|
|
|
More "Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her books for her just as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... him, shaking the solid earth with its ponderous weight, and he drew a decided breath of relief at the sight of the blinking red eyes on the rear platform of its caboose. How he wished he was in that caboose, riding comfortably toward New York, instead of plodding wearily along on foot, with nothing but uncertainties ahead ...
— Cab and Caboose - The Story of a Railroad Boy • Kirk Munroe
... retraced without difficulty, through the suite of saloons and galleries, the way which he had followed on his arrival with the King-at-Arms and the Usher of the Black Rod. He saw no one, except here and there some old lord with tardy steps, plodding along ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... that which will be the every-day life of every one who comes into and who lives in this higher realization and so in harmony with the higher laws. This is simply getting into the current of that divine sequence running throughout the universe; and when once in it, life then ceases to be a plodding and moves along day after day much as the tides flow, much as the planets move in their courses, much as the seasons come ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... indebted to his imagination. His experience of life had been remarkable, and it had impressed itself upon his character. His will was as strong as that of Trevethick, but he had less of caution; and he was at the same time both plodding ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous. Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind. ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... they mean to fire the Lombards' houses: Oh power, what art thou in a madman's eyes! Thou makest the plodding idiot bloody-wise. ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... prejudice, passion, sense, whim, with his petrific, leaden mace, that he had "bound volatile Hermes," and reduced the theory and practice of human life to a caput mortuum of reason, and dull, plodding, technical calculation. The gentleman is himself a capital logician; and he has been led by this circumstance to consider man as a logical animal. We fear this view of the matter will hardly hold water. If we attend to the moral man, the ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... approached the table near the fire and laid his leather case upon it, then carefully began to spread out various things—cotton-wool, gauze, scissors, a bottle of iodine. With mechanical precision he prepared a long strip of gauze, plodding steadily ahead, entirely concentrated on his occupation. His broad back was turned to Roger and also to the hall door. He did not even trouble to turn around when the door opened rather suddenly, and the voice of Chalmers, sounding somewhat ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... alone, without the true principles and sufficient grounds of the art, can only proceed upon a rote of tradition, which may appear infallible to him. But this adoption of unexamined rules, and this plodding on in a beaten track, will never lead to any thing great or eminent. It carries with it always something of the stiffness of a copy, without any thing of the graceful boldness of originality, or of ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... reached the woods before St. Pierre, found the directions on the tree and turned off toward the beach to follow the shore to the Point of Pines. But after plodding through the thick, soft sand for a while they decided that that mode of traveling was altogether too fatiguing, and went back into the woods where they found a path which ran in the general line of the shore and which was much easier traveling. ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... aware that this windfall meant a short cut to things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic hills. She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a career, ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... is she sees Mr. Frisky Squirrel, old Mr. Plodding Turtle, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, and many others; but never until yesterday did she make the acquaintance of the gray goose, and then it was owing to Master Teddy's mischief that she found a new friend among the dwellers ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... sister's delicate health, and dependence on her care;—and then admire as it deserves to be admired, the steady courage which could work away at "Jane Eyre", all the time "that the one-volume tale was plodding its ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... driving along back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling the baby into the mud. Terrible ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had been plodding among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... for some time plodding patiently along, when our attention was suddenly attracted by a slow but continued rustling amongst the palmettos. Something was evidently cautiously approaching us, but whether panther, stag, or bear we could not tell—probably ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... was a steady student, quiet in his manners and easily moved by sympathy or affection. I was regarded as a wild, reckless lad, eager in controversy and ready to fight. No one could then anticipate that he was to be a great warrior and I a plodding lawyer and politician. I fired my first gun over his shoulder. He took me with him to carry the game, mostly squirrels and pigeons. He was then destined to West Point, and was preparing for it. To me ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... make-up is wild and visionary, whatever is untrue, whatever is injurious, I can trace to the perusal of some work of fiction. Worse than that, they beget such high-strung and supersensitive ideas of life that plain industry and plodding perseverance are despised, and matter- of-fact poverty, or every-day, commonplace distress, meets with no sympathy, if indeed noticed at all, by one who has wept over the impossibly accumulated sufferings of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] The Duke of Bridgewater started a scheme for the improvement of London ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... said Lacy, with astonishing courtesy and forbearance under all the circumstances, as he overtook the other man plodding along the shaded street, "you don't seem to be in much greater favor with the young ...
— A Little Traitor to the South - A War Time Comedy With a Tragic Interlude • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... gray-haired teachings we have paid personal reverence, and we unaffectedly hope to have caught from his society and intercourse a spark of that professional enthusiasm which is the only true guiding-star of the plodding lawyer. ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... filled, wicks cut, chimneys polished. The big bell was hard to ring, hard for a fourteen-year-old boy. At first, for the fun of it, some of the other boys helped him pull the rope, but their enthusiasm soon cooled. Day in, day out, the stocky, sturdy form of Samuel might be seen, manfully plodding through all varieties of weather, and he had a good-morning or a good-evening ready for all he met. When he learned his lessons was a puzzle, but learn them he did, and nobody could complain that in anything he fell off, though his face did sometimes wear ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... and imagination are frequently upbraided by the industrious and plodding sons of care, with passing too great a part of their life in a state of inaction. But these defiers of sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... thought that a cask had surged, when coming out of the lighter, and struck them down. He desired old Tom to be more careful, and walked away, while we proceeded to unload the lighter. The new clerk was a very heavy, simple young man, plodding and attentive certainly, but he had no other merit; he was sent into the lighter to rake the marks and numbers of the casks as they were hoisted up, and soon became a butt to young Tom, who gave him the wrong marks and numbers of all the casks, to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... somewhere westward through the forest, a drenched and travel-sore cortege was plodding outward. A handful of lean and briar-infested cattle stumbled in advance, yet themselves preceded by a vanguard of scouting riflemen, and back of the beef-animals came ponies, galled of wither and lean of rib ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind. Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again. A sense of fatigue at the infinite repetitions of life comes over me. If Nature would but make a little variation! If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the flowers their order, so that there ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... and wet and out of breath. Her heart labored. An unreasonable antipathy seemed to attend her efforts. Only her ridiculous vanity held her to this task. She wanted to please Glenn, but not so earnestly that she would have kept on plodding up this ghastly bare mound of cinders. Carley did not mind being a tenderfoot, but she hated the thought of these Westerners considering her a weakling. So she bore the pain of raw blisters and the miserable sensation of staggering on under ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... in silence. For a time she kept in advance, then allowed him to gain upon her, and presently fell behind, plodding doggedly on through thick and thin, vainly trying to conceal the hunger and fatigue that were fast robbing her of both strength and spirits. Adam watched her with a masculine sense of the justice of the retribution which his ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... rather for his dog-like devotion to Napoleon than for any martial genius; and the brilliant Marmont had openly scoffed at his receiving the title of Marshal. But, under his quiet exterior and plodding habits, there lay concealed a variety of gifts which only needed a great occasion to shine forth and astonish the world.[109] The time was now at hand. Frederick William and Brunswick were marching from ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... attendant, driving her to and from the Pool, and finding as much to call him there as she had; for besides the Evelyns his friend Thorn abode there all this time. The only drawback to Fleda's pleasure as she drove off from Queechy would be the leaving Hugh plodding away at his saw-mill. She used to nod and wave to him as they went by, and almost feel that she ought not to go on and enjoy herself while he was tending that wearisome machinery all day long. Still she went on and enjoyed herself; but the mere thought ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... he briskly at the end of an hour, "it is time to mount;" and we were soon plodding on ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... mentioned above to the direction in which practical flight has been achieved, it is to be noted that between the time of Le Bris, Stringfellow, and their contemporaries, and the nineties of last century, there was much plodding work carried out with little visible result, more especially so far as English students were concerned. Among the incidents of those years is one of the most pathetic tragedies in the whole history of aviation, that ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... own heart with anxiety whenever I thought of my home affair, perhaps it was well for me that I had the monotonous, musty work that required little thought, but only a persistent plodding and a patient holding of my end ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... other way. In the first place the Pawnees were quite certain to perceive the sham, and, in case they were deceived, they were likely to tomahawk Otto so as to end the annoyance. These two considerations kept him plodding along with the party, which, ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... was my plodding age. Sometimes when I am tingling with impatience here I look back in wonder on the dogged drive of those days. Work is an unhappy man's best friend. I have no concealments from you, Lily. You know I never loved my wife—not this way—though I made her happy; I did my duty. She told me when she ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... felt by us all, of plod, plod, plodding across the sand! That fatal monotony into which every man's life stiffens, as far as outward circumstances, outward joys and pleasures go! the depressing influence of custom which takes the edge off all gladness and adds a burden ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... plodding away at her music lessons and doing the household work of her family, never guessed that she was about to become a bone of contention. But such she was fated to be, and that between persons no less distinguished than Lady Caroline ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... "This plodding team seems fitting in such a peculiar place," remarked one of the quartet in our sled. "Although it is not rapid transit, it is comfortable. But look, there is a more luxurious mode of traveling." As he spoke he pointed to two Portuguese bearing suspended on a pole ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... approached, plodding steadily along, with his billy in one hand and his water-bag in the other; on his shoulder, horse-shoe fashion, his forty years' gathering; and in his patient face his forty years' history, clearly legible to me by reason of a gift which I happily ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... and his other movements entailed in preparing his reports, were all watched and recorded. His letters were opened in the post, sealed up, and sent on. His friends were observed and shadowed on arriving—as they did—at Hull instead of in London. And all the time he was plodding along, wasting his time, quite innocent of the fact that he was being watched, and was incidentally giving us a ...
— My Adventures as a Spy • Robert Baden-Powell
... a few seconds before the crystal turned into the sunlight again. Rip told him to keep the torch going. There might be some last minute cutting to do. Then the lieutenant hurried off at an angle to where Dominico was plodding along with ...
— Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet • Harold Leland Goodwin
... poems (June 9,1808), "that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he could not walk." Scott could certainly run very well, though averse to a plodding motion. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... open his heavy eyelids. He first made out the bowed figure of Carmena plodding along, with one backward-dragged hand noosed in the reins of the weary pony. The gray light gradually brightened. He saw that the girl was swaying, almost staggering. He forced out ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... before she sailed. Incredible as it may appear, at five o'clock, or maybe earlier, on the morning of the twenty-second of April, 1906, A.D., Philip Kirkwood, normally a commonplace but likable young American in full possession of his senses, might have been seen (and by some was seen) plodding manfully through Cheapside, London, England, engaged upon a quest as mad, forlorn, and gallant as any whose chronicle ever inspired the pen of a Malory or a Froissart. In brief he proposed to lend his arm ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the unhappy transaction. He writhed in secret under the humiliation to which they had been subjected, till the resentment it gave rise to, and for which there was no vent, was sometimes beyond endurance; it induced a mood that did serious damage to the material and plodding perseverance necessary if he would secure permanently the comforts ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... brooded over the matter until I became eager to commence my investigations, as a young soldier may be to face the enemy; and yet, when the evening came, and darkness with it; when I set my back to the more crowded thoroughfares, and found myself plodding along a lonely suburban road, with a keen wind lashing my face, and a suspicion of rain at intervals wetting my cheeks, I confess I had no feeling of enjoyment ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... insight: one of the mysteries of life was bare before him. He was to have many of these cosmic moments, for although his practical brain relied always on hard work, never on inspiration, his divining faculty performed some marvellous feats, and saved him from much plodding; but he never had a moment of insight which left a profounder impression than this. He understood in a flash the weakness of the world, and his own. At first he was appalled, then he pitied, then he vibrated ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... in every age. All days are one for all good things. They are all holy-days; to the freshman of today, all joys of comradery, all delights of free enthusiasm are just as open, just as fresh as ever they were. From the teacher like influences should proceed. Plodding and prodding is not the teacher's work. It is inspiration, on-leading, the flashing of enthusiasms. A teacher in any field should be one who has chosen his work because he loves it, who makes no repine because he takes with it the vow of poverty, who finds his reward in ...
— Life's Enthusiasms • David Starr Jordan
... offended at the laughter of the kindly music-teacher who, coming into the room to summon a pupil, and seeing me gravely occupied, enquired what I was doing, and was intensely amused at my stolid method of composition, plodding on undisturbed by the voices and occupations of the older girls around me. "The Old Arm Chair" was certainly my first serious, painstaking effort in fiction; but as it was abandoned unfinished before my eleventh birthday, and as no line ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... reflection; and, after a night kept up till a late hour over a bowl of C——'s most faultless punch, I set out, moody and apprehensive, to my humble abode. By this time it was past three o'clock; the streets were nearly all deserted.—While thoughtfully plodding onwards, a sudden noise from the Holborn end of Drury-lane took my attention; it evidently proceeded from a row—a systematic, scientific row; and, indeed, as I drew near the scene of action, I could distinctly hear the watchman's oaths blending ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... with a rush of shuffling, plodding feet bellowing protest at the hurry, or welcome at sight of the piles of hay that one or two of the men were already pitching into the corral for their consumption. And in less than five minutes they ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... oppressive as the tyranny of men, Man falls below himself. Never will a citizen be made out of a poor fellow condemned to remain valet, hireling or beggar, reduced to thinking only of himself and his daily bread, asking in vain for work, or, plodding when he gets it, twelve hours a day at a monotonous pursuit, living like a beast of burden and dying in a alms-house.[2162] He should have his own bread, his own roof, and all that is indispensable for life; he must not be overworked, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... I was plodding wearily along beside the cart, thinking over the events of this tragic day, I was startled by a white face peering from beneath the upraised curtain out into the darkness. It was the stricken man within, who was surveying the remnant ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... kinswoman, from whom he, of course, saw no reason to be separated. To Edith herself, the delay was far from being disagreable. It promised a gay and cheerful gallop through the forest, instead of the dull, plodding, funeral-like march to which she had been day after day monotonously accustomed. She assented, therefore, to the arrangement, and, like her kinsman, beheld, in the fresh light of sun-rise, without a sigh, ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... to tremble and give way, but he went into the big red house, up the front staircase to his own room, and, in the cold, crept under the blankets into a big feather bed, and thought of Jo plodding his way home. ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... failure to distinguish between the important and the unimportant. Minor details and incidental aspects of the topic often receive the same degree of stress that is given to more important points. This results in a state of monotonous plodding through so much material without responding to its varying shades of meaning and value. Not only does this type of teaching fail to lodge in the mind of the pupil the larger and more important truths which ought to become a permanent part of his mental equipment, but it also fails to train ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... events, and not entirely on intellectual skill, turn the odds greatly against any one in the long run. The rule of business is to take what you can get, and keep what you have got; or an eagerness in seizing every opportunity that offers for promoting your own interest, and a plodding, persevering industry in making the most of the advantages you have already obtained, are the most effectual as well as the safest ingredients in the composition of the mercantile character. The world is a book ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... pow'r and praise was yet my own, That he should not excel alone: Nor is this Envy's jealous ire, But Emulation's genuine fire. And if Rome should approve my piece, She'll soon have more to rival Greece. But should th' invidious town declare Against my plodding over-care, They cannot take away, nor hurt Th' internal conscience of desert. If these my studies reach their aim, And, reader, your attention claim, If your perception fully weighs The drift of these ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... Marjorie slept in two pretty white beds, side by side, in this nice, large, cheerful bedroom. Ermengarde was completely mistress, but she did not object to Marjorie's company, for Marjorie was very plodding and useful and self-forgetful, and Ermie liked to be waited on, and her complaints listened to, and her ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... his nose at his poor brother Bill, Who was always content to be plodding up hill; Hard work he disliked, he despised peace and quiet, So he spent all his time and ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... which drifted across his face and left it damp. Suddenly he discovered that he could open his eyes. Looking down, he saw with supernatural distinctness the entire course of the frozen river-bed. Far to the north he could descry Spurling, plodding desperately on across the thawing ice. A few miles to the west, perhaps an hour's journey from Murder Point, he could see a second figure, tall, soldierly, erect, which approached with swift clean strides, through the solitude, inevitably ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... beginning to make itself felt, and the days were growing shorter and shorter. Ah! how Frank liked these winter evenings. He took his books, and, drawing his chair near a small table close to the fire, he kept plodding on, evening after evening, ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... an Englishman as any of his class in the island. Methodical, plodding, industrious, and regular in all his habits, he was honest by rule, and had no leisure or inclination for any other opinions than those which were obtained with the smallest effort. In consequence of the limited sphere in which he dwelt, in a moral sense at least, he was a mass of ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... they speak, is the music of the spheres audible in their Olympian mansion, making heaven drowsy with its harmony? In what way do they congregate? In what order do they address each other? Are the voices of all the deities free and equal? Is plodding Themis from the Home Department, or Ceres from the Colonies, heard with as rapt attention as powerful Pallas of the Foreign Office, the goddess that is never seen without her lance and helmet? Does our Whitehall Mars make eyes there ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... ready and accessible sources of knowledge he appears to have had recourse; he sought matter for his muse in the meetings, religious as well as social, of the district—consorted with staid matrons, grave plodding farmers—with those who preached as well as those who listened—with sharp-tongued attorneys, who laid down the law over a Mauchline gill—with country squires, whose wisdom was great in the game-laws, and in contested elections—and with roving ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... closely observing this singular visitor. He had always taken 'Abraham Wigmore' for a youth of nineteen or so, some not over-bright, but plodding and earnest clerk or counter-man in the little Gloucestershire town from which the correspondent wrote; it astonished him to see this mature and most respectable person. They talked on. Mr. Wigmore had a slight west-country accent, but otherwise his language differed little from ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... to Senor Nobody had given explicit enough direction. Clear of all buildings, he drew rein and took bearings. Here was the stream, the stump of a burned mill, the mountain-going road, narrower and rougher than the way of main travel. He followed this road; the horses fell into a plodding deliberateness of pace. The sunshine streamed warm around, but there was little human life here to feel its rays. After a time there came emergence into a bare, houseless, almost treeless plain or plateau. The narrow, little-traveled road went on upon the edge ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... they were plodding on their winding way Through orange bowers, and jasmine, and so forth: (Of which I might have a good deal to say, There being no such profusion in the North Of oriental plants, et cetera, But that of late your scribblers think ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... nearly formed, when the figure of a man moving slowly across the road at some distance before me was observed. Hard by this ford lived a man by name Bisset, of whom I had slight knowledge. He tended his two hundred acres with a plodding and money-doting spirit, while his son overlooked a grist-mill on the river. He was a creature of gain, coarse and harmless. The man whom I saw before me might be he, or some one belonging to his family. Being armed for defence, ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown
... effect produced by these Bashi Bazouks (conspicuous among whom were the Albanian levies) was heightened by the addition of the regulars, in their soiled garments and woollen great coats, I cannot pretend to say; yet let no one endeavour to depreciate the Turkish infantry who has not seen them plodding gallantly on beneath a broiling sun, and in a country which, by its stony roughness, would tax the energies of ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... of the way: they could not, of course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing- house. And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of time with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful strain, the muffled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of the wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle heard in snatches at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when we were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and bleached world. Then we stirred from our stupor, ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... discussing the new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried plodding about from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my knapsack, sought counsel with my carriers as to ways and means, crossed the river and took the Ruins road. A motor-car ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... ancient authors o'er in vain, Nor taste one beauty they contain, And plodding on in one dull tone, Gain ancient tongues and lose ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the bell was rung sharply, and, on Polly entering, Rhoda called her to the window and showed her two female figures plodding down the street. "Look," said she. "Those are the only women I envy. Sisters of Charity. Run you after them, and take a good look at those beastly ugly caps: then come and tell ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... grew up about him a something of mystery, uncanny and not respectable. The little plodding man who went so meekly past our gates had a shadow one ...
— Vrouw Grobelaar and Her Leading Cases - Seventeen Short Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... provided the companionship is not made altogether one-sided by the motor boy's perpetual monopolizing of all the avenues of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social lesson which is valuable may be taught him by submitting the same question to a pupil of the plodding, deliberate kind, and waiting for the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any supervision over the playground, similar treatment can ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... the one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... increasing quantities to the acre I feel as if the Republic would last the year out anyway. Not that I have any notion that mere material prosperity will make and keep us a free people, but it goes to show that the farmers are not plodding along, doing as their fathers did before them, but that they are reading and studying, and taking advantage of modern methods. There are two ways of increasing your income. One is by enlarging your output, and the other is by enlarging your share of the proceeds from the sale of that output. ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... ideal family will be first of all a man happy in his work. The plodding, weary slave to distasteful labor can be ideal neither as husband nor as father. Overworked fathers are quite as impossible in our scheme as overburdened mothers. In ideal conditions the father will have time, strength, and willingness to be more of a factor in the home life than ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... touch of the pen, to transform "battle'' into "bottle''; for "conquests'' one could substitute a word for which not even Macaulay's school-boy were at a loss; and the result, depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least one ancient fight on the illustrator's memory. But this plodding and material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a "clear sky'' ever through which I could sail away at will to more gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... Plodding on, he shortly made the Line that marked the victor's goal; Paused, and found he'd won, and laid the Flattering unction to his soul. Then in fashion grandiose, Like an after-dinner speaker, Touched his flipper to his nose, And ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... and faint, plodding on in the track, I praise your great patience, poor omnibus hack; In whose sad gentle eyes my spirit can trace The gloom of despair in that passionless face, While way-wearied muscles, strain'd out to the full And cruelly check'd by the pitiless pull, With little for food, but of lashes no ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... grown colder, beat upon her cruelly, he dropped behind a pace and took the windy side, that he might shield her with his body. But if she observed the action she gave no sign; her face was turned from him and the wind, and she rode without speaking. After long plodding, the line of posts turned unexpectedly a right angle, and Vaughan took ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... me from myself in Norway. We often passed over large unenclosed tracts, not graced with trees, or at least very sparingly enlivened by them, and the half-formed roads seemed to demand the landmarks, set up in the waste, to prevent the traveller from straying far out of his way, and plodding through ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... guessed, by the same hands that had painted my own face—and looked to the casual eye but an ordinary bagman. But art could not change those marvellous eyes, and I knew him in an instant. My heart leapt wildly for a moment—my hands were clenched and my teeth shut tight; but the next, I was plodding after him as before. I ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the Rangers and Indians were on snowshoes. The regulars followed us, plodding along heavily through the snow. We reached Halfway Brook that night, and the next day got over to Lake George. We waited till it was dark and then marched down the lake to the First Narrows, which we reached about two ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... Once more, we may conclude that Haydn, before he commenced writing clavier sonatas, had made acquaintance with those of Paradies and of Alberti. These early Italian influences should be noted, for one is apt to think rather of the young composer as plodding through Fux's "Gradus" and playing Emanuel Bach's sonatas on his "little worm-eaten clavier." During his last years Haydn told his friend Griesinger that he had diligently studied Emanuel Bach, and that he owed very much to him. From the painter Dies, ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... heard the men running on the porch of the hotel, so the enemy was not to be sought that way. I set off full speed for the other corner, fifty yards away, half suspecting an ambush. But at the turn I stopped. The rain-soaked street was empty for a block before me. Far down the next block a plodding figure under an umbrella bent to the gusts of the wind and tried to ward off the driving spray of the storm. But Darby Meeker had disappeared as though the earth had ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... taking with them their gray horse and wagon; and surrounded by their household goods, they moved slowly westward. Standing beside her father in the warm November sunshine, Susan watched the strong horses on the towpath, plodding patiently ahead, and heard the wash of the water against the prow and the noisy greeting of boat horns. As they passed the snug friendly villages along the canal and the wide fertile fields, now brown and bleak after the harvest, she wondered what the new farm would ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... knew what they could make of the women who love them—but they do not, as the plodding, faded matrons who sit and sew by their household fires testify ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... been plodding far before I found that it was entirely different to the hills we had climbed that day, for, in place of great masses of rugged, weatherworn rock, the stone we found here and there was slaty and splintery, ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked" in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the virile—and noisy—uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... light in colour, but became gradually more distinct. It came always crawling steadily on. Presently an occasional side-blown puff of dust added a certain heraldry, and thus finally the white-topped wagon and its plodding team came fully into view, crawling ever persistently from the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... concerned about Noodles, truth to tell, for he knew that Eben, while no great athlete, had a reserve fund in his stubborn qualities, and would shut his teeth hard together toward the end, plodding along with grim determination. Noodles must be watched, and coddled most carefully, if they hoped to carry him with them over the line in time to ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... robe, who let him lie there and promptly bade them throw water in his face. This was done, and he came to himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels reached the spot. It was drawn by four plodding oxen all covered with black housings; on each horn they had fixed a large lighted wax taper, and on the top of the cart was constructed a raised seat, on which sat a venerable old man with a beard whiter than the very snow, and so long that it fell below his waist; he was dressed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... explained that Frands—that was his name—had been in the society's care five months and over. They had found him drifting in the streets, and, knowing whither that drift set, had taken him in charge and sent him to one of their lodging-houses, where he had been since, doing chores and plodding about in his dull way. That was where I had met him. Now they had decided that he should go to Florida, if he would, but first they would like to find out something about him. They had never been able to, beyond the fact that he was from Denmark. He had put ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... bringing an action against the Lord President before he had been three years in office!...As I told Forster, when he was Vice-President, the whole value of the Examiner system depends on the way the examiners do their work. I have the gravest doubt about — steadily plodding through the disgustful weariness of it as you and I have done, or observing any regulation that did not ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one was the opposite of the other in temperament, in habits, ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... or two he was quite himself, plodding at the lessons, suddenly furious at the servants, and giving me fretful histories of his wrongs when brandy and water were not put by his bedside at night, or a warming-pan was not ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... determine the value of the finished product? By giving his intellect a thorough course in scientific training, which may occupy his time and absorb his energy for many years, is it not possible that you will turn out in the end a plodding hack, instead of the inspired ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... felt as if we had already arrived somewhere. I little knew what lay beyond. While I was plodding along in this blissfully ignorant state of mind, communing with a pipe, the path, which had frisked in and out for some time among the boulders, suddenly took it into its head to scale a cliff on the left. It did this, as it seemed to me, without provocation, ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... girl! Get out of that, you Fox! Dern you! You call that pulling? It's my notion of layin' off for the day." Even at its most urgent, his voice was soft, hushed by the great loneliness of this canon up which he slowly crept. Monkey and Fox had been plodding, foot by foot, the creaking wagon at their heels, since dawn. It was now ten o'clock and they were just beginning to climb. The Hill, that looked so near to the mesa above Hudson's yard, still stood aloof. It had towered there ahead of them as they jerked and toiled across the ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... She looked out upon a dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way—the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running—the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the homestead, ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome for all ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... fog was so thick we could see nothing, therefore, without a word of remonstrance, we followed our pilot, plodding through grass soaked in moisture which reached to our knees, feeling very chilled, wet, and weary, but all trying to keep stout hearts and turn cheery ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... the two bronzed railroad men at her side were like pilot guides to Gertrude. When she lost the wayfarers in the gullies or along the narrow defiles that gave them passage between towering rocks, their eyes restored the plodding line. Callahan was the first to detect the change from the expected course. "They are working east," said he, ...
— The Daughter of a Magnate • Frank H. Spearman
... a half-disdainful smile, "what one calls happiness. I, for one, don't want a respectable, plodding, money-saving married life. I'm not fit for it. Of ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... my mind while we were descending the steps to the roadway. When we reached the ground we turned back toward the garage, and with slow, plodding steps the leader of the Mercutians preceded me to its entrance, his companions following close behind me. They had evidently been here before, I could tell from their actions. I realized that probably they had all been inside the garage when Mercer ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... girl who wins prizes and scholarships, helps our school to shine, and no one applauds her more than I do, but in my heart, I feel that the school owes even more to the dull plodding girl, who knows she cannot do much, but who determines to give her very best to the school, and to be worthy of it by giving no scamped work. Perhaps she gets low marks, perhaps she is told she ought to do better,—and quite rightly, because we want her to rise to give ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... * * * Thus through life with thee I'll glide, Happy still what'er betide, And while plodding sots complain Of ceaseless toil and slender gain, Every passing hour shall be Worth a ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... areas of country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty: and when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards them lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wants is brilliant colour, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his favours must make ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... at all, or bring us back to our starting point. But, with only right living in view, there is no mistaking the way; for there has always been a straight road ahead of us, which we could follow if we would. It is hard to keep plodding along the narrow path, when fields of wealth and power stretch away on either side, but, happily for us, these are about all fenced in, even the great Sahara desert is fenced in. We cannot be tyrants if we would, nor can we despoil our fellows for they are as poor as we. Our road is made smooth ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... Grasmere, and leave smooth, bare, pyramidal Skiddaw and its "ancient" fellows behind. We at last ascended the steep zigzag which begins Sty Head Pass, confirming our resolution now and then by admiring the plodding industry of our mountain horses. It was indeed pleasant when the last gate was opened and we were safe within the wall of rough stones which headed the steep ascent, and we could wind more at leisure beside the foaming "beck" which runs out of Sty Head Tarn. ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... pavements. A knot of belated revellers in front of the Adelphia Hotel, standing in mid-street, to discuss ways and means of getting home, skip nimbly to one side, the ladies lifting up their dresses with shrill squeaks of alarm as the water splashes round them. Pedestrians plodding quietly up the street cower fearfully against the buildings, while a fine mist ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... the final test arrives When once more he tees and drives. Joy! As soon as he has hit he Sees it toddling down the pretty, Never swerving left or right Till it waddles out of sight, Plodding through a bunker and Braying ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... day found Harkness still plodding up the river with the dogs close at his heels. The hills to the northward were growing higher, and Folsom's general knowledge of direction told him that they were in danger ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... of Weldon's eyes, the alertness never came back into his step. Lean, gaunt as a greyhound, he went about his work with a silent, dogged endurance which took no note of the other life about him. For Trooper Weldon, his profession had dropped to a dull, plodding routine of danger lapping close upon the heels of danger. And still he spoke no word of the sorrow which had brought him ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... impair his real gratitude to them, and his real and simple friendship for them both. He was faithful in friendship once formed, obstinately so, for better or for worse; but he was shrewd enough to ignore opportunities for friendships which he foresaw could do him no good on his plodding pilgrimage toward the temple of ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... were gateways so close together that when, as occasionally happened, people passed through one, we were forced to crawl up to the other to avoid detection. We had done so again when, without warning, a drover came plodding up behind his sheep. We had no time in which to go back up the hedge. The sheep crowded from the rear and overflowed at the narrow gateway into the hedge where we lay and so ran over our bodies. We remained quiet, thinking he would ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... who let him lie there and promptly bade them throw water in his face. This was done, and he came to himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels reached the spot. It was drawn by four plodding oxen all covered with black housings; on each horn they had fixed a large lighted wax taper, and on the top of the cart was constructed a raised seat, on which sat a venerable old man with a beard whiter than the very snow, and so long that it fell below his waist; he was dressed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... softening change, bringing them in their turn nearer the type of their old antagonists; and thus each succeeding year would have seen these two extremes of social life drawing nearer and nearer together, and at last blending in dull, contented, plodding harmony. And the result would doubtless have been the degeneration of the entire race, and our fate that of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... exclaimed the Governor-General. "No pleasures to distract her, an atmosphere of plodding commercialism, an abundance of health-giving nourishment! Perhaps the mere change of climate will have the desired effect. We will make the experiment. She is doomed if she remains here, and America seems to be our only hope. I suppose our beloved ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... hardly be needed. He had just torn his finger upon a thorn. Seeing the blood rise, it occurred that one is never without a bit of red. At the base of the bank he turned his eyes upward. The Chinese was plodding up the stairs, the woman holding his mind ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... not prepared as an Encyclopedia of Knowledge for the successive generations of men. Its writers may anticipate the thought of ages by profound intuitions, pregnant imaginations, visions of the seer, as Plato does. Genius often outstrips the plodding feet of generations. But genius must not put on the airs of omniscience. It must submit its claims to trial by jury. They are to stand, if stand they shall, not because they are in Genesis or the Republic, but ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... how a mere trifle will, in an extraordinary way, determine or change the whole course of a life. I can illustrate this by my own case. I was plodding on contentedly at the Bar without getting "no forrarder," with slender meagre prospects, but with a hankering after "writing," when I came to read this Life of Goldsmith that I have just been describing, which filled me with admiration. The author was at the moment gathering materials ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... friend, what I endure, In slavish, plodding work, from day to day, Which work should be in its own nature pure, And lifted high, from ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... hamlet of Woods Eaves, he struck into a road on his left hand. Twenty minutes' steady plodding uphill brought him in sight of his home—a large, ancient, rambling grange house lying back from the road. It was now nearly ten o'clock, an hour when the household was usually abed; but the door of Wilcote Grange stood open, and a guarded candle ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... not say stupid, rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world is one with ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... raised by the trampling of the third drive settled down upon the veld when the fourth drive was in progress, and 14,000 men on a front which stretched from one blockhouse line to the other were plodding eastward to the Drakensberg. It was held up for a time by two rivers in spate, the Wilge and the Liebenberg's, and when released it trudged on to the mountain range, where on April 5 its components were dissolved, having disposed of less than ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... is sung to a circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... through the tangled mazes of the forest, would have required a separate sense, instinct, or faculty, which we did not possess. So, skulking out of our hiding-place, we made no comment on the remark of homeward-plodding labourer, who had heard the report, and now smelt the powder—"Cushats are geyan kittle birds to kill"—but returned, with our shooting-bag as empty as our stomach, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability, the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from different quarters ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... to go on plodding through classes and camp without knowing whether or not I am ever going to be rewarded!" grumbled John, so discouraged that every one felt sorry ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... mood to learn something from all I chanced on in my wandering; even this poor creature on his doorstep made me the wiser by one little thing. How was it he could mistake me for a woman; the woman Ingeborg he had called by name? I must have walked up too quietly. I had forgotten the plodding cart-horse gait; my shoes were too light. I had lived too luxuriously these years past; I must work my way back ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... and carry you down with it!... Rafael, my dear boy, don't be foolish. I am all right to have as a friend; but it's too late for me to be anything more ... even if I were to love you. We are of a different breed. I have been studying you, and I see that you are a sensible, honest, plodding sort of fellow. Whereas I—I belong to the butterflies, to the opposite of all you are. I am a conscript under the banner of Bohemia, and I cannot desert the colors. Each of us on his own road then. You'll easily find a woman to make you happy.... The ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... was plodding earnestly through his stint, utterly and happily oblivious of the effect he ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... coarse miner, far from civilizing influences and beyond the reach of social advantages, recognizes the fact that this Little, unostentatious animal plodding along through life in its own modest way, yet wields a wonderful influence over the destinies of man. So the Aladdin mine was ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... have no vocation to it, Gervase: A man of sense is not made for marriage; 'tis a game, which none but dull plodding fellows can play at well; and 'tis as natural to them, as ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... not "a thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... about "hope deferred;" also can tell of hope disappointed; has his wits sharpened, and, generally, is a smart fellow. The tut-worker knows nothing of this, his pay being safe and regular, though small. Many quiet-going, plodding men prefer and stick ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne
... horizon with an eagle eye. Nothing there took him by surprise; he foresaw all things, knew all that was happening, and kept his own counsel; he was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension of a situation; and in the routine of business he was as patient and plodding as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon he could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on the threshold of his shop, leaning against the framework of the door. Take him from his dark little counting-house, and he ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... Longface, that God made horses as they are, and gave them such grandeur of appearance when in action, and put such an eagle-like spirit between their ribs, so that, quitting the plodding motions of the ox, they can fly like that noble bird, and come sweeping down the course as on wings ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... still and helped to keep up his spirits. He never knew them by any other names than Freddie and Tennert—the first name of one and the last name of the other—but so great was his liking for them that it included the whole of sturdy, plodding, indomitable old England into the bargain. They never talked patriotism, and seemed to regard the war merely as a sort of a job that had to be done—just like any other job. Early in the day before the car filled up, Tom talked a good deal with them and ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... desiring to hold up this able man as a model for the young; yet it must be owned that in the art of prospering in business he has had no equal in America; and in that his example may be useful. Now, observe the secret. It was not plodding merely, though no man ever labored more steadily than he. Mr. Bowne, discovering what a prize he had, raised his wages at the end of the first month. Nor was it merely his strict observance of the rules of temperance and morality, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... courted by the Great, ever play'd high with those durst venture most; and durst make Love where'er my Fancy lik'd: but sometimes running out my Master's Cash, (which was supply'd still by my Father) they sent me, to reform my expensive Life, a Factor, into France—still I essay'd to be a plodding Thriver, but found my Parts ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... and the many scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone, to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be, to one of her quick spirit? Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must, who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; and I married ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... that a cask had surged, when coming out of the lighter, and struck them down. He desired old Tom to be more careful, and walked away, while we proceeded to unload the lighter. The new clerk was a very heavy, simple young man, plodding and attentive certainly, but he had no other merit; he was sent into the lighter to rake the marks and numbers of the casks as they were hoisted up, and soon became a butt to young Tom, who gave him the wrong marks and numbers of all the casks, to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the sight of that little old man was abundantly evidenced later. John Stanchfield, Elias Palmer, Harold Ormthwaite, and Nathan Ridge, all farmers or market-gardeners of the Colcord district, testified to frights and "spooky feelings" on being accosted by a dim gray figure plodding along the Colcord road in the lonely interval between midnight and morning. The dim gray figure seemed to have recognized the different "teams" by the section of the road through which they jolted or by their ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... As he passed the men on foot a sudden swirl of snow came in larger flakes from the leaden skies. Before him were a dozen horsemen, riding slowly. The air was now filled with the great white flakes; the men ahead, in their caped overcoats, with their hats drawn low, plodding on tired horses between the hills, all seen vaguely through the snow veil, had a sudden wintry, desolate, and far-away seeming. He said to himself that they were ghosts from fifty years back, ghosts of the Grand Army in the grasp of General January. He made what haste he could and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn-door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre-cut ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... writer is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... history, there should be any mere novel readers, let me advise them to throw the book aside at the commencement of this chapter; for I have no more wonderful incidents to relate, no more changes at nurse, no more sudden turns of fortune. I am now become a plodding man of business, poring over law-books from morning till night, and leading a most monotonous life: yet occupation, and hope, and the constant sense of approaching nearer to my object, rendered this mode of existence, dull as it may seem, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... millions of fathoms, half so low beneath her as I put myself when in imagination I took advantage of her noble trustfulness, took the fortune that I knew she must possess in her own right, and left her to find herself, in the zenith of her beauty and genius, bound to poor rusty, plodding me. ...
— George Silverman's Explanation • Charles Dickens
... was soon agreed that the fox should set a course for them, and be the judge. When the time came both started off together, but the Hare was soon so far ahead that he thought he might as well have a rest: so down he lay and fell fast asleep. Meanwhile the Tortoise kept plodding on, and in time reached the goal. At last the Hare woke up with a start, and dashed on at his fastest, but only to find that the Tortoise had already won ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... of snow. Sometime after leaving the "Devil's Gate" we passed Pacific Springs. There we gained first knowledge that we had passed the summit, on observing that the streams flowed westerly. Patient plodding had now taken us a distance of actual travel amounting to much more than one thousand miles and, from time to time, into very high altitudes. About four miles west of Pacific Springs we passed the junction of the California and Oregon ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell
... was mixed with scorn. "Peter's the only one among 'em as is good for anything," she sometimes said, "an' he's naught but a puzzle-headed sort of a chap." Peter was the farmer's only son, a loutish youth of fifteen, steady and plodding as his plough horses and almost ...
— White Lilac; or the Queen of the May • Amy Walton
... was out with Mahbub, and here, by the way, he nearly died of thirst, plodding through the sand on a camel to the mysterious city of Bikanir, where the wells are four hundred feet deep, and lined throughout with camel-bone. It was not an amusing trip from Kim's point of view, because—in defiance of the contract—the ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... bell was rung sharply, and, on Polly entering, Rhoda called her to the window and showed her two female figures plodding down the street. "Look," said she. "Those are the only women I envy. Sisters of Charity. Run you after them, and take a good look at those beastly ugly caps: then come and tell me how to ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... light, he retraced without difficulty, through the suite of saloons and galleries, the way which he had followed on his arrival with the King-at-Arms and the Usher of the Black Rod. He saw no one, except here and there some old lord with tardy steps, plodding along ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... spheres audible in their Olympian mansion, making heaven drowsy with its harmony? In what way do they congregate? In what order do they address each other? Are the voices of all the deities free and equal? Is plodding Themis from the Home Department, or Ceres from the Colonies, heard with as rapt attention as powerful Pallas of the Foreign Office, the goddess that is never seen without her lance and helmet? Does our Whitehall ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... knees was devoting all her attention to keeping the sufferer's feet in a tub filled with a brown liquid. Hearing a footstep and the clank of spurs, which sounded strangely in ears accustomed to the plodding pace of country folk, the man turned to Genestas. A sort of surprise, in which the old woman shared was ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... them without looking at the keyboard. If she had started with this difficult method she would never have succeeded in writing a letter the first day. It would have taken weeks to reach that achievement which the simpler method yields almost at once. But in plodding along on this harder road she would finally outdistance the competitor with the commonsense method and would finally gain the highest degree of efficiency. This is exactly the situation everywhere. Commonsense always grasps for ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Chloe," cried one of them, "how would you like it, with your pretty little feet, to be plodding at this mill all the day? Thank the Gods, the sun will set before a great while. The day has been hot as the lap ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... dying away, he heard the plodding hoofs of a string of pack mules. From the direction of the mine came the hoodlum racket which betokens, in Syria, the efforts of a number of honest labourers to perform their daily tasks in an ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... now again, and we trekked at night, seldom riding, but plodding doggedly through the endless succession of dunes, with the spiritless horses strung out behind us. Their hooves were splayed to an enormous size through this incessant trekking through the sand; yet, though broken and enfeebled, ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... have preferred dragoons or mounted riflemen, to scour on either side and ride in front and rear, it must have taken comfort in the presence of the plodding solid "walk-a-heaps," the ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... that it seemed a very probable contingency, and she was beginning to weary of plodding over the boggy land, alternately slapped by outstanding branches or—when a little puff of wind raced overhead—drenched by a shower of garnered raindrops from some tree which seemed to shake itself in the breeze just as a ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... Perseverance. — N. perseverance; continuance &c. (inaction) 143; permanence &c. (absence of change) 141; firmness &c. (stability) 150. constancy, steadiness; singleness of purpose, tenacity of purpose; persistence, plodding, patience; sedulity &c. (industry) 682; pertinacy|, pertinacity, pertinaciousness; iteration &c. 104 bottom, game, pluck, stamina, backbone, grit; indefatigability, indefatigableness; bulldog courage. V. persevere, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... strange, vivid joy that sends the blood tingling to the heart and brain. Were I to go back to such a life I would choose the danger, and be discontented to maunder on behind the slow and harmless wool-bearers, cursing a little every now and again at their foolishness, and then plodding on once more, bunched up in an inert mass on a slow-going horse, who wearily stretches his neck almost to the ground as he dreams, perhaps, of the long, exhilarating gallops after his own kind that we once had together, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... have. He would be compelled to make two scenes of it, and pan. his bleak mesa afterwards and trust to a "cut-in scene" to cover the break. He did not trust Bill Holmes to turn the crank on that slow, plodding march of misery. With his diaphragm of the camera wide open to get all the light possible, because the air was filled with falling snow, he followed the herd, as it wound snakelike down the easiest descents, making for the more sheltered small canyons that opened out upon ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... along up, in that plodding and peaceful region, and got to be good-sized boys and girls—big enough, in fact, to begin to know as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over the occasional news from these red fields as ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... and so suddenly ceased to be the special instrument in the hands of the Spirit, kept plod, plod, plodding on, with no bitterness of heart. For twenty years he had no share in the development of Gentile Christianity, of which he had sowed the first seed, but had to do much less conspicuous work. He toiled away there in Caesarea patient, persevering, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... remarkable rather for his dog-like devotion to Napoleon than for any martial genius; and the brilliant Marmont had openly scoffed at his receiving the title of Marshal. But, under his quiet exterior and plodding habits, there lay concealed a variety of gifts which only needed a great occasion to shine forth and astonish the world.[109] The time was now at hand. Frederick William and Brunswick were marching from Auerstaedt to make good their retreat ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... said Godolphin, impatiently. "Allow me to tell you that it is your objects I consider baubles. Your dull, plodding, wearisome honours; a name in the newspapers—a place, perhaps, in the Ministry—purchased by a sacrificed youth and a degraded manhood—a youth in labour, a manhood in schemes. No, Radclyffe! give me the bright, the glad ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... with her was unmercifully snubbed, and so also was a master butcher from Marylebone, who as a rule was received with favour. But the lady was not in an ill temper with everybody—certainly not with the stolid farmer-like man who was plodding his way through a rumpsteak washed down ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... behind and the woman pulled in the shafts. Strange, antique vehicles crammed with passengers. Couples and groups and sometimes larger companies of foot-travellers. Now and then a solitary man or woman, old and shabby, bundle on back, eyes on the road, plodding through the mud and the mist, under the high ...
— The Valley of Vision • Henry Van Dyke
... the pack-outfit, plodding doggedly along. From the rim we could look back down that fire-swept valley toward Heart Lake and the camp we had left. But there was little time for looking back. Somewhere ahead was a brawling river descending in great leaps from Lyman Lake, which lay in a ...
— Tenting To-night - A Chronicle of Sport and Adventure in Glacier Park and the - Cascade Mountains • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... store, much to the disgust of the plodding sorrel, who thought he was going directly home, and they soon reached the road that led through the woods. This was hard and sandy, as are many of the roads through the forests in that part of ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... often a considerable degree of ingenuity to extract from them more than monosyllables. We have been accustomed to consider the French as a restless, capricious, volatile people, and so I suppose they might have been formerly, but now they are undoubtedly the reverse, being a quiet routine plodding sort of people, particularly as regards the provincials; and even amongst the Parisians there are thousands that reside in one quarter of the city, which they seldom quit, never approaching what they consider the gay portion of Paris, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... impression; he has cost so much; what is his value? For what, in all the manifold activities of the world, is he fit? And if the answer be not satisfactory, if the product be only a sort of learned mummy, the system will be condemned. Are there not thousands of lads today plodding away at the ancient classics, and who, at the first possible moment, will cast them into space, never to reopen them? Think of the wasted time that that implies; not all wasted, perhaps, for something may be gained in power of application; but entirely wasted ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... and other offal in a highly concentrated form, find, perhaps, nowadays, more advocates; principally because the first-mentioned list contains articles that give off very offensive odors while being applied, so that the more fastidious are loath to use them. What may not be very offensive to the plodding florist would be highly so to the more refined, or when the general public comes more into contact with the crops while being so applied. In almost all of the cases where the ingredients mentioned are used they are diluted with a large quantity of water, except in ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine—as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... settlements, some of our number, scarcely able to travel, thought the best course to pursue would be to divide the company; one portion to press on, the weaker ones to proceed by easier stages, and when the advance arrived at the settlements, they were to send back a relief for those plodding on wearily behind them. Soon a few who were stronger than the others reached Independence, Missouri, and immediately sent a party with horses to bring in their comrades; so, at last, all got safely to ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... do," thought the young man; "he is too slow and plodding. We want a brisk, dashing fellow, full of spirit ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... traveled! A hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel's itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel's eyes were ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... of vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... fighting, rollicking Irish crew of the hamlet,—set them apart, so to speak, to act upon each other. Carrol, with one of his sons, worked in a saw-mill, and the other boys, as they grew old enough, easily found jobbing, being known as honest, plodding fellows. The little drama of their lives bade fair to be quiet, and the characters wrought out of it commonplace enough, had not Death thrust his grim face into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... look on the fame and fortune brought to him by his book as his chief reward. It had been his desire to be helpful to the plodding, discouraged men and boys. As he expressed it himself: "It seemed to me that the most important results in daily life are to be obtained, not through the exercise of extraordinary powers, but through the energetic use of simple means, and ordinary qualities, ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: And studie too, the causer of your vow. For ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... your scholar, your soldier, your lawyer, courtier, etc., and each of these so truly, as you would swear, but that your eye shall see the variation of the lineament, it were my most proper and genuine aspect. First, for your merchant, or city-face, 'tis thus; a dull, plodding-face, still looking in a direct line, forward: there is no great matter in this face. Then have you your student's, or academic face; which is here an honest, simple, and methodical face; but somewhat more spread then the former. The third is your soldier's ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... were ever two artists more unlike! Just compare "The Dancing Sylphs" and "The Gleaners." The theme of all Millet's work is, "Man goeth forth to his labors unto the evening." Toil, hardship, heroic endurance, plodding monotony, burdens grievous to be borne—these things cover the canvases of Millet. All of his deep sincerity, his abiding melancholy, his rugged nobility are there; for every man who works in freedom simply reproduces himself. That is what true work is—self-expression, self-revelation. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... going to ruin, yet everything that lives on him thrives and waxes fat. He would fain be a soldier, and swagger like his neighbors; but his domestic, quiet-loving, uxorious nature continually gets the upper hand; and though he may mount his helmet and gird on his sword, yet he is apt to sink into the plodding, painstaking father of a family; with a troop of children at his heels, and his womenkind hanging on ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... was filled with infantry, solid, plodding columns, pressing fast towards the west. The fields, too, were black with men, engineers, weighted down with their heavy equipments, resting in long double rows, eyes vacant, heads bent. Above the thickets of rifles sweeping past, mounted officers sat in their saddles, as though ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... shining, when the train that carried Mr. Carter steamed slowly into the great station at Hull—it was morning, and the sun was shining, and the birds singing, and in the fields about the smoky town there were herds of sweet-breathing cattle sniffing the fresh spring air, and labourers plodding to their work, and loaded wains of odorous hay and dewy garden-stuff were lumbering along the quiet country roads, and the new-born day had altogether the innocent look appropriate to its tender ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... that account, but the conflict is not yet ended. Sometimes the battling is very severe; but with patient, plodding faith they persevere in the ascent, ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... so. Out of the woods came running our frightened cattle, with the guard plodding heavily on their flanks; and in the rear two of our soldiers urged them on with kicks and blow; two more retreated backward, facing the dusky forest with levelled muskets, and a third staggered beside them, half carrying, half trailing a man whose ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... the rights of the redmen been thought of. The settler pushed onward, plodding, as it were, behind his plow with a rifle. He regarded the Indian as little better than a beast; he was easier to kill than to tame. How little the settler knew the proud independence, the wisdom, the stainless chastity of honor, which belonged so ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... way to Pierrefitte, added its share of beauty, and the graceful white heath growing up its sides loaded the air with a sweet scent. The wide expanse of the Argeles valley, with the busy farmers ploughing, sowing, or cutting the heavy clover crop; the lazy oxen ever patiently plodding beneath their heavy burdens; the Chateau de Beaucens—where the orchids grow—perched up on the hillside; the surrounding peaks throwing off their snowy garb; and the beautiful young leaves and tints, ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... the riverside and under the lime trees ... which reminds me of "Mails"! Little pen, little fountain pen, little vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, whither have you led me, and why cannot you learn the plodding of your trade? ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... calculated to secure the object of my ambition. My emulation is seldom stimulated by observing the industry and application of those whom my situation in life gives me for companions. The pernicious and childish opinion that extraordinary genius cannot brook the slavery of plodding over the rubbish of antiquity (a cant so common among the heedless votaries of indolence), dulls the edge of all industry, and is one of the most powerful ingredients in the Circean potion which transforms many of the most promising young men into the beastly forms which, in ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... lasted for a week, or a fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... of town under the impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... He saw the shops brighten suddenly with semi-supernal glories of crystallized fruits and gorgeous bonbon-boxes, and he was aware of a kind of movement in the streets that was brisker and gayer than the plodding hurry of everyday life. He stood aside and let the mummeries go by him, and was glad when these Christmas follies were done with, and the law-courts in full swing once more. In the happiest and most innocent days of his youth, Christmas had brought ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... two girls,—plodding over the sharp stones, splashing through the puddles,—Rebecca beating the old drum with might and main; Sarah blowing the fife ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... the travellers were plodding onward, Ketch walked for a time at the head of Aunt Amanda's mule. Aunt Amanda leaned forward and ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... true, of glorious sway; but I can boast but of the worst and most impotent part of it, the title only; but the busy, absolute, mischievous politician finds no room in my soul, my humour, or constitution; and plodding restless power I have made so little the business of my gayer and more careless youth, that I have even lost my right of rule, my share of empire amongst them. That little power (whose unregarded loss I never bemoaned till it rendered me incapable of serving Philander) I have stretched ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... examination that morning. Myrtle professed to be utterly overcome and exhausted by the physical effort of writing for three whole hours without a let-up. If Leslie could have seen her meagre paper, through which a much-tortured professor was at that moment wearily plodding, she would have been astonished. Leslie herself was keen and thorough in her class work, and had no slightest conception of what a lazy student could avoid when she ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; a Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... impression on some observant mind amongst her companions. My second sister, Elizabeth, too, may perhaps be remembered, but I cannot conceive that I left a trace behind me. My career was a very quiet one. I was plodding and industrious, perhaps I was very grave, for I suffered to see my sisters perishing, but I think I was remarkable for nothing.—Believe me, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... the society's care five months and over. They had found him drifting in the streets, and, knowing whither that drift set, had taken him in charge and sent him to one of their lodging-houses, where he had been since, doing chores and plodding about in his dull way. That was where I had met him. Now they had decided that he should go to Florida, if he would, but first they would like to find out something about him. They had never been able to, beyond the fact that he was from Denmark. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... mean to fire the Lombards' houses: Oh power, what art thou in a madman's eyes! Thou makest the plodding idiot bloody-wise. ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... Olga, with a half-disdainful smile, "what one calls happiness. I, for one, don't want a respectable, plodding, money-saving married life. I'm not fit for it. ...
— The Crown of Life • George Gissing
... any sign of a trail you can't get me rattled, but cracky, I don't like marshes. You can get lost in a marsh easier than in any other place. Pretty soon I was plodding around deeper than my knees and it gave me a strain every time I dragged my leg out of the swamp. Maybe you'll wonder why I didn't go back, but if you do, that's because you don't know much about marshes. All of a sudden I was right in the middle of it, as you might say, ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... the sprightly strain. The hares, whose noise had caused his fright, Saw, with surprise, the linnet's flight. Is there on earth a wretch, they said, Whom our approach can strike with dread? An instantaneous change of thought To tumult every bosom wrought. So fares the system-building sage, Who, plodding on from youth to age, At last, on some foundation-dream, Has reared aloft his goodly scheme, And proved his predecessors fools, And bound all nature by his rules; So fares he, in that dreadful hour, When injured truth exerts her power, Some new ...
— The Minstrel; or the Progress of Genius - with some other poems • James Beattie
... regained the top of the cliff and once more looked across the island towards the far-off point, the figure which he had previously seen making for it had turned back, and was plodding steadily across the coarse grass and rock-strewn moorland in his own direction. Chatfield had evidently taken a bird's eye view of the situation from the vantage point of the slope and had come to the conclusion that the higher part ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... lazy man. "Luck often comes when one isn't looking for it!" And in an instant he had leaped on the horse, and headed him for the castle of fortune. The little horse started at a fine pace, and in a very few minutes they overtook the other traveler, plodding ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant
... the horses set the sleigh-bells jingling. Farmers plodding home from the market gave them the road, and smiled as they listened to the merry laughter. They went at a brisk trot over the Neck leading to Roxbury, and turned to the left, taking the Dorchester road. At times the horses came to a walk, but at a chirrup ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the glen, was learning lessons of perseverance and patient endurance, which would not be lost upon her, whatever the future of the child might be. Jim was seldom at home, and, alas! but little of the old childish attachment survived. The boy was ambitious, business-like, and plodding. His heart was in the town, and he seemed to retain no affection for the associations of his childhood: some of them were absolutely abhorrent to him. George Hendrick was profoundly disappointed in the lad. Not that a word could be said against his character. He was steady, ...
— A Child of the Glens - or, Elsie's Fortune • Edward Newenham Hoare
... chased by one of our own men-o'-war; and why, being chased, we should have taken any trouble to escape from her. The fact, however, was that the Dolphin was altogether too rakish-looking a craft to be mistaken for a plodding merchantman, her long, low, beamy hull, taunt, tapering spars, and broad spread of superbly-cut canvas proclaimed her a sea-rover as far as the eye could distinguish her; and, as the ensign carried was at that time but an indifferent guarantee of a vessel's nationality, it was the imperative ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... who wins prizes and scholarships, helps our school to shine, and no one applauds her more than I do, but in my heart, I feel that the school owes even more to the dull plodding girl, who knows she cannot do much, but who determines to give her very best to the school, and to be worthy of it by giving no scamped work. Perhaps she gets low marks, perhaps she is told she ought to do better,—and quite rightly, ...
— Stray Thoughts for Girls • Lucy H. M. Soulsby
... perceived that Mrs. Charmond must have recognized her plodding up the hill under the blaze of the lamp; recognized, probably, her stubbly poll (since she had kept away her face), and thought that those stubbles were the result of her ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... advice on his part. At that time he was a steady student, quiet in his manners and easily moved by sympathy or affection. I was regarded as a wild, reckless lad, eager in controversy and ready to fight. No one could then anticipate that he was to be a great warrior and I a plodding lawyer and politician. I fired my first gun over his shoulder. He took me with him to carry the game, mostly squirrels and pigeons. He was then destined to West Point, and was preparing for it. To me the ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... promotion, on which his aspiring but chained foot had not yet succeeded in reposing. What, therefore, he became when he had succeeded in clambering to the top, and looked down from the lordly height he had after many years of plodding service obtained, we must leave it to the imaginations of our readers to determine. We reserve it to a future page, to relate ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapt his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... the broad path cut by the scythe around the field, the great machine clanked and whirred. All day the strange, disturbing noise continued, drawing gradually nearer the spot where the leveret lay. Through the spaces between the stalks she watched the whirling arms swinging over, and the horses plodding leisurely by the edge of the standing wheat. At last, but almost too late, she leaped from her "form" as the cruel teeth cut through the stalks at her side; and, taking the direction of her "creep," rushed off ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... desolate scene was a large, hulking boy. He had been plodding heavily with a sack upon his back. As he stopped, he set this upon the ground and ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... the Miller, plodding along the road, had come opposite to where the yeomen lay hidden, whereupon all four of them ran ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... blue shirt, moleskin or corduroy trousers, and a slouch hat. Their leader, Captain Cargill, wore always a blue "bonnet" with a crimson knob thereon. They named their harbour Port Chalmers, and a stream, hard by their city, the Water of Leith. The plodding, brave, clannish, and cantankerous little community soon ceased to be altogether Scotch. Indeed, the pioneers, called the Old Identities, seemed almost swamped by the flood of gold-seekers which poured in in the years after 1861. Nevertheless, Otago is still the headquarters of that large and very ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... first Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of this pile of wealth. He was born in 1794. His parents lived on Staten Island; his father conveyed passengers in a boat to and from New York—an industrious, dull man who did his plodding part and allowed his wife to manage household expenses. Regularly and obediently he turned his earnings over to her. She carefully hoarded every available cent, using an ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... puffed up with pride and importance, for he had accomplished the mission upon which he had been despatched, and in a very satisfactory manner, too. His report was to the effect that he had travelled at a good pace all through the preceding day, and that at nightfall, while still plodding forward, keeping his eyes wide open, meanwhile, on the look-out for a suitable camping spot, he had suddenly detected in the air a smell of burning wood and dry leaves, and, proceeding cautiously a little further, had become aware of a low, confused murmuring, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... Three years had made changes there. Edward found himself looking eagerly towards the back row of seats fur the old faces,—Will, Howard, Ellis, and half a dozen others,—before he remembered that they had long since entered higher schools. The boys whom he hid left plodding through long division were filling those back seats now, and leading their classes in algebra and Latin. He sat down near the blackboard to watch the progress of Joe Bartlett through an example in division. And behold, he was doing that old never-to-be-forgotten example about the cows ...
— Tip Lewis and His Lamp • Pansy (aka Isabella Alden)
... If we could be patient under the load of a mere worldly life; if we could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, like beasts, we might bend all our thoughts to the earth; and no call from the great Heavens above us would startle us from our plodding ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... picked me up was nothing but a tramp, plodding along with a general cargo from London to Dundee, and its accommodation was as rough as its skipper was homely. But it was a veritable palace of delight and luxury to me after that terrible night, and I was soon hard and fast asleep in ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... the finest works of Calderon to the ballads in the patois of every province, he could quote, to the infinite delight of those with whom he associated. He could assume any character that he pleased: he could be the Castilian, haughty and reserved; the Asturian, stupid and plodding; the Catalonian, intriguing and cunning; the Andalusian, laughing and merry,—in short, he was all things to all men. Nor was he incapable of passing off, when occasion required, for a Frenchman; but, as he spoke the language with a strong German accent, he called himself an Alsatian. ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... a mistake, as you will soon find out when you belong to their body. They do work, and well, too. Many of the grand things on which departmental ministers pride themselves—and get the credit, too, of effecting by their own unaided efforts—are really achieved by the plodding office hacks, who work on unrecognised in our midst! Our whole public service is a blunder, my boy. There is no effective rise given in it to talent or merit, as is the case in other official circles. The 'big men,' who ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... the Sazawa; Tabor towers up near this branch; Budweis, on the Moldau itself, is forty miles farther; and there at last you are out of the stony moors, and in a rich champaign comfortable to man and horse, were you but once there, after plodding through the desolations. But from that Sazawa by the Luschnitz on to Budweis, mounting and falling in such fashion, there must be ninety miles or thereby. Plod along; and keep a sharp eye on the whirling clouds of Pandours, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... gained by sticking to our stations. So, more for deviltry than from entertaining any real hope of overtaking him, I chucked my rifle to the nearest of the farmers, touched old Bob with the spur, and went away on a hard gallop after the wounded fugitive, who was now plodding onward at the usual long loping canter of his tribe. For about half a mile the wood was open, and sloped gently upward, until it joined the open country, where it was bounded by a high rugged fence, made in the usual snake fashion, with a huge heavy top-rail. ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... trees, which some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few field-people—Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen— gathered ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of this plodding life, There enter moments of an azure hue, Untarnished fair as is the violet Or anemone, when the spring strews them By some meandering rivulet, which make The best philosophy untrue that aims But to ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... in the old days was the deliberate fashion the desert had of searing men's souls with her majesty. Slowly, slowly, the changes melted one into the other; massively, deliberately the face of the world was altered; so that at last the poor plodding human being, hot, dry, blinded, thirsty, felt himself a nothing in the presence of eternities. Well I knew that old spell of the desert. But now! Honestly, after a few minutes I began to feel sorry for ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... vocation to it, Gervase: A man of sense is not made for marriage; 'tis a game, which none but dull plodding fellows can play at well; and 'tis as natural to them, as ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... Mr. Lansdowne had been plodding among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of his profession. His brilliant achievement in ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... that my father was sober and industrious by habit; but habit is not uniform. There were intervals when his plodding and tame spirit gave place to the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not sought by him; but he could not withstand entreaty, and a potion that produced no effect upon others changed him into ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... far out in the fields. Even the old people and the children had gone out with the others. The children, dancing ahead of the wagons, stirring up the dust of the street, the old people plodding along after, the infant, or the loaf of bread and the jug of coffee ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... for Mul-tal-la and the Shelton brothers when one afternoon the three rode into the village, with Zigzag the packhorse plodding at the rear of the procession. The arrival made a hubbub of excitement, and it seemed as if the whole settlement—men, squaws and children—gathered clamorously round the horsemen, who dismounted and gazed about them with ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... mounted," continued the Baroness serenely, "and we had no difficulty in keeping ourselves in the first flight, though it was a fairly stiff run. Towards the finish, however, we must have held rather too independent a line, for we lost the hounds, and found ourselves plodding aimlessly along miles away from anywhere. It was fairly exasperating, and my temper was beginning to let itself go by inches, when on pushing our way through an accommodating hedge we were gladdened ...
— The Chronicles of Clovis • Saki
... level of the plains: on each side the land was barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I left him. I had hills to climb now, and ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... of something like to love, such a creature as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,—any crude simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John took the distrait look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a higher life than he could give her. ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... There was a magnetism of dulness in them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere since ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... was waning deeper and deeper into the night, I entered the town; and, plodding my solitary way to the same old docks, I passed through the gates, and scrambled my way among tarry smells, across the tiers of ships between the quay and the Highlander. My only resource was my bunk; in I turned, and, wearied with my ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Sturtevant was aware of her status in Fairbridge, and she was not without a steady, plodding ambition of her own. That utterly commonplace, middle-aged face had some lines of strength. Mrs. Sturtevant was a member of the women's club of Fairbridge, which was poetically and ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... be traveling in Iceland, actually plodding my way over deserts of lava, and breathing blasts of air fresh from the summit of Mount Hecla! I was at last in the land of the Sagas—the land of fire, and brimstone, and boiling fountains!—the land which, ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... an examination that morning. Myrtle professed to be utterly overcome and exhausted by the physical effort of writing for three whole hours without a let-up. If Leslie could have seen her meagre paper, through which a much-tortured professor was at that moment wearily plodding, she would have been astonished. Leslie herself was keen and thorough in her class work, and had no slightest conception of what a lazy student could avoid when she set ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Lisle, securing another trout, waded ashore and glanced with a rueful smile at the dozen this one made. They scarcely averaged half a pound, and he had spent most of a day that could badly be spared in catching them. Plodding back along the shingle with his load, he reached a little level strip beneath a scarp of rock, where a fire blazed among the boulders. A tent stood beneath two or three small, wind-stunted spruces, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... of the habit of work, tasting the world's good and panting for more; fear of poverty and hate of "scabs" in the hearts of the workers; the dumb yearning in the hearts of the oppressed; the echo of laughter heard at the foot of the Pyramids; the faithful, plodding slouch of the laborers; fear of the Shadow of Death in ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... she heard the landlord's refusal and the miner's angry profanity. A moment later she saw the traveller plodding up ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... after painfully protracted exertions, succeeded in working out some simple problem in arithmetic, her slate containing the solution was freely handed about among her unaspiring comrades; so that I judged her to be "weakly generous" as well as "plodding,"—qualities not of a high order, I esteemed, yet by no means insuperable barriers to friendship when found to enter more or less largely into the composition ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... surged, when coming out of the lighter, and struck them down. He desired old Tom to be more careful, and walked away, while we proceeded to unload the lighter. The new clerk was a very heavy, simple young man, plodding and attentive certainly, but he had no other merit; he was sent into the lighter to rake the marks and numbers of the casks as they were hoisted up, and soon became a butt to young Tom, who gave him the wrong marks and numbers of all the ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Poor Janetta, plodding away at her music lessons and doing the household work of her family, never guessed that she was about to become a bone of contention. But such she was fated to be, and that between persons no less distinguished than ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... out the direction, and, gathering up their things, the cadets hurried off to where he had pointed. There, sure enough, was a man plodding along with a bundle over his shoulder. He was a short, thick-set man, and wore a heavy mustache curled up at ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... movement will bring into harmonious action the insurgent forces of the world. Within ten years an earthquake will shake the social fabric. Within twenty years profound political and social revolutions will lift the human race over centuries of plodding into a new world of ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... accumulated. Now she saw that genius could accomplish without effort or trouble what no amount of homely energy could effect, and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers. It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with a hint that he must be prepared, if he could ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... spring came she found herself doing Barker's work, keeping the farm accounts, ordering fertilizers, calculating so many hundredweights of superphosphate of lime, or sulphate of ammonia, or muriate of potash to the acre; riding about on Barker's horse, looking after the ploughing; plodding through the furrows of the hill slopes to see how the new drillers were working; going the round of the sheep-pens to keep count of the sick ewes and lambs; carrying the motherless lambs in her arms from the fold to the ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... because it is all a purposeless passing of dreary hours. Before, there was always an object ahead of me, a light to which I made my way; and all the pleasant incidents of life were things to guide me, and to beguile the plodding path. Now I am adrift; I need go neither forwards nor backwards; and the things which before were gentle and quiet occupations have become duties to be ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a story, hasn't it? This summer, I mean. A beautiful story! In the beginning you came to the office—to prison, you said. And I was plodding along, trying to make myself believe that I liked bookkeeping. A pair of lame ducks we were, with broken wings. I'm a little sorry for us yet—aren't you? But now we— Do you think it would hurt you ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... Allys and her three swains came again to the lawn. By some odd chance, the long shots had been well toward the head of it, leaving the two favorites and the three second choices to bring up the rear. The Heathflower thing was immediately in front of them. She had moved so soberly, plodding with low head and sleepy eyes, the watchers had given her an ironic cheer, mingled with cat calls. All the others had got a welcome more or less enthusiastic, but it was only when Aramis, even-money favorite, came through the paddock gate that the crowd ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... taking two or three steps on one foot, and then two or three steps on t'other, with a Spanish twist of her hips at each turn, swinging her arms as she claps her costagnettes to the air of a song she had picked up at Barcelona, and we three men plodding behind, the Don with a guitar across his back, Dawson with our bundle of clothes, and I with a wallet of provisions hanging o' one side and a skin of wine on the other—and all as white as any millers with the ...
— A Set of Rogues • Frank Barrett
... principally indebted. Gaspari and Zimmerman, among the Germans, have thrown into a philosophical and interesting form the labours and heavy details which were supplied them by less original but more plodding men. The English, though, as Malte Brun observes, they are still without a system of geography which deserves the name, are rich in excellent materials, which have been supplied by the extent of their dominions and their commerce in various ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... have much more to do at this station," said the major surgeon when a plodding section of infantry ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... isn't looking for it!" And in an instant he had leaped on the horse, and headed him for the castle of fortune. The little horse started at a fine pace, and in a very few minutes they overtook the other traveller, plodding along on foot. ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... with a cloud upon her brow, and in one of those rare flashes of insight which are vouchsafed to plodding mortals, a plan of action presented itself to Ruth. "Aunty," she said, before Mrs. Ball had time to speak, "you know I'm going back to the city to-morrow, and I'd like to send you and Uncle James a wedding present—you've been so good to me. What ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... in narrative is ofttimes a dangerous parting of ways. But on this particular day Bobbie Burke had come to a parting of the ways unwittingly. He had left the plodding life of routine excitement of the ordinary policeman to embark upon a journey fraught with multifold dangers. In addition to his enemies of the underworld, he had made a new one in ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... We were either wading through the hill-side torrents or lakes, which, frozen on the bottom, made the footing exceedingly treacherous, or else with seal skin boots, rendered soft by constant wetting, painfully plodding over sharp clay stones, set firmly in the ground, with the edges pointing up, or lying flat and slipping as we stepped upon them and sliding the unwary foot into a crevice that would seemingly wrench it from the body. These are some of the features of ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... alone the levities of Europe which have encompassed with a gaseous atmosphere of enthusiasm these idols of the day. We appeal to our sober, plodding, painstaking brother Jonathan. We move for returns of the sums he has expended on his beloved Fanny, and for notes of the honours conferred upon her, not only on the boards of his theatres and in the publicity of his causeways, but amid the august nationalities of his senate! ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 341, March, 1844, Vol. 55 • Various
... museum, tried new stitches in embroidery, and worked at the same patterns in chip carving. The two girls were at about the same level of attainment in most things, for if Ulyth had greater originality, Lizzie was the more steady and plodding. It was Ulyth's failing to take things up very hotly at first, and then grow tired of them. She was apt to have half a dozen unfinished pieces of fancywork on hand, and her locker in the carpentry-room held several ambitious attempts that ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... woman upon her knees was devoting all her attention to keeping the sufferer's feet in a tub filled with a brown liquid. Hearing a footstep and the clank of spurs, which sounded strangely in ears accustomed to the plodding pace of country folk, the man turned to Genestas. A sort of surprise, in which the old woman shared was ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... They were plodding down the dazzling road, one on either side of the dusty bicycle under the open sky when he ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... not of the same sort as before. As though seeking complete withdrawal, Evelyn turned her eyes out of the window. A wayfarer, head down, was struggling through the nimbus of watery electric light; a horse-drawn vehicle was plodding by. Colcord's voice brought her ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... 7,000 of Pike's Persuasives, 13,000 of Alleine's Alarm, and 41,000 of Baxter's Call! The two Secretaries, whose business it is to superintend the publishing department and matters relating to the raising of funds, the Rev. Wm. A. Hallock and the Rev. O. Eastman, are enterprising and plodding men. They told me they were brought up together in the same neighbourhood, and had both worked at the plough till they were ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... concentrated form, find, perhaps, nowadays, more advocates; principally because the first-mentioned list contains articles that give off very offensive odors while being applied, so that the more fastidious are loath to use them. What may not be very offensive to the plodding florist would be highly so to the more refined, or when the general public comes more into contact with the crops while being so applied. In almost all of the cases where the ingredients mentioned are used ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... success in his profession, was widely known throughout his section, and though still a poor man he had good prospects and considerable influence. Yet he ever retained a considerate regard and remembrance for the poor and obscure relatives he had left plodding in the humble ways of life. He never assumed the slightest superiority to them. Whenever, upon his circuit, he found time, he always visited them. Countless times he was known to leave his companions ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... teacher before his pupils. If the teacher could not silence the opponent, the faith of the pupils in him would be shaken and great disorder would follow, and it was therefore deemed necessary that he who was plodding onward for the attainment of mok@sa should acquire these devices for the protection of his own faith and that of his pupils. A knowledge of these has therefore been enjoined in the Nyaya sutra as being necessary for the attainment of salvation ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... you expect me to be happy over it? Do you suppose, dear, that you could feel toward me, after a year at college, just as you do now? Don't you see how it would separate us and you'd have all your new friends and studies to take up your time and I'd just be plodding along here in the woods like a clod of turf? How could you ever keep on loving me? Don't you see, Janet, how it sort o' breaks my heart ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... fled up the street, bearing his dainty burden—for, once in sight, he could not stop with out exposure. Plodding travellers on the illuminated sidewalks were startled by the swift apparition of a gorilla carrying off a young lady, who was borne into dark alleys to be eaten in the obscurity of some hidden den. Casual wayfarers through back streets shrieked ...
— Half-Hours with Great Story-Tellers • Various
... president of her house. As for the rest of us, Lucy Winton, Eleanor Cook, and me, all I can venture to say—and they agree with me—is that, like the proverbial green freshman, we have been plodding along at studies occasionally, and at all other times we have been eating, sleeping, or amusing ourselves to ...
— The 1926 Tatler • Various
... start my journey; the great caravan's Strange cattle with their snoring breaths made steam Upon the air, and (as I thought) sadly The beasts at market-booths and awnings gay Of shops, the city's comfortable trade, Lookt, and then into months of plodding lookt. And swiftly on my brain there came a wind Of vision; and I saw the road mapt out Along the desert with a chalk of bones; I saw a famine and the Afghan greed Waiting for us, spears at our throats, all we Made women by our hunger; and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the sunlight. It had evidently extended further than it did, for a blackened space showed where a fire had been lighted to destroy it. Here Hastings, clad in blue duck, with long boots, was ploughing, plodding behind his horses, which stopped now and then when the share jarred against a patch of still frozen soil. Further on two other men silhouetted in blue against the whitened grass drove spans of slowly moving oxen that hauled big breaker ploughs, and the lines of clods that lengthened ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... he announced, rolling great eyes over his shoulder at his father; and the old man also went over to the window and watched Deborah plodding through the snow ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... others obtained their supply of drinking water. The rule of the pump was "last come last served," and frequently a long string of men, women, and children might be seen waiting their turn. Many of us can recollect the old Digbeth men, with their shoulder-yoke and two buckets, plodding along to find customers for their "Warta;" and certain elderly ladies are still in existence who would fear the shortening of their lives were their tea-kettles filled with aught but the pure Digbeth water, though it does not come from ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... They overtook Murphy, plodding along in the horse-trampled, deep snow, with a big, black hat pulled down to his ears, an empty gunny sack over his shoulders like a cape, a quart bottle sticking out of each coat pocket. They took him into the sleigh and went on, through ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... bornes kilometriques, line the roadways of Continental military Europe mercilessly, and it's a bad sign when the chauffeur begins to count them off. All the same, he knows his destination a great deal better than does some plodding tourist by rail who scorns him for rushing off again immediately ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... secrets of your success. Why not have the same elements in your house? Why pitch every century, country, and fashion, higgledy-piggledly into your parlors and dining-room? Have everything you can get, in heaven's name, but have everything in its place. If you are a plodding tradesman, knowing and caring nothing about pictures, or books, or statuary, or objets de vertu; don't have them. Suppose your neighbor chooses to put them in his house. If he has them merely because he had the money to pay ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... shrill from o'er the hili, And shook his scanty rags; Whilst cold and sleet benumbed his feet, As plodding o'er the flags. ...
— Yorkshire Lyrics • John Hartley
... counsel,—all served to invest the practical man with those spells which are usually confined to the ideal one. But, indeed, Audley Egerton was an Ideal,—the ideal of the Practical. Not the mere vulgar, plodding, red-tape machine of petty business, but the man of strong sense, inspired by inflexible energy and guided to definite earthly objects. In a dissolute and corrupt form of government, under a decrepit monarchy or a vitiated republic, Audley Egerton might have been a most dangerous ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried plodding about from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my knapsack, sought counsel with my carriers as to ways and means, crossed the river and took the Ruins road. ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... and walked slowly up the path toward the house, as the others pursued their way to the railroad track, down which they presently were plodding on their homeward journey. There was at least a little milk left in the pail when finally they reached their log cabin, with its yard full of pigs and chickens. Eagerly they scanned the sides of the railway embankment ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... him explained that Frands—that was his name—had been in the society's care five months and over. They had found him drifting in the streets, and, knowing whither that drift set, had taken him in charge and sent him to one of their lodging-houses, where he had been since, doing chores and plodding about in his dull way. That was where I had met him. Now they had decided that he should go to Florida, if he would, but first they would like to find out something about him. They had never been able to, beyond ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... There was the same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind. Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again. A sense of fatigue at the infinite repetitions of life comes over me. If Nature would but make a little variation! If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the flowers their ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... looked out upon a dazzling world of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way—the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running—the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... passion that grew with his growth; so that his conversation was habitually spiced with phrases and expressions in which there was abundance of sound, but generally an equal lack of sense. Too full of himself to be willing to keep patiently plodding on like ordinary people, he had run through a good many trades without being master of any. Once he was a pastry-cook; at another time a painter; and then an auctioneer—which last business he held to the longest of any, ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... Hardress. The ring of hope came back into his voice: the "shop-leg" dragged ever so little, as he walked across the park daily to where the ploughs were turning the grass of the farm fields into stretches of brown, dotted with white gulls that followed the horses' slow plodding up and down. The other guests took up a good deal of Mr. Linton's time: he was not sorry to have an overseer, since Hawkins, while honest and painstaking, was not afflicted with any undue allowance of brains. Together, in the study at night, ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... stampeded them. He righted the pack-saddles and drove the burros back toward Laguna. Halfway across the mesa he met Pete, who told him what had happened. Montoya said nothing. Pete had hoped that his master would rave and threaten all sorts of vengeance. But the old man simply nodded, and plodding along back of the burros, finally entered Laguna and strode up to the store. All sorts of stories were afloat, stories which Montoya discounted liberally, because he knew Pete. The owner of the dog claimed damages. Montoya, smiling inwardly, referred that gentleman to Pete, who stood ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... with a new settler, and about two o'clock that afternoon we overtook a fellow who was plodding along the road. His name was B——, he said, and he pointed out to us his broad fields and herds. He had been overseeing some feeders he had, and his horse had escaped, so he was walking home, as it was only a couple of miles. He talked a great deal in that two-mile trip; ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... a question which we had not been bright enough to ask. We had been plodding on with the vague idea that it was a delightful book. Certainly the subject was agreeable. The writer was taking us on a ramble through the less frequented parts of Italy. He had a fine descriptive power, and ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... back seat, thanks to skillful maneuvering on the opening day of school, and flaxen-haired Olga occupied the desk ahead. A day earlier he had counted himself fortunate in having her for a neighbor, for she was clever at studies which required plodding perseverance, and not at all bashful about helping a fellow when teacher pounced on him with a ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... shortly after my arrival, in company with a friend, the latter pointed out to me a stranger, on the opposite side-walk, and desired me to guess who and what he might be. The subject of my examination was a compact, solidly-built man, with a plodding rustic air, and who walked a little lame. After looking at him a minute, I guessed he was some substantial grazier, who had come to Paris on business connected with the supplies of the town. My friend laughed, and told me it was Marshal Soult. To my inexperienced eye, he had not a bit ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's endurance. They brought ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... genius, And thou a plodding brain; On thee I think with pleasure, On him with doubt and pain." ("You see, good Ned," says Thomas "What he thought ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... definite line to follow, Fred made no attempt to do so, believing he was as likely to reach the ravine by aimless traveling as by acting upon any theory of his own as to the location of the place he desired to reach. This he continued to do until the afternoon was about half spent. He was still plodding along, with some hope of success, when he became aware of a sickness stealing over him. The thought of the berries, and the fear that he had been poisoned, gave him such a shock that the slight nausea was greatly intensified, and he reclined upon ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... or are merely plugging away. They are, as a people, slow and unimaginative, given to over-much self-criticism; but they eternally hold on to a task or to a policy. Yet the question forever arises whether they show imagination, to say nothing of genius, and whether the waste of a slow, plodding policy is ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... carelessness, for he certainly has no idea of offering marriage, he gains her affection, neither meaning, in any definite way, to do anything good nor anything bad with it. There is another man who loves Lizzie, a schoolmaster, who, in his dull, plodding way, has made the best of his intellect, and risen in life. He naturally, and we may say properly, for no good can come of them, resents Wrayburn's attentions, as does the girl's brother. Wrayburn uses the superior advantages of his position to insult them in the most offensive ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... displays of human genius at the bar—often, perhaps, the successful assaults of Freedom against the fortresses of Despotism—are lost to history and memory for want of needful recordation. Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona; or, as Tacitus says of the eloquent Haterius, "Whist the plodding industry of scribblers goes down to posterity, the sweet voice and fluent eloquence ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... activities of the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of this pile of wealth. He was born in 1794. His parents lived on Staten Island; his father conveyed passengers in a boat to and from New York—an industrious, dull man who did his plodding part and allowed his wife to manage household expenses. Regularly and obediently he turned his earnings over to her. She carefully hoarded every available cent, using an ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... line where the lights had been gleaming the night before, the workmen, just roused from sleep, were swarming. There was a sound of voices and the squeaking of wheelbarrows. The working day was beginning. One poor little nag harnessed with cord was already plodding towards the embankment, tugging with its neck, and dragging along a cartful ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... hundred miles behind us lie, As many more ahead, Through mud and mire on mountains high Our weary feet must tread. So one by one, with loyal mind, The horses swing to place, The strong in lead, the weak behind, In patient plodding grace. "Hy-o, Buckskin, brave boy, Joe! The sun is high, The hid ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... accustomed from his earliest days to the dissipation of cities, or the wild excitement of a rover's life—how should I, who have so long commanded a band of men, regardless of all laws but those I have framed, and yet obedient to me as children, submit to the dull, plodding business of a country farmer engaged in superintending bumpkins in their daily toil? No, Nina, you must not expect it; I feel it ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... won't find yu." Here he grinned with delight as he saw his Sharp's rifle in its sheath on his saddle and, drawing it forth, he put away his Colts and glanced at the trio, who were already industriously plodding northward. "Hey!" he shouted, and when they sullenly turned to see what new idea he had found he gleefully waved his rifle at them and warned them further: "This is a Sharp's an' it's good for half a mile, so don't stop ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... party—Bertrand Barrere in the National Assembly in 1794, when the tide of feeling had been turned by events the well-known taunt—"let Pitt then boast of his victory to a nation of shop-keepers." The instinct for persistent methodical plodding work which extracted this taunt, afterwards vanquished Napoleon at Waterloo, and enabled the English to pass what, when you come to gauge it by our present standard, was one of the darkest and most trying ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... present she takes little notice of this exuberant display of affection, beyond running beneath the charger's belly, and playfully trying to plant her tiny heels in his lofty side. When they have been twice round the paddock, "Ninette" plodding gamely on, a long way in the rear, the couple halt at the shed entrance, and look at us with exuberant curiosity, the donkey's long ears shooting backwards and ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... this Sunday morning's service to distinguish it from others of the same sort. The minister was a good man and a plodding country parson. He read the morning prayers in a creditable but by no means distinguished manner. And he preached a sermon, more remarkable for its practical bearing than for its eloquence or originality, his text being in these words: "Faith without ...
— Self-Raised • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... sack was a stout one, Sandy could easily have gnawed his way through it if he had not been too frightened to try. And there he stayed, while all the time old Ebenezer kept plodding along toward ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... and emulation among their townsmen, and stir up and increase their courage and pugnacity against enemies by the sound of trumpets and flutes. For it is not only in poems, as Plato says, that he that is inspired by the Muses, and as it were possessed by them, will laugh to shame the plodding artist, but also in fighting battles passion and enthusiasm will be irresistible and invincible, such as Homer makes the gods inspire men with, ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... jolt and jar, and I heard what I knew as a matter of course to be the grind of wheels on axles and the grate and clash of iron tyres against rock and sand. And there came to me the jaded voices of men, in curse and snarl of slow-plodding, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... afterward that a white horse was drawing the reaper, and women and children were stacking and gleaning. Now and then the horse would stop, and a woman, with her red handkerchief on her head, would stand, shading her eyes a moment, and look off. Then the white horse would turn and go plodding on. The grain had to be got in if the Germans were coming, and these fields were to be trampled as they were in 1870. Talk about the duality of the mind—it is sextuple. I would not dare tell you all that went through mine that ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... galloped off to the camp, the old man plodding steadily down the road. When the echo of the horse's hoofs had ceased, a lean gangling figure came from out of the field-brush, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various
... stupid, rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world is one ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... clever, subtle methods of attack transcended those of the mere devourer of leaf-tissue, as radically as an inventor of most intricate instruments differs from the plodding tiller of the soil. In the center of one leaf, less disfigured than some of its fellows, I perceived four tiny ivory spheres, a dozen of which might rest comfortably within the length of an inch. To my eye they looked quite smooth, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... men were tired, but they were marched and countermarched, and halted and started, and placed and unplaced, until it was fair to conclude that someone was drunk. At last the person directing the column got his bearings and we proceeded. We were plodding along a road in which there was on the right hand side a ditch about two feet deep. Having been up and awake all of the night before, I was fearfully sleepy and hardly able to drag myself along. All at once I went into this ditch, and struck full length. In its bottom there was about ...
— Personal Recollections of the War of 1861 • Charles Augustus Fuller
... satisfaction of seeing the whole force turned out after a weary march. But of course the Boers are in their element at this kind of game. A hundred of them wish to drive away some stock; they leave a dozen to snipe from a ridge, while we send Tommy plodding round for miles on a flanking movement (for you must keep him out of range); and when the cattle have been driven far enough away, Mr. Boer jumps on his horse and is off also, while we ruefully ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... round-faced German took position by it, calling "Ready." The whole line at once moved forward each taking his loaf in turn and going his separate way. On this occasion, the ex-manager ate his as he went plodding the dark streets in ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; a Mongol market with bare-pated and long-coated Mongols ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... victuals: there was clattering of pewter pots, harpe, pipe, and sawtrie." Alas! how sadly is the scene changed since the roaring days of Falstaff and old Stow! The madcap roisterer has given place to the plodding tradesman; the clattering of pots and the sound of "harpe and sawtrie," to the din of carts and the accurst dinging of the dustman's bell; and no song is heard, save, haply, the strain of some syren from Billingsgate, chanting the ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... and the Distaffs have ever since been employed in the woollen and linen manufactures, except myself, who am a genealogist. Pikestaff, the eldest son by the second venter, was a man of business, a downright plodding fellow, and withal so plain, that he became a proverb. Most of this family are at present in the army. Raggedstaff was an unlucky boy, and used to tear his clothes getting birds' nests, and was always playing ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... which prevails in Great Britain. We associate with a Scotchman the ideas of shrewdness and prudence; with a Frenchman, gaiety and frivolity; with a Spaniard, gravity and pride; with an Italian, strong passions of love and revenge: with a German, plodding industry and habits of deep thinking; and with the northern nations, an honest sincerity and persevering courage. We sometimes judge with tolerable correctness; at others are wholly mistaken, and not unfrequently run into such extremes, that having established a principle, that a particular ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 331, September 13, 1828 • Various
... crossing it - is a land of mountains and elevated plateaus, and the inhabitants I should call the "ranchers of the Orient," in their general appearance and demeanor bearing the same relation to the plodding corn-hoer and scythe-swinger of the Morava Valley as the Niobrara cow-boy does to the Nebraska homesteader. On the mountains are encountered herds of goats in charge of men who reck little for civilization, and the upland plains are ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the least confidence by those who knew him best. He could utter the most palpable exaggeration or marvellous absurdity with the utmost apparent gravity. He nevertheless evidenced the rapid development of a thinking, plodding, evilbrewing mental composition—largely given to inventions of low cunning, schemes of mischief and deception, and false and mysterious pretensions. In his moral phrenology the professor might have marked the organ of secretiveness as very large, and that of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... sister of a young farmer in the district. It is a mistaken notion to suppose that farmers in Scotland are by far too plodding a class to indulge themselves in anything savouring of English games and pastimes, particularly football, but this is a mistake. I know several farmers in the country who love the dribbling game dearly, and do their best to promote its interests in the way of supplying ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... only in small portions near the water, consequently there was not that sort of variety which leaves distinct separate remembrances, but one impression of solitude and greatness. While the Highlander and I were plodding on together side by side, interspersing long silences with now and then a question or a remark, looking down to the lake he espied two small rocky islands, and pointing to them, said to me, 'It will be gay {225a} and dangerous sailing there in stormy weather when the ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... to that it seemed a very probable contingency, and she was beginning to weary of plodding over the boggy land, alternately slapped by outstanding branches or—when a little puff of wind raced overhead—drenched by a shower of garnered raindrops from some tree which seemed to shake itself in the breeze just as a dog may shake himself after a plunge ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... mean to propose any violent incongruity. You must excuse my blundering; I understand but little of the etiquette of young ladies. 'Tis a science too intricate to be learned without more study than we plodding men of business can well spare time for. However, when I have done writing prescriptions, I will set about reading them, provided you will be ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... cubic feet may certainly be done to still greater advantage in many towns where the price is lower. Mr. Booer has entered upon his work in a proper spirit. He has begun at the beginning, with the necessities of the baker; and has gone plodding on quietly, until he has achieved a noteworthy success. It may be hoped he will receive the reward which his perseverance merits.—Jour. of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... of books and men renders you very capable to make yourself master of any science, or fit yourself for any profession.' I mentioned that a gay friend had advised me against being a lawyer, because I should be excelled by plodding block-heads. JOHNSON. 'Why, Sir, in the formulary and statutory part of law, a plodding block-head may excel; but in the ingenious and rational part of it a ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... works have proved the master's mind that is in the original. There is a talent in industry which every industrious man does not possess; and even taste and imagination may lead to the deepest studies of antiquities, as well as mere undiscerning curiosity and plodding dulness. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... from all I chanced on in my wandering; even this poor creature on his doorstep made me the wiser by one little thing. How was it he could mistake me for a woman; the woman Ingeborg he had called by name? I must have walked up too quietly. I had forgotten the plodding cart-horse gait; my shoes were too light. I had lived too luxuriously these years past; I must work my way back ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... with hot granite and disfigured by trolley wires, was a country road then. Green trees took the place of crowded rows of houses and stores, and little "bob-tail" yellow cars were drawn by plodding mules to an inclosure in a timbered valley, surrounded by a board fence, known as Lindell Grove. It was then a resort, a picnic ground, what is now covered by close residences which have long shown the wear ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... being cuckolds, that is to say, such of us as have not wherewithal fully to satisfy the appetite and expectation of that voracious animal. Odds fish! quoth Panurge, have you no preventive cure in all your medicinal art for hindering one's head to be horny-graffed at home whilst his feet are plodding abroad? Yes, that I have, my gallant friend, answered Rondibilis, and that which is a sovereign remedy, whereof I frequently make use myself; and, that you may the better relish, it is set down and written in the book ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... himself that he was ignorant of the laws respecting marriage. It occurred to him, therefore, that he had better consult his brother, and confide everything to him. That Jack was wiser than he, he was always willing to allow; and although he did in some sort look down upon Jack as a plodding fellow, who shot no seals and cared nothing for adventure, still he felt it to be almost a pity that Jack should not be the future Earl. So he told his aunt that he proposed to ask his brother to come to Scroope for a day ...
— An Eye for an Eye • Anthony Trollope
... before under the firm of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had prospered wonderfully and become one of the wealthiest John Browns on earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after innumerable schemes which ought to have collected all the coin and paper currency ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pavements, and kennels down which the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barn-door fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of the multitude which passed him;—all appeared anxiety, bustle, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... clutched the prey. Following the French as rapidly as wind and canvas could take him, he caught their rearmost vessels, smashed them up, battered the whole fleet successively into flight or splinters, and himself lost only two vessels, which ran upon a shoal. Plodding prose does scant justice to the extraordinary brilliancy of Hawke's victory, described by Admiral Mahan as "the Trafalgar of this war." We cannot pass on without quoting one ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... you go on keeping it there rotting for nothing, when it might just hinder us from wearing our very lives out while you are plodding ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... so jubilant and hopeful, wore weeds of mourning from Maine to Oregon. Lieutenant Bob was there, and Wilford, too; and so was Captain Ray, digging in the marshy swamps, where death floated up in poisonous exhalations—plodding on the weary march, and fighting all through the seven days, where the sun poured down its burning heat and the night brought little rest. No wonder, then, that the three faces at the farmhouse grew white with anxiety, or that three pairs of eyes grew dim with watching the daily papers. ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... consolations, for while plodding on as usual the travelers suddenly saw a white line ahead, and soon afterwards discovered that it was a sledge track. There was no doubt that the track was Barne's on his way back from his survey work to the west, but it was wonderful what that track told them. They could see that there ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... the other hand, increased by their consciousness of youth's misunderstanding and high scorn. It may relieve the mind to break forth in moments of irritation against "the folly of the coming generation," but whoso pauses on his plodding way to call even his youngest and rashest brother a fool, ruins thereby the joy of his journey,—for youth is so vivid an element in life that unless it is cherished, all the rest is spoiled. The most praiseworthy journey ...
— The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets • Jane Addams
... noted how a mere trifle will, in an extraordinary way, determine or change the whole course of a life. I can illustrate this by my own case. I was plodding on contentedly at the Bar without getting "no forrarder," with slender meagre prospects, but with a hankering after "writing," when I came to read this Life of Goldsmith that I have just been describing, which filled me with admiration. The author was at the moment gathering materials for his ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... later. John Stanchfield, Elias Palmer, Harold Ormthwaite, and Nathan Ridge, all farmers or market-gardeners of the Colcord district, testified to frights and "spooky feelings" on being accosted by a dim gray figure plodding along the Colcord road in the lonely interval between midnight and morning. The dim gray figure seemed to have recognized the different "teams" by the section of the road through which they jolted ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... the incensed owner; "your disposition be freer than welcome, methinks. Holloa, I say, whither away so fast?" cried he impatiently, quickening his pace; but the stranger altered not his gait in the least, plodding steadily onwards, without appearing to notice the angry inquiries ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... of gay fairies and plodding brownies stole off on a visit to the upper world, leaving Robin and his companions in ever-deeper despair. Poor Robin! he ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... in East Thirty-third Street, within a block of the Subway station. He was feverish, gay, looked years younger than his thirty-seven. She was quiet, dim, passive, neither grave nor gay, but going through her part without hesitation, with much the same patient, plodding expression she habitually bore as she sat working at her machine—as if she did not quite understand, but was doing her best and hoped to get through ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... An hour of plodding through the dusk, two hours, and they were at a water-hole near the northern hills. Overland unroped one of the packs, made a fire, and presently had some hot coffee for his companion, who was pretty well used up. ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... sisters toiling for their brothers. And all done not only without a murmur, but with cheerfulness and thankfulness to God that their condition was no worse. I have heard hopeful accents from the plodding charwoman, that have made me ashamed, as Wordsworth stood rebuked before the 'leech-gatherer, upon the lonely moor.' Let England look to it. These women, mothers of men, are abandoning her shores for foreign lands. When good and dutiful ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... speeding townwards along the rails Judkin would be plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow and a basketful of dahlias. The basket to ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... the statesmen of his day in patriotic zeal and in disinterested labors,—not to extend the boundaries of the empire, but to develop national resources and make the country strong for defence. He was a plodding, wary, cautious, far-seeing, long-headed old statesman, whose opinions it was not safe for Elizabeth to oppose; and although she was arbitrary and opinionated herself, she generally followed Burleigh's counsels,—unwillingly at times, but firmly when she perceived the necessity; for she was, with ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... two artists more unlike! Just compare "The Dancing Sylphs" and "The Gleaners." The theme of all Millet's work is, "Man goeth forth to his labors unto the evening." Toil, hardship, heroic endurance, plodding monotony, burdens grievous to be borne—these things cover the canvases of Millet. All of his deep sincerity, his abiding melancholy, his rugged nobility are there; for every man who works in freedom simply reproduces himself. That is what true work is—self-expression, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... not gone very far, when the child was again struck by the altered behaviour of Mr Thomas Codlin, who instead of plodding on sulkily by himself as he had heretofore done, kept close to her, and when he had an opportunity of looking at her unseen by his companion, warned her by certain wry faces and jerks of the head not to put any trust in Short, but to reserve all confidences for Codlin. Neither did he confine ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... whom the farmers all, Who dwelt around, "the Gentleman" would call; Whether in pure humility or pride, They only knew, and they would not decide. Far different he from that dull plodding tribe Whom it was his amusement to describe; Creatures no more enliven'd than a clod, But treading still as their dull fathers trod; Who lived in times when not a man had seen Corn sown by drill, or thresh'd by a machine! He was of those ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... brazen sun had fully risen on the second day these late peaceful farmers of Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, were plodding along once more beside their sore-footed oxen; passing out unaided into a land which many leading men in the Government, North and South, and quite aside from political affiliations, did not value at five dollars for it all, though still a thousand ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... rocky peninsula and trudged along the sandy isthmus with the plodding resolution of men who seemed almost to have made up their minds to be wanderers on the face of the earth. Despite Turnbull's air of scientific eagerness, he was really the less impatient of the two; and the Highlander ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... to see her play. In his small, shabby room in a musty house on one of the old side streets he set to work on his new plan. He wrote now without fervor, without elation, plodding along hour after hour, erasing, interlining, destroying, rewriting. He toiled terribly. He permitted himself no fancy flights. He calculated now. "I must have a young and beautiful duchess or countess," ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... sloth, Drunken Lark! thou would'st be loth 20 To be such a Traveller as I. Happy, happy Liver! With a soul as strong as a mountain River, Pouring out praise to the Almighty Giver, Joy and jollity be with us both! Hearing thee, or else some other, As merry a Brother, I on the earth will go plodding on, By myself, chearfully, ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... all the trails. A scheming intelligence seems now to direct the bandits. Pity was never in the Mexican heart. But now unarmed men are butchered while praying for mercy. Their bodies are wantonly gashed. Droves of poor, plodding, unarmed Chinese miners are found lying dead like sheep in rows. Every trail and road is unsafe. Different bodies of robbers, from five to twenty, operate at the same time. There is no telegraph here as yet, to warn the helpless settlers. ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... legitimate heirs of twelve years' accumulated glory by the sacrifice of so many heroic lives and all the more glorified because so few,[3348] and because, in these days, a man did not obtain the cross by twenty years of plodding in a bureau, on account of routine punctuality, but by wonderful strokes of energy and audacity, by wounds, by braving death a hundred times and looking it in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... the Inner Temple,—since the Bar was then, what it was at Rome, what it still is in modern capitals, the usual resort of ambitious young men. But Burke did not like the law as a profession, and early dropped the study of it; not because he failed in industry, for he was the most plodding of students; not because he was deficient in the gift of speech, for he was a born orator; not because his mind repelled severe logical deductions, for he was the most philosophical of the great orators of his day,—not because the law was not a noble field for the exercise of the highest ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... and plodding in those days. Ambition did not lure the husbandman to days of luxury and ease, but to the accomplishment of a good day's work, and a future crowned with the fruits of honest industry. If the girls were prepared for the future by the watchful care and ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... Broadway, in Norton Folgate, and at Kensal New Town. "A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... concealed beneath his hat brim, which had been drawn low to shade them from the glare, one hand pressing upon his saddle holster as he leaned over to rest. No insignia of rank served to distinguish him from those equally dusty fellows plodding gloomily behind, but a broad stripe of yellow running down the seams of his trousers, together with his high boots, bespoke the cavalry service, while the front of his battered campaign hat bore the decorations of two crossed sabres, with a gilded "7" prominent between. ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... undergone a very favorable change in reference to the celestial pilgrimage. It would have done Bunyan's heart good to see it. Instead of a lonely and ragged man with a huge burden on his back, plodding along sorrowfully on foot while the whole city hooted after him, here were parties of the first gentry and most respectable people in the neighborhood setting forth towards the Celestial City as cheerfully as if the pilgrimage were merely a summer tour. Among the gentlemen were characters ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the Iliad; the history of the World, the infinitudes of Space and Time! I never take up a book of Geology or Astronomy but this strikes me. And when we think that Man must go on to discover in the same plodding way, one fancies that the Poet of to-day may as well fold his hands, or turn them to dig and delve, considering how soon the march of discovery will distance all his imaginations, [and] dissolve the language in which they are uttered. Martial, as you say, lives now, after two thousand years; ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... buzzing flies. Heat waves that sear, and quivering rise; The long white road, the plodding team, The deep, cool grass in which to dream; The distant cawing of the crows, Tall, waving grain, long orchard rows; The peaceful cattle in the ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... rice, which fetches him a little more than their price in money. If he can get back soon enough he goes out again, after a hurried meal, to the sweetmeat seller's, where he assists in beating sugar for wafers. As soon as he comes home he sits at his shell-bangle making, plodding on often till midnight. All this cruel toil does not earn, for himself and his family, a bare two meals a day during much more than half the year. His method of eating is to begin with a good filling draught of water, and his staple food ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... so eager was he to get up to level ground, he did not send Ring or Whitie in advance. Encouraging Bess to hurry pulling at his patient, plodding burro, he climbed the soft, ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... that it is some idea about Good that brings order into a man's life? All I can say is that, for my part, I never once think, from one year's end to another, of anything so abstract and remote. I simply go on, day after day, plodding the appointed round, without reflexion, without reason, simply because I have to. There's order in my life, heaven knows! but it has nothing to do with ideas about Good. And altogether," he ejaculated, in a kind of ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... hatter, or "good old McGarver" were along. A scene so British that it seemed proper to enjoy it alone he did find in a real garden-party, with what appeared to be a real curate, out of a story in The Strand, passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot glow into a cold plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel which might as well have been in ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
Copyright © 2025 Free-Translator.com
|
|
|
