"Stumpy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over before he could hop upon the wall, where he got at last, and shook the dust off his feathers with an angry "jark;" while Dick, withy staring eyes and his tongue hanging out, ran right between Philip's legs, made a feint at Fred, and then leaped right on Harry, who caught hold of his short stumpy tail as he went down and ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... amiable towards him, because they loved him; and because they wholesomely feared him, they were amiable in the main towards each other. There were certain members of the Family who might be described as perennial. They were of the nature of established institutions. Such were Stumpy, the freak-legged dachshund-setter; James Edward, the wild gander; Butters, the woodchuck; Melindy and Jim, the two white cats; Bones, the brown owl, who sat all day on the edge of a box in the darkest corner of the cabin; and ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a rough and hairy dog, he now appeared before God and men a shivering battered creature, dripping and wind-tossed, bedraggled and bewildered. And yet, even in that first distant glimpse, Jeremy discerned a fine independence. He was a short stumpy dog, in no way designed for dignified attitudes and patronising superiority; nevertheless, as he now wandered slowly up the street, his nose was in the air and he said to the whole world: "The storm may have done its best to defeat me—it has failed. ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... old humor lifted the corners of the wide mouth. "He is. Who's there left? Stumpy Gans, up at the railroad crossing? Or maybe Fatty Weiman, driving the garbage. Guess I'll doll up this evening and see if I can't make a ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... please," said a clear voice, and a short, stumpy girl with red hair and freckled face calmly entered the room ...
— Mary Louise Solves a Mystery • L. Frank Baum
... to you, my lad, because we knew that if you lost on such a fool play your name would be—well, anything but Thomas 'Stumpy' Warren." The reply to this sally was a boot launched at the center rush, for Tom Warren's middle name was in reality Saalfield, and "Stumpy" was a cognomen rather too descriptive to be relished by ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... and I stood looking after his stumpy figure. I was again in a broil, not of my making; just a bit of ill luck, for here was a nice business. I went in, and was caught on my way upstairs by my Aunt Gainor, who called ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... to my sorrow, showed what he thought about it by wagging his stumpy tail and whining with satisfaction, so that it would have been ridiculous to attempt to persuade myself that he failed to ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the herring fishery was to commence a few days after the occurrences last recorded. The boats had all returned from other stations, and the little harbour was one crowd of stumpy masts, each with its halliard, the sole cordage visible, rove through the top of it, for the hoisting of a lug sail, tanned to a rich red brown. From this underwood towered aloft the masts of a coasting schooner, discharging its load of coal at the little quay. Other ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... wrong," had been a maxim of his father, and he had found it a rule with no exceptions. He appreciated that there is a better way from the wrong road into the right than a mad dash straight across the stumpy fields and rocky gullies between. That rough, rude way, however, was the single way open to him here. Whenever it had become necessary for him to be firm with those he loved, it had rarely been possible for him to do right in the right way; he had usually been forced to do right in the ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... animals endowed with reason and speech. As in the German tales, certain peculiarities in the appearance and natural habits of animals are frequently accounted for by events that happened 'once upon a time'—for instance, the stumpy tail of the bear, by his misfortune when he went out fishing on the ice—so we find in the American tales, 'that it was when the two principal heroes (Hun-Ahpu and Xbalanque) had caught the rat and were going to strangle it over the fire, that le rat commenca a porter une queue sans ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... country-roads, the farmhouses stood snowed in, with black window-shutters, which showed dark against the walls and shut in the light, and stumpy chimneys, with thick smoke curling from them. Indoors, there was no seeing clearly: the lamp hung from the ceiling in a ring of steam and smoke and everything lay black and tumbled. In the hearth, the yule-log lay blazing. The farmer's ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... conversation with him, and crept in at the door like a whipped dog. Moylan was too old to feel any such compunctions, and consequently made what he intended to be taken as a very complaisant bow to his future patron. He was an ill-made, ugly, stumpy man, about fifty; with a blotched face, straggling sandy hair, and grey shaggy whiskers. He wore a long brown great coat, buttoned up to his chin, and this was the only article of wearing apparel visible upon him: in his hands he twirled a ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... tree,' added Frank, who was something of a botanist as well as his mother; 'I noticed that its bark is very rough, dropping off here and there in large curling scales. The branches, too, are very odd-looking; they have blunt, stumpy ends, that give the tree a clumsy appearance. Is ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... enterprising. The two last qualities were absolutely necessary to take them through the long, wearisome journey to Ohio, the then far West. They took up lands, built cabins, and forced a subsistence from the newly-cleared, stumpy virgin soil. This homogeneous people constituted a practical and thorough democracy. Their social relations were based on personal equality, varied only by the accident of superior talents, address or enterprise, and as yet but ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... (that was) is still among the quick, and remembers, it may interest her to know that that fair-haired English boy's name was no less than Bartholomew Josselin; and that another English boy, somewhat thick-set and stumpy, and not much to look at, held her in deep love, admiration, and awe—and has ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... "It's a stumpy world," said Luclarion Grapp to Mrs. Ripwinkley, afterward; "but some folks step right over their ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... and the strong would secure the best cards. The weak and courteous be left with pictures of post offices and railway stations. Torn and dishevelled, the crowd would rush back to the hotel, sweep crockery from the table, and—sucking stumpy pencils—write feverishly. A hurried meal would follow. Then the horses would be put to again, the German tourists would climb back to their places and be driven away, asking of the coachman what the name of the place they had just left ...
— The Angel and the Author - and Others • Jerome K. Jerome
... there was nothing to fear, whether from ghost, goblin, or white face, retired and brought her mistress, a short stumpy old dame, who had seen at least some sixty summers. Her nose was short, squat, and flabby at the end, and her eyes were bald of brows or lashes; but still she retained great energy of manner, and was blessed with an ever-smiling face. The dress she wore consisted of ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... not Thou forget me." A peculiar old prayer, but I kept on repeating it to myself with great comfort that evening. My men were rather quiet. Perhaps the general calmness was affecting them with kindred thoughts, though an Englishman never shows them. On the left stood the stumpy spire of Bayencourt Church just left by us. On the right lay Sailly-au-Bois in its girdle of trees. Along the side of the valley which ran out from behind Sailly-au-Bois, arose numerous lazy pillars of smoke from the wood fires and kitchens of an artillery encampment. An English aeroplane, ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... a stumpy masted vessel that seemed as still and dead as ocean that rotted around it. She had not a sail aloft nor a plume of smoke in her funnel. For the moment this lifelessness was not observed by the hungry castaways. A joyous medley arose from ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... cross-looking, thin, withered, bony woman, wrapped in a large shawl, and with boots thick enough to have kept her dry if she had walked through the sea from Plymouth to Mount Edgecombe. Her tete-a-tete companion was a short, thick, squat, stumpy, dumpy, dumpling of a man, in a round jacket, and very tight striped trousers. "Sure such a pair were never seen." The sour she, stepped into their small boat first, but as soon as her fat playfellow seated himself ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... are very narrow and round-headed, and there is in the north-western bay a pointed door, differing only from those of about a hundred years earlier in having twisted shafts. One curious feature is the parapet of the central aisle, which is like a row of small classical pedestals, each bearing a stumpy obelisk. By far the finest feature of the outside is the great west door. On each side are clusters of square pinnacles ending in square crocketed spirelets, and running up to a horizontal moulding which, as so often, gives the whole design a rectangular form. Within comes the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... Mrs. Timmins was bent upon asking, were Mr. and Mrs. John Rowdy, of the firm of Stumpy, Rowdy and Co., of Brobdingnag Gardens, of the Prairie, Putney, and of Lombard ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to face with the characters of that mining camp. "The assemblage numbered about a hundred men. One or two of these were actual fugitives from justice, some were criminal, and all were reckless." We shall remember "Kentuck" and Oakhurst and "Stumpy," christening ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... sha'n't be seein' much of you now. 'Tis like an end of old times. I reckoned we'd have a pipe together afore partin'." John pulled out a stumpy clay and filled it. "Got ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... grand for architecture of a more material description. It had, no doubt, a perfect right to be called a castle, as it was entered by a castle-gate which led into a court, the porter's lodge for which was built as it were into the wall; there were attached to it also two round, stumpy adjuncts, which were, perhaps properly, called towers, though they did not do much in the way of towering; and, moreover, along one side of the house, over what would otherwise have been the cornice, there ran a castellated parapet, through the assistance of ...
— Doctor Thorne • Anthony Trollope
... red-headed man, with his coarse, bristling crop of hair, and the mustache like the stumpy bristles of an old tooth brush, the tall, dark young fellow with the red sash and the silver spurs, poor Peggy's "romantic brigand," and the hawk-nosed man with the drooping mustache, who had formed the red-headed one's companion on ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... one, appears to deserve a particular description. The Wombat (or, as it is called by the natives of Port Jackson, the Womback) is a squat, thick, short-legged, and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength, and somewhat bigger than a large turnspit dog. Its figure and movements, if they do not exactly resemble those of the bear, at least strongly remind one of ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... understand!' And he told us what his discovery was. 'I've just come from the Chamber. They made me climb up to the amphitheatre. I could see the Deputies swarming like black insects at the bottom of a pit. Suddenly a stumpy little man mounted the tribune. He looked as if he were carrying a sack of coals on his back. He threw out his arms and clenched his fists. By Jove, he was comical! He had a Southern accent, and his delivery was full of defects. He spoke of the workers, of the proletariat, of social ...
— A Mummer's Tale • Anatole France
... bodily and mental characters, as well as by language. Physically they are without question the finest people of the country. Their skin-colour is decidedly fairer than that of Sea Dayaks or Kayans. They are of medium stature, with long backs and short, muscular, well-rounded limbs; a little stumpy in build, but of graceful and vigorous bearing. They are perhaps the most courageous and intelligent of the peoples; pugnacious, but less quarrelsome than the Sea Dayak; more energetic and excitable than the Kayan; hospitable and somewhat improvident, sociable and ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... sizes for roasting birds or joints, and in them bread was occasionally baked. The bake-kettle, which in some communities was also called a Dutch oven, was preferred for baking bread. It was a strong kettle, standing, of course, on stout, stumpy legs, and when in use was placed among the hot coals and closely covered with a strong metal, convex cover, on which coals were also closely heaped. Such perfect rolls, such biscuit, such shortcake, as issued from the heaped-up bake-kettle can never be ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... opened, and there entered a woman hardly yet past middle age, who had once been undoubtedly handsome, but on whose worn and faded face was the look of patient weariness which so often is the result of a youth spent in helping a husband to overcome the stumpy stubbornness of an American bush farm. When the farm is conquered, the victor is usually vanquished. It needed no second glance to see that she was the mother from whom the daughter had inherited her good looks. Mrs. Howard did not appear surprised to see a stranger standing ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... horse rack in front of it and a trampled space. It was flanked by its several sheds and barns on one hand and a woodpile on the other. Beyond the woodpile a rail fence inclosed a corn-field, and beyond the barns and sheds a similar fence defined the bounds of a stumpy pasture-lot. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the Huns some moving target practice, which in all probability would have resulted in his contributing to a sausage machine. I am sure I do not know what I should have done if this had happened while I was with the party, for Tom, when feeling lonely, used to run straight up to me, wagging his stumpy tail and looking up with eyes which so plainly said that he was indeed glad to meet a fellow-countryman, for, though Dutchmen were kind enough to him, the scent ...
— 'Brother Bosch', an Airman's Escape from Germany • Gerald Featherstone Knight
... down his glass and comes into the sitting-room, followed by WALTER. HECTOR is puffing at a short, stumpy ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... bark-fibres, the lining being of fine grass or tendrils of creepers. The number of eggs varies from two to four, three being the most common. They vary much in shape, and also in the depth of their ground-tint; some are regular ovals, others are stumpy at the small end, while now and then very spherical eggs are laid. They are either reddish white, 'fleshy,' or pure white, in some cases marked with small and large blotches of faded red, confluent at the obtuse end, and openly dispersed over the rest of the surface, ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... fierce and cruel the brute looked! How Thor hated it! and fairly gnashed his teeth with disgust that now, when his greatest chance was come, he for once was without his gun. He was in not a little fear, too, and stood wondering what to do. The Lynx growled louder; its stumpy tail twitched viciously for a minute, then it picked up its victim, and leaping from the log ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... and he was the next moment sitting on the summer-house floor, lifting up the animal tenderly, regardless of her expostulation that the injured, frightened creature might not know its friends. But she did it injustice; it wagged its stumpy tail, ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... discreet, possessed of an excellent heart, rode well, talked well, had fine black hair always curled, and dressed with taste. In short, he would have done honor and credit to a duchess. The advocate was ugly, short, stumpy, square-shouldered, mean-looking, and, moreover, a husband. Anna, tall and pretty, had almond eyes, white skin and refined features. She was all love; and passion lighted up her glance with a bewitching expression. ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... upon getting sight of him as he sat on his horse with rope in hand, it changed, and fled towards me, plunging its long neck, and uttering a short whistle, as though blowing off steam. Even while running, the short, stumpy wings were used to aid its flight and steady its body, which rocked, and rolled, and swayed to and fro like a ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... timbers were broken upon. Point Old thrusts out like the stubby thumb on a clenched first. The Rock and the outer nib of the Point are haunted by quarreling flocks of gulls and coots and the black Siwash duck with his stumpy wings and brilliant yellow bill. The southeaster sends endless battalions of waves rolling up there when it blows. These rear white heads over the Rock and burst on the Point with shuddering impact and showers ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a sawmill fifteen miles out of Three Rivers for a week or more; but the day I left I came back to that place on a buckboard driven by a French habitant of the locality. On our way we passed a little stumpy clearing where there was a small, new, very tidy house, neatly shingled and clapboarded, with plots of bright asters and marigolds about the door. Adjoining was an equally tidy barn, and in front one of the best-kept, most luxuriant gardens I had ever seen in Canada. Farther ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... Bullyed, does thee know a man named Adam Green?" The bull-head was shaken in sign of ignorance. "Loy-a-bed, does thee?" Lie-a-bed's opportunities of making acquaintance had been rather limited, and she could not resolve the difficulty. Stumpy (a man with a wooden leg), Cowskin, Spindleshanks, Corkeye, Pigtail, and Yellowbelly were severally invoked, but in vain; and the querist fell into a brown study, in which she remained for some time. At length, however, ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... Flying Cloud and the clippers of her kind—taut, serene, immaculate—were sailing through the lonely spaces of the South Atlantic and the Pacific, they sighted now and then the stumpy, slatternly rig and greasy hull of a New Bedford whaler, perhaps rolling to the weight of a huge carcass alongside. With a poor opinion of the seamanship of these wandering barks, the clipper crews rolled out, among their ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine
... fortissimo by some one outside. There is a clatter of ammunition boots getting into step, and a solemn procession of four files into the room. The leader thereof is a stumpy but enormously important-looking private. He is the escort. Number two is the prisoner. Numbers three and four are the accuser—counsel for the Crown, as it were—and a witness. The procession reaches the table at which the Captain is sitting. Beside him is a young officer, one Bobby Little, who ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... surlily, "that sailor," as Mark called him, a little stumpy fellow who looked as though he should have been plump and rosy, but who was ghastly pale instead, sauntered up slowly, looking very hard at Mark, and opened his lips as if to say something, but closed them again ...
— Dead Man's Land - Being the Voyage to Zimbambangwe of certain and uncertain • George Manville Fenn
... well-wooded country, some miles west of the present town of Huntsville, where the only serious annoyance and drawback was the immense number of these animals which prowled through the woods and decimated the poultry. Stumpy tailed, green eyed, they strolled through the clearing and sunned themselves on the limbs of neighboring trees, blinking calmly at the clucking hens which they marked for their prey, and even venturing to throw suspicious glances at the infant sleeping in its cradle. Sociable in their disposition, ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... and I do not think that your mother's letters since conveyed to my mind the fact that there had been any material change since. Therefore I own that you are personally quite different from what I had expected to find you. I had expected to find you, I think, rather stumpy in figure, and square in build, with a ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty
... in which there is something of the true smack of the sea, and an echo, if not of the cannon's roar, yet of the rough-voiced mirth of the forecastle; and the sea-fight lies embalmed, so to speak, and made immortal in the sea-song. The Arethusa was a stumpy little frigate, scanty in crew, light in guns, attached to the fleet of Admiral Keppel, then cruising off Brest. Keppel had as perplexed and delicate a charge as was ever entrusted to a British admiral. Great Britain was at war with her American colonies, and there was every sign ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... county town on business, and had been vexed into laying rough hands on one of the prominent citizens who was a trifle under the influence of liquor. A warrant was issued, and Dave McLendon, the sheriff of the county, a stumpy little man, whose boldness and prudence made him the terror of criminals, was sent to serve it. Abe, who was on the lookout for some such visitation, saw him coming, and prepared himself. He stood in the doorway, with his rifle flung ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... sprinting—for speed. Now, we do find among the various races of mankind that some have been given long heels, such as the dark-skinned natives of Africa and of Australia, while other races have been given relatively short, stumpy heels, of which sort the natives of Europe and of China may be cited as examples. With long heels less powerful muscular engines are required, and hence in dark races the calf of the leg is but ill developed, because the muscles which move the heel ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... had labored and floundered along for about an hour, the road turned to the left, and in a little stumpy clearing near the creek a gable uprose on our view. It did not prove to be just such a place as poets love to contemplate. It required a greater effort of the imagination than any of us were then capable of to believe it had ever been ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... shaping course for the Fleet Flagship. She was crowded to suffocation with singing, cheering sailor-men, and secured to her stumpy bowsprit was a silver cock. As she approached the stern of the Flagship, however, the uproar subsided, and the densely thronged drifter was white ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... cave bear half-way down from the brow, and making a gingerly backward step with his flat hind-foot. His hind-quarters were towards Ugh-lomi, and he clawed at the rocks and bushes so that he seemed flattened against the cliff. He looked none the less for that. From his shining snout to his stumpy tail he was a lion and a half, the length of two tall men. He looked over his shoulder, and his huge mouth was open with the exertion of holding up his great carcase, and ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... rawness that attends incipient civilization. Nature has been cleared away to make room for the art of man, and art has not yet got beyond the inchoate unloveliness of bare utilitarianism. The beautiful woods have given place to a charred, stumpy, muddy waste, on which stand the gaunt, new frame-houses. Gardens, orchards, cornfields, and meadows are things to come; until they do the natural beauty of the place is killed and insulted. But what have we to do with sentimental rubbish? ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the basement story is heaviest, and each succeeding story increases in lightness; in the Ducal palace this is reversed, making it unique amongst buildings. The outer walls rest upon the pillars of open colonnades, which have a more stumpy appearance than was intended, owing to the raising of the pavement in the piazza. They had, however, no base, but were supported by a continuous stylobate. The chief decorations of the palace were employed upon ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... she went into peals of laughter. She was interrupted by the entrance of four men in khaki, a short, stumpy sergeant of middle age, a young corporal, and two young privates. The woman leaned back in ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... he said. "It's got a funny stumpy end to it, whatever it is, and nips like a crab. Ah, no, you don't!" He pulled his hand out in a flash. "Shove in a book quickly. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... penny now and then, we laid them in a row, The girls they played the same old tunes, and let the new ones go; And when from college came our Jim with laurels on his brow, I led him to the stumpy field and put him ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For, Book Two • Various
... first. His stumpy tail grew rigid. Nose to the ground, he crawled and wriggled through the undergrowth, Bobby at his heels. And now Bobby saw the trail, footprints. It is true that they resembled those of heavy boots with nails. But on the other hand, no one could say surely that the ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... King's head on one side and various designs on the other, which are different according to the coins they adorn. It would be rather nice if money did grow on bushes. Supposing we could have a row of them in the garden. The penny ones might be like gooseberry bushes, rather low down and stumpy, and mother would say, 'Now, who will go and see if there are any ripe pennies for me to-day?' and we should see the great round brown pennies hanging ready to drop, and the little wee ones just beginning to grow, or perhaps ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... which opens like a little oven. The stork picks up reptiles in the mud of the marshes; its beak is straight-pointed, cutting as a knife, and resembles a long pair of pincers. The sparrow feeds especially on hard grains, difficult to break; accordingly its beak is stumpy, short, and thick, and is arched on the upper side for still further solidity. But I should never end if I began to enumerate all the thousand varieties in the bills of birds. Each variety, too, corresponds with ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... valiant, the Dog was vain, He flew at the prickly ball again, Snapping with all his might and main, But, oh! the pain! He sat down on his stumpy tail and howled, Then he laid his jaws on his ...
— Verses for Children - and Songs for Music • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... looking magnified here, where nature is so level; and at one end of this field, which was planted in corn that was now clinging dry to the naked stalks, an old lane descended to a shell-paved wharf of a stumpy, square form; and almost at the other, or western, end of the clearing stood a respectable farm-house of considerable age, with a hipped roof and three queer dormer windows slipping down the steeper half below, and two chimneys, not built outside of the house, as was the general fashion, but ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... a bull will sometimes turn in desperation on his persecutor. Then, unless the horse is well trained, serious consequences are likely to follow. The plunging thrust of his stumpy horns perhaps rips open the steed, sending the rider flying over the back of the furious bison, who may turn upon him and slay him before ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis
... said Agnes, sticking out her ugly foot in its broken boot—"too genteel—too neat. No one could make a lydy o' me. Look at my 'ands." She spread out her coarse, stumpy fingers. "Look at my face. Why, yere's a glass; let's stand side by side, an' then let's compare. Big face; no nose to speak of; upper lip two inches long; mouth—slit from ear to ear; freckles; eyes what the boys call pig's eyes; 'air rough and ...
— Sue, A Little Heroine • L. T. Meade
... beaded (fig. 84), has been bred for five years and selected for wings showing more beading. In extreme cases the wings have been reduced to mere stumps (see stumpy, fig. 5), but the stock shows great variability. It is probable here as Dexter has shown, that a number of mutant factors that act as modifiers have been picked up in the course of the selection, and when it is recalled that during those five years over ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... these fifteen year," said the old man, "and he barks at 'em still." He barked so fiercely at us that Fred would not go on board, to my great annoyance, for I never feel afraid of dogs, and was quite sure I could see a disposition to wag about the stumpy tail of the terrier ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... bothered about the storm." The three girls had encircled the Abbate. For an excellent reason. From his capacious pockets he produced quantities of luscious sweets, and popped them into the children's mouths with his stumpy fingers. Meanwhile Olivo gave the newcomer a circumstantial account of the rediscovery of Casanova. Dreamily Amalia continued to gaze at the ...
— Casanova's Homecoming • Arthur Schnitzler
... scraggy ones, now come In turn; the lean, ill-favored, gawky, bald, Long-nosed, uncouth, raw-boned, and those with scald And freckled, frowsy, ricketty and squat, The stumpy, bandy-legged, gaunt, each bought A man; though ugly as a toad, they sold, For every man with her received his gold. The heaped-up gold which beauteous maids had brought Is thus proportioned to the bidder's ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... jaws of the butterfly are developed from imaginal discs, and this fact explains how it comes to pass that they differ so widely from the corresponding structures in the caterpillar. The larval feelers (fig. 3 At) are short and stumpy, those of the butterfly long and many-jointed. The maxilla of the larva (fig. 3 Mx) consists of a base carrying two short jointed processes; in the butterfly a certain portion of the maxilla, the hood or galea, is modified into a long, flexible grooved process, capable of forming with ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... are least expected. Last and worst of our venomous snakes comes the death, or deaf, adder, for it is called indiscriminately by both names, and amply justifies either prefix. The hideous reptile is very thick and stumpy in proportion to its length, which rarely exceeds two feet, whilst its circumference may be put down at one-fifth of its total measurement. The tail is terminated by a small curved spike, which is ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... tall, are as a rule stumpy and thickset, with very small hands and feet, broad faces, and projecting cheekbones, a narrow nose without the aquiline bridge of the Amerindian, slanting narrow eyes, and long heads containing large well-developed brains. In disposition ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... of here!" cried Uncle Wiggily, as he grabbed up his valise and crutch. Then the water came up to his little short, stumpy tail. Next it rose higher, up to his knees. Then it rose still faster up to his front feet and then almost up to ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis
... high, commonly cultivated for ornament, well known in the islands, almost constantly bearing fragrant flowers, but rarely bearing fruit. Branches forked and peculiarly stumpy at the ends. Leaves alternate, broad lanceolate, entire, glabrous, the apices curved downward. Petioles short. Flowers creamy white, light yellow in the throat. Calyx 5-toothed. Corolla twisted, funnel-form, 5-lobed. Stamens 5, hidden in depths of the tube. Anthers dart- or arrow-formed. ...
— The Medicinal Plants of the Philippines • T. H. Pardo de Tavera
... hills so steep it is with difficulty we get the mortar and heavy baggage forward. Killed a green snake with black spots along its back, about four feet long, four to five inches in girt, and with a thick stumpy tail. The natives say its bite is venomous. Our course today has been north along the banks of the Ipu river; the noise of the rapids so great that when near it we can with difficulty hear each other ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... burst down on the fair Vale, Alfred's own birthplace and heritage. And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma. "The Christians led up their line from the lower ground. There stood also on that same spot a single thorn-tree, marvellous stumpy (which we ourselves with our very own eyes have seen)." Bless the old chronicler! Does he think nobody ever saw the "single thorn-tree" but himself? Why, there it stands to this very day, just on the edge of the slope, and I ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... long day's work before us, we were enabled to make but a short stay, so, bidding him and his family a sincere good-bye and good speed, we renewed our journey. We soon came in sight of the black stumpy monuments of one of the most disastrous conflagrations which ever victimized a forest. Some idea may be formed of the ravages of the "devouring element," from the simple fact that it all but totally consumed every stick of timber covering a space of forty-five ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... a rock by a short stumpy stalk, sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn case or the receptacle of the ova (if that ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... and even the chamber at Mycenae from even the rudest and most archaic of the remaining Hellenic works of Greece. The Doric temple at Corinth is attributed, as has been stated, to the seventh century B.C. This was a massive masonry structure with extremely short, stumpy columns, and strong mouldings, but presenting the main features of the Doric style, as we know it, in its earliest and rudest form. Successive examples (Figs. 53 to 53b) show increasing slenderness of proportions and refinement of treatment, and are accompanied by sculpture ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith
... night; I remember 'cause there was a right smart crowd in an' I was busy an' Stumpy kep' pesterin' me until I 'tended to him. He won't have nothin' lef by this, though; it ain't Stumpy's way to save his money long. Firs' time I ever knowed him to have three dollars all ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... a deafening roar. The guests, tickled by the words that fell so pat, twisted and squirmed with laughter, digging their fingers into their neighbours' ribs to emphasize the details. But Barney, in trying to imitate a stumpy man with an umbrella, as the song demanded, tripped and lay where he ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone
... to blows or other injuries likely to be productive of lameness—that is, always supposing, of course, that the foot in other respects is of good shape. If lameness is met with at all, then it is where we have a foot that is in other respects unsound, with badly contracted heels and upright 'stumpy' hoof, or where side-bones have occurred in a young animal, and have already reached a large size before the horse is put to labour. In this latter case, the added effects of concussion and the evil influences of shoeing are sufficient to turn the scale. Directly the animal, previously sound, ...
— Diseases of the Horse's Foot • Harry Caulton Reeks
... are baby dolls with bodies made of grey cardboard, smiling after the manner of idols, monstrous and serene as they. Little six-penny dolls, dressed like servant girls, stretch out their arms, little stumpy arms so flimsy that the least breath of air sets them a-tremble. But the little maid whose hair is made of liquid light, has no eyes for these dolls and puppets. Her whole soul hangs upon the lips of a beautiful baby doll that seems to be calling her his mummy. He is hitched ...
— Marguerite - 1921 • Anatole France
... and sloops o' war put their glasses on us lazily as we neared Momba; but with our Dutch bow and stern, our stumpy spars, no self-respecting war-ship was bothering the Triton. They let us pass without so much as ...
— Wide Courses • James Brendan Connolly
... the pier, having put the dominie ashore, when I heard myself called, and there, at the head of the piers stood my skipper, Davie Flett, newly arrived from Kirkwall. How thankful I was to see his familiar stumpy figure again I need ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... piece of scrubbing-soap on the table, and an unwrung house-flannel soaking on the seat of a wooden chair. There is a nice, old-fashioned, round-fronted chest-of-drawers with brass handles in the room, but the most striking detail of its equipment is a stumpy and amazingly abrupt bedstead against the wall, which is just big enough for a big doll. The bedclothes of this eerie little cot are thrown back, and in the centre of the rumpled mattress, in the hollow made by my heroine's recumbent form, curled ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... Ramai and Somai came to a village and took some waste land from the headman, and ploughed it and sowed millet; and their plough was only drawn by cows and their ploughshare was very small, what is called a "stumpy share;" and when they had sowed a little the rains came on; and Somai gave up cultivation and took to fishing and for a time he made very good profits by catching and selling fish; and he did not trouble even to reap the millet he had sown; he laughed at Ramai ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... thousands of bull-headed forwards who had come upon him like thunder-bolts in the days of old. With the ease begotten by practice he circled his assailant with his long muscular arms, and gave a quick convulsive jerk in which every sinew of his body participated. The red-bearded man's stumpy legs described a half-circle in the air, and he came down on the stone pavement with a sounding crash which shook every particle of breath from ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... through this lesson much better than usual, but he lingered at my mother's knees, to point with his own little stumpy forefinger to each recurrence of the words "hit a Dog," and read them ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... the sharp, low, stumpy pine ridges in haphazard fashion, like a Swiss village. A small brook ran through it, smothered here and there in snow. A sawmill was the largest figure of the town, and the railway station was the centre. There ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Fox, old boy?" asked Wade, with low voice, as he peered ahead. The wind was in the wrong direction for him to approach close to game without being detected. Fox wagged his stumpy tail and looked up with knowing eyes. Wade proceeded cautiously. The swamp was a rank growth of long, weedy grasses and ferns, with here and there a green-mossed bog half hidden and a number of dwarf oak-trees. Wade's horse sank up to his knees in the mire. ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... stumpy front legs!" called Jack, who had forgotten his empty stomach in the excitement about this little creature, which looked like a cricket and yet was ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody
... horses are drawing heavy loads. The majority of them crawl patiently along, with their heads down and with reeking flanks and shoulders, pausing occasionally as the water-bars brace the wheels, and impatient only with the flies that vex their ears, and the insufficiency of their short and stumpy tails to protect their quivering sides. Some of these animals are not so patient, but are nervous and spasmodic and unhappy. I have noticed one among them particularly, that has a very bad time every morning with his first ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... on his side upon the snow, and a full seven feet he stretched from the tip of his nose to the root of his stumpy tail. No such wolf as he had ever been put inside a cage, and it was rare, indeed, to find one so large, even in the mountains south of the ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... and began to unlace his brogues. Meanwhile from a side-table his wife brought a silver tobacco-box and a stumpy Irish clay. The slippers substituted for his shoes, Kerry lovingly filled the cracked and blackened bowl with strong Irish twist, which he first teased carefully in his palm. The bowl rested almost under his nostrils when he put the pipe in his mouth, and how he contrived to light it ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... teeth, the nose, really very well shaped in young children, generally alters its shape as they get older, and it becomes blocked up with mucous matter, causing it unduly to expand at the bridge, and giving it rather a stumpy, fat appearance. The nostrils are not very sharply and powerfully cut in most cases, and are rounded up and undecided, a ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... appear in the dock looking like a young clergyman, dressed in a complete suit of black, a long frock coat, fitting him up to the neck and very nearly down to the heels. He had the appearance of a very tame curate. His hair, instead of being short and stumpy, as when the young policeman saw him, was now long, shiny, and carefully brushed over both sides of his forehead, which gave him the appearance so fashionable amongst the saints of the ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... speech Mr. Tressamer made!' ventured a fifth juryman, a short, stumpy watchmaker from Porthstone itself. 'I believe he's ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... unphilosophic philosopher had smoked his pipe—a singularly cold and uncomfortable perch. And here was where Mrs. Carlyle had tried to build a tent and to imagine herself in the country. And here was the famous walnut tree—or at least the stumpy bole thereof. And here was where the dog Nero was buried, best known ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... The stumpy little lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he is gentler ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... way," said Rap. "I was up in a hickory tree trying to look over into a Woodpecker's hole that was in another tree, when I stepped on a stumpy branch that was rotten and partly broke off; and there, inside, was a soft nest made of feathers, with, four very little birds in it. I was afraid they would fall out, but there was enough of the branch left to hold them in. While I was wondering ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... loved. But there were no feelings of that kind to come in the way of the detestation he felt for Lucy. Helen had told him that Lucy had fair hair and wore it in two plaits; and he pictured her to himself as a fat, stumpy little girl, exactly like the little girl in the story of 'The Sugar Bread' in the old oblong 'Shock-Headed Peter' book that had belonged to ...
— The Magic City • Edith Nesbit
... a dense undergrowth of Spice-Bush, Witch-Hazel, and Alder, I meet the Worm-Eating Warbler. In a remote clearing, covered with Heath and Fern, with here and there a Chestnut and an Oak, I go to hear in July the Wood-Sparrow, and returning by a stumpy, shallow pond, I am sure to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... breakfast, had looked up, and in awe-struck tones simultaneously exclaimed, "Why, we are at war!" and "War has been declared!" And then Mrs. Otway, as was her wont, had fallen into eager, impulsive talk. But she had to stop abruptly when the dining-room door opened—for it revealed the short, stumpy figure of Anna, smiling, indeed beaming even more than usual, as she brought in the coffee she made so well. Mother and daughter had looked at one another across the table, an unspoken question in each pair of kind eyes. That question was: Did ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... born, thirty miles away, and reached it the same night and stayed there; it was not till towards evening that the rest came back cautiously to make inquiries. One was trying to walk on two legs, and most of 'em looked more or less singed; and a little, singed, stumpy-tailed dog, who had been in the habit of hopping the back half of him along on one leg, had reason to be glad that he'd saved up the other leg all those years, for he needed it now. There was one old one-eyed cattle-dog round that shanty for ...
— Joe Wilson and His Mates • Henry Lawson
... figures recall, to the artist's mind, much of the myth of Manabozho, the Prometheus and the Deucalion, the Cain and the Noah of the dwellers by the great lake. Manabozho was a great chief, who had two wives that quarrelled. The two stumpy half-figures (4) represent the wives; the mound between them is the displeasure of Manabozho. Further on (5) you see him caught up between two trees—an unpleasant fix, from which the wolves and squirrels refused to extricate him. The kind of pyramid with a figure at ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade Appeared the writing implements home-made! What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out, Slit or unslit, with many a various snout, Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby. Stumpy and stubby; Some capable of ladye-billets neat, Some only fit for ledger-keeping clerk, And some to grub down Peter Stubbs his mark, Or smudge through some illegible receipt; Others in florid caligraphic plans, Equal to ships, ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... to row in Jimmy Kinsella's boat. The oar was short and stumpy with a very narrow blade. It was worked between two thole pins of which one was cracked and required tender treatment. It was impossible to pull comfortably while sitting in the middle of the seat; he still hit Priscilla in the back when he swung ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... Tavernier and Bazard were lifting a few boxes into a farm-wagon. The carriage from Trois-Feuilles was also there, a stumpy Alsatian peasant on the box. But there were yet no signs of the escort of gendarmes which had been ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers
... the place we found the foresters watching the dachshunde. These I discovered to be long, flat, shallow dogs with stumpy legs—a dog which an American has described as "looking as if he was always coming out from under a bureau." Very cautiously here and there the foresters uncovered a burrow, and a dachshund disappeared. Then from below ground came the sounds of fighting. ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... on us while she wrote it down with a stumpy pencil he lent her; but Oswald could swear that he heard money chink, and that there was something large and round wrapped up in the paper ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit
... as the Fox had said, and held his tail a long, long time down in the hole, till it was frozen in fast. Then he pulled it out with a cross pull, and it snapped short off. That's why Bruin goes about with a stumpy tail ...
— East O' the Sun and West O' the Moon • Gudrun Thorne-Thomsen
... distinguished from each other only by their names. Greta's had "Wilhelmina" painted on the side in black letters, while Minchen's had "Gouda" in red letters. They were similar to American canal-boats in shape, and of a dark red-brown color. Will thought them stumpy and heavy-looking; and he did not admire the red sails with crooked gaffs, and smiled at the blue pennants, stretched out on stiff frames that turned with the wind. But when Greta showed him a tiny windlass on the deck, by means of which she easily raised and ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, Nov 1877-Nov 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Church's fish pails only of the ordinary size. There is never any ill-feeling after a little spar, and each proceeds, in the most amicable way, to steal some other pelican's fish. A spar at this club, by-the-bye, is a joyous and hilarious sight. Two big birds with stumpy legs and top-heavy beaks, solemnly prancing and manoeuvring before one another with an accompaniment of valiant gobbles and a punctuation of occasional ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... are beautiful. Did you know it?" he said, gently, and led her to a little stumpy rocking-chair with a gay red-and-blue rag cushion that Mrs. Tanner always kept sitting by the front door in pleasant weather. Then he stood off and surveyed her, while the red stole into her cheeks becomingly. "What has Miss Earle been doing to glorify you?" he asked, ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill
... and his wrinkled old face beamed as he untwisted a black and stumpy clay from his perforated and pendulous ear-lobe, which hung full down upon his shoulder, and, turning it upside down, tapped the palm of his left ...
— Pakia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... in profile, we distinguish the regular position (fig. 5b) and designate all forward deviations as acute-angled (long toe and low heel, fig. 5a), and all deviations backward from the regular (steep toe and high heel, fig. 5c) as steep-toed, or stumpy. When the body weight is evenly distributed over all four limbs, the foot-axis should be straight; the long pastern, short pastern, and wall at the toe should have the ...
— Special Report on Diseases of the Horse • United States Department of Agriculture
... thirty years. A dirty hue of face; small, dull, tipsy eyes; a button-like nose; curved moist lips with drooping corners, and a short wisp of harsh hair escaping from beneath her kerchief; a long flat figure, stumpy hands and feet. I paused opposite her. She stared at me, and burst into a laugh, as though she knew all that was going ...
— The Moscow Census - From "What to do?" • Lyof N. Tolstoi
... of the mangled remains of M'ling, I heard a light footfall behind me, and turning quickly saw the big Hyena-swine perhaps a dozen yards away. His head was bent down, his bright eyes were fixed upon me, his stumpy hands clenched and held close by his side. He stopped in this crouching attitude when I turned, his eyes ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... and the dog returned, limping on three legs, his ears drooping, his stumpy tail dejected. He paused in the middle of the walk, and at a sharp clap, as of two hands, he dropped limply on his side, rolled to his back, and stiffened there pathetically, ...
— While Caroline Was Growing • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... Ladysmith. Well, it had made its last journey this time! The four dead horses had not been cut away from the traces, and from underneath the huddled and twisted heap stuck out an arm, and in the hand was clutched one of those short, stumpy whips which are used by the lead driver of a gun. I can see that poor chap in my mind thrashing and urging his team of horses into a gallop, for it was not reckoned wise to meander about the streets of Ypres, and ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips |
