"Round-shouldered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of English origin, introduced by Mr. John G. Waite, a seed-merchant of London. As figured and described, it is of large size, very richly colored, and remarkably smooth and symmetrical. At the crown, it is broad and round-shouldered, and measures about six inches in diameter; which size is nearly retained to a depth of eight or nine inches, when it contracts in a conical form to a tap-root. Color of upper portion, clear purple, richly clouded, and contrasting finely with the yellow on the lower part. It is represented ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... secondly, the motion is not so good, and the muscles are not so much put into action, and consequently cannot be so well developed, as when he is earned. A perambulator is very apt to make a child stoop, and to make him both crooked and round-shouldered. He is cramped by being so long in one position. It is painful to notice a babe of a few months old in one of these newfangled carriages. His little head is bobbing about first on one side and then on the other—at ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... a man in height rather less than the stock size six-feet so much in demand by the manufacturers of modern heroes of fiction; a man a bit round-shouldered, too, but ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... of the bones of his skull had to be removed, and from this time forth he never dared to remain long with his head uncovered. When he was fifty-nine he swallowed a certain corrosive poison, which did not kill him, but left him toothless. He was likewise round-shouldered, a stammerer, and subject to constant palpitation of the heart; but in compensation for these defects he had eyes which could see in the dark and which needed not ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... Marcus was small, round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, and freckle-faced. His hair was coarse, straight, and the color of maple sirup; his nose was broad and a little flattened at the point, and his clothes had a knack of never fitting him. They were ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... or mud- volcano. But at last, out of a hut half buried in verdure on the edge of a little clearing, there tumbled the quaintest little old black man, cutlass in hand, and, without being asked, went on ahead as our guide. Crook-backed, round-shouldered, his only dress a ragged shirt and ragged pair of drawers, he had evidently thriven upon the forest life for many a year. He did not walk nor run, but tumbled along in front of us, his bare feet plashing from log to log and mud-heap to mud-heap, his gray woolly head wagging ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... in a small, light buggy drawn by one good horse. Beside her the reins were held by a rather tall man, of middle age, gray, dark, round-shouldered, and dressed in the loose blue flannel so much worn by followers of the Federal camp. Under the stiff brim of his soft-crowned black hat a pair of clear eyes gave a continuous playful twinkle. Between this person ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... Matlack, entered the hall, Mr. Archibald looked at him with some surprise, for he was not the conventional tall, gaunt, wiry, keen-eyed backwoodsman who had naturally appeared to his mental vision. This man was of medium height, a little round-shouldered, dressed in a gray shirt, faded brown trousers very baggy at the knees, a pair of conspicuous blue woollen socks, and slippers made of carpet. His short beard and his hair were touched with gray, and he wore a small jockey cap. With the exception of his eyes, ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... the Marquis de Riviere and four other conspirators. A fisherman called Etienne Horne gave some valuable details of this arrival. He had noticed particularly the man who appeared to be the leader—"a fat man, with a full, rather hard face, round-shouldered, and with a slight trouble ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... reasonable excuse; but reviewing the physical geography of Mr. Iff, the word emaciation bobbed to the surface of the literary mentality: Iff was really astonishingly slight of build. Otherwise he was rather round-shouldered; his head was small, bird-like, thinly thatched with hair of a faded tow colour; his face was sensitively tinted with the faintest of flushes beneath a skin of natural pallor, and wore an expression curiously naive and yet ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... comical drawling tone, standing on one foot, and looking up at me with curious eye, as if wondering who I was, and what in the world I was there for. But who was Coachy?—an old yellowish-brown hen, all tousled and sort of round-shouldered. As I was laughing quietly at this old hen scratching, and kicking, and pecking, and crooning about on the garden walk, it occurred to me to toss the least bit of a stone at her. So picking one up, I took aim, when, click! click! upon the porch I heard a pair ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... on a sweating thoroughbred, came Maharajah Gungadhura Singh just in time to see the back of the carriage as it rumbled in through the gateway and the iron doors clanged behind it. Scowling—altogether too round-shouldered for the martial stock he sprang from—puffy-eyed, and not so regal as overbearing in appearance, he sat for a few minutes stroking his scented beard upward and muttering ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... score of women were turned upon Dan, as he was daily seen, round-shouldered and hollow-chested, toiling along the snowy country roads to and from school, coughing as he went. The topic was not an uncongenial one to the members of the sewing-circle, who had really very little to talk about. So absorbed were they, indeed, in the discussion of poor Dan's fate, and of the ...
— A Bookful of Girls • Anna Fuller
... she was where all the others had come, and where countless others would come sooner or later. She was not unconscious and at Delia's cry she opened her eyes. The Probationer was off filling water bottles, and only the Dummy, stricken, round-shouldered, ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... well tell you that if I'm going to take a peer—and I must own peers are rather my fancy at present—it was Mohammedan pashas last year, wasn't it, Ri?" ("That is so," from Ri.)—"If I AM going to take a peer, I must have a man that LOOKS a peer. I've been plagued with so many undersized and round-shouldered noblemen that I'm beginning to wonder whether the aristocracy gets proper nourishment. How tall ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... stream from the university gate to the hospital. The figures and gait of the men were young, but there was little youth in most of their faces. Some looked as if they ate too little—a few as if they drank too much. Tall and short, tweed-coated and black, round-shouldered, bespectacled, and slim, they crowded with clatter of feet and rattle of sticks through the hospital gate. Now and again they thickened into two lines, as the carriage of a surgeon of the staff rolled over the ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... your muscles all the exercise needed, but if you are suffering from defects of any kind and you are desirous of remedying them some special exercises adapted to your individual needs should be taken with religious regularity. If you have a flat or sunken chest, if you are round-shouldered, if there is one shoulder higher than the other, if there is a spinal curvature, or if the muscles of the stomach or abdomen are weak, it will be necessary to give special attention to such parts through systematic movements intended to have a corrective influence. In another part ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... though it pays no bills to the grocer, milliner, tailor, or market man. It is the vertebra which steadies him plumb up to a positive perpendicular. A hopeless man or woman—how fearful! They very soon become round-shouldered, limp and weak, and drink little but unsizable sighs, and feed on all manner of dark and unhealthy things. It is TODD'S deliberate opinion that if a cent can't be laid up, Hope should. Hope with empty pockets is rich compared to wealth with "nary ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... monotonous and prosaic as a batch of fourpenny loaves. This was not the reason why the little South London side-street was called Baker's Terrace, though it might well seem so; for Baker was the name of the builder, a worthy gentleman whose years and virtues may still be deciphered on a doddering, round-shouldered stone in a deceased cemetery not far from the scene of ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill
... was being fixed. Gustave said it would be ready in a half-hour. He slipped the microscope over his eye and, bending in his heavy round-shouldered way above the small watch, began to pry with his thick fingers. A pair of tiny pincers, a fragile-looking screwdriver and a set of things that looked like ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... the inhabitants are poverty-stricken, every one of them, and have the reputation of being desperate gamblers at the game of shtoss. I go into a hut; the people are not at home; on a bench sits a white-haired, round-shouldered, bare-footed boy; he seems lost in thought. We ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... laden sacks of mail, and realized that when the winter really set in we would never be able to make it. So Dave Dykstra was appointed mail-carrier. He was a homesteader who taught the McClure school that winter, a slim, round-shouldered chap, rather frail in physique. Dave would never set the world on fire, but he would keep it going around regularly. Blizzard, rain or sun, he came to the post office every morning those short winter days before it was light. At night Ida Mary, as postmistress, would lock the mail sack ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... There was nothing at all formidable or dignified about Mrs. Higgs, who was a round-shouldered, infirm old woman in a brown dress, a black-and-white check shawl, and ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... the teacher of "physical culture," one will probably be innocent of such solecisms as thrusting the feet out to display the shoes; sitting sideways, or cross-legged; or slipping half-way down in the chair; or bending over a book in round-shouldered position; rocking violently; beating a noisy tattoo with impatient toes; or standing on one foot with the body thrown ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... scholar's stoop and the scholar's near-sighted, peering gaze—the sort of man who has never been really young and will never be old, looking at forty-five much as he looked at twenty, a little grayer, perhaps, a little more round-shouldered and ineffectual, but no more mature. His most marked characteristic was a certain shy amiability, which endeared him to his classes and his friends, even while it failed to command their respect. Beneath this surface ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... minutes,' said the fly-man, pulling in his horse. A zig-zag fugitive thought passed: why did the fly-man speak of taking them to the station? How was it that he knew where they wanted to go? They stopped and wondered. The poor horse's bones stood out in strange projections, the round-shouldered little fly-man sat grinning on his box, showing three long yellow fangs. The vehicle, the horse, and the man, his arm raised in questioning gesture, appeared in strange silhouette upon the grey clouds, assuming portentous aspect in their tremulous and excited ...
— Vain Fortune • George Moore
... brief, had been heavy enough to turn a thick layer of white dust into a greasy, grey paste of mud. On our left was a sudden drop into the rushing river, on the right a deep ditch, and the road between was as round-shouldered as a hunchback. Seeing this natural phenomenon, and feeling the slightly uncertain step of our fat tyres as they waddled through the pasty mud, the pleasant smile of the proud motor-proprietor which I had been wearing hardened ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... for good, having finally lost all hope of quitting the Russia which he detested, and managing, after a fashion, to support his scanty existence by giving lessons. Lemm's external appearance did not predispose one in his favour. He was small of stature, round-shouldered, with shoulder-blades which projected crookedly, and a hollow chest, with huge, flat feet, with pale-blue nails on the stiff, unbending fingers of his sinewy, red hands; he had a wrinkled face, sunken cheeks, and tightly-compressed ...
— A Nobleman's Nest • Ivan Turgenieff
... fingers, instead of gloves, you might have almost mistaken him for a gentleman. His companion presented the most striking contrast. His face, shaded by a torn, slouched hat, was dirty and coffee-colored. Of short stature, slight build, and round-shouldered, he followed his master, with an humble, abject look, and from his tread, you would almost have imagined that he was anxious not to leave any track behind, of his footsteps on the gravel walk. A velvet cloak, so worn and patched that a lazzaroni ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... were quartered in old Spanish buildings, where the sliding windows of the upper floors disclosed the lanes of white mosquito-bar. Back in the courtyard, where the cook was busily preparing mess, a mangy and round-shouldered monkey from the bamboo fence was looking on approvingly. The cook was not in a good humor. All that the mess had had for three weeks was the regulation beans and bacon, without a taste of fresh meat ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... we irreverently say,—it happened as we crossed Park Square, so called from its being an irregular pentagon of which one of the sides has been taken away, that I recognized a tall man, plodding across in the snow, head down, round-shouldered, stooping forward in walking, with his right shoulder higher than his left; and by these tokens I knew Tom Coram, prince among Boston princes. Not Thomas Coram that built the Foundling Hospital, though he was of Boston too; but he was longer ago. You must ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... little bird came back with six different kinds of eagles: a Black Eagle, a Bald Eagle, a Fish Eagle, a Golden Eagle, an Eagle-Vulture, and a White-tailed Sea Eagle. Twice as high as the boy they were, each one of them. And they stood on the rail of the ship, like round-shouldered soldiers all in a row, stern and still and stiff; while their great, gleaming, black eyes shot darting glances here and ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting
... all men, to "the Shirra." But perhaps we scarcely need a word (it would be seldom in use) for a character so rare, or rather so lonely, in its nobility and charm as that of Walter Scott. Here, in the heart of your own country, among your own grey round-shouldered hills (each so like the other that the shadow of one falling on its neighbour exactly outlines that neighbour's shape), it is of you and of your works that a native of the Forest is most frequently brought in mind. All the spirits of the river and the hill, ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... recruit. Richard had a drill-sergeant from the nearest barracks down for him, to give him a proper pride in himself, and marched him to and fro with immense satisfaction, and nearly broke his heart trying to get the round-shouldered rustic to take in the rudiments of letters: for the boy had unbounded hopes for Tom, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the fine gentlemen and dandies who promenade such unexceptionable figures in our frequented thoroughfares. Stripped of the cunning artifices of the tailor, and standing forth in the garb of Eden—what a sorry, set of round-shouldered, spindle-shanked, crane-necked varlets would civilized men appear! Stuffed calves, padded breasts, and scientifically cut pantaloons would then avail them nothing, and the ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... and done it better? The latter, it is well known, was much dependent on moods, and spent long periods in mental inactivity. The labors of the other were fitful, and his views of life betray the influence of the same cerebral defect that led to so much domestic woe. The narrow-chested, round-shouldered person, whose lungs barely oxydize blood enough to maintain life, is not expected to walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours, or to excel as a performer on wind-instruments. We impute to him no fault for this sort of incompetence. We should rather charge him with consummate ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... the old lady, who expressed a hope that I would now make a long visit. About an hour after I had arrived, Colonel Delmar made his appearance: he was a cousin of Lord de Versely's, but I certainly should not, from his appearance, have supposed him to be a Delmar: for he was short, round-shouldered, and with a fat, rubicund face, apparently about forty years of age. I observed, after our introduction, that his eyes were very often directed towards me; but his manner was courteous, and, although his appearance ...
— Percival Keene • Frederick Marryat
... some cowboys from the Indian Territory told pa and the other managers that if we would take the show to the Indian Territory we couldn't get cars enough to haul the money away, as the Indians had got round-shouldered and bow-legged carrying the money they had made grazing cattle, and the territory was full of cowboys that had money to burn, and they hadn't seen ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... people were the better or the worse for liquor. There was one fellow,—named Randall, I think,—a round-shouldered, bulky, ill-hung devil, with a pale, sallow skin, black beard, and a sort of grin upon his face,—a species of laugh, yet not so much mirthful as indicating a strange mental and moral twist. He was very riotous in the crowd, elbowing, thrusting, seizing hold of people; and at last a ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the poor white "cracker" population that we saw, seemed indigenous products of the starved soil. They suited their poverty-stricken surroundings as well as the gnarled and scrubby vegetation suited the sterile sand. Thin-chested, round-shouldered, scraggy-bearded, dull-eyed and open-mouthed, they all looked alike—all looked as ignorant, as stupid, and as lazy as they were poor and weak. They were "low-downers" in every respect, and made our rough and simple. minded East Tennesseans look like ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... the act and began to explain its meaning, but at that point a tall, stout, round-shouldered landowner, with dyed whiskers, in a tight uniform that cut the back of his neck, interrupted him. He went up to the table, and striking it with his finger ring, he shouted loudly: "A ballot! Put it to the vote! No need for more talking!" Then several voices began to talk ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... "A soldier shouldn't be round-shouldered, or have a slouching gait," said the instructor quietly; "but you will find when you come to march that the opposite extreme is attended with great inconvenience and discomfort. Until then you ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the large window, face and form in strong relief against the crude green without, the energy of the May landscape was, as it were, repeated and expressed in the man beholding it. He was tall, a little round-shouldered, with a large, broad-browed head, covered with brown, straggling hair; eyes, glancing and darkish, full of force, of excitement even, curiously veiled, often, by suspicion; nose, a little crooked owing to an injury at football; ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... itself in all their actions: hence it is by no means an uncommon occurrence to see a tall, round-shouldered, woolly-headed, buck-shinned, and inky-complexioned "Free Nigger," sauntering out on Sunday, shading his huge weather-proof face from the rays of the encroaching sun under a carefully-carried silk umbrella! And again, as in many ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various |
