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More "Stolid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to a lower rock, and lying at Benicia's feet looked upward. The scene was all above him—the great mass of white rocks, whiter in the moonlight; the rigid cypresses aloft; the beautiful faces, dreamy, passionate, stolid, restless, looking from the lace mantillas; the graceful arms holding the guitars; the sweet rich voices threading through the roar of the ocean like the melody in a grand recitativo; the old men and women crouching ...
— The Splendid Idle Forties - Stories of Old California • Gertrude Atherton
... pieces of "jewelry" rock. When all the "color" in sight had been cleaned up, the Desert Rat produced a drill and a stick of dynamite from the pack, put in a "shot" and uncovered a pocket of such richness that even the stolid Cahuilla could not forbear indulgence in one of his infrequent Spanish expletives. It was a deposit of rotten honeycombed rock that was nine- tenths pure gold—what is known in the parlance of the prospector as ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... not be allowed to penetrate farther than the parlor, the very fact of his presence sent a thrill of excitement through the house. An English milord, a heretic, the grandfather of "cette chere Lisa," whom they were to lose so soon! No wonder the most placid of the nuns, the most stolid of the lay-sisters, tingled ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... answer him a word. He became enraged to such a pitch, that he so far forgot himself as to loosen the golden ear-rings from her ears, and threatened to take away all the finery he had given her. Even this was not sufficient to rouse the girl from her stolid calmness, and the valiant officer was, at last, obliged to retreat from ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... the room with an appearance of stolid indifference and as he handed the picture to ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... their way into the fishing village, and one morning in the following spring, Janet met a young girl who frequently went to Braelands House with fresh fish. She was then on her way home from such an errand, and Janet fancied there was a look of unusual emotion on her broad, stolid face. ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one who really ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in strong contrast the two groups round the Cross—the stolid soldiers and the sad friends. The four legionaries went through their work as a very ordinary piece of military duty. They were well accustomed to crucify rebel Jews, and saw no difference between these three and former prisoners. They watched the pangs without a touch of pity, and only wished that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... right," said Amroth, "because the impressions of youth are swift and keen; but of course, here, age is not a question of years or failing powers. The old, here, are the wise and gracious and patient and gentle; the youth of the spirit is stupidity and unimaginativeness. On the one hand are the stolid and placid, and on the other are the brutal and cruel and selfish ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... little kitchen-maids bustled around, eager to help, hot and panting, with cotton sleeves well tucked up above the dimpled elbows, and giggling over some private jokes of their own, whenever Miss Sally's back was turned for a moment. And old Jemima, stolid in temper and solid in bulk, kept up a long and subdued grumble, while she stirred the stock-pot methodically ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... enough,' said the dairyman, and paused. He was a man noisy with his associates—stolid and ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... march; and the only type of Christian work then attemptable takes the form of a brief greeting in the name of Christ to the men who tramp beside us, though they are often too tired even to talk, and we are compelled to trudge on in stolid silence. ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... flying shadow coming up to her, with a shriek of delight; and immediately she was hugged rapturously and kissed all over by little Jeannie, whose movements, as they ever were—so agile, so quick, so Protean—appeared to her, now that she was stolid with despair, as the postures and gestures of a creature appearing in ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... me as usual, but her face was flushed, and she looked at me uneasily, as though she feared that I had overheard Leah's speech. I thought Leah looked sullen and stolid as she waited upon me. It was a most forbidding face. I was glad when Miss Darrell dismissed ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... office, little groups were gathered, peaceful folk; a gendarme paced slowly to and fro, and bulletins littered the muddy thoroughfare. But there was no excitement. Nothing more. Not even a quickened pulse-beat was felt by those stolid men upon whose votes depended the fate of the nation. Sulpice could not help marvelling at so much indifference, but he reflected that it was thus throughout all France, and that not only his name but the destiny of the nation was involved in ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... suggested to him the possibility of obtaining a commission in the little army of the Duchy of Maasau. This hint set him on the right track. The regiments of Maasau, though few in number, carried splendid traditions. Their ranks were drawn from a stolid, silent peasantry, and officered by a wire-strung, high tempered aristocracy, born of a mixed race, it is true, but none the less frantically devoted to the freedom and independence of their shred of ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... ecstasy that possessed him. Then she looked at Richard, standing. with his back to her, his violin tucked under his chin, his body swaying in rhythm with the music. Unger sat next to him, his instrument between his knees, his stolid, shiny face unruffled by the glorious harmonies ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... mother in an apartment in Thirty-second Street. He loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a desk by another window. ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Jordan he went nearly to the end of the short street before they came to a rude lunch-counter, set under a canvas awning, where a thin, nervous little man and his fat, stolid wife set canned goods and coffee before them. Billy produced a yellow ticket to be punched, Conniston paid his two bits, and they strolled back to the office. When Conniston suggested that they take something to Garton, Billy told ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... alarm was passed along the front trench. One of the officers on duty was determined to make sure this time, and stopped the passing of the message. He made his way along the trench where the men by this time had assumed their gas helmets, until he came to one stolid, oldish man who was on sentry, staring truculently out in front without his gas protection on. "Jones," said the officer, "can you smell pineapples?" "What, sir," he grunted, "I could if I had a tin of 'em under ...
— The Seventh Manchesters - July 1916 to March 1919 • S. J. Wilson
... minutes, for one minute more of precious grace; negroes gone drunk on religious exhortation who died in a frenzy, sure of salvation, and shouting out halleluiahs; Indians upborne and stayed by a racial stoicism; Chinamen casting stolid, slant-eyed glances over the rim of the void before them and filled with the calmness of the fatalist who believes that whatever is to be, is to be; white men upon whom at the last, when all prospect of intervention ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb
... general indifference to that first opportunity of realizing what all those gentlemen had advocated so long; and, in looking back over the many intervening years, we still wonder at the stolid incapacity of all men to understand that woman feels the invidious distinctions of sex exactly as the black man does those of color, or the white man the more transient distinctions of wealth, family, position, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... train. They nearly all were dressed in some sort of fur coat, and all had the look of men accustomed to out-door life—powerful, loud-voiced, unrefined. They were, in fact, travelling men, business men, the owners of mills or timber. The stolid or patient ox-like faces of some Norwegian workmen, dressed in gay Mackinac jackets, ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... and at the well-guarded bridges from one end of the city to the other. Backwards and forwards the battle raged for days and weeks, by day and night, with small time for rest and refreshment. Forward rode the Colonna, the stolid Germans, Henry himself, the eagle of the Empire waving in the dim streets beside the flag that displayed the simple column in a plain field. It is not hard to hear and see it all again—the clanging gallop of armoured knights, princes, nobles and bishops, with ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... of peace and good temper follows on the first rush of spring. The very doctors of the winter resort shake hands with one another, the sermons of the chaplain lose their frost-bitten savour and die down into something like charity, scandal and tittle-tattle go to sleep in the sunshine. The stolid, impassive English nature blooms into a life strangely unlike its own. Papas forget their Times. Mammas forget their propriety. The stout British merchant finds himself astride of a donkey, and exchanging good-humoured badinage with ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... behaved so queerly, he was not at breakfast; he went to Paris and I did not see him until the evening, when he was as stolid and quiet as usual, so it must have been a fit, and perhaps he went up to Paris to ...
— The Visits of Elizabeth • Elinor Glyn
... he's got his servant with him, I guess," and Tom nodded toward a stolid German who was ...
— Tom Swift and his Giant Cannon - or, The Longest Shots on Record • Victor Appleton
... narrow convictions, of punctilious etiquette—the epitome of respectable and respected mediocrity, save when, with a profound irony, the recurring blast of insanity transformed the personality of the stolid monarch, and shattered the complacency of the smug little Court. Within its shelter hovered the bevy of amiable Princesses, whose minutest word and glance yet lives for us in the searchlight of Fanny Burney's adoring scrutiny. Afar, the sons pursued their wild careers. The Prince of ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... horseman, but, like all Italians, he was by nature cruel. As he passed the gates the horse slid and stumbled to his knees; he was up instantly, only to receive a hard stroke between the ears. This unexpected treatment caused the animal to rear and waltz. This was not the stolid-going campaign mount, but his best Irish hunter, on which he had won prizes in many a gymkhana. There was a brief struggle, during which the man became master both of himself and the horse. They were just passing the confines of the villa when a man darted out suddenly from ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... attended by a cavalier in the person of a stolid young man of German extraction, as I thought at first glance, and this was confirmed by Blister's, "Let me make you acquainted with Miss Malloy," and "Shake hands with ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent of demeanor—swaggering along as if conscious of there being a full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was accompanied by a whistle, ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... yearning human heart which was being solaced by the beautiful story of Christ and the mother Mary, and which was filled with religious enthusiasm at the thought of this Virgin enthroned in the heavens, was growing weary of the set features and stolid look of the Madonna of Byzantine art, and dreaming mystic dreams of the beauty of the Christ mother as she must have been in real life. She became the centre of thought and speculation, prayers and supplications were addressed to her, and more than once did she appear in beatific ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... moment—alone, resolutely shutting one's eyes to the mistakes behind one, refusing to look at the blankness ahead. And this is more especially the case when the mistakes and the blankness have been caused by our own actions. There is not even stolid philosophy to come to our aid, a shrugging of the shoulders, a foisting of the blame on to fate. It may be that the majority of the incidents have been forced upon us, that we have not been free agents in the matter, but if we must of honesty say,—Here or there ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... cloak and slouched hat, and holding in his hands a wire fencing-mask, extinguished with it the red nose. The latter met his fate with stolid fortitude. All were perfectly still, but the twitching cheeks of most of the spectators betrayed a laugh retained with difficulty. The cloak then advanced, like a less beautiful Norma, to a bell in the portico, and struck three tragical strokes. A strong, pealing bass voice came ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... enough. This delighted me. I read my books to them by way of amusement; I sang my songs to them; I talked to them; I would even narrate the various histories out of the Bible to them, such as that of Joseph and his brethren, &c., and the stolid air with which the communications were received made me almost imagine ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... miners, who had preceded them to the shore. But the yellow men made no show of resistance, not even when some of their number were seized—and thrown into the water with their heavily weighted baskets; they crowded together like sheep, and gazed with stolid faces at the Customs officials remorselessly capsizing their baskets upon the ground, and kicking the contents apart in the search for opium. Bags of rice were cut open and the grain spilled upon the ground, to the delight of the white diggers, especially when a tin of opium ...
— Tom Gerrard - 1904 • Louis Becke
... "Are those the Rocky Mountains?" she suddenly asked, appealing to the stolid porter. She told Belle long afterward, she knew ...
— Laramie Holds the Range • Frank H. Spearman
... Berryer advanced another point. As might have been expected of so accomplished an advocate, he had little difficulty in demolishing the elaborate, but specious and unsupported, hypothesis built up by the other side. Hard facts did more with the stolid and unimaginative Rouen jury than ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... of Pierrette Lorrain in the home of her cousins, who gazed at her with stolid eyes; she was tossed to them like a package, with no intermediate state between the wretched chamber at Saint-Jacques and the dining-room of her cousins, which seemed to her a palace. She was shy and speechless. To all other eyes than those of the Rogrons the little Breton ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... Surprise, astonishment, and confusion followed each other across his stolid countenance; and with quicker pace than he was ever known to use in his life before, he made his way to his seat. No sooner had the reading began again when once more the door clicked. True to his promise, the minister paused and cheerfully announced to his people: ...
— The Man From Glengarry - A Tale Of The Ottawa • Ralph Connor
... pressure, to gain an entrance through the pane. So violent did its contortions become that I momentarily anticipated the yielding of the glass, and the excited assailant coming crashing through. Considerably to my relief the window proved more impregnable than seemed at one time likely. The stolid resistance proved, in the end, to be too much either for its endurance or its patience. Just as I was looking for some fresh manifestation of fury, it seemed rather to tumble than to spring off the sill; then came, once more, the same sound of quietly ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... over and over to himself that what other men could do, he could. It became a nightmare chant, and he gibbered it to those that passed him on the trail. At other times, resting, he watched and envied the stolid, mule-footed Indians that plodded by under heavier packs. They never seemed to rest, but went on and on with a steadiness and certitude that were ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... America, or even—now that national costumes are dying out—from France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pass into the hands of children—not the favoured children reared on the charming fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the masses of the people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... a case even obtuseness is in some sort a qualification; for it will enable one to sympathise with the vulgar insensibility to the offered delicacy, if only to substitute articulate rejection for simple stolid silence. ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... he felt, perhaps, for Matthew's stolid face and small, twinkling eyes were not pleasant. He muttered something, and then went grumbling across the yard towards a wall, from behind which emanated an odour which ...
— Great Uncle Hoot-Toot • Mrs. Molesworth
... "TANNHAUSER", although he was called several times before the curtain at the first performances. The part of "Tannhauser" was sung by "Herr Jung", the husband of "Lucile Gran." He succeeded, in my opinion, better than the public here seemed to think, which is, as a rule, somewhat lukewarm and stolid. "Frau Dietz", whose figure and personality do not particularly fit her for "Elizabeth", sang the beginning of the second act with intelligence and feeling, but in the last act she was no longer up to the mark, ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... turned halfway round, and the light of the candle fell full on his face. Jim saw the whole outline with the utmost clearness, even to the expression in the eyes, which was neither gay nor sad, but rather stolid and stern—just what he had been accustomed to see there. The dog crouched back against the wall, and after a brief halt near the stair-head, Captain Bywater turned the knob of his bed-room door and passed in. The dog followed, the door was closed, and once more ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... forward in his chair. He was in a state of extraordinary excitement. He quivered and jumped. Ted, standing by the wall, looked as stolid as ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... not quite see what Mrs. Butler's throat had to say to a clandestine wife of Captain Bertram's, stared at her friend with her usual round and stolid eyes. ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized, as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that stolid old lady in ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... train drew up in a siding, where an officer with R.T.O. upon his arm made us welcome, and informed us that hot water was available for taking tea. Everybody had two days' rations in his haversack, so a large-scale picnic followed. From the horse-trucks emerged stolid individuals with canvas buckets—you require to be fairly stolid to pass the night in a closed box, moving at twenty miles an hour, in company with eight riotous and insecurely tethered mules—to draw water from the hydrant which ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... through the clinging brambles in Sir HENRY's coverts with his eye-glass in his eye and his Express at the trail. At every step his unfortunate legs had been more and more torn, until there was literally not a scrap of sound skin upon them anywhere. Even the beaters, a stolid lot, had roared when old VELVETEENS the second keeper had brought up to poor COODENT a lump of flesh from his right leg, which he had found sticking on a thorn-bush in the centre of the high covert. Suddenly Sir HENRY stopped and shaded his eyes with his hand anxiously. We all imitated him, ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... extended a tinted photograph. His gnarled fingers trembled as he handed it over, and there was a suspicious softness in the lines of his wrinkled old face, as he looked fondly at the likeness of the stolid, ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - From Interviews with Former Slaves - Florida Narratives • Works Projects Administration
... eyes of Andreas would kindle into something like intelligence, and a flush would warm his stolid countenance. He was a fair-haired young giant, white-skinned and well-featured, but dull, looking, with cold, hard eyes suggesting the barbarian that he was considered by the cultured Neapolitans, and that he certainly looked by contrast with them. Friar Robert supporting the ...
— The Historical Nights' Entertainment • Rafael Sabatini
... close upon the buckboard that he might have touched either of its occupants with his rawhide quirt, rode the Mexican. When they discovered him he was leaning forward, his half-closed eyes mere slits with pin-points of black fire to mark them, and his repulsive face a stolid mask. Ford's hand went instinctively to the whip: it was the only available weapon. But the Mexican merely touched his flapping sombrero and rode on at the ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... ultimatum left her a little blank; but in the immediate excitement of removal, in the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand. He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled; when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn't wonder. When the minister, egged on by distracted Hall relatives, remonstrated, ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... the measure of the quiet, stolid-looking Englishman. She had seen him long before Sylvia had done so, and had watched him with some attention, guessing almost at once that he must be the man for whom ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... Sun, we found novelty and interest in every yard of the three miles that stretch between the station and the capital. The scrub-covered desert has given place to a wooded and cultivated valley, ringed by a chain of hills, sterile and steep. The white ribbon of the road, through whose dust plough stolid buffaloes and strings of creaking bullock-carts, is bordered by tall cactus and yellow-flowered mimosa on either side. Among the trees rise countless half-ruined temples and chatries; on whose whitewashed walls are frequent frescoes of tigers or elephants rampant, and of wonderful Rajput ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... intrusted to its care, it went on telling, in the midst of the ever-changing and bustling crowd, with a bold and unhesitating click, the simple fact it knew; and that there might be no mistake, it registered what it told in palpable signs transmitted through the features of its own stolid face. Mr Dent's great clock was by no means the least distinguished object in the collection of the ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal Vol. XVII. No. 418. New Series. - January 3, 1852. • William and Robert Chambers
... skins he invested in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments. His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to the savages, and also he supplied the stolid Dutch the best of everything in this particular line, from a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... "stuck on," give them a rather comical aspect. You will find them inquisitive, too. Put your finger in front of their tank, and they will all flock to see what it is. On the contrary, other fishes, such as the pike and carp, will remain stolid and indifferent to any movement you may make, and some, like the timorous trout—for which Isaak Walton loved to angle above any fish,—will be so dreadfully upset at the appearance of your digit that they will dart off in ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... by, he was content with blunt, wistful ruminations upon her indistinct image. Jacob Sowerby's accusation, and several kindred innuendoes let fall by his mother, left him coolly incredulous; the girl still seemed to him altogether distant; but from the first sight of her face he had evolved a stolid, unfaltering conception of her difference from the ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... down upon Henry Chatillon's saddle. We tossed a piece of buffalo robe to Jack, who was looking about in some embarrassment. He spread it on the ground, and took his seat, with a stolid ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... city—walked directly between us, eyeing each of us with his red round eyes in a manner so ludicrous that we all broke forth in a fit of laughter that lasted for several minutes, while the ungainly bird stalked away with much the stolid air of one who has seen something ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... reveals itself in a long line of dome-like hills and deep-cut shadows, whose stolid front quickly dissolves. The tufted tops of a sentinel palm, the wide-spreading arms of the banian, clumps of green and yellow bamboo, and the fan-shaped outlines of the traveller's palm become distinguishable. As the great, red, tropical sun rises from behind the encircling hills, ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... breath of prayer, the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted in silent ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... Billy gave one of the monkeys a banana. He peeled it exactly as a man would have done, smelt it critically, and threw it back at her in the most insulting fashion. We saw also the rows of Hindu shops open to the street, with their gaudily dressed children of blackened eyelids, their stolid dirty proprietors, and their women marvellous in bright silks and massive bangles. In the thatched native quarter were more of the fine Swahili women sitting cross-legged on the earth under low verandas, engaged in different handicrafts; and chickens; and many amusing naked children. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... resentful when she stood upon the threshold and rang the bell. She presented a stolid countenance to the maid servant who opened the door and received her message. When she was at last taken to Miss Amory, she went with an unresponding bearing, and, being led into a cheerful room where the old woman sat, stood before her waiting, ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and the sky was dirty!.. To complete his gloom, a whole squad of the Salvation Army, who had come aboard at Beckenried, a dozen stout girls with stolid faces, in navy-blue gowns and Greenaway bonnets, were grouped under three enormous scarlet umbrellas, and were singing verses, accompanied on the accordion by a man, a sort of David-la-Gamme, tall and fleshless with crazy ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... classed as "superstition," we would rejoin by gleefully pointing to a leading article in the Irish Times of Jan. 27, 1914, which gives a short account of a lecture by Mr. Lovett on the folklore of London. Folklore in London! in the metropolis of the stolid Englishman! The fact is that the Irish people are not one whit more superstitious than their cross-channel neighbours, while they are surely on a far higher level in this respect than many of the Continental nations. They seem to be more superstitious because (we speak without wishing ...
— True Irish Ghost Stories • St John D Seymour
... checkstring before a tall block of buildings. She hurried inside, ascended two flights of stairs, and rang the bell of a door immediately opposite her. A very German-looking manservant opened it after the briefest of delays—a man with fair moustache, fat, stolid ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... knew well that he was dying, and saw these sad tidings reflected in every face. It was touching and terrible to see around his house, his door, in his chamber even, these old grenadiers of the guard, always stolid and unmoved till now, weeping and sobbing like children. What an atrocious thing war ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... to Leader-of-the-Opposition Bebel, the Prince said, "One thing at least, the Emperor is no Philistine," and proceeded to explain, rather negatively and disappointingly, that the Emperor possesses what the Greeks call megalopsychia—a great soul. One knows but too well the English Philistine, that stolid, solid, self-sufficient bulwark of the British Constitution. The German Philistine is his twin brother, the narrow-minded, conservative burgher. Other epithets the Prince applied to the imperial character were "simple," "natural," "hearty," "magnanimous," "clear-headed," and "straightforward"; ...
— William of Germany • Stanley Shaw
... ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is— Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" reassureth him. I probed the sore as thy disciple should: "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" He merely looked with his large eyes on me. The man ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... mistake. He knew who it was. His mates did not see the smile of irony, of sly ridicule, which stirred his lips as he bowed to the passer. Immediately his rather handsome effeminate face resumed a stolid vacuity. ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... mind the wonderful things that he intended "Mortimer Stant" to be. It was to concern a man of forty (in his confident selection of that age he displayed, most stridently, his own youth) and Mortimer was to be a stolid, reserved Philistine, who was, against his will, by outside forces, dragged ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... its habitat in the house of the president of the local Chamber of Commerce. As I was in this house, a tall young captain entered. He had long curly red hair and an unusually white face, though heavy and stolid, with large, steel-cold eyes and with beautiful, tender, almost girlish lips. But in his eyes there was such cold cruelty that it was quite unpleasant to look at his otherwise fine face. When he left the room, our ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... Brunswick moose that he was after. Nothing but the noblest antlers that New Brunswick forests bred could seem to him worthy of a place on those walls of his, whence the surly front of a musk-ox of the Barren Grounds glared stolid defiance to the snarl of an Orinoco jaguar, and the black, colossal head of a Kadiak bear was eyed derisively by the monstrous and malignant mask of a two-horned rhinoceros. With such a quest upon him, the Famous Hunter came, and naturally sought the guidance ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... of his foes at his fingers' ends, and the most that he expected from these wild irregulars was that they might, perchance, stay an onset and worry the imperial army with dashing cavalry raids. But that they should hold their own with the incomparable infantry of Spain, or make head against the stolid valour of the German men-at-arms, was not contemplated by Barbarossa. In his Janissaries, in his hard-bitten fighting men from the galleys, he could expect much; but there were but some few thousands of these, while the disciplined host against ...
— Sea-Wolves of the Mediterranean • E. Hamilton Currey
... glance at the stolid back of John beyond the two empty seats in front of them. Although she knew he could not hear her words, instinctively ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... normally, has a stolid expression, redeemed slightly, perhaps, by its exchange often for a lugubrious one. I should feel disposed to predict for him the scoring of an immense success in the personation of such characters as those of the melancholy Dane; or of Antonio, in the Merchant ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been done by the highest authority before him. Devoid of even the rudiments of an ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... outside the station, and she had a momentary fear lest she should receive deferential recognition from the chauffeur. But he was as solid and stolid as any other portion of the car, and paid no more attention to her than he did to her baggage. The one was a nurse; the other, a box, both common nouns, and merely articles to be conveyed to Gleneesh ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... your brute as to a fellow galley-slave; a dangerous road puts him out of his wits; in short, he's an uncertain and exacting ally, and adds thirty-fold to the troubles of the voyager. What I required was something cheap and small and hardy, and of a stolid and peaceful temper; and all these requisites pointed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sudden transition, her thoughts went back to the early morning when Wyllard had driven away, and every detail of the scene rose up clearly in her mind. She saw him and the stolid Dampier sitting in the wagon, with nothing in their manner to suggest that they were setting out upon a perilous venture, and she felt his hand close tight upon her fingers, as it had done just before the vehicle jolted away from ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... in there?" asked Vassili of one waggoner who was dangling his legs lazily over the splashboard of his conveyance and flicking his whip about as he gazed at us with a stolid, vacant look; but he only made answer when we were too far off to catch what ...
— Boyhood • Leo Tolstoy
... on the great, stolid, comfortable class which forms the backbone of the novel-reading public. The best novelists do not find their material in this class. Thomas Hardy never. H.G. Wells, almost never; now and then he glances at it ironically, in an ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... years now John Carlson has been custodian of the refuge. No thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his mind during all that time. To betray his trust would have been in his mind a thing undreamed. He was phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that one could not but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to him at all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely and steadily in his dim soul. In ways it was indeed good that he was not flighty and imaginative. He never lost his head. He could obey ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... in obtaining some details of the attitude of the two condemned men. Vaucheray observes a stolid sullenness and is awaiting the fatal event with no ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... to be fastened speechless upon a rack, and to be charged by uncomprehending souls with counterfeiting emotion. She was so constituted that she could not help laying up this speech of her husband's against him as one of many stolid misdoings which justified both contempt and aversion. In fact, his inability or unwillingness to comprehend her had always been, in her searching and sensitive eyes, his chief crime. To be understood, to be accepted at her full worth, was ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... efficiency in every line of her body. The other, a tall Polish girl, of perhaps 22, was also extremely neat, but her pretty brown hair was blown around her face and her blue eyes were fairly dancing with eagerness, in contrast to the stolid expression of the other woman. As I faced them, the older woman compressed her lips in a thin line, while the girl smiled at ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison
... man's face, as he stepped back a pace or two. I understood it afterwards; I felt it then. There was no resentment; there was no fire of anger, which I should have expected; there was no manly and no stolid disregard of what had been done. There was instead a slight smile, which to this day I cannot bear to recall; it spoke so much of patient and helpless humiliation; as of one wincing at the galling of a sore and trying not to show he winced. Preston took me off my horse, and began to speak. I turned ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... current of cool air that they had felt since entering the place had stopped for some time past, and still the water kept rising, and at last seemed to come through the narrowing opening with so horrible a gurgling rush that it affected even stolid Josh, who took his cap off and said that it was "a ...
— Menhardoc • George Manville Fenn
... swinish, base, brute, imbruted, sottish, unintellectual, beastly, carnal, insensible, stolid, unspiritual, bestial, ...
— English Synonyms and Antonyms - With Notes on the Correct Use of Prepositions • James Champlin Fernald
... that he forgot his manners and went into peals of laughter. And from that moment I ceased to exist as the bright particular star in Mr. Gibson's firmament of eligible young men: for in spite of the kink in my nose, and my stolid gravity, which was really and merely the result of my shyness, he had always looked upon me as an exceptionally presentable, proper, and goodly youth, and a most exemplary—that is, if my sister was to be trusted in the matter; ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... keen little Robinson eyes took in this saying with quick intelligence, and four stolid sets of shoulders straightened up importantly with four uplifted saucy chins. They would store these remarks away for future reference when the aunt in question arrived on the scene. They would ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... Bud's eye. But the young Philistine kept his own counsel. He listened, but said nothing, and the eyes under his shaggy brows gave no sign. Ralph could not tell whether those eyes were deep and inscrutable or only stolid. Perhaps a little of both. When Monday morning came, Ralph was nervous. He ...
— The Hoosier Schoolmaster - A Story of Backwoods Life in Indiana • Edward Eggleston
... possibility of help from his frightened flock it was ended by this ill-timed blow. The Prior and his fellows on the dais made not a single motion; and save for an excited swaying and whispering, the monks sat stolid on their benches, either too frightened to flee or too indifferent to the Abbot's safety to care to aid him. For once had the habit of trembling obedience, yoked upon them by years of stern domination, been loosed by the spirit of fear or the hope ...
— Beatrix of Clare • John Reed Scott
... twenty years, the other for life. They had been in eighteen years. I watched their faces when their numbers were called; they stepped forward to the platform and were told of their pardon. There wasn't a sign of comprehension, not a movement of a muscle, the twitch of an eyelid—simply a dead stolid stare. The truth is, they were benumbed as to feeling, incapable of comprehending anything, of initiating anything, as I was till—till this afternoon; then I began to live, ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... its concentrated stolidity. They do not intend wrong—they intend rightly: in truth, they work against the entire human race. So wedded and so confirmed is the world in its narrow groove of self, so stolid and so complacent under the immense weight of misery, so callous to its own possibilities, and so grown to its chains, that I almost despair to see it awakened. Cemeteries are often placed on hillsides, and the white stones are ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... dear life; blue-bloused men in French caps, but bigger and blonder than Frenchmen, and less given to epigrammatic repartee, with mild, blue, beery eyes, a fleur de tete, and a look of health and stolid amiability; sturdy green-coated little soldiers with cock-feathered brigand hats of shiny black, the brim turned up over the right eye and ear that they might the more conveniently take a good aim at the foe ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... stolid black eyes full on the Elder, but made no reply. It was indeed an evil face. The Elder was conscious that impulses which he feared were unchristian were rising rapidly in his breast. He had wished a few ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the hospital a few months ago, when he looked calmly on without a groan or a wince, while the surgeon sawed off the ends of the bone of his fractured arm, drilled holes through them and screwed them together with a fastening of gold wire! That was physical bravery, or perhaps stolid exemption from pain: this was that moral bravery, in a bad cause, but none the less real, which could see wholesale and undeniable ruin fall without betraying one sign of agony to the observer most interested. Though ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford
... and chief engineer turned pale at this significant speech. The rest of the crew looked on in stolid wonder, for they understood no word ...
— Dave Darrin After The Mine Layers • H. Irving Hancock
... ages of oppression have damped its virility. Although some of our most notable prizefighters have been gipsies, it used to be well known in times when the ring was fashionable that a gipsy could not be relied upon “to take punishment” with the stolid indifference of an Englishman or a negro, partly, perhaps, because his more highly strung nervous system makes him more sensitive to pain. The courage of a gipsy woman, on the other hand, has passed into a proverb; nothing seems to daunt her, and yet she will allow ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... face close to you, star- gazing. If you have a visitor, you will see the door slowly open, and a black face protruded at least six times in a quarter of an hour. They are intensely curious, but otherwise as stolid ...
— The Romance of Isabel Lady Burton Volume II • Isabel Lady Burton & W. H. Wilkins
... have felt some qualms of uneasiness as one humiliation followed another; but if he felt he did not show them. Conscious of his ability, and of his own great purposes, he seems to have borne his position with a sort of proud or stolid patience. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... obstinate resolve to remain amongst his tenants. In her alarm, Lady Louisa implored him to sell the property and buy one in Ireland, which was Lady Craikshaw's native country; and the list she contrived to run up of the drawbacks to the Ammaby estate would have driven a temper less stolid than ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... he was in khaki, but the contrast between the two officers was very striking. The one was lean and athletic in every line of his figure, with laughing grey eyes in a handsome face; the other, a stolid, fair-haired Fleming, whose square visage would have been rather colourless and commonplace but for the pleasant smile which showed his ...
— With Haig on the Somme • D. H. Parry
... his back upon the advancing party in an unmistakable manner, and Stanton smoked with a stolid, impassive face that had anything but welcome in it. Sibley was just sufficiently excited by wine to act out ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... mulberry-trees, her whitewashed, red-tiled cottages, her light-hearted, easy-going, Latin-blooded peasantry; across the mountains is the solemn, austere German scenery, with savage peaks and gloomy pine forests, a region inhabited by a stolid, slow-thinking Teutonic people. The Trentino and the Tyrol have about as much in common as ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... he burst out, consternation in every line of his usually stolid countenance. "A dreadful thing has happened! How it's come about I can't for the life of me say, and how we're going to tell the General, ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... live, as one of these eternal hills bears his name. He lived to a good old age, and for many years in rather awful solitude here, and at the last with some of the best blessings that wait on age, 'respect, and troops of friends.' His son—whose stature, broad shoulders, and stolid aspect bring to mind the Saxon peasant of the middle ages—is driver, in the season, and sportsman in and out of it. He stood at the door this morning as we were driving off to the Falls of the Ammonoosuck, with his fowling-piece in hand, and asked ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the married state is ... said to be very rare; and, when it does occur, is one of the few occasions when the stolid aborigine is roused to the extremity of passion, frequently revenging himself on the guilty pair by cutting off his wife's nose and knocking out the brains of ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... her a legacy, or something of that sort. Gentlemen, that is peculiarly and emphatically a matter for you to deal with, and on which it would be out of place for me to offer you any guidance whatever.' (Dismay among several jurymen, stolid pride among others.) 'If you believe that evidence, and I confess I am wholly unable to follow the prisoner's counsel in some of his comments upon the general demeanour of the witnesses, most of whom appeared to me to give their evidence with every appearance of impartiality, ...
— The Queen Against Owen • Allen Upward
... and nearer. Now and then a vivid flash of lightning split the sombre clouds. At such times the nervous girls would jump in their seats, and there would follow hysterical, though quickly subdued, bursts of laughter from their more stolid mates, or the boys. ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope
... feelings of great provocation, the negro, as is commonly the case on board steam-boats, having been for a long time browbeaten by the victim of the sad catastrophe, and subjected to very insolent and overbearing treatment at his hands. The culprit, who was a very sullen, stolid-looking, full-bred negro, refused to answer the questions put to him on the subject, and certainly manifested a careless indifference to consequences that was not in his favour; his fierce scowl denoting great ferocity, in all probability induced by long ill-treatment. As soon as convenience ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... circled his blue hosts in a whirlpool of death trying in vain to break Lee's trenches. He gave it up. The stolid, silent man of iron nerves watched the stream of wagons bearing the wounded, groaning and shrieking, from the field. Lee's forces had been handled with such skill the impact of numbers had made ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon
... with much show of righteous indignation against them from Manning, and stolid assistance to the sumners on the part of Haimet. When the door was shut and all quiet again, Manning came ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... lands of silk and spices. In truth, we found fevers, violent deaths, pestilential paradises where death and beauty kept charnel-house together. That old Johannes Maartens, with no hint of romance in that stolid face and grizzly square head of his, sought the islands of Solomon, the mines of Golconda—ay, he sought old lost Atlantis which he hoped to find still afloat unscuppered. And he found head-hunting, ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... seminaries would produce a still greater number of inestimable scholars hereafter if sordidness did not obscure the splendid light, corruption interrupt, and certain truckling harpies and beggars envy them their usefulness. Nor can any one be so blind as not to perceive this—any so stolid as not to understand it—any so perverse as not to acknowledge how sacred Theology has been contaminated by those notorious idiots, and the celestial Muse treated with profanity. Vile and shameless souls (says Luther) for ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... die better than fighting for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods, or assured her audience with thrilling intensity that one crowded hour of glorious life was worth an age without a name. Even stolid Miller Douglas was so fired one night that it took Mary Vance a good hour to talk him back to sense. Mary Vance said bitterly that if Rilla Blythe felt as bad as she had pretended to feel over Jem's going to the front she wouldn't be urging ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... rope!" I retorted. I was dull—as usual. Marie made no answer. Surely he was the most stolid and silent of brothers. I turned to him. He was taking off his waistcoat ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... beef. The two little kitchen-maids bustled around, eager to help, hot and panting, with cotton sleeves well tucked up above the dimpled elbows, and giggling over some private jokes of their own, whenever Miss Sally's back was turned for a moment. And old Jemima, stolid in temper and solid in bulk, kept up a long and subdued grumble, while she stirred the stock-pot methodically over ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... does not understand; and its curiosity will help it to solve the problem. Beth did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her, they formed a poor opinion of her intellect. The truth was that she had no use for letters or figures. The books of nature and of life were spread ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... But you may look on at a Kirchweih from morning till night without seeing either horseplay or drunkenness. Not that the German peasant is an opera hero in his inner life. He is a hard-working man, God-fearing on the whole, stupid and stolid often, narrowly shrewd often, having his eye on the main chance. When he is stupid but not God-fearing he dresses himself and his wife in their best clothes, puts his insurance papers in his pockets, sets his thatched house on fire, and goes for ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... could move his stolid disposition, or melt his stony heart; and, looking at her with an expression akin to ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... is your passenger." He lifted Jewel to her place beside the driver, whose smooth, stolid face did not ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... rig, or of almost anything else connected with the affairs of the sea. It happened that I used to know this fellow. I had even been quite chummy with him in the old days—that is, to the extent of drinking too many beers with him in certain hot-country ports. I remembered him as a stolid and deliberate sort of a person, with an amazing hodge-podge of learning, a stamp collection, and a theory about the effects of tropical sunshine on the Caucasian race, to which I have listened half of more than one ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... life, this optimism is ethically useful as giving cheerfulness and enthusiasm to moral life, with power of enduring ills through the conviction of the ultimate triumph of the right. It may pass into a stolid dogmatic ignoring or denial of the existence of evil, and then tends to become inhuman and therefore ethically bad.[2118] It is, however, commonly saved from such an unfortunate result by common sense and the instinct of sympathy. And it is so general a conception and its goal is so remote ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... varies greatly in different tribes. The lives of some seem to be moved wholly through the emotions, while others are stolid or dull. The variations in musical ability and practice of savage and barbarous races are good evidence of this. Many of the tribes in Africa have their rude musical instruments, and chant their simple, monotonous music. The South Sea Islanders beat hollow logs with clubs, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... victims: a road-man, his wife, an orphan baby—all belonging to the thick central mass of the proletariat, for a West End slum had received a bomb full in the face—and Lady Queenie Paulle. The policemen were stolid; the reporters were stolid; the proletariat was stolid; the majority of the witnesses were stolid, and in particular the representatives of various philanthropic agencies who gave the most minute evidence about the habits and circumstances ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... grovelled at his knees, and kissed his feet, hailing him as the child of the Sun: but the most part kept a stolid indifference, and when freed from their fetters, sat quietly down where they stood, staring into vacancy. The iron had entered too deeply into their soul. They seemed ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... as a soldier is that his elan and gay courage are very much more remarkable even than supposed; but for the dull, heavy work of continued warfare there is wanted, if we may say so without offence, the more stolid qualities of the English. On the other hand, the French opinion of their Ally as a soldier is that his dash and devilment are really astonishing, even to the most expectant critic; but for the sordid, monotonous strain of this trench business it needs (a thousand ...
— Mr. Punch's History of the Great War • Punch
... side upon it. Presently the five outgoing guests slouched one by one into the room. Each was shaven and shorn; each wore clean linen; each was clad in a neat, plain, gray suit of tweed; each bore stamped upon his face a dogged, obstinate, stolid, low-browed shame. The colonel gave each the money enclosed in the envelope, thanked each for his service, inquired with pleasant friendliness as to his future movements and plans, invited each to come ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... was not simply a profession, like another, but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint. Others have written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy, might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill." There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... Pocockians have at last come to see that a spirit is not necessarily a malevolent spirit, and accepting his presence as a fact in their stolid, unreasoning way, they are quite neighborly and ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... celebrated the Fete des Narcisses, and from the smallest street urchin, grabbing a bunch of narcissi in his grubby little hand and trying to induce the good-natured foreigner to purchase his wares, to the usually stolid hoteliers, vying with each other as to which of their caravanserais should blaze out into the most arresting scheme of decoration on the great occasion, the whole population was aquiver with an almost child-like sense of anticipation and delight. There was to be a procession of decorated cars ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler
... reasons for remaining stolid, and Harry started. But when he reached the landing he paused. Mr. Skratdj had especially announced that morning that he did not wish to be disturbed, and though he was a favorite, Harry had no desire to invade the dining-room at this crisis. So he returned to the ...
— Junior Classics, V6 • Various
... world. It was the figure of a Cree squaw, blanketed and many-wrinkled and unmistakably dirty, blinking at the devil-wagons and the ceaseless hurry of the white man. And being somewhat Indianized, as my husband once assured me I was, I could sympathize with that stolid old lady ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... assertion which their intellect, so long employed among worldly considerations, could not in any manner grasp. But the truth of a vitally important fact soon makes its way into the understanding of even the most stolid. Finally, all men saw that astronomical knowledge lied not, and they ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... remarkable impression. Her dress was florid and not in excellent taste, and her accent was rather crude. Sophie had gone to school at the convent in the city, but she had no ambition. She had inherited the stolid simplicity of her English grandfather. When her schooling was finished she let her school friends drop, and came back to Bonaventure, rather stately, given to reading, and little inclined to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the life is begun, how few there are who attempt to withdraw from it? It grows on the senses and faculties. It appeals to the emotional as well as to the stolid humours. The cares of this world as expounded in town life, and the sinfulness of never-to-be-acquired riches are foreign to the free, bland air which has filtered through the myriad leaves of the mountain, and which smacks so strongly of freedom. Sometimes the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... little gray man! what else? Not portraits, surely? Wise that he was, he left those to the snapshot photographer; for even the camera can be given the artistic kink by the toucher-up. Have you forgotten, then, the rage of a stolid Englishman when he saw his wife as Whistler painted her? Oh, yes, art lies outrageously and lives long, like ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... saw the old woman and the donkey dignified, decorative, and flat, as they might have marched across the Elgin Marbles. Seen thus under an equal light, there was nothing specially ugly about them; the cart was long and sufficiently comfortable; the donkey was stolid and sufficiently respectable; the old woman was lean but sufficiently strong, and even smiling in a sour, rustic manner. But seen from behind they looked like one black monstrous animal; the dark donkey ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... ship of martial build (Her standards set, her brave apparel on) Directed as by madness mere Against a stolid iceberg steer, Nor budge it, though the infatuate ship went down. The impact made huge ice-cubes fall Sullen, in tons that crashed the deck; But that one avalanche was all No other movement save the ...
— John Marr and Other Poems • Herman Melville
... little Robinson eyes took in this saying with quick intelligence, and four stolid sets of shoulders straightened up importantly with four uplifted saucy chins. They would store these remarks away for future reference when the aunt in question arrived on the scene. They would come ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... as Stern could discover, no disaffection as yet existed. The Folk, in any event, were singularly stolid, here as in their own home. If the colonists sometimes muttered together against conditions or concerning the lie Allan had told about the patriarch, he ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... the morning of June 12, 1917, the British won new and valuable positions astride the Souchez River. In the night the Germans in force delivered a counterattack to regain the lost ground, displaying a disregard for safety and stolid bravery as they pushed on in spite of heavy losses. But the British were in a situation where they could rake the German lines with their artillery and machine-gun fire, and made the most of their advantage. The Germans could not make any headway against this storm of fire, and at last ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... Hester slowly and thoughtfully returned to his quarters after witnessing the departure of his son, he found sitting on the doorstep, and patiently awaiting his coming, a Canadian woman. Beside her stood her stolid-looking husband, whom the major recognized as a well-to-do farmer of the settlement, to whom he had granted some trifling favors while in command of ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... the manager had been in nowise wrong. Peter Gee was that rare creature, a good as well as clever Eurasian. In fact, it was the stolid integrity of the Chinese blood that toned the recklessness and licentiousness of the English blood which had run in his father's veins. Also, he was better educated than any man there, spoke better English as well as several other tongues, and knew and lived more of their own ideals of ...
— A Son Of The Sun • Jack London
... day was passed in calculations and in conversations. I remained a steadfast adherent of the opinions of Professor Liedenbrock, and I envied the stolid indifference of Hans, who, without going into causes and effects, went on with his eyes shut wherever ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... prowess in battle, and of mercilessness toward an enemy. To be told that they must root out this passion and be governed by the Golden Rule was turning themselves into squaws, and spurning that nobility which is the crowning glory of the red man's life. Their demeanor was stolid. The wise Deerfoot plainly saw, however, that his doctrine found favor with only a few. He made his appeal as clear and direct as he knew how, but he did not need to be told that he ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... drama of the flare-up of a stolid and apparently unfeeling nature in the flame of the ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... swearing that he would "hike for Attleboro, and hoe potatoes until he died." I was forced to seek Steve Drinkwater. Short, pillow-like, as red-cheeked as a winter apple, and yellow-haired, he was a Dutchman, unafraid of anything, stolid, powerful, but not resourceful. I called Steve to my room above Captain Benson's, and set before him a bottle of schnapps, in a square-faced bottle, ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... came Mrs. Taylor in white with a pistol, and Miss Peck in white, staring and stolid. But no Tommy. Noise prevailed without, shots by the stable and shots by the creek. The two cow-punchers dismounted and joined Taylor. Maniac delight seized me, and I, too, rushed about with them, ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they might be charred down below. It was nearly calm, but a ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... seats to hear him out, he would carry them all inevitably to his conclusion. They know it and run away. But the press has made our whole world of civilization one great lecture-room, from which no reading man can escape, and the only defence against progress is stolid preoccupation with trade or trifles. Yet this persistency is holding the breath, and can no more be continued in the mind than that in the body. Blundering and falsehood become intolerable to the blunderers; they must return to thought, and that is proper in a single direction, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... removal, in the thrill of martyrdom that came with publicity, the blankness did not last. What the publicity was to her husband she could not understand. He received the protests of his family in stolid silence; when the venturesome great-aunt told him what she thought of him, he smiled; when his brother informed him that he was a fool, he said he shouldn't wonder. When the minister, egged on by distracted Hall ...
— The Way to Peace • Margaret Deland
... Thirty-second Street. He loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was employed. She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died. To the foreman, a heavy stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world. Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a desk by another window. He sat at his desk making out sheets containing ...
— Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories • Sherwood Anderson
... Chelmsford, and were met by the farmer in whose house they were going to lodge, a stolid, good-natured fellow named Pammenter, with red, leathery cheeks, and a corkscrew curl of black hair coming forward on each temple. His trap was waiting, and in a few minutes they started on the drive to Danbury. The ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... some personal cost they might have yet attempted a rush and overpowered him. But there was no rush in these exhausted men, and, except for a few who showed signs of relief, they took the situation with stolid gravity. ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... the gnome began to understand that his antics amused the audience, and he, too, enjoyed them. For the first time an emotion was expressed on his stolid countenance; but it was not an agreeable transformation. The corners of his mouth widened until they reached his ears, which stood still farther out from his head; he closed one eye, and opened the other to its farthest extent; and pressing the stem of his pipe more firmly between his teeth, ...
— The Nameless Castle • Maurus Jokai
... THE stolid gentleman in livery who has his carriage-stand at the corner opposite my house is constantly touching on the extremes of human experience, with probably not the remotest perception of the fact. Now he takes a pair of lovers out for ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... and, on entering her room, found Mary seated on a chair, sobbing hysterically. One only had to glance at the girl to see that she was suffering from some very severe shock. Though normally red-cheeked and placid, in short, a very healthy, stolid creature, and the last person to be easily perturbed, she was now without a vestige of colour, whilst the pupils of her eyes were dilated with terror, and her entire body, from the crown of her head to the soles ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... peasants working in the fields or plodding along the way, paused in their occupations to regard the novel vehicle with stolid wonderment. ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... If any one asks her a question, she answers civilly in a businesslike tone, with a hard foreign accent, for she is the widow of one of the Swiss Guards at the Vatican; but she is naturally silent, stolid, mechanical, and trustworthy. She is a lay sister and is called Sister Anna, and she lives in a small room on the left of the vestibule, as you go in, five steps above the stone pavement. She is very rarely relieved from her duties ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford
... Stolid minds travel in grooves, and old Mrs. Guille's had been groping along possibilities of all kinds, clinging at the same time to the hope that Peter would ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... with varied reception. In some places the people were so stolid, that even the catechist, one of their own people, seemed to make no impression. On many occasions we were heard most patiently, and were treated most courteously. Now and then, especially in the larger places, and where markets were being ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... seraph. Then again he is so sly and still, so imperturbably saturnine; shows such indifference, malign coolness towards all that men strive after; and ever with some half-visible wrinkle of a bitter sardonic humor, if indeed it be not mere stolid callousness,—that you look on him almost with a shudder, as on some incarnate Mephistopheles, to whom this great terrestrial and celestial Round, after all, were but some huge foolish Whirligig, where kings and beggars, and angels and demons, and stars and ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... the landlady's daughter, attended by a cavalier in the person of a stolid young man of German extraction, as I thought at first glance, and this was confirmed by Blister's, "Let me make you acquainted with Miss Malloy," and "Shake hands with ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... to consider this wonderful state of affairs; for the time will come when Englishmen will quote it as the stock example of the stolid stupidity of their ancestors in the nineteenth century. The most thoroughly commercial people, the greatest voluntary wanderers and colonists the world has ever seen, are precisely the middle classes of this country. If there be a people which has been busy making history on the ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... heh," creaked an old skin-and-bones, with one tooth visible, which shook as the laugh emerged. Stolid men smoking, deigned ...
— The Young Seigneur - Or, Nation-Making • Wilfrid Chateauclair
... at rest, breathing peacefully, close to the head of the dead child. But the sun blazed fiercely down upon the sand; and something pitiless, emanating from that sky of flame and from those stolid witnesses, seemed to pass over ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... caught you?" he cried, with innocent gaiety. "Dear fellow, I was growing quite impatient." And on the speaker's somewhat stolid face there came a glow of genuine affection. "I am so long unused to have a friend," he continued, "that I begin to be afraid I may prove jealous." And he wrung the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... impressed the Kaiser on manoeuvres; perhaps for that reason he has refrained to pass that way. Outside, in the slippery streets, over which the red-capped children passed with shouts of glee, I had seen something of the preparations; the men, steel-like and stolid, marching by, the officers, stiff and martial-looking, saluting right and left under the quaint arcades of this charming city. Colored photographs of corps commanders adorned the windows and seemed to find a ready sale. These things pointed ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... face took on a decided pallor, and then his expression took on a blank, noncommittal look. There was no getting behind that stolid wall. ...
— Frontier Boys in Frisco • Wyn Roosevelt
... whole line. They simply stood and waited. In truth there is nothing about the survivors of the disaster that strikes one so forcibly as their evident inability to comprehend their misfortune and the absence of sympathetic expressions among them. It is not because they are naturally stolid, but the whole thing is so vast and bears upon them so heavily they ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker
... by the wealthy Chola women of La Paz. In another row are the dealers in Indian blankets; still another is devoted to such trinkets as one might expect to find in a "needle-and-thread" shop at home. There are stolid Aymara peddlers with scores of bamboo flutes varying in size from a piccolo to a bassoon; the hat merchants, with piles of freshly made native felts, warranted to last for at least a year; and vendors of aniline dyes. The fabrics which have come to us ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... in "Indian Goods"—colored cloth, beads, blankets, knives, axes, and musical instruments. His was the first store in New York that carried a stock of musical instruments. These he sold to the savages, and also he supplied the stolid Dutch the best of everything in this particular line, from a ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... destroyed all hope; but the very horror of the situation gave Prosper, not the coolness of a matured resolution, but that sort of stupid, stolid indifference which often results from ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... said it was a shocking outrage, the captain of U.S.S. Adirondack concurred, and so the cruiser, with the injured, stolid-faced 'Reo on board, steamed off to Leone Bay and gave the astounded natives twelve hours to make up their minds as to which they would do—pay 'Reo one thousand dollars in cash or have their town burnt. ...
— The Colonial Mortuary Bard; "'Reo," The Fisherman; and The Black Bream Of Australia - 1901 • Louis Becke
... perfectly stolid during the harangue. Once he reached down with one long arm and scratched his bare ankle with his forefinger, his eyes, with the gentle light in them that had first attracted me, glancing aimlessly about the room; then he ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of my body was exhausted so completely that it could give no support to my spirit; and as the days went on and on—always with the same weed-covered sea around me and the same soft golden mist over me, and I always working wearily but with the stolid steadiness of a machine—so deadening a numbness took hold of me that I seemed to myself like some far-away strange person—yet one with whom I had a direct connection, and must needs sorrow for and sympathize with—struggling interminably ...
— In the Sargasso Sea - A Novel • Thomas A. Janvier
... was too late to recall it now, and filled with no pleasant forebodings by learning that the one who had just stepped out of the place in which he had stood had been committed to the Tower, he watched the swearing-in of the jury with stolid indifference. ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... am that I have lived to see this wonderful reform of prohibition at last accomplished in England. There is something so difficult about the British, so stolid, so hard to move. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... effort and toil 'neath the sun, The stolid old sun, tranquil ripener of wheat, Who works o'er our haste imperturbably on To swell the green ...
— Poems of Paul Verlaine • Paul Verlaine
... and very solid, Fixed in purpose as a rock, Slow, deliberate, and stolid, Of the real ...
— Songs Of The Road • Arthur Conan Doyle
... me from the stolid crowd, which had complacently been listening to her passionate outpourings, she seemed relieved at finding some one to whom she could appeal to oppose these horrible proceedings with all his might. I met her on another ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... clinging brambles in Sir HENRY's coverts with his eye-glass in his eye and his Express at the trail. At every step his unfortunate legs had been more and more torn, until there was literally not a scrap of sound skin upon them anywhere. Even the beaters, a stolid lot, had roared when old VELVETEENS the second keeper had brought up to poor COODENT a lump of flesh from his right leg, which he had found sticking on a thorn-bush in the centre of the high covert. Suddenly Sir ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... wonderful things that he intended "Mortimer Stant" to be. It was to concern a man of forty (in his confident selection of that age he displayed, most stridently, his own youth) and Mortimer was to be a stolid, reserved Philistine, who was, against his will, by outside forces, dragged ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... pear with two fat hands, when he immediately sank into the depths of the old shawl again, all his teeth quite busy at work. Phronsie set down her basket on the deck, and the rest of the brood emptied it to their own satisfaction. Their mother's stolid face lighted up with a broad smile that showed all her teeth, and very ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... that has brought forth this most perfect embodiment of purity among the nations. This is of itself one of those miracles which captivate the mind and charm the imagination, the living paradox in which the soul delights. How did she come out of that stolid peasant race, out of that distracted and ignoble age, out of riot and license and the fierce thirst for gain, and failure of every noble faculty? Who can tell? By the grace of God, by the inspiration ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... closer to the light and frown to make out the print of his book. The sight of his stolid immobility merely sharpened their hunger, for there was never any passion in this hulk of a man. When he relaxed over a book the world went out like a snuffed candle for him. He read slowly, lingering over every page, for ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... a different view of the matter, and felt that if he was willing to take the consequences, he ought to be allowed to eat as much as he pleased. He was not troubled with the catechism any more. The deacon found him so stolid and unteachable that he was forced to give up in despair, and Sam became master of his own time in the evening. He usually strayed into the village, where he found company at the village store. Here it was ...
— The Young Outlaw - or, Adrift in the Streets • Horatio Alger
... her husband's stolid countenance and averted eyes, and made no rejoinder until the silent intensity of her regards compelled him to look up. Reading distrust and alarm in these, he shook off his sister's ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... of numbers marked in stone, like those on a clock-face, let into the earth—is covered with delicate ornament. The great feature, however (the nave is perfectly bare and wonderfully new-looking, though the warden, a stolid yet sharp old peasant in a blouse, who looked more as if his line were chaffering over turnips than showing off works of art, told me that it has never been touched and that its freshness is simply the quality of the stone)—the great feature is the admirable ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... silence. And sharply without warning, the influence, deep and invisible, of many generations of stolid folk in New England made itself felt in each of them. Father and daughter grew awkward, both. The talk had been too emotional. Each made, as by an instinct, a quick strong effort at self-control, and ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... have a little score to settle between us as man to man, Kent," he began, when Kent had clipped the end from his own cigar and lighted it in stolid silence. ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde
... stepped out of the drawing, or sat for it, whichever you please. But, much more than that, he seems to have exactly realised the sort of man Old Bill probably is in real life—slow-speaking and stolid in manner, yet with a vein of common-sense underlying his apparent stupidity; much addicted to beer and other liquids, but not brutalized thereby; and, while often grousing and grumbling, nevertheless possessed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 15, 1917 • Various
... had never moved, as we have said. Save for his one eye and his quivering, one would scarcely have known that he lived. That was his game, perhaps. Who can tell? For a stolid, slow-thinking gull may have, in his way, just as deep, or low, a cunning as a brilliant-brained raven. Anyhow, in that fiftieth of a second allowed, just when it seemed as if nothing could save his eye, Cob's head snicked round and up, and he slid the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... a smile for him directly from both, and he plunged into his business at once; but as he went on, the smiles died out, and all he said was received in a dull, stolid way. Neither Jack nor his wife would understand what ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... next two days he was in a state of the greatest excitement, and on Friday at twelve o'clock he drove down to the Buckingham to wait for news. All the afternoon the stolid hall-porter kept posting up telegrams from various parts of the country giving the results of horse-races, the verdicts in divorce suits, the state of the weather, and the like, while the tape ticked out wearisome details about an all-night sitting in the ...
— Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories • Oscar Wilde
... and did not attract observation as we joined the outside circle of one of these groups after another. It was as interesting to watch the listeners as the speakers. I wished I might paint the sea of faces, eager, anxious, stolid, attentive, happy, and unhappy: histories written on many of them; others blank, unmarked by any thought or aspiration. I stole a sidelong look at the Honourable Arthur. He is an Englishman first, and a man afterwards (I prefer it the other way), ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... saint it serves no less willingly than any other purpose,—stiffly holding out its arms there, about its own wooden business, neither more nor less, centred utterly upon itself. But is it not this stolid self-centration which makes it needful to Divinity? An infinite energy required a resisting or doggedly indifferent material, itself quasi infinite, to take the impression of its life, and render potentiality ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... cheer Taras and to divert his mind; in vain did the long-bearded, grey-haired guitar-players come by twos and threes to glorify his Cossack deeds. He gazed grimly and indifferently at everything, with inappeasable grief printed on his stolid face; and said softly, as he drooped his head, "My ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... The horizon seemed to have come on all sides within arm's length of the ship. Into that narrowed circle furious seas leaped in, struck, and leaped out. A rain of salt, heavy drops flew aslant like mist. The main-topsail had to be goose-winged, and with stolid resignation every one prepared to go aloft once more; but the officers yelled, pushed back, and at last we understood that no more men would be allowed to go on the yard than were absolutely necessary for the work. ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad
... Ye stolid, homely, visible things, Above you all brood glorious wings Of your deep entities, set high, Like slow moons in a hidden sky. But you, their likenesses, are spent Upon another element. Truly ye are but seemings — The shadowy cast-off gleamings Of bright solidities. Ye seem ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... smile with an expression of crude and rather stolid discomfort. It had a base of indignation, corrected by a concession to the common idea that most events, with an issue pendent, were the result of a smart piece of work: a kind of awkward shrug was in it. He had no desire to be unpleasant ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... In the straw hat, and the young man beside him: Father and son are they. Old Lothian, Five months ago, was high among the trusted Of our chief bankers; Charles, his only son, By a maternal uncle's death enriched, Kept out of Wall Street; turned a stolid ear To all high-mounting schemes for doubling wealth, His taste inclining him to art and letters. But Lothian had a partner, Judd,—a scamp, As the result made evident; and Judd One day was missing; bonds, securities, ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... in the passages, and the damp odor of leaves in the dining-room. There was the cry of night birds in the creaking cupola, and the swift rush of dark wings past bedroom windows. Lissome shapes crept along the terraces between the stolid wooden statues, or, bolder, scampered the whole length of the great veranda. In the lulling of the wind the breath of the woods was everywhere; even the aroma of swelling sap—as if the ghastly stumps on the deforested slope behind the hotel were bleeding afresh in ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte
... J'en passe et des meilleurs. I could have lived in Calcutta or in Clerkenwell, been received in Belgravia or in Boulogne. Good Lord! the parts one woman is supposed to be fit for, while the man remains his stolid, stupid self. Talk of the variety stage! Or is it that they all want the ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the motor's den; so hot that it was no wonder the deck, which formed the roof, often felt warm underfoot. Chump, chump, went the engine, sounding stolid and Dutch and obstinate, as if nothing on earth or water could induce it to go faster than it chose. It even seemed to me as I gazed that it was slowing down, out of spite. I longed to feel its pulses with a stop-watch in the other hand, and make sure. Could it be that, after all, Alb had ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... the soul, buried under the ashes of worldly cares, flamed up, and the air that fanned it made it glow like an inward fire, lighting up the thick cheeks, the stolid, heavy features. It smoothed out the crackled surface of wrinkles, softened in the younger women the vulgarity of chapped red lips, gave colour to the dull brown flesh, overflowed in the smile on lips half parted ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... the stiff and stolid Sabin; "I can see nothing suspicious about it. Indeed, it goes to show me that the rebellion is crushed; for, as I presume, the honest but well-meaning part of the rebels are ashamed, and their leaders afraid to show their ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... commercial activity. The Government of Italy helped the Government of Austria in so far as was possible. And in so acting, I felt I was working better for the greatness of my country than I could possibly have done by any kind of stolid persecution. I felt that over and beyond our competition there existed the human sorrow of nations for whom we must avoid fresh shedding of blood and fresh wars. Had I not left the Government, it was my intention not only to continue in this ...
— Peaceless Europe • Francesco Saverio Nitti
... couriers who had arrived simultaneously from different points. Father Joseph arose, and, leaning against the wall like an Egyptian mummy, allowed nothing to appear upon his face but an expression of stolid contemplation. Twelve messengers entered successively, attired in various disguises; one appeared to be a Swiss soldier, another a sutler, a third a master-mason. They had been introduced into the palace by a secret stairway ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... ran back for his horse and soon returned, and then drank his coffee and snatched a bite, while Amalia and Larry slung the bags of food and the water on the mule and made all ready for the start. As he ate, he tried to arouse and encourage the mother, but she remained stolid until they were in the saddle, when she rose and followed them a few steps, and said in her deep voice: "Yes, I ask a thing. You will find Paul, my 'usband. Tell him to come to me—it is best—no more,—I cannot in English." Then turning to her daughter ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... door opened, and the Indian chief glided into the apartment with a grunt of salutation. He spread his blanket in a corner, and sat down, turning a stolid face ...
— Lahoma • John Breckenridge Ellis
... the arm-pits, and his hind legs dangle. He continues to lick his chops and looks at me sardonically. He is stolid over his cups—which is somewhat disappointing. No matter; he can be ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... at the block in the narrow way. The 'bus-driver, with London stout, and plenty of it, polishing his round cheeks like the brasswork of a locomotive, his neck well wound and buttressed with thick comforter and collar, heedeth not, but goes on his round, now fast, now slow, always stolid and rubicund, the rain running harmlessly from him as if he were oiled. The conductor, perched like the showman's monkey behind, hops and twists, and turns now on one foot and now on the other as if the plate were red-hot; now holds on with one hand, and now dexterously shifts ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... work, and its predella has all the qualities of boldness and freedom characteristic of the master's best times. Some of the figures are perhaps too obviously life-studies, especially the Mary, standing in the foreground left, which he evidently painted straight from some contadina, whose stolid features he reproduced without reference to the subject. The body of the Christ is successful, and has all the weight and helpless inertia of a corpse; the composition is admirable, and there is sincerity of emotion in the painting ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell
... the control room with Tom Farley, big, husky fellows of stolid countenance and armed with regulation flame-ray pistols ...
— The Copper-Clad World • Harl Vincent
... they repose in security, always however taking the precaution of sleeping just above the deep channel, into which they can plunge when alarmed. When a shot is fired into a sleeping herd, all start up on their feet, and stare with peculiar stolid looks of hippopotamic surprise, and wait for another shot before dashing into deep water. A few miles below Chikumbula's we saw a white hippopotamus in a herd. Our men had never seen one like it before. It was of a pinkish white, exactly like the ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... speaking from her corner, and her explanation of the excellence of Jenny's dogs, given with stolid childish gravity in the interval of tearing a large sheet of brown paper, made them laugh. But in the midst of the laughter thought of her great trouble came upon Esther. Mrs. Saunders noticed this, and a look of pity came ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... delicious. Only once on her journey from Oxford Circus she felt the sense of curiosity rise in her, in relation to a man, and this was when she asked a policeman at Tottenham Court Road, and he put his head down fully a foot to listen to her. So huge, so broad, so red in the face, so stolid, it seemed wonderful to her that he paid her any attention! If he were a human being, could she really be one, too? But that, after all, was no more odd than everything. Why, for instance, the spring flowers in that woman's basket had been born; why that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... life. All that care and attention could do for them was done; and when they were in a fit condition to travel, their horses and a supply of provisions were given to them. The Indians had maintained during the whole time the stolid apathy of their race. They had expressed no thanks for the kindness bestowed upon them. Only when their horses were presented to them, and bows and arrows placed in their hands, with an intimation that they were free to go, did ...
— Out on the Pampas - The Young Settlers • G. A. Henty
... till the officer motioned him to the gate, behind which the prisoners sat in stolid rows. Then he walked dejectedly back into the pen, and sat down by another drunkard. His look touched me, and I went around and talked to the magistrate privately. But he was inexorable; he said he knew more of him than I did, and that ten days in ...
— The Burial of the Guns • Thomas Nelson Page
... real ground, His own conviction? Ardent as he is— Call his great truth a lie, why, still the old "Be it as God please" re-assureth him. I probed the sore as thy disciple should: {220} "How, beast," said I, "this stolid carelessness Sufficeth thee, when Rome is on her march To stamp out like a little spark thy town, Thy tribe, thy crazy tale and thee at once?" He merely looked with his large eyes on me. The man is apathetic, ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... I trust?" said Jorworth, bending his keen, wild blue eye on the stolid and unexpressive face of the Netherlander, like an eager student who seeks to discover some hidden and mysterious meaning in a passage of a classic author, the direct import of which ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... the memories from him with an effort that brought a dew to his face, but the conflict which must be fought every day was over, and he stretched his long limbs amidst the soft cedar-twigs and lay down to sleep with a stolid acquiescence that if wholly free from bitterness was but little brightened by the victory. The man's life had been a struggle almost since its beginning, and he was stubborn, but his own headstrong passions had been the most obdurate enemy he ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... without a word smote him in the face with such force that the man fell flat and Henry thrust him aside, resuming his original position. The warrior rose to his feet and rubbed his bruised face, looking doubtfully at the boy who sat in such stolid silence, staring into the coals and paying no further attention to his opponent. The Indian never uses his fists, and his hand strayed to the handle of his tomahawk; then, as it strayed away again he sat down on the far side of the fire, and he ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... consternation at every mouthful, at every step—all this will reduce me at last to idiocy. I went out of my mind, I had megalomania; but then I was cheerful, confident, and even happy; I was interesting and original. Now I have become more sensible and stolid, but I am just like every one else: I am—mediocrity; I am weary of life. . . . Oh, how cruelly you have treated me! . . . I saw hallucinations, but what harm did that do to any one? I ask, what harm ...
— The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... playing peek-a-boo all about his stolid features. After that the Dane treated me with an air of superiority—the superiority of thirty dollars per month ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... cut sharper than the actual pain of it at the moment. He had gone through with it with a sort of stolid endurance, letting Michael see but a tithe of what he felt. But the remembrance was anguish unalloyed. For a time he could neither speak ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... bearing a slouch of uninterested fatigue. By his side—unshaven, a little dusty, but otherwise no whit the worse—stood the Professor and the Bureaucrat, salved from their underground prison by the crowbars of the six muscular policemen who formed at the present impressivejuncture a stolid back-drop to the scene. Close by, also unshaven and weary-looking, but happy in the moment of release, were a priest, a poet, and a nondescript young man of amiable aspect and engaging mien, whose name was Peter Brown. M. Lesueur had just completed his narrative ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could only be driven a short distance farther down ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... children, perhaps even without shoes and stockings. At most, they spent their leisure over cards and, of course, had never read a single book. The two merchants looked respectable, but were strangely silent and stolid. One of them was close-shaven, and was dressed in European style; the other had a small, gray beard, and wore a red ribbon with some sort of a medal upon it on his neck. There is no need to speak ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... blue, but the lids drooped over them so heavily that his expression was habitually drowsy, even stolid. In build, he was short and thick-set, like a bulldog; and there seemed to be something of a bulldog's strength in the breadth of his chest, though there was no hint of energy about ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... to be pleasant," said Rainey, and went to the wheel. The girl had given him a smile, but he marked her face as weary from sleeplessness and strain. Rainey left the spokes in charge of Hansen for a minute—Hansen stolid and chewing like an automaton, undisturbed by the incident now it had passed—and asked the ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... care for these stolid people on the height, or whether the vision counseled her, Mary gave up her house in the village, and bought a little old dwelling under an overhanging hillside, at Horn o' the Moon. It was a nest built into the rock, its back sitting snugly there. The dark came down ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... you what it is, my boy," he accused, with lifted forefinger. "You like to pose—that's what is the matter with you! You like to act stolid, matter-of-fact, correct; you want to sit in your ambulance and smoke cigarettes indifferently and raise your eyebrows superciliously when shrapnel bursts round. And it's all very well now; it looks picturesque; ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... a last yellow glow across the land, sank from sight, and soon the moon, with silvery light and black bands of shadow, was playing strange tricks with the stolid world beneath them. ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... secret service man. He is entirely safe, and I have sent for him. Now I imagine that the Duke will wish our new secretary to live still at the 'Brand'—he preferred it in your case, as you will remember. Our new secretary is going to be my nephew. He is very stolid and honest, and fortunately not a chatterbox. He is going to be the nominal secretary, but I want you to be the one ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to shore, and was making for the stolid Swogon and its waiting sleds. The stranger's method of construction could now be distinguished, A good half-score of tote-sleds had been lashed together into a sort of runnered raft The sail was the huge canvas used in summer ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... conditions of intense excitement meet in a murder trial. The awful issue at stake gives significance to the lightest word or look. How the quick eyes of the spectators rove from the stolid jury to the keen lawyers, the impassive judge, the anxious prisoner. Nothing is lost of the sharp wrangle of the counsel on points of law, the measured decision's of the bench; the duels between the attorneys and the witnesses. The crowd sways with the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... intervened, was now a fine-looking, heavily built man of sixty-five, with prominent dark eyes under sleepy lids, abundant iron-gray hair which was brushed until it shone, and a drooping moustache that was still as brown as it had been in his youth. He had an impressive though stolid bearing, an amiable expression, an engaging smile, and the manner of a weary monarch. It was his boast that he had never done anything for the first time without ascertaining precisely how it had been ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... then became disquieted, Let stolid people think who do not see What the point is beyond which ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
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