"Stubby" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... black hair stood upright like thick wire. His thick, stubby fingers trotted like cart horses on and on. He stopped and drew ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... bound to be a certain percentage of scoundrels and of men too weak to resist a bribe in a great and shifting body like the House. Any scoundrel feels that he can slink among the rest unseen. The old members who have been returned term after term since they began to grow stubby beards on their cast-iron chins are an argument against rotation; they have had a chance to acquire the confidence of the public, they are experienced legislators, and ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... the stubby mustache stuck upon his lip, made a very amusing appearance. Under close scrutiny the falsity of his hirsute adornment ...
— The Mission of Janice Day • Helen Beecher Long
... discovered sitting on step, figuring out her accounts with a stubby pencil on back of an old envelope. She looks disconsolately at her figures. Then as she glances up her eyes brighten ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... nails were manicured, too, not quite so pointedly, but just as correctly as Mrs. Samstag's. But his fingers were stubby and short. Sometimes he pulled ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... glee at the misfortunes which befell it; at shipyards which caught fire and burned up, at railroad bridges and ships at sea destroyed by mysterious explosions. Kumme, a wizened-up, grizzle-haired old fellow with a stubby nose and a bullet-head, would fall to cursing in a mingling of English and German when anyone so much as mentioned the fleets of ships that went across the water, loaded with shells to kill German ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... to pass that as he was soliloquizing as above one morning, a girl appeared before him. She was so muffled up in furs that only an Eskimo could distinguish whether the bundle was male or female. She sat down beside him and placed her short, stubby, muffled arm as far around his neck as it would go, and in this attitude she coaxed, and begged, and prayed, and argued with him, thinking that she might resurrect him to himself again. But when she found that his mania was for the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... the stranger, "is whar we watches for the County Delegations when they come in to a meetin'." And with this remark, pointing with a stubby thumb up a well-worn stair, he departed before Stephen could thank him. Stephen paused under the awning, of which there were many shading the brick pavement, to regard the straggling line of stores and houses which surrounded and did homage to the yellow pile. The brick house in which ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... forehead and that he was wearing the tallest heels she had ever seen. She calculated that, with his hair flat and his feet on the ground, he would hardly come to her shoulder—and she was barely of woman's medium height. She caught sight of his hands—the square, stubby hands of a working man; the fingers permanently slightly curved as by the handle of shovel and pick; the skin shriveled but white with a ghastly, sickening bleached white, the nails repulsively manicured into long white curves. "If he should touch me, I'd scream," she thought. And ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... Peter's return, clearly betrayed the disappointment which that return involved. He said nothing, but when he saw my eye upon him he gazed dourly toward his approaching rival and tapped a weather-beaten brow with one stubby finger. He meant, of course, that ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... chair, his stubby bare feet stuck out before him, and his two hands actively employed as fly-catchers. Suddenly he remembered having amused himself the day before in oiling his sled runners, using the striped stockings for wipers; but he did not trouble Kathleen just then with the tidings. ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... coach brought our long-expected guests from the embarcadero, and after the excitement of the meeting was over, I stealthily scanned each face and figure. Mr. Miller's stocky form in coarse, dark clothes, his cold gray eyes, uneven locks, stubby beard, and teeth and lips browned by tobacco, chewing, were not unfamiliar; but he looked less tired, more patient, and was a kindlier spoken ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... which we observed in works of the imagination is vividness. To achieve this, pay close attention to the details of your sensory experiences. Observe sharply the minute but characteristic items—the accent mark on apres; the coarse stubby beard of the typical alley tough. Stock your mind with a wealth of such detailed impressions. Keep them alive by the kind of practice recommended in the preceding paragraph. Then describe the objects of your experience in terms ...
— How to Use Your Mind • Harry D. Kitson
... whistles began to blow, far and near; and the romancer in the sawdust-box, summoned prosaically from steep mountain passes above the clouds, paused with stubby pencil halfway from lip to knee. His eyes were shining: there was a rapt sweetness in his gaze. As he wrote, his burden had grown lighter; thoughts of Mrs. Lora Rewbush had almost left him; and in particular as he recounted (even by the chaste dash) the annoyed expressions of Mr. Wilson, ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... blind and, as frequently occurs in such cases, the touch-sense compensatingly developed extraordinarily. It was observed that after touching a person once or twice with his stubby baby fingers, he could thereafter unfailingly recognize and call by name the one whose hand he again felt. The optic sense is the only one defective, for tests reveal that his hearing, taste, and smell are acute, and the tactile development ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of Volney Sprague's newspaper, and with stubby rigid thumb guided the candidate's glance ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... inquisitive youths manifested with rustic freedom their contempt for such paltry sport, and, after a dissertation among themselves upon the disadvantages of hawking, they returned to their occupations; one only of the curious party, a stout, stubby, cheerful lad, having demanded how it was that Monsieur, who, from his great revenues, had it in his power to amuse himself so much better, could be satisfied with ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... until he could find himself in the midst of the bunch. He cast numerous side glances in the direction of that disputed ground, as though half anticipating seeing a whole army of ferocious bobcats come leaping forth, all with blazing yellow eyes and stubby tails. ...
— Phil Bradley's Mountain Boys - The Birch Bark Lodge • Silas K. Boone
... lighted for the purpose of enabling Miss Scatchett to locate the score of a Tschaikowsky concerto, it had been moved to the small center table, and had served to give light if not festivity to the afternoon coffee and cakes. It still burned, a gnarled and stubby fragment, in its china holder; round it the disorder of the recent refreshment, three empty cups, a half of a small cake, a crumpled napkin or two,—there were never enough to go round,—and on the floor ...
— The Street of Seven Stars • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... carefully crushing the mint between his stubby fingers, stirred it with the sugar at the bottom of his tall glass; then, resting the concoction on the broad arm of the rocker, and without turning his head, lifted ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the dome top. A sleek, rounded spread of glassite, with broad aluminite girders. There were cross ribs which gave us a footing, and occasionally projections—streamline fin-tips, the casings of the upper rudder shafts, and the upstanding stubby funnels ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... knees, almost touching with his head a big licheny boulder, half buried in vines and grass. Glancing back, he saw what had twisted him off his course and thrown him down—it was an upward-aimed tree-root, stubby and pointed, which had thrust itself through his right shoe lacing. The low shoe had been pulled half-way off his foot, and, under the strain, the silken lace had ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... Around the table shone two rows of cranial spheres, reddish or dark. Their ears stood out grotesquely, and their jaw bones were in strong relief owing to their thinness. Some had preserved the upright moustache in the style of the Emperor; the most of them were shaved or had a stubby tuft like ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... wet, fresh air through the warm house from the open door, and he would perhaps glance from a window to see her, roughly coated and booted, ploughing about her duck yard, delving into barrels of grain, turning on faucets, wielding a stubby ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... Gerns hurried down the ramp behind them. The searchlights gleamed on their battle helmets and on the blades of the bayonets affixed to their rifle-like long range blasters. Hand blasters and grenades hung from their belts, together with stubby flame guns. ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... speaking—and reminded Mike that they were not talking about crooked sticks ner no kind of sticks, ner they didn't give a dom what happened in Minnesota fifty year ago—if it ever had happened, which Murphy doubted. So Mike left his story in the middle and went off to the water jug under a stubby cedar, walking bowlegged and swinging his arms limply, palms turned backward, and muttering to ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... the rope with the pin, fiber by fiber, and slowly, strand by strand, the hard, twisted, weather-beaten cords gave way and stood out on each side in stubby, frazzled ends. The pin bent and turned in his fingers, and the blood oozed from their raw ends. But he held a tight grip upon his one hope of freedom, and finally the rope was so nearly separated that a sudden wrench of his body broke ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... vast contempt. "But you're about what I'd expect folks like that friend of th' Professor's, th' Cacique, t' worship. It takes a low sort of a heathen, even in his blindness, t' bow down to a stone like you—with your twisted head, an' your stubby legs, an' your little fryin'-pan over your stomach. Why, where I come from they wouldn't have you even for a stone settee in a park. No, you're not fit even t' sit on—unless, maybe, it's on th' flat top of your crooked head;" and by way of testing ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... stocking-feet, flushed with the exertion of pulling off his heavy boots, the light of the tallow candle falling on his weak eyes with their red rims, on his large open mouth with the conspicuous gap in its front teeth, and his stubby hair, he was more than usually grotesque. 'As slamp an wobbly as an owd corn-boggart,' so his neighbours described him when they wished to be disrespectful, and the simile fitted very closely with the dishevelled, disjointed appearance which ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... doctors alighted without answering, and watching them, the man stroked a stubby red ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... air rang the voice of one of Tessibel's friends. The brindle bulldog from Kennedy's farm had heard the unequal race. With short tail raised, his fat neck bristling with stubby hair, he started for the tracks, as Tess did for the fence when she heard his growl. As the girl came on and on, the dog bounded along the ground toward her. Tess opened her lips and spoke sharply—and a pleased ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... a bald-headed man with a paunch, stubby iron-grey moustache, and a dark line of machine oil encircling his finger nails so that they stood forth separately like formal flower beds at the edge of a lawn, worked industriously from Monday morning until Saturday night, going to bed at nine o'clock, and until ...
— Windy McPherson's Son • Sherwood Anderson
... they reach the ground floor, sir, I reckon we can tackle them and begin to make them pay for themselves. By that time they will have something to draw on and we'll exact payment. Right here and here"—Sandy's forefinger was going rapidly from point to point, and Levi's stubby digit was laboriously following—"are the workshops, the school rooms, the kitchens and conservatories. Why, sir, even the idiot children can be utilized. They love flowers and animals; we must find their one gleam and guide ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... a small man with a stubby mustache, under whose derby hat-rim a pair of round black eyes shone with a ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... spoke, Lynde caught a hateful glimpse of the road through the stubby pine-trees beyond. It appeared to him only two minutes ago that he was assisting Miss Denham to mount the stone steps at the other extremity of the foot-path; and now he was to lose her again. She was with him alone ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... friend, then, let me tell you you'll never stand it." A stubby thumb made motion up the narrow street. "You see this town. I won't say what it is—you realize for yourself; but bad as it is, it's advanced civilization alongside of the country. You'll have to go ten miles out to get any land that's not taken." He stopped and lit ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... cheek, but before his design could be accomplished he was drawn close by a single arm around his neck, and repeatedly kissed. "You blessed darling!" she softly exclaimed, "here I've been waiting for you, and waiting for you and longing—Oh!" That silky moustache and that chin, that was not stubby, could they belong to a gentleman of sixty years? Her right arm fell limp and useless as the other. "I thought you were my father," she said in a weak voice of ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... the joker and saw a tall, well-set-up young fellow with extraordinarily broad shoulders, long brown face, stubby blond mustache, who looked down on ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... figure lying lax upon a water-bed and clad in a flowing shirt, a figure with a shrunken face and a stubby beard, lean limbs and lank nails, and about it was a case of thin glass. This glass seemed to mark off the sleeper from the reality of life about him, he was a thing apart, a strange, isolated abnormality. The two men stood close to ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... the only happy one, except the children, and I sometimes think that even they have the shadow on them of the dreadful things that are happening. Margaret-Mary tries to knit, and tires her stubby little fingers with the big needles, and Teddy, poor chap, seems to feel that he must be the man of the family and take his father's place, and he is pathetically ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... was born in Tyler Co., Texas, on Jim Sapp's plantation. He is very feeble, but keeps his great grandchildren in line while their mother works. They live in Beaumont. Joe is tall, slight, and has gray hair and a stubby gray mustache. In his kind, gentle voice he relates his experiences in ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Texas Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... glance falling on the book she held. Stratton saw that it was a shabby account-book, a stubby pencil thrust ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... pleased with the compliment, drew a pocket-book and a stubby end of a pencil from his pocket, and began alternately stroking his chin and jotting down words and figures. Lorna grimaced at me behind his back, but kept a stern expression for his benefit. I suppose ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... city I was then residing, and he was much in society. He was really a Connecticut Yankee though transplanted to Ohio, and he was, in figure and character, thoroughly a New Englander. He was tall and slender, his prominent forehead standing out from light straight hair, a stubby beard veiling a well-pronounced and well-worked jaw (for he was one of the readiest of talkers), it would require little scratching to get to the uncontaminated Yankee underneath. A New Englander of the best type, shrewd, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... kicking his heels against the settee. He's awful cross today," said Marguerite, and kept right on making the doll's bed. In a second Rose had her head out of the window. There sat Stubby, kicking his heels against the ...
— Dew Drops, Vol. 37, No. 34, August 23, 1914 • Various
... a baffled snake the road turns and turns upon itself until its earlier promise of high adventuring seems doubtful. As often as not it climbs a semi-barren dun stretch of sunbaked earth dotted with stubby cacti—passes these dwarfed grotesques, and attempts the narrowing crest of the canon-wall, to swing abruptly back to the cacti again, gaining but little ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... waste is carried out from shore into the deeper waters of the bay mouth; where it is no longer supported by the breaking waves, and sinks to the bottom. The dump is gradually built to the surface as a stubby spur, pointing across the bay, and as it reaches the zone of wave action current and wave can now combine to carry shore drift along it, depositing their load continually at the point of the spur. An embankment is thus constructed in much the same manner ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... cabin. The James was under all her canvas and in hot pursuit of a large sloop, visible some three miles to leeward. The fleeing ship was driving straight to sea before the strong west breeze, her sails spread on both sides like the broad, stubby wings of a white owl. Bonnet had his jury spar swung to starboard from the foremast foot and bent the big jib to balance his main and foresail. Bowing her head deep into every trough as the waves ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader
... gleaming Tower of Galileo, Commander Walters, commandant of Space Academy, paused for a moment from his duties and turned from his desk to watch the touchdown of the great spaceship. And on the grassy quadrangle, Warrant Officer Mike McKenny, short and stubby in his scarlet uniform of the enlisted Solar Guard, stopped his frustrating task of drilling newly arrived cadets to watch the mighty ship come ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... the long horn and plunged it into the smooth, purplish back. Again and again he drove it home, as the monster writhed under him. It had enormous vitality. Gashed and dripping, it yet struggled on, attempting to encircle Joyce with its stubby arms. Once it succeeded, and he felt his ribs crack as it contracted its powerful body. But a final stroke finished the savage fight. He got up and, with an incoherent cry to Wichter, raced toward the opening on which they pinned their hopes ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... John pointed a stubby forefinger at Van Horn and returned a perfectly intelligible retort: "That's not the first question, Harry; that's the second question," he yelled. "What are ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... man descended from a third-class carriage at Chatham Station and inquired of a porter the way to the dockyard. He carried a lot of carpenter's tools in a straw bag and smoked a short clay pipe. The porter looked at the man with his white, stubby ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace
... better than a soldier does. A few blotted lines from his mother or sister or sweetheart are meat and drink and fine raiment for his soul. He feels brave again and good again and—homesick again. He makes life a burden for the whole camp until he has borrowed or stolen a scrap of paper and a stubby pencil wherewith to make reply. He sits down in some convenient spot, with emotion fairly oozing from every pore, and for a solid hour he wrestles with his tools and vocabulary. The result probably does not altogether please him. He feels that he has said too much about his lack ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... you can go right ahead and there is no further care to be given it. After the Fisher and the Gildig is one called the Queens Lake. (This was called Gildig number 2.) It is a little more round. It is stubby and heavy in diameter something like the Money-maker among the southern varieties only not as large. It ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... could the Red Un recall without shame his share in that night's work—recall the Chief, stubby hair erect, kind blue eyes searching anxiously for the offending tooth. Recall it? Would he ever forget the arm the Chief put about him, and him: "Ou-ay! laddie; it's a ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Thomas Cadge was darkened with disapproval, he shifted his stubby brier pipe to the other corner of his mouth, edged a little from his seat on the sunny front stoop and, craning his neck around the corner of his house, revealed an unwashed area extending from collarbone to ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... from dawn to dark, We fed, till we all had grown Uncommonly shrunk,—when a Chinese junk Came by from the torriby zone. She was stubby and square, but we didn't much care, And we cheerily put to sea; And we left the crew of the junk to chew The bark of the ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... they prepared her hastily against risks on board the steamer. The plan had been abandoned as too dangerous. But the colour clung to the soft skin; and the hair, cropped close to the neck, had a stubby, uncouth look. No one seeking Betty Harris, would have looked twice at the queer, little, brownie-like creature, dressing itself with careful haste. It lifted a plaid dress from the chair—large squares of red and green plaid—and looked at ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... stock, these Servisses, and knew it and felt it. Breeding was indicated in their well-set heads, in their shapely hands, and especially in their handsome noses. "We are inclined to be stubby, that's true, but we have the noses of aristocrats—they go back to the Aryans of the Danube," said Mrs. Rice to a friend. "Morton cannot consider a girl of questionable pedigree, no matter how rich or charming she may be. We believe in stock—not in family, but strain; ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... had been changed greatly by a stubby young beard that called aloud for a razor. Clad in a peasant's garb, and with a cap drawn down over his face Carstairs and Wharton themselves might have ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... A man of fifty-five enters—a short man with a stubby red beard, a round face, and hair well sprinkled with gray. He is dressed in a gray cutaway business suit and wears a silk hat. His neckscarf is of English make, his collar is of the thickest linen and neatest pattern, and his general appearance that of the aristocratic ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... sanctimoniously clasping his stubby fingers, "I'm afraid the girl is a bit of a heathen. What wonder is it? Nursed by Sara—always out with the cows or the sheep, and they say she thinks nothing of sleeping under a hedge, or out on the slopes, if any animal ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... horse's stubby mane with the whip. "He didn't look like a livery horse, and the liveryman said he had bought him from the Armstrongs when they purchased a couple of motors and cut down the stable. Nice ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... the engineer—a man Ralph could not remember having seen before. His attire was that of a conventional tourist, and his face, words and bearing suggested the conventional foreigner. He wore a short, stubby black mustache and side whiskers, a monocle in one eye, and he had a vacuous expression on his face as of a person ...
— Ralph on the Overland Express - The Trials and Triumphs of a Young Engineer • Allen Chapman
... ourselves easy and fall to threshing things out," he remarked, filling a blackened brier-root pipe, into the bowl of which he packed the tobacco with his stubby forefinger. "Yes, I'm a lover of the weed, you see—don't ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... had cried "Fire!" Her mother had been peeling potatoes while seated comfortably at the table. She sprang to her feet. "No—it can't be—how you know it's them—where?" The stubby knife fell from her hand, and two or three curls of potato skin dropped from ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... the trampled hedges; in the empty beer bottles that dotted the roadside ditches—empty bottles, as we had come to know, meant Germans on ahead; in the subdued, furtive attitude of the country folk, and, most of all, in the chalked legend, in stubby German script— "Gute Leute!"—on nearly every wine-shop shutter or cottage door. Soldiers quartered in such a house overnight had on leaving written this line—"Good people!"—to indicate the peaceful character of the dwellers therein ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... fleet consisted of three caravels —the Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina (pronounced Neen'ya). A caravel was a small, roundish, stubby sort of craft, galley-rigged, with a double tower at the stern and a single one in the bow. It was much used in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for the herring fisheries which took men far from the coast; and when the Portuguese tried to find far-off India, they ...
— Christopher Columbus • Mildred Stapley
... and headed down the great river. And now we picked in full view, hardly sixty fathoms distant, the dingey, pulled furiously toward us. My friend, the varlet Cal Davidson, half stood in the stern of the stubby craft and waved at us an ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... quietly. "It has a master here. Not P. Teagarden. Why, Margret," pushing his stubby finger between the tin bars "do you think the God you believe in would have sent it here ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... myself usually in a little room, walled with high-arched, thin sheets of living roots, some of which would form solid planks three feet wide and twelve long, and only an inch or two in thickness. These were always on edge, and might be smooth and sheer, or suddenly sprout five stubby, mittened fingers, or pairs of curved and galloping legs—and this thought gave substance to the simile which had occurred again and again: these trees reminded me of centaurs with proud, upright man torsos, and great ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... after him with a tentative movement from her chair. It almost seemed as if she repented and meant to go on the quest herself. Old Mis' Meade, translating this, held her breath and waited; but Amarita only sighed and took a needleful of thread. Then Elihu returned with the rule and a stubby pencil, and all the evening long he drew lines and held the paper at arm's length and frowned at what he saw. Old Mis' Meade was in the habit of going to bed before the others, and to-night she paused, candle ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... new boss that already was Larry busy on a new song. Ward, his attention directed, beheld the lyricist seated on the edge of the tavern porch, absorbed in composition, writing slowly on the planed side of a bit of board, licking the end of a stubby pencil, rolling his eyes as he ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... two varieties of this are found (see fig. 11). One is a standard club-tooth lever with banking pins, the other, much more interesting because unconventional, has pointed pallets and all the lift on the escape wheel, which has very short stubby teeth, very much like the wheel of a pin-pallet escapement. No banking pins are used, the banking taking place between the pallets and the wheel. An examination of a number of these watches, with serial ...
— The Auburndale Watch Company - First American Attempt Toward the Dollar Watch • Edwin A. Battison
... distribute his packages, make change and take down his next day's orders, in a much soiled note-book, and with the aid of a stubby pencil which he was obliged to wet every other letter. When he had finished a ...
— With Those Who Wait • Frances Wilson Huard
... could not even open the window to take his taste of the outdoors. His feet were wrapped up in bits of blanket, and his thin arms were covered by footless, old stockings of Cis's, which he drew on of a morning, keeping them up by pinning them to the stubby sleeves ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... the fence and stood at her side while the mollified Cardinal waved a stubby tail, as one who would say—"Now you see it took my dog sense to bring you two together. Without ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... have died on the road long ago. I bought them for fifty roubles apiece, and I wouldn't take two hundred and fifty for them to-day. But, then, they're all I have left of back there." He spoke in a quiet voice, scratching his stubby, unshaven face, absent-mindedly. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... than made it his home; rarely entering it, except in his father's absence, and then chiefly to obtain largess from his mother, who loved and indulged him the more because others disliked or despised him. Reckless, stupid, savage; ignoble and stubborn; with thick, black, stubby hair, and dark, bushy, beetling brows; his protuberant eyes filled with cunning, and burning with a lustre like live coals; deep-chested, and with shoulders raised and rounded, giving him an air of ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... afternoon and learned the names of the seven hills together. In that place, at that moment, after so many years, how it all came back to me—the warm sun on my back, the chattering girl beside me, the curly hair, the laughing yellow eyes, the stubby little finger on the page! I felt as if even then, when we sat in the sun with our heads together, it was all arranged, written out like a story, that at this moment I should be sitting among the crumbling bricks and drying grass, and she should be lying in the place I knew so well, on ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... specially attached to one of the three dogs with spiked collars. She was a spaniel, of kind disposition, and compact build. She had a stubby tail, pendant ears, and twisted paws. She was easy to get on with and polite. She had been born in a pig-pen at a cobbler's who went hunting on Sundays. When her master died, and no one wanted to give her shelter, she ran about in the ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... country there are four varieties—the black rhinoceros, having a single horn; the black species having two horns; the long-horned white rhinoceros; and the common white species, which has a short, stubby horn. ...
— New National Fourth Reader • Charles J. Barnes and J. Marshall Hawkes
... been heard to indulge in profane language since I had a long talk with her last week out in the garden, that ended in stubby tears and the gift of a very lovely locket which I impressed upon her was as chaste in design as I wished her ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess
... a wizened little man in worn and threadbare garments, his hat in his hand, came slowly into the garden. His sunken cheeks were covered with stubby gray whiskers, his shoulders were stooped and bent from hard work, and his hands bore evidences of a life of toil. Yet the eyes he turned upon Beth, as she faced him had a wistful and pleading ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Work • Edith Van Dyne
... an hour or so, a bumboat came out, manned by a crew of two coal-black negroes who spoke a French patois, intermingled with comical English. The boat itself was a queer, stubby craft propelled by home-made oars. Before the morning was well advanced the ship was surrounded by boats carrying shells, limes, prickly pears, green cocoanuts, bananas, fish, and "water monkeys." The latter were jugs made of a porous clay, and they were ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... shall answer for that, you English liar!" he said, at the same time clapping his hand to his belt, in which his hunting-knife was placed. Thus for a few seconds they stood face to face. John never flinched or moved. There he stood, quiet and strong as some old stubby tree, his plain honest face and watchful eye affording a strange contrast to the beautiful but demoniacal countenance of the great Dutchman. Presently he spoke ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... desired nothing more than complete safety in his investments, freedom from attention to details, and the thirty or forty per cent. profit which, according to all authorities, a pioneer deserves for his risks and foresight. He was a stubby man with a cap-like mass of short gray curls and clothes which, no matter how well cut, seemed shaggy. Below his eyes were semicircular hollows, as though silver dollars had been pressed against them and had ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... him, he dined at the Traders' Club. As he passed one of the tables Silas Trimmer leered up at him with the circular smile, which, bisected by a row of yellow teeth and hooded with a bristle of stubby mustache, had now come to aggravate him almost past endurance. To-night it made him approach his dinner with vexation, and, failing to find the man he had sought, he finished hastily. As he went out, Silas Trimmer, though looking straight in his direction, did not seem ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... a trifle on the coarse side. Sally quickly compared Mrs. Perce's plump hands with her own lean ones. At the scrutiny, she put her hands below the table, for they were not clean. But if they had been clean she would have taken pride in them; for where the fingers of Mrs. Perce were stubby her own were slim and pretty. She understood her own shortcomings, but in the quick observations and comparisons she had been making, Sally had learnt a great deal more clearly than ever before how careful she must be to avoid exaggeration ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... grotesquely, in an attitude of mirth, On a damask-covered hassock that was sitting on the hearth; And at a magic signal of his stubby little thumb, I saw the fire place changing ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... broom and Fardie will help her," said Langshaw, catching the child up in his arms and holding the round little form closely to him before putting her down carefully on her stubby feet. ...
— The Blossoming Rod • Mary Stewart Cutting
... after the moment of exaltation, came the reaction. He was afraid. The thought of his stubby uninteresting figure came to him; and a deep sense of his unworthiness. What could she, accustomed to brilliant creatures of the wonderful city, of whom Gerald was probably but a mild sample, find in commonplace little Bobby Orde? He walked meekly home; and ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... a lovely little dinner!" He looked expectantly at her. "You certainly are a queen! What a dainty little hand!" He reached out one of his hands—puffy as if it had been poisoned, very white, with stubby fingers. Susan reluctantly yielded her hand to his close, mushy embrace. "No rings. That's a shame, petty——" He was talking as if to a baby.—"That'll have to be fixed—yes, it will, my little sweetie. My, how ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... of his look, and saw a man whom she did not recognize. She left the path and moved whither her companion was leading, over the stubby grass; it was wet, but for this ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... he, spreading it out under his stubby fingers, "shows the deestrict. I gets it of Fay, so you gains an idee of th' lay of the land a whole lot. Them claims marked with a crost belongs to th' Company. You kin take her ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... of the slave baron in Dougherty; and as we ride westward, by wide stretching cornfields and stubby orchards of peach and pear, we see on all sides within the circle of dark forest a Land of Canaan. Here and there are tales of projects for money-getting, born in the swift days of Reconstruction,—"improvement" companies, wine ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... upon a day there was a swart, stubby boy by the name of Mariano Fortuny. He was ten years old, going on 'leven, and lived with his grandfather away up and up four flights of rickety stairs in an old house at the village of Reus, in Spain. Mariano's father had died some years before—died ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... grunting, from his chair. Somebody came in to take over the desk. Sergeant Madden nodded and waved his hand. He went out and took the slide-stair down to the tarmac where squad ship 390 waited in standard police readiness. Patrolman Willis arrived at the stubby little craft ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... closer acquaintance with the newcomer. She had known few dogs; her father had always warned her to leave the stray dogs that she met on the street quite alone—and she had detested Aunt Josephine's silky poodle! But this poor scrap was wagging his stubby tail and looking at her in a coaxing manner that said ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... Cynthia's effect upon her host, Mrs. Friend could not make up her mind. He seemed attentive or amused while she chatted to him; but towards the end their conversation languished a good deal, and Lady Cynthia must needs fall back on the stubby-haired boy to her right, who was learning agency business with Mr. Parish. She smiled at him also, for it was her business, Mrs. Friend thought, to smile at everybody, but it was ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... said Polly, gathering him up in the other corner of the old chair, close to her side; "don't feel bad; I know you didn't mean to," and she dropped a kiss on his stubby black hair. ...
— Five Little Peppers And How They Grew • Margaret Sidney
... seat and brought out a stubby pole like a fishpole with a very large reel. There was also a headset, and something very much like a large aluminum fish on the end ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... who went outside their homes saw a strange sight. From a torpedo-shaped object overhead, dazzling searchlights were pointing downward, sweeping the countryside. The thing appeared to be about two hundred feet long, some thirty feet in diameter, with stubby wings and red and green lights along the sides. For almost ten minutes the aerial visitor circled the town, then ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe
... with a big lamb chop between his teeth and Stubby with a huge steak, while Billy contented himself with ...
— Billy Whiskers' Adventures • Frances Trego Montgomery
... in the door—a stubby, grossly stout man, thin-legged, thick-necked, all body and beard: clad below in tight trousers, falling loose, however, over the boots; swathed above in an absurdly inadequate pea-jacket, short in the ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... looked at Shorty, this did not happen to him. There was not a line of badness in the face; yet also there was not a line of strength; no promise in eye, or nose, or chin; the whole thing melted to a stubby, featureless mediocrity. It was a countenance like thousands; and hopelessness filled the Virginian as he looked at this lost dog, and ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... mo' than was respectable in a man of ninety," croaked old Adam indignantly, while he prodded the ashes in his corncob pipe with his stubby forefinger. "'Tis my j'ints, not my ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... he continued, solemnly; "you've gone and done it." He looked at his clipping again. "Lemme see your ticket," he said. He placed the ticket and the clipping side by side; his stubby, black-fringed finger slid from one ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... up a bit," he said, and got out a pocket comb, with which he adjusted his hair and his stubby mustache. ...
— The Rover Boys on the Ocean • Arthur M. Winfield
... bend in the river a few rods above. They saw me at the same instant and turned toward the shore. On hastening up there, I found the old bird rapidly leading her nearly grown brood through the woods, as if to go around our camp. As I pursued them they ran squawking with outstretched stubby wings, scattering right and left, and seeking a hiding-place under the logs and debris. I captured one and carried it into camp. It was just what Joe wanted; it would make a valuable decoy. So he kept it in a box, fed it upon oats, and took ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... prodigious capacity for devouring food. He ate with a calculated energy as though the safety of nations depended upon his sustenance. Apart from the ordinary fare, he demolished about eighteen inches of a long French loaf at his side, tearing pieces from it with his short stubby fingers and filling his mouth with great wads of crust and dough. Richard afterwards learnt that this voracity of appetite was nerve begotten. In moments of acute agitation it was Van Diest's custom to eat enormously on the theory that a full belly begets a placid mind. His little ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... pastures and sheep and cattle and horses, and houses and white fences and big white barns. Little Jason gazed but he could not get his fill. Perhaps the old nag, too, knew those distant fields for corn, for with a whisk of her stubby tail she started of her own accord before the lad could dig his bare heels into her bony sides, and went slowly down. The log cabins had disappeared one by one, and most of the houses he now saw were framed. One, however, a relic of pioneer times, was of stone, ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... far above all his surroundings as to have been easily recognized even had he not been in uniform. Beside him sat Corporal Castillo of the "plain-clothes" squad, a young man of forty, with a high forehead, a stubby black mustache, and a chin that was decisive without ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... bad plan to allow a hedge of any kind, especially an evergreen one, to run a number of years without trimming. If a hedge is neglected so long, and then severely pruned, it will look stubby and shabby for a year or two after. With a pair of sharp hedge-shears, a person having a straight eye will make a good job of the ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... sizes, and where they will go best in a wall. He can tell at a glance where to strike a stone to make it fit a particular place, and out of a great pile he can select with a shrewd eye the stone for the exact opening he has to fill. He will run his stubby rough hand over a stone ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... stood with mitted hands thrust up above his head. He was gazing into the smiling eyes of a man no less dark than himself. There were three others confronting him, and each was armed with a stubby, automatic pistol which ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... into the parlor, and there, still seated on the edge of his chair, twirling an old felt hat rapidly round between two big, red hands, she saw a tall, lean man in a suit of coarse gray clothes. He had grizzly, iron-gray hair, stubby white whiskers, a pale-blue eye, a brown face ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins
... to Expound in a clear and straightforward Manner, omitting Foreign Quotations, setting up for illustration of his Points such Historical Characters as were familiar to his Hearers, putting the stubby Old English words ahead of the Latin, and rather flying low along the Intellectual Plane of the Aggregation that chipped in to pay ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... at the left; at the right a door of rough boards leading out into the open; in the rear mall an empty casing from which the door has been lifted.—In the left corner a flat oven, above which hang kitchen utensils in a wooden frame; in the right corner oars and other boating implements. Rough, stubby pieces of hewn wood lie in a heap under the window. An old kitchen bench, several stools, etc.—Through the empty casing in the rear a second room is visible. In it stands a high, neatly, made bed; above it hang cheap photographs in still cheaper ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... stubby warrant officer, at the air lock of the Solar Guard rocket destroyer that would take them to Mars. After they had climbed into the ship, they waited for a full hour before they could get clearance to blast off. And, in flight, they were forced to maintain constant alert and careful ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... guilty start, Johnny and Albert turned instantly, and beheld the strangest specimen of humanity that either had ever seen. An unmistakable tramp, with a pale, sickly face, covered partly with grime and partly with stubby black beard, stood leaning with his arms on top of the wall, looking down at them. Although it was summer, he wore a greasy winter cap, and his coat, too, spoke of many rough journeys through dirt and bad weather. ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... appeared in a seemingly endless line. Motorized transport would be better, but the Bulgarians were short of it. Shaggy, stubby animals plodded in the wake of the tanks and the infantry. There were two-wheeled carts in single file all across the valley. They went through the village ...
— The Invaders • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... out through the doors of the waiting room toward a rattletrap vehicle. It looked something like a cross between a schoolboy's jalopy and a scaled-down army tank of former times. The treads were caterpillar style, and the stubby body was completely enclosed. A tiny airlock stuck out ...
— Badge of Infamy • Lester del Rey
... head which was bent over something held in its arms, which it was most evidently lulling to sleep. The room was darkening, with only a single patch of orange-coloured sunlight upon the bare floor. Back and forth went the little body. He could see the bare feet with the stubby toes, escaping as by miracle the ever-threatening rocker. There was a small square of blue-calico-covered back, two little pigtails of hair tightly tied with scraps of baby-blue ribbon, and—the voice. It was as fine and high as wind blowing across a hair ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... saw no necessity for its being strictly spherical or spheroidal. He now suggested that it was probably shaped like a pear, rather a blunt and corpulent pear, nearly spherical in its lower part, but with a short, stubby apex in the equatorial region somewhere beyond the point which he had just reached. He fancied he had been sailing up a gentle slope from the burning glassy sea where his ships had been becalmed to this strange and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... accentuated by the fact that, while the left eye looked straight out at its object, the right eye had a sort of roving commission and was now, while its colleague fixed Mrs. Pett with a gimlet stare, examining the ceiling. As to the rest of the appearance of this remarkable woman, her nose was stubby and aggressive, and her mouth had the coldly forbidding look of the closed door of a subway express when you have just missed the train. It bade you keep your distance on pain of injury. Mrs. Pett, though herself a strong woman, was conscious of a curious weakness as she looked at a female ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... notice until unusual exclamations on the part of the bird denoted something extraordinary. By circumnavigating the plate and at the same time stretching its neck to the utmost it had contrived to convert the shapeless lagoon into a perfectly symmetrical pond just out of the reach of the stubby tongue. Hence the scolding. Three witnesses—each ardently on the side of the bird—watched intently. Decently mannered, it refused to clamber on to the edge of the plate, for it was ever averse from defilement ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the streets of Paris a week later, he was but the shadow of his former portly self. He was gaunt and haggard, his clothes hanging on him as if they had been made for some other man, a fortnight's stubby beard on the face which had always heretofore been smoothly shaven. He sat silently at the cafe, and few of his friends recognised him at first. They heard he had received ample compensation from the Government, and now would have money enough to suffice him all his life, without the necessity ...
— Revenge! • by Robert Barr
... I began to make the children comfortable. My unwilling host sat silently on his log, drawing long and hard at his stubby old pipe. How very little there was left of our lunch! Just for meanness I asked him to share with us, and, if you'll believe me, he did. He gravely ate bread-rims and scraps of meat until there was not one bit left for even the baby's breakfast. Then he drew the back of his hand ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... herself, and then added to her daughter: "Yes, my dear, I did take in what you said. You really think you are in love with this Wayne boy, don't you? It's immensely to your credit, darling," she went on, her tone taking on a flattering sweetness, "to care so much about any one who has such funny, stubby little hands—most unattractive hands," she ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... it in curious, interesting whirls. Eddie Zanders, the sheriff's deputy on guard at the court of Quarter Sessions, accompanied him and his father and Steger. Zanders was a little man, dark, with a short, stubby mustache, and a shrewd though not highly intelligent eye. He was anxious first to uphold his dignity as a deputy sheriff, which was a very important position in his estimation, and next to turn an honest penny if he could. He knew little save the ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... Joel's stubby black curls dropped so that she couldn't see his face. As there was no reply forthcoming, Mrs. Fox took him by the arm. "You needn't go to your room, Joel," she said sharply. "You ...
— Five Little Peppers at School • Margaret Sidney
... convenient form for smoking. On the tips of his pointed ears were little tufts of long hair, which gave his head a lynx-like appearance. There were quite a number of large yellow spots on his hairy chest. His nose was very stubby, and his entire face was ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... a stubby hand. He had an air of one who deprecates, and at the same time lets another into a secret. He moved across the room with short steps that made no sound, and gave him a peculiar appearance of drifting ...
— Black Jack • Max Brand
... Sarawak, and that Iban raids had had much to do with their movements. According to their reports the tribe had recently, at the invitation of the government, left the mountains and formed several kampongs in the western division. One of them, with short stubby fingers, had a broad Mongolian face and prominent cheek-bones, but not Mongolian eyes, reminding me somewhat of ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... the concerts which was the most painful I have not touched upon: the moments when his master was talking, and Tom was left to himself,—when a weary despair seemed to settle down on the distorted face, and the stubby little black fingers, wandering over the keys, spoke for Tom's own caged soul within. Never, by any chance, a merry, childish laugh of music in the broken cadences; tender or wild, a defiant outcry, a tired sigh breaking down ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... cacti were in their beautiful bloom and gave to the country the needed dash of color. Occasionally one saw small herds of cattle feeding off the short stubby vegetation. They were drawing near the mountains, whose ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall |
