to ask whether his master would see us. A few minutes later the stairs creaked, and Aldobrand himself came down. He was a little wizened man with yellow skin and deep wrinkles, not less than seventy years old; and I saw he wore shoes of polished leather, silver-buckled, and tilted-heeled to add to his stature. He began speaking ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner
... taken by Sylvia to be presented to the wise-ones, at whose instigation I had been brought to the island. These I found to be men, if indeed they could be called such, but they were so wizened in appearance as more to resemble monkeys. Their manner of life is so austere as to make it a matter for marvel that body and soul could cling together. They will not kill an animal for food, or for any other purpose, not even a fly or a flea, or anything ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... a wizened veteran of the studios, with a bald head which glistened rather ridiculously, entered as though he expected to be held for the death of the ...
— The Film Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve
... I'm lookin' at somethin' that gives me a pain. That wizened-up landshark of a Jerry Clifford is in sight, bound to the post-office, I cal'late. Goin' to put a one-cent stamp on a letter and let the feller that gets it pay the other cent, I suppose. He always asks the postmaster to lick the stamp, so's to save the wear and tear on his own tongue. ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... to conjuration, don't nobody know more 'bout that, and there ain't nobody had as much of it done to 'em as I have," said a wizened old woman. "I know nobody could stand what I have stood. The first I knowed 'bout conjuration was when a woman named Lucinda hurt my sister. She was always a 'big me,' and her chillun was better than anybody elses. Well her oldest child got pregnant and that ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... fight tooth and nail when a pretty girl is concerned, and I have frequently heard bursts of impassioned eloquence poured forth in defence of a pair of bright eyes or a piquant figure, in cases where an elderly or wizened dame would have run a strong chance of finding no Cicero by her side. Tom accordingly approached the bar for the purpose of putting some questions to his client, but not a word could he extract in reply. Euphemia drew down her veil, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... the two regarded the little brown woman so unconscious of their gaze. By the piteous wizened face screwed up in the sunlight, by the faded hair, nut-cracker jaws, and hollow eyes they utterly condemned Mrs. Tuttle, who, blue feathers floating, was also absorbed in watching ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 'ave, I ain't the on'y one wot 'as," said Eliza darkly. Her wizened little face suddenly flushed. "Lor, Miss," she said confidentially, "you doan't know wot a success that 'at you trimmed for me is. It's a fair scream. I wore it larst night, an' me young man—'im wot's in the Royal Irish—well, it fair knocked 'im! An' 'e wants ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... more impressive. It consisted in staring at the eastern sky, which was perfectly clear of cloud, and every now and again beckoning at it with his finger, then turning round to point with the assegai towards his rival. For a while I looked at him in silence. He was a curious wizened man, apparently over fifty years of age, with thin hands that looked as tough as wire. His nose was much sharper than is usual among these races, and he had a queer habit of holding his head sideways like a bird when he spoke, which, in addition to the ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... Cosmo a round punch on the shoulder next him that made him look from his work, and then began eying him up and down in the most supercilious manner. He was a small, withered, bowed man, with a thin wizened face, crowned by a much worn fur cap. His mouth had been so long drawn down at each corner as by weights of discontent, that it formed nearly a half-circle. His eyebrows were lifted as far as they would go above his ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... in the house was the ladies'-maid, a thin and wizened spinster, Madeleine Vivet by name. This Madeleine, in spite of, nay, perhaps on the strength of, a pimpled complexion and a viper-like length of spine, had made up her mind that some day she would be Mme. Pons. But in vain she dangled twenty ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... This was a wizened creature of about fifty, in rusty black, widow of a stonemason and mother of four children—'four livin',' she said with some significance. She added her mite of testimony to that of the 96,000 organized women ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... was more interesting to her than anything else in the world, Liz followed Gladys into the kitchen, where the old man sat, as usual, in his arm-chair by the fireside, looking very old and wizened and frail in the flickering glow of ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... explode. When he does, when he throws mud and stones, and shows us the side of him which the gutter developed, we are shocked, and marvel much what our boys are coming to, as if we had any right to expect better treatment of them. I doubt if Jacob, in the whole course of his wizened little life, had ever a hand in an honest game that was not haunted by the spectre of the avenging policeman. That he was not "doing anything" was no defence. The mere claim was proof that he was up to mischief of some sort. Besides, the policeman was usually right. Play in such a setting becomes ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... much as I am!" replied Desroziers. "It is a portrait in youth of that wizened old being we have ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac
... the mules with the gold-packs slung over their backs. There were four men to guard them, and it seemed to me that in one of these men I recognised the little wizened figure of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... redecorated by Cornichon in the most elegant taste; not a little to the scandal of some of the steady old country dowagers; for I had pictures of Boucher and Vanloo to decorate the principal apartments, in which the Cupids and Venuses were painted in a manner so natural, that I recollect the old wizened Countess of Frumpington pinning over the curtains of her bed, and sending her daughter, Lady Blanche Whalebone, to sleep with her waiting-woman, rather than allow her to lie in a chamber hung all over with looking-glasses, ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... like a parson's damn. Her face did not change, since a face must be said not to change while it preserves the same pleasant lines in the mobile parts as before; but anybody who has preserved his pleasant lines under the half-minute's peer of the invidious camera, and found what a wizened, starched kind of thing they stiffen to towards the end of the time, will understand the tendency of Ethelberta's lovely ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... round here.' An instant afterwards there appeared a little wizened fellow, with a cringing manner and a shambling style of walking. He wore an open jacket, with a splotch of tar on the sleeve, a red and black check shirt, dungaree trousers, and heavy boots badly worn. His face was thin and brown and crafty, ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... trunk of some tree and waited silently for me to pass. A lean, grey little man, clad in a quaintly barred and mottled mantle, woven by his own hands from some soft silky material, and a close-fitting brown peaked cap on his head with one barred feather in it for ornament, and a small wizened grey face with a thin sharp nose, puckered lips, and a pair ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... Gin. Dot's nigger trink. Absinthe? It's doped. You'll go off your chump, Froggy! Cochon! Whiskey, that's the ticket! Where's Paddy? Going asleep. Sing us that whiskey song, Paddy. [They all turn to an old, wizened Irishman who is dozing, very drunk, on the benches forward. His face is extremely monkey-like with all the sad, patient pathos of that animal in his small eyes.] Singa da song, Caruso Pat! He's gettin' old. The drink is too much for ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill
... and bright and orderly room, and the invalid in the big white bed bore evidence to the care and attention so dutifully lavished on him. He was a very wizened little old man, and his features had been crossed and recrossed by the finger of Time until their original characteristics were nearly obliterated. The expression upon his face resembled nothing so much as a sketch which has been done over so many times that its first design ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Friend Mrs. Lathrop • Anne Warner
... you think I would come?" said Reginald, looking down with tears in his eyes on the poor wizened upturned face. ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... experiences he had come across scores of such men, dapper little fellows, wizened of face yet curiously youthful in manner; but they, each and all, were labeled "low comedian." Certainly, a rare intelligence gleamed from this man's eyes, but that is an attribute not often lacking in humorists who command ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... was crouching well to one side in the familiar attitude of supplication. There were dozens like him in Ghawalkhand, but she knew him by the peculiar, gibbering movement of the wiry beard that protruded from his chuddah. He was repulsive, but in a fashion fascinating. He made her think of a wizened old monkey who had ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... answered. He felt suddenly contrite. He noticed for the first time in his life that his father looked old and little, almost wizened, and there was something deferential in his manner toward his big son that smote Leonard. It was as if he were saying, apologetically, "You're the bone and sinew of this country now. I admire you inordinately, my son. See, I defer to you; but do not treat me too much like a back ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway |
