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More "Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... middle of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... hunters, a bull will sometimes turn in desperation on his persecutor. Then, unless the horse is well trained, serious consequences are likely to follow. The plunging thrust of his stumpy horns perhaps rips open the steed, sending the rider flying over the back of the furious bison, who may turn upon him and slay him before ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... "O yes!" exclaimed Stumpy, derisively; "'course, boys, you mus' wait. 'Tain't no use a-hurryin' up the cattle; yer mustn't rush the buck. Jest wait till some feller comes along with a melted rainbow, and lays on the war-paint! and another feller fetches the ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... the sight of no roofs and spires could have been more welcome than that of these logs and cabins, broiling in the midsummer sun. At a little distance from the fort, a silent testimony of siege, the stumpy, cleared fields were overgrown with weeds, tall and rank, the corn choked. Nearer the stockade, where the keepers of the fort might venture out at times, a more orderly growth met the eye. It was young James Ray whom Colonel ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... affording a front of only a single field, on the crest of a considerable sand-bluff—elevations looking magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field, which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks, an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form; and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, and two chimneys, not built outside of the house, as was the general fashion, but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... prematurely born; but, as it seemed to me, already an old woman. I credited her with thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going on in ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... surface. Billy interposed, for he saw Theodora's color come, and he knew that the rug, his own contribution to her college room, was one of her dearest possessions. He shook his head at the six-pound culprit who stood before him, waggling his stumpy tail in smug satisfaction over the success ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther away ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... times the force of gravity; in the second at from two to four times; and in the third at about one and a half times. The straight tails he ascribes to hydrogen because the hydrogen atom is the lightest known; the sword-shaped tails to hydro-carbons; and the stumpy tails to vaporized iron. It will be seen that, if the force driving off the tails is that which Arrhenius assumes it to be, the forms of those appendages would accord with those that Bredichin's theory calls for. At the same time ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... look short and stumpy in proportion to the rest of the palm—one may be sure that the individual to whom they belong is of an animal nature, possessing coarse instincts, devoid of real intellectuality, and belonging to the ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... Cordovese his reproaches for destroying the wonder of them when they planted their proud cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there are still enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns left, and enough of those arches, striped in red and white with their undeniable suggestion of calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings of ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the first faint tones of rose, the dawn was bringing its enchantment to this marriage-time of the black and white. Over in the Key West barracks a bugler would soon be blowing reveille; down in the sleeping town stumpy little street cars would squeak from their sheds and clang their discordant gongs through the narrow thoroughfares. But farther yet to the northeast, in the Florida I best knew and loved, a whooping crane would startle the solitude with its uncanny ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... his glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy little black cigar. ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... Jacobus's household evidently spent their days in light attire. This stumpy old woman with a face like a large wrinkled lemon, beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was dressed in a garment of some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff. It fell from her thick neck down to her toes with ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... century the beauty of the Samplers distinctly declined. They became squarer, and were bordered with a running pattern, and the whole canvas became more or less pictorial. Inevitably the end of this art came. Ugly realistic bowpots with stumpy trees decorated the picture in regular order. The alphabet still appeared, and moral reflection seemed to be the aim of the worker rather than to make the Sampler show beauty of stitchery. Quaint little maps of England are often seen, surrounded with floral borders, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Loanda struck me as unusually ill-favoured; short, "stumpy," and very dark, or tinged with unclean yellow. Lepers and hideous cripples thrust their sores and stumps in the face of charity. There was no local colouring compared with the carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... right enough," he said. "It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah, no, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. Now it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... direct contrast to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest. From his station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into beer mugs and exchanged them ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... at comparatively long intervals, for it was only when both craft happened to be on the summit of a wave at the same moment that we were able to see her. Yet two facts concerning her gradually became clear to us, the first of which was that she was undoubtedly a slaver—so much her short, stumpy masts and the enormous longitudinal spread of her yards told us,—the second was that she was steadily settling down to leeward at a more rapid rate than ourselves, as was only to be expected from the fact that she was exposing much more top-hamper to the gale than ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... had theirs also, and had testified to the same in their sleep by low growls and whines. Now they shook themselves, and rubbed against each other, growling in a warlike manner through their teeth, and wagging peaceably with their little stumpy tails. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he is ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... sherry in the commandant's little parlour, and forth the two cronies sallied mysteriously side by side; the commandant, Colonel Bligh, being remarkably tall, slim, and straight, with an austere, mulberry-coloured face; the general stout and stumpy, and smiling plentifully, short of breath, and double chinned, they got into the sanctum I have ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... and stumpy, and old and gray, With a sleepy look in his lonely eye, (The other he lost at a matinee— Knocked out by a boot from a window high.) Wherever he goes, he never knows— Quarter or pause in the midnight spree, For the life of a cat is a life of blows, If he is ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... "It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... been of Bauer—why Bauer did not come and what could have befallen him. It was grand to hold the king's secret for him, and she would hold it with her life; for he had been kind and gracious to her, and he was her man of all the men in Strelsau. Bauer was a stumpy fellow; the Count of Hentzau was handsome, handsome as the devil; but the king was her man. And the king had trusted her; she would die before hurt should come ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... fubsy boys—copied apparently from cherubim—who, with glowing, distended cheeks, are simpering on the ceiling, doing the tenor, with wide open mouths that would shame e'er a barn-door in the village; their red, stumpy fingers sprawling over the music which they are (not) reading. The pale, lantern-jawed youths, in yellow waistcoats and tall shirt-collars, who look as if they were about to whistle a match, are holloing out what is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... away, and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called me into ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... or woman whose writing is a fine, wavy line, upright, with short, stumpy and indistinct tops and tails, words running at their end to an almost straight line, the letters merely indicated. The flatter, finer and more perpendicular this writing, the greater the insincerity. Such a writer would ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... the Adirondacks, forty or fifty years ago, was Henry Clymer, from Brooklyn, who went up to Little Black Creek and tried to make a farm out of the gnarly, stumpy land; but being a green hand at that sort of thing, he soon gave it up and put up the place near Northwood, that is locally referred to as the haunted mill. When the first slab was cut, a big party was on hand to cheer and eat pie in honor of ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... of primitive ungulate mammals, taking its name from the short and stumpy feet, which were furnished with five toes each, and supported massive pillar-like limbs. The brain-cavity was extremely small, and insignificant in comparison to the bodily bulk, which was equal to that of the largest rhinoceroses. These ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... lay on his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... myself no longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you die. He comes ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... to prevent possible loss from some prank of mischievous boys or thieving negroes, Maurice had secured a long and stout chain, with a padlock, and at night this was so attached to the dinky that no one could sneak the stumpy little craft away without the use of a hatchet to chop out the staple; and while this was being done the owners of the Tramp would surely be getting extremely busy also with gun ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... father. How that boy can chop! thought Nancy, as she heard the sound of his ax biting into wood. Tree after tree had to be cut down before crops could be planted. With the coming of spring, he helped his father to plow the stumpy ground. He learned to plow a straight furrow. He ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... and the label tied on to him. Forgive me that label, Chum; I think that was the worst offence of all. And why should I label one who was speaking so eloquently for himself; who said from the tip of his little black nose to the end of his stumpy black tail, "I'm a silly old ass, but there's nothing wrong in me, and they're sending me away!" But according to the regulations—one must obey the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... front of it and a trampled space. It was flanked by its several sheds and barns on one hand and a woodpile on the other. Beyond the woodpile a rail fence inclosed a corn-field, and beyond the barns and sheds a similar fence defined the bounds of a stumpy pasture-lot. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... yeehoing on board; grimy colliers smoking at the liquor-shops along the quay; and as for the bridge-there is a crowd of idlers on that, you may be sure, sprawling over the balustrade for ever and ever, with long ragged coats, steeple-hats, and stumpy doodeens. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... through this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and read them all ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Canadian Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields—the farmer in Drury's youth did well ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... our departure. There was no longer anything to detain us on Endeavour Island. The Ghost's stumpy masts were in place, her crazy sails bent. All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... day succeeding this visit of reconciliation, that Miss Arabel and the stumpy Susannah pursued their way to the shrubbery walk, in a rapid and mysterious manner, as if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... neighboring hotel; but the window wore its usual look—there was the veil, and the placard, and the disjointed, rattling sash; and in the neighboring court was, sometimes, the tall gentleman picking his way carefully over the stones, and sometimes the stumpy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of the whole block of masonry, with its stumpy tower and heavily buttressed walls, conveys the idea of immense strength rather than of gracefulness; while its situation at the bottom of a hill, and near the bank of the river, is ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... bad member of society. He was a thorough-going old Tory, whose proxy was always in the hand of the leader of his party; and who seldom himself went near the metropolis, unless called thither by some occasion of cattle-showing. He was a short, stumpy man, with red cheeks and a round face; who was usually to be seen till dinner-time dressed in a very old shooting coat, with breeches, gaiters, and very thick shoes. He lived generally out of doors, and was almost as great in the preserving ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... at its stumpy front legs!" called Jack, who had forgotten his empty stomach in the excitement about this little creature, which looked like a cricket and yet ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... where pigeons strut and prink their feathers, undisturbed. Charlemagne is sitting with a mighty two-edged sword upon his knees, and a gilded crown upon his head; but the figure is badly proportioned, and the statue is a good-natured, stumpy affair, that makes one smile rather than admire. The outside of the minster still shows traces of the image breakers of Zwingli's time, and yet the crumbling north portal remains beautiful, even in decay. As for the interior, it has an exceedingly bare and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... poor men named Ramai and Somai came to a village and took some waste land from the headman, and ploughed it and sowed millet; and their plough was only drawn by cows and their ploughshare was very small, what is called a "stumpy share;" and when they had sowed a little the rains came on; and Somai gave up cultivation and took to fishing and for a time he made very good profits by catching and selling fish; and he did not trouble even to reap the millet he had sown; he laughed at Ramai who was toiling away clearing more ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... naturally turn towards foreign climes; and David's imagination circled round and round the utmost limits of his geographical knowledge, in search of a country where a young gentleman of pasty visage, lipless mouth, and stumpy hair, would be likely to be received with the hospitable enthusiasm which he had a right to expect. Having a general idea of America as a country where the population was chiefly black, it appeared to him the most propitious destination ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... of sheep among the hills, and they appear very tame and gentle; though sometimes, like the wicked, they "flee when no man pursueth." But, climbing a rude, rough, rocky, stumpy, ferny height yesterday, one or two of them stood and stared at me with great earnestness. I passed on quietly, but soon heard an immense baa-ing up the hill, and all the sheep came galloping and scrambling ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gentleman rejoicing in the name of Cadger (but whose real cognomen I subsequently ascertained to be Stumpy Walker) proceeded on his walk, whistling shrilly to himself, exchanging a passing recognition with one and another loafer, and going out of his way to kick every boy he saw smaller than himself, which last exertion, by the way, at twelve o'clock at night he ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... was out in a stumpy pasture-field beside a woods in Canada, and he saw a mother caribou and her little calf feeding quietly down in ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... everything depended on us. Those were hard times; we had a great deal to do. We used to change works, as we called it, so as to be together as much as we could; for it was rather lonesome, planting and hoeing off in the stumpy, sprouted clearings. That was a long, anxious summer! We heard from father only once. He was somewhere ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and began to unlace his brogues. Meanwhile from a side-table his wife brought a silver tobacco-box and a stumpy Irish clay. The slippers substituted for his shoes, Kerry lovingly filled the cracked and blackened bowl with strong Irish twist, which he first teased carefully in his palm. The bowl rested almost under his nostrils ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of the explosion, and the water looked rather foamy: then in about a second it began to rise, and there was the most enormous outbreak of spray that you can conceive. It rose in one column of 60 or 70 feet high, and broad at the base, resembling a stumpy sheaf with jagged masses of spray spreading out at the sides, and seemed to grow outwards till I almost feared that it was coming to us. It sunk, I suppose, in separate parts, for it did not make any grand squash down, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... writer to be an eye and ear witness of the closing bout, at Alton, Illinois, between those two political champions in their great debate of 1858. The contrast between the men was remarkable. Lincoln was very tall and spare, standing up, when speaking, straight and stiff. Douglas was short and stumpy, a regular roly-poly man. Lincoln's face was calm and meek, almost immobile. He referred to it in his address as "my rather melancholy face." Although plain and somewhat rugged, I never regarded Lincoln's face as homely. I saw him many times and talked with him, after ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... waste no time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known of ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... he could hop upon the wall, where he got at last, and shook the dust off his feathers with an angry "jark;" while Dick, withy staring eyes and his tongue hanging out, ran right between Philip's legs, made a feint at Fred, and then leaped right on Harry, who caught hold of his short stumpy tail as he went down and dragged ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... appeared unexpectedly upon the threshold. He was yellow and coarse of hair; flea-bitten, too; and even as he smiled at Ruth and wagged his stumpy tail, he was forced to turn savagely upon one of these disturbers who had no sense of the fitness ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook hands with her commander, young, clear-eyed and cheery of mien, who presently led me past a stumpy smokestack and up a perpendicular ladder to the bridge where, beneath a somewhat flimsy-looking structure, was the wheel, brass-bound and highly be-polished like all else about this crowded craft as, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... Ali, he entered a small boat and was rowed to the shore. They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them. While the vegetables ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... and left among them. She was as slatternly as ever, but her hair was shining with bear's grease and a strong odor of musk pervaded her garments; a paste diamond of enormous size but of doubtful brilliancy ornamented her breastpin and on her stumpy, grimy fingers were numerous brass rings containing dull imitations of rubies, ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... precipitous: no limestone, but much clay slate occurs. The ravine up which we passed, or rather watercourse, was well stocked with Xanthoxylon, some of large size as to the diameter of trunk, but very stumpy: water is found not far from the entrance: some cultivation also occurs and one large walled village, Dera Abdoollah Khan, lay to our left. Not much change in the vegetation: Xanthoxylon is almost entirely confined to ravines, Cerasus common, and one or two other prickly shrubs, and ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... in miniature for the benefit of the little ones; the intricate mechanical toys that a Dutch youngster tumbles about in stolid unconcern would create a stir in our patent office. Ben laughed outright at some of the mimic fishing boats. They were so heavy and stumpy, so like the queer craft that he had seen about Rotterdam. The tiny trekschuiten, however, only a foot or two long, and fitted out, complete, made his heart ache. He so longed to buy one at once for his little brother in England. He had no money to spare, for ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... the other world. In South Africa, as well as in Germany, the habits of the fox and of his brother the jackal have given rise to fables in which brute force is overcome by cunning. In many parts of the world we find curiously similar stories devised to account for the stumpy tails of the bear and hyaena, the hairless tail of the rat, and the blindness of the mole. And in all countries may be found the beliefs that men may be changed into beasts, or plants, or stones; that ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Hooded Warbler. In a dense undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure to find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... come back, but—' She beckoned with a stumpy, triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I always go in and read a chapter to ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... we realize the truth, live in the consciousness of it, and become obedient to the laws of life and being, the life becomes increasingly free. This does not mean that if we are plain of feature, and of a stumpy figure, that we shall become beautiful and graceful; but it does mean that these so-called drawbacks will no longer fetter us, and that others will see in us something far better than mere regularity of feature and beauty of form. When ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... the "legale testimonium;" Mr. Francis Butzkay, the lawyer, came to his aid with his stumpy, short-limbed figure: he had gazed for a time in passive inactivity at the fruitless struggle of his principal with the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... "I've taken a fancy to you. It's best to be plain and speak out. I've taken a fancy to you, and you shall have that bat. It's just your size, and the finest bit of willow you ever set eyes on. I'll wager you'll make top score every time you use it. You shall have it. Never mind about the stumpy—" ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... quiet for Betty, and no one wondered wherever she got her ideas from. And yet she had quite a collection of fairy stories and poems of her own composition. She and an exercise book, or a few scraps of paper and a stumpy bit of pencil were to be seen ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... fray. I almost lost my senses among the ribbons, and flew up and down among the flounces, and went mad amongst the basques. I move round as gay as when I was young; and modern scissors, with their stumpy ends, and loose pivots, and weak blades, and glaring bows, and course shanks, are stupid beside an old family piece like me. You would be surprised how spry I am flying around the sewing-room, cutting corsage into heart-shape, and slitting a place for button holes, and making double-breasted ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... toward the sound. In twenty minutes after that, with the aid of grass ropes and leather thongs, they had hauled the huge carcass to the shore and rolled it out of the water, where it lay glistening in moonlight, stumpy, foolish, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's lot; The grisly, blear-eyed, every one is sold, And husbands purchased ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... cleared, the Major took forty winks on the sofa, and we two beat a retreat, lit up our pipes in the passage, and were just turning out when the postman's double knock came, but no showers of letters in the box. Derrick threw open the door, and the man handed him a fat, stumpy-looking roll in a ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... little books in my friend's library is a thick-set, stumpy old copy of Richard Baxter's "Holy Commonwealth," written in 1659, and, as the title-page informs us, "at the invitation of James Harrington Esquire,"—as one would take a glass of Canary,—by invitation! There is a preface addressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of such description as was nearest at hand; the greater part at a house in Princes-street, Soho. Colton's lodging was a penuriously-furnished second-floor, and upon a rough deal table, with a stumpy pen, our ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... beautiful. Did you know it?" he said, gently, and led her to a little stumpy rocking-chair with a gay red-and-blue rag cushion that Mrs. Tanner always kept sitting by the front door in pleasant weather. Then he stood off and surveyed her, while the red stole into her cheeks becomingly. "What has Miss Earle been doing ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... As soon as this takes place, in a wild state the tadpole comes of age, so to speak, and creeps ashore to assume his new dignity of frog-hood. For a little while longer, however, he carries the evidence of his infancy about with him, in the shape of a short, stumpy tail; but in a very brief space the last remnant of this disappears, and now, save in size, he cannot be ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... called beaded (fig. 84), has been bred for five years and selected for wings showing more beading. In extreme cases the wings have been reduced to mere stumps (see stumpy, fig. 5), but the stock shows great variability. It is probable here as Dexter has shown, that a number of mutant factors that act as modifiers have been picked up in the course of the selection, and when it is recalled that during ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... with a deafening roar. The guests, tickled by the words that fell so pat, twisted and squirmed with laughter, digging their fingers into their neighbours' ribs to emphasize the details. But Barney, in trying to imitate a stumpy man with an umbrella, as the song demanded, tripped and lay where he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... was valiant, the Dog was vain, He flew at the prickly ball again, Snapping with all his might and main, But, oh! the pain! He sat down on his stumpy tail and howled, Then he laid his jaws on ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... look for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue mansions, he is there; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is there; if you take—but it is vain to take the wings of the morning, or of anything else, in the hope of flying to a spot where the stumpy little wings of the English sparrow have not ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the other end of the room had swung open, and a tall woman swept in, followed by a diminutive figure in green coat and white trousers. A pair of huge spectacles, mounted on a somewhat stumpy nose, peered absently from side to ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... keen in the fish business, and Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a clear voice, and a short, stumpy girl with red hair and freckled face calmly entered the room and stood ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... noticed those stumpy, abbreviated fingers, so oddly at variance with the rest of ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... day's work before us, we were enabled to make but a short stay, so, bidding him and his family a sincere good-bye and good speed, we renewed our journey. We soon came in sight of the black stumpy monuments of one of the most disastrous conflagrations which ever victimized a forest. Some idea may be formed of the ravages of the "devouring element," from the simple fact that it all but totally consumed every ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too. But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit with one ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... patiently along, with their heads down and with reeking flanks and shoulders, pausing occasionally as the water-bars brace the wheels, and impatient only with the flies that vex their ears, and the insufficiency of their short and stumpy tails to protect their quivering sides. Some of these animals are not so patient, but are nervous and spasmodic and unhappy. I have noticed one among them particularly, that has a very bad time every morning with his first load. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. Other boats ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby subsequently observed to the ladies of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it decided upon Brock, it gave me the chance I had been waiting for. I fired instantly at the hollow between neck and shoulder; the brute dropped at once, and save for one or two convulsive kicks of its stumpy legs as it lay half on its back, it never moved again. The second rhino proved to be a well-grown youngster which showed considerable fight as we attempted to approach its fallen comrade. We did not want to kill it, and accordingly spent about two hours in shouting ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, and then—one ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... spoiled child that had been half whipped. Everybody knew him, and everybody despised him for a low-down, thieving, lazy cur,—everybody except Jonathan. Jonathan loved him,—loved his weepy, smeary eyes, and his rough, black hair, and his fat round body, short stumpy legs, and shorter stumpy tail,—especially the tail. Everything else that the dog lacked could be traced back to the peccadillos of his ancestors,—Jonathan ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the pup takes on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... glass at Hougomont. His elevated face makes itself distinct in the morning light as a gloomy resentful countenance, blue-black where shaven, and stained with snuff, with powderings of the same on the breast of his uniform. His stumpy figure, being just now thrown ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... over the place of the explosion, and the water looked rather foamy: then in about a second it began to rise, and there was the most enormous outbreak of spray that you can conceive. It rose in one column of 60 or 70 feet high, and broad at the base, resembling a stumpy sheaf with jagged masses of spray spreading out at the sides, and seemed to grow outwards till I almost feared that it was coming to us. It sunk, I suppose, in separate parts, for it did not make any grand squash down, and then there were seen logs of wood rising, and a dense ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... born stepmother. Well, she got shut out one night, and froze her feet, and lost some good claws, too; but I knew she'd manage some way, and of course I did not let her set, because she could not scratch with these stumpy feet of hers. But she found a job all right! She stole chickens from the other hens. I often wondered what she promised them, but she got them someway, and only took those that were big enough to scratch, for Biddy knew her limitations. ...
— The Next of Kin - Those who Wait and Wonder • Nellie L. McClung
... on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... reef, plunging and rolling heavily, was a small steamer. She was stumpy, high bowed, low waisted, with a short black funnel. Her bridge and single deck-house were disproportionately high. She was shabby and rusty. She looked insignificant. She was swept frequently with showers of ...
— The Island Mystery • George A. Birmingham
... a curious looking fellow, about twenty-five years old, as I should judge; but to look at his back, you would have taken him for a little old man. His arms and legs were very large, round, short, and stumpy; so that when he had on his great monkey-jacket, and sou'west cap flapping in his face, and his sea boots drawn up to his knees, he looked like a fat porpoise, standing on end. He had a round face, too, like a walrus; and with about the same expression, half human and half indescribable. ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... a mound for the first time on April 16. He coiled up on the eastern side every morning for some hours, but was never seen in the afternoon. His short, thick body and unfinished tail, more like a punch or the neck of a stumpy bottle, was turned in a loop, the head nearly touching the tail, like a pair of sugar-tongs. Coming out from the stitchwort and grasses, the spiders often ran over his shining dark brown surface, something the colour of glazed earthenware. A snake ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... verses in which there is something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song. The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest. Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to a British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's lot; The ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... faithful Ali, he entered a small boat and was rowed to the shore. They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them. While the vegetables were cooking ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... loved him; and because they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... mustache, is childishly self-willed and weak, of an obstinate kindliness. A thick neck is jammed like a post into the heavy trunk of his body. His arms with their big, hairy, freckled hands, and his stumpy legs terminating in large flat feet, are awkwardly short and muscular. He walks with a clumsy, rolling gait. His voice, when not raised in a hollow boom, is toned down to a sly, confidential half-whisper ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... degree was always administered by Captain H—— himself. It was in the form of a little sortie from the trench to a stumpy willow in "No-Man's-Land," a willow that bore a striking resemblance to some giant cacti and was called by us the ...
— From the St. Lawrence to the Yser with the 1st Canadian brigade • Frederic C. Curry
... fortress, where he had a biscuit and a glass of sherry in the commandant's little parlour, and forth the two cronies sallied mysteriously side by side; the commandant, Colonel Bligh, being remarkably tall, slim, and straight, with an austere, mulberry-coloured face; the general stout and stumpy, and smiling plentifully, short of breath, and double chinned, they got into the sanctum I have ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... Goldwin Smith—Canada and the Canadian Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields—the farmer in Drury's youth did well to ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... there is in the north-western bay a pointed door, differing only from those of about a hundred years earlier in having twisted shafts. One curious feature is the parapet of the central aisle, which is like a row of small classical pedestals, each bearing a stumpy obelisk. By far the finest feature of the outside is the great west door. On each side are clusters of square pinnacles ending in square crocketed spirelets, and running up to a horizontal moulding which, as so often, gives the whole design a rectangular form. ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... winks on the sofa, and we two beat a retreat, lit up our pipes in the passage, and were just turning out when the postman's double knock came, but no showers of letters in the box. Derrick threw open the door, and the man handed him a fat, stumpy-looking roll in a ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... jaws of the butterfly are developed from imaginal discs, and this fact explains how it comes to pass that they differ so widely from the corresponding structures in the caterpillar. The larval feelers (fig. 3 At) are short and stumpy, those of the butterfly long and many-jointed. The maxilla of the larva (fig. 3 Mx) consists of a base carrying two short jointed processes; in the butterfly a certain portion of the maxilla, the hood or galea, is modified into a long, flexible grooved process, capable of forming with ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... him know when the sun was down, and I prolonged his fast until it was quite dark, when I gave him permission to eat. They all had tolerable stallions for their service, and seemed to live pleasantly enough, in their wild way. The fat, stumpy corporal, with his enormously broad pantaloons and automaton legs, went down to the fountain with his musket, and after taking a rest and sighting full five minutes, fired at a dove without hitting it. He afterwards joined us in a social pipe, and we sat ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... famous Iron Crown, of which a description has been given, on the occasion of the baptism of her son. Under the influence of these subsequently civilized barbarians many of the greatest specimens of carving in North Italy came into being. The most delightful little stumpy saints and sacred emblems may be found on the facade of St. Michele at Pavia, and also at Lucca, and on the Baptistery at Parma. The sculptor who produced these works at Parma was a very interesting craftsman, named ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... you who I am when you have wrestled with me,' said Ian. And they threw their arms round each other, and the giant forced Ian on to his knees; but in a moment he was up again, and crooking his leg round the shoulders of the giant, he threw him heavily to the ground. 'Stumpy black raven, come quick!' cried he; and the raven came, and beat the giant about the head with his wings, so that he could not get up. Then he bade Ian take out a sharp knife from under his feathers, which he carried with him for cutting berries, and Ian ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Andrew Lang
... microscope, he had perceived something else; something which startled him, and yet which he had somehow expected. Whoever was the tall priest, there could be no doubt about the identity of the short one. It was his friend of the Harwich train, the stumpy little cure of Essex whom he had warned ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... finish to correct a mistake of Old Jack's. She resumes the chair she had risen from when he came in, and thereupon he, suffering fearfully from having no breathing-apparatus and nothing to use it on, makes concession to a chair himself, but all the while waves a stumpy finger to keep Sally's last remark alive till his voice comes. The other old soldier remains standing, but somewhat on Sally's other side, so that she does not see both at once. A little voice, to be used cautiously, comes ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... looked up at me with a hesitating you-would-and-you-wouldn't sort of look. You thought I was looking out of the window all the time; and so I was, being uncommonly interested in the corn-fields we were passing just then, so flat and stumpy and picturesque they looked; but, lor', Mr. Austin, if I couldn't look out of the window and watch you at the same time, I shouldn't be worth my salt to you or any one else. I saw plain enough that you had half a mind to show me that letter; and it wasn't very difficult to guess ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... this way," said Rap. "I was up in a hickory tree trying to look over into a Woodpecker's hole that was in another tree, when I stepped on a stumpy branch that was rotten and partly broke off; and there, inside, was a soft nest made of feathers, with, four very little birds in it. I was afraid they would fall out, but there was enough of the branch left to hold them in. While I was wondering ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... watched them disposing of the mangled remains of M'ling, I heard a light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... Philip wagged his stumpy tail and frisked about, trying his best to tell the children that he had come out to look for them. Having Philip with them to talk to and pet made the rest of the way home seem shorter, and in less than fifteen minutes Meg and ...
— Four Little Blossoms and Their Winter Fun • Mabel C. Hawley
... he went away, and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called me ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... were netted, but fish that had been surrounded with the mackerel. Several times over little stumpy red mullet were seen—brilliant little fish, and then grey mullet—large-scaled silvery fish with tiny mouths and something the aspect, on a large ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... not very grand for architecture of a more material description. It had, no doubt, a perfect right to be called a castle, as it was entered by a castle-gate which led into a court, the porter's lodge for which was built as it were into the wall; there were attached to it also two round, stumpy adjuncts, which were, perhaps properly, called towers, though they did not do much in the way of towering; and, moreover, along one side of the house, over what would otherwise have been the cornice, there ran a castellated ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... are drawing heavy loads. The majority of them crawl patiently along, with their heads down and with reeking flanks and shoulders, pausing occasionally as the water-bars brace the wheels, and impatient only with the flies that vex their ears, and the insufficiency of their short and stumpy tails to protect their quivering sides. Some of these animals are not so patient, but are nervous and spasmodic and unhappy. I have noticed one among them particularly, that has a very bad time every morning with his first load. He is what the teamsters call "balky," though evidently ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... only when they were stripping him for the last sad toilet, and the cherished top and half a dozen highly-prized marbles rolled out of the pocket in the stumpy little round jacket she had made out of a cast-off garment of his father's that her bosom heaved, and the fountains of her grief sprang from the stony soil. She wept copiously, and found resignation. Soon she was sufficiently herself to scold a prodigally-minded ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... of Harrodstown greeted our eyes as we stole cautiously to the edge of the forest. And the sight of no roofs and spires could have been more welcome than that of these logs and cabins, broiling in the midsummer sun. At a little distance from the fort, a silent testimony of siege, the stumpy, cleared fields were overgrown with weeds, tall and rank, the corn choked. Nearer the stockade, where the keepers of the fort might venture out at times, a more orderly growth met the eye. It was young James Ray whom Colonel Clark singled ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... is standing steady on the ground. Molly and Cynthia have got those new plaid shawls just alike, and they trim their bonnets alike, and Molly is grown as tall as Cynthia since Christmas. I was always afraid she'd be short and stumpy, but she's now as tall and slender as any one need be. I'll answer for it, Mrs. Goodenough saw Molly, and ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... and long, envelop'd in the deep musical drone of these bees, flitting, balancing, darting to and fro about me by hundreds—big fellows with light yellow jackets, great glistening swelling bodies, stumpy heads and gauzy wings—humming their perpetual rich mellow boom. (Is there not a hint in it for a musical composition, of which it should be the back-ground? some bumble-bee symphony?) How it all nourishes, lulls ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... over before he could hop upon the wall, where he got at last, and shook the dust off his feathers with an angry "jark;" while Dick, withy staring eyes and his tongue hanging out, ran right between Philip's legs, made a feint at Fred, and then leaped right on Harry, who caught hold of his short stumpy tail as he went down and dragged him ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... He was wagging his stumpy tail, anyway; but one can always give a dog the benefit of a doubt, and she believed that it began to wag more happily. Thus it was settled between them. All the affection which his nature held, which his rearing in a large kennel of other dogs had not permitted him to bestow upon any one master, ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... prolongations of the skin, which project on either side from its broad and flattened head. A long, flexible, double tube forms its snout. The shield on the back is marked with three distinct ridges, or keels, along it, and is broader before than behind. It has a stumpy, pointed tail. ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping in the ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... powerful that a hippopotamus has been known to cut holes through the iron plates of a Nile steamer with one blow. Its eyes are very small, but protruding, and placed on the top of its head. Its body resembles a huge hogshead perched on four short, stumpy legs. A full-grown animal will sometimes measure twelve feet in length and as much in circumference. The hide of this beast is very thick and strong, and is used to make whips. Ordinary bullets, unless they strike near the ear, rattle off ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... constitutes a landmark in the study of folklore. It and Dasent's later volume, Tales from the Fjeld, are still, perhaps, the best sources for versions of the Norse popular tales. "Why the Bear Is Stumpy-tailed" belongs to the class of stories which explain how things happened to be as they are. It is of great antiquity and is found over most of the world. The greatest of all modern nature fairy tales, Kipling's Just So Stories, ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... but to explore on her own account. A staircase of the dull Victorian kind led down to a dark, cool hall. The front door was open. She walked to it and stood under a stumpy portico, looking out. The view was much the same as that seen from the bathroom, only that instead of grass and flower-beds there was a gravel sweep, and, just opposite the front door, a circle of grass with a tall monkey-puzzle tree ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... the sharp, low, stumpy pine ridges in haphazard fashion, like a Swiss village. A small brook ran through it, smothered here and there in snow. A sawmill was the largest figure of the town, and the railway station was the centre. There was not an ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... story is heaviest, and each succeeding story increases in lightness; in the Ducal palace this is reversed, making it unique amongst buildings. The outer walls rest upon the pillars of open colonnades, which have a more stumpy appearance than was intended, owing to the raising of the pavement in the piazza. They had, however, no base, but were supported by a continuous stylobate. The chief decorations of the palace were employed upon the capitals of these thirty-six ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... wrinkled brown hand, with its extended forefinger capped by its stumpy nail, looking for all the world like a mud turtle with head out crawling over the crumpled surface ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... well-wooded country, some miles west of the present town of Huntsville, where the only serious annoyance and drawback was the immense number of these animals which prowled through the woods and decimated the poultry. Stumpy tailed, green eyed, they strolled through the clearing and sunned themselves on the limbs of neighboring trees, blinking calmly at the clucking hens which they marked for their prey, and even venturing to throw suspicious glances at the infant sleeping in its ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... between the "Er" of common intercourse and the blast of a trumpet. The girl in brown slipped back to her place: it was immediately in front of Hill's, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a notebook out of the drawer of his table, turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stumpy pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred text of the College students. Books, saving only the Professor's own, you may—it ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... the terrace, and it should be added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby subsequently observed to the ladies of his family in the Scriptural ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the Great and empress of Russia, daughter of a Livonian peasant; "a little stumpy body, very brown,... strangely chased about from the bottom to the top of the world,... had once been a kitchen wench"; married first to a Swedish dragoon, became afterwards the mistress of Prince Menschikoff, and then of Peter the Great, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... it! and fairly gnashed his teeth with disgust that now, when his greatest chance was come, he for once was without his gun. He was in not a little fear, too, and stood wondering what to do. The Lynx growled louder; its stumpy tail twitched viciously for a minute, then it picked up its victim, and leaping from the log was lost ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... spoke I caught the quick rush of his wing, and saw him dart across a space, a few yards to my right. I felt my hand shake; I had not pulled a trigger in ten months, but in a second's space I rallied. There was an opening just before me between a stumpy thick thorn-bush which had saved the last bird, and a dwarf cedar; it was not two yards over; he glanced across it; he was gone, just as my barrel sent its charge into ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... Bullyed, does thee know a man named Adam Green?" The bull-head was shaken in sign of ignorance. "Loy-a-bed, does thee?" Lie-a-bed's opportunities of making acquaintance had been rather limited, and she could not resolve the difficulty. Stumpy (a man with a wooden leg), Cowskin, Spindleshanks, Corkeye, Pigtail, and Yellowbelly were severally invoked, but in vain; and the querist fell into a brown study, in which she remained for some time. At length, however, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... apart, those were enjoyable suppers after the toil and grime of the day. The Beadle especially admired Zussmann's hands when the black grease had been washed off them, the fingers were so long and tapering. Why had his own fingers been made so stumpy and square-tipped? Since Nature made herself, why was she so uneven a worker? Nay, why could she not have given him white teeth like Zussmann's wife? Not that these were ostentatious—you thought more of the sweetness of the smile of which they were ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... suborder of primitive ungulate mammals, taking its name from the short and stumpy feet, which were furnished with five toes each, and supported massive pillar-like limbs. The brain-cavity was extremely small, and insignificant in comparison to the bodily bulk, which was equal to that of the largest rhinoceroses. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... with champagne; whereupon he lifted it, and said, "Here's luck, my dear boy," and somewhat recklessly gulped down the gout-compelling liquid. And after dinner, when Miss Winwood had left them together, he lighted a long Corona instead of his usual stumpy Bock, and discussed with ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... yer want, young feller?" demanded the leader of the party, who rejoiced in the name of Stumpy Nuggs. ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... table, purring, and rubbing her head against his arm as if she knew him for a friend. He stroked it occasionally as he read his evening papers, and stroked it in the caressing way which cats love, from its forehead to the tip of its stumpy tail. It was while he was thus engaged that a tap at the door was heard, and the tap was followed by the entrance of a young man, who looked as if he were quite ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... rainy; the landscape was a flat dreariness. A buzzard flapped his heavy wings and flew from a dead tree; a yelping dog ran after the train; a horse, turned out to die, stumbled along a stumpy road. ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... stayed there; it was not till towards evening that the rest came back cautiously to make inquiries. One was trying to walk on two legs, and most of 'em looked more or less singed; and a little, singed, stumpy-tailed dog, who had been in the habit of hopping the back half of him along on one leg, had reason to be glad that he'd saved up the other leg all those years, for he needed it now. There was one old one-eyed cattle-dog round that shanty for years afterwards, who ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... ever watched my movements when on deck and a word or look from me was sufficient to set his stumpy tail wagging as if it would never stop; while he would lick my bare feet in a most affectionate manner should I ever pass near him and give him the chance, showing me his 'bad leg,' if the slightest hint to that effect were given, by holding up one of his hind limbs and stretching it ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... a new one, appears to deserve a particular description. The Wombat (or, as it is called by the natives of Port Jackson, the Womback) is a squat, thick, short-legged, and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength, and somewhat bigger than a large turnspit dog. Its figure and movements, if they do not exactly resemble those of the bear, at least strongly remind one of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... by some one outside. There is a clatter of ammunition boots getting into step, and a solemn procession of four files into the room. The leader thereof is a stumpy but enormously important-looking private. He is the escort. Number two is the prisoner. Numbers three and four are the accuser—counsel for the Crown, as it were—and a witness. The procession reaches the table at which the Captain is sitting. Beside him is a young officer, one Bobby ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... we do find among the various races of mankind that some have been given long heels, such as the dark-skinned natives of Africa and of Australia, while other races have been given relatively short, stumpy heels, of which sort the natives of Europe and of China may be cited as examples. With long heels less powerful muscular engines are required, and hence in dark races the calf of the leg is but ill developed, because the muscles which move the heel are small. We must admit, however, that the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... side of Maine. A "squire" from England gave it his name. He bought the tract, named it, inhabited several years, a popular squire-arch, and then returned from the wild to the tame, from pine woods and stumpy fields to the elm-planted hedge-rows and shaven lawns of placid England. The local gossip did not reveal any cause for Mr. Rangeley's fondness ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would have done honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short, stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband. Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a bewitching expression. While her family was poor, Maitre Lebrun had an income of twelve thousand ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... brow, and making a gingerly backward step with his flat hind-foot. His hind-quarters were towards Ugh-lomi, and he clawed at the rocks and bushes so that he seemed flattened against the cliff. He looked none the less for that. From his shining snout to his stumpy tail he was a lion and a half, the length of two tall men. He looked over his shoulder, and his huge mouth was open with the exertion of holding up his great carcase, ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... "But look at its stumpy front legs!" called Jack, who had forgotten his empty stomach in the excitement about this little creature, which looked like a cricket and ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... was nothing to fear, whether from ghost, goblin, or white face, retired and brought her mistress, a short stumpy old dame, who had seen at least some sixty summers. Her nose was short, squat, and flabby at the end, and her eyes were bald of brows or lashes; but still she retained great energy of manner, and was blessed with an ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... water, with a freeboard of nearly five feet. A little forward of amidships was a small deck cabin containing a brass wheel and binnacle. Aft of the cabin, in the middle of the open space of the deck, was a skylight, the top of which formed two short seats placed back to back. Forward rose a stumpy mast carrying a lantern cage near the top, and still farther forward, almost in the bows, lay an unexpectedly massive anchor, housed in grids, with behind it a small hand winch for pulling ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts
... could not find in any dictionary, but which he thinks might be very useful); servant girls, smart children with nurses and hoops going up to the Pincio, black-browed washerwomen with big baskets of clothes on their heads, stumpy little infantry soldiers in grey uniforms, priests, friars, venders of boot-laces and thread, vegetable sellers pushing hand-carts of green things in and out among the horses and vehicles with amazing dexterity, and yelling their cries in super-humanly ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... side and then to the other in his frantic efforts. Then he tried to crawl under and then over the dog in front of him. Failing in this, he suddenly sprang forward with such force that he managed to seize hold of the short, stumpy tail of the dog in front of him. This was an unfortunate move on his part, as the dogs that are accustomed to work together will readily fight for each other when one is in trouble. So, before Sam or the ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young
... looked to my untutored eye a confused litter of guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook hands with her commander, young, clear-eyed and cheery of mien, who presently led me past a stumpy smokestack and up a perpendicular ladder to the bridge where, beneath a somewhat flimsy-looking structure, was the wheel, brass-bound and highly be-polished like all else about this crowded craft as, notably, the binnacle and certain brass-bound dials, on the faces whereof one might read ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... you are beautiful. Did you know it?" he said, gently, and led her to a little stumpy rocking-chair with a gay red-and-blue rag cushion that Mrs. Tanner always kept sitting by the front door in pleasant weather. Then he stood off and surveyed her, while the red stole into her cheeks becomingly. "What has Miss Earle been doing ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... all sorts and conditions of men. For'ard, there are peasants and soldiers: stumpy, placid-looking little warriors for the most part, smoking feeble cigars and looking quite harmless under their enormous helmets. A poor stunted dull-looking boy of sixteen, staggering before a black-striped sentry-box, with an ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray
... himself on the extreme edge of the bed, and painfully tucking his feet away under it,—"surely." After a pause, he rubbed a short, thick, stumpy beard, that bore a general resemblance to a badly-worn blacking-brush, with the palm of his hand, and went on, "You ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... quarters on the upper floor in a vast apartment with heavy black beams. But there was no ceiling, and the eye lost itself in the darkness under the high pitch of the roof. The thick shutters stood open. On a long table could be seen a large inkstand, some stumpy, inky quill pens, and two square wooden boxes, each holding half a hundred-weight of sand. Sheets of grey coarse official paper bestrewed the floor. It must have been a room occupied by some higher official of the Customs, because a large leathern armchair stood ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... beautiful neatness of the case that quite intoxicates me. Oh, Lord, what a happiness it is to be concerned in such a job as this!" cries Mr. Dark, slapping his stumpy hands on his fat knees ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... rogue, and too conscientious for a rake. At Calais he met Harriet, the elder daughter of Sir David Dunder, of Dunder Hall, near Dover, and fell in love with her. Scruple subsequently got invited to Dunder Hall, and was told that his Harriet was to be married next day to Lord Snolt, a stumpy, "gummy" fogey of five and forty. Harriet hated the idea, and agreed to elope with Scruple; but her father discovered by accident the intention, and intercepted it. However, to prevent scandal, he gave his consent to the union, and discovered that Scruple, both in family and fortune, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... another. "I want to hear Zay talk, and you've been to Berlin and that picturesque Dresden. Did you see the shepherdesses with their crooks, and Corydon making love to them, and Holland—that funny place of canals and windmills and stumpy dutchmen." ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... said my aunt; 'and it was the one with the stumpy tail which that Murdering sister of a woman rode, when she came to my house.' This had been, ever since, the only name my aunt knew for Miss Murdstone. 'If there is any Donkey in Dover, whose audacity it is harder ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... tadpole comes of age, so to speak, and creeps ashore to assume his new dignity of frog-hood. For a little while longer, however, he carries the evidence of his infancy about with him, in the shape of a short, stumpy tail; but in a very brief space the last remnant of this disappears, and now, save in size, he cannot be distinguished from ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk, with a short stumpy tail, with fins like a bank of ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... of Jacobus's household evidently spent their days in light attire. This stumpy old woman with a face like a large wrinkled lemon, beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was dressed in a garment of some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff. It fell from her thick neck down to ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... I said to myself; and, starting up impatiently, I walked right out of the furnace-house across the strip of yard, and in at the door, making Piter give his stumpy tail a sharp rapping noise upon the ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... were about him. Then he thought of Noorna, and that she sang to him and danced, and when he rose to embrace her she was Rabesqurat by the light of the Lily! And he thought of Shagpat, and that in shaving him the blade was checked in its rapid sweep, and blunted by a stumpy twine of hair that waxed in size and became the head of Karaz that gulped at him a wide devouring gulp, and took him in, and flew up with him, leaving Shagpat half sheared. Then he thought himself struggling halfway down the throat of the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... course led directly towards Fred; but upon getting sight of him as he sat on his horse with rope in hand, it changed, and fled towards me, plunging its long neck, and uttering a short whistle, as though blowing off steam. Even while running, the short, stumpy wings were used to aid its flight and steady its body, which rocked, and rolled, and swayed to and fro like a ship in a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... complicated curricula, of which more anon. Lying in the still waters of the dock, alongside the comparatively big grey cruiser, were the trim little hulls of a numerous flotilla of 20-knot motor launches, newly arrived from Canada, with wicked-looking 13-pounder high-angle guns, stumpy torpedo-boat masts and brand-new White Ensigns and brass-bound decks. These were the advance guard of a fleet of over 500 similar craft, to the command of which many of the officers being trained would, after a period of practical experience ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... morning. Market-place of a large mining village in the Midlands. A man addressing a small gang of colliers from the foot of a stumpy memorial obelisk. Church bells heard. Churchgoers passing ...
— Touch and Go • D. H. Lawrence
... in profile, we distinguish the regular position (fig. 5b) and designate all forward deviations as acute-angled (long toe and low heel, fig. 5a), and all deviations backward from the regular (steep toe and high heel, fig. 5c) as steep-toed, or stumpy. When the body weight is evenly distributed over all four limbs, the foot-axis should be straight; the long pastern, short pastern, and wall at the toe should ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... beaded (fig. 84), has been bred for five years and selected for wings showing more beading. In extreme cases the wings have been reduced to mere stumps (see stumpy, fig. 5), but the stock shows great variability. It is probable here as Dexter has shown, that a number of mutant factors that act as modifiers have been picked up in the course of the selection, and when it is recalled that during those five years over 125 new characters ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... said that the police were determined to find the Prince and his secretary guilty; they did not look further than their own stumpy noses. Messrs. Winslow and Vassall spent money with a free hand in those investigations. Mr. Winslow, as the senior partner, stood to lose over L9000 by that robbery. Now, with Mr. Vassall it ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... a new respect for her. Over by the wheel-house something made a strange noise of crying, and St. George saw that Mr. Frothingham sat holding a weird little animal, like a squirrel but for its stumpy tail and great human eyes, which he had unwittingly stepped on among the rocks. The little thing was licking his hand, and the old lawyer's face was softened and glowing as he nursed it and coaxed it with crumbs. ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... creature off. It had then retreated a few paces, had seated itself on its hind legs like a dog when it is begging, and had regarded her with such a look of rage, that she had fled in terror. She described the animal as resembling a wolf, but as being shorter and stouter; its hair was red, its tail stumpy, and the head smaller than ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... he said. "It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah, no, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. Now it can't ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... old boy?" asked Wade, with low voice, as he peered ahead. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to approach close to game without being detected. Fox wagged his stumpy tail and looked up with knowing eyes. Wade proceeded cautiously. The swamp was a rank growth of long, weedy grasses and ferns, with here and there a green-mossed bog half hidden and a number of dwarf oak-trees. Wade's horse sank up to his knees in the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the apples waxing greener and larger, ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was fast asleep in ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... flash of the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... which of us it ought to attack. When at last it decided upon Brock, it gave me the chance I had been waiting for. I fired instantly at the hollow between neck and shoulder; the brute dropped at once, and save for one or two convulsive kicks of its stumpy legs as it lay half on its back, it never moved again. The second rhino proved to be a well-grown youngster which showed considerable fight as we attempted to approach its fallen comrade. We did not want to kill it, and accordingly spent about two hours in ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... whom little Mrs. Timmins was bent upon asking, were Mr. and Mrs. John Rowdy, of the firm of Stumpy, Rowdy and Co., of Brobdingnag Gardens, of the Prairie, Putney, and of Lombard ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... very well, could not pronounce her r's, and lisped in what her trail of nurses told her was a ridiculous fashion for so big a girl. But, then, she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year. Her eyes were large and black ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... day. Trix affected dense unconsciousness; her mother allowed herself a mysterious smile—which, however, speedily vanished when the curate (he was taking lunch with us) observed in a cheerful tone, "Newhaven! oh, I remember the chap at the House—ploughed twice in Smalls—stumpy fellow, isn't he? Not a bad chap, though, you know, barring his looks. I'm glad ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... surlily, "that sailor," as Mark called him, a little stumpy fellow who looked as though he should have been plump and rosy, but who was ghastly pale instead, sauntered up slowly, looking very hard at Mark, and opened his lips as if to say something, but closed them again ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... Stumptail, with a sort of laugh away down in her trunk. "All our family have short, or stumpy tails. That is how we get our name. The Stumptail elephants are very ...
— Umboo, the Elephant • Howard R. Garis
... the red-headed man, with his coarse, bristling crop of hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... head of the table. His lordship always held out that he was a marrying man; but even if he hadn't they would have come all the same, an unmarried man being always clearly on the cards; and though he was stumpy, and clumsy, and ugly, with as little to say for himself as could well be conceived, they all agreed that he was a most engaging, attractive man—quite a pattern of a man. Even on horseback, and in his hunting clothes, in which ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... no longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, presented an ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... sha'n't be seein' much of you now. 'Tis like an end of old times. I reckoned we'd have a pipe together afore partin'." John pulled out a stumpy clay and filled it. "Got a ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... dad,' said Ken, as another shell cut away the top of the stumpy funnel. We can't ...
— On Land And Sea At The Dardanelles • Thomas Charles Bridges
... and Bazard were lifting a few boxes into a farm-wagon. The carriage from Trois-Feuilles was also there, a stumpy Alsatian peasant on the box. But there were yet no signs of the escort of gendarmes ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... characters, as well as by language. Physically they are without question the finest people of the country. Their skin-colour is decidedly fairer than that of Sea Dayaks or Kayans. They are of medium stature, with long backs and short, muscular, well-rounded limbs; a little stumpy in build, but of graceful and vigorous bearing. They are perhaps the most courageous and intelligent of the peoples; pugnacious, but less quarrelsome than the Sea Dayak; more energetic and excitable than the ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... Every possible thing is copied in miniature for the benefit of the little ones; the intricate mechanical toys that a Dutch youngster tumbles about in stolid unconcern would create a stir in our patent office. Ben laughed outright at some of the mimic fishing boats. They were so heavy and stumpy, so like the queer craft that he had seen about Rotterdam. The tiny trekschuiten, however, only a foot or two long, and fitted out, complete, made his heart ache. He so longed to buy one at once for his little brother in ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... mountain, but mighty cold and wet, for a gusty drizzle had set in, and I got the spindrift of the big waves. There I balanced myself, as we lurched into the twilight, hanging on with one hand to a rope which descended from the stumpy mast. I noticed that there was only an indifferent rail between me and the edge, but that interested me and helped to keep off sickness. I swung to the movement of the vessel, and though I was mortally cold it was rather pleasant than otherwise. My notion was to get the nausea whipped ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... but unequal struggle, and though the boy struck out right and left, inflicting not a little injury, in the end he found himself on his back, with Stumpy Nuggs sitting on ...
— The Rover Boys out West • Arthur M. Winfield
... replied Aunt Betsy, with a critical air; 'I think she has rather improved. She is plump enough still, in all conscience, but not quite so stumpy as she was last summer. Her figure is a little less ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... are details that tell an endocrine tale. Students of hands naturally have grouped them as the long slender and the short, broad, the bony and the well-filled out, the tapering fingers and the stumpy. The character of a hand is determined anatomically by the length and breadth of the bones, the amount and distribution of fat, and the thickness and elasticity of the skin. Over these, the essential control lies in the pituitary and the thyroid. So we find that ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... to four inches long; the greenish colour; the stumpy legs; movements, as walking, feeling, clinging; the rows of warts, and short, stiff spines on these; the feeding habits, biting or sucking; eggs of parasites, for frequently these are ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... one and a stumpy pencil. With these materials Beecot wrote a reply saying the brooch would be returned on the morrow. When the boy went away with the answer Paul felt in his breast pocket and took out the old blue case. "I've a good mind to send it now," ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... sense of a drop upon a funny, whirly world. He kept from giddiness, though the whirl had lasted since he beheld the form of a wild forest girl, dancing, as it struck him now, over an abyss, on the plumed shoot of a stumpy tree. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... use. We hesitated for a time between "Le Gris" and "Souris," two much-vaunted animals, belonging to Paquette, the interpreter. At length, being determined, like most of my sex, by a regard for exterior, I chose "Le Gris," and "Souris" was assigned to young Roy; my own little stumpy pony, "Brunet," being pronounced just the thing for a pack-saddle. My husband rode his own bay horse "Tom," while Plante, the gayest and proudest of the party, bestrode a fine, large animal called "Jerry," which ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... the area of the sprunk strakes with the stumpy thumb and little finger of an outstretched hand. Then he puckered his forehead and stared out to sea, apparently making mental calculations connected with the "li'l' ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... reproaches for destroying the wonder of them when they planted their proud cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there are still enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns left, and enough of those arches, striped in red and white with their undeniable suggestion of calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... those only whose personal appearance was such as to discourage any approach to familiarity or endearment. Never before or since was youthful beauty surrounded by such moustached duennas, squinting chambermaids, hunchbacked pages, and stumpy maids-of-all-work. This was a real sorrow to her, for she loved beauty; it was a still sadder trial that she could no longer feel it right to indulge herself in the least morsel of arsenic; she sighed for strychnia, and pined for prussic acid. The change of diet was of course at first most ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... struck me as unusually ill-favoured; short, "stumpy," and very dark, or tinged with unclean yellow. Lepers and hideous cripples thrust their sores and stumps in the face of charity. There was no local colouring compared with the carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose thrum-mop ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
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