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More "Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that genius could accomplish without effort or trouble what no amount of homely energy could effect, and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers. It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... inclined to wonder why we should have been chased by one of our own men-o'-war; and why, being chased, we should have taken any trouble to escape from her. The fact, however, was that the Dolphin was altogether too rakish-looking a craft to be mistaken for a plodding merchantman, her long, low, beamy hull, taunt, tapering spars, and broad spread of superbly-cut canvas proclaimed her a sea-rover as far as the eye could distinguish her; and, as the ensign carried was at that time but an indifferent guarantee of a vessel's nationality, ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood
... against the wooden sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far down the road, and thither—since the Weymore sleigh had not come—Faxon saw himself under the immediate necessity of plodding ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... message Si set out. But an unlucky idea occurred to him as he went plodding along the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... him vacantly where he stood. There was something in his attitude, in his look, which swept over them, seeing none of them, in the eager lifting of his head, in the excited fire in his eyes, that arrested all—from the dullest muleteer, plodding on with his string of patient beasts, to the most volatile French girl laughing on her way with a group of fantassins. He did not note them, hear them, think of them; the whole of the Algerine scene had faded out as if it had no place before him; he had forgot that he was a cavalry soldier of the ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... afternoon their concert was cut short before its finish. Commandant Balliot came back to the launch with satisfaction on his streaming face, and two armed black soldiers plodding at his heels. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... surrounds Hiram. The landscape here had a less distinctive character, and there was no vapour in the sky to make the sunset beautiful. She was weary of her horse's rough trot, and still more so of its slow plodding, but she felt excitement. She had conquered those forces, part of her womanhood, which urged compliance with her husband's desire and her own desire to abide by the homely routine whatever it might be. The thing that she had done seemed ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... he, "I know nothing so humiliating: to see a rational being in such mechanical motion! with no knowledge upon what principles he proceeds, but plodding on, one foot before another, without even any consciousness which is ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... are both extreme views, and they have hardly ever been held or realized in that extreme form by any nation, whether in the East or in the West. We are not always plodding—we sometimes allow ourselves an hour of rest and peace and thought—nor were the ancient people of India always dreaming and meditating on [Greek: ta megista], on the great problems of life, but, when called upon, we know that they too could fight like heroes, and ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile, back from the highway connecting the settlements. Along this main road a man was plodding wearily. All day he had been walking, and now as he neared home his steps began to quicken with anticipation of rest. Over his shoulder projected a double-barrelled fowling-piece, from which was slung a bundle of such necessities as he had purchased in town that morning. It ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... graceful antelope; from short, sturdy Bhutias to tall, slim Hindustanis. Likewise in character individuals are as different as the strong, firm tree standing open-faced, four-square to all the world and the creeping, insinuating parasite; as the intelligent, industrious ant and the clumsy, plodding beetle; as the plucky boar and the timid hare; as the rough forest tribesman and ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... horse, and escorted by a troop of National Guards, came a low open cart, in which sat two persons, deadly white, gazing in a dazed vacant way at the scene around them, and sometimes casting a reproachful glance at the slowly plodding horse. One of the two was an old man, of fine, aristocratic presence, which the coarse clothes he wore could not disguise. The other was a low ruffian, with swollen face and bleared eyes, in the dress of a butcher. ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... 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
... hour he figured that he had covered half the distance. He was plodding doggedly, every muscle aching from the unaccustomed strain. His feet, which burned and itched where the irritating soap rubbed into his skin, had swollen until the boots held them in a vise-like grip of torture. ...
— Prairie Flowers • James B. Hendryx
... the office, and the sheriff was given his mount. The Indians swung the pack-horses into line, and the men settled themselves in their saddles as they began the long, plodding journey to the blue hills in the heart of ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... double meaning, Mr Drummond 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 ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... that plodding and peaceful region, and got to be good-sized boys and girls—big enough, in fact, to begin to know as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over the occasional news from these red fields as they did. I remember ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... that was something. His natural aptitude and affection for street-railway work had long since been demonstrated, and it was now making him restless. One might have said of him quite truly that the tinkle of car-bells and the plop of plodding horses' feet was in his blood. He surveyed these extending lines, with their jingling cars, as he went about the city, with an almost hungry eye. Chicago was growing fast, and these little horse-cars on certain streets were crowded night ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... lap of the woman, saying, "Here's yo' ticket, missus. I do hopes yo' find dat husban' o' yourn ain' so bad as yo'se afeared." And before her dazed eyes could take in what he was doing, the old man had shuffled out of the car, and as the train pulled on he was seen quietly plodding along, still ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... Remembering, at the time the above remarks concerning the South American species, we looked carefully for the workers, in this instance, and failed to discover above half a dozen wingless ants above ground, and these were plodding about, very indifferent, as it appeared to us, to the fate or welfare of their winged brothers. And on digging down a few inches, we could find but comparatively few individuals in the nest, and could detect ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... barrier whizzed into the air, and the five horses were on their long journey. The boy on Auckland sent her to the front at once, and the mare settled into her long, easy stride, close to the rail, saving every possible inch. Pharaoh immediately dropped into last position, plodding through the dust kicked up by the field. The big hammer-head showed nothing in the first mile save dogged persistence. At the end of the second mile Auckland was twenty lengths in front of Pharaoh, and ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... and the universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity of the older world. Only a false mediaevalism can paint the past in colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the soft glory of retrospect. Misled by these, the sentimentalist ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... they entered the town they met poor young Peter plodding slowly and heavily towards his ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... chest and shoulders. Then, as her great grandmother had plodded across the bleak plains of the Dakotas at her master's behest, Annie-Many-Ponies took the bridle reins and led the horse out of the ruin, and started upon her plodding, patient journey to what lay beyond the mountains. Behind her the black horse walked with drooping head, half asleep in the warm sunlight. At the heels of the horse ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... and primitive in mental processes, nearer to their plodding burros than to the bright-eyed sensitive dogs, they were the best who would consent to wander with the sheep through the wilderness, seeing nothing, doing nothing, knowing nothing, having before them nothing but the vision of a distant pay day, a drunk, the calabozo, ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... that was a bad guess: I'm sure Lindley's just the same steady-going, sober, plodding old horse he was as a boy. His picture doesn't fit a romantic frame—singing under a lady's window in a thunderstorm! Your serenader ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... to have one's eyes opened and to act from the new knowledge, day by day, until a normal mode of life is firmly established. It requires quiet, steady force of will to get one's self out of bad, and well established in good habits. After the first interest and relief there often has to be steady plodding before the new way becomes easy; but if we do not allow ourselves to get discouraged, we are sure to gain our end, for we are opening ourselves to the influence of the true laws within us, and in finding and obeying these ...
— The Freedom of Life • Annie Payson Call
... That of one there was no recollection at all, of the other, tender childhood memories, sweet and lasting and incomparably precious, but only memories. No sister, no brother, no cousins that had taken the place to her of sisters; only that old uncle and aunt, who were such staid and common and plodding people, that sometimes the very thought of them tired this girl so full of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden
... to shout to make each other hear, so drove the snow and wind through the trees and into their very faces and ears. They plodded on. It was plodding; the snow lay thick enough now to make their footing uneasy, and grew deeper every moment; their shoes were full; their feet and ankles were wet, and their steps began to drag heavily over the ground. Ellen clung as close to Alice's cloak as their hurried travelling would permit; sometimes ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... at Christmas, but in the rest of the merry-making she naturally could take no part. Austin, however, proved the most enthusiastic reveller of all, put through his work like chain lightning, and was out and off before the plodding Thomas had fairly begun. Manlike, it did not occur to him to give up any of these festivities because Sylvia could not join in them. For years he had hungered and thirsted, as most boys do, for "a good time"—and done so ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... said the church was near auntie's—it was within three doors; but she was wrong when she kept walking precisely the wrong way. She crossed over to Sixth Avenue. Now, where were the brown houses? She saw the horse-cars plodding along, and tried to read the ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... feeling of any kind who does not recognize the unspeakable value of that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... overtook, her step being far lighter than his, one of the men going home from his work, and spoke to him, telling him with a smile not to be afraid; but he never so much as raised his head, and went plodding on with his heavy step, not knowing that she had spoken to him. She was startled by this; but said to herself, that the men were dull, that their perceptions were confused, and that it was getting dark; and went on, passing him quickly. His breath made a cloud in the air as he walked, and his heavy ...
— Old Lady Mary - A Story of the Seen and the Unseen • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... short halt for rest and refreshment, taken simultaneously, and presently set out again, with a vague idea of plodding on as far as Orsieres. The Boy refused so obstinately to ride his donkey (I believe because I must go on foot), that Innocentina, thwarted, did frightful execution among her favourite saints. Joseph reproved her; she retorted by calling him a black heretic, and vowing that ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... reason—it happened in this case that love lit the girl's mind to good purpose. She'd laugh with her father sometimes, that Sam hadn't no dazzling sense of fun himself, and it entertained her a lot to see Sam plodding in his mind after her nimble-witted father and trying in vain to see a joke. But what delighted her most was Sam's own dark forebodings about Mr. Green's manner of life, and his high-minded hopes that some day, come he was Chawner's ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... had outwitted the Apaches, they had completely checkmated him. Their falling back and giving up the chase was simply a ruse to throw him off his guard. It had succeeded to perfection. While he was plodding along over the prairie, the Apaches had circled around, gone ahead of him, and, ensconcing themselves in the woods, had patiently waited for him to ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... bias was for Greek and Latin, but Mr. Hayes had recommended her to take up modern languages as well, and she was steadily plodding through the French and German, for which she had not so strong a liking as for her beloved classics. Prissie was a very eager learner, and she was busy now looking over her notes of the last lecture and standing close to the door, so ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... the procession was again plodding, Indian file, through the still, dew-fragrant, midnight woods. The little raccoon, its heart now beating quietly, nestled in secure contentment under the young schoolmaster's arm, untroubled even by the solemn and deep-toned menace of a horned-owl's cry from the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... slowly into the great station at Hull—it was morning, and the sun was shining, and the birds singing, and in the fields about the smoky town there were herds of sweet-breathing cattle sniffing the fresh spring air, and labourers plodding to their work, and loaded wains of odorous hay and dewy garden-stuff were lumbering along the quiet country roads, and the new-born day had altogether the innocent look appropriate to its tender youth,—when the detective stepped out on the platform, calm, self-contained, and resolute, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... thickly overhead, and the ground beneath was covered with rustling leaves, which, blighted by the early frosts, lay helpless and dead at the roadside, or were made the sport of the wind. A solitary horseman was slowly plodding along the road but a few miles from the village of Salem. In truth he was so near to the famous Puritan village, that, through the hills and intervening tree-tops, he could have seen the spires of the churches had he raised his melancholy eyes from the ground. The rider ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... which lay thick upon the wide road between rolling fields of ripened grain, rose in little spirals from beneath the heavy feet of the plodding farm-horses drawing the empty hay-wagon, and had scarcely settled again upon the browning goldenrod and fuzzy milkweed which bordered the rail fences on either side when Ebb Fischel's itinerant butcher-jitney rattled past. Ebb Fischel's ...
— Anything Once • Douglas Grant
... through it, partly that the greater glory might redound on him who had conquered it at last, and issued from its portals a fat and prosperous alumnus. Stupid men who have mastered a system, not by intuition but by a plodding effort of slow years, always exaggerate its importance—did it not take them ten years to understand it? Whoso has passed the system, then, is to their minds one of a close corporation, of a select and intellectual few, and entitled to pose before the uninitiate. Because their stupidity made the ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... better in the world for this little experience. And as for me—I have been in Elysium for three months; and that is more than a host of your excellent prudent men can boast of, who plod on day after day only that they may continue plodding to the end of their lives. Adieu! my adorable—my angel that will now vanish from my sight!' And here, in spite of my struggles, he embraced me with the greatest ardour, and then, tearing himself away as if he only were the sufferer, he rushed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... she gives— Blind to the pomp of which she is possessed— Unconscious of the spiritual power that lives Around, and rules her—by our bliss unblessed— Dull to the art that colors or creates, Like the dead timepiece, godless nature creeps Her plodding round, and, by the leaden weights, The slavish ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... him. Some years ago Mr Halgrove had lived several months in the Metropolis, and the boy, spending his summer holidays there, and left entirely to his own devices, had learned in a plodding way about as much of the great city as a youth of seventeen could ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... were weak in this direction, it was all the more necessary that she should be trained, and volunteered to take her in hand for half an hour daily, to see what could be done. Fraulein accepted this offer with a chuckle of satisfaction, and the vicar went on with the lessons several weeks, patiently plodding over the same ground without making the least impression on poor Mellicent's brain, until there came one happy never-to-be-forgotten morning when Algebra and Euclid went spinning up to the ceiling, and he jumped from the table with a roar ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... answer, Stampa resumed his steady plodding through the snow. Bower followed, somewhat in the rear. He glanced sharply back toward the hotel. So far as he could judge, no one had witnessed that frantic spring at his tormentor. At that hour, nearly every resident would be on the sunlit veranda. He wondered ...
— The Silent Barrier • Louis Tracy
... thorough-going 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 the prejudices ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... can offer not the slightest excuse; my conduct on this occasion has been very bad. I expect a severe reproof from you, and pray do not send me any money, nor grant me the slightest [favour?]. Whilst ....., who has very little ability (uncle says), is, by plodding on, getting credit, I, who (my tutor says) have abilities, am wickedly neglecting and offending both my heavenly and earthly Father by my bad use of them. Aunt called me into the drawing-room, and very kindly showed ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... along the coast of James's Bay, much relieved to think that the mountains were now past, and that our road henceforth, whatever else it might be, was level. One evening, as we were plodding wearily along, after a hard day's march over soft snow alternated with sandy beach—for the spring was fast advancing—we came suddenly on a camp of Indians. At first I thought they must be some of the Moose ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... in extolling the virtue of repentance on the part of the prodigal above the faithful, plodding service of his brother, who had remained at home, true to the duties required of him. The devoted son was the heir; the father did not disparage his worth, nor deny his deserts. His displeasure over the rejoicing ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... a steady, sober man, who disliked excitement, and the quiet plodding along in Mossvale just suited him. He was only a journeyman, and it is doubtful if his ambition had ever risen beyond his present station. By frugality he and his wife had saved enough to buy a half acre of land in this pretty New Jersey village, on which they had erected a neat cottage, ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... selfish to wish to mould your brilliant life to my plodding one," he said wistfully, as if he were reading my thoughts. "But I don't mean to be selfish. I love you—and—you're drifting away ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... eloquent speaker. A lawyer haranguing a jury in a densely crowded courtroom fills a much larger space in the public eye than when, in the solitude of his back-office, he is preparing a brief; and, as young Squire Talcott used to argue all the cases which his plodding partner elaborately prepared to his hand, his fame as a wonderfully smart young lawyer soon began to extend even beyond the limits of the county. The judges, in other places upon their circuit, spoke of his quick and brilliant parts, and his apparent ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... feet may certainly be done to still greater advantage in many towns where the price is lower. Mr. Booer has entered upon his work in a proper spirit. He has begun at the beginning, with the necessities of the baker; and has gone plodding on quietly, until he has achieved a noteworthy success. It may be hoped he will receive the reward which his perseverance merits.—Jour. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... mind; Galvani and Volta. They have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs above the paths of men in every civilized country, and the cables that lie in the ooze ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... happened, as we irreverently say,—it happened as we crossed Park Square, so called from its being an irregular pentagon of which one of the sides has been taken away, that I recognized a tall man, plodding across in the snow, head down, round-shouldered, stooping forward in walking, with his right shoulder higher than his left; and by these tokens I knew Tom Coram, prince among Boston princes. Not Thomas Coram that built the Foundling Hospital, though he was of Boston too; but he was longer ...
— The Man Without a Country and Other Tales • Edward E. Hale
... slow, plodding gait of the packer again, finding it easier now that they were on the crest of a divide where the trail was less obstructed and firmer, and the yellow lines on the peak, their goal, came more plainly into view. The ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... many evil things which they have done for me. Whatever in my mental 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 some gaudy hero ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... like to work. Patient, plodding labor, devoid of excitement, was his aversion; though handling a boat, cleaning out a gutter on some dizzy height of the mansion, or cutting off a limb at the highest point of the tallest shade tree on the estate, was entirely to his taste, and he did not regard anything ...
— Work and Win - or, Noddy Newman on a Cruise • Oliver Optic
... night, and still found them plodding laboriously through the weary waste of snow, or encamping under the trees of the forest. The two friends went through all the varied stages of experience which are included in what is called "becoming used to the work," which is sometimes a ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part of it through the amomums, and stumps of the cut ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... through the sleeping hamlet of Woods Eaves, he struck into a road on his left hand. Twenty minutes' steady plodding uphill brought him in sight of his home—a large, ancient, rambling grange house lying back from the road. It was now nearly ten o'clock, an hour when the household was usually abed; but the door of Wilcote Grange stood ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... really did know something and he pricked up his ears. It seemed to him that a gentleman whom he knew very well in the city,—and who had maliciously stayed away from his dinner,—one Mr Brown, who sat just before him on the same side of the House, and who was plodding wearily and slowly along with some pet fiscal theory of his own, understood nothing at all of what he was saying. Here was an opportunity for himself! Here was at his hand the means of revenging himself for the injury done him, and of showing to the ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... chafing the hands, the cheeks; they were cold like ice. He gave another despairing glance around; then he lifted the form in his stiffening arms and carried it slowly, laboriously forward, plodding each step; his head bent, his teeth grit together, ...
— The Black Cross • Olive M. Briggs
... grew sure and determined; she drew longer, deeper breaths; the pink of a wild rose flushed her cheeks. But Frederic, plodding abreast, laid his ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... letters have disappointed every body: but it is to be observed, that we have only a small portion of them; that they were written to a college tutor, a not very exciting species of correspondent at any time, and who in this instance having nothing to give back, and plodding his way through the well-meant monotony of college news, allowed poor Lord Dudley not much more chance of brilliancy, than a smart drummer might have of producing a reveille on an unbraced drum. We ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see Captain Jim returning from a visit to him, slowly plodding along the ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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 remarked, ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... the gambler, willing to play for colossal stakes, to hazard a fortune on the chance of winning a million. It was the true California spirit that found expression through him, the spirit of the West, unwilling to occupy itself with details, refusing to wait, to be patient, to achieve by legitimate plodding; the miner's instinct of wealth acquired in a single night prevailed, in spite of all. It was in this frame of mind that Magnus and the multitude of other ranchers of whom he was a type, farmed their ranches. They had no love for their land. They were not attached to the soil. They worked their ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... consciousness that her own life and that of her passenger depended upon her skill, sharpened her perceptions and quickened her judgment to such an extent that those moments of thrilling experience became equivalent to months of plodding study when the mind is ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... imitation of Alsatian peasants—yet the fixed French colour seemed all the stronger for these specks of something else. All day long and all night long troops of dusty, swarthy, scornful little soldiers went plodding through the streets with an air of stubborn disgust, for German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more than you. It is a part, I suppose, ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... until it was bank full and overflowed the bottoms. Twice there was a false night alarm of the enemy approaching, and the battalion went slopping through the mud and brush into the dark, picking out the best way to retreat, plodding miserably back to camp when the alarm was over. Once they fired a volley at a row of mullen stalks, waving on the brow of a hill, and once a picket shot at his own horse that had got loose and had wandered toward ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... She went plodding heavily over the sand that was soft as velvet. He, on the sandhills, watched the great pale coast envelop her. She grew smaller, lost proportion, seemed only like a large ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... sloppy pavements, and kennels down which the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barn-door fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of the multitude which passed ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... Martha West. Big and ungainly though she was, her voice was one of the sweetest imaginable. She had also great force of character, and was regarded as one of the strong girls of the school. She was always helping others, was the soul of unselfishness, and although not exactly clever, was plodding and persevering. She was absolutely without self-consciousness; and when her companions welcomed her in this cheery manner she smiled broadly, showing a row of pearly white teeth, and then sat down on ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade
... was 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, educating ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... four o'clock, when Courtland came plodding up the hall of the dormitory to his room, a head was stuck out of Tennelly's door, followed by Tennelly's shoulders attired in a bath-robe. The hair on the head was much tumbled and the eyes were full of sleep. Moreover, ...
— The Witness • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... stood alone, meditating on Miss Benedet's trust in her. She saw her husband, her stool of repentance and her mercy-seat in one, plodding toward her contentedly across the soft garden ground, stepping between the lettuces and avoiding the parsley bed. He knocked off a huge fat kitchen weed with ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... period of puberty. The gelding, on the other hand, develops into an animal that is in every respect a neuter. Physically this animal develops a body almost identical with that of the female of the same species. Temperamentally the gelding is a patient, plodding, beast of burden, and though under good grooming he may show considerable life, while under the control of his driver, he seldom shows any interest in other members of the horse family, either male or female, and in the pasture or on the ranch his neutral sex temperament is ever apparent. While he ...
— The Biology, Physiology and Sociology of Reproduction - Also Sexual Hygiene with Special Reference to the Male • Winfield S. Hall
... A maxim by the wise denied; For 'tis alone tame plodding souls, Whose spirits bend when it controls,— Whose lives run on in one dull same, Plain honesty their highest aim. With him it merely can repress— Tailor o'er-cow'd—the pomp of dress; His spirit, unrepressed, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... were plodding through life in a routine affection, reminding Dona Luisa, in her limited imagination, of the yokes of oxen on the ranch who refused to budge whenever another animal was substituted for the regular companion. Her husband certainly ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... Lanarkshire, each paying his own expenses. On such occasions Telford would say that, though he could not drink, yet he would carve and draw corks for them. One of the rules he laid down was that no business was to be introduced from the moment they sat down to dinner. All at once, from being the plodding, hard-working engineer, with responsibility and thought in every feature, Telford unbended and relaxed, and became the merriest and drollest of the party. He possessed a great fund of anecdote available for such occasions, had an extraordinary memory for facts relating to persons ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient fancy ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... Mr. Moore did tell him what Alexis is, but I believe he thought it all nonsense, and there was nothing to be done. Alexis—dear fellow—-took it so nicely, said he was thankful to be able to help mother, and if it was his duty and God's will, it was sure to come right; and he has been plodding away at the marble works ever since, quite patiently and resolutely, but trying to keep up his studies in the evening, only now he has worked through all his ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... him, he paused. He went a little distance up the hedge on both sides, and held up his light, but did not detect the cowering boys, and at last giving up the search in despair, went slowly home. They heard him plodding back over the field, and it was not until the sound of his footsteps had died away, that Eric cautiously broke cover, and looked over the hedge. He saw the man's light gradually getting more distant, and said, "All right now, Charlie. ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... up with wings as eagles," is God's preliminary; for the next promise is, "They shall run and not be weary, and they shall walk and not faint." Hours of holy exultation are necessary for hours of patient plodding, waiting and working. Nature has its springs, and ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... a list of the men who have left their mark on the world, we should find that, as a rule, it is not composed of those who were brilliant in youth, or who gave great promise at the outset of their careers, but rather of the plodding young men who, if they have not dazzled by their brilliancy, have had the power of a day's work in them, who could stay by a task until it was done, and well done; who have had grit, persistence, common ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... expect an indignant, or at least a disdainful rejection of the offer: not knowing all my thoughts and feelings, though guessing some, he could not tell in what light the lot would appear to me. In truth it was humble—but then it was sheltered, and I wanted a safe asylum: it was plodding—but then, compared with that of a governess in a rich house, it was independent; and the fear of servitude with strangers entered my soul like iron: it was not ignoble—not unworthy—not mentally degrading, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the heart of the storm, and ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,—wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect than that of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... which these collections are intended to serve is liable to be construed into an unreasoning assumption that every specimen exhibited is equally worthy of admiration. How often the plodding student is to be seen carefully drawing and measuring work of the dullest imaginable quality, with no other apparent reason ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack
... than their price in money. If he can get back soon enough he goes out again, after a hurried meal, to the sweetmeat seller's, where he assists in beating sugar for wafers. As soon as he comes home he sits at his shell-bangle making, plodding on often till midnight. All this cruel toil does not earn, for himself and his family, a bare two meals a day during much more than half the year. His method of eating is to begin with a good filling draught of water, and his staple food is the cheapest kind of seedy banana. And ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... nevertheless have undergone a softening change, bringing them in their turn nearer the type of their old antagonists; and thus each succeeding year would have seen these two extremes of social life drawing nearer and nearer together, and at last blending in dull, contented, plodding harmony. And the result would doubtless have been the degeneration of the entire race, and our fate that of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No. V, May, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... are utterly ignorant and imbecile—or worse than imbecile. Early called into public notice, probably before their moral habits are formed, they are extolled for some play of fancy or of wit, as Bacon calls it, some juggler's trick of the intellect; they immediately take an aversion to plodding labour, they feel raised above their situation; possessed by the notion that genius exempts them, not only from labour, but from vulgar rules of prudence, they soon disgrace themselves by their conduct, are deserted ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... has been changing for a year past; I am only surprised that you did not sooner notice it. What I said in jest has become serious truth; he has already half forgotten. We might have expected, in the beginning, that one of two things would happen: either he would become a plodding Quaker farmer or take to his present courses. Which would be worse, when this life is ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... round again to the window that was no window, the rumble of wheels, the plodding of a horse's hoofs. Beyond the low arch—or was it a pent?—shone a star or two, and against their pale radiance a shadow loomed—the shadow of the Princess, still seated, still patient, still with her hands in her lap. The rumble ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... likeness of his own staid and prudent father, "Yet it was a wonder, too, for I have a thread of the attorney in me," which was doubtless the case; nor was that thread the least of his inheritances, for from his father certainly Sir Walter derived that disposition towards conscientious, plodding industry, legalism of mind, methodical habits of work, and a generous, equitable interpretation of the scope of all his obligations to others, which, prized and cultivated by him as they were, turned a great genius, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... Low Country estate." ["Colin of Kinnock, who entered a lawsuit against Alexander Mackenzie of Gairloch, meaning to cut him out of his low country estates, and being powerfully supported by Mackenzie of Fairburn and Mr John Mackenzie of Tolly, minister of Dingwall, a plodding clergyman, kept him sixteen sessions at Edinburgh; the last year of which Gairloch and his brother Kenneth seeing Lord Kintail insulted by the Earl of Glencairn, who was supported by most of those on the ...
— History Of The Mackenzies • Alexander Mackenzie
... out on the white pike, lying like a snowy ribbon under the December stars. On the highway he hung undecided for a moment; but an hour later, William Layne, driving homeward from South Tredegar, overtook him plodding slowly southward far beyond the head of Paradise; and it was nearing midnight when he won back, pacing steadily past the Deer Trace and Woodlawn gates and holding his way down the ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... Inner Temple,—since the Bar was then, what it was at Rome, what it still is in modern capitals, the usual resort of ambitious young men. But Burke did not like the law as a profession, and early dropped the study of it; not because he failed in industry, for he was the most plodding of students; not because he was deficient in the gift of speech, for he was a born orator; not because his mind repelled severe logical deductions, for he was the most philosophical of the great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... speak, it could relate wonderful stories concerning the Sample Gentry; relating, perhaps, to a Spunkville merchant, who, having retreated precipitately down his cellar stairs several tunes during the day, to avoid "them confounded drummers, with their everlasting samples," was, while plodding his lonely way homeward, seized upon by these commercial freebooters, conveyed forthwith to the Half-Way House, and there deluged with such a perfect torrent of brow-beating eloquence as to reduce him to an imbecile state, in which condition he would willingly order large ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... into the kettle, and their oily tails—the greatest tidbit of all—were fried in a pan. The Indians made a feast time of it, and never ceased eating the livelong night. This day of plenty came in cheerful contrast to the cheerless nights with scanty suppers following the weary days of plodding that had preceded. The glowing fire in the centre, the appetizing smell of the kettle and sizzling fat in the pan, and the relaxation and mellow warmth as they reclined upon the boughs brought a sense of real comfort ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... the scene of his trouble with true German phlegm, he would fish a brier-wood pipe from the recesses of his pockets, fill it with tobacco, and go plodding off in a cloud of smoke in search of some fresh way to narrowly escape destruction. He did not know enough about horses to put a snaffle-bit in one's mouth, and yet he would draw the friskiest, most mettlesome ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... action and severe labor passed, the Cliffords proved that their rural life was not one of plodding, unredeemed toil. For the next few weeks Nature would give them a partial respite. She would finish much of the work which they had begun. The corn would mature, the oats ripen, without further ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... lavishly provided with small coins by Vocco, had provisioned themselves abundantly. These supplies they handed over to their fellows when they took up the litter. All the way back the spare carriers, plodding behind, munched their provender and conversed in undertones. The bearers, necessarily ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... another, out into the next street, and so on; block after block he takes, until he finds himself alone in a quiet street, far from the scene of danger, and while his enemies are surrounding and searching the block into which he first had disappeared, he is many miles away, plodding weary and ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt
... generally found that when people are of no use at home, they are of no use in the mission field. The bright, brave, earnest spirit, ready to face difficulties at home, is the right spirit for the work abroad. A patient, persevering, plodding spirit, attempting great things for God, and expecting great things from God, is absolutely essential to success in missionary efforts. Those will not make the best missionaries who are easily daunted by the first ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... that would be acting dishonestly, and again if I do not go mamma will have her feelings so deeply outraged that I fear the consequence. Oh! that I were once more in the protecting arms of my dear, dear father." The girl then thought of the lonely, silent man, plodding on so patiently amid the daily straggles of life, and her heart went out ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... was plodding along through the smooth lanes at the rate of less than a mile an hour, the oxen swaying from side to side with their slow, patient steps. The level country around lay sleepily still under the hot afternoon sun; it was rarely that any human stir was to be seen, save only ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barn-door fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes. Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... was far away from London. He was seeing again that line of mud bespattered men, patiently plodding up the communication trench. He was looking upon them sleeping with worn and weary faces, in rain and mudsoaked boots and puttees, down in their flimsy, dark dugouts. He was hearing again the heavy "crash" of the trench mortar, the earth shaking "crumph" of the high explosive, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... sent for the work. He opened it with a chuckle, which, instead of developing itself into a guffaw and then into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, gradually subsided altogether, his smile vanished, and an expression of weariness came over the Baron's face, as after heroically plodding through five chapters he laid the book down, and sighed aloud, "Well, I'm hanged if I see where the fun of this is." The Baron may be wrong, and the humour of this book, which seems to him to consist in weak imitations of American fun, and in conversations garnished with such phrases as "bally ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... don't mean to propose any violent incongruity. You must excuse my blundering; I understand but little of the etiquette of young ladies. 'Tis a science too intricate to be learned without more study than we plodding men of business can well spare time for. However, when I have done writing prescriptions, I will set about reading them, provided you ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... blundering, careless, optimistic, always hopeful for better things in the future, and yet attempting to succeed in a business which requires care, infinite pains and precautions. Thoughtless, impulsive, frivolous people are always trying to do work requiring careful, plodding, painstaking, methodical ways; while thoughtful, philosophic, and deliberate people oftentimes find themselves distressed, bewildered, and inefficient in the hurly-burly of ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Mrs. Charmond must have recognized her plodding up the hill under the blaze of the lamp; recognized, probably, her stubbly poll (since she had kept away her face), and thought that those stubbles were the result ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... out with Mahbub, and here, by the way, he nearly died of thirst, plodding through the sand on a camel to the mysterious city of Bikanir, where the wells are four hundred feet deep, and lined throughout with camel-bone. It was not an amusing trip from Kim's point of view, because—in defiance of the contract—the Colonel ordered him to ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... him and once more had a qualm like shame before his moral superiority to me. We were plodding along on about the same moral level; but he had ascended to that level, while I had descended to it. There were politicians posing as pure before the world and even in the party's behind-the-scene, who would have sneered at Doc's "conscience." ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... his part. At that time he was a steady student, quiet in his manners and easily moved by sympathy or affection. I was regarded as a wild, reckless lad, eager in controversy and ready to fight. No one could then anticipate that he was to be a great warrior and I a plodding lawyer and politician. I fired my first gun over his shoulder. He took me with him to carry the game, mostly squirrels and pigeons. He was then destined to West Point, and was preparing for it. To me the future ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... is, by an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient fancy rather than the difficult ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... to be a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a blessing to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... Then I remembered the voice. It was old Sutton, a prospector I had known for many years—one of the typical, plodding, babbling old fellows who live only in ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, underneath Highgate Archway, or pursuing the even tenor of his ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... kind in the world. Some of the finest things I have seen in Holland, in the way of painting, are the little gems descriptive of life as it lay about the artist—interiors of domestic abodes, and out-door scenes at the roadside. These, the patient, plodding Dutchmen have worked up most elaborately. One or two of Nicholas Maes's pictures are wonderful. I saw one in a private collection, and it was a glorious thing, though only a Kitchen, with two or three figures. O, how poor are the things we often hear spoken of as fine pictures! ...
— Young Americans Abroad - Vacation in Europe: Travels in England, France, Holland, - Belgium, Prussia and Switzerland • Various
... a question which we had not been bright enough to ask. We had been plodding on with the vague idea that it was a delightful book. Certainly the subject was agreeable. The writer was taking us on a ramble through the less frequented parts of Italy. He had a fine descriptive power, and made us see the quiet hill towns, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... the hot sun began to mount high in the sky. The perspiration dripped from their faces as they walked. The mountain was thickly wooded to its very base and they made as rapid progress as possible in the wake of the doggedly plodding negro in the effort to gain the shade and the security of ...
— A Voyage with Captain Dynamite • Charles Edward Rich
... sturdy Bhutias to tall, slim Hindustanis. Likewise in character individuals are as different as the strong, firm tree standing open-faced, four-square to all the world and the creeping, insinuating parasite; as the intelligent, industrious ant and the clumsy, plodding beetle; as the plucky boar and the timid hare; as the rough forest tribesman ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... though perhaps I looked, for he exclaimed, 'Don't, Ned!' wrung my hand, and sped away to his own quarters higher up. Then came a sound which made me open my door to listen. Dear little Emily! She had burst out of her own room in her dressing-gown, and flung herself upon her brother as he was plodding wearily upstairs in the dark, clinging round his neck sobbing, 'Dear, dear Clarry! I can't bear it! I don't care. You're my own dear brother, and they ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... this plodding life, There enter moments of an azure hue, Untarnished fair as is the violet Or anemone, when the spring strews them By some meandering rivulet, which make The best philosophy untrue that aims But to console man for his grievances. I have remembered when the winter came, High in ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... falsest notions imaginable. They represent romantic love as the great important business of human life, and describe all the other concerns of it as too low and paltry to merit the attention of such elevated beings, and fit only to employ the daughters of the plodding vulgar. In these letters, family affairs are misrepresented, family secrets divulged, and family misfortunes aggravated. They are filled with vows of eternal amity, and protestations of never-ending love. But interjections and quotations are the principal ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... risk, avoided the danger, and clutched the prey. Following the French as rapidly as wind and canvas could take him, he caught their rearmost vessels, smashed them up, battered the whole fleet successively into flight or splinters, and himself lost only two vessels, which ran upon a shoal. Plodding prose does scant justice to the extraordinary brilliancy of Hawke's victory, described by Admiral Mahan as "the Trafalgar of this war." We cannot pass on without quoting one of Mr. ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... friendship between Inez and Bertha—a favour of which she availed herself eagerly, though the three were as different from one another as three little girls could be. Bertha was a good-natured romp, hard-fisted, thick of leg, and of a plodding but ineffectual industry. Inez, on the other hand, was so pretty that Laura never tired of looking at her: she had a pale skin, hazel eyes, brown hair with a yellow light in it, and a Greek nose. Her mouth was very small; her nostrils were mere tiny slits; and so lazy was she that she seldom ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment. He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I have his image vividly as he laughed and joked in ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... whom the farmers all, Who dwelt around, "the Gentleman" would call; Whether in pure humility or pride, They only knew, and they would not decide. Far different he from that dull plodding tribe Whom it was his amusement to describe; Creatures no more enliven'd than a clod, But treading still as their dull fathers trod; Who lived in times when not a man had seen Corn sown by drill, or thresh'd ...
— Tales • George Crabbe
... the indication of his whip to the spreading, graceful arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... armed entry into Western China. The river was well on our right. The plain down which we rode is of exceeding richness and highly cultivated, water being trained into the paddy-fields in the same way that everywhere prevails in China proper. Buffaloes were ploughing—wearily plodding through mud and water up to their middles. We were now among the Shans, and those working in the fields were Shans, not Chinese. Ganai, Santa, and other places are but little principalities or Shan States, governed by hereditary princelets or Sawbwas, and preserving a form of ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... whizzed into the air, and the five horses were on their long journey. The boy on Auckland sent her to the front at once, and the mare settled into her long, easy stride, close to the rail, saving every possible inch. Pharaoh immediately dropped into last position, plodding through the dust kicked up by the field. The big hammer-head showed nothing in the first mile save dogged persistence. At the end of the second mile Auckland was twenty lengths in front of Pharaoh, and running without effort. The Maori and Ambrose Churchill ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... to learn something from all I chanced on in my wandering; even this poor creature on his doorstep made me the wiser by one little thing. How was it he could mistake me for a woman; the woman Ingeborg he had called by name? I must have walked up too quietly. I had forgotten the plodding cart-horse gait; my shoes were too light. I had lived too luxuriously these years past; I must work my way back to the ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily forward on ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... reception of a spark, the divinae particulam aurae, and conceived a dim idea, that in some time, manner, and degree, I might come to know. Even then, as I had really no instructor, my efforts at Eton, down to 1827, were perhaps of the purest plodding ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... noon. The storm predicted by Black Moran had been raging for hours, and for hours the little wizened man who had left the cabin before dawn had been plodding at the head of his dogs. At intervals of an hour or so he would stop and strain his eyes to pierce the boiling white smother of snow that curtained the back-trail. Then he would plod on, glancing to the right and to ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of the ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... sweetly and said she was not feeling cold, after which there was a long interval of silence. From time to time we met a villager, a fisherman in his ponderous sea-boots, or a farm-labourer homeward plodding his weary way. But though heavy-footed after his day's labour he is never so stolid as an English ploughman is apt to be; invariably when giving us a good-night in passing the man would smile and look at Millicent very directly with a meaning twinkle in his Cornish eye. He might ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... securing another trout, waded ashore and glanced with a rueful smile at the dozen this one made. They scarcely averaged half a pound, and he had spent most of a day that could badly be spared in catching them. Plodding back along the shingle with his load, he reached a little level strip beneath a scarp of rock, where a fire blazed among the boulders. A tent stood beneath two or three small, wind-stunted spruces, ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... Galvani and Volta. They have a unique claim upon us. With others that will follow, they have descended to all posterity in the immortal nomenclature of the science of electricity. It is through the accidental discovery of the plodding demonstrator of anatomy in a medical college, a man who died at last in poverty and in ignorance of the meaning of his own work, that we have now the vast web of telegraph and telephone wires that hangs ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... 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
... I confess. I quite approve of it. It's just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they'll make it very useful. But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort. Perhaps I have grown out of it. Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower classes, but I feel that my own work ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... of the Walk by the Ilissus.—Nevertheless occasionally this inborn love of the glorious outer world must find its expression, and it is of these very groves along he Ilissus that we have one of the few "nature pieces" in Athenian literature. As the plodding steeds take their way let us recall our Plato—his "Phoedrus," written probably not many ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... disputants who often tried to humiliate a teacher before his pupils. If the teacher could not silence the opponent, the faith of the pupils in him would be shaken and great disorder would follow, and it was therefore deemed necessary that he who was plodding onward for the attainment of mok@sa should acquire these devices for the protection of his own faith and that of his pupils. A knowledge of these has therefore been enjoined in the Nyaya sutra as being necessary for the attainment of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... chat, they spied old Corydon where he came plodding to meet them, who told them supper was ready, which news made them speed them home. Where we will leave them to the next morrow, ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... with pride and importance, for he had accomplished the mission upon which he had been despatched, and in a very satisfactory manner, too. His report was to the effect that he had travelled at a good pace all through the preceding day, and that at nightfall, while still plodding forward, keeping his eyes wide open, meanwhile, on the look-out for a suitable camping spot, he had suddenly detected in the air a smell of burning wood and dry leaves, and, proceeding cautiously a little further, had become aware of a low, ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... pomp of which she is possessed— Unconscious of the spiritual power that lives Around, and rules her—by our bliss unblessed— Dull to the art that colors or creates, Like the dead timepiece, godless nature creeps Her plodding round, and, by the leaden weights, The slavish ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... look that bad?" asked Mr. Taylor, quite ruefully. "Well, I daresay it's to be expected. I've been plodding around on the bottom of the lake for a year and the wear and tear is enormous. For months I was frozen stiff as a rail. Then summer came along and I was warmed up a bit. The terrible cold snap we're having ...
— Her Weight in Gold • George Barr McCutcheon
... fascinated by the lovely personality of Mrs, Desternay, and he began to think that she might be of some real help to him. Though a skilled detective, he was of the plodding sort, and never had brilliant or even original ideas. He had had a notion it would have been better to send Driscoll on this errand he was himself attempting, but a touch of jealousy of the younger and more quick-witted man made him determine to attend ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... prairie sun the little object appeared now dark, now 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 Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... occur. Dead men are weltering in their blood, on all the trails. A scheming intelligence seems now to direct the bandits. Pity was never in the Mexican heart. But now unarmed men are butchered while praying for mercy. Their bodies are wantonly gashed. Droves of poor, plodding, unarmed Chinese miners are found lying dead like sheep in rows. Every trail and road is unsafe. Different bodies of robbers, from five to twenty, operate at the same time. There is no telegraph here as yet, to warn the helpless settlers. The following of ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... nobody finds out, if I only get the stuff there. Taylor is a smart fellow, and so is his father, or he could not have made a big fortune in a year or two, as Taylor says he did. My dad won't make one in a life-time, I'm afraid, and I shall just have to go plodding on at hard work, unless I can learn a thing or ...
— That Scholarship Boy • Emma Leslie
... 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 artist ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... 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 ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... imagination which light up the dreary pages of the parliamentary journals. At the first he was the steady supporter of Peel, but this clever man of ideals, imagination, and insight, could have little in common with that prosy, plodding man of business, whose stronghold was in the esteem of the plodding middle classes. When the Tories came into power in 1841, with Peel as Prime Minister, he found no place in his government for the supporter whose talent all parties had now begun to recognize. The slight bred coolness, and ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... behind him, flashed a face—a man's face, outlined against the glass, a high, white face fixed upon a printed page—some magnate, travelling at his ease, sleepless... thundering past in the night—unconscious of the Greek, plodding in the roadside dust. ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... was old Mr. Crow, whose keen eyes had caught sight of the hand-organ man plodding along with his precious load. Major Monkey whistled. And just for a moment, as he watched Mr. Crow sailing lazily overhead, he almost wished that he hadn't been quite so fond of sugar. For he knew that he could no longer wander through Pleasant ...
— The Tale of Major Monkey • Arthur Scott Bailey
... outfit in the North Woods, plodding diligently across portage, laden like the camels of the desert. Three Indians swarmed back and forth a half-dozen trips apiece. An Indian can carry over two hundred pounds. That evening a half-breed and I visited their ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... interests him, and in mere wanton carelessness, for he certainly has no idea of offering marriage, he gains her affection, neither meaning, in any definite way, to do anything good nor anything bad with it. There is another man who loves Lizzie, a schoolmaster, who, in his dull, plodding way, has made the best of his intellect, and risen in life. He naturally, and we may say properly, for no good can come of them, resents Wrayburn's attentions, as does the girl's brother. Wrayburn uses the superior advantages of his ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... brisk walk. Mile after mile in every footing, through desolate country where the scrub was low, the land slightly rolling, bleak, uninhabited. The road ran mostly straight; as it dipped you could see ahead the two lines of men swiftly plodding on and on. ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... to wish to mould your brilliant life to my plodding one," he said wistfully, as if he were reading my thoughts. "But I don't mean to be selfish. I love you—and—you're drifting ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... distance, which will be quite far enough for its inexperienced rider. Many parents who are supervising the riding instruction of their children, look too far ahead when selecting a mount. Instead of purchasing a steady, plodding, though not unwilling slave, they invest in a second- or third-stage animal, which is absolutely useless to a beginner, because it wants more riding than she can give it. Such a young lady needs a thoroughly steady ...
— The Horsewoman - A Practical Guide to Side-Saddle Riding, 2nd. Ed. • Alice M. Hayes
... she could ever have been young enough to see no significance in that time of blood and pain. In these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters, but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They looked up as one woman when ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... and the many scenes of which she was the ornament; in which she was the brightest little star that ever shone, to shut her up from day to day in my dull house, and keep my tedious company? Did I consider how little suited I was to her sprightly humour, and how wearisome a plodding man like me must be to one of her quick spirit? Did I consider that it was no merit in me, or claim in me, that I loved her, when everybody must who knew her? Never. I took advantage of her hopeful nature and her cheerful disposition; ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... and there has been something in the air of the hills that made me buoyant and happy in the midst of my weariness. But George Vavasor was wretched as well as weary, and every step that he took, plodding through the mud, was a new misfortune to him. What are five miles of a walk to a young man, even though the rain be falling and the ways be dirty? what, though they may come after some other ten that he has already traversed on his feet? His sister Kate would have thought nothing of ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... Each plodding wayfarer looks up to gaze, Blinded by rainbow haze, The stuff of happiness, No less, Which wraps me in its glad-hued folds Of ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... battle on, that much was certain; but the uproar was so distributed that one could hardly tell whether it was in front or behind. However, the transport was steadily advancing—horse-wagons, mule-wagons, motor-wagons, all plodding patiently, paying no heed to the shell-bursts. And then Jimmie took a look behind, and saw that infernal red-headed Orangeman! He imagined a raucous voice, shouting: "C'mon here! Whatcher waitin' fer?" Jimmie bounced on to his machine and turned ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... a stupid duffer I am! You must find us plain, plodding Americans horribly short-witted ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... he was doing the same. This argued that he had not found the road, yet, but was marching to it with some peasant. There was nothing for us to do but plod along—and this we did. At the end of three hours we were still plodding. This was not only mysterious, but exasperating. And very fatiguing, too; for we had tried hard, along at first, to catch up with the guide, but had only fagged ourselves, in vain; for although he was traveling slowly ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... of town under the impression that it lies in quite another direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the settlement of ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... trotting donkeys or swinging camels who pass us with difficulty. Camels everywhere, indeed, on dyke or in meadow; even the clouds are shaped like camels who have gone to heaven and turned to mother o' pearl. There are horses, too; not little sand stallions like ours, but ordinary, plodding animals whose hoofs know only Fayoum dust or mud. Our desert creature, however, does not spurn them. On the contrary, though he pretends not to notice camels, cows, or buffaloes, he whinnies and prances with delight when he meets anything of his own shape, and assumes ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... hills, but when I came to traverse them I found that the dim light had exaggerated their size, and that they were mere scattered sand-dunes, mottled with patches of bramble. Over these I toiled with my bundle slung over my shoulder, plodding heavily through the loose sand, and tripping over the creepers, but forgetting my wet clothes and my numb hands as I recalled the many hardships and adventures which my ancestors had undergone. It amused me to think that the day might come when my ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... circulation; where literature itself is scaled to subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... him move away, plodding along the pavement heavily, huge and portentous. The back of his head bulged above the collar, with no show of neck between. He was comical and pathetic; he seemed too vast in mere flesh to be the sport of a thing so freakish as luck. To think that such a bulk had a weak heart in it—and ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... desire. I had 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 ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... will be plodding on through the sands and dust, and I'll be all alone. But you, little girl, you will be making your peace with Omkar and dreaming of ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. There was a smile in his puckery eyes. When there ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... a short but square-shouldered Irishman, with massive breast, arms like the piston-rods of an engine, and a broad, good-natured face. He is one of those beings who may be aptly termed "machines," a patient, plodding, ox-like creature who takes to the most irksome labor as a flail takes to the sheafs on the threshing-floor. Work was his element, and nothing, it would seem, could tire or overcome those indurated muscles and vice-like nerves. The only appellation ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... 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
... far, when the child was again struck by the altered behaviour of Mr Thomas Codlin, who instead of plodding on sulkily by himself as he had heretofore done, kept close to her, and when he had an opportunity of looking at her unseen by his companion, warned her by certain wry faces and jerks of the head not to put any trust ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... the sheet?" "No," she says, "I've got to get to Piddinghoe to-morrow! P'raps they'd tell the work'us! And I've lashings here to eat: Don't the gorse smell sweet?"... Well, I turned and left her plodding on ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... a man of lively imagination. Had he been an ordinary, prosaic and plodding individual, he would have stayed at home combing wool as did his prosaic and plodding ancestors for several generations. At the age of fourteen he went to sea and soon developed an active curiosity about regions then unknown but believed to ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... this 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 ...
— Vocational Guidance for Girls • Marguerite Stockman Dickson
... did not occupy the time you have spent in reading this relation of it. One minute I was plodding quietly homeward; the next, I stood in the middle of the street; beside me a stranger of gigantic proportions; at my feet a black mass of dead humanity, half doubled up in the mud as it had fallen; on the banquette, the slight, shivering form of a boy; while ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... interminable scrubs, with nothing to view, and less to cheer. Our success has traced a long and a dreary road through this unpeopled waste, like that to a lion's abode, from whence no steps are retraced. The caravan for months was slowly but surely plodding on, under those trees with which it has pleased Providence to bedeck this desolate waste. But this expedition, as organised, equipped, and intended by Sir Thomas Elder, was a thing of such excellence and precision, ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless, plodding, and rather ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England. Prussia, plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... us was a never-failing source of wonder and delight. At first my father, like nearly all the backwoods settlers, bought a yoke of oxen to do the farm work, and as field after field was cleared, the number was gradually increased until we had five yoke. These wise, patient, plodding animals did all the ploughing, logging, hauling, and hard work of every sort for the first four or five years, and, never having seen oxen before, we looked at them with the same eager freshness of conception as we did at the wild animals. We worked with them, sympathized with them ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability, the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, from different ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... my Lord, or you, or you, Haue found the ground of studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: And studie too, the causer of your vow. For where is any Author in the ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... up 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 ...
— Sagittulae, Random Verses • E. W. Bowling
... would peer, to be sure there were no watching eyes, then he would slip over to the fireplace, lift the lion, draw out the cipher message, place it sometimes in his mouth, sometimes in his shoe, and as soon as his morning chores were done he would be seen plodding down the dusty road leading to the farm, where some one was eagerly waiting for the tidings he carried. Well had the ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... not the commanding genius of Thomas Cromwell or the ambitious foresight of Richelieu, he surpassed the statesmen of his day in patriotic zeal and in disinterested labors,—not to extend the boundaries of the empire, but to develop national resources and make the country strong for defence. He was a plodding, wary, cautious, far-seeing, long-headed old statesman, whose opinions it was not safe for Elizabeth to oppose; and although she was arbitrary and opinionated herself, she generally followed Burleigh's counsels,—unwillingly at ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... one of them, "how would you like it, with your pretty little feet, to be plodding at this mill all the day? Thank the Gods, the sun will set before a great while. The day has been hot as the lap ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... back in a full tide and she sprang to her feet. The weary plodding search which had taken her half over the city in the past few agonizing days had been fruitless, yet must it still continue until definite news of Tia Juana could be learned. Dan Morrissey had been faithful, but his ardent spirit outran ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... they had acquired a smattering of chemistry, physiology, and biology they imagined themselves capable of reorganising human society from top to bottom, and when they had acquired this conviction they were of course unfitted for the patient, plodding study of details. ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of the duchess's 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 ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... As we were plodding wearily back, temptation suddenly loomed up on our right in the shape of a great gas-bag which we at first took to be a Zeppelin. It proved to be a stationary balloon which was acting as the eye of the artillery. It was signaling the range to the German gunners beneath, who were pounding ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... o'clock we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part of it through the amomums, and stumps ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... modern maps are principally indebted. Gaspari and Zimmerman, among the Germans, have thrown into a philosophical and interesting form the labours and heavy details which were supplied them by less original but more plodding men. The English, though, as Malte Brun observes, they are still without a system of geography which deserves the name, are rich in excellent materials, which have been supplied by the extent of their dominions ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... able to bear corn." That history should repeat itself is, of course, to be recognised as merely a commonplace fact; but a myth reproducing itself in the shape of events happening visibly before our eyes, is a rarer phenomenon. And it seems to be occurring whenever a string of Laraghmenians come plodding up their winding mountain-path under the burden of heavy creels filled with earth, or oftener with slippery brown sea-wrack and leathery weed. For it is in this way that whatever scanty foothold their starveling crops may find, has been fashioned and maintained in the stony little fields. Year ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... weeks back, when T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had made his memorable speech, explaining to his fellow-students the "Billon-Dollar Mystery," and arousing in them a vast admiration for the slow-minded, plodding John Thorwald, every collegian had done his best to befriend the big Freshman. Upperclassmen helped him with his studies. Despite his almost rude refusal to meet any advances, the collegians always had a cheery greeting for him, and his ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... from Eddyville was a short one. When we got to plodding along over the Plains, we made from fifteen to twenty miles a day. That was counted a good day's drive, ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... the America swooped among the plodding merchantmen like a falcon on a dovecote, the sight of her frightening most of her prey into submission, with a brush now and then to exercise the crews of the twenty-two guns, and perhaps a man or two hit. Long after the war, Captain James Chever, ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... glad. Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch. The base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing. The dining-room was fragrant with ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... the sky, a waggon of clover Slowly goes rumbling, over the white chalk road; And I lie in the golden grass there, wondering why So little a thing As the jingle and ring of the harness, The hot creak of leather, The peace of the plodding, Should suddenly, stabbingly, make ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes
... thing you find anybody reading is Rupert Brooke's poems. When men sing among the shell-holes they prefer a song which belittles their own heroism. Please picture to yourself a company of mud-stained scarecrows in steel-helmets, plodding their way under intermittent shelling through a battered trench, whistling and humming the following splendid sentiments from The ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... and fertile valley, Tracing all its winding ways, Plodding on with dogged patience Through a score of weary days, Camping in the lonely timber, Sleeping on the scorching plain, Bearing heat and thirst and hunger, Sore fatigue and wind and rain— Halting only when the telltale Mark was missing in the ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... We were quite glad to get to this sort of mountain scenery again, which we had so enjoyed at 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 ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... and I was plodding drowsily along through a beautiful open part dotted with large bushes growing in great clumps, many of which were covered with sweet smelling blossoms, when just as I was passing between a couple of the great clumps which were large enough ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... the 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 ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... hiccupped, plodding steadily on. And he was again in a wash of water, the horse splashed up water as he went. It was thickly dark, save for the gig-lamps, and they lit on ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... description of the poisonous snakes, nevertheless had no poison-fangs that even after the most minute examination we could discover. Miller and one of the dogs caught a sariema, a big, long-legged, bustard-like bird, in rather a curious way. We were on the march, plodding along through as heavy a tropic downpour as it was our ill fortune to encounter. The sariema, evidently as drenched and uncomfortable as we were, was hiding under a bush to avoid the pelting rain. The dog discovered it, ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... straggling village, still fairly intact and occupied by Belgian civilians. It was shelled now and again but not severely. When we reached this place, the battalion opened out considerably, platoons keeping 200 yards apart; a precaution necessary on roads that were periodically shelled at night. After plodding along for some time we reached the Cafe Belge, a mere ruin now, but a well-known halting place for troops on the march. Here we turned off to the right and left the pave road which runs on to Ypres, and after this the roads were ...
— Q.6.a and Other places - Recollections of 1916, 1917 and 1918 • Francis Buckley
... bright, dusty fields. He felt as if he were a little to blame for Enid's melancholy. He hadn't been very neighbourly this last year. "People can live in darkness here, too, unless they fight it. Look at me. I told you I've been moping all winter. We all feel friendly enough, but we go plodding on and never get together. You and I are old friends, and yet we hardly ever see each other. Mother says you've been promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her. Why don't you come? It would ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... charming even the women most wearied of homage, and persuading even the men most obdurate to counsel,—all served to invest the practical man with those spells which are usually confined to the ideal one. But, indeed, Audley Egerton was an Ideal,—the ideal of the Practical. Not the mere vulgar, plodding, red-tape machine of petty business, but the man of strong sense, inspired by inflexible energy and guided to definite earthly objects. In a dissolute and corrupt form of government, under a decrepit ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... went up over the rim of the basin, disappeared, and then came plodding back through the heat. Johnny had laughed all that while; laughed until his sides were sore; until his eyes were red with the tears he had shed; until he was so weak he staggered when he first crawled out from under the plane and stood up. But it did him good, for all that, to have laughed ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... 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 ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... all stooked and stood in silvery sheaves, ready for the thrasher; the great stretch of wheat had melted down to a narrow oblong, round which the binders were working. Gertrude stopped to watch them. The plodding horses, the bent figures of the men, the play of light on falling grain, and the revolving arms of the machines fixed her eyes; the rustle of sheaves, the crackle of stubble, and the musical tinkle of metal, fell pleasantly on her ears. The mornings and evenings ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... 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, if it were in her to ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... other; and when they were alone Taffy stood an inch or two higher in self-conceit than when Honoria happened to be by. But he took more pains with his stories if she was listening. As for her lessons, Honoria got through them by honest plodding. She never quite saw the use of them, but she liked Mr. Raymond. She learnt more steadily ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... load behind them plodding On the ass! Silenus he, Old and drunken, merry, nodding, Full of years and jollity; Though he goes so swayingly, Yet he laughs and quaffs alway.— Youths and maids, enjoy to-day; Nought ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... pity, Mr. Longface, that God made horses as they are, and gave them such grandeur of appearance when in action, and put such an eagle-like spirit between their ribs, so that, quitting the plodding motions of the ox, they can fly like that noble bird, and come sweeping down the course as ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... Drummond 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 ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... 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 to every duty! the weariness of all that tugging ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... which was furnished from a superior kind of clay underlying the land all around them, and thenceforward maintained themselves from the products of the soil, then, as now, proverbial for its fruitfulness. It descended to their children, most of whom were equally plodding and unambitious with themselves. All continued the old occupation of looking to the soil for subsistence; and so long as the forty acres were kept together, they lived well. But as descendants multiplied, and one generation succeeded to another, so the little farm became subdivided among numerous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... 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 wails arose, and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... authors o'er in vain, Nor taste one beauty they contain, And plodding on in one dull tone, Gain ancient ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... 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, after a certain ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... forty to fifty thousand, and the gate-money taken during the week was about L35,000. Henri Farman, Hubert Latham, and Glenn Curtiss earned among them almost L6,000 in prizes. The Grand Prix de la Champagne for the flight of longest duration was won by Farman, who remained in the air, plodding steadily round the course, for more than three hours. He also won the passenger-carrying prize in a flight which carried two passengers round the ten-kilometre course in about ten minutes and a half. Latham gained the altitude prize by flying to a height of more than five ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... 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 and courage to be the shield and buckler of one who might or might not be a damsel ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... manure, and the like; and though he was perfectly well again, some of the spring had ebbed from his muscles during his week's rest. This day, too, the first of November, had been exhausting. They had walked since daybreak, after a wretched night in a barn, plodding almost in silence, mile after mile, against a wet south-west wind, over a discouraging kind of high-road that dipped and rose and dipped again, and never seemed to ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... found that it deals with things as opposed to ideas; incidents as opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called upon. The fable teaches better than an essay can that the dullness which perseveres will arrive at success ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... roads are practicable, an old-fashioned diligence may occasionally be seen plodding along, freighted with villagers bound for some local market; but the roads are, for the most part, as ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... the morning of the 24th to find six inches of snow on the ground and the storm still raging, with the temperature down to 28. Soon after we began plodding through the snow on a pea-soup breakfast, George left us to hunt geese. The night before he had told Hubbard he would kill a goose in the morning, if he were permitted to go on with a rifle. He ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... ferns, rocks round which danced the columbines like rosy elves, or the trees where birds built, squirrels chattered and woodchucks burrowed, that Thorny was seized with a desire to go and see these beauties for himself. So Jack was saddled and went, plodding, scrambling and wandering into all manner of pleasant places, always bringing home a stronger, browner rider ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... even from a distance. He strode slowly along, looking intently at each house. None of them seemed to him to hold the object of his search. As his steps carried him farther and farther into the beautiful avenue he began to smile to himself and his plodding spirit wavered. After all, thought he, no one but a silly ass would attempt to find a person in a great city after the fashion he was pursuing. He was deciding to board a tramcar and return to the hotel when, at some distance ahead, he saw a young ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... had taken to riding to King's Bridge of late. Sometimes he would start out early in the morning, just about the time when young Van Riper was plodding by on his way to the shop. Young Van Riper liked to be at the shop an hour earlier than his father. Old Mr. Dolph was always up, on these occasions, to see his son start off. He loved to look at the boy, in his English riding-boots and breeches, astride of black Diana, ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... 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, and ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Amos was glad. Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch. The base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing. The dining-room was fragrant with pine. He was not allowed to take off his overcoat, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... through endless hot marches The trail of a plodding desire: Now with night he has lost the fierce fever of getting, Adrowse by his dull-embered fire. Immeasurable silences compass him over, His body grows one with the streams Of sands that slide and whisper around him; The stars draw his soul: ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... narrative is ofttimes a dangerous parting of ways. But on this particular day Bobbie Burke had come to a parting of the ways unwittingly. He had left the plodding life of routine excitement of the ordinary policeman to embark upon a journey fraught with multifold dangers. In addition to his enemies of the underworld, he had made a new one in ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... been conceived to be a great bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea in Punch some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers, strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision. Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming Slavery," and it must be confessed that the early forms ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... shout to with a strange, vivid joy that sends the blood tingling to the heart and brain. Were I to go back to such a life I would choose the danger, and be discontented to maunder on behind the slow and harmless wool-bearers, cursing a little every now and again at their foolishness, and then plodding on once more, bunched up in an inert mass on a slow-going horse, who wearily stretches his neck almost to the ground as he dreams, perhaps, of the long, exhilarating gallops after his own kind that we once had together, being conscious, ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... 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 ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... their sender had found them lying forgotten in his desk, or, mendaciously, that they were "thrown off" on the spur of the moment a few hours before. Some of the names appended to them astonished me. Grave, practical business men, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding traders, never before suspected of poetry, or even correct prose, were among the contributors. It seemed as if most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the Pacific Coast had been in the habit at some time of expressing ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The two Secretaries, whose business it is to superintend the publishing department and matters relating to the raising of funds, the Rev. Wm. A. Hallock and the Rev. O. Eastman, are enterprising and plodding men. They told me they were brought up together in the same neighbourhood, and had both worked at the plough till they were 20 ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... rung sharply, and, on Polly entering, Rhoda called her to the window and showed her two female figures plodding down the street. "Look," said she. "Those are the only women I envy. Sisters of Charity. Run you after them, and take a good look at those beastly ugly caps: then come and tell me how ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... a glance; he knew because he knew; and if others would not follow, he had the audacity to push on alone. This recklessness to the opinion of the slow and plodding, this indifference to the dull, gradually drew upon him the hatred of ...
— Little Journeys To the Homes of the Great, Volume 3 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... world between twenty and thirty years before under the firm of Goldthwaite & Brown; which copartnership, however, was speedily dissolved by the natural incongruity of its constituent parts. Since that event, John Brown, with exactly the qualities of a thousand other John Browns, and by just such plodding methods as they used, had prospered wonderfully and become one of the wealthiest John Browns on earth. Peter Goldthwaite, on the contrary, after innumerable schemes which ought to have collected all the coin and paper currency of the country into his ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... accurate and methodic details of the natural history of each district—details ninety-nine hundredths of which might seem worthless in the eyes of the public, but which would all be precious in the eyes of scientific men, who know that no fact is really unimportant; and more, that while plodding patiently through seemingly unimportant facts, you may stumble on one of infinite importance, both scientific and practical. For the student of nature, gentlemen, if he will be but patient, diligent, methodical, ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... this bellicose message Si set out. But an unlucky idea occurred to him as he went plodding along the ...
— The Young Mountaineers - Short Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... John Stanchfield, Elias Palmer, Harold Ormthwaite, and Nathan Ridge, all farmers or market-gardeners of the Colcord district, testified to frights and "spooky feelings" on being accosted by a dim gray figure plodding along the Colcord road in the lonely interval between midnight and morning. The dim gray figure seemed to have recognized the different "teams" by the section of the road through which they jolted or ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King
... artificial and unromantic guidance of the railway: he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal shoon are silently opened to him by the engineer; and that Timon now, seeking the profoundest cave in the fissures of the earth, reaches it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily ...
— The Ebb-Tide - A Trio And Quartette • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... world's good and panting for more; fear of poverty and hate of "scabs" in the hearts of the workers; the dumb yearning in the hearts of the oppressed; the echo of laughter heard at the foot of the Pyramids; the faithful, plodding slouch of the laborers; fear of the Shadow of Death in the hearts ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... protracted exertions, succeeded in working out some simple problem in arithmetic, her slate containing the solution was freely handed about among her unaspiring comrades; so that I judged her to be "weakly generous" as well as "plodding,"—qualities not of a high order, I esteemed, yet by no means insuperable barriers to friendship when found to enter more or less largely into the composition ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... the serene, haughty house, the repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road. "This is your birthright," whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said: "You have sold it for ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... hours before we reached Buffalo River, the column plodding along in the wooded ravine. I had turned out from the road to wait for the brigades to pass, and have a word with the commanders in turn, and was picking my way to the head of column again, when I overheard one of those little colloquies between soldiers which give real pleasure to an officer. ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... keep all 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, at ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... water. The rule of the pump was "last come last served," and frequently a long string of men, women, and children might be seen waiting their turn. Many of us can recollect the old Digbeth men, with their shoulder-yoke and two buckets, plodding along to find customers for their "Warta;" and certain elderly ladies are still in existence who would fear the shortening of their lives were their tea-kettles filled with aught but the pure Digbeth water, though it does not come from the pump at St. Martin's, for that ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... strikes deep water, and carry you down with it!... Rafael, my dear boy, don't be foolish. I am all right to have as a friend; but it's too late for me to be anything more ... even if I were to love you. We are of a different breed. I have been studying you, and I see that you are a sensible, honest, plodding sort of fellow. Whereas I—I belong to the butterflies, to the opposite of all you are. I am a conscript under the banner of Bohemia, and I cannot desert the colors. Each of us on his own road then. You'll easily find a woman to make you happy.... The sillier she is, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... after a weary march. But of course the Boers are in their element at this kind of game. A hundred of them wish to drive away some stock; they leave a dozen to snipe from a ridge, while we send Tommy plodding round for miles on a flanking movement (for you must keep him out of range); and when the cattle have been driven far enough away, Mr. Boer jumps on his horse and is off also, while we ruefully ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... on the first floor. The apartments were magnificently furnished, and glittered with mirrors, candelabra, gilt ornaments, and the most quaint and costly bric-a-brac. Viotti received his guests at the head of the staircase, no longer the plodding man of business, but the courtly, high-bred gentleman. Garat's amazement was still further increased when he heard the names of the other guests, all distinguished men. After an admirably cooked dinner, there was still more admirable music, and Viotti proved to the satisfaction ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together—a miserable few—often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been seen exploring the country, in carts, on foot, taking everybody into his confidence, visiting all the inns and alehouses for miles around, stopping people on the road with his questions, looking into the very ditches almost; first in the greatest excitement, then with a plodding sort of perseverance, growing slower and slower; and he could not even tell you plainly how his son looked. The sailor was supposed to be one of two that had left a timber ship, and to have been seen dangling after some girl; but ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... and the eldest son had been thankful for a clerkship in the office of Mr. Burford, a solicitor in considerable practice, and man of business to several of the county magnates. Frank Morton was not remarkable for talent or enterprise, but he was plodding and trustworthy, methodical and accurate, and he had continued in the same position, except that time had made him senior instead of junior clerk. Partly from natural disposition, partly from weight of responsibility, he had always been ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pig-tail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... passed with little tramp and a good deal of shuffle,—shabby, wretched, silent. I did not hear a laugh or an oath; I did not see a violent gesture, and hardly a smile, that day. The roistering, roaring, terrible 'Reds,' as I saw them, were weary, dull men, doing ill-directed work with plodding indifference. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... "like mother, like son," he, too, sat down on the doorsill and laughed as only youth and health and joy can laugh, for, heading straight for the door was the fat young Shorthorn, saddled with an enormous feather-bed, and plodding at her heels was old Billy ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... provided a spectacle which I shall never forget. For twenty miles every road was jammed with clattering cavalry, plodding infantry, and rumbling batteries, the guns, limbers, and caissons still covered with the green boughs which had been used to mask their position from German aeroplanes. Gendarmes in giant bearskins, chasseurs in uniforms of ...
— Fighting in Flanders • E. Alexander Powell
... of Ide. 30 Then in agony, breathless, errant, flush'd wearily, cometh on Taborine behind him, Attis, thoro' leafy glooms a guide, As a restive heifer yields not to the cumbrous onerous yoke. Thither his the votaress eunuchs with an emulous alacrity. Now faintly sickly plodding to the goddess's holy shrine, 35 They took the rest which easeth long toil, nor ate withal. Slow sleep descends on eyelids ready drowsily to decline, In a soft repose departeth the devout spirit-agony. When awoke the sun, the golden, that his eyes heaven-orient Scann'd lustrous air, ...
— The Poems and Fragments of Catullus • Catullus
... "The plodding housekeeper, whose picture you drew just now—humble, even mean in your regard though she be—sinks to peaceful sleep when her tasks are done, and rises refreshed at coming dawn. If she is happier than your fine lady, ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... pickers on the Tiffany ranch, in concert with all the other Japanese of Santa Lucia, had thrown down their baskets, repudiated their agreements, and struck. It needed more than Judge Tiffany's failing strength, more than Olsen's methodical plodding, to conquer this situation. ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... tracks,—have slept because nature refused to allow longer wakefulness. But my heart has been as light as my purse, and there has been something in the air of the hills that made me buoyant and happy in the midst of my weariness. But George Vavasor was wretched as well as weary, and every step that he took, plodding through the mud, was a new misfortune to him. What are five miles of a walk to a young man, even though the rain be falling and the ways be dirty? what, though they may come after some other ten that ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... often a considerable degree of ingenuity to extract from them more than monosyllables. We have been accustomed to consider the French as a restless, capricious, volatile people, and so I suppose they might have been formerly, but now they are undoubtedly the reverse, being a quiet routine plodding sort of people, particularly as regards the provincials; and even amongst the Parisians there are thousands that reside in one quarter of the city, which they seldom quit, never approaching what they consider the gay portion of Paris, ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... I feel about getting away and seeing something. Still, if you really want me to stay, I'll give it up. But you are a good deal to blame. You have told me of what you saw when you were in the army. You have showed me that there are bigger things in this world than plodding after a plough, and more exciting chases than those after foxes. I want to do more than sit on a nail-keg in the store and discuss big events. I want to have a little part in them ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... treated and controlled by diet and medication. Such illness does not appear to have been a major factor in his actions prior to the Revolution, the first significant attack not occurring until 1788. Instead, the stolid and often plodding king tended to rely upon men like the unimaginative Lord Bute or his somewhat stodgy wife, Charlotte of Mecklenberg (for whom two Virginia counties and the town of Charlottesville are named.) The breakdown of the once-powerful Whig ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... hill-side of fir-trees where avenging presences may lurk. It would be absurd to pretend that the naturalist does not also find pleasure in observing the life of the birds, but his is a steady pleasure, almost a sober and plodding occupation, compared to the morning enthusiasm of the man who sees a cuckoo for the first time, and, behold, the world ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... a day's wading, without rest or food, gradually weighted his heels, and little by little he lagged behind his companions. The moon came out and silvered tree and river, but the silent, plodding band had no eyes for the glory ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... flask tendered him by one of the men did much to revive Paul, and the relief at finding himself well mounted, instead of plodding wearily along on foot, was very great. He was glad enough to be mounted behind one of the stout troopers, for he was excessively drowsy, despite the peril of his situation. He had been unable to sleep, as Edward had done, in the woodman's hut, and it was now more than thirty-six hours since sleep ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 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 his ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... 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
... look at the old fellow's autograph. What a bad hand for a schoolmaster! I will spare my dear lazy father the trouble of deciphering these villainous pot-hooks. Ha! ha! my good, industrious, quiet, plodding cousin Anthony, heir of Oak Hall, in the county of Wilts, there lies your amiable despatch;" and he spurned the torn document with his foot. "That's the way that I mean to serve all those who dare to ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... up, in that plodding and peaceful region, and got to be good-sized boys and girls—big enough, in fact, to begin to know as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over the occasional ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... his jack-tar companions were with him still and helped to keep up his spirits. He never knew them by any other names than Freddie and Tennert—the first name of one and the last name of the other—but so great was his liking for them that it included the whole of sturdy, plodding, indomitable old England into the bargain. They never talked patriotism, and seemed to regard the war merely as a sort of a job that had to be done—just like any other job. Early in the day before the car filled up, Tom talked a good deal with them and as there was no guard inside, the conversation ...
— Tom Slade on a Transport • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... is his value? For what, in all the manifold activities of the world, is he fit? And if the answer be not satisfactory, if the product be only a sort of learned mummy, the system will be condemned. Are there not thousands of lads today plodding away at the ancient classics, and who, at the first possible moment, will cast them into space, never to reopen them? Think of the wasted time that that implies; not all wasted, perhaps, for something may be gained in power of application; but entirely ...
— Shadow and Light - An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century • Mifflin Wistar Gibbs
... to gambling, unabashed and unashamed. The result seemed a triumph. Half a million dollars was realized, but it was a violation of decency that sounded the knell of the institution, and it was later absorbed by the plodding Mechanics' Institute, which had always been most judiciously managed. Its investments in real estate that it used have ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... ground to him. Some years ago Mr Halgrove had lived several months in the Metropolis, and the boy, spending his summer holidays there, and left entirely to his own devices, had learned in a plodding way about as much of the great city as a youth of seventeen could well ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... not suspect what was passing in his mind; the city man had never seen a snowstorm on the prairie. Topping every rise, he looked back, and waved his hat at the plodding figure, slightly bent under the weight of ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... greater things in every conceivable direction. The Negroes are taking but a small part in their creation, glory and profit. If there are men among us who can be the means of bringing better conditions to the great Negro masses, and who can weed out the slow, dull, plodding process of evolution, they should not be denied the opportunity. The masses seem to be hedged about by a wall of indifference. Negroes have such little respect for their own kind that the thing is becoming proverbial. Now they pretend ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... for Greek and Latin, but Mr. Hayes had recommended her to take up modern languages as well, and she was steadily plodding through the French and German, for which she had not so strong a liking as for her beloved classics. Prissie was a very eager learner, and she was busy now looking over her notes of the last lecture and standing ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... and gave up all thoughts of self-destruction—even in a noble cause; and there, in penance, I somewhat hastily committed to flame the plodding labor of many midnights—an elaborate copy in pen and ink, line for line, of Retel's immortal wood-engraving "Der Tod als Freund," which Mrs. Lintot had been kind enough to lend me—and under which I had written, in beautiful black Gothic letters and red capitals (and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... regained the top of the cliff and once more looked across the island towards the far-off point, the figure which he had previously seen making for it had turned back, and was plodding steadily across the coarse grass and rock-strewn moorland in his own direction. Chatfield had evidently taken a bird's eye view of the situation from the vantage point of the slope and had come to the conclusion that the higher part of the island was the most likely point ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... flashed through 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 and I first approached ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings
... and the five horses were on their long journey. The boy on Auckland sent her to the front at once, and the mare settled into her long, easy stride, close to the rail, saving every possible inch. Pharaoh immediately dropped into last position, plodding through the dust kicked up by the field. The big hammer-head showed nothing in the first mile save dogged persistence. At the end of the second mile Auckland was twenty lengths in front of Pharaoh, and running ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... and, gathering up their things, the cadets hurried off to where he had pointed. There, sure enough, was a man plodding along with a bundle over his shoulder. He was a short, thick-set man, and wore a heavy mustache curled up at ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... and be the judge. When the time came both started off together, but the Hare was soon so far ahead that he thought he might as well have a rest: so down he lay and fell fast asleep. Meanwhile the Tortoise kept plodding on, and in time reached the goal. At last the Hare woke up with a start, and dashed on at his fastest, but only to find that the Tortoise ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... wore on, one could guess that a great centre of government and trade was near at hand; the traffic was continuous,—coolies bent almost double under their heavy burdens, laden barrows creaking dolefully as they moved, foot travellers plodding wearily along, groups of wild Tibetans from the distant frontier, gorgeous mandarins returning from an inspection tour, all were hurrying towards the capital. Yes, we were nearing Marco Polo's "large and noble" city of Sindin-fu and it is to-day again a "large ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... she had "a pile of ginger" deep down inside of her. In our games, whenever allowed to play, with a dogged resolution she would come pegging along in the rear, she was a sticker, she never gave up. In winter when they flooded the yard she was the poorest skater of all, but patiently plodding along on the ice, each time she fell down she would pick herself up with such determination that at last with a jerk ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... McGarver" were along. A scene so British that it seemed proper to enjoy it alone he did find in a real garden-party, with what appeared to be a real curate, out of a story in The Strand, passing teacups; but he passed out of that hot glow into a cold plodding that led him to Chester and a dull hotel which might as well have ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... suffering all the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... dumb driven animal in Ben when he entered unfamiliar territory, and his slow plodding methods had been known to irritate Miss ...
— The Motor Maids at Sunrise Camp • Katherine Stokes
... of the towns of the plain, St. Girons or another, along the riverside and under the lime trees ... which reminds me of "Mails"! Little pen, little fountain pen, little vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, whither have you led me, and why cannot you learn the plodding ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... untutored reading of Greek and Latin. It was no tale of Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family woe that inflamed their imaginations and spurred them onward. They were plodding away at the Greek Testament, immersed in a chapter of the idiomatic and ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... Meanwhile I am plodding away with Dash. I have now reached page 27. A great book, as all agree. But the books that I shall read while I am reading it will make a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, March 18, 1914 • Various
... by his foe-men's side? Ah! when will come the time, when o'er the plain No more shall death and desolation reign? When will the sun smile on the bloodless field, 45 And the stern warrior's arm the sickle wield? Not whilst some King, in cold ambition's dreams, Plans for the field of death his plodding schemes; Not whilst for private pique the public fall, And one frail mortal's mandate governs all. 50 Swelled with command and mad with dizzying sway; Who sees unmoved his myriads fade away. Careless who lives or dies—so that he gains ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... to know and understand the earth well enough for such purpose as this. One does not have to dim his eyes with acres of maps, or become a plodding geologist, or learn to distinguish schists from granites, or to classify plants by table, or to call wild geese and marmots by their Latin names. It is true that geography, geology, physiography, mineralogy, botany and zoology must each contribute their share toward ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... account, but the conflict is not yet ended. Sometimes the battling is very severe; but with patient, plodding faith they persevere in the ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... with a new settler, and about two o'clock that afternoon we overtook a fellow who was plodding along the road. His name was B——, he said, and he pointed out to us his broad fields and herds. He had been overseeing some feeders he had, and his horse had escaped, so he was walking home, as it was only a couple ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... was through rows of tall wooden or brick structures, along streets traveled by everything from the latest European cars to plodding donkey carts. The people were dressed in a variety of costumes, from suits and dresses that would have been suitable in New York, to traditional Arab dress with flowing robes and the cloth headdress that is held in place by a band ...
— The Egyptian Cat Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin
... satisfied with the results. No wonder the cry has gone out again and again from many a human soul, Is life worth the living? But from one who has once commenced to live, this cry never has, nor can it ever come; for, when the kingdom is once found, life then ceases to be a plodding, and becomes an exultation, an ecstasy, a joy. Yes, you will find that all the evil, all the error, all the disease, all the suffering, all the fears, all the forebodings of life, are on the side of the physical, ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... lesson on the same plane of emphasis, with a 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 ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts
... him? Shall I wake up some time and know, because I've been a thief, I ought never to think of anything now but money—paying back, cent for cent, or cents for dollars, what I lost? I don't know. Or shall I think I'm right in not doing anything spectacular and plodding along here and working for the town? I don't know that. One thing I know—you. If I said I loved you it wouldn't be a millionth part of what I do. I'm founded on you. I'm rooted in you. There! that's enough. Stop me. That's the thing I wasn't ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... so fine as that of our poet could not servilely confine itself to the slow method of school learning, adapted to the intellects of ordinary boys. Accordingly, while his fellow pupils were still plodding through the first rudiments of Latin, Petrarch had recourse to the original writers, from whom the grammarians drew their authority, and particularly employed himself in perusing the works of Cicero. And, although he was, at this time, much too young to comprehend the full force ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... Happy, happy liver! With a soul as strong as a mountain River Pouring out praise to th' Almighty Giver, Joy and jollity be with us both, Hearing thee or else some other As merry as a Brother I on the earth will go plodding on, By myself, cheerfully, ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... weighted down by a number of logs laid across the arms. Men guided it by levers, and by throwing their weight against the fans of the plow. It was a gay, animated scene this, full of the spirit of winter—the plodding, straining horses, the brilliantly dressed, struggling men, the sullen-yielding snow thrown to either side, the shouts, warnings, and commands. To right and left grew white banks of snow. Behind stretched a broad white path in which a scant inch ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... by Thomas Hughes, though twenty-five years later, may be placed next to Gorboduc in our discussion of the rise of tragedy. It will serve as an illustration of the kind of tragedy that was being evolved from Senecan models by plodding uninspired Englishmen before Marlowe flung his flaming torch amongst them. To understand the story a slight introduction is necessary. Igerna, the wife of Gorlois, Duke of Cornwall, was loved by King Uther, who foully slew her husband and ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... 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 as Fate—the symbol of Justice in pursuit of ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... 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
... had fully risen on the second day these late peaceful farmers of Ohio, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, were plodding along once more beside their sore-footed oxen; passing out unaided into a land which many leading men in the Government, North and South, and quite aside from political affiliations, did not value at five dollars for ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... stupid, so that no man could or would learn from them more about other men's opinions, affairs, or occupations than it concerned his practical convenience to know; when even wars were waged at slow pace,—armies sailing great distances by chance winds, or plodding on foot for thousands of miles, and fighting doggedly hand to hand at sight; when fortunes also were slowly made by simple, honest growths,—no men excepting freebooters and pirates becoming ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... It is always difficult to judge either distance or location by sound, when the wind is blowing. The horse hoofs sounded about a quarter of a mile away. I know not how far they really were. Very soon I could see the black moving mass coming quietly along the road. The duffle hoof-wraps made a dull plodding noise near at hand. Nearer the unknown rider came, suspecting nothing. I could see him bent forward, peering out ahead. I could even take stock of him, dark though it was. He was a not very tall man, wearing a full Spanish riding cloak. It seemed to me that ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... Now tiresome plodding folks are gone to rest; And soothing slumber locks the careful breast. And tell-tale friends, and wise advisers snore; And softly slip-shod youths unbar the door. Now footsteps echo far, and watch-dogs bark; ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie
... placed in the rear. In this manner I thought to keep them somewhat apart. For myself, I proposed to ride abreast of mademoiselle, but she made it so clear that my neighbourhood displeased her that I fell back, leaving her to ride with Fanchette; and contented myself with plodding at their heels, and striving to attach the later evangelists to ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman
... He had heard nothing like it before, but he determined to avail himself of every opportunity of learning. His inquisitiveness was a trouble to the men; they rebuked him for bothering them; but by steady plodding he began to learn the names of the multiplicity of ropes, and the different things he would have to do when the vessel put to sea. He was ordered to have the side lights trimmed ready for lighting, the day ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... that is wild, With heart full of glee, as the heart of a child! Afar o'er the mountains, afar o'er the stream, To revel in joy 'mid the glad summer beam. I leave care behind me, I throw to the wind All sorrows allied to the earth-plodding mind; The music of birds and the murmur of rills, Shall be my companions o'er Scotia's loved hills. How lucent each lake, and how lovely each dell! Who would not be happy, at home let him dwell; I 'm away, I 'm away, like a thing ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... a long day's journey frisking, barking, bounding, striking attitudes, slanting a bushy tail, manifestly playing to the spectator's eye, manifestly rejoicing in their grace and beauty—and turned to observe Sim and Candlish unornamentally plodding in the rear with the plaids about their bowed shoulders and the drop at their snuffy nose—I thought I would rather claim kinship with the dogs than with the men! My sympathy was unreturned; in their eyes I was a creature ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... amount of homely energy could effect, and a new horizon was unveiled to her. But on the boy it did not seem to have the right result. He might have learned to extend his sympathy to a nature so dumb and plodding; and this coldness of his called down a rebuke of what seemed almost undue sternness from one of our teachers. It was not given in my presence, but the boy, bewildered by the severity which he did not anticipate, coupled indeed with ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... one. Of course, a nation is not one kind of person; it is composed of many kinds of persons. These persons are diverse in character. All Scotchmen are not canny, nor all Irishmen happy-go-lucky. Those who know a great many Chinamen are acquainted with those who are idealists with little taste for plodding industry. It is only the outsider who is greatly impressed by the family resemblance. To the more analytic mind of the parent each child is, in a most remarkable degree, different ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... say he was plodding along? A reactionary is immovable except in the wrong direction. Enderby's ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... with me it was a more enduring subject for 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 in deep chorus with the treble of some dozen ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various
... twilight was waning deeper and deeper into the night, I entered the town; and, plodding my solitary way to the same old docks, I passed through the gates, and scrambled my way among tarry smells, across the tiers of ships between the quay and the Highlander. My only resource was my bunk; in I turned, and, wearied with my long stroll, was soon fast asleep, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... modern capitals, the usual resort of ambitious young men. But Burke did not like the law as a profession, and early dropped the study of it; not because he failed in industry, for he was the most plodding of students; not because he was deficient in the gift of speech, for he was a born orator; not because his mind repelled severe logical deductions, for he was the most philosophical of the great orators of his day,—not because the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... Grey" by Anne, and "The Professor" by Charlotte. Eventually the two former were accepted for a three-volume issue, though eighteen months passed and much happened before the book was actually circulated. Meantime, "The Professor" was plodding its way round London through many rejections. Under these circumstances, her brother's brain mazed and his gifts and life lost, her father's sight hanging on a thread, her sisters in delicate health and dependent on her care, did the brave genius begin, with steady courage, the writing ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... below the twinkling stars. Villon cursed his fortune. Would it were still snowing! Now, wherever he went, he left an indelible trail behind him on the glittering streets; wherever he went he was still tethered to the house by the cemetery of St. John; wherever he went he must weave, with his own plodding feet, the rope that bound him to the crime and would bind him to the gallows. The leer of the dead man came back to him with a new significance. He snapped his fingers as if to pluck up his own spirits, and choosing a street at random, ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... played him out, and I dropped into a walk again. But around the corner at my heels came that persistent Mongolian. It was the old story of the hare and the tortoise. He could not run so fast as I, but he stayed with it, plodding along at a shambling and deceptive trot, and wasting much good breath in noisy imprecations. He called all Sacramento to witness the dishonor that had been done him, and a goodly portion of Sacramento heard and flocked at his heels. And I ran on like ...
— The Road • Jack London
... obedient child. She cooked the Doctor's meals and did the work about the house and yard as if nothing had disturbed her habits of lonely plodding. She believed implicitly all that was told her. Her son had pneumonia from cold he had taken in the long drive from Asheville. The house must be kept quiet. John Sanders was helping her nurse him. She was sure ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young woman ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... but for the knowledge of the value of the load Saxe would gladly have freed himself of the burden by letting it fall on the stones. But these were the crystals of which Dale was in search, and as he saw that his companion was patiently plodding on and making his way over the sharp, rough masses of stone with which the ravine was floored, he bent to his task patiently, though it seemed as though they would never reach the spot where the ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... world. The universal spread of elementary education, the universal access to the printed page, and the universal hope of better things, if not for oneself, at least for one's children, and even the universal restlessness that the industrialism of to-day have brought are better things than the dull plodding passivity of the older world. Only a false mediaevalism can paint the past in colors superior to the present. The haze of distance that dims the mountains with purple, shifts also the crude colors of the past into the soft ...
— The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice • Stephen Leacock
... brief half hour than she had ever known before, for the consciousness that her own life and that of her passenger depended upon her skill, sharpened her perceptions and quickened her judgment to such an extent that those moments of thrilling experience became equivalent to months of plodding study when the mind is comparatively dull ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... first rains, homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see Captain Jim returning from a visit to him, slowly plodding along the ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... respecting its origin and progress from an obscure fishing-town to such a focus of wealth and fashion as at this moment it presents. The celebrity of Brighton, we may observe, extends throughout the empire, and is almost as well known to the plodding and stay-at-home townsman of the north as to the luxurious idler ever and anon in quest of new pleasures. As the occasional abode of the Royal Family, its name has figured in the Court records of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 533, Saturday, February 11, 1832. • Various
... Freckles had turned aside into the little curved depression in the cliffs and was plodding slowly up the trail. Staring blindly at the rough, ragged cliffs and peaks ahead of her, the girl was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of helplessness. If Lynch failed her, what could she do? Whom could she turn to for ...
— Shoe-Bar Stratton • Joseph Bushnell Ames
... that, first of all, he would get rid of the useful daily plodding that occupies him. Instead of living to work he would ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... They began the slow, plodding gait of the packer again, finding it easier now that they were on the crest of a divide where the trail was less obstructed and firmer, and the yellow lines on the peak, their goal, came more plainly into view. The cross resolved itself into a peculiar slide of oxidized earth ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... no watching eyes, then he would slip over to the fireplace, lift the lion, draw out the cipher message, place it sometimes in his mouth, sometimes in his shoe, and as soon as his morning chores were done he would be seen plodding down the dusty road leading to the farm, where some one was eagerly waiting for the tidings he carried. Well had the Spy ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... cooperation with Jack Payson, of Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own age. The two young men became the closest of comrades. When the fever of adventure seized upon Lane, and he became dissatisfied with the plodding career of a wage-earner, Payson insisted on mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand dollars and in lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the mountains of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of ...
— The Round-up - A Romance of Arizona novelized from Edmund Day's melodrama • John Murray and Marion Mills Miller
... the air— And the capricious beams of Dian's light Gave something mystic to the scene most fair. I gave my cousin Dante's divine "Inferno," Imploring her to read il primo canto. "Lo giorno s'andava," she drawled; but, tired of plodding, Directly fell asleep, and pretty soon—was nodding!! "Cousin, sweet cousin," cried I out, "awake! I long for sympathy—compassion on me take: They say yon stars are worlds—dost think 'tis so?" "Really, my—dear (a yawn), I—don't exactly ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... shutters, and the winking weary policemen, and the roofs all shining gray in the gray dawn. They passed through the pitmen's village, all shut up and silent now, and through the turn-pike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; and at the wall's foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all drenched with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... inches. The irrigated land in Bannu is heavily manured and is often double-cropped. Wheat accounts for nearly half of the whole crops of the district. The Marwats are a frank manly race of good physique. The Bannuchis are hard-working, but centuries of plodding toil on a wet soil has spoiled their bodily development, and had its share in imparting to their character qualities the reverse of admirable. The Deputy Commissioner has also political charge of some 17,884 tribesmen living across ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... of lessons by running to his mother with a plea of headache or any trifle, and in youth he had escaped business in like manner. His father had tried him a few times in his office, but was soon glad to fall in with his wife's opinion, that her son "had too much spirit and refinement for plodding humdrum business, that he was a born gentleman and suited only to elegant leisure," and as his gentleman son only did mischief downtown, the poor over-worked father was glad to have him out of the way, for he with difficulty made both ends meet, as it ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... again to the lawn. By some odd chance, the long shots had been well toward the head of it, leaving the two favorites and the three second choices to bring up the rear. The Heathflower thing was immediately in front of them. She had moved so soberly, plodding with low head and sleepy eyes, the watchers had given her an ironic cheer, mingled with cat calls. All the others had got a welcome more or less enthusiastic, but it was only when Aramis, even-money favorite, came through the paddock gate that the ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm nursery. And down that narrow foot-path, meandering around the boulders and disappearing among the thickets, see what big loads of brushwood are moving towards us. Beneath them my swarthy and hardy peasants are plodding up the hill asweat and athirst. When I first descended to the wadi, one such load of brushwood emerging suddenly from behind a cliff surprised and frightened me. But soon I was reminded of the moving forest in Macbeth. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... on the change. Should not be surprised if we don't get a blizzard before long, but of course we don't want that. Hooper seems a bit fagged but he sticks it pretty well. Mr. Day keeps on plodding, his only complaint is should like a little ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... in the week; three for shorthand and two for typing. Her fellow scholars were drawn from all ages and all ranks—clerks, office boys, and grey-headed men; girls with their hair still in pig-tails, and elderly women with patient, strained faces, who would sit at their desks plodding through the intricacies of shorthand and paying very little attention to what went ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... and 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 ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... mildness, wisdom, and fortitude of her character might have left an indelible impression on some observant mind amongst her companions. My second sister, Elizabeth, too, may perhaps be remembered, but I cannot conceive that I left a trace behind me. My career was a very quiet one. I was plodding and industrious, perhaps I was very grave, for I suffered to see my sisters perishing, but I think I was remarkable for nothing.—Believe me, my dear ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability, the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous arrival in Bagdad, ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and helped her to learn some hymns and to read a little. This latter work seemed a hopeless task, as Mrs. Hsiao was not young; moreover, she was half blind. When the writer saw her next time she had, however, mastered quite a few hymns. Patiently she was plodding on, using every spare minute, determined to learn as much as possible, but lamenting her own stupidity. Mrs. Lue showed herself a patient teacher, and it was touching to see how persevering they both were, never losing heart, even when the hymns ...
— Everlasting Pearl - One of China's Women • Anna Magdalena Johannsen
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