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Hard-featured   Listen
adjective
Hard-featured  adj.  Having coarse, unattractive or stern features.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Hard-featured" Quotes from Famous Books



... perplexed than ever by the curious regard in the hard-featured countenance. For there was something very like ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... watched the hard-featured, resolute, pitiless salesman, as he sat doggedly in the chair wherein he had installed himself, unflinchingly extolling the merits of his undesired wares. A spirit of wistful emulation took possession of the author; why could he not live up to the cold stern name he had adopted? ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki

... describe to you, my Curtius, the effect of this little narrative upon myself, or upon those who, as he spoke, had gathered round, especially those hard-featured soldiers. Tears flowed down their weather-beaten faces, and one of them—Macer, as I afterward learned—cried out: 'Where now are the gods of Rome?' Probus started from his seat, apparently for the first time conscious of any other listener ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware

... secretly aspired to be a brilliant hostess. She could remember when the doors of Belle Plain were open to whoever had the least claim to distinction—statesmen and speculators in land; men who were promoting those great schemes of improvement, canals and railroads; hard-featured heroes of the two wars with England—a diminishing group; the men of the modern army, the pathfinders, and Indian fighters, and sometimes a titled foreigner. She wondered if Tom had maintained the traditions ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... straggling, unkempt villages, with a store or two, a tavern,—sometimes good, often a "scandalous hog-sty," where travellers were devoured by fleas, and every one slept and ate in one room,[18]—a small log school-house, and a little church, presided over by a hard-featured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and zealous, probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but nevertheless a great power ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... the matter, and Flora, not without some difficulty, got rid of the promising candidate for matrimony and emigration. Her place was instantly supplied by a tall, hard-featured, middle-aged woman, who had been impatiently waiting for Miss Pack's dismissal, in the kitchen, and who now rushed upon the scene, followed by three rude children, from six to ten years of age, a girl, and two impudent-looking ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... a doubt whether I have not made the foregoing portrait too hard-featured for historical accuracy; and, by way of fortifying his opinion, points to illustrious examples of men who have taught schools in their youth—senators and statesmen—some of whom now hold prominent positions before ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel

... a strong, large-boned, hard-featured woman, about forty, dressed as if her clothes had been flung on with a pitchfork, her cheeks flushed with a scarlet red where they were not smutted with soot and lamp-black, jostled through the crowd, and, brandishing high a child of two years old, which she danced ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... several lengths of rich silken stuffs were spread out; and on other benches near the windows sat two or three girls busily at work. Several elder ladies were moving about the room, and one of them, a rather stout, hard-featured woman, was examining the girls' work. ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... holly bush near—and the running stream made a low, soft, sweet accompaniment. All was the same; Nature was as fresh and young as ever. It might have been yesterday that Edward Williams had overtaken her, and told her his love—the thought of his words—his handsome looks—(he was a gray, hard-featured man by this time), and then she recalled the fatal wintry morning when joy and youth had fled; and as she remembered that faintness of pain, a new, a real faintness—no echo of the memory—came over her. She leant her back against ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various

... down to the fortunate circumstance that the evening papers had published rough wood-cuts which professed to be my portrait, and which naturally led the public to look out for a brazen-faced, raw-boned, hard-featured termagant. ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... These guided her forward; until she came forth at last upon the clearing whence the smoke arose. A hut stood in the clear shadow, hard by a brook which made a series of inconsiderable falls; and on the threshold the Princess saw a sun- burnt and hard-featured woodman, standing with his hands behind ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson

... about to close for ever. Here beauty, late glowing in youthful lustre and consciousness, now wan and neglected, knelt fanning with uncertain motion the beloved, who lay striving to paint his features, distorted by illness, with a thankful smile. There an hard-featured, weather-worn veteran, having prepared his meal, sat, his head dropped on his breast, the useless knife falling from his grasp, his limbs utterly relaxed, as thought of wife and child, and dearest relative, all lost, passed across his recollection. There sat a man ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... dressed lumber is costly in the Bush. Looking through the open door into the general living-room, which was also lighted, he could see a red twinkle beneath the register of the stove, beside which a woman was sitting sewing. She was a hard-featured, homely person in coarsely fashioned garments, which did not seem to fit her well, and Nasmyth felt slightly disconcerted when he glanced at her, for she was not the woman whom he had expected to see. Then his glance rested on a man, who had also figured in his uncertain ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... after due scrutiny of the man. He had seen her before, and apparently was waiting to be recognized. He now took off his hat, and grinned a smile of pleasure. He was a rough-headed, hard-featured personage, not old, but very weather-beaten. His attire was decent and clean; that of his children singularly neat. It was our old friend Farren. ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... its inmates—for which services each man pays her a penny a day, has from time immemorial taken upon herself the duty of bestowing a "morning" on the Christmas anniversary upon the men she "does for." Accordingly, about a quarter to six, she enters the room—a hard-featured, rough-voiced dame, perhaps, with a fist like a shoulder of mutton, but a soldier herself to the very core and with a big, tender heart somewhere about her. She carries a bottle of whisky—it is ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes

... Mejnour had engaged for his strange abode were such as might suit a philosopher of few wants. An old Armenian, whom Glyndon recognized as in the mystic's service at Naples; a tall, hard-featured woman from the village, recommended by Maestro Paulo; and two long-haired, smooth-spoken, but fierce-visaged youths, from the same place, and honored by the same sponsorship,—constituted the establishment. The rooms used by the sage were commodious and weather-proof, ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... loathsome, hideous, grewsome, frightful; (Colloq.) crossgrained, ill-natured, unamiable, inaffable, surly, refractory, vicious, indocile, spiteful, sullen, morose; uncomely, hard-visaged, homely, ill-favored, hard-featured. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... a spot as this the town we shall call Fairport was built. Axe in one hand and Bible in the other, stern settlers here found a home. Strong hard-featured sons, and fair rosy-cheeked daughters made glad the rude cabins that were soon scattered along the shore. The axe was plied in the woods, and the needle by the fireside, and yet grim Poverty was ever shaking ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis

... where he died within four months of his retreat—was the finest of fine gentlemen. Before he had demonstrated his professional capacity, the habitual costliness and delicacy of his attire roused the distrust of attorneys, and on more than one occasion wrought him injury. An awkward, crusty, hard-featured attorney entered the foppish barrister's chambers with a bundle of papers, and on seeing the young man in a superb and elaborate evening dress, is said to have inquired, "Can you say, sir, when Mr. Yates will return?" "Return, ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson

... crowned the barren hill there stood a single giant boulder, and against this boulder there lay a tall man, long-bearded and hard-featured, but of an excessive thinness. His placid face and regular breathing showed that he was fast asleep. Beside him lay a little child, with her round white arms encircling his brown sinewy neck, and her golden haired head resting upon the breast of his velveteen tunic. Her rosy lips were parted, ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle

... against Nick Carter, Surly Bob?" asked Madge, smiling. She liked the looks of this hard-featured individual. He was just brutal enough in his appearance to satisfy her ideas of what ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter

... simple enough—it was to meet an American! I know that race! Who but an American would have heard of our little experiment here, and not only wanted to know—they all do that—but positively arranged to know? Yes, he was a hard-featured man—a man of wealth, I imagine—from some place, the grotesque and extravagant name of which I could not even accurately retain, in the State ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson

... a curt order. The room was a simplified edition of the room on the top floor; everything was there, but in a less luxurious degree, and the result was insignificant. The manager of the Lack Vale Coal Company, who sat at the table, was a hard-featured, thin-lipped man of forty-five, with thin hair already turning grey, and pince-nez dangling from his ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant

... way was to Jasper Losely a supreme blessing compared to that benignant compassionate espionage, with its relentless eye and restraining hand. Alas and alas! deem not this perversity unnatural in that headstrong self-destroyer! How many are there whom not a grim, hard-featured Arabella Crane, but the long-suffering, divine, omniscient, gentle Providence itself, seeks to warn, to aid, to save; and is shunned, and loathed, and fled from, as if it were an evil genius! How many are there who fear nothing so much ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... was ugly and dirty, the shop was ugly and dirty. The interior into which he passed was dark, odoriferous, bare of stock, poverty-smitten. A woman, lean, hard-featured, with thin grey hair disordered and unkempt, looked up quickly at his coming and as quickly down again. Her face was perhaps too lifeless to express any emotion whatsoever, but there might have been a shade of disappointment in the swift withdrawal ...
— A People's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... entered the dining-room a woman who painted pictures and sold them. Hedwig Vogel was about fifty, tall, angular, hard-featured. She was reported to be very rich and very mean. Moreover, she was an undoubted democrat; for when Elsa von Ente's lady patron came to the house, everybody kissed the august dame's hand except Hedwig Vogel and "the Mees." Of course "the Mees," poor thing! knew no better; but FrAulein Vogel!—a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various

... required it. Such are the deeds by which an officer can easily win the hearts of seamen. I had not to wait long before I was told to walk into his room, and I found myself in the presence of a dark and somewhat hard-featured man—with a figure, however, tall, well-proportioned, and dignified. Had I not known him by repute I should have been somewhat awe-struck, but as he spoke his countenance brightened up, and his kind look dissipated ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston

... at the Gare de l'Ouest with Jean and her boxes and baskets, an upright, hard-featured, fierce-eyed figure, all ready to defend the child against all sorts of imaginary perils. The bookbinder kissed the lad and expressed his satisfaction ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France

... was near forty; a thin, hard-featured spinster, dwelling alone with her mother the Lady Balgarnock. Her two younger sisters had married early—the one to Captain Luce, of Dunragit in Wigtownshire, the other to a Mr. Forbes, of whom I know nothing save that his house was in Edinburgh: and as they had no great love for Miss Catherine, ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... and commonalty on different sides of the Tweed. The boors of Northumberland are lusty fellows, fresh complexioned, cleanly, and well cloathed; but the labourers in Scotland are generally lank, lean, hard-featured, sallow, soiled, and shabby, and their little pinched blue caps have a beggarly effect. The cattle are much in the same stile with their drivers, meagre, stunted, and ill equipt. When I talked to my uncle on this subject, he said, ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett

... river, with its graceful water-curves and white foam; and a steady murmur, low, deep voices of water, the softest, sweetest sound of Nature, blends with the sigh of the south wind in the pine-tops. But these hard-featured saints of the New Canaan "care for none of these things." The stout hearts which beat under their leathern doublets are proof against the sweet influences of Nature. They see only "a great and howling wilderness, where be many Indians, but where fish may be taken, and where be meadows for ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... of Simla and Lahore. You'll find none of the 'beer and skittles' of the country up here. But the Frontier has its own fascination all the same; especially when a man has the spirit of it in his blood. Desmond, for instance, wouldn't give a brass farthing for life out of sight of those hard-featured hills. Do you know him and his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... ordered two of the leaders to be seized and kept prisoners, until the drinker of sassy-wood should be given up. This had the desired effect; and, in half an hour, there came to the Government House a hard-featured man of about fifty, escorted by a crowd, no small portion of which was composed of his own multifarious wives and children, all displaying symptoms of high satisfaction. He looked much exhausted, but was taken into ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... day grew on there came an old, hard-featured man who wept as women weep. "I was cruel to the lad," he muttered; "and now I would have made amends,—yea, to the half of my substance,—and he should have been to me ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various

... was slowly becoming inured; but the strangeness of her life she could not yet comprehend—its meaningless days and nights, its dragging hours—and the strange people around her immersed in their sordid pleasures—this woman—her husband's sister, thin-lipped, hard-featured, drinking, smoking, gambling, shrill in disputes, merciless of speech, venomously curious concerning all that she held locked in the privacy ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... pleasant theory—that every woman may be loved, once at least in her life, if she so wills it. It must be true: how, otherwise, can you account for the number of hard-featured visages—lighted up by no redeeming ray of intellect—that preside at "good men's feasts," and confront them at their firesides? How do the husbands manage? Do they, from constantly contemplating an inferior ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence

... chairs, expanded until she fancied herself in the drawing-room of Blenheim House. Between the landladies there was little enough to choose. Mrs. Raithby Lawrence, notwithstanding her caustic tongue and suspicious nature, had at least made some pretense at gentility. The woman who faced her now—hard-featured, with narrow, suspicious eyes and a mass of florid hair—was unmistakably ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... girls here mentioned (to wit, Silence and Sukey) were the eldest and the youngest of a numerous, family, the offspring of three wives of Seth Jones, of whom these two were the sole survivors. The elder, Silence, was a tall, strong, black-eyed, hard-featured woman, verging upon forty, with a good, loud, resolute voice, and what the Irishman would call "a dacent notion of using it." Why she was called Silence was a standing problem to the neighborhood; for she had more faculty and inclination for making a noise than ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... visitors who, branching off from the great stream of travellers who inundated Europe, came as far as Toledo. But after a little while the people he saw every afternoon seemed to him just the same. There were the same questions, the same stiff and hard-featured Englishwomen, and the same o-o-o-h's of cold and conventional admiration, and the same identical way of turning their backs with rude pride when there was nothing else to be shown. Returning to the quiet of the upper cloister after the daily exhibition ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... by want of food. 'It hae no faither,' sobbed the mother; and for a moment I did not catch the meaning that the father had left to the mother all the burden of a child unallowed by law. In another lay the corpse of a mother, with the children round her, and hard-featured, gentle-hearted women came in to take back to their overcrowded beds 'the mitherless bairns.' In yet another a woman, shrunken and yellow, crouched over a glimmer of fire; "I am dying of cancer of the womb," she said, with that pathetic resignation ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... directly asked the question, curious as I had been to know their history and the purpose of their visits. Had I not learned from Mr Clayton the impropriety and sinfulness of judging humanity by its looks, I should have formed a most uncharitable opinion of their characters. They were hard-featured men, sallow of complexion, rigid in their looks. I knew that, attached to the church of Mr Clayton, were two missionaries—men of rare piety, and some of humble origin—small boot-makers, in fact; sometimes I believed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various

... was of the ordinary class, and the carriers were poorly clad, hard-featured men, but stout and well trained. They ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... minutes in the laboratory, then went downstairs. Two other guests had meanwhile arrived, and were conversing with the hostess, Miss Moxey. The shy, awkward, hard-featured girl was grown into a woman whose face made such declaration of intellect and character that, after the first moment, one became indifferent to its lack of feminine beauty. As if with the idea of compensating for personal disadvantages, ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... end of time. The leg was broken in two places between the knee and thigh. Emil, helped by his frightened playmates, managed to drag himself to the front sidewalk, where he fainted. The children of the neighbourhood were afraid of the hard-featured shrew who presided over the Bartell house; but, summoning their resolution, they rang the bell and told Ann Bartell of the accident. She did not even look at the little lad who lay stricken on the sidewalk, but slammed the door and went back to her wash- tub. The time passed. A drizzle came ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London

... and we all walked up and down the garden, talking over a thousand plans for making ends meet in that little household. To their young hopefulness even poverty itself became a jest; and was met cheerfully, like an honest, hard-featured, hard-handed friend, whose rough face was often kindly, and whose harsh grasp made one feel ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... up. A trim, clean-shaven, hard-featured young man in naval uniform was standing upon the threshold. He ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... eighty-one, dependent, save in moments of excitement, upon his knotted stick, hard-featured, with a rusty beard and a shabby black hat, departed slowly for his own quarters. Miss Prentiss, twenty-one, hazel-eyed and graceful, with a wonderful creamy skin, under a crown of auburn braids, sank dreamily ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various

... of the eight Virtues:—Faith, Hope, Charity, Justice, Temperance, Prudence, Humility (the Venetian antiquaries call it Humanity!), and Fortitude. The Virtues of the fourteenth century are somewhat hard-featured; with vivid and living expression, and plain every-day clothes of the time. Charity has her lap full of apples (perhaps loaves), and is giving one to a little child, who stretches his arm for it across a gap in the leafage of the capital. Fortitude tears open ...
— Stones of Venice [introductions] • John Ruskin

... shade to render its uncomely front less unattractive. Hampton could scarcely refrain from forming a mental picture of the woman who would most naturally preside within so unpolished an abode—an angular, hard-featured, vinegar-tempered creature, firm settled in her prejudices and narrowed by her creed. Had the matter been left at that moment to his own decision, this glimpse of the house would have turned them both back, but the ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... punishment, cowered lower, then, obeying some impulse, looked up, and saw the back of the young priest. He was running. As her dull gaze was about to fall again, it encountered for a moment the indignant blue eyes of a red-haired, hard-featured, but distinguished-looking young man, clad in sober gray. She knew him to be the American, Malcolm Sturges, the guest of the Governor. But her mind rapidly shed all impressions but the wretched horror of her own plight. In another moment she felt the shears at her neck, and knew that her disgrace ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton

... some friends, and hearing that Hugh was in residence there, had called upon him. Hugh was very much interested to see him, and gradually began to discern the smooth-faced boy he had known, under the worn and hard-featured mask of the priest. They spent most of that day together, and went out for a long walk. Hugh thought he perceived a touch of fanaticism about Maitland, who found it difficult to talk except on matters connected with his parish. But eventually he began to talk of the religious ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... The hard-featured Hans set his teeth and made no answer. Only he looked backward at his pursuers and onward at those who barred the way. ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

... she knew Joanna could attend to her, found Daisy in the housekeeper's room. Joanna was a tall, rather hard-featured woman, with skill and capacity in every line of her face however, and almost in every fold of her gown. She heard with a good deal of astonishment the project unfolded to her, and to Daisy's great delight gave it ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell

... constructed with an eye rather to safety than comfort, and, like a city omnibus, is never full. Still, our passengers look upon even their discomforts as a joke. They are most of them old miners, hard-featured but genial and kindly, and easily distinguished from men reared in the easy life of cities. Mr. Bowles describes them as characterized by a broader grasp and more intense vitality. I could not but notice, particularly, their freedom from ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... a hard-featured dame of fifty, "I'll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Nevertheless, at first sight of her Douglas was attracted, and for good reason—the face of the girl, once seen, was not soon forgotten. During the time he had been in Scotland it had seemed to him that the Scotch women were hard-featured, uninteresting, and altogether unlovely; but this girl was different. There was something of the savage in her, and yet she possessed a charm which fascinated the young man. Her black hair hung in curling and tangled tresses over her shoulders; her eyes were almost as black as her ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking

... have fine sunsets on the Mediterranean—a thing that is certainly rare in most quarters of the globe. The evening we sailed away from Gibraltar, that hard-featured rock was swimming in a creamy mist so rich, so soft, so enchantingly vague and dreamy, that even the Oracle, that serene, that inspired, that overpowering humbug, scorned the dinner ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... special importance and interest, in opening up a vast and most fruitful and salubrious region to European emigration. Those territories offer room and food for myriads. "The population of Russia, that hard-featured country, is about 75,000,000, the population of the Argentine Republic, to which nature has been so bountiful, and in which she is so beautiful, is about 1,000,000." If ever government in the South American States becomes more settled, we shall find ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith

... the hard-featured Josephine would welcome her husband's widowed daughter. In fact she saw the fear of Josephine in her father's restrained letter. She contemplated a return to Chicago as a last resort, but it was sad to feel ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick

... be the wrong house," said Sister, and without pausing an instant in our centrifugal career we rushed round the complete circle and disappeared through the gate as suddenly as we had come. As we passed the house I had a fleeting glimpse of an old, hard-featured and furious female face glaring at us ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 3, 1917 • Various

... assembled were rather good looking men; but there were a few dare-devil marked fellows, whose sinister countenances bore the imprint of crime and an expression of anything but honesty or goodness; hard-featured and hard-hearted, they had doubtless committed deeds entitling them to a ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison

... Green did not require to be told the profession of the Putney Pet. His thick-set frame, his hard-featured, battered, hang-dog ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.

... glad to comply; and, lighting their pipes, the men began to talk. Their host, who told them his name was Robertson, was a rather hard-featured man ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss

... a strong-minded woman, and her husband a submissive man without character and will. The myth rests only on the science of physiognomy working on portraits,—a most insecure foundation. The Founders' portraits depict him as a gentle, placid person with melancholy eyes; her as a hard-featured woman with a long upper lip and an almost cruel mouth. Against the testimony, always dubious, of portraits, must be set the known facts of her loyal devotion in carrying out his wishes with scrupulous fidelity, ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... a Severe Person, tiny, hard-featured and even more garrulous than her husband, who watched her anxiously and nervously as he answered any question ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren

... himself was about fifty years old, a strong, hard-featured man with a withered face. He was an early riser, and had once been very fond of hunting. But now for a great portion of the year he applied himself wholly to reading the old books of knighthood, and this with ...
— The Junior Classics, V4 • Willam Patten (Editor)

... I could hear the weeping spectators say, "Pobre Jesus!" "How wicked they are!" The bulk of the audience was of people who do not often go to theatres. They looked upon the revolting scene as a real and living fact. One hard-featured man near me clenched his fists and cursed the cruel guards. A pale, delicate-featured girl who was leaning out of her box, with her brown eyes, dilated with horror, fixed upon the scene, suddenly shrieked as a Roman soldier struck the unresisting Saviour, ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay

... doubt remained on the mind of either, after the facts were explained, of the reality of the relationship; for that was so simply proved, as to place the circumstance beyond all dispute. Mrs. Wetmore thought of her lost son as of an innocent smiling babe; and here she found him a red-faced, hard-featured, weather-beaten tar, already verging towards age, and a man of manners that were rough, if not rude. She could not at first possess any knowledge of the better points in his character, and was compelled to receive this boon from Providence as it ...
— Miles Wallingford - Sequel to "Afloat and Ashore" • James Fenimore Cooper

... grouped themselves all round, fluttering their big fans and whispering to each other, and Don Pedro and the Grand Inquisitor stood laughing at the entrance. Even the Duchess—the Camerera-Mayor as she was called—a thin, hard-featured woman with a yellow ruff, did not look quite so bad-tempered as usual, and something like a chill smile flitted across her wrinkled face and twitched her ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde

... and James was King of Great Britain and Ireland. Cecil had become his prime minister long before the queen's eyes were closed. The hard-featured, rickety, fidgety, shambling, learned, most preposterous Scotchman hastened to take possession of the throne. Never—could there have been a more unfit place or unfit ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... tales of Rob Roy's exploits being told familiarly round the 'ingles' hereabouts, for this neighbourhood was his home. We landed at Inversneyde, the ferry-house by the waterfall, and were not sorry to part with our boatman, who was a coarse hard-featured man, and, speaking of the French, uttered the basest and most cowardly sentiments. His helper, a youth fresh from the Isle of Skye, was innocent of this fault, and though but a bad rower, was a far better companion; he could not speak a word of English, and sang a plaintive Gaelic ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth

... some half-dozen jailers, attired in garments of dark-brown frieze, and each having a large bunch of keys at his girdle. All of them were stout, hard-featured men, and bore upon their countenances the ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... Trappeme. Others of that lady's guests were the local Episcopalian clergyman and his wife—the former was a placid, dreamy-looking, mild creature, with soft, kindly eyes. He smiled at everybody, was evidently in abject terror of his wife—a hard-featured lady about ten years his senior, with high cheek-bones and an exceedingly corrugated neck and shoulders. She eyed Myra and Sheila with cold dissatisfaction, and after dinner had once begun, devoted herself to the task of extracting information from the latter regarding ...
— Chinkie's Flat and Other Stories - 1904 • Louis Becke

... widened Northrup's vision and developed a new tie between him and other men. He found himself looking at them in the street with awakened interest. He wondered how many of them, stern, often hard-featured men, had realized their souls in private or public life, and how had they dealt with the revelation? He grew sensitive as to expressions; he believed, after a time, that he could estimate, by the look ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock

... was a spare, hard-featured woman, with a weather-stained face, and hands as horny as a man's with farm-work. Twice a week she wore a bonnet and shawl, when she went to market or church. All other times her head was covered by a cotton hood, which could not be damaged by rain, snow, or wind; and in bad weather ...
— The Christmas Child • Hesba Stretton

... estate. Even the slumberer on the sofa was not exempt. His usually ruddy face had become ashen, and his snoring was developing into a series of choking gasps. It was fearful, this dust,—alkaline, penetrating, stifling,—and from such soil the raw-boned, hard-featured men of H—— wrung a living. And I, sharing their narrow lives, began to understand the true significance of the word 'onery' as applied to us by our more prosperous and ofttimes ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald

... comprise their only personal decorations. As in all countries where the burden of heavy labor is thrown upon the women, they lose their comely looks at an early age, and become withered, ill-shaped, and hard-featured long before they reach the prime of life. The Faroese women doubtless make excellent wives for lazy men; they do all the labors of the house, and share largely in those of the field. I do not know that they are more prolific than good and loving wives ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne

... voice of no agreeable timbre asked what we wanted. We explained, across the dog, that we had come by appointment to see Mr. Whittier. The door was closed a second time, and, if our carriage had still been waiting, we should certainly have driven back to Danvers. But at length a hard-featured woman grudgingly admitted us, and showed us, growling as she did ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... a broken and ruined man. The burly Lucas Meyer, smart young Smuts fresh from the siege of Ookiep, Beyers from the north, Kemp the dashing cavalry leader, Muller the hero of many fights—all these with many others of their sun-blackened, gaunt, hard-featured comrades were grouped within the great tent of Vereeniging. The discussions were heated and prolonged. But the logic of facts was inexorable, and the cold still voice of common-sense had more power than all ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle

... courage and strength expanded, we tried bolder flights—spent a day among the smoke and thunder of the Nantiglo ironworks—with processions of thousands of men hurrying off amidst music, and shouts of the most tremendous loudness, to a dinner at their club. Great, hard-featured, savage-looking fellows they were, though in their holiday attire, and accompanied by one or two of the Bailey family—the real iron kings of the neighbourhood; and a sight of their grim features and brawny arms gave us a more vivid respect for the courage of Sir Thomas Philips, who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... hard-featured, wiry old man, now entering his second childhood and beginning to limp painfully. He had his hands full of hard clods which he threw impatiently at the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... he stands now." And, as Cabot spoke, he pointed to a tall, hard-featured man standing by the window, looking out into the street. "I slept at the head of the stairs last night, and distinctly heard him tell the guards that you were intending to leave. His name is Bishop, and he belongs to the Thirtieth Maine ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon

... melody repay the impresario, as they enrapture the audience at the Academy, there will be new faces in the most prominent boxes, almost as outre and unaccustomed in their appearance there as was that of the hard-featured Western President, framed in a shock head and a turn-down collar, meeting the gaze of astonished Murray Hill, when he passed an hour here on his ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... customers. They had a mighty demure look, and never condescended to solicit any person to deal with them—a mode of behaviour which the butchers, fishmongers, fruiterers, and greengrocers, of Great Britain would do well to imitate. The generality were hard-featured; and their grotesque head-dresses, parti-coloured kerchiefs, and short clumsily-plaited petticoats, gave them a grotesque, antiquated air, altogether irreconcilable to an Englishman's taste. They were, however, wonderfully clean, and civil and honourable in their traffic, compared with the filthy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various

... upon this pipe," for which Hamlet gives Guildenstern such lucid directions. But this intelligent Me, who steps forward as the senior partner in our dual personality, turns out to be a terrible bungler. He misses those glancing hits which the hard-featured young professional person calls "carroms," and insists on pocketing his own ball instead of ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... into the adjoining room and there found herself face to face with the hard-featured woman who had only a few moments ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... which he remained, impressed him still more. The venerable Scotchman who led it had a face that beamed with sweetness and intelligence. It was fortunate that the marquis saw so good a specimen. In fact, Priscilla trembled lest Mr. Boreas, the stern, hard-featured "exhorter," should have been invited to lead. But as the sweet-faced old leader called upon one and another to speak, and as many spoke with streaming eyes, D'Entremont quivered with sympathy. He was not so blind that he ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... slightest response to my knocks. I was on the point of turning away in despair and driving back in the gig to Holdergate, when a sound of footsteps was heard within, together with an unbolting and unbarring, the door was opened about six inches on the chain, and a hard-featured woman peeped cautiously ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil

... was a tall, hard-featured lady, but by no means ill-looking. There was an inflexibility in her face, in her voice, in her gait and carriage, amply sufficient to account for the effect she had made upon a gentle creature like my mother; but her features were ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... call on you," said Jane Allen, a hard-featured woman who lived next door. "Why should you put yourself out just for a sick lass? and she'll be much better ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade

... in by the boy with his hat, by Bud Strothers and another teamster she knew, and by two strangers. The latter were big, hard-featured, sheepish-faced men, who stared at Saxon as ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... was carried into the cabin, and after a short delay conveyed in a carriage to the Infirmary or hospital. When the carriage reached the gateway of the Infirmary, the bell was rung by the coachman, and the porter made his appearance. He was a tall, hard-featured, sulky-looking man, about fifty years of age, called Thomas; and having held that office a number of years, he assumed as many airs, and pretended to as much ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper

... calls upon you to save that child's merry soul? You ought to be ashamed of yourself, boy! Why, what shall I wager now? I will stake this roll of gold that I could make her come with me to-morrow—with me, a hard-featured countryman, freckled all over like a plover's egg, where my clothes do not protect my skin, and with hair on end like the top of a broom—yes, that she will follow me to Arsinoe or wherever I choose to bid her. Let the hussy go, you simple innocent. Such a Soul as hers is of small ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... that he had the right money, and departed; and Winthrop followed Mr. Forriner through a narrow entry cut off from the store, to a little back room, which was the first of the domestic premises. Here stood a table, and Mrs. Forriner; a hard-featured lady, in a muslin cap likewise hard-featured; there was a "not-give-in" look, very marked, in both, cap and lady. A look that Winthrop recognized at once, and which her husband seemed to have ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... Kishkako, the Saginaw, from Kentucky, when he was a boy of about nine years old. He is now a gray-headed, hard-featured old man, whose feelings are at war with every one on earth, white and red. Every attempt to meliorate his manners and Indian notions, has failed. He has invariably misapprehended them, and is more suspicious, revengeful, and bad tempered than any Indian I ever knew. Dr. James, who ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft

... so it will! I never did think of that. And now I'll not think of it. Here we are just come from a wedding, and before you ask us how the bride looked, or even what she had on, you begin to talk to us about that grim old Florentine, who looks like a hard-featured Scotch woman in her husband's night-cap, and who wrote such a succession of frightful things! Where is all your interest in Kitty Jones? I've seen you talk to her by the half-hour, and heard you say she is a charming woman; and now she marries,—and you not only won't ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... sat a woman advanced in life, clad in faded but cleanly garments, whose hollow cheeks and sunken eye told a painful tale of sorrow and destitution. Those sad eyes were fixed anxiously and imploringly upon the stern, grim face of a hard-featured old man, who, with hat pulled over his shaggy gray eyebrows, was standing, resting on a stout staff, in the centre ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage

... equally ethical distinction between touching tobacco and lighting it. For the rest, it would be easy to make a merely external sketch full of things equally strange; for this can always be done in a strange country. I allow for the fact of all foreigners looking alike; but I fancy that all those hard-featured faces, with spectacles and shaven jaws, do look rather alike, because they all like to make their faces hard. And with the mention of their mental attitude we realise the futility of any such external sketch. Unless we can see that these are something more than men smoking ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton

... hat in two hours than any one of those she sold at the reduced price of ten dollars; yet even the dingiest of them at last found a purchaser, and she saw the green velvet toque, which had been rejected by the sensible middle-aged woman in the morning, finally pass into the possession of a hard-featured spinster. What amazed her, for she had a natural talent for dress, was the infallible instinct which guided the vast majority of these customers to the selection of the inappropriate. A few of them had taste, or had learned from experience what they could not wear; but by far the larger ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... stove stood a strange man in oilskins, waiting for a bottle of soda-water; two fish-buyers had three times demanded cognac for their coffee; the stableman stood with an empty lantern waiting for a light, and a tall, hard-featured countryman followed Karen anxiously with his eyes; he had to get sixty-three oere change out of a krone. [Footnote: A krone contains 100 oere, and is equal ...
— Norse Tales and Sketches • Alexander Lange Kielland

... in Parliament, with a book, or in connection with an adventure; it is, as it were, a sacred ampulla poured upon the heads of each successive generation. Whereas a noble family, inactive and forgotten, is very much in the position of a hard-featured, poverty-stricken, simple-minded, and virtuous maid, these qualifications being the four cardinal points of misfortune. The marriage of a daughter of the Troisvilles with General Montcornet, so far from opening the eyes of the Antiquities, ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac

... hung up the receiver, and seized a railway timetable from the rack before him. After a rapid consultation of this oracle, he flung it down with a forcible word as Mr. Silver hurried into the room, followed by a hard-featured man with spectacles, and a youth with an ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley

... the flickering little lamp and the strange shadows it cast among the rich, painted carvings of the ceiling. She slept little, but waking she dreamed of the gold and the glitter of Shushan, of the magnificence of the young king, and of the brilliant hard-featured beauty of Atossa, whom she already hated or had determined to hate. The king interested her most. She tried to recall his features and manner as he had appeared when he tarried one night in the fortress a year previous. She remembered a black-browed man in the prime ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... Greenharbour; and a chaplain, a black canon, young, broad-cheeked and fresh-looking, but hard-faced and unlovely; three new damsels withal were come for the young Queen, not young maids, but stalworth women, well-grown, and two of them hard-featured; the third, tall, ...
— Child Christopher • William Morris

... else admires, and by the time he has written this letter in his mind, and turned the sentences to it, he will find himself at Callander and the carriage all ready. Giving the order for the Port of Monteith, he will rattle through this hard-featured, and to our eye comfortless village, lying ugly amid so much grandeur and beauty, and let him stop on the crown of the bridge, and fill his eyes with the perfection of the view up the Pass of Leny—the Teith lying diffuse and asleep, as if its ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... ones, sunflowers—to give to her dingy room an air of refinement and of gaiety. Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown. The day was dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder. The window was open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and incessant street noises. Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... is of my own people, a small man, definite, hard-featured, an accurate weapon of small calibre. Of the other I cannot judge. He is heavily built, and when he is still the dignity of the Orient is about him like his robe. His head is large and beautifully domed, his hands tapering ...
— Profiles from China • Eunice Tietjens

... bed's head stands a small table with a bronze lamp and a bronze cup on it. Queen HYGD, an emaciated woman, is asleep in the bed; her plenteous black hair, veined with silver, spreads over the pillow. Her waiting-woman, MERRYN, middle-aged and hard-featured, sits watching her in a chair on the farther side of the bed. The light of early morning ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... yon house of Belial," retorted Mrs. McBain, presenting a chaste cheek to Nan's salute. The young red lips pressed against the hard-featured face curved into a smile. Nan was no whit in awe of her aunt's bitter tongue, and it was probably for this very reason that Mrs. McBain could not help liking her. Most sharp-spoken people appreciate someone who is not afraid to stand up to them, ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... hurriedly shifted my coat for a "jumper" or blouse, put on an old cap, and climbed into the fresh air again. For a double reason, even MY seasoned head was feeling bad with the villainous reek of the place, and I did not want any of those hard-featured officers on deck to have any cause to complain of my "hanging back." On board ship, especially American ships, the first requisite for a sailor who wants to be treated properly is to "show willing," any suspicion of slackness being noted immediately, and the backward one marked ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen

... cost not a little to bid it, the neighbouring church of the St. Germain des Pres, where she had so long worshipped, and her little coterie of intimate friends, farewell. Yet she set forth, taking with her Henriette, the hard-featured, old, Breton maid, and Monsieur Pouf, the gray, Persian cat,—he protesting plaintively from within a large Manilla basket,—and thus accompanied, made pilgrimage to Brockhurst. And when Katherine, all the lost joys of her girlhood assailing her at sight of her lifelong friend, had broken down ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... ever straying towards the door, as though she even yet hoped for the fickle one's return. Withal her bearing was erect and proud; she seemed to be more tightly laced than ever; and there was all the wonted haughtiness on her hard-featured face, with its jet-black ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... a "homely gathering" did not produce quite the effect he intended; "home-like" is one thing in Canada, "homely" quite another, and the people laughed at the slip—they knew, what he did not, that "homely" meant hard-featured and ugly. My other illustration will take us towards the second canon. I remember, years ago, a working-man of my own city talking a swift, impulsive Socialism to me. He was young and something of a poet. He got in return the obvious common sense that would be expected of a ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... a pig's tail, for instance, appended to the back of the head, and reaching down to that place where tails in other animals are generally seen to begin; thus betailed and bepowdered, the man of taste fancies he improves in beauty, dresses up his hard-featured face in smiles, and attempts to look hideously tender. Thus equipped, he is qualified to make love, and hopes for success more from the powder on the outside of his head than the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various

... her cashmere shawl folded correctly over her shoulders, and her lace bonnet set precisely on her thin shining crimps. But she could take no pleasure in that or in the sermon now, when Wilbur sat right across from her pew, between hard-featured Robins and his sulky-looking wife. The boy's eyes had grown too large for his ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1904 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... Brown must have been forty; she had a sickly, pained, careworn expression on her face, and looked as if the gaiety of youth had long faded out of sight. Even when young she must have been plain and hard-featured. Miss Jessie Brown was ten years younger than her sister, and twenty shades prettier. Her face was round and dimpled. Miss Jenkyns once said, in a passion against Captain Brown (the cause of which I will tell you presently), that "she thought it was time for Miss Jessie to ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... had engaged for his strange abode were such as might suit a philosopher of few wants. An old Armenian whom Glyndon recognised as in the mystic's service at Naples, a tall, hard-featured woman from the village, recommended by Maestro Paolo, and two long-haired, smooth-spoken, but fierce-visaged youths from the same place, and honoured by the same sponsorship, constituted the establishment. The rooms used by the sage were ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... found no acquaintances on board, outside of my own party; but when we had made the due inspection, and were returning in the afternoon, just when we were off Fort Washington, an acquaintance belonging to the capital came up, in conversation with a thin, scrawny, hard-featured man, dressed, in black, and looking like a cross between a decayed Yankee schoolmaster and a foreign Count gone into the hand-organ business. As we exchanged salutations he stopped, made a step backward, and astounded me by ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... and having discussed cheese, porter, and red herrings, the cloth was drawn, and a hard-featured dessert, consisting principally of apples, followed. The wine having made a couple of melancholy circuits, the strained conversation about came to a full stop, and Spigot having considerately placed the little round table, as if to keep the peace between them, the ladies ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... discriminating and doctrinal than in England. One who studies the pictures given in Scott's novels must often have been struck with the apparent similarity in the theologic training and tastes of the laboring classes in New England and Scotland. The hard-featured man, whom he describes in Rob Roy as following the preacher so earnestly, keeping count of the doctrinal points on his successive fingers, is one which can still be seen in the retired, rural districts of New England; and I believe ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe

... boy of twelve, lean, hungry-looking, and hard-featured, but as sharp as a weasel. He piloted me through the crowds, turned down alleys, shot through narrow courts, turning now to right now to left, till my ...
— My Sword's My Fortune - A Story of Old France • Herbert Hayens

... Granville neither acquiesced nor dissented. He signed mechanically whatever documents his father presented to him, and he stood by his bargain with a certain sullen, undeviating, hard-featured loyalty; but he never forgot those few angry words in which his father had half let out his ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... of youth. He had less of the appearance and more of the reality of culture than the young Oxford diplomatist, for he had keener emotions though less exact knowledge. Miss Adams and Miss Sadie Adams were aunt and niece, the former a little, energetic, hard-featured Bostonian old-maid, with a huge surplus of unused love behind her stern and swarthy features. She had never been from home before, and she was now busy upon the self-imposed task of bringing the East up to the standard of Massachusetts. She had hardly landed in Egypt ...
— The Tragedy of The Korosko • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Alas! however, for dreams of ruddy welcome—rubicund host, and capon turning on the spit. In spite of German accents, we were walking in America, after all. A shabbily-lit glass door admitted us into a dreary saloon bar, where a hard-featured, gruff-mannered young countryman, after serving beer to two farm-labourers, admitted with apparent reluctance that beds were to be had by such as had "the price," but that, as to supper, well! supper was "over"—supper-time was six-thirty; it was now seven-thirty. The young man seemed ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... Catherine might rest content with what she had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother's wife ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler

... these reflections by the contemplation of that rugged, hard-featured, square-shouldered, angry old woman who so opportunely ...
— The Hot Swamp • R.M. Ballantyne

... occasioned the misunderstanding. The colonel then apologised to Newton, while he repaired to the bath, and in a few minutes returned, having undergone this necessary ablution after a mango feast. His dress was changed, and he offered the appearance of an upright, gentleman-like, hard-featured man, who had apparently gone through a great deal of service without his stamina having ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... a chocolate brown. The double front doors, which opened to admit Lesley's boxes, showed an ordinary London hall, narrow, crowded with an oaken chest, an umbrella and hat stand, and lighted by a flaring gas lamp. At these doors two persons showed themselves; a neat but hard-featured maid-servant, and a lady of uncertain age, whom Lesley correctly guessed to be his sister and housekeeper, Miss Brooke. There was no sign of ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... looked just as my uncle used to look when he was filing stones: but the other was pleasant in features, and delicate in form, and orderly in her dress; and so, in the end, they left it to me to decide, after hearing what they had to say, with which of them I would go; and first the hard-featured and ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... walk with me as it was dusk, and I presumed we were going to an inn—but, oh, horror of horrors! I was conducted to the prison from whence I came. They there wished me good-night, and I wished them at the devil. Next morning, after a restless night on a bed of straw, we were awakened by the grim, hard-featured gaoler who had been kind enough to lock us up. He asked the doctor if we wished to have breakfast, and if we could pay for it; he answered in the affirmative. This turnkey gentleman informed us that our first admiral, Mons. ...
— A Sailor of King George • Frederick Hoffman

... Helene Vauquier was leaning back in a chair. She looked ill, and her face was very white. On the appearance of Hanaud, the Commissaire, and the others, however, she rose to her feet. Ricardo recognised the justice of Hanaud's description. She stood before them a hard-featured, tall woman of thirty-five or forty, in a neat black stuff dress, strong with the strength of a peasant, respectable, reliable. She looked what she had been, the confidential maid of an elderly woman. On her face there was now ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason

... and yelling in his or her uncouth dialect, and all accompanying their vociferations with violent and extraordinary gestures, quite incomprehensible to the uninitiated. We were literally stunned by the strife of tongues. I shrank, with feelings almost akin to fear, from the hard-featured, sun-burnt harpies, as they elbowed rudely ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... In the hard-featured yard of the schoolhouse the children were assembled-the girls on one side, the boys on the other. Curates and teachers hovered about the intervening space. Almost every child wore its Sunday best. Even the shabbiest little girls had a clean white pinafore to hide deficiencies ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... social scale of the town was meteoric, chiefly owing to the goodwill of Madame Coquereau, the widowed mother of the Mayor. She was a hard-featured old lady, with a face that might have been made of corrugated iron painted yellow and with the eyes of an old hawk. She dressed always in black, was very devout and rich and narrow and iron-willed. Aristide was presented to her one Sunday afternoon at the Cafe on the Place Arago—where on Sunday ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke

... peas so late!"—for I continued to plant when others had begun to hoe—the ministerial husbandman had not suspected it. "Corn, my boy, for fodder; corn for fodder." "Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing where he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be ashes or plaster. But here ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau

... hall door to welcome him. There stood, not her father, but a little hard-featured old man, Mr. Wyld, the family lawyer. Olive drew back, sorely disappointed; for if in her gentle heart lingered one positive aversion, it was felt towards this man—partly on his own account, partly because his appearance seemed always the forewarning of evil in the ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)

... His agent, a hard-featured man of business, sat at a desk, busy with papers, and a venerable old man, who had been his father's steward, stood a little behind his chair. There was a frown on the brow of the nobleman, as after a stern glance at ...
— Edward Barnett; a Neglected Child of South Carolina, Who Rose to Be a Peer of Great Britain,—and the Stormy Life of His Grandfather, Captain Williams • Tobias Aconite

... emptiness of the place, when a railway porter stepped out of the solitary signal-box, where he had evidently been performing a double function, and lounged with exasperating deliberation towards him. He was a hard-featured man, with a thin fringe of yellow-gray whiskers that met under his chin like dirty strings to tie ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... wig, and, assuming a more familiar appearance, strolled out into the warehouse. De Grost looked around him with absolutely unruffled composure. He was the centre of a little circle of men, respectably dressed, but every one of them hard-featured, with something in their faces which suggested not the ordinary toiler, but the fighting animal—the man who lives by his wits and knows something of danger. On the outskirts ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... with his writing, and presently the waiter ushered in a tall, gaunt woman, with a rugged, hard-featured face, dressed in the rustiest black, ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson

... returned Mabel, looking from the view up into the hard-featured but honest face of her companion, though not without surprise at the energy of his manner. "One feels nearer to God in such a spot, I think, than when the mind is distracted by the ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper

... license of honesty. He drinks sometimes more than enough, and is guilty of peccadilloes with the fair sex; yet speaks most affectionately of his wife, and is a fond and careful father. He is a tall, thin, hard-featured man, with a sly expression of almost hidden grave humor, as if there were some deviltry pretty constantly in his mind,—which is probably the case. His brother tells me that he was driven almost crazy by the loss of his wife. It appears to me that men are more affected by the deaths of their ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... served in one of the smaller rooms, in the modern wing of the Castle, on an oval table. The Prince sat at one end faced by his beautiful consort. To his right sat his guest, Alexis Vollmar, and a tall, handsome, but somewhat hard-featured woman of about thirty, with the clear blue eyes and thick, yellow-gold hair which proclaimed her a daughter of the northern German lowlands. This was Hulda von Tyssen, the Princess's companion and lady-in-waiting. They were faced by a stout, ...
— The Mummy and Miss Nitocris - A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension • George Griffith

... grew unusually busy about matters of no importance, and the hard-featured trooper was seen to brush his brows, as though some unpleasant suspicions had crossed his brain. He raised his arm as he gazed on the children, muttering as ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... take Gifford Woodhouse very long to get settled in Lockhaven. His office and bedroom constituted his household, and Miss Deborah never knew that her bags of lavender were not even taken out of the trunk, and that the hard-featured Irishwoman who "came in by the day" never saw the paper of directions, written, that she might be able to read it easily, in Miss ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... misunderstanding. The colonel then apologised to Newton, while he repaired to the bath, and in a few minutes returned, having undergone the necessary ablution after a mango feast. His dress was changed, and he offered the appearance of an upright gentlemanlike, hard-featured man, who had apparently gone through a great deal of service without his stamina having been ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat

... where she sat so long before, crouched in an old chair covered with calico, her bent fingers striving with mechanical motion to knit a coarse stocking, sat old Mrs. Buel. Age had worn to the extreme of attenuation a face that must always have been hard-featured, and a few locks of snow-white hair, straying from under the bandanna handkerchief of bright red and orange that was tied over her cap and under her chin, added to the old-world expression of her whole figure. She was very deaf; scarcely could I make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various



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