"Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... comfortable assurance' that it will fail in England. True, we have more rapidly departed from and defaced that system than the English, chiefly because, in escaping from the fogs of England, we left behind us that stolid conservatism, that bulldog tenacity for the old because it is old, which are instinctive in the narrow-minded islanders. But they, just as much as we, have lost out of mind the significance of the Christian idea. They, just as much as we, have ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... thoughtfully returned to his quarters after witnessing the departure of his son, he found sitting on the doorstep, and patiently awaiting his coming, a Canadian woman. Beside her stood her stolid-looking husband, whom the major recognized as a well-to-do farmer of the settlement, to whom he had granted some trifling favors while in command ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... going of the desert to the road-bed. As Rhoda saw the long line of rails the panic of the previous night overwhelmed her. Like a mad thing, unmindful of the strap about her waist she threw herself from the saddle and hung against the stolid pony. Kut-le dismounted and undid the strap. The girl dropped to the ties and lay crouched with her face against ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... who were there present, I was surprised at seeing so few with red or fair hair. I noticed this to my companion. He had never observed it before, but said it was strange. The convicts were mostly of a dull grey complexion, large eyed, stolid looking men, or with very black hair, and ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... entirely lost upon the stolid Huron. He appeared not to hear it. He merely repeated, "He come out furder up," and, springing lightly from the tree, continued his cautious ascent of the creek, O'Hara following behind, and occasionally muttering his unbounded admiration of the ...
— The Riflemen of the Miami • Edward S. Ellis
... also indicates a desire to shun observation; for she is cloaked and close hooded. Not enough to ensure disguise, though she may think so. The most stolid slave on all Colonel Armstrong's plantation, could tell at a glance whose figure is enfolded in the shapeless garment, giving it shape. He would at once identify it as that of his master's daughter. For no ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... shook hands with great heartiness; and perhaps Sabine would have become still more expansive had he not been brought up to credit Englishmen stolid fellows at best with a favourite motto: ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... mind. Other wild men were leading in a lion, immense and lean as if it were a fawn-coloured ass. It roared and pulled at the golden chains by which the knot of men held it. Many ladies shrieked out, but the men dragged the lion into the open space before the dais where the Queen sat unmoved and stolid. ...
— The Fifth Queen • Ford Madox Ford
... fitted them to the five smallest Indian children. Trading ceased for a moment, while all eyes turned to the funny sight of these wild little creatures in English clothing. The settlers and seamen laughed aloud, while even the stolid faces of the old warriors ...
— Some Three Hundred Years Ago • Edith Gilman Brewster
... Jasper's second object in coming to America was to leave his wife in Sioux City, so that she could secure a divorce from him, on quite un-Scriptural grounds. Hardress told me of this at least without any excitement. He did not blame her. He was too old for her, too stolid, too dissimilar in every respect, he said. Their marriage had been a mistake, that was all,—a mismating, as many marriages were. She wanted to marry someone ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... a frantic rush at the stolid Hippopotamus in response to this suggestion, but they might as well have tried to batter down the rock of Gibraltar by hurling feathers against it, so firmly fixed in his seat was this passenger of ...
— Andiron Tales • John Kendrick Bangs
... and I came into my office, tired-out, warm, and exceedingly anxious. Clearing Thad Hawley meant a great deal to me just then. It was my first important case, and I felt that my future would be decided in a great measure by its outcome. If the twelve stolid farmers upon whom I had showered my eloquence went Fraley-ward in their verdict, I knew that my professional goose would be cooked, and visions of a move to some distant bailiwick rose up before me. Fraley and Hicks would then monopolize ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... irreproachable evening attire, groups of French students in someone else's doubtful evening attire, crowds of rustling silken dominoes, herds of crackling muslin dominoes, countless sad-faced Pierrots, fewer sad-faced Capuchins, now and then a slim Mephistopheles, now and then a fat, stolid Turk, 'Arry, Tom, and Billy, redolent of plum pudding and Seven Dials, Gontran, Gaston and Achille, savoring of brasseries and the Sorbonne. And then, from the carriages and fiacres: Mademoiselle Patchouli ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature appearing ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... On one side of that wall is Italy, with her vines, her mulberry-trees, her whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peasantry; across the mountains is the solemn, austere German scenery, with savage peaks and gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in common ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... peasant's legs, naked below the knee, were tanned by the sun to the same brown hue as his face and bare throat; his feet were sandalled, and just above one of his ankles, a soiled bandage, apparently concealing a wound, was wrapped. A broad-brimmed felt hat shaded his half-closed eyes and dull stolid countenance, and the only thing that in any way distinguished him from the generality of peasants was his hair, which was cut short behind, instead of hanging, according to the usual custom of the province, in long ragged locks ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... quickly, and a little change in his countenance showed that he recognised Walter; but he assumed a stolid look, and said: "Were you speaking to ...
— Walter Sherwood's Probation • Horatio Alger
... whom he found in waiting for him—a stolid, impenetrable-looking Englishman, who led the way to an entrance into the garden of the villa—an entrance which Stretton did ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... lines, far outside, the stolid Prussians joke over their beer, as they learn of the wholesale murder finishing red Bellona's banquet. "The French are all ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... only homogeneous in race in the sense that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and imposed their culture and language on the whole continent. The staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less than the Japanese does from either. This much you can say: Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a closer homogeneity ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the paradox, that it was huge because it was petty, getting a miserable sour sustenance out of his consciousness of the position it explained. Great enemies, great undertakings, would have revived him as they had always revived and fortified. But here was a stolid small obstacle, scarce assailable on its own level; and he had chosen that it should be attacked through its own laws and forms. By shutting a door, by withholding an answer to his knocks, the thing reduced him to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... drill in the market-place; and on the collar of one of the officers was embroidered the Bear and Ragged Staff, which has been the cognizance of the Warwick earldom from time immemorial. The soldiers were sturdy young men, with the simple, stolid, yet kindly, faces of English rustics, looking exceedingly well in a body, but slouching into a yeoman-like carriage and appearance, the moment they were dismissed from drill. Squads of them were distributed everywhere about the streets, and sentinels were posted at ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... back, my friend,' the stranger answered. And, lighted by Maignan, whose face on such occasions could assume the most stolid air in the world, he disappeared down the stairs, and I ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... than thirty feeding at once in the lower half of the parade ground, and at nightfall have seen forty at roost in one tree, with half as many more in the tree adjoining. They grow extremely noisy about sunset, filling the air with songs, cackles, and screams, till even the most stolid citizen pauses a moment to look up at the authors ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... had stolen and come West. He had started the first saloon at Manitou, and had grown with the place in more senses than one. He was heavy and thick-set, with huge shoulders, big hands, and beady eyes that looked out of a stolid face where long hours, greed and vices other than drink had left their mark. He never drank spirits, and was therefore ready to take advantage of those who did drink. More than one horse and canoe and cow ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... judge as he raised the soup-basin and listened to his patient's words, while all at once a suspicious thought glanced through Fitz's brain, and he looked at the lad quickly and felt relieved, for no one could have imagined from the grave, stolid face before him that mirth like so much soda-water was bubbling and twinkling as it effervesced all through the being ...
— Fitz the Filibuster • George Manville Fenn
... this have happened? The explanation is at once simple and ridiculous. As Goldsmith finished writing out each page of his poem for press, he laid it aside on top of the pages preceding; and, when all was done, he forgot to sort back his pages in reverse order. That is all. Given a good stolid compositor with no thought beyond doing his duty with the manuscript as it reached him, you have what Mr. Dobell has recovered— an immortal poem printed wrong-end-foremost page by page. I call ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... was about forty feet long and thirty feet wide. The ceiling was covered with quaint figures in fresco, the walls were paneled with oak, and high-backed, stolid-looking chairs stood around. On one side was the fire-place, so vast and so high that it seemed itself another room. It was the fine old fire-place of the Tudor or Plantagenet period—the unequaled, the unsurpassed—whose day has long since been done, and ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the stolid, heavy disposition that seems armed by outward indifference, or mayhap pride. He knew that his case was hopeless, and he would not thaw even to the priest. But Giles had been quite unmanned, and when he found that for the doleful procession to the Guildhall he was to ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... motive—"of that sort"—said he to himself, without further analysis. He threw himself into the laugh, without attempting any. It disposed of the discussion of the subject, but left matters so that stolid silence would have been priggish. It seemed to him that not to say another word would almost have amounted to an insinuation against the eyebrows and the teeth. He would say ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... sense of self-satisfaction, which he is at no pains to hide, that he aimed at winning honour for his country as well as for himself. In a letter which he wrote to his guardian, Chevalier Gherardo Compagni, he alludes to the stolid indifference of the English people and philosophers to the brilliant achievements in aeronautics which had been made and so much belauded on the Continent. He proclaims the rivalry as regards science and art existing between ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... of the finest examples of real humor that ever were perpetrated upon parents. Sheila is the first-born. Norah decided that she should be an Irish beauty, and bestowed upon her a name that reeks of the bogs. Whereupon Sheila, at the age of six, is as flaxen-haired and blue-eyed and stolid a little German madchen as ever fooled her parents, and she is a feminine reproduction of her German Dad. Two years later came a sturdy boy, and they named him Hans, in a flaunt of defiance. Hans is black-haired, gray-eyed and ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... members in the House of Commons has really nothing to do with my reminiscences, but I remember one occasion when it was uncommonly well excelled by a stolid Englishman. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... pleasant thing it is to see a little country lad riding one of the plough-horses to water, thumping his naked heels against the ribs of his stolid steed, and pulling hard on the halter as if it were the bridle of Bucephalus! Or perhaps it is a riotous company of boys that have come down to the old swimming-hole, and are now splashing and gambolling through the water like a drove of white seals very much sun-burned. ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... great-coat and thick gloves or mittens, if the howling blasts of winter drive in across the assembly fresh streams of ventilation that move the hair upon their heads, they are none the less content, if only he gives them good strong exercise. Under their hard and, as some would say, stolid faces, great thoughts are brewing, and these keep them warm. Free-will, fixed fate, foreknowledge absolute, trinity, redemption, special grace, eternity—give them anything high enough, and the tough muscle of their inward man will be ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... impatiently. "Who cares what becomes of him? You have made him seem a fool, but, Lucille, to tell you the truth, I am sorry that we did not leave this country altogether alone. There is not the soil for intrigue here, or the possibility. Then, too, the police service is too stolid, too inaccessible. And even our friends, for whose aid we are here—well, you heard the Duke. The cast-iron Saxon idiocy of the man. The aristocracy here are what they call bucolic. It is their own fault. They have intermarried with parvenus and Americans for generations. They are a race ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... from the Ottomans began the fight, which was continued for four hours with stolid energy on both sides. The English and French vessels, being foremost, carried on the chief contest with the enemy's shipping; the Russians had to silence the batteries before they could enter the harbour, but then their Admiral, Count Heyden, did his full share of the deadly work. The ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... glance at the stolid back of John beyond the two empty seats in front of them. Although she knew he could not hear her words, instinctively she ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... waiting while a porter lugged his traps down from the rack. He had felt depressed in Paris, but now London seemed a thousand times worse. The sight of Driver waiting on the platform annoyed him. He answered the man's stolid greeting snappishly. He had wanted to come home, and yet now he was here he wished himself a thousand miles away. He leaned back in a corner of the taxi and ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... to a good old age, and for many years in rather awful solitude here, and at the last with some of the best blessings that wait on age, 'respect, and troops of friends.' His son—whose stature, broad shoulders, and stolid aspect bring to mind the Saxon peasant of the middle ages—is driver, in the season, and sportsman in and out of it. He stood at the door this morning as we were driving off to the Falls of the Ammonoosuck, with his fowling-piece in hand, and asked leave to occupy a vacant seat in the wagon. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... his fears were ridiculous. We hunted over the ship for an hour and a half without coming on any sign of the missing woman or child. Poor Tibbs lost his voice completely from calling her name. Even the sailors, who are generally stolid enough, were deeply affected by the sight of him as he roamed bareheaded and dishevelled about the deck, searching with feverish anxiety the most impossible places, and returning to them again and again with a piteous pertinacity. The last time she was seen was about seven o'clock, when ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... hours and days, till she passed into a phase of stolid acquiescence. She watched the familiar routine of life with the incurious eye of a savage on whom the meaningless processes of civilization make but the faintest impression. She had come to regard herself as part of the routine, a spoke ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary—that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; for ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... me to the Cafe Bauer, the reputed wild and questionable resort of Leipzig night-life, though the pension glanced ceiling-wards and sighed and shook their heads. I do not know just what I did expect to see, but I know that what I saw was countless stolid family parties—on all sides grandmas and grandpas and sons and daughters, and the babies in high chairs beating the tables with spoons. It was quite the most moral atmosphere we ever found ourselves in. That is what you get for ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... her conviction, if such it was, as I look at a daguerreotype of myself taken about that period, a round head, mostly hair, a low forehead, a pair of round eyes, thick nose and lips and short neck, altogether just such a solid, stolid child as one would expect to see from the country, bred in the sun and cold, and fed on brown bread and milk. My being with my sister, and a pupil in her school was a temporary expedient until a place could be found for me. At length it was found, a situation in a dry goods store, where ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... varied reception. In some places the people were so stolid, that even the catechist, one of their own people, seemed to make no impression. On many occasions we were heard most patiently, and were treated most courteously. Now and then, especially in the larger places, and where markets ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... breeze in her castle of sunshine; Babbles the bee in a stolid ear; Pipe the sweet birds in ignorant cadence, — ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... that the stolid, fur-clad Russian is a child of song, for such seem to belong to sunny climes, but throughout his life from the cradle to the grave he is accompanied with song. Not modern compositions, for they are quite ...
— Yule-Tide in Many Lands • Mary P. Pringle and Clara A. Urann
... hand, when you have an especially attractive young woman staying with you, ask a stolid middle-aged couple and an octogenarian professor for dinner, because the charm and beauty of the former is sure to appeal to ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... practicable. But this was not the work of a moment. The savage can drink and dance through the night with as lusty a zeal as his white neighbour; the song, the jest, the merry tale, are as dear to his imagination; and in the retirement of his own village, feeling no longer the restraint of stolid gravity,—assumed in the haunts of the white man, less to play the part of a hero than to cover the nakedness of his own inferiority,—he can give himself up to wild indulgence, the sport of whim and frolic; and, when the fire-water is the soul of the feast, the feast only ends ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... Stolid and unshaven fishermen, in drab scows, along the canoe's route, looked up from their lines, in bovine wonder at the vision of loveliness which swept resonantly past them. For the quartet were warbling. They were also doing queer musical stunts which are ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune
... the expensive useless goods that no sensible person ever wants; the liveries worn by pampered servants standing at carriage wheels; the glossy coats of mettlesome, prancing horses; the extravagant dresses of fine ladies mincingly walking on the common public pavement; the stolid grandeur of huge policemen, and the infinite audacity of small newspaper boys; the life, the color, the noise. It seemed as if the busy city and the pleasure-loving West-end alike unfolded themselves ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... and of a heavy, ungraceful build. His hair was thick and rather scraggly, his face was of the square type, and his expression what people call stolid. He had freckles but not too many, and his mouth was large and his lips tight-set. His face wore a characteristic frown which was the last feeble trace of a lowering look which had once disfigured it. Frowns are in the taboo list of the scouts, but somehow this one wasn't half ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... he preserves softer gifts for necessary purposes. Indeed, it is certain, although he vouchsafed none of it to me, that this cold and stolid politician possesses to a great degree the art of ingratiation, and can be all things to all men. Hence there has probably sprung up the idle legend that in private life he is a gross romping voluptuary. Nothing, at least, can well ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... who might have been sixteen, gave Jane a stolid, incurious look and shuffled down the hall, closing the door on a ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... papers were full of the attempted burglary. Before the magistrates, the man who had been apprehended said not a word. He seemed to accept his position with stolid fatalism. The cross-examination as to his associates, and the motive of the ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... inhabitants were unaware that so formidable a guest traversed their highways. The heat had driven them indoors, whence outdrifted occasional shrill laughs, or the depressing whine of a maltreated concertina. In the shade a few Mexican children, like vivified stolid idols in clay, stared from their play, vision-struck and silent, as Alvarita came and went. Here and there a woman peeped from a door and stood dumb, reduced to silence by the aspect of ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... moment Cob had never moved, as we have said. Save for his one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived. That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed, just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head snicked round and up, and he slid the enemy's beak down off his own ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... exciting affair also, with new features that Ashland had never seen before. Here the girls began to shine into prominence, but there were very few good spellers, and they were presently reduced to two girls—Rosa Rogers, the beauty of the school, and Amanda Bounds, a stolid, homely girl with deep eyes ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... without taking her arms from the tub, as Mary made her faltering inquiry for the old lady who made lace, and answered in some foreign tongue. Then she bent again to her rubbing, in stolid indifference to the stranger who had made a sudden descent on her home. Mary was too inexperienced to know that one cause of her indifference was that she was too underfed and overworked and mentally stunted by her hideous surroundings to care who ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... one climate, invariable, from generation to generation, and both low and uninvigorating, had brought to nearly aboriginal form and lines his cheek-bones, hair, and resinous brown eyes. From the cheek-bones up he looked like an Indian, and expressed a stolid power and swarthiness. Below, there dropped a large face, in proportion, with nothing noticeable about it except the nose, which was so straight, prominent, and complete, and its nostrils so sensitive, that only the nose upon his face seemed to be good company ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... same mothers with their children sucking their breasts; the same little boys and little girls laden with a few miserable rags; the same able-bodied men carrying the food they had saved. The older people gazed straight in front of them with the stolid despair of the fatalist East, and did not utter a word. A woman who had given birth to a child the very night before was being carried on a single plank slung on ropes, with a green-white pallor of death on her features. ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... entertainment. The crowd having dispersed, buffalo-robes were spread on the ground, and Marquette and Joliet spent the night on the scene of the late festivity. In the morning, the chief, with some six hundred of his tribesmen, escorted them to their canoes, and bade them, after their stolid fashion, ...
— France and England in North America, a Series of Historical Narratives, Part Third • Francis Parkman
... allowed to penetrate farther than the parlor, the very fact of his presence sent a thrill of excitement through the house. An English milord, a heretic, the grandfather of "cette chere Lisa," whom they were to lose so soon! No wonder the most placid of the nuns, the most stolid of the lay-sisters, tingled with ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... peculiarities with a quasi-celebrity. One of them now smiled broadly, and another so far forgot himself and his dignity as to wink; but all the rest, as American freemen by birth or adoption, united in a stolid determination to refrain from seeing, or at least from acknowledging, any distinguishing peculiarity, any differentiation—above all, any savor of superiority. The one of whom Truesdale inquired for his father was so Spartan in ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... as they gaze are swelling fast. An afflatus of heroism given forth by this host of self-devoted men communicates itself to the most stolid spectators. The booming of the drum fills the brain, and the blood in the veins leaps to its rhythm. The unearthly gayety of the fife, like the sweet, shrill song of a bird soaring above the battle, ...
— An Echo Of Antietam - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... chilled me, as I recalled their meaning; and Heald half rose to his feet as though he would protest, but not a stolid face among the warriors changed in expression. Gomo drew his robes more closely about his gaunt figure in simple ...
— When Wilderness Was King - A Tale of the Illinois Country • Randall Parrish
... "because the impressions of youth are swift and keen; but of course, here, age is not a question of years or failing powers. The old, here, are the wise and gracious and patient and gentle; the youth of the spirit is stupidity and unimaginativeness. On the one hand are the stolid and placid, and on the other are the brutal and ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... many of our middle-class seem able to wallow without suffering asphyxia; but I am only mournful because I have seen the plight of so many and many after their dip in the sinister depths of the pool. I envy those stolid people who can talk so contemptuously of frailty—I mean I envy them their self-mastery; I quite understand the temperament of those who can be content with a slight exhilaration, and who fiercely contemn ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... of tribal movements carved on the rocks by men who wrought in the dawn of history. We wonder at the compelling force that drove our ancestors through the forests of northern Germany, or caused the Aztecs to cross the Mexican deserts. It calls to something in our blood, for even the most stolid must at times hearken to the Pied Piper and with Kipling feel that "On the other ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... no concord among men, to end the horrible bondage. The State falls inwardly, as well as by the outward blows of the incoherent elements. The furious human passions, the sleeping human indolence, the stolid human ignorance, the rivalry of human castes, are as good for the kings as the swords of the Paladins. The worshippers have all bowed so long to the old idol, that they cannot go into the streets and choose another Grand Llama. And so the effete State floats on down the puddled ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... a stolid, sober man, of virtuous deportment, came down stairs to inform the land baron his master had suffered a relapse and was unable to ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... I cried, and met by a keen gust of wind which came sweeping down the village street, showering cascades of water from the leaves above, I set out in step with my stolid companion. ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... to the lady, who returned his greeting by an inclination of the head, and his keen eyes played briskly over her. She was a plump-faced, insipid child, with fair hair and pale blue eyes, stolid ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... outgoing guests slouched one by one into the room. Each was shaven and shorn; each wore clean linen; each was clad in a neat, plain, gray suit of tweed; each bore stamped upon his face a dogged, obstinate, stolid, low-browed shame. The colonel gave each the money enclosed in the envelope, thanked each for his service, inquired with pleasant friendliness as to his future movements and plans, invited each to come again to the Refuge if he chanced to be in those parts, shook each by a heavy, reluctant ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the alphabet of the wonderful Renaissance; and in our chastened and reverent mood, it almost takes our breath away when your high-priestess unrolls the last pronunciamento, and tells us her startling story of 'Euphorion!' Why? Ah!—don't you know? The Puritan leaven of prudery, and the stern, stolid, phlegmatic decorum of Knickerbockerdom mingle in that consummate flower of the nineteenth century occident, the 'American Girl', who pales and flushes at sight of the carnival of the undraped—in English art and literature. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... word. He became enraged to such a pitch, that he so far forgot himself as to loosen the golden ear-rings from her ears, and threatened to take away all the finery he had given her. Even this was not sufficient to rouse the girl from her stolid calmness, and the valiant officer was, at last, obliged to retreat from the field ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... you see what I see. It is impossible for her to register changing expressions and feelings as a white girl would. Nor would she be natural as 'Brighteyes' if she easily showed emotion. Yet she mustn't be stolid, for if she does the audience will never get what we are trying to ...
— Ruth Fielding in the Great Northwest - Or, The Indian Girl Star of the Movies • Alice B. Emerson
... to collect pence in the streets. Joe had been offered a three or four days' job; he had accepted it gratefully because it was only for three or four days, and for that period he would be the sober, stolid, British workman. The pleasures of the pot-house would claim him on Saturday, when he would have money in his pockets and the appetite ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... does, about the duty of sailors as well as soldiers to defend the crown against the foes beyond the frontiers of the empire, as well as against the enemies within the boundaries of the latter. He then singled out a stolid-looking recruit, and having ascertained that he was the son of a Bavarian farmer, with a strongly developed taste for the sea, he proceeded to question him with regard to the address which he had ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... in a blue shirt-waist and black skirt, with the tightest of fair braids packed above a round, pink face, with eyes so blue they looked opaque, tied and wove garlands with the stolid radiance of her kind. Her brother Franz worked as she did. Only the father Blumenfeldt, who was of a more nervous strain, flew about in excitement, his fat form full of vibrations, his fat face blazing, ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... account of how it had been at first intended that Oberon should be represented by little Sir Adrian, with his Bexley cousin, Pearl Underwood, for his Titania; but though she was fairy enough for anything, he turned out so stolid, and uttered 'Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,' the only lines he ever learnt, exactly like a lesson, besides crying whenever asked to study his part, that the attempt had to be given up, and the fairy sovereigns had to be of large size, ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... servant promised to stay with the "Captain" and take care of him, and as I said "Good-bye, Hoo Chack," I noticed an expression of real regret on his usually stolid features. ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... sing to those equals in wonder, Of BRADSHAW (the expert on trains), Who have torn the Hun's fiction asunder— That our City's a mass of remains; Here's our proof that we're plainly not undone, That, although every night she lies hid, Our stolid undaunted old London Still stands where ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, January 5, 1916 • Various
... glance at Doe, when stripped, ought to have satisfied a doctor. His figure, small in the hips, widened to a chest like a Greek statue's; his limbs were slender and rounded; his skin was a baby's. But no, the stolid old doctor carried on, as though Doe were nothing to sing songs about. He tested his eyes, surveyed his teeth, tried his chest, tapping him before and behind, and telling him to say "99" and to cough. ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... with ignorant, ragged, and bare-footed urchins. These children are, indeed, no less well cared for and taught than their Yankee fellows, and one cannot sufficiently admire the energy and enthusiasm with which school-teachers generally endeavor to "make Americans" of their stolid and ragged little alien charges. In these cases, however, where often the children have had no schooling at all before they are old enough to work, it is quite clear that the school cannot do all that is required to ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... first hearing of this accusation, strode forward, even to the table, where sat the awful conclave astonished at his temerity. He stood calmly erect, surveying his judges with a countenance scarcely moved from its usually hard and stolid expression. ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... does not imply power; of the Americans, whose rasping voices in the hush of a hot afternoon strain tense-drawn nerves to breaking-point, and whose suppers lead to indigestion; of tempestuous Russians, neither to hold nor to bind, who tell the girls ghost-stories till the girls shriek; of stolid Germans, who come to learn one thing, and, having mastered that much, stolidly go away and copy pictures for evermore. Dick listened enraptured because it was Maisie who spoke. He ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, "One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine," and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia—a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were "simple," "natural," ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... A stolid, ignorant, and densely superstitious people was at war with a rejuvenated nation keenly alive to the power of education. That is the secret. Man for man, Russia would have won. But the resourcefulness ...
— The Story of Russia • R. Van Bergen
... of passengers and trainmen into the refreshment-room at Big Shanty had been calculated upon. The presence of a Confederate camp at that out-of-the-way station had not been. It might have proved fatal to their enterprise but for the stolid stupidity of the sentinel. But that peril had been met and passed. They were safely away. Exhilaration filled their souls. All was safe ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... started to their feet at once, and stared around them with looks of stolid surprise that were almost equal to the looks of the natives, to whom fire-arms were little known, except by report. Another shot sent the whole herd with a heavy plunge ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... seated—a hardy race, reared on the hills, and disciplined in the straitest of creeds. Stolid and self-complacent, theirs was an unquestioning faith, accepting, as they did, the Divine decrees as a Mohamedan accepts his fate. What was, was right—all as it should be; elect, or non-elect, according to the fore-knowledge, it was well. Sucking ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... the stolid way he did so caused Flambeau's fierce black eyes to ramble over his companion afresh. "What's the matter with you?" Flambeau demanded. "Dubosc's all right in that way. You ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Hinpoha longed to poke him in order to make him give some expression of feeling. But at all events, he did not struggle against his captivity, and Hinpoha reflected judicially that after all it was a good thing that he had such a stolid personality, for a calm frame of mind aids the recovery of the patient and he would not be likely to keep his wing from healing by dashing it against the side of the cage. It seemed almost as though he knew his ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... she had hoped so long, and on the night that faithful spies had brought her thirtieth wreath, Andelsprutz went suddenly mad. All the bells clanged hideously in the belfries, horses bolted in the streets, the dogs all howled, the stolid conquerors awoke and turned in their beds and slept again; and I saw the grey shadowy form of Andelsprutz rise up, decking her hair with the phantasms of cathedrals, and stride away from her city. And the great shadowy form that was the soul of Andelsprutz went ...
— A Dreamer's Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... there were wholesome human emotions. He sorrowed, He wept, He wondered, He was angry, He pitied, He loved. And yet all these were perfectly consistent with the unruffled calm which marked His whole career. So peace is not stolid indifference, nor is it to be found in the avoidance of difficult duties, or the cowardly shirking of sacrifices and pains and struggles; but rather it is 'peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation,' of which the great example stands in Him who was 'the Man of Sorrows and acquainted ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain—Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman—became very nervous and voluble. The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whisky and proceeded to drink. The theory was beautiful—namely, if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... deck of the ship commanded by Capt. Sparhawk, which lay alongside of the wharf. Of the dozen Indians who had been at the audience on the yesterday only seven were present, and they were all the oldest. The whole group appeared, to a careless observer, stolid and unmoved by what they saw; but one who watched them might notice that they cast inquisitive, though stolen glances, on every thing around. Moreover, upon closer examination, he might fancy an air of uneasiness among them, as ever and anon they turned their eyes toward the houses of ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams
... on the following afternoon I called at my aunt's house in Belgrave Square. The hall was full of portmanteaux, boxes, and packages. Sleaford had already arrived, and was waiting with stolid patience for my mother, who had gone to her room to dress. He began to talk to me about the astonishing gifts ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... high hills, and tried to appear unconcerned; while Dick, still choking, led the way up the trail. The unwritten law of the mines had decreed there should be no work that day; and he saw the men of the Cross pass down the road, arguing with stolid emphasis against the injustice of the ordered strike. He knew they would return to the camp and continue that argument, with more or less heat, and wondered what the ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... Surprise, astonishment, and confusion followed each other across his stolid countenance; and with quicker pace than he was ever known to use in his life before, he made his way to his seat. No sooner had the reading began again when once more the door clicked. True to his promise, the ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... reckoning. Although his character is a strong mixture of courage and ferocity, the Apache is gentle and affectionate toward those of his own flesh and blood, particularly his children. Fear, to him, is unknown. Death he faces with stolid indifference; yet Apache men have been known to grieve so deeply over the loss of a friend as to end their ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... across Darry's mouth. I shall never forget the coloured man's face, as he stepped back a pace or two. I understood it afterwards; I felt it then. There was no resentment; there was no fire of anger, which I should have expected; there was no manly and no stolid disregard of what had been done. There was instead a slight smile, which to this day I cannot bear to recall; it spoke so much of patient and helpless humiliation; as of one wincing at the galling of a sore and trying not to show he winced. Preston took me off my horse, and began to ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the humblest wayfarer and the elaborately decorated high-laced boots affected by the wealthy Chola women of La Paz. In another row are the dealers in Indian blankets; still another is devoted to such trinkets as one might expect to find in a "needle-and-thread" shop at home. There are stolid Aymara peddlers with scores of bamboo flutes varying in size from a piccolo to a bassoon; the hat merchants, with piles of freshly made native felts, warranted to last for at least a year; and vendors of aniline ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... of a practised swimmer, dived into the depths and disappeared; while the boys, in the silence of intense anxiety, crowded as close as they dared to the edge of the wharf, and the Lascars looked down from their bulwarks in stolid admiration. There were some moments of harrowing uncertainty, and then a shout arose from the boys, which even the swarthy sailors imitated, after a fashion; for cleaving the bubbled surface came the head of brave John Connors, and, close ...
— Bert Lloyd's Boyhood - A Story from Nova Scotia • J. McDonald Oxley
... early in the season, scatters for shelter; umbrellas pop up here and there under the beautiful trees along the western roadway; the adjutant rushes through "delinquency list" in a style distinguishable only to his stolid, silent audience standing immovably before him,—a long perspective of gray uniforms and glistening white belts. The fateful book is closed with a snap, and the echoing walls ring to the quick commands of the first sergeants, at which the bayonets are struck ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... Sunday broke stolid and respectable, and even the sea seemed to mumble and complain, so they returned to Princeton via the Fords of transient farmers, and broke up with colds in their heads, but otherwise none ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... from posterity. That they hung in the hall, evidently no more than an overflow, was an earnest of packed plenitude within. The room I was ushered into was a back-room, a dining-room, looking on to a good garden. It was, in form and 'fixtures,' an inalienably Mid-Victorian room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its proportions, its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its folding-doors (through which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming mysteriously in the front room), its mantel-piece, ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... those at home; but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the incalculable hordes of his countrymen. He went through galleries, churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter's; but in the hotels he never ceased to enquire and investigate, questioning every one who could speak English, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the investment. He ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... force of threats and punishment. By thus denying the knowledge it craves, and cramming it with knowledge it cannot digest, we produce a morbid state of its faculties; and a consequent disgust for knowledge in general. And when, as a result partly of the stolid indolence we have brought on, and partly of still-continued unfitness in its studies, the child can understand nothing without explanation, and becomes a mere passive recipient of our instruction, we infer that education must necessarily be carried on thus. Having by our ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... the Englishman, showed by contrast his American origin. His chin was all that Peter had said an American's chin ought to be, and he had keen, brilliant blue eyes. Hannaford, though taller than he, was stouter as well as older, and therefore appeared less tall. He was of a more stolid type, and it seemed incredible that such an adventure as that sketched by Madame d'Ambre could approach such a man. Yet for once, gossip and truth were one. The thing had happened. Hannaford had lately retired from the army, after being stationed for two years in ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... all on the march; and the only type of Christian work then attemptable takes the form of a brief greeting in the name of Christ to the men who tramp beside us, though they are often too tired even to talk, and we are compelled to trudge on in stolid silence. ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... with a glib tongue how Mr. Ingledew had been hurriedly called away to town on important business. There was no corpse on the moor, no blabbing blood to tell the story of his attempted murder: nobody anywhere, he felt certain in his own stolid soul, would miss the mysterious Alien who came to them from beyond the distant abyss of centuries. With true Scotch caution, indeed, even in the midst of his wrath, Robert Monteith had never said a ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... "Our idea of our Ally as a soldier is that his elan and gay courage are very much more remarkable even than supposed; but for the dull, heavy work of continued warfare there is wanted, if we may say so without offence, the more stolid qualities of the English. On the other hand, the French opinion of their Ally as a soldier is that his dash and devilment are really astonishing, even to the most expectant critic; but for the sordid, monotonous strain of this trench business it needs (a thousand pardons!) ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... it is just this love for him, for what he was, not what he is, and her respect for herself, which Miss ELLEN TERRY marks so forcibly. Katharine is a foreigner, therefore is her bearing, though stately, less stolid than that of the typical English Tragedy Queen. The note of her dying scene, so striking by its simplicity, is its perfect tranquillity. Who's Griffith? Why the veteran HOWE (ah, Howe, When and Where did I first see you, Sir? Wasn't it in the days when good old ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 16, 1892 • Various
... not sentimentalizing about stolid, brazen note-taking, such as that with which the gentlemen of the Ateneo debase their books, because that merely indicates barbarous lack of culture and an ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... with tears; the sight of them put out the flame that had leapt for once from stolid Hugh, and he took her hand in his own ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... headstrong fellow!" said Eustace, looking back wistfully. "And what to do! To ride back myself might be the means of getting the whole troop late in starting, and disorderly—yet, to leave him!" Eustace looked at John Ingram's comely and stolid face, and then almost smiled at himself for seeking counsel from him. "Ride you on, John," said he; "tell Master d'Aubricour of the order to depart—let all be in readiness by ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his attitude. The man of money was both good-hearted and large-minded, and had departed from the ways of commerce to seek distinction in politics. Stolid, without enthusiasm or dash, he could be stubbornly great in defence of principle. Success and a few millions had not changed his early theories of life. Pride in his race, delight in his religion, devotion to his party, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... pillars and arches springing from the green turf, the large carved window, empty of glass, the broken walls; and, looking up to the blue sky, she tried to imagine the time when the Gothic roof closed overhead, and music sounded through the arches, and trains of stolid monks paced through them, where now the very pavement was not. Strange it seemed, and hard, to go back and realize it; but in the midst of this, the familiar face of the sky set Ellen's thoughts off upon a new track, and suddenly ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... ignorance and isolation made him indifferent to politics. There might be a bad squire or parson, as there might be a bad season; but squire and parson were as much parts of the natural order of things as the weather. The farmer or yeoman was not much less stolid; and his politics meant at most a choice between allegiance to one or other of the county families. If in the towns which were rapidly developing there was growing up a discontented population, its discontent was not yet directed into political channels. An extended franchise meant a ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume I. • Leslie Stephen
... children got between every one's legs, and every one was in a fume of curiosity and delight—anything being an event in Blanchisseuse—save the one Chinaman, if I recollect right, who stood in his blue jacket and trousers, his hands behind his back, with visage unimpassioned, dolorous, seemingly stolid, a creature of the earth, earthy,—say rather of the dirt, dirty,—but doubtless by no means as stolid as he looked. And all the while the palms and bananas rustled above, and the surf thundered, and long streams of light poured down through the glens in the black northern wall, and ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... the taste of the Germans turned to sombre, tragical and almost sinister plays. Only a death on the stage seemed to bring a ray of animation to the stolid bovine faces of the audience. In my last winter in Berlin the hit of the season was "Erdgeist," a play by Wedekind, whose "Spring's Awakening," given in New York in the spring of 1917, horrified and disgusted the most hardened Broadway theatregoers. The principal ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... on the contrary, were delighted with my dog; and it was on this ground that we became friendly. My particular affection for Polly was also probably due to the discovery that with an incomparably stolid expression of countenance she was passing highly buttered pieces of bread under the ...
— A Flat Iron for a Farthing - or Some Passages in the Life of an only Son • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... came into the Bowery Boy's face, followed by one of stolid woodenness. He took the sovereign that Jimmy held out to him with a muttered word of thanks, and shuffled ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... privilege—that of fortitude. You can always consent, and by a forced and perpetual conformity to nature lift yourself above all vicissitudes. Those tender and tentative ideals which nature really breeds, and which fill her with imperfect but genuine excellences, you will be too stolid to perceive or too proud ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... to the liquid, siren note of a succubus. " Do you know what kind of a man I like? Really like? I like a man that a woman can't bend in a thousand different ways in five minutes. He must have some steel in him. He obliges me to admire him the most when he remains stolid; stolid to me lures. Ah, that is the only kind of a man who cap ever break a heart among us women of the world. His stolidity is not real; no; it is mere art, but it is a highly finished art and often enough we can't ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... of the greasy lamps, blindly beating out their lives against the hot chimney; but save this and the soft voice there was no other sound. The man at the right held his pipe in his hand; to the left the boys had ceased whispering; one and all were listening to the speaker with the stolid, expressionless gaze of ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... a public assemblage of all the Indians, the next day, by investing him with a petticoat, for so unmanly an act. The thing was, accordingly, done with great ceremony. The man then sneaked away in this imposed matchcota, in a stolid manner, slowly, all the Indians looking stedfastly, but uttering no sound ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... experience, informs me that with idiots laughter is the most prevalent and frequent of all the emotional expressions. Many idiots are morose, passionate, restless, in a painful state of mind, or utterly stolid, and these never laugh. Others frequently laugh in a quite senseless manner. Thus an idiot boy, incapable of speech, complained to Dr. Browne, by the aid of signs, that another boy in the asylum had given him a black eye; and this was accompanied by "explosions of laughter and with his face covered ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... went by in absolute silence—while the great gilt clock upon its carved bracket ticked on with stolid relentlessness, marking another minute—and yet another—of this hour which was so full of portent for the destinies of France. Clyffurde would gladly have bartered the future years of his life for the power to stay the hand of ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... not an uncommon case. What we have first to determine, under these circumstances, is whether this dislike springs from a stolid, prosaic nature, whether it springs from a real inability to visualize such pictures as the fairy or marvelous element in the story present, or whether (and this is often the real reason) it is from a fear of being asked to believe what his ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... habitant loved the free life of the forest and river better than the monotonous work of the farm. He preferred too often making love to the impressionable dusky maiden of the wigwam rather than to the stolid, devout damsel imported for his kind by priest or nun. A raid on some English post or village had far more attraction than following the plough or threshing the grain. This adventurous spirit led the young Frenchman ...
— Lord Elgin • John George Bourinot
... the day nears its close, and the death-dogs pant hard upon his track. But at that moment the strong features, with their gnarled muscle and iron sinews, seemed to have lost every sign both of passion and the will, and to be locked in a stolid and dull repose. At last he looked up at Morton, and said, with a smile like that of an old ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the object of Ireland's devotion, of England's fear, and of the world's admiration, kneeling with the people before the altar, practicing the piety of the people, with that humble simplicity, that recollection, that devoutness, and that modesty, which supercilious science and stolid pride abandon as things fit only to be followed by those whom ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... distinctly saw the devil glaring through zu Pfeiffer's eyes, and was so scared that he let fall the tray, which was the reason that he also was doomed to have twenty-five lashes that evening. Even the stolid Sergeant Schultz remarked that the Herr Lieutenant had gotten a touch of the sun; but the grizzled Schneider, who came from Luthuania, opined that the Herr Kommandant had left his table knife ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... emphatically repudiated all insinuations of unfairness toward the red man, but he had put the chief himself on the defensive by showing that he was an interloper who sought to control the rightful possessions of others. At last, it was the stolid savage who lost his self control, and the Governor, who by his respect for the laws of the council fire had brought the flush of shame to the chieftain's cheek. That night, as he afterwards admitted at Fort Meigs, ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... moment they had been entirely unconscious of their surroundings and now as she looked at their captors she saw that they had fallen again into their almost habitual manner of stolid indifference, and at a gesture from one of them the march was resumed as though no untoward ...
— Tarzan the Untamed • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... her position she must have some influence outside of her own ability, so she laid plans to entangle in her net a hard-headed, blunt and supposedly soubrette-proof theatre manager. He fell victim to her charms, and in his cold, stolid way, gave her what love there was in him. Still not satisfied, she played two ends against the middle, and finding a young man of wealth and position, who could give her in his youth an exuberance ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow |
