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Plodding   /plˈɑdɪŋ/   Listen
Plodding

noun
1.
Hard monotonous routine work.  Synonyms: donkeywork, drudgery, grind.
2.
The act of walking with a slow heavy gait.  Synonym: plod.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books



... matter of much doubt. It may be that the archaic forms give an additional flavour to his style, since they present few difficulties to the modern reader, and yet sound like echoes from the earlier periods of the language. Generally he is content to follow his author with almost plodding fidelity, but occasionally he makes additions which are eminently characteristic. His author having remarked:—"Il nest an Jour Duy nulle chose qui tant grieue Rome ne ytalie come fait le college Des notaires publiques Car ilz ne sont mie en accort ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton

... fragment of meaning here and there, but the sumptuous imagery, the stirring names, the glimpses into a past where Roman senators were mingled with the gods of a gold-pillared Olympus, filled his mind with a misty pageant of immortals. These moments of high emotion were interspersed with hours of plodding over the Latin grammar and the textbooks of philosophy and logic. Books were unknown ground to Cantapresto, and among masters and pupils there was not one who could help Odo to the meaning of his task, or who seemed aware that it might have a meaning. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... And ask himself, in bitterness of soul, Why he his destiny could not control? Why some were wealthy, and could take their ease, And ride about wherever they should please? While he, poor lad, on foot his weary way Kept plodding still, till ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd

... they are still attractive, as natural curiosities, and as displaying a wonderful exhibition of the creative power. Beheld in any light, they are interesting. Whatever may have been their origin, they adorn the monotony of western scenery, and afford employment to the fancy of the traveller. The plodding foot may tread carelessly over them, the uninquiring eye may pass them, unheeded; but the poet and philosopher linger around the hallowed spot where they stand, to catch inspiration, or to gather wisdom ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas

... all the craturs?" persisted Mickey, who was anything but satisfied at this plodding along. "Lone Wolf and his spalpeens did not ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne

... 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

... plodding steps, and periods of abstracted lagging, the hunter made his way back to Moore's cabin. At his entrance the cowboy leaped up with a ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey

... 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



Words linked to "Plodding" :   walk, walking, effortful, labor, donkeywork, labour, toil



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