"Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... caught the quick rush of his wing, and saw him dart across a space, a few yards to my right. I felt my hand shake; I had not pulled a trigger in ten months, but in a second's space I rallied. There was an opening just before me between a stumpy thick thorn-bush which had saved the last bird, and a dwarf cedar; it was not two yards over; he glanced across it; he was gone, just as my barrel sent its charge into ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... of the mangled remains of M'ling, I heard a light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... those were enjoyable suppers after the toil and grime of the day. The Beadle especially admired Zussmann's hands when the black grease had been washed off them, the fingers were so long and tapering. Why had his own fingers been made so stumpy and square-tipped? Since Nature made herself, why was she so uneven a worker? Nay, why could she not have given him white teeth like Zussmann's wife? Not that these were ostentatious—you thought more of the sweetness of the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... section of Len Yang another scrutiny. Thick cables sagged between stumpy poles like clusters of black snakes, all converging at the mine's entrance. His acute ears were registering a dull hum, indicating the imminence of ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... not less bitter because it was a feud in which nothing was said and nothing done—a silent and implacable mutual resistance. The sole outward sign of it was the dirty and stumpy brown-brick shop-front of Mr. Timmis, squeezed in between those massive luxurious facades of stone which Ezra Brunt soon afterwards erected. The pharmaceutical business of Mr. Timmis was not a very large one, and, fiscally, Ezra Brunt could have swallowed him at ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail. ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... middle of the night, and thought he heard curious noises outside. He sat up and listened; then got up, and, opening the door very quietly, went out. When he peeped round the corner, he saw, under his own window, a group of stumpy creatures, whom he at once recognized by their shape. Hardly, however, had he begun his 'One, two, three!' when they broke asunder, scurried away, and were out of sight. He returned laughing, got into bed again, and was ...
— The Princess and the Goblin • George MacDonald
... hunters, a bull will sometimes turn in desperation on his persecutor. Then, unless the horse is well trained, serious consequences are likely to follow. The plunging thrust of his stumpy horns perhaps rips open the steed, sending the rider flying over the back of the furious bison, who may turn upon him and slay him before ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... "O yes!" exclaimed Stumpy, derisively; "'course, boys, you mus' wait. 'Tain't no use a-hurryin' up the cattle; yer mustn't rush the buck. Jest wait till some feller comes along with a melted rainbow, and lays on the war-paint! and another feller fetches the ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... the sight of no roofs and spires could have been more welcome than that of these logs and cabins, broiling in the midsummer sun. At a little distance from the fort, a silent testimony of siege, the stumpy, cleared fields were overgrown with weeds, tall and rank, the corn choked. Nearer the stockade, where the keepers of the fort might venture out at times, a more orderly growth met the eye. It was young James Ray whom Colonel ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... affording a front of only a single field, on the crest of a considerable sand-bluff—elevations looking magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field, which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks, an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form; and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, and two chimneys, not built outside of the house, as was the general fashion, but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... prematurely born; but, as it seemed to me, already an old woman. I credited her with thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going on in ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... surface. Billy interposed, for he saw Theodora's color come, and he knew that the rug, his own contribution to her college room, was one of her dearest possessions. He shook his head at the six-pound culprit who stood before him, waggling his stumpy tail in smug satisfaction over the success ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther away ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... times the force of gravity; in the second at from two to four times; and in the third at about one and a half times. The straight tails he ascribes to hydrogen because the hydrogen atom is the lightest known; the sword-shaped tails to hydro-carbons; and the stumpy tails to vaporized iron. It will be seen that, if the force driving off the tails is that which Arrhenius assumes it to be, the forms of those appendages would accord with those that Bredichin's theory calls for. At the same time ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... look short and stumpy in proportion to the rest of the palm—one may be sure that the individual to whom they belong is of an animal nature, possessing coarse instincts, devoid of real intellectuality, and belonging to the ...
— Palmistry for All • Cheiro
... Cordovese his reproaches for destroying the wonder of them when they planted their proud cathedral in the heart of the mosque. He held it a sort of sacrilege, but I think the honest traveler will say that there are still enough of those rather stumpy white marble columns left, and enough of those arches, striped in red and white with their undeniable suggestion of calico awnings. It is like a grotto gaudily but dingily decorated, or a vast circus-tent curtained off in hangings of ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... the first faint tones of rose, the dawn was bringing its enchantment to this marriage-time of the black and white. Over in the Key West barracks a bugler would soon be blowing reveille; down in the sleeping town stumpy little street cars would squeak from their sheds and clang their discordant gongs through the narrow thoroughfares. But farther yet to the northeast, in the Florida I best knew and loved, a whooping crane would startle the solitude with its uncanny ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... his glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy little black cigar. ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... Jacobus's household evidently spent their days in light attire. This stumpy old woman with a face like a large wrinkled lemon, beady eyes, and a shock of iron-grey hair, was dressed in a garment of some ash-coloured, silky, light stuff. It fell from her thick neck down to her toes with ...
— 'Twixt Land & Sea • Joseph Conrad
... century the beauty of the Samplers distinctly declined. They became squarer, and were bordered with a running pattern, and the whole canvas became more or less pictorial. Inevitably the end of this art came. Ugly realistic bowpots with stumpy trees decorated the picture in regular order. The alphabet still appeared, and moral reflection seemed to be the aim of the worker rather than to make the Sampler show beauty of stitchery. Quaint little maps of England are often seen, surrounded with floral borders, ...
— Chats on Old Lace and Needlework • Emily Leigh Lowes
... and more variegated omnium-gatherum was never assembled. They had already begun to straggle in when I arrived. There were long-haired and spectacled doctrinaires from New England, spliced by short-haired and stumpy emissaries from New York—mostly friends of Horace Greeley, as it turned out. There were brisk Westerners from Chicago and St. Louis. If Whitelaw Reid, who had come as Greeley's personal representative, had his retinue, so had Horace White and Carl Schurz. ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... Loanda struck me as unusually ill-favoured; short, "stumpy," and very dark, or tinged with unclean yellow. Lepers and hideous cripples thrust their sores and stumps in the face of charity. There was no local colouring compared with the carregadores, or coolies, from the northeast, whose ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... right enough," he said. "It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah, no, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. Now it ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... direct contrast to his brother, being thick-necked, stumpy and dark, had not failed to garner his share of the rich harvest. From his station behind the long counter, which was made of four heavy planks supported on barrels at either end, he had poured strange mixtures into beer mugs and exchanged them ...
— The Plow-Woman • Eleanor Gates
... at comparatively long intervals, for it was only when both craft happened to be on the summit of a wave at the same moment that we were able to see her. Yet two facts concerning her gradually became clear to us, the first of which was that she was undoubtedly a slaver—so much her short, stumpy masts and the enormous longitudinal spread of her yards told us,—the second was that she was steadily settling down to leeward at a more rapid rate than ourselves, as was only to be expected from the fact that she was exposing much more top-hamper to the gale than ...
— A Middy in Command - A Tale of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... ever a ship's timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and showers of spray. When ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... had theirs also, and had testified to the same in their sleep by low growls and whines. Now they shook themselves, and rubbed against each other, growling in a warlike manner through their teeth, and wagging peaceably with their little stumpy tails. ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he is ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... sherry in the commandant's little parlour, and forth the two cronies sallied mysteriously side by side; the commandant, Colonel Bligh, being remarkably tall, slim, and straight, with an austere, mulberry-coloured face; the general stout and stumpy, and smiling plentifully, short of breath, and double chinned, they got into the sanctum I have ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... dust we found bits of planking and bundles of brushwood that sent the wagon bounding into the air. The journey in itself was a delight. Sometimes we crashed through bracken; anon, where the blackberries grew rankest, we found a lonely little cemetery, the wooden rails all awry and the pitiful, stumpy head-stones nodding drunkenly at the soft green mullions. Then, with oaths and the sound of rent underwood, a yoke of mighty bulls would swing down a "skid" road, hauling a forty-foot log along a ...
— American Notes • Rudyard Kipling
... and stumpy, and old and gray, With a sleepy look in his lonely eye, (The other he lost at a matinee— Knocked out by a boot from a window high.) Wherever he goes, he never knows— Quarter or pause in the midnight spree, For the life of a cat is a life of blows, If he is ...
— The Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56, No. 2, January 12, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... "It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... been of Bauer—why Bauer did not come and what could have befallen him. It was grand to hold the king's secret for him, and she would hold it with her life; for he had been kind and gracious to her, and he was her man of all the men in Strelsau. Bauer was a stumpy fellow; the Count of Hentzau was handsome, handsome as the devil; but the king was her man. And the king had trusted her; she would die before hurt should come ...
— Rupert of Hentzau - From The Memoirs of Fritz Von Tarlenheim: The Sequel to - The Prisoner of Zenda • Anthony Hope
... fubsy boys—copied apparently from cherubim—who, with glowing, distended cheeks, are simpering on the ceiling, doing the tenor, with wide open mouths that would shame e'er a barn-door in the village; their red, stumpy fingers sprawling over the music which they are (not) reading. The pale, lantern-jawed youths, in yellow waistcoats and tall shirt-collars, who look as if they were about to whistle a match, are holloing out what is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... away, and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called me into ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... or woman whose writing is a fine, wavy line, upright, with short, stumpy and indistinct tops and tails, words running at their end to an almost straight line, the letters merely indicated. The flatter, finer and more perpendicular this writing, the greater the insincerity. Such a writer would ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... the Adirondacks, forty or fifty years ago, was Henry Clymer, from Brooklyn, who went up to Little Black Creek and tried to make a farm out of the gnarly, stumpy land; but being a green hand at that sort of thing, he soon gave it up and put up the place near Northwood, that is locally referred to as the haunted mill. When the first slab was cut, a big party was on hand to cheer and eat pie in honor of ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... of primitive ungulate mammals, taking its name from the short and stumpy feet, which were furnished with five toes each, and supported massive pillar-like limbs. The brain-cavity was extremely small, and insignificant in comparison to the bodily bulk, which was equal to that of the largest rhinoceroses. These ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... lay on his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... myself no longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... in which I am now living snakes are very plentiful. There are cobras and keraits, but the most dreaded is the Russell's viper. He is a snake that averages from three to four feet long, and is very thick, with a big head and a stumpy tail. His body is marked very prettily with spots and blurs of light on a dark, grayish green, and he is so like the shadows of the grass and weeds in a dusty road, that you can walk on him quite unsuspectingly. Then he will bite you, and you die. He comes ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... to prevent possible loss from some prank of mischievous boys or thieving negroes, Maurice had secured a long and stout chain, with a padlock, and at night this was so attached to the dinky that no one could sneak the stumpy little craft away without the use of a hatchet to chop out the staple; and while this was being done the owners of the Tramp would surely be getting extremely busy also with gun ...
— The House Boat Boys • St. George Rathborne
... father. How that boy can chop! thought Nancy, as she heard the sound of his ax biting into wood. Tree after tree had to be cut down before crops could be planted. With the coming of spring, he helped his father to plow the stumpy ground. He learned to plow a straight furrow. He ...
— Abe Lincoln Gets His Chance • Frances Cavanah
... and the label tied on to him. Forgive me that label, Chum; I think that was the worst offence of all. And why should I label one who was speaking so eloquently for himself; who said from the tip of his little black nose to the end of his stumpy black tail, "I'm a silly old ass, but there's nothing wrong in me, and they're sending me away!" But according to the regulations—one must obey the ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... front of it and a trampled space. It was flanked by its several sheds and barns on one hand and a woodpile on the other. Beyond the woodpile a rail fence inclosed a corn-field, and beyond the barns and sheds a similar fence defined the bounds of a stumpy pasture-lot. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... yeehoing on board; grimy colliers smoking at the liquor-shops along the quay; and as for the bridge-there is a crowd of idlers on that, you may be sure, sprawling over the balustrade for ever and ever, with long ragged coats, steeple-hats, and stumpy doodeens. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... through this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and read them all ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... Canadian Question, in which the writer alleged that the Canadian farmer sold the best he produced and ate the culls. Well, with hogs at $3 per cwt., oats 20 cents a bushel, hay $7 a ton, and wheat under a dollar, from stumpy little fields—the farmer in Drury's youth did well ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... our departure. There was no longer anything to detain us on Endeavour Island. The Ghost's stumpy masts were in place, her crazy sails bent. All my handiwork was strong, none of it beautiful; but I knew that it would work, and I felt myself a man of power as I ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... day succeeding this visit of reconciliation, that Miss Arabel and the stumpy Susannah pursued their way to the shrubbery walk, in a rapid and mysterious manner, as if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... neighboring hotel; but the window wore its usual look—there was the veil, and the placard, and the disjointed, rattling sash; and in the neighboring court was, sometimes, the tall gentleman picking his way carefully over the stones, and sometimes the stumpy ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... of the whole block of masonry, with its stumpy tower and heavily buttressed walls, conveys the idea of immense strength rather than of gracefulness; while its situation at the bottom of a hill, and near the bank of the river, is ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... bad member of society. He was a thorough-going old Tory, whose proxy was always in the hand of the leader of his party; and who seldom himself went near the metropolis, unless called thither by some occasion of cattle-showing. He was a short, stumpy man, with red cheeks and a round face; who was usually to be seen till dinner-time dressed in a very old shooting coat, with breeches, gaiters, and very thick shoes. He lived generally out of doors, and was almost as great in the preserving ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... at its stumpy front legs!" called Jack, who had forgotten his empty stomach in the excitement about this little creature, which looked like a cricket and yet ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... where pigeons strut and prink their feathers, undisturbed. Charlemagne is sitting with a mighty two-edged sword upon his knees, and a gilded crown upon his head; but the figure is badly proportioned, and the statue is a good-natured, stumpy affair, that makes one smile rather than admire. The outside of the minster still shows traces of the image breakers of Zwingli's time, and yet the crumbling north portal remains beautiful, even in decay. As for the interior, it has an exceedingly bare and ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... poor men named Ramai and Somai came to a village and took some waste land from the headman, and ploughed it and sowed millet; and their plough was only drawn by cows and their ploughshare was very small, what is called a "stumpy share;" and when they had sowed a little the rains came on; and Somai gave up cultivation and took to fishing and for a time he made very good profits by catching and selling fish; and he did not trouble even to reap the millet he had sown; he laughed at Ramai who was toiling away clearing more ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... The stumpy-footed, two-toed, long-legged, kicking creature has wings that are apparently more useful to man than to itself. In fact, the possession of these apparently superfluous appendages is generally the cause of its being hunted by man ...
— The Giraffe Hunters • Mayne Reid
... naturally turn towards foreign climes; and David's imagination circled round and round the utmost limits of his geographical knowledge, in search of a country where a young gentleman of pasty visage, lipless mouth, and stumpy hair, would be likely to be received with the hospitable enthusiasm which he had a right to expect. Having a general idea of America as a country where the population was chiefly black, it appeared to him the most propitious destination ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... of sheep among the hills, and they appear very tame and gentle; though sometimes, like the wicked, they "flee when no man pursueth." But, climbing a rude, rough, rocky, stumpy, ferny height yesterday, one or two of them stood and stared at me with great earnestness. I passed on quietly, but soon heard an immense baa-ing up the hill, and all the sheep came galloping and scrambling ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gentleman rejoicing in the name of Cadger (but whose real cognomen I subsequently ascertained to be Stumpy Walker) proceeded on his walk, whistling shrilly to himself, exchanging a passing recognition with one and another loafer, and going out of his way to kick every boy he saw smaller than himself, which last exertion, by the way, at twelve o'clock at night he ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... was out in a stumpy pasture-field beside a woods in Canada, and he saw a mother caribou and her little calf feeding quietly down in ...
— Fifty-Two Story Talks To Boys And Girls • Howard J. Chidley
... everything depended on us. Those were hard times; we had a great deal to do. We used to change works, as we called it, so as to be together as much as we could; for it was rather lonesome, planting and hoeing off in the stumpy, sprouted clearings. That was a long, anxious summer! We heard from father only once. He was somewhere ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... and began to unlace his brogues. Meanwhile from a side-table his wife brought a silver tobacco-box and a stumpy Irish clay. The slippers substituted for his shoes, Kerry lovingly filled the cracked and blackened bowl with strong Irish twist, which he first teased carefully in his palm. The bowl rested almost under his nostrils ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... of the explosion, and the water looked rather foamy: then in about a second it began to rise, and there was the most enormous outbreak of spray that you can conceive. It rose in one column of 60 or 70 feet high, and broad at the base, resembling a stumpy sheaf with jagged masses of spray spreading out at the sides, and seemed to grow outwards till I almost feared that it was coming to us. It sunk, I suppose, in separate parts, for it did not make any grand squash down, ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... writer to be an eye and ear witness of the closing bout, at Alton, Illinois, between those two political champions in their great debate of 1858. The contrast between the men was remarkable. Lincoln was very tall and spare, standing up, when speaking, straight and stiff. Douglas was short and stumpy, a regular roly-poly man. Lincoln's face was calm and meek, almost immobile. He referred to it in his address as "my rather melancholy face." Although plain and somewhat rugged, I never regarded Lincoln's face as homely. I saw him many times and talked with him, after ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... waste no time gettin' off the wrong road, once you're sure it's wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known of ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... he could hop upon the wall, where he got at last, and shook the dust off his feathers with an angry "jark;" while Dick, withy staring eyes and his tongue hanging out, ran right between Philip's legs, made a feint at Fred, and then leaped right on Harry, who caught hold of his short stumpy tail as he went down and dragged ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... appeared unexpectedly upon the threshold. He was yellow and coarse of hair; flea-bitten, too; and even as he smiled at Ruth and wagged his stumpy tail, he was forced to turn savagely upon one of these disturbers who had no sense of the fitness ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... guns, torpedo tubes, guy ropes, cables and windlasses. Howbeit, I clambered aboard, and ducking under a guy rope and avoiding sundry other obstructions, shook hands with her commander, young, clear-eyed and cheery of mien, who presently led me past a stumpy smokestack and up a perpendicular ladder to the bridge where, beneath a somewhat flimsy-looking structure, was the wheel, brass-bound and highly be-polished like all else about this crowded craft as, ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... Ali, he entered a small boat and was rowed to the shore. They found a few vegetables growing that they had never seen before, and so, collecting twigs from the short, stumpy bushes, they made a fire to cook them. While the vegetables ...
— Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends • Gertrude Landa
... and left among them. She was as slatternly as ever, but her hair was shining with bear's grease and a strong odor of musk pervaded her garments; a paste diamond of enormous size but of doubtful brilliancy ornamented her breastpin and on her stumpy, grimy fingers were numerous brass rings containing dull imitations of rubies, ...
— Monte-Cristo's Daughter • Edmund Flagg
... precipitous: no limestone, but much clay slate occurs. The ravine up which we passed, or rather watercourse, was well stocked with Xanthoxylon, some of large size as to the diameter of trunk, but very stumpy: water is found not far from the entrance: some cultivation also occurs and one large walled village, Dera Abdoollah Khan, lay to our left. Not much change in the vegetation: Xanthoxylon is almost entirely confined to ravines, Cerasus common, and one or two other prickly shrubs, and ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... in miniature for the benefit of the little ones; the intricate mechanical toys that a Dutch youngster tumbles about in stolid unconcern would create a stir in our patent office. Ben laughed outright at some of the mimic fishing boats. They were so heavy and stumpy, so like the queer craft that he had seen about Rotterdam. The tiny trekschuiten, however, only a foot or two long, and fitted out, complete, made his heart ache. He so longed to buy one at once for his little brother in England. He had no money to spare, for ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... the other world. In South Africa, as well as in Germany, the habits of the fox and of his brother the jackal have given rise to fables in which brute force is overcome by cunning. In many parts of the world we find curiously similar stories devised to account for the stumpy tails of the bear and hyaena, the hairless tail of the rat, and the blindness of the mole. And in all countries may be found the beliefs that men may be changed into beasts, or plants, or stones; that ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... Hooded Warbler. In a dense undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure to find ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... come back, but—' She beckoned with a stumpy, triumphant linger that drew their heads close together. 'You know I always go in and read a chapter to ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... we realize the truth, live in the consciousness of it, and become obedient to the laws of life and being, the life becomes increasingly free. This does not mean that if we are plain of feature, and of a stumpy figure, that we shall become beautiful and graceful; but it does mean that these so-called drawbacks will no longer fetter us, and that others will see in us something far better than mere regularity of feature and beauty of form. When ...
— Within You is the Power • Henry Thomas Hamblin
... the "legale testimonium;" Mr. Francis Butzkay, the lawyer, came to his aid with his stumpy, short-limbed figure: he had gazed for a time in passive inactivity at the fruitless struggle of his principal with the ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... "I've taken a fancy to you. It's best to be plain and speak out. I've taken a fancy to you, and you shall have that bat. It's just your size, and the finest bit of willow you ever set eyes on. I'll wager you'll make top score every time you use it. You shall have it. Never mind about the stumpy—" ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... quiet for Betty, and no one wondered wherever she got her ideas from. And yet she had quite a collection of fairy stories and poems of her own composition. She and an exercise book, or a few scraps of paper and a stumpy bit of pencil were to be seen ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... fray. I almost lost my senses among the ribbons, and flew up and down among the flounces, and went mad amongst the basques. I move round as gay as when I was young; and modern scissors, with their stumpy ends, and loose pivots, and weak blades, and glaring bows, and course shanks, are stupid beside an old family piece like me. You would be surprised how spry I am flying around the sewing-room, cutting corsage into heart-shape, and slitting a place for button holes, and making double-breasted ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... toward the sound. In twenty minutes after that, with the aid of grass ropes and leather thongs, they had hauled the huge carcass to the shore and rolled it out of the water, where it lay glistening in moonlight, stumpy, foolish, ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... the scare-crows, scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's lot; The grisly, blear-eyed, every one is sold, And husbands purchased ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... cleared, the Major took forty winks on the sofa, and we two beat a retreat, lit up our pipes in the passage, and were just turning out when the postman's double knock came, but no showers of letters in the box. Derrick threw open the door, and the man handed him a fat, stumpy-looking roll in a ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... little books in my friend's library is a thick-set, stumpy old copy of Richard Baxter's "Holy Commonwealth," written in 1659, and, as the title-page informs us, "at the invitation of James Harrington Esquire,"—as one would take a glass of Canary,—by invitation! There is a preface addressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... of such description as was nearest at hand; the greater part at a house in Princes-street, Soho. Colton's lodging was a penuriously-furnished second-floor, and upon a rough deal table, with a stumpy pen, our ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and Ananias-and-Sapphira, the green parrot, so named, as ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... beautiful. Did you know it?" he said, gently, and led her to a little stumpy rocking-chair with a gay red-and-blue rag cushion that Mrs. Tanner always kept sitting by the front door in pleasant weather. Then he stood off and surveyed her, while the red stole into her cheeks becomingly. "What has Miss Earle been doing ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... As soon as this takes place, in a wild state the tadpole comes of age, so to speak, and creeps ashore to assume his new dignity of frog-hood. For a little while longer, however, he carries the evidence of his infancy about with him, in the shape of a short, stumpy tail; but in a very brief space the last remnant of this disappears, and now, save in size, he cannot be ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... called beaded (fig. 84), has been bred for five years and selected for wings showing more beading. In extreme cases the wings have been reduced to mere stumps (see stumpy, fig. 5), but the stock shows great variability. It is probable here as Dexter has shown, that a number of mutant factors that act as modifiers have been picked up in the course of the selection, and when it is recalled that during ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... with a deafening roar. The guests, tickled by the words that fell so pat, twisted and squirmed with laughter, digging their fingers into their neighbours' ribs to emphasize the details. But Barney, in trying to imitate a stumpy man with an umbrella, as the song demanded, tripped and lay where he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... was valiant, the Dog was vain, He flew at the prickly ball again, Snapping with all his might and main, But, oh! the pain! He sat down on his stumpy tail and howled, Then he laid his jaws on ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... look for him in the rain-pipes of the Fifth Avenue mansions, he is there; if you search for him in the middle of the wide, silent salt-marsh, he is there; if you take—but it is vain to take the wings of the morning, or of anything else, in the hope of flying to a spot where the stumpy little wings of the English sparrow have not ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... the other end of the room had swung open, and a tall woman swept in, followed by a diminutive figure in green coat and white trousers. A pair of huge spectacles, mounted on a somewhat stumpy nose, peered absently from side to ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... keen in the fish business, and Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... a clear voice, and a short, stumpy girl with red hair and freckled face calmly entered the room and stood ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... noticed those stumpy, abbreviated fingers, so oddly at variance with the rest of ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... day's work before us, we were enabled to make but a short stay, so, bidding him and his family a sincere good-bye and good speed, we renewed our journey. We soon came in sight of the black stumpy monuments of one of the most disastrous conflagrations which ever victimized a forest. Some idea may be formed of the ravages of the "devouring element," from the simple fact that it all but totally consumed every ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too. But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a hit with one ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... Yet it goes hard with you if you buy your Object in Life and find it just a 'special line' made to sell.... We're all amateurs at living, just as we are all amateurs at furnishing—or dying. Some of the poor devils one meets carry tattered little scraps of paper, and fumble conscientiously with stumpy pencils. It's a comfort to see how you go, even if you do have to buy rubbish. 'If we have this so good, dear, I don't know how we shall manage in the kitchen,' says the careful housewife.... So it is we do our shopping ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... patiently along, with their heads down and with reeking flanks and shoulders, pausing occasionally as the water-bars brace the wheels, and impatient only with the flies that vex their ears, and the insufficiency of their short and stumpy tails to protect their quivering sides. Some of these animals are not so patient, but are nervous and spasmodic and unhappy. I have noticed one among them particularly, that has a very bad time every morning with his first load. ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... of the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. Other boats ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... on his heel at the end of the terrace, and it should be added, discoursing with passion's privilege of the passion of love to Miss Durham, Sir Willoughby, who was anything but obtuse, experienced a presentiment upon espying a thick-set stumpy man crossing the gravel space from the avenue to the front steps of the Hall, decidedly not bearing the stamp of the gentleman "on his hat, his coat, his feet, or anything that was his," Willoughby subsequently observed to the ladies of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... it decided upon Brock, it gave me the chance I had been waiting for. I fired instantly at the hollow between neck and shoulder; the brute dropped at once, and save for one or two convulsive kicks of its stumpy legs as it lay half on its back, it never moved again. The second rhino proved to be a well-grown youngster which showed considerable fight as we attempted to approach its fallen comrade. We did not want to kill it, and accordingly spent about two hours in shouting ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, and then—one ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... spoiled child that had been half whipped. Everybody knew him, and everybody despised him for a low-down, thieving, lazy cur,—everybody except Jonathan. Jonathan loved him,—loved his weepy, smeary eyes, and his rough, black hair, and his fat round body, short stumpy legs, and shorter stumpy tail,—especially the tail. Everything else that the dog lacked could be traced back to the peccadillos of his ancestors,—Jonathan ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the pup takes on character from the family. I call it Sweet-Alice-Ben-Bolt, because it very nearly weeps with delight when you give it a smile and trembles with fear at your frown. The Deacon is of that large and austere order of persons who "like dogs, in their place"; S.A.B.B. wears his stumpy, little tail at half mast whenever the head of the ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell |
