"Rotund" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... know what?" snapped the doctor, his glance straying wrathfully toward the rotund clergyman, who all at once assumed an abjectly apologetic air and interested himself in a picture on the ...
— The Return of Peter Grimm - Novelised From the Play • David Belasco
... the rotund little object of two-feet-ten standing before the fire with its legs apart and its arms crossed, putting ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... arching trees that mark the zenith hour, How great thy reach, how marvellous thy power, So lavishly outpouring all thy rotund gifts On mortal ways, in superhuman shifts That overtax the mind, and vex the soul of man, As would the details of some awful plan, Jocund, mysterious, complex, and yet withal Enmeshed with Joy and Sorrow, as a pall Envelops all the seas at eventide, and brings New meaning ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... respect—he positively refused to learn anything from books, and it was in sheer despair that his father, Filipepe, apprenticed the boy to a goldsmith, who rejoiced in the nickname of Botticello—'the little tun'—perhaps on account of his rotund figure, and it was from this first master of his that the boy came to be called 'Botticello's Sandro.' The goldsmith soon saw that the boy was a born painter, and took him to Lippo Lippi to be taught. Both Botticelli and Gozzoli, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... contemplated it with an air of exultation. Again begging to thank the Prince and Princess for this mark of their distinguished consideration, Lady Swiggs inquires if they ever met or heard of Sir Sunderland Swiggs. The rotund lady, for herself and the prince, replies in the negative. "He was," she pursues, with a sigh of disappointment, "he was very distinguished, in his day. Yes, and I am his lineal descendant. Your highnesses ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... sell us that little?" asked John, as they gazed at the tempting array of vegetables in the store window. They opened the door timidly. The rotund proprietor stepped forward ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... Paddle-wheels churning, the rotund boat swung into the Brooklyn dock. Her gunwales rubbed and squeaked along the straining piles green with sea slime; deck chains clinked, cog-wheels clattered, the stifling smell of dock water gave place to the ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... the sentimentalists," answered the severe critic, "but that of exceeding feebleness. They have no bone and muscle in their genius—all is flaccid and rotund in its feminine symmetry. They seem to think that vigour consists in florid phrases and little aphorisms, and delineate all the mighty tempests of the human heart with the polished prettiness of a miniature-painter on ivory. ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... heard fragments of conversations—"They never trouble the Bordeaux route"—"Absolutely safe, je t'assure"; and in the accents of Iowa the commanding advice, "Now, don't worry!" "Good-bye, Jim! Good-bye, Maggie!" cried a rotund, snappy American drummer, and was answered with cheery, honest wishes for "the success of his business." Two young Americans with the same identical oddity of gait walked to and fro, and a little black Frenchman, with a frightful ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... towards the small plank bridge. As the girl drew nearer to it, she gave without Jude perceiving it, an adroit little suck to the interior of each of her cheeks in succession, by which curious and original manoeuvre she brought as by magic upon its smooth and rotund surface a perfect dimple, which she was able to retain there as long as she continued to smile. This production of dimples at will was a not unknown operation, which many attempted, but only a ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... an arrangement that seemed to satisfy every one concerned except the farmer himself, who never missed an opportunity to praise the food and the comforts to be enjoyed at the county "poorhouse" when he paid his semi-annual visit to the venerable dependents; Mr. Charlie Webster, the rotund manager of the grain elevator, who spent every Saturday night and Sunday in the city and showed up for duty on Monday with pinkish eyes and a rather tremulous whistle that was supposed to be reminiscent of ...
— Quill's Window • George Barr McCutcheon
... murders, and bragged that he had long since lost count of his robberies and rapes. Something must be abated for boastfulness. But after all deduction there remains a tale of crime that is unsurpassed. His most admirably artistic quality is his complete consistence. He was a ruffian finished and rotund; he made no concession, he betrayed no weakness. Though he never preached a sermon against the human race, he practised a brutality which might have proceeded from a gospel of hate. He spared neither friends nor relatives, and he murdered his own mother ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley
... they were in the room, seven of them. In the lead was the dignified Miss Elvira herself, an impressive figure of gentility in black silk and a hair breast pin. Close behind her, of course, was the rotund Mrs. Aurora Chase, and equally close—yes even a little in advance of Aurora, was a solidly built female with gray hair, a square chin, and a very distinct mustache. The others were in the rear, but as they came in one of these, a little woman in a ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... fat old woman, there clambered out from the broadcloth box a rotund man, in flowing silks, and a conical, tasseled hat of fine straw. He waddled down the compound path, shading with his fan a shrewd, bland face, thoughtful, ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... years, but in sage counsel old." Next would have appeared the successive governors, Winthrop, Dudley, Bellingham, and Endicott, who sat in the chair while it was a chair of state. Then its ample seat would have been pressed by the comfortable, rotund corporation of the honest mint-master. Then the half-frenzied shape of Mary Dyer, the persecuted Quaker woman, clad in sackcloth and ashes would have rested in it for a moment. Then the holy, apostolic form of Eliot would have sanctified ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of its body is at these seasons astonishing, the spine of its back becomes pointed, the flesh of its sides adhere to each other, and apparently form one united subsance, when it will, in a few hours, at pleasure, resume its rotund state; and this appears to me to be a most extraordinary circumstance in the construction of this animal, which invites the minutest research of ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... visit to Prato. This ancient town one should see for several things: for its age and for its walls; for its great piazza (with a pile of vividly dyed yarn in the midst) surrounded by arches under which coppersmiths hammer all day at shining rotund vessels, while their wives plait straw; for Filippino Lippi's exquisite Madonna in a little mural shrine at the narrow end of the piazza, which a woman (fetched by a crowd of ragged boys) will unlock for threepence; and for the cathedral, with Filippino's ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... played an even match at splitting rails. Fillmore, however, strangely adaptive, had taken on a marked grace of manner, his fine stature and mien carrying a dignified courtliness which is said to have won him a handsome compliment from Queen Victoria—a gentleman rotund, well-groomed, conspicuously elegant. Shoulder to shoulder with him rose the queer, raw-boned, ramshackle frame of the Illinoisan, draped in the artless handiwork of a prairie tailor, surmounted by the rugged, homely face. The service, which the new auditor followed reverently, being finished, ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... thoughts; this kindly, plump little man so entirely outside her plans. He told her his troubles, which should have warned her. She gave him some shrewd advice, which encouraged him. He rather fancied himself as a Lothario. He was secretly distressed about his rotund waist line and, theoretically, never ate a bite of lunch. "I never touch a morsel from breakfast until dinner time." Still you might see him any day at noon at the Congress, or at the Athletic Club, or at one of the restaurants known for its savoury food, busy with one of the richer luncheon ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... northern pines. The lofty or normal type with the umbrella-formed top is almost peculiar to Central and Southern Italy. In other parts of the south of Europe, though often attaining large dimensions, it remains more dwarf and rotund ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... mug—a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund side ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... minister, which was as much a part of her as her breathing, contended in a vigorous fight against her much too solid flesh. It was a certain aid to wakefulness that her two children, deep in audible slumber, kept her in a state of active concern lest their inert and rotund little masses of slippery flesh should elude her grasp, and wreck the proprieties of the hour by flopping on the floor. There was also a further sleep deterrent in the fact that immediately before her sat Mr. McFettridge, ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... waited comfortably for the hammer to be fetched to him. And scarcely had the fetcher started to climb before there came the voice of a woman from across the stage: "Comrade Higgins, has the Ypsel banner come?" And from the rear part of the hall came the rotund voice of fat Comrade Rapinsky: "Comrade Higgins, will you bring up an extra table for the literature?" And from the second tier box Comrade Mary Allen spoke: "While you're downstairs, Comrade Higgins, would you mind telephoning ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... who had joined him, a whole roasted pigeon in his hands. "How can you make such an underestimate! Our rotund Monsieur would be far more graceful and far more healthy if he dropped forty pounds! And it behooves us, his trainers and physicians, to see that he drops 'em. Then he will go back to Albany and to his good friend, Mynheer Hendrik Martinus, a far handsomer man than he was when ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... from my chamber, except through a window, was cut off. The crowd, however, quickly procured and raised a long ladder. By means of this I was descending rapidly, and in apparent safety, when a huge hog, about whose rotund stomach, and indeed about whose whole air and physiognomy, there was something which reminded me of the Angel of the Odd—when this hog, I say, which hitherto had been quietly slumbering in the mud, took it suddenly into ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... son. "Mon Dieu!" she cries; "what a path!" and through my open window there floats the odour of poudre-de-riz disturbed by nervous excitement. Papa follows. He is fat. No one can deny it, and I do not think he would like any one to try. Honesty is writ large on his rotund countenance. Now he is hot and somewhat weary with the climb. He carries his hat under his arm and large pearls of moisture shine on the puckered forehead. His hair is thick and closely cropped, and strives ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... dashed through the magueys, I leaped the zequia, and galloped through the affrighted herd; I beheld the spotted mustang stretched lifeless upon the plain, its rider bending and weeping over it. That face of rare beauty, that form of exquisite proportion, that eye rotund and noble, that tongue so free, and heart so bold—all were again encountered in dreamland. A dark face was in the vision, and at intervals crossed the picture like a cloud. It was ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... some by a rotund black woman named Letty, and some, much to their discomfort, by Plez himself, and it was beginning to grow dark, when an open spring wagon driven by a colored man, and with a white man on the back seat came ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... to conceive of a man between thirty-eight and forty years of age, big-bodied, rapidly acquiring that rotund shape which is thought becoming to bishops, about six feet high though stooping a little, prodigiously active, walking with incredible rapidity, having large limbs, large feet, large though well-shaped and very white hands; in short, a huge fellow ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... Beechleaf. Tired of this, at last, Bark, with no particular intent, drew forth from the pouch in his skin cloak a string of sinew, and drawing the ends of the strong twig somewhat nearly together, attached the cord to each, thus producing accidentally a petty bow of most rotund proportions. He found that the string twanged joyously, and, to the delight of Beechleaf, kept twanging it for such time as his boyish temperament would allow a single occupation. Then he picked from the ground ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... startled-looking individual, a man with grey beard and rotund body, who before the onset of the war may have anticipated well enough that he would never again be called to the colours, advanced somewhat timidly from behind his comrades and drew himself up stiffly ...
— With Joffre at Verdun - A Story of the Western Front • F. S. Brereton
... and elbows, and entered his native village. What! Was this Catskill? Was this the place that he left yesterday? Had all these houses sprung up overnight, and these streets been pushed across the meadows in a day? The people, too: where were his friends? The children who had romped with him, the rotund topers whom he had left cooling their hot noses in pewter pots at the tavern door, the dogs that used to bark a welcome, recognizing in him a kindred spirit of vagrancy: where ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... if the most striking, of a long row of villas that overlook the river, each with its comfortable-looking and rotund trees and trim plat in front, with sometimes a summer-house snuggling down to the ripples. These riverside colonies, thrown out so rapidly by the metropolis, have no colonial look. We cannot associate ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... assuming the duties of generals; revolvers and daggers were displayed on large rotund bodies, enveloped in red sashes; common citizens turned warriors, commanding battalions of noisy volunteers, and swearing like troopers to ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... there is a king dead; can you help coming to town?" That represents his measure of things. Those who love laughing will laugh all the more when they discover that, a week earlier, Walpole had written a letter, rotund, fulsome, and in the language of the bended knee, begging Lord Bute to be allowed to kiss the Prince of Wales's hand. His attitude to the Court he described to George Montagu as "mixing extreme politeness with extreme indifference." ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... help in the spiritual work of the parish. Mr. Wesley's experience of curates had been far from happy, but Romley promised to be the bright exception in a long list of failures. (It was he who discovered and introduced Johnny Whitelamb to the household.) He was sociable; had pleasant manners, a rotund figure not yet inclining to coarseness, a pink and white complexion, and a mellifluous tenor voice. To his voice, alas! he owed most of his ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... over the principal entrance representing the 'Resurrection of Christ' in the 'Italian' style. Sprawling in the foreground of the picture was a swarthy warrior in a helmet, specially conspicuous for his rotund contours. Behind the church a long village stretched in two rows, with chimneys peeping out here and there above the thatched roofs. The manor-house was built in the same style as the church, the style known among us as that of Alexander; the house too was painted yellow, and had a green roof, ...
— Fathers and Children • Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev
... rotund man, bald, with red hair that had a faded, washed-out appearance. His eyes were large, pale blue in color, with a singularly ingratiating expression which was made almost yearning ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... him to visiting friends in silence. When Nancy had led them in to the bedroom, and raised a shade so that the tempered sun light revealed the fuzzy head and shut eyes and rotund linen- swathed form of Junior, she felt that words were unnecessary. She never really saw the baby's face, she saw something idealized, haloed, angelic. In later year she used to say that none of the hundreds of snapshots Bert took of him really did the child justice. Junior had ...
— Undertow • Kathleen Norris
... the sun's gold touch displaced From the vast Rotund and the neighbouring dead When her husband followed; bowed; half-passed, With lip ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... this dizzy saturnalia and avoiding the pranks of animated hosiery and the more ponderous frolics of over-alls, sheets and tablecloths, Saint-Prosper entered the kitchen. Here the farm hand and maid of all work were eating, and the landlord's rotund and energetic wife was bustling before the fireplace. An old iron crane, with various sized pothooks and links of chain, swung from the jambs at the will of the housewife. Boneset, wormwood and catnip had their places on the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... he fulfilled his long-cherished purpose of visiting Scotland and the Hebrides, the story of which trip he told afterwards in his usual rotund and massive style, and which was recounted with far more liveliness and verisimilitude by Boswell. In 1774 he lost Goldsmith, who had long been his friend, whom he had counselled, rebuked, assisted, loved, and laughed at, and at whose death he ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... by the following inventory: "Fine house in the rue du Bac, salons handsomely furnished, good pictures, one hundred thousand francs a year, husband formerly receiver-general of the department of Montenotte." So saying, the Practical man, rotund and fat and usually dressed in black, will project his lower lip and wrap it over the upper, nodding his head as if to add: "Solid people, those; nothing to be said against them." Ask no further; Practical men settle everybody's status by figures, incomes, ...
— Madame Firmiani • Honore de Balzac
... State House. I must have become a citizen of Andover at the age of three, when my father resigned his Boston pulpit for the professorship of Rhetoric in Andover Seminary. I remember distinctly our arrival at the white mansion with the large, handsome grounds, the distant and mysterious grove, the rotund horse-chestnut trees, venerable and solemn, nearly a century old—to this day a horse-chestnut always seems to me like a theological trustee—and the sweep of playground so vast, so soft, so green, so fragrant, so clean, that the baby cockney ran imperiously ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... rude carnal. One list shoe and one of leathern manufacture cased his ample feet. Enterprise, or the noble glow of his present culinary profession, spread a yet rosier blush over a countenance early tinged by generous libations, and from beneath the curtain of his pallid eyelashes his large and rotund orbs gleamed dazzlingly on the new comers. Such, O reader! was the aspect and the occupation of the venerable man whom we have long since taught thee to admire; such, alas for the mutabilities of earth! was—A new chapter only ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... rotund and suave with the mushiness of the near-gentleman, met them graciously in the hall, having waited for the servant to ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... buccaneer. I mean the Captain, of course. And all because I had the forethought to tell Cleone her nose was red,—which it was,—sunburn you know, and because I remarked that the Captain was growing as rotund as a Frenchman, which he is,—I mean fat, of course. All Frenchmen are fat—at least some are. And then he will wear such a shabby old coat! So here I am, Mr. Beverley, very lonely and very sad, but industrious you see, quite as busy as Penelope, who used ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... offering a reply, said good-night again and left the room. Dona Casiana continued to grumble, then ensconced her rotund person in the rocker and dozed off into a dream about an establishment of the same type as that across the way; but a model establishment, with luxuriously appointed salons, whither trooped in a long procession all the scrofulous youths of the clubs and fraternities, mystic ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... upon her back by one or both of the handles. Among the tribes nearer the Djurjura the jar has a broader and hollowed bottom, fitted to rest upon the head of the woman. It must therefore be less elongated and more rotund to admit of her reaching the handles for the purpose of balancing it. These jars weigh, filled with water, sixty pounds. In carrying one of them a Kabyle woman, it may easily be supposed, is not in a condition to study lightness of step or grace of carriage. Yet this heavy task, to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the interior of the house, where he was content they should stay. This was his only boy, the pride and joy of his heart. Engrossed as he was in recording his gains, he could not refrain from lifting his eyes now and again to feast them on that rotund little body, like a goblet set on two pillars. No clothing concealed the tense and shiny brown skin, but there were silver bracelets on the fat wrists and massive anklets where deep creases divided the fat little feet from the fat little legs, ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... good company never ceased to have a charm for both poets. Mrs. Browning loved him almost as a brother: her husband told Bayard Taylor, on the day when that good poet and charming man called upon them, and after another visitor had departed—a man with a large rosy face and rotund body, as Taylor describes him—"there goes one of the most splendid men living—a man so noble in his friendship, so lavish in his hospitality, so large-hearted and benevolent, that he deserves to be known all over the world as Kenyon ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... harness, and primitive carts laden with red-soaked wine-casks rattle recklessly along; where bare-footed, girdled, and tonsured monks plod on their no-business, and every third man one passes is a rotund ecclesiastic, who never in his life walked at more than a mile an hour; where, at evening, carriages returning from the Villa Nazionale cram the thoroughfare from side to side, and make one aware, if one did not previously know it, that parts of the street have no pedestrians' pavement;—from ...
— The Emancipated • George Gissing
... the best he can do is to wabble around a vacant space in front of the hotel, the awkward motions of the old bone-shaker affording intense amusement to the crowd. After supper this chatty and entertaining gentleman brings his wife, a rotund, motherly-looking person, to see the bicycle; she is a Levantine Greek, and besides her own lingua franca, her husband has improved her education to the extent of a smattering of rather misleading English. Desiring to be complimentary in return for my riding ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... the infantry there to guard the site and protect the gang of woodchoppers set to work at once, then turned their faces homeward. They had spent four days and nights at the Gap, and the more the youngster saw of the rotund quartermaster the less he cared to cultivate him. A portly, heavily built man was he, some forty years of age, a widower, whose children were at their mother's old home in the far East, a business man with a keen eye for opportunities and investments, ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... for they obviously believe in watching their interests at close hand. The floor above, by reason of the rail-protected opening in the center, is little more than a spacious gallery; but it is there that the big gamblers congregate, natives in costly fabrics, and whose rotund bodies tell of lives not spent in toil. They loll on blackwood divans and smoke opium and send their bank-notes and commands to the gambling table by servants, until yielding to the exalted dreams induced by ...
— East of Suez - Ceylon, India, China and Japan • Frederic Courtland Penfield
... gold and scarlet morning as he came home after finding that resolve, which, as a matter of fact, he had taken with him! How the roof of the parsonage shone like the New Jerusalem! And how the fantail pigeons, very rotund denizens of that city, cooed as they walked gingerly—tiles being cold to pink feet on a frosty morning—up and down in ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... hours was Dan, the watchman, whom I regarded with a certain awe; for though so much together, I never fairly saw his face, and but for his legs should never have recognized him, as we seldom met by day. These legs were remarkable, as was his whole figure: for his body was short, rotund, and done up in a big jacket and muffler; his beard hid the lower part of his face, his hat-brim the upper, and all I ever discovered was a pair of sleepy eyes and a very mild voice. But the legs!—very long, very thin, ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... sonorous voice behind us, "do you happen to have seen Judge Henry?" It was the reverend gentleman in his meadow, come to the fence. As we turned round to him he spoke on, with much rotund authority in his eye. "From his answer to my letter, Judge Henry undoubtedly expects me here. I have arrived from Fetterman according to my plan which I announced to him, to find that he has been absent ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... don't. I mean to have some of those rotund berries of yours. Don't you, Edna? I'll wager she hasn't thrown them in with this common ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... man that hath not heard of that precious gift, and none who does not covet it greatly, but there be two degrees of assurance"—here the Rabbi looked sternly at the happy, rotund little figure—"and it is with the first you must begin, and what you need to get is ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... cried Genevieve, giving the rotund, gayly-clad figure a bear-like hug. "You look just as good as you used to—and my, my! just see all this new finery to welcome me," she added, holding off her beaming-faced old nurse at arms' length. "I reckon you'll think ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter
... took him on with us to the town so that he could identify the head man and see that we got hold of the right people. Our reception was by no means cordial, although after we had talked a little and explained what we were after, the mayor became cheerful and expansive. He had a jovial, rotund face, covered in large part by a bushy beard, and would have done excellently as a model for Silenus. In the town were a handful of Turkish stragglers—among them a stalwart Greek who spoke a little English. He said that he had been impressed into service by the ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled—the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen's Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests—and that never returned. It had known the ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... sight, so common alas! in England, of the affluent spinster, "growing pointlessly rotund on rich food at one of the smug hotels or boarding-houses for parasitic nonentities, which are distributed so plentifully all over the land," while thousands of promising young men had to wait too long before they were ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... tramp on a ringing December afternoon, through snow-drifted meadows down to the icy Chaloosa River. She was exotic in an astrachan cap and a short beaver coat; she slid on the ice and shouted, and he panted after her, rotund with laughter.... Myra Babbitt never ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... the first stranger handed his neighbour the large mug—a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away, like a threshold, by the rub of whole genealogies of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burned upon its rotund ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... absorbed three bottles, while the distracted "Gyppies" tugged and wailed, "No gude! No gude! Finish Noo Zealand!" to which the only reply was "Imshi Yallah, you black devils." At this stage the little beast, an animal of rather miserable dimensions, with a large, rotund centrepiece, escaped and wobbled ridiculously down the street. He was recaptured, drenched with two more bottles, and let loose to wander wherever his tottery legs would carry him. The donk swayed and stumbled, his ears cocked at all angles, and his expression ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... the order should be revoked. Five minutes later, Ruby heard the small gate click again, and with a sigh saw the girl's rotund figure waddling down the lane. Then she picked up the book and strove to bury herself in the woes of Wilhelmina, but still with frequent glances out of window. Twice the book dropped off her lap; twice she picked it up ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... one of the committee of five elected by ballot to frame a declaration of independence. Had he been called upon to write the document he would certainly have given something more terse and simple than that rotund and magniloquent instrument which Jefferson bequeathed to the unbounded admiration of American posterity. As it was, Franklin's recorded connection with the preparation of that famous paper is confined to the amusing tale about John Thompson, Hatter, wherewith he mitigated ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.
... Moore's glance followed her, and a look of sudden inspiration illumined his shiny face. Wild Cat Bill, with his rotund form, resembled a domesticated house cat far more than the agile creature which had given him his frontier title. The incongruity struck Danvers, and he smiled at Winifred Blair as she drifted to another part of the room—a smile that she returned with a friendly ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... by an excursion to Prague. Meanwhile I had already ascended Mount Millischau once with my wife, and in her company I now made the journey to Prague in an open carriage. There I stayed once more at my favourite inn, the Black Horse, met my friend Kittl, who had now grown fat and rotund, made various excursions, revelled in the curious antiquities of the old city, and learned to my joy that the two lovely friends of my youth, Jenny and Auguste Pachta, had been happily married to members of the highest aristocracy. Thereupon, ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... occasion, he looked Lark up and down with his usual rotund complacency, Carol only gritted her teeth and reminded her heaving soul that he was ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... Hale would soon be done with his rotund person and jovial face, if he could no longer send the sharp arrows of his wit and sarcasm into the consciences ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... and he seated himself in a capacious chair, substantially fitted to receive and sustain its burden of divinity, and began to read. My letters were from men high in authority, purple-robed and rotund supporters of our good Alma Mater, and met with all due respect. Clearing his sonorous throat of the obstructing phlegm, with which there seemed to be danger that he should sometime or other be suffocated, he welcomed me to London, rejoiced ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... tribute, having momentarily withdrawn himself from mamma, whose loyal escort he was once more. Willie was a shade balder than last year, when he had played his great part in Cally's life and then sunk below her horizon; a shade more rotund; a shade rosier in the face. But he was as genial as ever, being well lined now with a menu to his own taste and an ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... his aid. Doubtless the spell of his buoyant personality does bring comfort and relief. In the adjoining settlement of Bareneed lives an enormously fat old woman of seventy-odd summers. Life passes over her, and its only effect is to make her rotund and unwieldy. When the sick come to Brother Luke for treatment, if any of the few drugs which he has accumulated chance to have lost their labels—a not uncommon contingency in this land of mist and fog—he takes down a likely-looking bottle from the shelf, and tries a dose of the contents ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... did not want any interference; she did not want the doctor's wisdom to edge in between these two young fools and spoil the drama. So she brought upon the stage the Reverend Henry Dolby, a preacher of means, worldly-wise and kindly, cheery and rotund, who, with his wife and daughter, had arrived at the Victoria that morning. Ruth met him in the hall as he was following his family into the dining room. She recognized the cloth at once, waylaid him, and with that ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... distress of a hen on losing her chickens, furnish abundant evidence of vivid feelings of the kind in question. Even the stupid-looking ostrich has heart enough to die for love, as was the case with a male in the Rotund of the Jardin des Plantes, who, having lost ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... companion of the rifles; and in the rounded contour of his body, not an angle was apparent. His garments were quite filled by his body, arms and legs—so that there was not a wrinkle to be seen anywhere. It was a form usually styled "dapper." His face was also of the rotund shape—the features all tolerably regular, with the exception of the nose—that, like the nasal organ of his comrade, was nez retrousse—the turn-up being infinitely more pronounced. The expression was equally indicative of good-nature and good-fellowship—as ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... thought the rector, "for an intelligent man you are slow at taking hints." The good-natured rotund preacher went on, amazing his helpless friend, "I wonder if the Squire would ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... their places at the table reserved for them. Waiters stood aloof, effacing themselves, prepared to pounce upon their smallest need and annihilate it. Dupontel breathed a number as he sat down, and the rotund and reverend wine-waiter, wearing a chain of office, tried to express in his face respectful esteem for a man who could ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... Miss Niphet acquiesced, but it was long before they found a third. At length one young gentleman, of the plump and rotund order, volunteered to supply the deficiency, and was soon deposited on the ice, where his partners in the ice-dance would have tumbled over him if they had not anticipated the result, and given him a wide berth. One or two others followed, exhibiting several varieties in the art of falling ungracefully. ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... one day when Ten-teh reluctantly took up his propelling staff and began to urge his raft towards the shore. It was a season of parched crops and destitution in the villages, when disease could fondle the bones of even the most rotund and leprosy was the insidious condiment in every dish; yet never had the Imperial dues been higher, and each succeeding official had larger hands and a more inexorable face than the one before him. Ten-teh's ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... noticed, but there was the faintest shadow of a queer smile upon his own lips as he turned back to the big notebook open on his knees—a vaguely unpleasant smile that was not in keeping with the rotund jollity ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... unexpectedly—he had heard of her having at last, left alone after successive deaths and with scant resources, sought economic salvation in Europe, the promised land of American thrift—she was present as this almost ancient and this oddly unassertive little rotund figure whom one seemed no more obliged to address than if she had been a black satin ottoman "treated" with buttons and gimp; a class of object as to which the policy of blindness was imperative. ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... stately cavaliers. The "decorative impulse" is here at its topmost. In his second period we get the Decameron series, the episodes from Faust, the Don Quixote—recall, if you can, that glorious tableau with its Spanish group and the long, grave don and merry, rotund squire entering on the scene, a fantastic sky ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... an early work of the interesting case of the Marquis of Cortona, a subchieftain under the Duke of Alva, and a fine fat old butcher he must have been, too, by all tellings. Finding himself grown so rotund that no longer could he enter with zest into the massacre bees and torture outings which the Spaniards were carrying on in the harried Netherlands, the marquis had recourse to vinegar; and so efficacious was the treatment that, as the tradition runs, he soon ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... to a bank account in four figures and a credit that was gilt edged. An even half-century of summers and winters had passed over his head, and, in the passing, fattened him comfortably and snugly. Short of stature, his full front was as rotund as a water-melon seed. His face was moon- faced. His garb was dignified and silken, and his black-silk skull-cap with the red button atop, now, alas! fallen on the ground, was the skull-cap worn by the successful and ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... pulled up his steed with much difficulty, and joined us. The horse was small but beautiful, a sorrel with long mane and tail; had he been hoodwinked he might perhaps have been mistaken for a Cordovese jaca; he was broad-chested, and rotund in his hind quarters, and possessed much of the plumpness and sleekness which distinguish that breed, but looking in his eyes you would have been undeceived in a moment; a wild savage fire darted from the restless orbs, and so far from exhibiting the docility of the other noble ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... with benignity in her, looks, appeared on the scene, followed quickly by a man and several maid servants, all of whom added to the confusion, in the midst of which Cousin Milly was conveyed to her room and deposited on her bed. The family doctor, a rotund little man of fifty-five, was ...
— The Eagle Cliff • R.M. Ballantyne
... short, rotund man. His close-cropped hair was graying, although his face was unlined, with the smooth complexion of a child. His irises were ...
— General Max Shorter • Kris Ottman Neville
... figure and the divinely chiseled, sorrow-lighted face of Lincoln, the others were children of the everyday. The clarionettist, with his dark beard and high temples, might have sat for Rembrandt's picture of "The Philosopher." The rotund kettle-drummer, with his smooth head and sparkling eyes, restlessly turning his little keys and bending down to listen to the tuning of his grotesque music-pots, seemed impatient for the part in ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the bell, and in a moment a rotund and loquacious landlady appeared. Yes, the drawing-room was to let; would the reverend gentleman come up and see it? Mr Bunker went up, and approved. They readily agreed upon terms, and the landlady, charmed with her new lodger's appearance and manners, ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... yet he held head against them because his Beaune wine was so adorable, and because he could keep his own counsel. Slender Ren de Montigny, in a jerkin of rubbed and faded purple velvet, with his malign, Italianate face and his delicate Italianate grace; rotund Guy Tabarie, bluff, red and bald; Casin Cholet, tall and bird-like, with the figure of a stork and the features of a bird of prey; Jehan le Loup, who looked as vulpine as his nickname; these Robin Turgis eyed and catalogued with a kind of pride. It was a fearsome ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... cushioned with mosses, afforded us a comfortable resting-place. Elder Staples, in his faded black coat and white neck-cloth, leaned his quiet, contemplative head on his silver-mounted cane: right opposite him sat the Doctor, with his sturdy, rotund figure, and broad, seamed face, surmounted by a coarse stubble of iron-gray hair, the sharp and almost severe expression of his keen gray eyes, flashing under their dark penthouse, happily relieved by the softer ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... what a keen observer he was receiving beneath his roof. "A more respectable-looking individual was never seen," writes his erstwhile pupil; "he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was his head, which was bald, and shone like ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... rapidly; all was silent and then from the study the sound was heard of other steps, firm and resolute—they were those of Napoleon. He had just finished dressing for his ride, and wore a blue uniform, opening in front over a white waistcoat so long that it covered his rotund stomach, white leather breeches tightly fitting the fat thighs of his short legs, and Hessian boots. His short hair had evidently just been brushed, but one lock hung down in the middle of his broad forehead. His plump white neck stood ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... restaurateur's pain, at discretion—can prove any thing, that the larger the foreign trade he carried on, the greater were his losses, in various instances cited of hundreds per cent; from whence, seeing how rotund and robust grows the worthy alderman, deplorable balance-sheets notwithstanding, which would prostrate the Bank of England like the Bank of Manchester, it should result that he, like another Themistocles, might exclaim to his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... waving a hand that trembled with anxiety, and with anxiety stamped upon his benignly rotund ...
— The Snare • Rafael Sabatini
... business man, and was rough and plain and blunt—a man of no genius and with loads of common sense. He made a specialty of unpalatable truths and discarded sentiment. Indeed, he was so good a business man that he got possession of a rotund interest in a group of coal mines without the outlay of a dollar, and later became the owner of sundry sheaves of railway stocks on the ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... recollection of his appearance. The clothing manufacturer had dragged himself from his cabin, heaven knows how, and was lying in his chair like a corpse. Besides these, there were two men conversing with each other, one small, rotund and scary-faced, the other ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... my way. My heart ceased to beat, my blood turned to ice; I was sick, absolutely sick, with terror. Besides this, the figure held me spellbound—I could neither move nor utter a sound. It had a white, absolutely white face, a tall, thin, perpendicular frame, and a small, glittering, rotund head. For some seconds it remained stationary, and then, with a gliding motion, left the path ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... slender, smooth- faced Simmons, who in the old days was content to take his chances of filling a vacancy at Wallack's or the Winter Garden, when some one of the regular orchestra was under the weather; but a sleek, prosperous, rotund Waller, with a bit of red in his button- hole, a wide expanse of shirt-front, and a waxed mustache; and a thoughtful, slightly bald, and well- dressed Simmons, with gold eyeglasses, and his hair worn long in his neck as befitted the leader of an orchestra whose concerts crowded the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... after that. Everybody was encouraged. The rotund little Mr. Mann beamed—"more than ever like a cherub," Bobby declared. They came to the final curtain with tremendous applause from the back benches where some of the faculty sat ...
— The Girls of Central High Aiding the Red Cross - Or Amateur Theatricals for a Worthy Cause • Gertrude W. Morrison
... crutches, tottering on the brink of the sewers—shores I mean—of eternity; behold his crushed and crownless hat—his hollow eyes—his rheumy visage—look at that petition penned on his breast. Poh! 'tis a surveyor's notice to pull down. But, then, look at that plurality parson with rotund prominence of portico, and red brick cheeks of vast extent, and that high, steeple-crowned hat—look at the smug, mean, insignificant dwarf of a meeting-house, sinking up to its knees in a narrow lane, and looking as blank as a wall, with a trap-door of a mouth, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 385, Saturday, August 15, 1829. • Various
... orchestra that played during the evening at the hotel was chosen in his stead. At the end of the third month a red flag was seen hanging at the door of Mr. Strout's store and Mr. Beers the auctioneer whose once rotund voice had now become thin and quavering, sold off the remaining stock and the fixtures. Then the curtains were pulled down and the door locked. The next day Mr. and Mrs. Strout and ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... which it soon makes insanitary. In the open it crouches among dead leaves which have gathered in the fork of a tree, and will construct a web which spans the coconut avenue with its stays. From one aspect its rotund body invites a good-humoured smile, for the marking exactly simulates the features of a tabby cat, well fed, sleepy, and in placid mood. Venom of virulence to kill a bat almost instantly would be severe enough to a human being. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... conglobating sunk. And as the bond grew firmer, ampler forth Pressed they the fluid essences that reared Sun, moon, and stars, and main, and heaven's high wall. For those of atoms lighter far consist, Subtiler, and more rotund than those of earth. Whence, from the pores terrene, with foremost haste Rushed the bright ether, towering high, and swift Streams of fire attracting ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... remarkably new and bright, both as to uniform and countenance. Indeed, if she had not worked herself into such a desperate state of mind she would have felt proud of him then and there. His shapely upright figure was quite noteworthy in the row of rotund yeomen on his right and left; while his charger Tony expressed by his bearing, even more than Jim, that he knew nothing about lime-carts whatever, and everything about trumpets and glory. How Jim could have scrubbed Tony to such shining ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... have a good society, and the beauty of the young girls sitting at the doors or walking in the evening showed something of the florid North Europe skins, Batavian eyes, and rotund Dutch or ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... minutes, that it really would be a case for a chirurgeon, with cupping and leeching and smelling salts. Our rotund friend was in a bad way. His heart, plainly, was broken. From his right-hand trouser emerged a green roll. With delicate speed and tact the conductor hastened this tragic part of the performance. His silver punch flashed in his hand as he made change, issued ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... into a less rasping routine than that of the early years, grew rotund and comfortable in expression, and though the festivities of training days, and the more solemn one of ordination or Thanksgiving day, meant sermon and prayers of doubled length, found this only an added ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... "retreats," and I had hard work keeping the muscles of my face steady, as they made pantomimic signs to the lay-brothers who waited on us, for more omelet or more wine. After dinner the "Frere Hospitalier," a jolly, rotund little lay-brother, who wore a black stole over his brown habit as a sign that he was allowed to talk, drew me on one side in the garden. As I was a heretic (he put it more politely) and had the day to myself, would I do ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... to search for an even smaller word. Carpenter's "here," was little more than a whisper, as might come from one who was making an admission which he wished circumstances had ordered otherwise. And the rotund little McWilliams answered in a manner that convinced McGee that Mac was really wishing he were ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... one answered. When he had opened the door he stood still on the threshold, for at first he could see nothing but a dense smoke, through which a yellow speck of light appeared, with a great halo round it. Gradually he discovered in this smoke a few rotund forms, placed around the candle like so many planets around the sun, and at times something was seen to move, possibly a man's arm, but not unlike an elephant's leg. At length the air through the open door partially ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag |
