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More "Stiffness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... after, one evening, accompanied by Aristo, he set out in his litter to the lodging where she was in custody; not, however, without much misgiving when it came to the point, some shame, and a consequent visible awkwardness and stiffness in his manner. All the perfumes he had about him could not hinder the disgust of such a visit rising ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... have a sun which is not a ray brighter than an English sun. The hedges and ditches wear a familiar livery, and the land which is fully cultivated repays the toil of the husbandman with some of the most luxuriant crops of wheat I ever saw. Barley and oats are not equally good, perhaps from the stiffness of the soil, which is principally of chalk; but flax is abundant and luxuriant. The surface of the ground is undulated, and sufficiently so to make a pleasing alternation of hill and dale; hence it is agreeably varied, ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. I. (of 2) • Dawson Turner
... shape of cards for women is nearly square (about 2 1/2 x 3 inches). A fine dull-finished card-board of medium weight and stiffness ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... fallen down; and a great portion of what remains seems to indicate rapid decay. The whole stands indeed greatly in need of reparation. Ducarel, if I remember rightly,[108] has made, of this whole front, a sort of elevation, as if it were intended for a wooden model to work by: having all the stiffness and precision of an erection of forty-eight hours standing only. The central tower is of very stunted dimensions, and overwhelmed by a roof in the form of an extinguisher. This, in fact, was the consequence of the devastations of the Calvinists; who absolutely ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... finer, little girl! Barring a little stiffness here and there, she's perfect. So, then, when do we ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... work a greater antiquity. Certainly, as one studies its details, one is convinced that it is not quite a Gothic work, nor yet is it Byzantine; for the figures have all the grace of Greek work prior to the age of Byzantine stiffness. It is embroidered chiefly in gold, on a delicate bluish satin ground, and has not been transferred, although it has been carefully restored. The central ornament on the front is a circular composition, and the arrangement of the figures both ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... and heavily it is woven, is soft and yielding and will fall into folds without sharp angles. This quality of softness is in its very substance. Even a single unwoven thread of silk will drop gracefully into loops, where a cotton or linen or even a woollen thread will show stiffness. ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... in the seventh heaven of rapture and vainly endeavours to enlighten him as to the reason of the beauty's stiffness and heartlessness. ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... us down to the rigging. It was hard work making head against them. One after another we got out upon the yards. And here we had work to do; for our new sails had hardly been bent long enough to get the stiffness out of them, and the new earings and reef-points, stiffened with the sleet, knotted like pieces of iron wire. Having only our round jackets and straw hats on, we were soon wet through, and it was every moment growing colder. Our hands were soon ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... throwing all the consciousness of a shining success into the stiffness of the neck which upheld the slight additional weight of the Earl's gold buckle in his cap, found himself, not wholly by accident, in the neighbourhood of his heart's beloved, Maud Lindesay. For, like a valiant seneschal, she had kept her place all ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... down for a week at some vague future date; one of the children was unwell, and until it recovered it was impossible to fix a day. Still, they would be delighted to see him again. Her letters always had a note of stiffness in them, which was purely unintentional, or rather, purely natural, reflecting the one salient ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... Geordie agreed, cordially. "It's worth four shullings to have your mind at ease, man. I'll just go up to the lodge and get a warm bath ready, to tak' the stiffness out of his muscles, and brew a tea from an herb that wee wild creatures know all about and aye hunt for when ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson
... spirit of honor and confidence was generally high among the young gentlemen, and, consequently, having promised to be friendly to Ferrers, each individual, in duty bound, did his utmost to fulfil that promise, and in a little while the stiffness attendant on the effort wore off, and Ferrers was, in appearance, in precisely the same position as before, to the great satisfaction of the doctor, who was much pleased with his pupils' ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... same as one of ourselves, of course, Sholto. But I believe you delight in stiffness and ceremony. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... exceedingly the fact, that the universal ignorance prevailing in England of the Russian language, will prevent the possibility of that important merit—strict fidelity—being tested by the British reader. Let the indulgent, therefore, remember, if we have in any case left an air of stiffness and constraint but too perceptible in our work, that this fault is to be considered as a sacrifice of grace at the altar of truth. It would have been not only possible, but easy, to have spun a collection of easy rhymes, bearing a general resemblance to the vigorous and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... attitude is normal; it consists of an equal balance of the weight of the body on the two legs. This attitude is that of the soldier carrying arms, without the stiffness assumed by the wilful regularity of rigid discipline. It is also that attitude taken by a man in the act of salutation; it is also characteristic of the weakness of a child or of old age; it is the sign of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... out and held up his hand in answer to the yell. The wave of thanksgiving at the sight of this most efficient help took all the stiffness out of the knees of the mail-rider. The tears rolled down ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... arm would not rise! At least the man could not extend it far enough to open the shutter. There was a twinge of pain and a strange stiffness of the elbow. The other arm was raised—nothing the matter with that. The man tried to move his legs. The left responded, but the right was as useless as the arm. There was a pain, too, across the loins as Markham sought to turn himself in ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... is said to have essayed, by a collection of the most exact features, to form a perfect face, and to that, a behaviour, so full of grace and sweetness, such easy motions, with an air so majestic, yet free from stiffness or affectation, that I am persuaded, could she be suddenly transported upon the most polite throne of Europe, nobody would think her other than born and bred to be a queen, though educated in a country we call barbarous. To say all in a word, our most ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... place for the family gathering, having a large table as an objective plane for a round game, which also serves as a support for reading matter; while from an economical point of view it preserves the drawing-rooms in reception stiffness ...
— Other Things Being Equal • Emma Wolf
... you, my own blood, that has never crossed me, and of whom I have reason to be proud? Yes, Harry, it gratifies me to hear you admired and to learn your success. All I want now is to see you in Parliament. A man should be in Parliament early. There is a sort of stiffness about every man, no matter what may be his talents, who enters Parliament late in life; and now, fortunately, the occasion offers. You will go down on Friday; feed the notabilities well; speak out; praise Peel; abuse O'Connell and the ladies of the Bed-chamber; anathematise all ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... deities were incorruptible. It was not possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon men, it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows of formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with infinite fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually began to lean more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... to his aid—the first occasion, we believe, on which this prodigious power was employed in bridge pile-driving. A temporary staging was erected for the steam-engine and hammer apparatus, which rested on two keels, and, notwithstanding the newness and stiffness of the machinery, the first pile was driven on the 6th October, 1846, to a depth of 32 feet, in four minutes. Two hammers of 30 cwt. each were kept in regular use, making from 60 to 70 strokes a minute; and the results were astounding to those who had been accustomed ...
— Lives of the Engineers - The Locomotive. George and Robert Stephenson • Samuel Smiles
... come back, I'll meet them with my hands free," he said. "Come on, old man; we're like rats in a trap if they catch us in those beastly tubs. At least, out here, we've our knives and our fists. Come out, and get the stiffness out ...
— Captain Jim • Mary Grant Bruce
... if they would allow me, as I think you will, in consideration of my age and stiffness; let some more supple youth try a fall with you, and do not drag me ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... the very horse he ought to have had—old, weary, infirm, decently hiding its disabilities under a blanket, and, when this was stripped away, confessing them in a start so reluctant that they had to be explained as the stiffness natural to any young, strong, and fresh horse from resting too long. It did, in fact, become more animated as time went on, and perhaps it began to take an interest in the landscape left so charmingly wild wherever it could be. It apparently liked being alive there with its fares, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... sleeve of my uniformed coat and could not even see the hole where the bullet had entered. Neither was there any sudden flow of blood. At the time there was no stiffness or discomfort in the arm and I continued to use it to work my ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... had betrayed himself. Audrey's maidenly consciousness was up in arms in a moment. The gleam in Cyril's eyes had opened hers. Some instinct of self-defence made her suddenly entrench herself in stiffness; the soft graciousness that was Audrey's chief charm seemed to desert her, and for once in her life she ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... life in Paris is arranged more sensibly than with us. Visiting involves no trouble in the feeding line. People don't go to eat. A cup of tea and plate of biscuit is all,—just enough to break up the stiffness. ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... step, that had in it none of the stiffness or fatigue of a long night's ride, Commines mounted the stairs, answering friendly salutes at every turn. As at all times with the King in residence, the halls, corridors, and ante-rooms were like those of a barrack rather than of a royal chateau. Here and ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... upon one of the hills of Slieve Echtge, but he was not sure how he came there; for all that had happened in the barn had gone from him, and all of his journey but the soreness of his feet and the stiffness in his bones. ...
— Stories of Red Hanrahan • W. B. Yeats
... one second of awful indecision. The boys looked at each other, at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain terror. ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... Thracian and Galatian horse to fall upon their flank, and beat down their lances with their swords. The only defense of these horsemen-at-arms are their lances; they have nothing else that they can use to protect themselves, or annoy their enemy, on account of the weight and stiffness of their armor, with which they are, as it were, built up. He himself, with two cohorts, made to the mountain, the soldiers briskly following, when they saw him in arms afoot first toiling and climbing up. Being on the top and standing in an open place, with a loud ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... waiting for Mme. General Bonaparte on their magnificent prancing steeds in front of the gate through which she was to pass. Even old Count Metternich, the delegate of the Emperor of Austria and ruler of the empire, notwithstanding the stiffness of his limbs, had mounted his horse; by his side the other two ambassadors of Austria were halting—Count Lehrbach, the Austrian member of the imperial commission, and Count Louis Cobenzl, who was acting as a delegate for Bohemia ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... observed old Mr. Delamere, with a touch of stiffness. "The only servant in hearing of the conversation has been my own; and Sandy is as honest as any ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... only of comfort and convenience, and nothing of show, he carelessly invited my attention to the drawing-room, the library, the music-room, and the little sitting-room, all of which were furnished with as much stiffness and hardness and inharmonious coloring as ...
— A Bicycle of Cathay • Frank R. Stockton
... incident that silence reigned in the salon while the three took their coffee, a silence rather annoying to Adam, who was incapable of imagining the cause of it. Clementine no longer tried to draw out Thaddeus. The captain, on the other hand, retreated within his military stiffness and came out of it no more, neither on the way to the Opera nor in the box, where he seemed to ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... the gracious response of the ladies, Randolph was aware of their critical scrutiny of both himself and Miss Eversleigh, of the exchange of significant glances, and a certain stiffness in her guardian's manner. It was quite enough to affect Randolph's sensitiveness and ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... the Gods above, that he might mourn for ever. And now, his blood quite exhausted by incessant weeping, his limbs began to be changed into a green colour, and the hair, which but lately hung from his snow-white forehead, to become a rough bush, and, a stiffness being assumed, to point to the starry heavens with a tapering top. The God {Phoebus} lamented deeply, and in his sorrow he said, "Thou shalt be mourned by me, and shalt mourn for others, and shalt {ever} attend upon those who are ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... ancient times, to discover their attachment to rural nature, and to gardens. His candid and submissive mind thus speaks:—"If we would, therefore, arrive at any greater perfection than we are in gardening, we must cashiere that mathematical stiffness in our gardens, and imitate nature more; how that is to be done, will appear in the following chapters, which though they may not be, as new designs scarce ever are, the most perfect, it will at least excite some after-master to take pen and pencil in hand, and finish what is here thus imperfectly ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton
... manner, and formed or grouped into the most pleasing and tasteful shapes. The figures are small, with a well indicated outline. How pretty are the little subjects at the foot of each month of the Calendar! And how totally different from the common-place stiffness, and notorious dullness, of the generality of Flemish pieces of this character! This book has no superior of its kind in Europe; and is worthy, on a small scale, of what we see in the superb ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... far from town to learn baseball, Whose only play was what he found himself, Summer or winter, and could play alone. One by one he subdued his father's trees By riding them down over and over again Until he took the stiffness out of them, And not one but hung limp, not one was left For him to conquer. He learned all there was To learn about not launching out too soon And so not carrying the tree away Clear to the ground. He always ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... supper, and the presence of the young people robbed it of all possible stiffness. Aunt Jane helped clear the table and put away the food, while Miranda entertained in the parlor; but Rebecca and the infant Burches washed the dishes and held high carnival in the kitchen, doing only trifling damage—breaking ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... stiffness of which a young back is capable. She saw an old grey-haired priest, with a round face and a pair of chubby hands, which he constantly held crossed or clasped upon his breast. His long irregular-mouth ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... wishes. In England especially, they are completely out of their element. A language nearly impossible for them to acquire, a religion which they consider heretical, outward coldness covering inward warmth, a perpetual war between sun and fog, etiquette carried to excess, an insupportable stiffness and order in the article of the toilet; rebosos unknown, cigaritos considered barbarous.... They feel like exiles from paradise, and live but in hopes of a ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... to admit the body of the fox. Even as the boy looked, the long hairs of Leloo's great ruff stiffened, and stood quiveringly erect, a low growl rumbled deep in the dog's throat, and with a curious tense stiffness of movement, he began to back slowly from the hole. Never for an instant did the low throaty growl cease, nor did the fixed yellow eyes leave the black aperture. Not until he had backed a full twenty feet from ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... these men, it may be sufficient to state that the "NOTES AND QUERIES" is conceived in the exact spirit of those works. The chief difference, besides the usual subject-matter, consists in the greater formality and "stiffness" of those than of this; arising, however, of necessity out of the specific and rigid character of mathematical research in itself, and the more limited range of subjects that were open ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 57, November 30, 1850 • Various
... representation is, of course, far from the perfection of Art. Both the faces and the figures have a certain stiffness, partly due to the very nature of mosaic-work. There is also a sort of child-like simplicity in the treatment, especially of the female figures, which an unsympathetic critic would call grotesque. But, I think, most beholders feel that there is something indescribably solemn ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... the time talking to you—and as you've just recorded your sensations, I'd rather be excused," he said with a touch of stiffness. "Your innings, I suppose, old man?" And, with a friendly nod, he ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... pen with her trusty knife, wrote to the lady in waiting an agreeable and polished letter, one of those letters, careful without stiffness, that one writes, indulging oneself a little with the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Isabel's admirers should be desperadoes or laggards; they were not rivals of his and were perfectly welcome to act out their genius. Nevertheless he felt much curiosity as to the result of Miss Stackpole's promised enquiry into the causes of Mr. Goodwood's stiffness—a curiosity for the present ungratified, inasmuch as when he asked her three days later if she had written to London she was obliged to confess she had written in vain. Mr. Goodwood had ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... (p. 258) other officers to keep in the background, I would go over in front of the battalion and tell them that the Colonel had handed the parade over to me, and that they were to break ranks and sit on the ground as close as possible. At once military stiffness was dispelled, and amid much laughter the men would crowd around and squat on the ground tightly packed together. Imagine what a picture that was. Splendid stalwart young men they were, hundreds ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... the Swift-goer, untied his foot from beside his head, put it to the ground, wriggled it a little to get the stiffness out of it, ran off, and was out of sight almost before he had stepped from the ship. Quicker than I can tell it you in words he had come to the water of life, and put some of it ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... instant my arms were about his neck—I felt no stiffness nor soreness now. He folded me to his breast, and cried, as I did. After a long ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... so melted down the rude stiffness of the Tetchy family as this wonderful revolution in my domestic prospects. They became amusingly disposed to sociability, as well as to inquisitiveness. But I was glad to see my mother stiffen up in proportion to their sudden condescension, for she would have ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865 • Various
... contest. I had not, up to this time, the least knowledge of the original cause of the row. I have naturally an aversion to pugilistic contests and tumultuous sports, and yet I found by certain bruises, and bumps, and stains of blood, and stiffness of joints, and exhaustion, and the loss of my upper garment, which I had then only just discovered, that I must have borne a pretty considerable{5} part in the contest, and carried away no small share ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... lengthening when at length he laid down his oars, and felt the boat's nose rub against the sand of the little home-cove. But rowing was no more effort than breathing to Captain January, and it was no fatigue, but only a trifle of stiffness from sitting so long, that troubled him a little in getting out of the boat. As he stepped slowly out upon the firm-grained silver of the little beach, he looked up and around with an expectant air, and seeing no one, a look of disappointment crossed his face. ...
— Captain January • Laura E. Richards
... and left me to my mysterious fate," said the Count, with a slight degree of stiffness. "I conclude that you did not receive my letter requesting you to meet me at Amsterdam, and stating the reasons for my not rejoining you sooner; however, I am very glad ...
— Voyages and Travels of Count Funnibos and Baron Stilkin • William H. G. Kingston
... stroked his little black mustache with the foreign manner he had inherited. If he had cared to do so perhaps he could have explained Kate Underwood's stiffness. Partly it was embarrassment and partly shyness. He knew that there had been a time—before Valencia's return from college—when Kate lacked very little of being in love with him. He had but to say the word to have ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... no dealings with Lavendar," the Captain said, with sudden stiffness; "he's like all the rest of 'em. I'll get a license in Upper Chester, and we'll go to ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... was wise to the fact that he was the only friend I had in that country, and the sort of friend that sticks closer than a brother, I experienced a sincere desire to beat him over the noodle with my gun and thereby knock a little of the stiffness out of his neck—simply saluted the officer, tipped his hat to her, and passed on. I didn't sabe the play, and when I saw the red flash up into her face it made me hot, and there followed a few seconds when I took a very ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... yardstick out of the question,—even if they are covered by carpets six inches thick, it will not pay to lay poor ones. They should be double for solidity and warmth, well nailed for stiffness, seasoned for economy, and of good lumber for conscience' sake. Seasoned for economy, I say, since nothing is more destructive to carpets, especially to oil-cloth, than cracks in the floor underneath them. Yes,—one thing; the ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... valuable gift of sitting still without stiffness, and not fidgetting with fan, bouquet, or hand-kerchief, as she listened or talked. Rosa's mercurial temperament betrayed itself, every instant, in the bird-like turn of her small head, the fluttering ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... that we were sailing away south, and that the men seemed to be enjoying themselves, for there was a good deal of singing and shouting—strong indications of drinking going on. Mr Frewen was far better, and my pains had passed into an unpleasant stiffness; otherwise, I was ...
— Sail Ho! - A Boy at Sea • George Manville Fenn
... an assistant butler in Madame du Barry's hotel at Versailles, was a sharp, sour-natured old fellow, truculent and avaricious. The spine of this man was a sort of social barometer; by its exact degree of curvature or stiffness in the presence of a guest the stable-boys and housemaids knew whether his rank was great or small, and whether, to please their cantankerous master, they were to fly or walk at his beck, or in the case of a mere bourgeois, to drink ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... much upon the hearts of unexperienced girls; and his two cousins respected him greatly. He placed them at the house of an old, out-of-fashion aunt, who had been a keen partizan of the royal cause during the civil wars; she was full of the heroic stiffness of her own times, and would read books of Chivalry, and Romances with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... this cane were exceedingly thick, giving it great stiffness, and solidity to resist storms of wind. It proved to be hardly ...
— A Source Book Of Australian History • Compiled by Gwendolen H. Swinburne
... voices that Domini could not hear. More close at hand certain roofs in the dancers' street revealed luxurious sofas on which painted houris were lolling in sinuous attitudes, or were posed with a stiffness of idols, little tables set with coffee cups, others round which were gathered Zouaves intent on card games, but ever ready to pause for a caress or for some jesting absurdity with the women who squatted beside them. Some men, dressed like ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... "on the contrary, taken as an ornament, it was the most useful ornament of any belonging to full dress, occupying the hands, giving the eyes something to look at, and taking away stiffness and formality from the figure and ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... through space, and terrific thunderous sounds in my very ears. I was conscious of turning a double or triple somersault, of alighting face-down on the long grass, of a heavy weight leaning upon my neck and spine, of pain, stiffness, semi-consciousness, of a continuous noise as though a motor-car lay and throbbed and whirred on the top of me. ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... to my feet and ascended the companion stairs. Fair weather was over, and there was nothing left but to return to the galley. My left arm was numb, as though paralysed, and days passed before I could use it, while weeks went by before the last stiffness and pain went out of it. And he had done nothing but put his hand upon my arm and squeeze. There had been no wrenching or jerking. He had just closed his hand with a steady pressure. What he might have done I did not fully realize till next day, when he put his head into the galley, ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... and obedient and plastic as the clay in the potter's hands. The tanner takes a stiff hide, and soaks it in bitter waters, and dresses it with sharp tools, and lubricates it with unguents, and his work is not done till all the stiffness is out of it and it is flexible. And we do not lose our lives in the lofty, noble sense, until we can say—and verify the speech by our actions—'Not my will but Thine be done.' They who thus submit, they who thus welcome into their hearts, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... dark and I could see nothing about me in any direction, so I concluded that the only thing to do was to remain standing just where I was until daybreak. It was a long and tedious wait and I suffered much from stiffness and cold, but at last dawn appeared and I anxiously strained my eyes, looking about in every direction. Then my head nearly burst with a feeling of joyousness, for within two hundred yards of me I discerned ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... cleaned in gasoline or soap and water, using a brush. Do not rub or wring. Hang up to drip dry, or wind tightly around a bottle and leave to dry. Do not press until after twenty-four hours, if cleaned in gasoline. To produce extra stiffness, rinse in a weak solution of sugar and water. It is also very easy to change the color of ribbons by using any of ...
— Make Your Own Hats • Gene Allen Martin
... suffering from any infectious disorder. Flannels are rendered softer, and the appearance of lace, fine articles, coloured prints, soiled ribbons, &c., greatly improved by washing them in this solution. A teaspoonful to each pint of starch, when hot, will add to the stiffness and gloss of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous
... executed almost too much in the modern manner to be interesting; for the charm of mosaic work is, to my sense, confined altogether to the infancy of the art. The great Christ, in the series of which I speak, is quite an elaborate picture, and yet he retains enough of the orthodox stiffness to make him impressive in the simpler, elder sense. He is clad in a purple robe, even as an emperor, his hair and beard are artfully curled, his eyebrows arched, his complexion brilliant, his whole ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... morning, drying up the damp floors, and turning to gold the scrap of yellow hair that showed through a hole in the old quilt. Presently the small girl shook the covering away from her and stood up, to yawn and stretch herself out of the stiffness from a night spent on the hard floor. She was not a pretty child, unless naturally curling fair hair, that would be fairer when it was washed, could make her so. The long, thin legs that came below her torn ...
— The Making of Mary • Jean Forsyth
... conscience, so Aristophanes and Petronius are untranslatable for him. Everything ponderous, viscous, and pompously clumsy, all long-winded and wearying species of style, are developed in profuse variety among Germans—pardon me for stating the fact that even Goethe's prose, in its mixture of stiffness and elegance, is no exception, as a reflection of the "good old time" to which it belongs, and as an expression of German taste at a time when there was still a "German taste," which was a rococo-taste in moribus et artibus. ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... outburst of genuine grief for a brother's death to a fugitive epigram of the most voluptuous triviality. His verses display ease and impetuosity, tumultuous merriment and wild passion, playful grace and slashing invective, vigorous simplicity and ingenious imitation of the learned stiffness and affectation of the Alexandrian school. They are strongly national, despite the author's use of foreign materials, and made Catullus exceedingly popular among ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... been taught to consider lawful as eating, was held in abhorrence by those around me; many words to which I had never heard an objectionable meaning attached, were totally interdicted, and the strangest paraphrastic sentences substituted. I confess it struck me, that notwithstanding a general stiffness of manner, which I think must exceed that of the Scribes and Pharisees, the Americans have imaginations that kindle with alarming facility. I could give many anecdotes to prove this, but will ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... at the stern, rigid countenance of her father, of whom she had ever thought, as the warm-hearted dwell on the affection of their absent parents; and, as she saw that the muscles of his face were working, notwithstanding the stiffness and method of his manner, her very heart yearned to throw herself on his bosom and to weep at will. But he was so much colder in externals, so much more formal and distant than she had expected to find him, that she would not have dared to hazard the freedom, even ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... dropping of the wrist below the level of the keyboard. A few great players practice this at a public recital, and lo! and behold! a veritable cult of 'wrist-droppers' arises and we see students raising and lowering the wrist with exaggerated mechanical stiffness and entirely ignoring the important end in which this wrist dropping ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... thine eyes," or "Still to be neat, still to be dressed"? Beautiful in form, deft and graceful in expression, with not a word too much or one that bears not its part in the total effect, there is yet about the lyrics of Jonson a certain stiffness and formality, a suspicion that they were not quite spontaneous and unbidden, but that they were carved, so to speak, with disproportionate labour by a potent man of letters whose habitual thought is on greater things. It is ...
— Sejanus: His Fall • Ben Jonson
... golosh—a shade more quickly than the first one. She kicked it off. The stiffness melted out of her; ...
— The Extra Day • Algernon Blackwood
... and Ted to everybody but Peter—the three were classmates—shepherds his flock with a few disarmingly personal insults to prevent stiffness closing down again over the four that have already got to talking at the arrival of the two newcomers, and marshals them out to the terrace where they are to have dinner. Without seeming to try, he seats them so that ...
— Young People's Pride • Stephen Vincent Benet
... nature, or revolting to decency. These qualifications ensured, a regular initiation into the Cockney mysteries follows as a matter of course, and the novice enlists himself under their banners, proud of his newly-acquired honors, and starched up to the very throat in all the prim stiffness of his intellect. A few symptoms of this literary malady appeared as early as the year 1795, but it then assumed the guise of simplicity and pathos. It was a poetical Lord Fanny. It wept its pretty self to death by murmuring brooks, and rippling cascades, it heaved ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... function of supporting the mechanically weak active material and of conducting the current. It is made of a lead antimony alloy which is melted and poured into a mould. Pure lead is too soft and too easily attacked by the electrolyte, and antimony is added to give stiffness, and resistance to the action of the electrolyte in the cell. The amount of antimony used varies in different makes but ...
— The Automobile Storage Battery - Its Care And Repair • O. A. Witte
... watched I observed that the discoloration was beginning to fade. First it vanished from the extremities, then from the larger limbs, and lastly from the trunk. Then in turn came the third stage of relaxation, the second stage of stiffness or rigor, and the first stage of after-death collapse. When all these had rapidly succeeded each other, Indaba-zimbi quietly ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard
... the jaw cavity is very small. None the less, it may have been occupied by the muscle or a ligament connected to it. Such an insertion leaves unexplained the great dorsal production of the dentary, surangular and coronoid. This may merely be a device to provide great dorsal-ventral stiffness to the long jaw, but it is possible and probable that some part of the temporal muscle was inserted on the inner surface of the coronoid. Indeed a very well-preserved jaw of D. limbatus? (R. 105: Pl. I, Fig. 2) bears a special depressed area on ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... rather slender man, measuring almost exactly six feet, with sloping shoulders, and he stood so straight, as almost to be the personification of uprightness. No soldier was ever more erect, and this without the least stiffness or conventionality. His head was not large at the base, but high-crowned and finely arched. His eyes were magnificent, and can only be compared to Hawthorne's eyes, though not so clear. Marshal von Moltke had eyes like two brilliant ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... of the issues at stake was floating in Finn's mind as he crept in and out among the tents and wagons of the enclosure: and he was conscious neither of wounds, or weakness, or stiffness; but only of his great resolve, based upon the wonderful chance that had come to him. Once he came to a place where ten feet of brilliant moonlight lay between the black shadow he occupied and the next. He paused for a moment or two, looking about him upon every side with all the cunning of ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... lesser parties, they far excel us. The conversation in these is easy, natural, and often even fascinating. The terms of polite familiarity with which you yourself are regarded, and with which you are encouraged to treat all around you; the absence of every thing like stiffness, or formality; the little interludes of music, in which, either in singing, or in performing on some instrument, most of those you meet are able to take a part; the round games which are often introduced, and where all forget themselves to be happy, and to make others so,—this species of party ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... is not of such nature that I can settle on cutting it off once for all, and never touching it afterward, as I could of concubinage. The bridle of the throat then is to be held attempered between slackness and stiffness. And who is he, O Lord, who is not some whit transported beyond the limits of necessity? whoever he is, he is a great one; let him make Thy Name great. But I am not such, for I am a sinful man. Yet do I too magnify Thy name; and He maketh intercession to Thee for my sins who hath overcome ...
— The Confessions of Saint Augustine • Saint Augustine
... Poland for us. The moment is come for accomplishing that promise. The King is dead [died this very day; see if I lose time in sentimental lamentations!]—with him these grievances of Russia [our stiffness on Courland and the like] must be extinct; the rather as we [the now reigning] will lend ourselves willingly to everything that can be required of us for perfect reconcilement ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... "Its stiffness, if that's what you mean," Carroll answered with a smile. "These big conifers look as if they'd been carved, like the wooden trees in the Swiss or German toys. They're impressive in a way, but ...
— Vane of the Timberlands • Harold Bindloss
... anguish when I drew a stiff white amice over my head, instead of the dear old limp and wrinkled one I was used to; and when I feebly tried to push my hands through the lace meshes of an alb, that would stand with stiffness and pride, if I placed it on the floor. I would gladly have called for my old garment; but I knew that I too had to undergo the process of the new reformation; and, with much agony, I desisted. But I drew the line at a biretta which cut my temples with ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... tedium at the camp of Compiegne, the dauphin, it is said, overtaxed his strength, and died at the age of thirty-six on the 20th of December, 1765, profoundly regretted by the bulk of the nation, who knew his virtues without troubling themselves, like the court and the philosophers, about the stiffness of his manners and his complete devotion to the cause of the clergy. The new dauphin, who would one day be Louis XVI., was still a child; the king had him brought into his closet. "Poor France!" he said sadly, "a king of fifty-five and a dauphin of eleven!" The dauphiness ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... ship they burnt her. The boys were kept in the capacity of ordinary slaves until about four years before the coming of the Essington, when Edwards died, and since that time Forbes had been unable to move in consequence of the stiffness in his legs. The scars were caused by the natives when he incurred their displeasure. One of their common modes of punishment was to take hot embers from the fire and place them on some part of his body until it was severely burned. When asked how he was treated generally, he replied ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee
... parlours and porches (the rented chairs always seen at Cherryvale parties and funerals) were one moment starkly exposed and the next moment hidden by light-hued skirts and by stiffly held, Sunday-trousered dark legs. For a while that stiffness which inevitably introduces a formal gathering of youngsters held them unnaturally bound. But just as inevitably it wore away, and by the time the folding chairs were drawn up round the little table where "hearts" were to be played, voices were babbling, and laughter ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... up bamboo for mast so that we shall be able to fix up a sail when favourable, we proceeded on our way to cross the Barrier. We have now 360 miles to travel geographically to get to Hut Point. Mr. Evans complained to me while outside the tent that he had a stiffness at the back of his legs behind the knees. I asked him what he thought it was, and he said could not account for it, so if he dont soon get rid of it I am to have a look and see if anything is the matter with him, as I know from what I have ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... climates very necessary to keep the sun from scorching a man, they may also be serviceable to keep the rain off; most men of account maintain one, two or three roundeliers, whose office is only to attend their master's motion; they are very light but of exceeding stiffness, being for the most part made of rhinoceros hide, very decently painted and guilded with what flowers they best admire. Exactly in the midst thereof is fixed a smooth handle made of wood, by which the Roundelier doth carry it, holding it a foot or more above his master's ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... volume on the table, tugging the hair on a puckered forehead. Sometimes the depression left him, when he buckled to his work; as his mind became occupied with other things the vision of the Howff was expelled. Usually, however, the stiffness of his brains made the reading drag heavily, and he rarely attained the sufficing happiness of a student eager and engrossed. At the end of ten minutes he would be gaping across the table, and wondering what they were doing at the Howff. ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... lace, and slightly turned down on either side of the face, completed his attire. There was nothing majestic, but the very reverse, in the King's deportment, and he seemed only kept upright by the exceeding stiffness of his cumbersome clothes. With the appearance of being corpulent, he was not so in reality, and his weak legs and bent knees were scarcely able to support his frame. He always used a stick, and generally sought the additional aid of a ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... limp ease that made for rest, his body shifting now and again in the saddle, so as to change the weight and avoid stiffness. ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... offends it on the lips of Socrates, and virtue in the life of Phocion. It is well known that the Romans had to exhaust their energies in civil wars, and, corrupted by Oriental luxury, to bow their heads under the yoke of a fortunate despot, before Grecian art triumphed over the stiffness of their character. The same was the case with the Arabs: civilization only dawned upon them when the vigor of their military spirit became softened under the sceptre of the Abbassides. Art did not appear in modern Italy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... he gave the impression of being? Audrey considered that all was lost, and she was aware of a most unpleasant feeling of helplessness and inefficiency. Then she seemed to receive inspiration and optimism from somewhere. She knew not exactly from where, but perhaps it was from the shy stiffness of the demeanour of her old acquaintance, Inspector Keeble. Moreover, the Irishman's twinkling eyes ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... monotonous in action, but Mrs. Woffington's delivery has the compass and variety of nature, and her movements are free from the stale uniformity that distinguishes artifice from art. The others seem to me to have but two dreams of grace, a sort of crawling on stilts is their motion, and an angular stiffness their repose." He then cited the most famous statues of antiquity, and quoted situations in plays where, by her fine dramatic instinct, Mrs. Woffington, he said, threw her person into postures similar to these, and of equal ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... you to broach the subject. The fact is, when I begin to talk, she gets her arms round my old neck and falls to weeping and kissing me at such a rate as makes a fool of me. If the child would only be rebellious, one could do something; but this love takes all the stiffness out of one's joints; and she tells me she never wants a husband, and she will be content to live with me all her life. The saints know it isn't for my happiness to put her out of my old arms; but I can't last forever,—my old back grows weaker every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... cottage, Feathertop strode manfully towards town. Mother Rigby stood at the threshold, well pleased to see how the sunbeams glistened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and how diligently and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and how handsomely he walked, in spite of a little stiffness of his legs. She watched him, until out of sight, and threw a witch-benediction after her darling, when a turn of the road snatched him from ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey.' 'The style of Madame de Sevigne,' wrote Mackintosh (Life, ii. 221), 'is evidently copied, not only by her worshipper Walpole, but even by Gray; notwithstanding the extraordinary merits of his matter, he has the double stiffness of an imitator and of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... the soprano had sung exactly to key, the alto had shrieked "Beware!" to thrilling purpose, Arkwright had shown all his old charm and vim, and the chorus had been prodigies of joyousness and marvels of lightness. Even the lovers had lost their stiffness, while the two earth-bound fairies of the night before had found so amiable a meeting point that their solos sounded, to the uninitiated, very like, indeed, a duet. The operetta was, in short, a glorious and gratifying success, both artistically ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... the inertia that some deep thought imparts to the attitude. Thus standing, she presented a living model of those ingenuous works of statuary a taste for which prevailed at that period,—works which obtained admiration for the harmony of their lines, straight without stiffness, and for the firmness of a design which did not exclude vitality. No swallow, brushing the window-panes at dusk, ever conveyed the idea of ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... I am turned out in this pasture because I am too old to work. Horses pass here every day drawing heavy loads, older by half a dozen years than I am, poor broken-down hacks too, most of them, while I—well, if it wasn't for a little stiffness in the joints and a giving out of wind, now and then, I can't see but what I'm as well able to travel as ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... glance. Standing there, in the fire-light of the guard-room, was the tall figure of Anthony Unziar, waiting with haughty stiffness for the appearance of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... only working by touch, but Sam made good use of his muscles, forgetting all about his stiffness, and for quite a couple of minutes the panting and scuffling of the wrestling pair went on, till Sam found himself upon his back with the black sitting upon his chest and a pair of hands in ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... easier, freer, and more genuine than the cumbrous rhetoric, partly derived from the allegorising style of the Roman de la Rose and its followers, partly influenced by corrupt following of the re-discovered and scarcely yet understood classics, partly alloyed with Flemish and German and Spanish stiffness, of which Chastellain, Cretin, and the rest have been the frequently quoted and the rarely read exponents to students of French literature. The contents of the Marguerites, to take the order of the beautiful edition of M. Felix Frank, are as follows: Volume I. contains first a long and ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... reduce the number of words in which this more vigorous scheme of expressing degrees is allowed, we must recognize an evidence that the energy which the language had in its youth is in some measure abating, and the stiffness of age overtaking it. Still it is with us here only as it is with all languages, in which at a certain time of their life auxiliary words, leaving the main word unaltered, are preferred to inflections of this last. ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... he had a sharp tussle with the Bank of England, and displayed a toughness, stiffness, and sustained anger that greatly astonished Threadneedle Street. In the spring he had introduced a change in the mode of issuing deficiency bills, limiting the quarterly amount to such a sum as would cover the maximum ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of you to come—though I thought you would," Miss Gibson said impulsively, as we shook hands. "You have been so sympathetic and human—both you and Dr. Thorndyke—so free from professional stiffness. My aunt went off to see Mr. Lawley directly ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... He was a concentrated force. His white body was knotted with nerves and muscles. The chances were good if—Gordon pictured it to himself—and again the horror and doubt were over him. He himself had acquired a certain stiffness and lassitude from years, and long drives in one position. He would stand no chance unarmed against a bullet. But the dog—that was another matter. The dog would make a spring like the spring of death itself, and that white leap of attack might easily cause the aim ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... flame that flashed from it. It was a fixed gaze, which was, nevertheless, full of trouble and tumult. And, from the profound immobility of his whole body, barely agitated at intervals by an involuntary shiver, as a tree is moved by the wind; from the stiffness of his elbows, more marble than the balustrade on which they leaned; or the sight of the petrified smile which contracted his face,—one would have said that nothing living was left about Claude Frollo ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... which Mrs. Herndon ushered him to await the girl's appearance—the formal look of the old-fashioned hair-cloth furniture, the prim striped paper on the walls, the green shades at the windows, the clean rag carpet on the floor. The very stiffness chilled him, left him ill at ease. To calm his spirit he walked to a window, and stood staring out into the warm sunlight. Then he heard the rustle of Naida's skirt and turned to meet her. She was pale from her weeks of nursing, ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... locality,—as all men well versed with London are aware,—lies within one minute's walk of the top of Gray's Inn Lane. Gager, during his conference with his colleague Bunfit, had been dressed in plain black clothes; but in spite of his plain clothes he looked every inch a policeman. There was a stiffness about his limbs, and, at the same time, a sharpness in his eyes, which, in the conjunction with the locality in which he was placed, declared his profession beyond the possibility of mistake. Nor, in that locality, would he have desired to ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... world is at your feet. I dread two things for you,—that you should marry unworthily, and that you should injure your prospects in public life by an uncompromising stiffness. On the former subject I can say nothing to you. As to the latter, let me implore you to come down here before you decide upon anything. Of course you can at once accept Mr. Gresham's offer; and that is what you ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... at last, the coat repaired. Dick with difficulty concealed the growing stiffness of his shoulders, while Dolly turned up the lamp, which bluntly hinted bedtime, and Mrs. Ward successfully devoured six gapes behind her hand, but was detected in the seventh by Mr. Bopp, who glanced at the ...
— On Picket Duty and Other Tales • Louisa May Alcott
... dash now and then of biting sarcastic humour, we see the remains of a great and noble nature, out of which all the genial sap of humanity has been pressed by accumulated injuries. With as much elasticity of mind as stiffness of neck, every step he takes but the last is as firm as the earth he treads upon. Nothing can daunt, nothing disconcert him; remonstrance cannot move, ridicule cannot touch, obloquy cannot exasperate him: when he has not provoked them, he has been forced to bear them; ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... can tell you, about everything. There was no humbugging him. The fellows liked him because he was really so earnest about everything, and always just and fair. But he didn't look a bit like a soldier except as to his stiffness, and when the fellows who had been at Lexington heard that he was in command here they did not think he would have made much hand at it; but I tell you, he did. You never saw such a fellow ...
— With Lee in Virginia - A Story of the American Civil War • G. A. Henty
... capable of responding except Mr. Bultitude, who dashed into the breach with an almost pathetic effort to maintain his accustomed stiffness. ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... spread out their fichus more proudly, but there is no longer that sweet flower of old-fashioned pudicity in their costume that made them resemble Holbein's virgins. They are more coquettish, more graceful. The correct style in the old days was a sort of unbending stiffness which made their infrequent smiles ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... tunes Old fellow ought to seem wise whether he really be so or not Please all who are worth pleasing; offend none Pleasures do not commonly last so long as life Polite, but without the troublesome forms and stiffness Prejudices are our mistresses Quarrel with them when they are grown up, for being spoiled Read with caution and distrust Ruined their own son by what they called loving him Secret, without being dark and mysterious Seeming inattention ...
— Widger's Quotations from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son • David Widger
... conventionalities so as not to fetter her own free spirit. It may be her mission to show the world a social order free from the forward independence and smartness of which she has been accused, and yet relieved of the dull stiffness of the older forms. It is enough now to notice that a change is going on, due to the effect of foreign society upon American women, and to express the patriotic belief that whatever forms of etiquette she may bow to, the American Girl ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the door, his sensations painful enough in the mingled tumult of suspense, hope, and fear. There was no bell, only an old-fashioned brass knocker, which, with a kind of surly stiffness, resisted his attempt to use it. He managed to wrench one knock out of it, and left it suspended ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... whom I now knew to be Lady Fitzgraham. She hardly acknowledged my look of recognition, and out of the tail of my eye I saw Connie Stapleton glance quickly at each of us in turn, as though Lady Fitzgraham's unmistakable stiffness surprised her. ...
— The Four Faces - A Mystery • William le Queux
... the first splendour of their coming faded—faded imperceptibly day after day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue of their long march from London told in a certain stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered from a slight unaccountable cold. Moreover, Denton became aware of unoccupied time. In one place among the carelessly heaped lumber of the old times he found a rust-eaten spade, and with this he made a fitful attack on ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... nerves and irrepressible life—no hint of arriving at her typical American grace in the most usual way. She was pretty without emphasis and as might almost have been said without point, and your fancy that a little stiffness would have improved her was at once qualified by the question of what her softness would have made of it. There was nothing in her, however, to confirm the implication that she had rushed about the deck of a Cunarder with a newspaper-man. She was ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... the strange camp was astir, and one by one the boys painfully crawled out, to try to get some of the stiffness from their limbs ...
— The Boy Scouts of Lenox - Or The Hike Over Big Bear Mountain • Frank V. Webster
... boundary lines or at buildings, the taller ones should be used at the back, but the semi-tall ones—say three feet in height—should occasionally be brought well toward the front in order to avoid stiffness and to add irregularity to the general effect. If a house or fence is at the back, flowering vines like the Clematis paniculata, or C. flammula, or any annual flowering vine, may be used here and there. In detached beds which may be seen from all sides, the taller ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan
... croaking tale? If they bloomed on with the same crimson flaunt of color, though the rockers beneath them had grown warped and the body of the chair creaked and groaned every time one ventured to sit in it, why should she not ignore the stiffness which the years seemed to bring to her joints, the complaints which her body threatened every now and again to utter, and fare on herself, a hardy perennial bravely facing ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... How far down would it sink with him? This was too much for Nimble Dick, even under the present overpowering circumstances—he laughed. His hostess blessed him for that laugh. The horrible stiffness was somewhat broken, ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... and bosquets by no means resembling (one should conjecture) the gardens of the Hesperides. But, considering that the whole group of trees, terraces, and verdure were in a manner created out of hills of sand, the place may claim some portion of merit. The walks and alleys have all the stiffness and formality our ancestors admired; but the intermediate spaces, being dotted with clumps and sprinkled with flowers, are imagined in Holland to be in the English style. An Englishman ought certainly to behold it with partial eyes, since every possible attempt ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... opportunity of singing songs and speech-making, and can put up with indifferent wine, let him go to the race Ordinary at Glyndewi next year, if it still be among the things which time has spared. There was nothing like stiffness or formality: people came there for amusement, and they knew that the only way to get it was to make it for themselves. There seemed to be fun enough for half-a-dozen of the common run of such dinners, even while the ladies remained. It was, as Hanmer called it, an extra-ordinary. But it was when ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... says, "Those persons who have ever had the pleasure to be in his company may recollect that even in his common conversation the order and method he pursued without the smallest degree of formality or stiffness were beautiful, and gave a sort of pleasure to ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... brought over a pulley at the end of the jib. The rails for the carriage rest on rolled joints bolted to the underside of jib. This arrangement involves the use of an overhung traveling carriage, but enables the jib to be of a stiff box section, the side stiffness being further secured by ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 312, December 24, 1881 • Various
... about Poussin's Orion. I found this out on my second visit to it. What disappointed me, and perhaps him, at first sight, was a certain stiffness in Orion's own figure; I expected to see him stalk through the landscape forcibly, as a giant usually does; but I forgot at the moment that Orion was blind, and must walk as a blind man. Therefore this stiffness in his figure was just the right thing. I think however the picture ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... admit the body of the fox. Even as the boy looked, the long hairs of Leloo's great ruff stiffened, and stood quiveringly erect, a low growl rumbled deep in the dog's throat, and with a curious tense stiffness of movement, he began to back slowly from the hole. Never for an instant did the low throaty growl cease, nor did the fixed yellow eyes leave the black aperture. Not until he had backed a full twenty feet from the hole did the dog's ...
— Connie Morgan in the Fur Country • James B. Hendryx
... the predominant race is the Kailouee. To me the latter seems to be a mixture of the Berbers, or supposed aborigines of the northern coast, with all the tribes and varieties of tribes of the interior of Africa. This may account for their having less pride and stiffness than the Tuaricks of Ghat, who are purer Berbers; as well as for their disposition to thieving and petty larceny, of which I have recently been obliged to give some examples. The pure Berbers, likewise, are much less sensual than their bastard descendants, who seem, indeed, to ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... Stiffness was over when she came in, and Dr. May, who presently made his appearance, soon was much more at his ease than could have been hoped, after his previous declarations that he should never be able to be moderately civil about it to Mr. Rivers. People of ready sympathy, such as ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... It seems as if with English writers poetic sentiment naturally sought expression in poetic forms, while the Frenchmen of nearly corresponding temperament were restrained within the limits of prose by reason of the vigorously prescribed stateliness and stiffness of their verse at that time. A man in this country with the quality of Vauvenargues, with his delicacy, tenderness, elevation, would have composed lyrics. We have undoubtedly lost much by the laxity and irregularity ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol 2 of 3) - Essay 1: Vauvenargues • John Morley
... the parlours and porches (the rented chairs always seen at Cherryvale parties and funerals) were one moment starkly exposed and the next moment hidden by light-hued skirts and by stiffly held, Sunday-trousered dark legs. For a while that stiffness which inevitably introduces a formal gathering of youngsters held them unnaturally bound. But just as inevitably it wore away, and by the time the folding chairs were drawn up round the little table where "hearts" were to be played, voices were babbling, and laughter ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... Islanders how to build and manage a catamaran. This consists of two canoes or long thin boats, placed parallel and joined together by wooden strips, which also answer for a deck. This craft can be rowed or driven by a sail, placed well forward. Its great advantage is its stiffness, for it cannot be upset in ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort
... The night was very dark and I could see nothing about me in any direction, so I concluded that the only thing to do was to remain standing just where I was until daybreak. It was a long and tedious wait and I suffered much from stiffness and cold, but at last dawn appeared and I anxiously strained my eyes, looking about in every direction. Then my head nearly burst with a feeling of joyousness, for within two hundred yards of me I discerned the outline of what appeared to be a hill of rocks protruding ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... the wisest and most honourable plan that a man can pursue when he finds himself thrown into a dangerously familiar association with a beautiful and unprotected woman, is the very line of proceeding which a beautiful woman can never bring herself to forgive. A chivalrous stiffness, a melancholy dignity, a frozen frigidity, which suggest the fiery bubbling of the lava flood beneath the icy surface,—these are delightful to the female mind. But friendly indifference and fraternal cordiality constitute the worst insult that ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... getting up steam to go to St. Kentigern. Would they kindly come on board until it was ready? At an added word or two of explanation from the consul, the father accepted, preserving the same formal pride and stiffness, and the transfer was made. The consul, looking back as his gig swept round again towards Bannock pier, received their parting salutations, and the first smile he had seen on the face of his grave little passenger. He thought ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... "As the executive of the P. K. & R, system it wouldn't be exactly official and proper in me to approve your judgment in that matter of the Italians; but as a man—plain man, now, you understand,—I know grit when I see it and—" he dropped his bluff stiffness got out of his chair and came along and squeezed Parker's muscular arm, "you've got a brand of it that I admire. Yes, I do. No mistake! But that is just between you and me. That is simply my own personal opinion. I don't believe the directors relish the idea of gladiators in ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... himself as his handwriting; and indeed I seem to see in the handwriting of Edmond de Goncourt just the characteristics of his style. Every letter is formed carefully, separately, with a certain elegant stiffness; it is beautiful, formal, too regular in the 'continual slight novelty' of its form to be quite clear at a glance: very personal, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... with formal military stiffness the Prince saluted,—and turning slowly on his heel, left the presence-chamber. Alone, the King and his beautiful Queen-Consort looked questioningly at ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... was that sense of stiffness and awkwardness as the Dixons came forward to greet their cousins; there was no triumphant entry and welcome to the old home. Mrs. Chase drew Mrs. Orban in; Mr. Chase took Mr. Orban; Becky, sleepy ...
— Queensland Cousins • Eleanor Luisa Haverfield
... disher fam'ly 'fore dey's bo'n and sence! All comes o' apin' white folks," said the old man, threatening the debaters with the scantling. "Dey's boun' to git up a 'batin'-soci'ty an' talk all de evening w'en dere was Paublo Johnson standin' up all de evenin' from stiffness he cotched from ole man Geiger's goat, an', hit's a fac', he stan' an' 'scuss de question, tryin' to make outen how de goat kicked him, all kase he's on de on side. But dat's de coon ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... intellectual working; it is enough to consider the results. We see that the intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigor, the stiffness and the brutality of an instrument not designed for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent and constant need we have to preserve our bodies ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... a noble mind, is ever the fittest object of good-will. The eldest of them, I will suppose, for his honour, to have been of the academic sect, neither dogmatist nor stoick; if he were not, I am sure he ought, in common justice, to yield the precedency to his younger brother. For stiffness of opinion is the effect of pride, and not of philosophy; it is a miserable presumption of that knowledge which human nature is too narrow to contain; and the ruggedness of a stoick is only a silly affectation of being a god,—to wind himself up by pullies to an insensibility of suffering, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... well; the majority of composers, nowadays, taking the precaution to write them at the beginning, and in the course, of their pieces. I do not mean to say by this that it is necessary to imitate the mathematical regularity of the metronome, all music so performed would become of freezing stiffness, and I even doubt whether it would be possible to observe so flat a uniformity during a certain number of bars. But the metronome is none the less excellent to consult in order to know the original time, and ...
— The Orchestral Conductor - Theory of His Art • Hector Berlioz
... awoke, in the dead of the might, and found myself seized with shivering fits, my teeth chattering, a sickness at my stomach, my head intolerably heavy, and my temples bruised with the blows I had received, and having a sensation as if they were ready to burst. To all this was added the stiffness that pervaded the muscles of my arms, and body, from the bruises, falls, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the side of a mountain which they had begun to ascend shortly before noon. Mr. Hardy proved himself an old campaigner. He had a fire made, and bacon frying before the boys had the stiffness from their legs, caused by their ride. Then, with bread and coffee, they made a better meal than they had partaken of in ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... or say something at once. The commonest matter gently stated is better than an embarrassing silence. Sometimes changing your position, or looking into a book for a moment may relieve your embarrassment, and dispel any settling stiffness. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... were bound. They were crossed behind his back, and the lasso was wrapped twice around them, and tied in a square knot—a single glance at which drove all thoughts of sleep out of Johnny's mind, and suggested to him the idea of an attempt to liberate his friend. The knot, on account of the stiffness of the lasso, had not been drawn very tight, and Johnny thought he had hit upon a plan to ...
— Frank Among The Rancheros • Harry Castlemon
... Imogen's rugs about her, "Here's my sister at last, you see;" which off-hand introduction the lady acknowledged with a pleasant smile, saying she was glad to see Miss Young able to be up. Her manner was so unaffected and cordial that Imogen's stiffness melted under its influence, and before she knew it they were talking quite ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... great stiffness, at the same time preserving its lightness; and the feature which specially distinguishes this railway from others of the same class is not only its extreme strength, but above all its solidity, which results from its bearing equally upon the ground by means of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 446, July 19, 1884 • Various
... rubies, sweet flowers, and fine silken tufts, and very pleasantly would pass their time in taking you know what between their fingers, and dandling it, till it did revive and creep up to the bulk and stiffness of a suppository, or street magdaleon, which is a hard rolled-up salve spread upon leather. Then did they burst out in laughing, when they saw it lift up its ears, as if the sport had liked them. One of them would ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... now found he was expected to eat large quantities of boiled fish, plum-cake and sweets; and Mrs. Kettering, perceiving that he didn't do justice to the fare, enumerated to him other things that were in the larder, with the suggestion that he might perhaps prefer a choice of them. Some of the stiffness that had characterised the former meal had vanished—Morgan could see now that had been due to shyness at his presence—and, though Mark still showed little willingness to converse, the girls were evidently beginning to find themselves again, occasional gigglings heralding ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... dales which the road skirts, are sometimes entirely barren, at others thickly covered with vines and fruit-trees. Though the former plant is pleasing in the tints of its leaf, and in the idea of cultivation and plenty that its thick plantations present, yet there is a stiffness in the regularity in which it grows, propped up by sticks; and it is so short, that one's fancy as to its luxuriance, (especially if formed from such poetry as Childe Harold,) is certainly disappointed. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... procedure was as follows: The reinforcing rings were erected to a height of 7 ft. The bars were bent by being pulled through a tire binder and around a curved templet by a steam engine. The bending gave some trouble, due, it was thought, to the stiffness of the high carbon steel. Vertical channels 4 ins. deep were set with webs in radial planes or across wall at four points in the circumference. The flanges of these channels were punched exactly to the vertical spacing of the reinforcing rings. Through the punched holes were passed short bars on ...
— Concrete Construction - Methods and Costs • Halbert P. Gillette
... supplying the current, and by which an incandescent lamp is suspended. It often is merely a little block of wood perforated with two holes through which the wires pass, and in which they are retained in any desired position by friction and their own stiffness. ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... foretell nothing at all. I rose out of it this good while, with the stiffness and the swelling it brought upon ...
— The Unicorn from the Stars and Other Plays • William B. Yeats
... great that no intimacy could bridge it over, no reserve widen it, and that his own bashful hauteur was almost a sign that he knew that the gulf had been passed by his own parents; but shame and consciousness did not enable him to alter his manner but rather added to its stiffness. ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... is a long word, Lennan. I am going to have some tea;" and gingerly he walked away, quizzing, as it were, with a smile, his own stiffness. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Hassam's painting, Fruits and Flowers. This again is a conventional treatment, showing very obviously vegetable and human fruits and flowers. The arrangement is tediously symmetric, the coloring is rather weak, and there is a wooden stiffness about the figures. The panel makes a pleasant spot of color, but is by no means up to the standard of the canvases in Hassam's room in the Palace ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... only "a father," Old-fashioned and rather Deficient in stiffness of spine, So, feeling unequal To facing the sequel, My name I'm unwilling to sign; For the call for more powder Grows stronger and louder From every daughter of mine, And any restriction Of puffs or nose-friction Would end in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... Examiner, in his gown, cap, and hood, gravely walking up and down during the two hours the examination lasted, going through the ceremonial with all the regular solemnity of the Senate House. The candidates, we are told, expected a sort of jocose business, and were little prepared for the "stiffness" of the questions which were of the deep and searching kind they were accustomed to in the case of a Greek Play or a Latin Epic. Almost at once, three-fourths showed by their helpless bewilderment that the thing was beyond them; and the struggle lay between the two well-versed Pickwickians—Besant ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... is General Andrew Jackson?" he demanded, surprised at the stiffness of his own tongue. And those hands, pale and inert, lying on the coverlet before him, could they be his own? And why should he, Marcel, be in his bed in broad daylight? Suddenly he remembered that yesterday he had fetched a despatch ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... could be put slyly, how the stiffness and awkwardness of native speech could be suppled and decorated, how the innuendo, the turn of words, the nuance, could be imparted to dog-Latin. And if to dog-Latin, why not to genuine ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... beheld to his fury and amazement the Duchess alone with his page Guiscard. But the descendant of Robert the Wiseacre well knew how to temper vengeance with dissimulation. Dreading the scandal that would follow an open exposure, the Prince, in spite of his years and the stiffness of his joints, contrived to quit the chamber unperceived by means of a convenient window. That very night the unsuspecting Guiscard was seized by his sovereign's orders and thrust into a foul dungeon of the palace, whither Tancred himself ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... he had copied from the English gentry, his manners, his dress, his curled whiskers, his outward distinction; the woman, with her grand manners, her supreme elegance, all the stiffness and formality of the upper middle class, represented admirably the pride of money. Their disdainful politeness, their haughty amiability, seemed to come down to people. There was a kind of insolence ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... and all round the world forty times over. Many and many's the time I was shipwrecked and overboard, but I never got drowned. At last, when I were gitting a old man, and not much use by reason of the rheumatiz and stiffness in the jints, there was a mutiny in our ship when we was off the Cape; and the captain and mate they was killed. Then comes my turn, becoz I went again the men, d'ye see, and they wasn't a-going for to pardon me that. So out they had ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... generally in the course of the second day that the child complains of considerable stiffness in the muscles of the neck, extending to the lower jaw, and under the ears;—of a roughness of the throat, and difficulty in swallowing;—and some degree of hoarseness will be noticed: all so many indications that the throat is affected. Very shortly, an increased secretion of ...
— The Maternal Management of Children, in Health and Disease. • Thomas Bull, M.D.
... those who went to the Continent for their long vacations. From France they returned with marked French manners and tones and clothes, while from Germany they brought the distinctive marks of German stiffness in manner and general bearing. It was noted as still more curious that the same student would illustrate both variations, provided he spent one summer in Germany ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... Though you can't imagine the stiffness of my neck and legs. Let me see, how long is it ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 14, 1841 • Various
... singeing, some ugly blisters, a certain number of hands that were bound up by the doctor, and a few orders as to their use—orders which proved to be forgotten at once—and a certain awkwardness of gait set down to the stiffness of the newly issued garments—those were all that were noticeable at the first glance round by the midshipmen, and apparently the whole crew were ready and fit to help in the efforts being made to ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... ponderous tome bodily out of the shelf, swung it, and sent it spinning through the air, so that it struck Greenwood flat in the face and knocked him over like a rolling ninepin. At the same instant Basil's stiffness broke, and he sank, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... the world is at your feet. I dread two things for you,—that you should marry unworthily, and that you should injure your prospects in public life by an uncompromising stiffness. On the former subject I can say nothing to you. As to the latter, let me implore you to come down here before you decide upon anything. Of course you can at once accept Mr. Gresham's offer; and that is what you should do unless the office proposed to ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... still gripping the nutritious bank with a moiety of roots, turned slowly in its fibrous stiffness and directed its life and sap and hopes upward. During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided, controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... opposition he met with from the master, who said it was foolishness, Harry Paul plunged overboard, and swam to the bathing-place, where he dressed; and, saving that he was suffering from a peculiar sensation of stiffness, he was ...
— A Terrible Coward • George Manville Fenn
... beauty. Adorned with crowns, garlands, bracelets, and other ornaments, endued with mighty arms, possessed of prowess and vigour and bursting with strength and energy, those princes could not, even in imagination, string that bow of extraordinary stiffness. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... admiration for him; and it is easy to see, before it happened, how desolate his loss would leave her. Then the Prince of Wales was always 'Bertie,' and the Princess Royal 'Vicky,' and the family circle generally a group as loving and united—without a trace of courtly stiffness—as was to be found round any hearth ...
— Queen Victoria • Anonymous
... the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, of a Benedicite." The French officers must have been surprised; they were not used to simple country manners and to grace before meat on all occasions, but they were too polite and too well trained to laugh. "Twenty ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... It was soiled and shrunken with its wetting, and the clasp had flecks of rust upon it. What it contained Lone did not know. Virginia had taught him that a man must not be curious about the personal belongings of a woman. Now he turned the purse over, tried to rub out the stiffness of the leather, and smiled a little as he dropped it back into ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... and always lively, and it was her duty to see that Giselle accommodated herself to his taste; sea-bathing, life in the open air, and merry companions, were the things she needed to make her a little less thin, to give her tone, and to take some of her convent stiffness out of her. Besides, she could have free intercourse with her intended husband, thanks to the greater freedom of manners permitted at the sea-side. Such were the ideas of Madame ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the regulation of matters at head- quarters. He kept up more formality and state than Bishop Heber had done; and, of course, as the one had been censured for his simplicity, so the other was found fault with for pomp and stiffness. But these were minor points, chiefly belonging to the character of the two men, whose whole natures were in curious accordance with their prize performances at Oxford,—the one with all the warmth, fire, and animation of the poet of Palestine, sensitive ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... again Balzac's own—adorned by fancy: a superb head, black hair sparsely sprinkled with white, hair like that of Saint Peter and Saint Paul as shown in our pictures, with thick glossy curls, hair of bristly stiffness; a white round neck, as that of a woman; a splendid forehead with the puissant furrow in the middle that great plans and thoughts and deep meditations engrave on the brow of genius; an olive complexion streaked with red; a square nose; eyes of fire; gaunt cheeks with two long ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... simple biscuit and cakes, offered by another, is all the further repast. The teacups and cake-basket are a real addition to the scene, because they cause a little lively social bustle, a little chatter and motion,—always of advantage in breaking up stiffness, and giving occasion for those graceful, airy nothings that answer so good a purpose ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... in ageing, whether from repentance for her errors or from hypocrisy, Lady Douglas had become a prude and a puritan; so that at this time she united with the natural acrimony of her character all the stiffness of the new religion ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... back in silence for some minutes, looking now at the fire too, now at the figure opposite, noticing, however, that the helplessness seemed gone. His hands dangled no longer; he sat upright, his hands clasped, yet with a curious look of stiffness ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... None the less, it may have been occupied by the muscle or a ligament connected to it. Such an insertion leaves unexplained the great dorsal production of the dentary, surangular and coronoid. This may merely be a device to provide great dorsal-ventral stiffness to the long jaw, but it is possible and probable that some part of the temporal muscle was inserted on the inner surface of the coronoid. Indeed a very well-preserved jaw of D. limbatus? (R. 105: Pl. I, Fig. 2) bears a special depressed area on the outer surface of the extreme hinder ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... about that, Toby," the other told him, as he commenced with his customary early morning exercises, modeled somewhat after the type of those in use in the army, and which were best calculated to take all the stiffness and numbness out of his system, brought about by curling ...
— Jack Winters' Campmates • Mark Overton
... trusses; the former mainly concerned about the monetary loss involved, and the other demonstrating with a chair that the statue might have been kept up. As for Mahoudeau, still very shaky and growing dazed; he complained of a stiffness which he had not felt before; his limbs began to hurt him, he had strained his muscles and bruised his skin as if he had been caught in the embrace of a stone siren. Christine washed the scratch on his cheek, which had begun ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... before the old sailor awoke to find a hot dinner ready and the boys patiently waiting. He was surprised to find that his stiffness had nearly all disappeared, and, except for the cuts on hands and face, he was ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... fall upon their flank, and beat down their lances with their swords. The only defense of these horsemen-at-arms are their lances; they have nothing else that they can use to protect themselves, or annoy their enemy, on account of the weight and stiffness of their armor, with which they are, as it were, built up. He himself, with two cohorts, made to the mountain, the soldiers briskly following, when they saw him in arms afoot first toiling and climbing up. Being on the top and standing in an open place, with ...
— Plutarch's Lives • A.H. Clough
... for a week at some vague future date; one of the children was unwell, and until it recovered it was impossible to fix a day. Still, they would be delighted to see him again. Her letters always had a note of stiffness in them, which was purely unintentional, or rather, purely natural, reflecting the one salient point ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... high ceilings and three large windows that loomed down pleasantly upon Fifty-second Street. In its appointments it escaped by a safe margin being of any particular period; it escaped stiffness, stuffiness, bareness, and decadence. It smelt neither of smoke nor of incense—it was tall and faintly blue. There was a deep lounge of the softest brown leather with somnolence drifting about it like a haze. There was a high screen of Chinese lacquer chiefly ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the sergeant ejaculated, "ye dinna say that ye are a colonel?" Then reassuming with a great effort his military stiffness, he opened the door and announced in a loud ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... Those sleeves, rising above the shoulders—as high as the ear in Catherine's costume, you will observe—are unsightly enough to nullify whatever beauty the costume might have in other points; though in her case they only complete the expression of the costume, which is a grim, unnatural stiffness. And the reason of the unsightliness of these sleeves is, that the outline which they present is directly opposed to that of Nature. No human shoulders bulge upward into great hemispherical excrescences nine inches high; and the peculiar ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... the inn—formerly an assistant butler in Madame du Barry's hotel at Versailles, was a sharp, sour-natured old fellow, truculent and avaricious. The spine of this man was a sort of social barometer; by its exact degree of curvature or stiffness in the presence of a guest the stable-boys and housemaids knew whether his rank was great or small, and whether, to please their cantankerous master, they were to fly or walk at his beck, or in the case of a mere bourgeois, to drink ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... might have received us in more state, but certainly they could not have given us a warmer greeting. In fact, in his own domain Roland appeared another man. His stiffness, which was a little repulsive to those who did not understand it, was all gone. He seemed less proud, precisely because he and his pride, on that ground, were on good terms with each other. How gallantly he extended,—not his arm, in our modern Jack-and-Jill ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... so soon as Urquhart's sanguineness had predicted. Perhaps he began taking precautions against stiffness too soon; anyhow he did not that term make a decent three-quarter, or any sort of a three-quarter at all. It always took Peter a long time to get well of things; he was easy to break and hard to mend—made in Germany, as he was frequently told. So cheaply made was he that he could perform nothing. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... his faithful admirers, and compromised it in the eyes of those who had only followed him with some effort and attended him to this decisive point. It made him a painter more peculiar and a master less sure. It heated and divided men of taste according to the heat of their blood, or the stiffness of their reason. In short, it was regarded as an absolutely new but dangerous adventure which brought him applause and some blame, and which at heart did not convince anybody. If you know the judgment expressed on this subject ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... remarked that Miss Strange was "very easy in her manners." This was not always the case with ladies in Coalchester, and Mrs. Moggridge did not mean the remark as an unreserved compliment. She liked a certain stiffness in strangers. It was not, however, in Isabel Strange's nature to oblige her in that particular. Her way of pouring her grace into Mrs. Moggridge's great arm-chair suggested at once that she had lived there for ever so long, and to him particularly she chatted as with an old acquaintance. You ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... are at all acquainted with his performance, fill up every idea of excellence in this character: his love was enchanting, his rage alarming, his grief melting: even now, though overtaken by time, and impaired in constitution, he has not the shadow of a competitor. The rheumatic stiffness of his joints has been industriously trumpeted forth, and every mean art made use of to lower him in public opinion; yet true it is that if he hobbled upon stilts, he would be better than many persons, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... marble parapet, are so many proofs of Giorgione's hand. Moreover, we find in Mr. Benson's picture the characteristic tree-trunks, so suggestive of solemn grandeur,[129] and the striped scarf,[130] so cunningly disposed to give more flowing line and break the stiffness ...
— Giorgione • Herbert Cook
... keyboard. A few great players practice this at a public recital, and lo! and behold! a veritable cult of 'wrist-droppers' arises and we see students raising and lowering the wrist with exaggerated mechanical stiffness and entirely ignoring the important end in which this wrist dropping ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... found that in the sitting-room the gas was dimly burning. There was the usual lodging-house furniture, and on a faded red sofa near the fire old Mrs. Warlock was lying. Maggie could not see her very clearly in the half-light, but there was something about her immobility and the stiffness of her head (decorated as of old with its frilly white cap) that reminded one of a figure made out of wax. Maggie turned to find Amy Warlock standing ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... room. Lucian sat down and gave his attention to Alice, who had still enough of her old nervousness to make her straighten her shoulders and look stately. But he did not object to this; a little stiffness of manner ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... requires to stir and stretch his limbs to free them from the stiffness resulting from being curled up so long. His limbs are stretched indeed, but he is not allowed to move them. Even the head is confined by a cap. One would think they were afraid the child should look as if it ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... marked five were two nice seats that were to each other face to face, but it appeared that neither of them was vacant for Mr. Robert Carruthers. On one the lady sat with very stiff black silk skirts projecting from her sides, as did her thin elbows also in the stiffness of white linen. Beside her, occupying the rest of her seat, was a hat with large black bows of equal stiffness with the rest of the lady's apparel and disposition not to be friendly. On the seat opposite, which from the nature of my ticket and the case I should have supposed belonged to me, ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... they had been friends for many years, there had long been a certain stiffness in their friendship. Their characters were in fact profoundly antipathetic. Rousseau we know,—sensuous, impulsive, extravagant, with little sense of the difference between reality and dreams. Grimm was exactly the opposite; judicious, collected, self-seeking, coldly ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... carriage have ever been considered very important in the training of soldiers. In marching, the head and trunk should remain immobile, but without stiffness; as the left foot is carried forward the right forearm is swung forward and inward obliquely across the body until the thumb, knuckles being turned out, reaches a point about the height of the belt plate. The upper arm ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... the Count," said Sir Pierre with some stiffness, "insisted upon exact punctuality. I have formed the habit of referring to my ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... with his back against the tree, and, despite his soaked condition, slept as soundly as Pennington. When he awoke in the morning the hot sun was shining again, and his clothes soon dried on him. He felt a little stiffness and awkwardness at first, but in a few minutes it passed away. Then breakfast restored his strength, and he looked ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... up the mess. I was so ashamed, and so sorry for my poor Jock, I couldn't lift my eyes, but Mr. Jowett rose to the occasion and earned my affection and unending gratitude. He pretended to find it a very funny episode, and made so many jokes about it that stiffness vanished from the party, and we all became riotously happy. And Mrs. Jowett, whose heart must have been wrung to see the beautiful table ruined at the outset, so mastered her emotion as to be able to smile ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... and passed from the stiffness of ancient times to that beauty which afterward distinguished Phidias and Polynotus. Schools of art, in the sixth century, flourished in all the Grecian cities. We can not enter upon the details, from the use of wood to brass and marble. The temples were filled with groups from celebrated ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... hot sperm shot into her delighted cunt at that same moment, making her squirm with the excess of her emotion, but it never relaxed in stiffness and kept on poking away, and making her more and more excited till we both came again in a perfect flood of love juice, which was so profuse that my balls and thighs, as well as her notch and legs, were all drowned in the creamy, viscous fluid and we lay panting and exhausted. There was no time for ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... will suffice. The Natural Son must, by me at least, be pronounced one of the most vapid performances in dramatic history. Even Lessing, unwilling as he was to say a word against a writer who had taught him so much, is too good a critic not to recognise monotony in the characters, stiffness and affectation in the dialogue, and a pedantic ring in the sentences of new-fangled philosophy.[251] Even in the three critical dialogues that Diderot added to the play, Lessing cannot help discerning the mixture ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... the soil from growing crimson clover on it are very marked, especially when it inclines to stiffness, owing to the strong development of the ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... as robust as ever, he continued to take the same amount of exercise as he had enjoyed twenty years earlier. No one knew how weary the evenings found him, and, besides, there was that increasing stiffness of ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... sufficiently profound and sufficiently refined to be followed by a popular audience with that slight degree of intellectual exertion which is a pleasure. His style is not brilliant; but it is pure, transparently clear, and equally free from the levity and from the stiffness which disfigure the sermons of some eminent divines of the seventeenth century. He is always serious: yet there is about his manner a certain graceful ease which marks him as a man who knows the world, who has lived in populous cities and in splendid ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... outspread volume on the table, tugging the hair on a puckered forehead. Sometimes the depression left him, when he buckled to his work; as his mind became occupied with other things the vision of the Howff was expelled. Usually, however, the stiffness of his brains made the reading drag heavily, and he rarely attained the sufficing happiness of a student eager and engrossed. At the end of ten minutes he would be gaping across the table, and wondering what they were doing at the Howff. "Will Logan be singing ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... greenish coat,—all these reminiscences of Imperial fashions were blended with a sort of afterwaft and lingering perfume of the coquetry of the Incroyable—with an indescribable finical something in the folds of the garments, a certain air of stiffness and correctness in the demeanor that smacked of the school of David, ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... common acceptation of the word, means an absurd ostentation of learning, and stiffness of phraseology, proceeding from a misguided knowledge of books, and a total ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... introduction of a more moderate tempo and very soft piano I had tried to free this from the original coarseness with which Devrient had heard it rendered in Berlin—presumably with traditional fidelity. My most innocent device, and one which I frequently adopted, for disguising the irritating stiffness or the orchestral movement in the original, was a careful modification of the Basso-continuo, which was taken uninterruptedly in common time. This I felt obliged to remedy, partly by legato playing, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... East from Paris; who, one and all, had far rather have been eating their curry, and drinking their bitter beer, at home, in all the comfort of muslin and nankeen. Macaulay is vehement in his dislike of "those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle, and, as I always sit next ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... described to me as follows the condition in which she found her: "Her feet were crossed like the feet of a crucifix. The places of the stigmas were more red than usual. When we raised her head blood flowed from her nose and mouth. All her limbs remained flexible and with none of the stiffness of death even till the coffin was closed." On Friday the 13th of February she was taken to the grave, followed by the entire population of the place. She reposes in the cemetery, to the left of the cross, on the side nearest the hedge. In the grave in front of hers there ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... strode manfully towards town. Mother Rigby stood at the threshold, well pleased to see how the sunbeams glistened on him, as if all his magnificence were real, and how diligently and lovingly he smoked his pipe, and how handsomely he walked, in spite of a little stiffness of his legs. She watched him until out of sight, and threw a witch benediction after her darling, when a turn of the road snatched him ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... aided as was this, by the auxiliaries of lights, dress and scenery. It is true, the women had been a little absurd, and the "virtuous Marcia" particularly so; but the fine sentiments of Addison, which, though as Herman Mordaunt observed, they had all the accuracy and all the stiffness of a pedantic age, were sufficiently beautiful and just, to cover the delinquencies of the Hon. Mr. Harris. She hoped the afterpiece would be of the same general character, that they might all enjoy it as much as they ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... raw material—strong and stiff wood, such as the oak and the hazel; and strong and pliable, such as the ash-plant and various kinds of canes. What one really wants to secure is a sufficient amount of stiffness and strength to enable one to make an effective hit or longe, without any chance of snapping, and a degree of pliability and spring combined with that lightness which makes a stick handy and lively ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... parts of their journey.' 'The style of Madame de Sevigne,' wrote Mackintosh (Life, ii. 221), 'is evidently copied, not only by her worshipper Walpole, but even by Gray; notwithstanding the extraordinary merits of his matter, he has the double stiffness of an imitator and of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... slowly back, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight, towards that dignified retirement in which the higher officials at Charing Cross shelter from the importunity of the vulgar, he smiled still at his unaccustomed energy. It was a very gratifying revelation of his own possibilities, in spite of the stiffness of his arm. He wished some of those confounded armchair critics of railway management could have ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... errand, wishing he had a better day and a thicker pair of boots. He was an unusually large, well-made man, and reminded me of a fine building going to ruin before its time; for the broad shoulders were bent, there was a stiffness about the long legs suggestive of wounds or rheumatism, and the curly hair looked as if snow had fallen on it too soon. Sitting at work in my window, I fell into the way of watching my Red Cap, as I called ...
— Kitty's Class Day And Other Stories • Louisa M. Alcott
... trouble my self with prescribing any Rules for the ordering the Angle-Rod, since every Cane-shop in London will furnish us at an easy rate, with Rods of Cane, that shall suit with the sport we designe; the usual Objection of their Colour and Stiffness being taken away, the first by covering it with Parchment or thin Leather, dyed as you please; and the other by the length and strength of ...
— The School of Recreation (1684 edition) • Robert Howlett
... stand with the left foot, as a rule, a little advanced, the body and head facing directly forward with primitive stiffness. But the arms no longer hang straight at the sides, one of them, regularly the right, being extended from the elbow, while the other holds up the voluminous drapery. Many of the statues retain copious traces of color on hair, ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... strength—a pride and dignity in the features, so steadily composed, below the stiff, archaic arrangement of the long, fillet-bound locks. It is the exact expression of that midway position, between an involved, archaic stiffness and the free play of individual talent, which is attributed to ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... awoke long before dawn again. She felt lame and stiff, like an old person afflicted with rheumatism. The unusualness of the previous day's activities caused this stiffness of the joints and soreness ...
— Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch • Annie Roe Carr
... level with the first tone, and allow or let the voice start spontaneously and freely. Make no effort to hold the breath. Hold from position. Sing down, moving with the voice, but do not let the body or the tone droop or relax. Neither must there be stiffness or contraction. If you find it impossible to control the voice in this way, or to prevent depression of body and of tone, ...
— The Renaissance of the Vocal Art • Edmund Myer
... of his epistles, reminding the queen of her promise to interpret them faithfully to her husband. The unconstrained and familiar tone of his correspondence affords a pleasing example of the personal intimacy to which the sovereigns, so contrary to the usual stiffness of Spanish etiquette, admitted men of learning and probity at their court, without distinction of rank. ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V3 • William H. Prescott
... light was turned out the whole room began to tick like ten agitated clocks, and all about us in the darkness began strange noises of life: rats scampered in all directions and were finally hurdling over our heads. We had taken some aspirin to ward off the stiffness of unaccustomed exercise, but we were sore, and the narrowness of the bed forced us to lie on our backs; exhaustion, however, conquered all discomforts, and we slept. Jo awoke in the night and yelped to find that the mackintosh had slipped and that ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... specimen of the long-service soldier of those days; a not unhandsome man, with a certain undemonstrative dignity, which some might have said to be partly owing to the stiffness of his uniform about his neck, the high stock being still worn. He was much stouter than when Selina had parted from him. Although she had not meant to be demonstrative she ran across to him directly she saw him, and he held her in his arms ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... more of Sir Miles's antiquated stiffness than his own rakish ease, offered his arm, with a profound reverence, to his cousin, and they took their way to the house. Not till they had passed up the stairs, and were even in the gallery, did further words pass ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... moderation and candour; attributed all Lady Julia's errors to the imprudence of her new governess, Miss Bateman. Miss Strictland now showed a desire not to make, but to prevent mischief; even the circumlocutions and stiffness of her habitual prudery did not, on this occasion, seem unseasonable; therefore what she suggested made a great impression on Vivian. He still, however, defended Russell, and assured Miss Strictland that, from the long experience he had himself had of his friend's honour, he was convinced that ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... from these exercises I shall notice only one or two. The firemen, when at their ordinary employments, as masons, house-carpenters, &c., being accustomed to a particular exercise of certain muscles only, there is very often a degree of stiffness in their general movements, which prevents them from performing their duty as firemen with that ease and celerity which are so necessary and desirable; but the gymnastic exercises, by bringing all the muscles of the body into action, and by aiding the more general development of the frame, tend ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... or chambers for which they are designed. The bristles are to be sheared so as to work easily and leave no windage. The worm must project one-fourth of an inch, in order to take the bottom of the bore, and special care is to be taken by the Inspector that it has both the necessary stiffness to act efficiently and elastically enough, when pressed home, to yield sufficiently to allow the bristles to act also. Spiral spaces extending the whole length of the sponge-head, including the portion adapted to the main bore in chambered guns, are to be left, in ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... their best work on a character of great rectitude and uprightness, even tending to severity, such as softened with advancing years. Remarkably handsome, and with a high-bred tone of manners, he was almost an ideal country gentleman, with, however, something of stiffness and shyness in early youth, which wore off in later years. In 1826 he became member for the county on ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... fortunate that I was not killed. In my next attempt I made sure of not coming by a similar accident, so I unreeved the tackling and fitted up larger blocks and ropes. But although the principle on which I acted was quite correct, the machinery was now so massive and heavy that the mere friction and stiffness of the thick cordage prevented me from moving it at all. Afterwards, however, I came to proportion things more correctly; but I could not avoid reflecting at the time how much better it would have been had I learned all this from observation ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... hinder end, which maintained its balance, as they were six—an even number—two on each extremity, and two in the middle. The gallows was so narrow that they touched. The ropes, by reason of their size and stiffness, despite the soaping given them, were adjusted with difficulty; but through the indefatigable efforts of the sheriff and a lieutenant who had accompanied him, all preliminaries were arranged, although the blue uniform looked sadly out of place ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman
... walking neither slowly nor quickly. After having gone a thousand yards he stopped, dug a hole and placed pieces of turf one on another to make it more visible. Then he went on; and now that he had walked off his stiffness he quickened his pace. After a while he dug ...
— What Men Live By and Other Tales • Leo Tolstoy
... prominent in it as in the later (and, I think, less consummate) companion and sequel Thyrsis. With hardly an exception, the poet throughout escapes in his phraseology the two main dangers which so constantly beset him—too great stiffness and too great simplicity. His "Graian" personification is not overdone; his landscape is exquisite; the stately stanza not merely sweeps, but sways and swings, with as much grace as state. And therefore the Arnoldian "note"—the special form of the maladie du siecle which, as we have ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... that you are not looking very well," he said at last, with supreme stiffness, and with that peculiarly unconciliating air which an Englishman is apt to put on, when he is languishing ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... Desdemona? Is not her heart equally pure, serene, tender, and at the same time passionate, yet with love, not material but actual, which, according to Plato, gives a visible form to virtue, and then admits of no other rival. Yet this sublime noble woman had no cold stiffness in her nature; she forgives Steno, but not from the ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... as one of ourselves, of course, Sholto. But I believe you delight in stiffness and ceremony. Will you ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... was audience to all its scenes. Is not the desire to meet, at least to see, the natural sequence of such an interest and such a pre-occupation? Given the wish, what was simpler than its gratification? He need ask no leave from me, and need run no risk of my rebuff or of Princess Heinrich's stiffness. He knew all the world of Forstadt. From favour or fear every door opened when he knocked at it. He knew, among the rest, Victoria's Baron over at Waldenweiter. From no place could he better observe the King. Nowhere else was it so easy for ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... informed me] made his pupils begin with the B major scale, very slowly, without stiffness. Suppleness was his great object. He repeated, without ceasing, during the lesson: "Easily, easily" [facilement, facilement]. Stiffness ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... the afternoon again when Rhoda woke. She pushed aside her blankets and tried to get up but fell back with a groan. The stiffness of the previous days was nothing whatever to the misery that now held every muscle rigid. The overexertion of three nights in the saddle which the massaging had so far mitigated had asserted itself and every muscle in the girl's body seemed acutely painful. To lift her hand to ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... advanced slightly to meet her, with a grewsome rustling of copper-colored stiffness. She did not approve of Dolly at any time, but she specially disapproved of her habit of setting time at defiance and ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... then the point of his machine to the slit, into which he sought entrance, it was so small, he could scarce assure himself of its being rightly pointed. He looks, he feels, and satisfies himself: there driving on with fury, its prodigious stiffness, thus impacted, wedgelike, breaks the union of those parts, and gained him just the insertion of the tip of it, lip deep; which being sensible of, he improved his advantage, and following well his stroke, in a straight line, forcibly deepens his penetration; but put me to such intolerable ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... toward a great uncouth-looking monster that was emerging from a pool and advancing ponderously toward the unwilling victim with widely opened, cavernous jaws thickly set with most formidable-looking teeth. The figures were executed in rather high relief, and there was a certain quaintness and stiffness of outline in their delineation that marked them as the work of an untutored artist, yet the action of them was depicted with a spirit and vigour which proved that the sculptor, although untutored, was undoubtedly a keen student ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... others we can remember to have read. Talma comes next in his regard as "the most finished artist of his time, not below Kean in his most energetic displays, and far above him in the refinement of his taste and the extent of his research—equaling Kemble in dignity, unfettered by his stiffness and formality." He says acutely of Kean that "when under the impulse of his genius he seemed to clutch the whole idea of the man, ... but if he missed the character in his first attempt at conception he never could recover it by study." Of Kean, if of any actor, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... have seen of our client, Mr. Carless," observed Methley, with some stiffness of manner, "there is no ...
— The Middle of Things • J. S. Fletcher
... faith, might have an air of caricature. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own impression of social diversions. They were, very probably, much more lively and brilliant than I thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, except at the theatre or the caffe, have a certain stiffness, all the more surprising, because tradition has always led one to expect exactly the reverse of them. I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this people, who deride colder nations for inflexible manners; and I have certainly never ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... Chief Thompson knew me and told me all. And so you've done it—and you're master in your old house again. Clarence, old boy! Jim said you wouldn't do it—said you'd weaken on account of her! But I said 'No.' I knew you better, old Clarence, and I saw it in your face, for all your stiffness! ha! But for all that I was mighty nervous and uneasy, and I just made Jim send an excuse to the theatre and we rushed it down here! Lordy! but it looks natural to see the old house again! And she—you packed her off with the others—didn't you? Tell me, Clarence," ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... as she was leaving the academy, she looked distinctly homely to him, and yet such was the honor of the man that he did not in the least realize that the homeliness was an exterior thing. It seemed to him that he saw her encompassed with the stiffness of her New England antecedents, as with an armor, and that he got a new and unlovely view of her character. On the contrary, Evelyn's charming, half-smiling, half-piteous face turned towards him seemed ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... be observed in house furnishing are color, form, and proportion. All stiffness of design in furniture should be avoided. Do not attempt to match articles, but rather carry out the same idea as to color and form in the whole. It is not en regle to have decorations in sets or pairs; ...
— The Ladies Book of Useful Information - Compiled from many sources • Anonymous
... Pierre, she that nursed me when the Honourable and meself were taken out o' Sandy Drift, more dead than livin'; she that brought me back to life as good as ever, barrin' this scar on me forehead and a stiffness at me elbow, and the Honourable as right as the sun, more luck to him! which he doesn't need at all, with the wind of fortune in his back and shiftin' neither to right nor left. —That woman! faith, y'd better not cut the words so sharp betune ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... prepared as follows:—Nitro-glycerine is thickened with pyroxyline to the consistency of raw rubber. This is done by employing about 75 to 85 per cent. of nitro-glycerine, and 15 to 25 per cent. of pyroxyline, according to the stiffness or elasticity of the compound desired. Some solvent that dissolves the nitro-cotton is also used. The product thus formed is a kind of blasting gelatine, and should be in a pasty condition, in order that it may be mixed with fulminate of ...
— Nitro-Explosives: A Practical Treatise • P. Gerald Sanford
... bodies was almost miraculous, a wave of warmth surged through them, and presently the American was on his feet, and, with Dick's arm linked in his, was staggering to and fro upon the surface of the ice. As the stiffness and cramp worked out of their limbs they were able to increase their pace, until within a few minutes they were trotting to and fro across the mass and feeling almost warm ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... pompous-looking gentlemen, the majority of us, in frock coats and silk hats. The sergeant was a man with a sense of the fitness of things. The idea of shouting and swearing at us fell from him: and that gone there seemed to be no happy medium left to him. The stiffness departed from his back. He met us with a defferential attitude, and spoke to us in ...
— Idle Ideas in 1905 • Jerome K. Jerome
... is nothing but concrete. At 500 lb. per sq. in., this force would require an area of 32 sq. in. Will some advocate of this type of design please state where this area can be found? It must, of necessity, be in contact with the rod, and, for structural reasons, because of the lack of stiffness in the rod, it would have to be close to the point of bend. If analogy to the queen-post fails so completely, because of the almost complete absence of the post, why should not this ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... always look out for heroism at dinner. It is their great time. They live up to the stiffness of their shirt fronts. Do you mean to say that you never noticed how he set ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster
... of his address and the seeming stiffness of his manner were really due to an innate and incurable shyness, but they produced, even among people who ought to have known him better, a totally erroneous impression of his character ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... women of the Renaissance in the works of all its painters; heavy in Ghirlandajo, vulgarly jaunty in Fillipino, preposterously starched and prim in Mantegna, ludicrously undignified in Signorelli; and mediaeval stiffness, awkwardness, and absurdity reach their acme perhaps in the little boys, companions of the Medici children, introduced into Benozzo ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... resembled a crocodile. This lay in a monstrous inaptitude for turning round. The crocodile, I presume, owes that inaptitude to the absurd length of his back; but in our grandpapa it arose rather from the absurd breadth of his back, combined, possibly, with some growing stiffness in his legs. Now, upon this crocodile infirmity of his I planted a human advantage for tendering my homage to Miss Fanny. In defiance of all his honourable vigilance, no sooner had he presented to us his mighty Jovian back (what a field ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... "No," I told him. "See that the messenger takes some refreshment. No, no answer." And I walked into the garden, Up and down the patterned paths, In my stiff, correct brocade. The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun, Each one. I stood upright too, Held rigid to the pattern By the stiffness of my gown. Up and down ...
— ANTHOLOGY OF MASSACHUSETTS POETS • WILLIAM STANLEY BRAITHWAITE
... have imagined that a garment could be so difficult to unfasten as this one she was now incased in? For of course the stiffness and shakiness of Polly's fingers came from the zero temperature in her dressing room and not in the least from the momentary fright she had received from her supposed recognition of a face in the audience. Undoubtedly she had been ...
— The Camp Fire Girls in the Outside World • Margaret Vandercook
... such familiarity, for he was very formal; but he had seen M. Daubigeon more than once at the chateau; and he knew the plans that had been discussed between M. Galpin and his master. Hence he was not a little amazed at the embarrassed stiffness of the two gentlemen, and at the tone of voice in ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
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