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More "Blunt" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... order. Nine idealists out of ten who fight against News-men, or men who are trying to make the beautiful work, and who call them hypocrites, would not do it if they were trying desperately to make the beautiful work themselves. It is more comfortable and has a fine free look, to be blunt with the beautiful—the way a Poet is—to dump all one's ideals down before people and walk off. But it seems to some of us a cold, sentimental, lazy, and ignoble thing to do with ideals if one loves them—to give everybody all of them all ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... all events her doctor seemed to entertain some such opinion, for, sitting in an easy chair beside her, and looking earnestly at her handsome, worn-out countenance, he said, somewhat abruptly, being a blunt doctor. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... and his colleagues, Admiral Gambier assured the Americans of their earnest desire to end hostilities on terms honorable to both parties. Adams replied that he and his associates reciprocated this sentiment. And then, without further formalities, Goulburn stated in blunt and business-like fashion the matters on which they had been instructed: impressment, fisheries, boundaries, the pacification of the Indians, and the demarkation of an Indian territory. The last was to be regarded as a sine qua non for the conclusion of any treaty. Would the Americans be good ...
— Jefferson and his Colleagues - A Chronicle of the Virginia Dynasty, Volume 15 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Allen Johnson
... almost as large as Jim Boone himself, on strong steady-striding horses. They came last in this crew, but among a thousand other long-riders they would have ridden first, either red-faced, good-humored, loud-voiced Garry Patterson, or Phil Branch, stout-handed, blunt of jaw, who handled men as he had once hammered red iron ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... Augusta, but you are about to strike with the blunt edge, which may wound but will ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... the court in the likeness of some young man whose maiden had just smiled on him. Or if some hunter prided himself too openly on a buck he had killed, the first thing he knew there would be Tse-tse-yote walking like an ancient spavined wether prodded by a blunt arrow, until the whole ...
— The Trail Book • Mary Austin et al
... and poured them forth by thousands and tens of thousands, all as well turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks which have passed through Mr. Brunel's mill in the dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets resemble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand, with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his translation Of a celebrated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she repeated. "How do you propose to secure them? By crushing my fingers or dragging me about by my hair? I want to tell you something, Duane: these blunt, masterful men are very amusing on the stage and in fiction, but they're not suitable to have ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... has given it under his hand, that he has known some with whom the very sight of physic would work. All which conceits come now into my head, by the remembrance of a story was told me by a domestic apothecary of my father's, a blunt Swiss, a nation not much addicted to vanity and lying, of a merchant he had long known at Toulouse, who being a valetudinary, and much afflicted with the stone, had often occasion to take clysters, of which he caused several sorts to ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... if I could have done so, I would not have recalled what I had just said; but still, I trembled in spite of myself as I expressed in plain, blunt words what I had only rapturously thought over, or delicately hinted at to ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... of poems grew larger and his flock smaller. Yvonne's nose and temper waxed sharp and her talk blunt. Her pans and kettles grew dull, but her eyes had caught their flash. She pointed out to the poet that his neglect was reducing the flock and bringing woe upon the household. David hired a boy to guard the sheep, locked himself in the little room at the top of the cottage, and wrote more ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... when professing to accord with Blunt's Lunar Chart, is entirely at variance with that or any other lunar chart, and even grossly at variance with itself. The points of the compass, too, are in inextricable confusion; the writer appearing to be ignorant that, on a lunar map, these are not in accordance with terrestrial ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Lavendar's blunt refusal, except under certain conditions, to announce to Mrs. Prettyman her coming ejection from the cottage at Wittisham, was unprofessional enough, as he himself felt; but it was final and categorical. Conveying as ...
— Robinetta • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... the earliest moment to acknowledge its receipt, and to thank you for the box of magnets which I found here. Though I do not know certainly, by, or from whom they come, I presume they came by Colonel Smith, who was here in my absence, and from Messrs. Nairne and Blunt, through your good offices. I think your letter of February the 16th, flatters me with the expectation of another, with observations, on the hygrometers I had proposed. I value what comes from you too much, not to remind you of it. Your favor by Mr. Garnett also, came during ...
— The Writings of Thomas Jefferson - Library Edition - Vol. 6 (of 20) • Thomas Jefferson
... stellar chemistry should not only have become possible, but should already have made material advances, is assuredly one of the most amazing features in the swift progress of knowledge our age has witnessed. Custom can never blunt the wonder with which we must regard the achievement of compelling rays emanating from a source devoid of sensible magnitude through immeasurable distance, to reveal, by its distinctive qualities, the composition ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... we owe to ourselves, and we have a right to expect justice even from our own consciences. A sentimental conscience is the most tiresome of all altruists, and wilfully to indulge in remorse that we have not justly incurred is to blunt our consciences for real offences. The best repentance for our sins is a clear-eyed recognition of their nature, and the temptation in some flurry of feeling to take on our shoulders the mistakes of ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... mind her (my wife) of cutting for her, but it soon over, and so up and with Sir W. Batten and Sir W. Pen to St. James's, and there did our business with the Duke, and thence homeward straight, calling at the Coffee-house, and there had very good discourse with Sir——Blunt and Dr. Whistler about Egypt and other things. So home to dinner, my wife having put on to-day her winter new suit of moyre, which is handsome, and so after dinner I did give her L15 to lay out in linen and necessaries ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... young men in your position. It is a comparatively easy matter to draw a cheque to alleviate distress, but finding work for anybody to-day is next to impossible. However, as one can never tell what may turn up, let me ask you a blunt question. What are you fit for? ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... know how to fight that sort of strategy. I look like I am: blunt and obvious. Suddenly I didn't care ...
— Each Man Kills • Victoria Glad
... eyes, and was able to understand and reply to what was said to him. As soon as he was considered out of danger, old Michael regained his usual manner. Though he expressed his gratitude to his hosts in his rough, blunt way, he uttered no expression which showed that he believed that aught of thanks were due to the Giver of all good for his son's recovery. With his ordinary firm tread he stalked into ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... be closed, at the other end it might be open wide enough to allow the cotton to be pulled through by the combing cylinder, and made into waste. In Messrs. Dobson and Barlow's nipper there is neither cloth nor leather on the cushion plate. Its edge is made into a blunt ^, upon which the narrow flat surface of a strip of India rubber or leather fixed in the knife falls to give the nip. By this plan the cushion is applied to the knife instead of to the plate, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... as Tuscany or Venetia; "though," he added, "I think our economists, in praising one state at the expense of another, too often overlook those differences of character and climate that must ever make it impossible to govern different races in the same manner. Our peasants have a blunt saying: Cut off the dog's tail and he is still a dog; and so I suspect the most enlightened rule would hardly bring this prompt and choleric people, living on a volcanic soil amid a teeming vegetation, into any resemblance with ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... conventions he regarded as ineffectual means to good. There is no virtue in one who is restrained from evil by fear. He went further: he regarded external restraints as means to bad, since they come between a man and his conscience and blunt the moral sense. "So long as I keep to the rules," says the smug citizen, "I am of the righteous." Ibsen loathed the State, with its negative virtues, its mean standards, its mediocrity, and its spiritual squalor. He was ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... two months in its progress through the House of Commons. During this time every exertion was made by the directors and their friends, and more especially by the Chairman, the noted Sir John Blunt, to raise the price of the stock. The most extravagant rumours were in circulation. Treaties between England and Spain were spoken of, whereby the latter was to grant a free trade to all her colonies; and the rich produce of the ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... grinders, called premolars or false molars, and six large grinders, or true molars, in each jaw—making thirty-two in all. The internal incisors are larger than the external pair, in the upper jaw, smaller than the external pair, in the lower jaw. The crowns of the upper molars exhibit four cusps, or blunt-pointed elevations, and a ridge crosses the crown obliquely, from the inner, anterior cusp to the outer, posterior cusp (Figure 17 m2). The anterior lower molars have five cusps, three external and two internal. The premolars have two ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... for affection as a flower longs for light, she was yet the only girl out of all her set who had never had any especial attention. Perhaps it was because she was no flirt. Bell Masters said no girl could get along who did not flirt. Perhaps because in her excessive truthfulness she was sometimes blunt and almost brusque; it is dreadfully out of place not to be able to lie a little at times. Even Mrs. Upjohn, the female lay-head of the Presbyterians, who was a walking Decalogue, her every sentence being a law beginning with Thou shalt not, admitted practically, if not theoretically, ...
— Only an Incident • Grace Denio Litchfield
... fact that Gudrid was happy with her blunt blackbeard of a man. He was easy to live with, always much the same, and did not ask for more than he was able to give. He was very thrifty, and taught her to be so, for she was anxious to please. ...
— Gudrid the Fair - A Tale of the Discovery of America • Maurice Hewlett
... from agreeing with the descriptions of the horn of the unicorn. The nearest approach to a horn in the middle of the forehead is exhibited in the bony protuberance on the forehead of the giraffe; but this also is short and blunt, and is not the only horn of the animal, but a third horn standing in front of the two others. In fine, though it would be presumptuous to deny the existence of a one-horned quadruped other than the rhinoceros, it may be safely stated that the insertion of a long and solid horn in the ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... with much trepidation the untimely summons, found himself to his astonishment the recipient of a frank apology. Jackson's scruples carried him even further. Persons who interlarded their conversation with the unmeaning phrase "you know" were often astonished by the blunt interruption that he did NOT know; and when he was entreated at parties or receptions to break through his dietary rules, and for courtesy's sake to accept some delicacy, he would always refuse with the reply that he had "no genius for ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... river now, and fresher blew the breeze. As they rounded the blunt point of the "Isle" the fog banks went swirling past them astern, and the lights on either shore showed clearly ahead. A ship's siren began to roar somewhere behind them. The steamer which they had passed was ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Blunt did not move from the gate, but threw forward his rifle with a careless motion, but an expressive glance, that caused the Indians to resume their seats and pipes with an emphatic "Wah!" of disgust at having been startled ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... Queen now confined?" said Roland Graeme, interested in the fate of a woman whose beauty and grace had made so strong an impression even on the blunt and careless character of ...
— The Abbot • Sir Walter Scott
... delay they embarked in the boat, which, though small, was found to be sufficiently tight, and rowed off towards the spot where the hippopotamus had been seen. Presently his blunt ungainly head rose within ten feet of them. Wilkins got such a start that he tripped over one of the thwarts in trying to take aim, and nearly upset the boat. He recovered himself, however, in a moment, and fired—sending a ball into ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... appear in my own eyes. A strong, healthy man with an active disposition, and capable of, and a lover of hard work. A blunt manner, and with an entire absence of tact in anything in which strict business is not concerned. I know that I am truthful, for, in addition to a natural hatred of lying which I must have inherited from my dear parents, I have always recognised the fact that in business and ...
— If Only etc. • Francis Clement Philips and Augustus Harris
... does not the habit of frequenting her give rise! To set them forth worthily, the marvellous art which the little printer was to acquire were not too much. One needs the pen of a Michelet; and I have but a rough, blunt pencil. Let us try, nevertheless: even when poorly clad, ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... phrases of silken courtiers are. A good ship I know, and a poor cabin; and the language of a cannon: and therefore as my breeding has been rough, scorning delicacy; and my present being consisteth altogether upon the soldier (blunt, plain and unpolished), so must my writings be, proceeding from fingers fitter for the pike than the pen." In those days a soldier was never at a loss to express himself, and honest Dick Pike was no exception ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... shrink from appearing in any way to condescend, to patronize, to forgive, where perhaps he needed rather to be forgiven. A strange awkwardness had come over him. He felt himself suddenly to be beyond his depth. How unpardonably blunt and masculinely obtuse he had been in dealing with this beautiful and tender thing, which God had once, for a short time, intrusted to his keeping! How cruel and wooden that moral code of his by which he had relentlessly judged her, and often found her wanting! What an effort it must ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of Bearn, young Conde, and all our leaders, though making use of less blunt speech, were of the same opinion, but the Admiral cared little for his own safety, when there was a ...
— For The Admiral • W.J. Marx
... I'm blunt. But the fact is young women of modern times are very different from my kind when I was a girl. You haven't acted as though you pined for Glenn. You gad around almost the ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder—what can one make of such a denouement? But the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever forecast of coming events, the triumphant vindication of bold ...
— The Valley of Fear • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the purpose of hands— indeed, he vies with the monkey in the use he can make of them. The hind-feet are webbed, and with these—together with his tail, which acts as a rudder—he is enabled to swim rapidly through the water. The beaver is a rodent, with a short head and broad blunt snout, and his incisor teeth are remarkably large and hard, enabling him to bite through wood with wonderful ease and rapidity. So great is their hardness, that formerly the Indians were accustomed to use them as knives for cutting bone ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... shape, pin to an ironing-board, cover with a damp cloth and press with a fairly hot iron until the cloth is dry. This will prevent the coat from drawing up, as the ribs are inclined to do. For sewing, use a blunt-pointed needle to avoid splitting the wool. Sew up the side and shoulder-seams, taking a stitch from each edge and keeping the edges perfectly even, being careful not to draw the sewing-yarn so tightly as to pucker ...
— Handbook of Wool Knitting and Crochet • Anonymous
... well with your dad at last. I'm a poor hand to talk and a poorer to write, for my finger is crooked to hold a trigger, not a pen. But he gave me it to do. Don't take it too hard that a man with only plain words is blunt. Your father ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... and thirstiness after fame, and that deceitful fame of popularity; and, to help on his catastrophe, I observe likewise two sorts of people that had a hand in his fall: the first was the soldiery, which all flock unto him, as it were foretelling a mortality, and are commonly of blunt and too rough counsels, and many times dissonant from the time of the court and State; the other sort were of his family, his servants and his own creatures, such as were bound by safety, and obligations of fidelity, ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... rejoined, "The blunt weapon that I carry would surely not cost Caesar his life, even if he were no ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... volume is the response to that request. It was written by Katharine Blunt, of the University of Chicago, Frances L. Swain, of the Chicago Normal School, and Florence Powdermaker, of the United States Department ...
— Food Guide for War Service at Home • Katharine Blunt, Frances L. Swain, and Florence Powdermaker
... better days; even a landsman could tell that. But from the blunt bows to the weather-scarred stern, on which the name was faintly discernible, the hulk had an air about it, the air of something that has lived; it was eloquent of ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... line by line, word by word. To tell the truth it was absorbingly interesting to her. Already there had come rumours of the daring and blunt, resistless force with which this new-made millionaire had confronted a gigantic task. His terse communications had found their way into the Press, and in them and in the boy's letter she seemed to discover something Caesaric. That night it was ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in the same frantic way. Time will blunt his grief; but it will bring him I fear no other or better comfort. He hopes for oblivion of his loss; but that can never be. He may cease to grieve as he grieves now; but he can never cease to remember. I trust to see him again ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... in a barely perceptible breath. The blunt tip of his shoe was jammed squarely against her toe. She withdrew her foot, ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... wouldst thou believe it, Theos! each little paid scribe that adds his poor quota to this ill-assorted trash deems himself wiser and greater far than any poet or philosopher dead or living! Why, in this very news-sheet I have seen the immortal works of the divine Hyspiros so hacked by the blunt knives of ignorant and vulgar criticism that, by my faith! ... were it not for contempt, one would be disposed to nail the hands of such trumpery scribblers to a post, and scourge their bare backs with thorny ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... actually the same, but the subjective or personal appreciation of it varies, the event is just as much a different one in the eyes of different persons as if the objective factors had not been alike; for to a blunt intelligence the fairest and best object in the world presents only a poor reality, and is therefore only poorly appreciated,—like a fine landscape in dull weather, or in the reflection of a bad camera obscura. In plain language, ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer: The Wisdom of Life • Arthur Schopenhauer
... to the baking trade tooth and nail; and, in the course of years, thumped butter-bakes with his elbows to some purpose; so that, at the time of our colleaguing together, Peter was well to do in the world—had bought his own bounds, and built new ones—could lay down the blunt for his article, and take the measure of the markets, by laying up wheat in his granaries against the day ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - tailor in Dalkeith • D. M. Moir
... tapping the table with the forefinger of his right hand. Prescott observed his thin, almost ascetic face, smooth-shaven and finely cut. Both General Wood and the Secretary were mountaineers, but the two faces were different; one represented blunt strength and courage; the other suppleness, dexterity, meditation, the power of silent combination. Had the two been blended here would have been one ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... than seven centuries. The old engineers perhaps built over a stronger Wey than to-day's, for they made the buttresses that point up stream to divide the water; on the other side they are round and blunt. The time to stand on Eashing Bridge is when it is quietest, on a Sunday morning. Up stream is the mill, humming out one of the best of all songs of water; to the left is a row of timbered cottages, cream-painted brick and black beams, and ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... gallery and looks for a lover among the gallery gods at the back." Puffed up with this delightful chatter. "Come now, confess, won't you," I queried, "is this lady who loves me yourself?" The waiting maid smiled broadly at this blunt speech. "Don't have such a high opinion of yourself," said she, "I've never given in to any servant yet; the gods forbid that I should ever throw my arms around a gallows-bird. Let the married women see to that ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... or brilliancy of such as are drawn from them by means of the bow or quill. But, notwithstanding it is represented so massive, I should rather suppose it to have been a quill, or piece of ivory in imitation of one, than a stick or blunt ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... sneered Neergard, "you'd better tell me. And you'd better understand, now, once for all, just exactly what I've outlined for myself—so you can steer clear of the territory I operate in." He clasped his blunt fingers and leaned forward, projecting his whole body, thick legs curled under; but his close-set ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... in repeated intoxication. The unhappy lady underwent a long series of hysterical fits and other complaints, which seemed to have a fatal effect on her brain as well as constitution. Cordials were administered to keep up her spirits; and she found it necessary to protract the use of them to blunt the edge of grief, by overwhelming reflection, and remove the sense of uneasiness arising from a disorder in her stomach. In a word, she became an habitual dram-drinker; and this practice exposed her to such communication as debauched her reason, and perverted her sense of decorum and propriety. ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... enemy. Such was the leader under whom Eustace hoped to serve his king, and learn the art of war. His friend, Monthault, was a transcript of all Lord Goring's faults, to which he added the most cool and determined treachery, under the garb of blunt ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... addressed loved not the shuttlecock, thought one woman but falser than another, and made parade of blunt speech. Now a shrug of the shoulder accompanied his answer. "The Star went down months ago, off the Grand Canary, in ...
— Sir Mortimer • Mary Johnston
... connection on matters of business, with either of these individuals, for whom I entertained the most sincere attachment. They, like myself, were not in the good graces of Marshal Davoust, who could not pardon the one for his incontestable superiority of talent, and the other for his blunt honesty. On the receipt of M. Bouvier's letter I carried it to the Due de Rovigo, whose situation made him perfectly aware of the intrigues which had been carried on against me since I had left ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... didn't know you had that much sense," approved Bobby, who was blunt almost to a fault but undoubtedly fond of her younger cousin. "Come on, girls, we'll have one more good game before the family begin to hint I'm too old for such hoydenish tricks. We'll go up to the attic and make as much noise ...
— Betty Gordon in Washington • Alice B. Emerson
... Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: "What ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... being concluded then, and the door being closed, the three detectives stood looking at one another in momentary silence. Then Dunbar spoke with blunt directness: ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... lessons, for its disciples. But, with a divine wisdom, and contrary to its human copyist, it has carefully guarded (if I may use the expression) against extending its revelations to any point which would blunt the keenness of human research or the activity of human toil. It has taken those matters for its field in which the human mind, left to itself, could not profitably exercise itself, or progress, if it would; it has confined its revelations to the province of theology, only indirectly touching ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman
... the knife, as if it had become blunt again in the night, and got up a razor edge on the weapon, and once more proceeded to the stye. I selected my victim, and got one of my legs over the wall of the enclosure; but then my heart failed me, it seemed as if I was about to slay an old friend; indeed, they were old friends, ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... "honor" and now and then just "kindness." Let us make a likeness of one who hunts the moose or elk in some mighty wood. He sees a little dell, mossy and embowered, where a rill trickles, babbling to him of rest and comfort. At these times the spear of Nimrod himself grows blunt. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... downstairs for a woman in her clothes"; and the chambermaid disguised as a fine lady, who by "the toss of her head, the jut of the bum, the sidelong leer of the eye" proclaimed her real condition—these types are treated by Defoe in a blunt realistic manner entirely foreign to Eliza Haywood's vein. Some passages,[2] perhaps, by a sentiment too exalted or by a description in romantic style suggest the hand of another writer, possibly Mrs. Haywood, but more probably William Bond, in whose ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... look very strong," pursued Mary, who had a blunt downright sort of manner; "I wonder if India will agree with you; I wonder if you will ...
— A Bunch of Cherries - A Story of Cherry Court School • L. T. Meade
... a good steel point, as a separate, blunt, V-shaped piece, and a moldboard of cast steel with a good twist which turned the soil well. The standard and sole were of wood and at the end of the beam was a block for gauging the depth of furrow. The cost of this plow, to the farmer, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... wildly, saw him give up that attempt and paddle boldly out, instead, into the middle of the coiling waters, saw him turn the cockleshell's blunt nose straight for the Pass, and stand watchfully amidships with his board poised to keep her to a true course if ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... it, I beseech you, such as it is, rude and plaine; for I know your pure iudgement lookes as soone to see beauty in a Blackamoore, or heare smooth speech from a Stammerer, as to finde any thing but blunt mirth in a Morrice dauncer, especially such a one as Will Kemp, that hath spent his life in mad Iigges{2:2} and merry iestes. Three reasons mooue mee to make publik this iourney: one to reproue lying fooles I neuer knew; the other to commend louing ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... Paper-cutting.—Men of great parts (says Swift) are unfortunate in business, because they go out of the common road. I once desired Lord Bolingbroke to observe that the clerks used an ivory knife, with a blunt edge, to divide paper, which cut it even, only requiring a strong hand; whereas a sharp penknife would go out of the crease, and disfigure ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 572, October 20, 1832 • Various
... whom to greet:[9.B.] Woe to the man that walks in public view Without of loyalty this token true: Sharp is the knife, and sudden is the stroke; And sorely would the Gallic foeman rue, If subtle poniards, wrapt beneath the cloke, Could blunt the sabre's edge, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... the blunt inquisitiveness, the girl responded cordially with her little story—glad, apparently, to ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... part of a goose's wing, and barbed with iron or steel. In the reign of Edward III., a painted bow cost 1 shilling and 6 pence, a white bow, 1 shilling; a sheaf of steel-tipped arrows (24 to the sheaf), 1 shilling and 2 pence, and a sheaf of non accerata (the blunt sort), 1 shilling The range of the long-bow, at its highest perfection, was, as we have seen, "eleven score yards," more than double that of the ordinary cross-bow. The common sort of both these weapons carried about the same distance—nearly ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... success. But Munich, the comic papers, Herr Harden, Vorwaerts, speak, I think, for the central masses of German life far more truly than any official utterances do. They speak in a voice a little gross, very sensible, blunt, with a kind of heavy humour. That German voice one may not like, but one must needs respect it. It is, at any rate, not bombastic. It is essentially honest. When the imperial eagle comes home with half its feathers out like a crow that has met a bear; when the surviving aristocratic officers reappear ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... to say, however," he went on, "that the skull was fractured in several places, as by blows of some blunt instrument; and that instrument itself—a pick-handle, still stained with blood— lay under the ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... after Amyas, in his blunt simple way, had told him the whole story about Rose Salterne and his brother,—"yes, sweet lad, thou hast chosen the better part, thou and thy brother also, and it shall not be taken from you. Only be strong, lad, and trust in God ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Major Ridley's plantation. An alarm took place during the darkness,—whether real or imaginary does not appear,—and the men became scattered again. Proceeding to make fresh enlistments with the daylight, they were resisted at Dr. Blunt's house, where his slaves, under his orders, fired upon them, and this, with a later attack from a party of white men near Captain Harris's, so broke up the whole force that they never reunited. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... was a new life to me. I never looked twice at any girl before. It is not your beauty only—oh, no! it is your goodness—goodness such as I never thought was to be found on earth. Don't turn your head from me; I know my defects; could I look on you and not see them? My manners are blunt and rude—oh, how different from yours! but you could soon make me a fine gentleman, I love you so. And I am only the first mate of an Indiaman; but I should be a captain next voyage, Miss Lucy, and ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... of molars is just the opposite of the superior row. In the scissor-mouth the wear takes place largely on the internal face of the superior and the external face of the inferior row of molars. The teeth become worn to more or less of a blunt cutting edge, and after a time the molars come together somewhat like the jaws of a pair of scissors. A horse with a badly deformed scissor-mouth is unable to grind the feed, and unless given special care, suffers ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... he cut speed and altitude, he could see the pock-marks of open-pit mines and the glint of sunlight on bright metal and armor-glass roofs, the blunt conical stacks of nuclear furnaces and the twisted slag-flows, like the ancient lava-flows of Barathrum. And, he reflected, he was an influential non-office-holding stockholder in every bit of it, as soon as they could screen Storisende and ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... statutes, yet the Jewish Talmuds for the maintenance of the poor were sustained thereby. And the decisions show that, where a gift had for its object the maintenance and education of poor Jewish children, the statutes sustained the devise. In proof of this he quoted 1 Ambler, by Blunt, p. 228, case of De Costa, &c. Also, the case of Jacobs v. Gomperte, in the notes. Also, in the notes, 2 Swanston, p. 487, same case of De Costa, &c. Also, 7 Vesey, p. 423, case of Mo Catto v. Lucardo. Also, Sheppard, p. ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... uncle you brought that letter from. He was my godfather, you know. This is my sister, Connie." Connie, who was a pretty, fair girl, looked embarrassed at her brother's blunt method of introduction, but he rattled on. "Rather good for a girl. Not so slow as most of them. Can take a turn with the bells or clubs"—by bells and clubs was meant dumb-bells and Indian-clubs—"and she can scout at cricket. ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... came a scuffle with the albino Whitey and the little ferret-faced man. Blunt, the swart artist in scrapping, having first let Denton grasp the bearing of his lesson, intervened, not without a certain quality of patronage. "Drop 'is 'air, Whitey, and let the man be," said his gross voice through a shower ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... and my troops, was told off as an escort to Blunt's Battery, F.A., which formed the left of the line, consisting of our other two squadrons, more F. Artillery, 8th and 75th Regiments, etc., all moving to ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... success in life, whatever be the object of pursuit, are very, very different from what we think them at first sight, and so it was with Mr. O'Leary, and I have more than once witnessed the triumph of his homely manner and blunt humour over the more polished and well-bred taste of his competitors for favour; and what might have been the limit to such success, heaven alone can tell, if it were not that he laboured under a counter-balancing infirmity, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... afternoon arrived; two o'clock struck, and I was beginning to fear no one was coming for me, when, turning to look out the window for the eighteenth time, I saw the straight blunt nose of Harold Beecham passing. Grannie was serving afternoon tea on the veranda. I did not want any, so got ready while ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... raft wasn't built to carry bears!" exclaimed the startled lad, who used the pole with all the strength of which he was master; but, unfortunately, the bottom of the pond was composed of slippery rocks in many places, and the blunt end of the crooked limb slid along the upper surface of one of these so quickly that Nick dropped on his side and came within a hair's breadth ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... the disguise of her voice and manner. This was the only part of the character in which it had been possible, with her physical peculiarities, to produce an imitation of Miss Garth; and here the resemblance was perfect. The harsh voice, the blunt manner, the habit of accompanying certain phrases by an emphatic nod of the head, the Northumbrian burr expressing itself in every word which contained the letter "r"—all these personal peculiarities of the old North-country governess ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... fell, they two leaned on St. Michel's bridge of the River Lys. Just under the loiterers, canals that wound their way from inland cities to the sea were dark and noiseless, as if sleep held them. The blunt-nosed boats of wide girth that trafficked down those calm reaches were as motionless as the waters that floated them. Out of the upper air, bells from high towers dropped their carillon on a population making its peace with the ended day. Cathedral and churches and belfry were ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... with sorrel horses;" and praised a sorrel with white forehead and legs; but he dispraised the "Shikal," which has white stockings (Arab. "Muhajjil") on alternate hoofs (e.g. right hind and left fore). The curious reader will consult Lady Anne Blunt's "Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, with some Account of the Arabs and their Horses" (1879); but he must remember that it treats of the frontier tribes. The late Major Upton also left a book "Gleanings from the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... emphasis, that he thought well of it. He began to realize that this woman, with her blunt common sense, was likely to be a pilot worth having in the difficult waters which he must navigate as skipper of the Regular church in Trumet. Also, he began to realize that, as such a skipper, he was most inexperienced. And Captain Daniels had spoken highly—condescendingly ...
— Keziah Coffin • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Major, in the warmth of friendship, 'Joseph Bagstock is a bad hand at a counterfeit. If you want to hold your friends off, Dombey, and to give them the cold shoulder, J. B. is not the man for your purpose. Joe is rough and tough, Sir; blunt, Sir, blunt, is Joe. His Royal Highness the late Duke of York did me the honour to say, deservedly or undeservedly—never mind that—"If there is a man in the service on whom I can depend for coming to the point, that man is ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... recording these events in his life; they are characteristics of the natural man,—and prove, moreover, that the indulgence in such exhibitions did not for one moment blunt the gentler emotions of his heart, or vulgarize his inborn love of all that was beautiful and true. His own line was the axiom of his moral existence, his political creed:—"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"; and I can fancy no coarser consociation able to win him from this faith. Had he been ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... they had enjoyed, along with their father and mother, in watching a dog worry a hedgehog. And yet it is plain enough that the faculty for compassion and kindness is inborn in the villagers, so that their susceptibilities might just as well be keen as blunt. In their behaviour to their pets the gentle hands and the caressing voices betoken a great natural aptitude for tenderness. And not to their pets only. All one afternoon I heard, proceeding from a pig-stye, the voice of an elderly man who was watching an ailing sow there. "Come on, ol' ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Greek, the legal breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... urbane. Always he inquired solicitously concerning the captain's health. There was never a hint of hostility, never a trace of resentment or envy. And always, too, Sears emerged from one of those encounters with a feeling that he had had a little the worst of it, that his seafaring manners and blunt habit of speech made him appear at a marked disadvantage in comparison with this easy, suave, gracefully elegant personage. And so many of those meetings took place in the ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... without using up the little I have already gathered together. But I cannot bear to go before she comes to England.... I was surprised by a visit from Lord Hardwicke yesterday; it is years since I have seen him. I knew and liked him formerly, as Captain Yorke. He is as blunt and plain-spoken as ever, and retains his sailor-like manner in spite of his earldom, which he hadn't when I met him last.... Henry Greville is coming to tea with me this evening, and I promised to read him my translation of "Mary Stuart." I hope he may like it as well as you did. Lady Dacre was ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... see what Blake's got to do with it," said the blunt captain; "young Ford may tell him to mind ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... back to Father Christmas week, I wanted to get your advice as to the advisability of writing him that, though there is still a chance for doing wonders, I do not think we shall be able to save him. Of course I won't put it in just that blunt way, but it seems to me I should begin to prepare him for the blow. I have not talked over any more plunging with you, Mr. Brownley, since the unlucky one ...
— Friday, the Thirteenth • Thomas W. Lawson
... objection to have Gifted Hopkins about Myrtle as much as she would endure to have him. The youthful bard entertained her very innocently with his bursts of poetry, but she was in no danger from a young person so intimately associated with the yard-stick, the blunt scissors, and the brown-paper parcel. There was Cyprian too, about whom he did not feel any very particular solicitude. Myrtle had evidently found out that she was handsome and stylish and all that, and it was not very likely she would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... the catalogues to a shrewd old fellow in Washington Market. He was a dealer in country produce who had done business so long at the same stand that among his fellows he was looked upon as a kind of patriarch. During a former interview he had replied to my questions with a blunt honesty that had inspired confidence. The day was somewhat mild, and I found him in his shirt-sleeves, smoking his pipe among his piled-up barrels, boxes, and crates, after his eleven o'clock dinner. His day's work was ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... that of Diogenes proved a failure. After two attempts and two repulses the committee were not disposed to invite the humiliation of a third refusal and must have listened with no little relief, to this blunt summary of the situation by Beriah Green, who was one of the six. "If there is not timber amongst ourselves," quoth Green, "big enough to make a president of, let us get along without one, or go home and stay there until we have ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... the well-known handwriting of Hariot, and is presumed to be the ' note of remembrance' for the speech, made in the Gate House, probably from dictation, during the night before the execution. It appears as if hurriedly penned with a blunt quill, and is on a narrow strip of thin foolscap paper such as Hariot used. It is about twelve inches long and nearly four inches wide, about one-third of the lower part of the paper being blank. There is no ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... as you do about it, Evelyn," was her blunt rejoinder. "It shows that you are on the right road. I don't believe it is necessary for you to tell the Southards anything. Still there is another person ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... thenceforthe your Home; and in quitting it you committed a Fault you may yet repaire, though this offensive Act has made the Difficultie much greater."—"Oh, what has happened?" I impatientlie cried. Just then, Dick comes in with his usual blunt Salutations, and then cries, "Well, Moll, are you ready to goe back?" "Why should I be?" I sayd, "when I am soe happy here? unless Father is ill, or Mr. Agnew and Rose are tired of me." They both interrupted, ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... discs on the table. They were perfectly smooth and perfectly round, tapered by wear to a thin blunt edge. There was no design on them, and no printing. Morgan looked up at the man sharply. "What did you get ...
— Circus • Alan Edward Nourse
... for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of guests, young ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... that tools would be my first want and that I should have to grind mine on the stone, as they were blunt and worn with use. But as it took both hands to hold the tool, I could not turn the stone; so I made a wheel by which I could move it with my foot. This was no small task, but I took great pains with it, and at ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... seeing at his elbow a mere lad, Of a high spirit evidently, though At present weighed down by a doom which had O'erthrown even men, he soon began to show A kind of blunt compassion for the sad Lot of so young a partner in the woe, Which for himself he seemed to deem no worse Than any other scrape, a ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... unfortunately possessed a very large nasal organ, which literally overhung his mouth. "No, no," said the clerk, as the sheriff was quietly explaining the practice in certain cases. On which Logan, somewhat nettled at the blunt interruption, coolly replied: "But, my lord, I say: 'Yes, yes, yes,' in ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... gentleman's family as any in England: But, continued he, if you can be contented, I'll do what I can to make you happy with him. I believe he loves you, and mutual love must make the marriage-state happy." Mr. Blunt, the owner or proprietor of Paradise, the house inhabited by Lord Mark Kerr, was then at my father's, and knew, if I am not mistaken, from whom the letter came. Be that as it will, no more passed on this subject at that time. The next ...
— Trial of Mary Blandy • William Roughead
... of Kirsty's tale. Wee Davie had taken no harm, for he was fast asleep with his head on her bosom. Allister was staring into the fire, fancying he saw the whorls of the wimble heating in it. Turkey was cutting at his stick with a blunt pocket-knife, and a silent whistle on his puckered lips. I was sorry the story was over, and was growing stupid under the reaction from its excitement. I was, however, meditating a strict search for the wimble carved on the knight's ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... and left the office with his first feeling of suspicion and repulsion for his Chief. He didn't like the blunt, brutal way this Southern Democrat talked. He couldn't believe in his honesty. Beneath those bushy eyebrows burned a wolf's hunger for office and power. On the surface he was loyal to the Union. He wondered if he were not in reality ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... at her ease in this kind of conversation, and finding the effort to see Steptoe as Lothario difficult, Letty became blunt again. "He must have had an awful crush on the ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Unequal. "This is Spirit from above, Who marshals us our upward way, unsought; And in his own light shrouds him;. As a man Doth for himself, so now is done for us. For whoso waits imploring, yet sees need Of his prompt aidance, sets himself prepar'd For blunt denial, ere the suit be made. Refuse we not to lend a ready foot At such inviting: haste we to ascend, Before it darken: for we may not then, Till morn again return." So spake my guide; And to one ladder both address'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... some expression of sympathy would be graceful here, yet he divined that it must be very discreetly, almost delicately, worded. He could easily be too blunt. ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... one man's no worse than marriage with another, the way they all are," said Ellen darkly, and got back to her argument. "And hating the Scotch and democracy, and saying blunt foolish things as if they were blunt wise ones—that's not sense. And if it were, what's the good of living to be sensible? It's like living to have five fingers on your hand. And life's so short! Mr. James, does it never worry you dreadfully that life is so short? I wonder how we all bear ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... the boast and pride of the nation. The young and ardent Braves sought her hand in marriage; but she was deaf to all their entreaties and protestations, and refused all their offers. Yet she did it with so much kindness, and said so many sweet words to blunt the severity of the refusal, that all her lovers became her friends, and each, with affectionate kindness, blended with the bold bearing of one who says what he knows he has courage to perform, promised that his love mellowed into friendship should remain firmly fixed in his heart, and that ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... with the nature of the people of Meadowvale to make so riotous a demonstration. At the close of the meeting it happened, by the purest accident, that I walked home with Mary and Phyllis, and when Mary said in her blunt way that I really had been most generous, Phyllis did not speak, but she slipped her hand under my arm and gave me an appreciative little squeeze, which made me regret that I had not ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... Susan Bailey, a gentle, frail little body also joined our circle, adding one more pair of eyes to those whose scrutiny must have been somewhat trying to the bride. To meet these blunt, forthright folk at such a table without betraying amusement or surprise, required tact, but the New Daughter succeeded in winning them all, even Mary, the cook, ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... bill was two months in its progress through the House of Commons. During this time every exertion was made by the directors and their friends, and more especially by the Chairman, the noted Sir John Blunt, to raise the price of the stock. The most extravagant rumours were in circulation. Treaties between England and Spain were spoken of, whereby the latter was to grant a free trade to all her colonies; and the rich produce of the mines of Potosi-la-Paz was to be brought to England until silver ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... leave Emlyn to guide the King over a field-path while he fetched Mrs. Jane Lane and the horse to meet them beyond, as it was wiser for the King not to shew himself in the village. Again Charles jested on his supposed jealousy of leaving the fair Queen Mab alone in such company, and on his blunt answer, "I only feared the saucy child ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... expect it to be? would he have us represent it as beautiful and gratifying? The answer to this question, I fear, must be a blunt Yes; for it seems impossible to root out of an Englishman's mind the notion that vice is delightful, and that abstention from it is privation. At all events, as long as the tempting side of it is kept towards the public, and softened by plenty of sentiment ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... A furious battle, and men yelled, and swords Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. A craven hung along the battle's edge, And thought, 'Had I a sword of keener steel— That blue blade that the king's son bears—but this Blunt thing.'—He snapt and flung it from his hand, And lowering crept away and left the field. Then came the king's son wounded, sore bestead, And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, Hilt buried in the dry and trodden sand, And ran and snatched it, and with battle shout Lifted ...
— Making the Most of Life • J. R. Miller
... scooped-out place; shallow valley of some extent, which deserves notice against to-morrow: but in general the ground is lazily spherical, and without noticeable hollows or valleys when fairly away from the River. A dull blunt lump of country; made of sand and mud,—may have been grassy once, with broom on it, in the pastoral times; is now under poor plough-husbandry, arable or scratchable in all parts, and looks rather miserable in winter-time. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle
... half barrel or a large earthenware jar to hold the tan liquor, a fleshing knife and a fleshing beam are necessary to begin with at least. Any smith can make a knife of an old, large file or rasp by working both sides to a blunt edge and drawing the upper end out in a tang for another handle. A piece of old scythe blade with cloth wrapped around the ends will do, or a dull draw knife, either. One blade filed into fine teeth will be useful in removing the inner ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... dollar, sterling coin; pounds shillings and pence; Ls.d.; pocket, breeches pocket, purse; money in hand, cash at hand; ready money, ready cash; slug [U.S.], wad* wad of bills[U.S.], wad of money, thick wad of bills, roll of dough[coll]; rhino|!, blunt|!, dust|!, mopus|!, tin|!, salt|!, chink|!; argent comptant[Lat]; bottom dollar, buzzard dollar|!; checks, dibs*[obs3]. [specific types of currency] double eagle, eagle; Federal currency, fractional currency, postal currency; Federal ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Samson's absence; the other met the commissioner himself, and demanded of him point-blank what he had been doing with the princess. The question was so bluntly put and the man's attitude so impudent that Samson lost his temper and couched his denial in blunt bellicose bad language. The vehemence convinced the questioner that he was lying, as the maharajah was shortly informed. So the fact became established beyond the possibility of refutation that Yasmini had been closeted with Samson for several hours ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy
... of these pale corridors of silence came moving very deliberately a dark, squat shape with blunt muzzle close to the snow. Its keen, fierce eyes and keener nostrils were scrutinizing the white surface for the scent or trail of some other forest wanderer. Conscious of power, in spite of its comparatively small stature—much ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set like a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two—being all he had—gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all over it; one ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... was, after all, something that her charming listless hands could really do; she had no doubt of their capacity for knotting a ribbon or placing a flower to advantage. And of course only these finishing touches would be expected of her: subordinate fingers, blunt, grey, needle-pricked fingers, would prepare the shapes and stitch the linings, while she presided over the charming little front shop—a shop all white panels, mirrors, and moss-green hangings—where her finished creations, hats, wreaths, aigrettes ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... wanted her, and, never hesitating in efforts to get what she wanted, a month after the meeting at the little Inn of Le Bon Laboureur she invited her to be her guest in a trip around the world. The invitation was blunt. She had long wanted to take this trip, had long been looking for the proper companion. She had a dog, but he wasn't allowed to come to the table. Would she go? Her uncle and aunt would not let her miss the chance. They made her go. Doctor Alden and his wife ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... blunt directness about the doctor which generally drove straight to the point. The clerk wearily passed his hand across his forehead. He seemed half asleep, and, as the doctor ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... frequent cause of strength in Saxon and other primitive words-their imitative character may be similarly resolved into the more general cause. Both those directly imitative, as splash, bang, whiz, roar, &c., and those analogically imitative, as rough, smooth, keen, blunt, thin, hard, crag, &c., have a greater or less likeness to the things symbolized; and by making on the senses impressions allied to the ideas to be called up, they save part of the effort needed to call up such ideas, and leave more attention ...
— The Philosophy of Style • Herbert Spencer
... however, some kind of miserable good luck, and while de haut-en-bas rigour may depress an unoffending wretch to the ground, it has a tendency to rouse a stubborn something in his bosom, which, though it cannot heal the wounds of his soul, is at least an opiate to blunt their poignancy. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... kept house for him; she was married to a German from Cologne, Schulz by name, who was a painter on glass. The pair lived apart. Madame Schulz was pretty, caustic, spiteful, and blunt. Her daughter, the fourteen-year-old Nanni, was enchantingly lovely, as developed and mischievous as a girl of eighteen. Everyone who came to the house was charmed with her, and it was always full of ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... learnt with the stick are invaluable to the swordsman. The true way to meet the difficulty would be to supplement stick-play by a course with broad-swords, such as are in use in different London gymnasiums, with blunt ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... itself originally appeared in the Filipino forthrightly review, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, running from July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal's campaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken his countrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousing the Spaniards to the defects in Spain's colonial system that caused ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... in 1909, when a small airship fitted with two 12 horse-power motors and named the 'Baby' was turned out from the balloon factory. This was almost egg-shaped, the blunt end being forward, and three inflated fins being placed at the tail as control members. A long car with rudder and elevator at its rear-end carried the engines and crew; the 'Baby' made some fairly successful flights and gave a good deal of useful data ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... and stronger grew its embraces, and already the mouth, greedy of hissing kisses, interfered with the monarch's breathing, and already to the surface of the soft tissues of the body came the iron of the bones and tightened its merciless circle,—and unknown fangs, blunt and cold, touched his heart and sank ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... breadth and sensual recklessness of the Roman, the martial frenzy of the Goth, the chivalric and dark pride of the Spaniard, the treacherous blood of the Italian, the mercurial vanity of the Frenchman, the blunt realism ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... know who would be cheerful when his neck is in danger?" answered the cat. "Now that I am old, my teeth are getting blunt, and I would rather sit by the oven and purr than run about after mice, and my mistress wants to drown me; so I took myself off; but good advice is scarce, and I do not know what is to become ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... him in the Hebrew tongue, saying, Saul, Saul!' thou mayest hear a voice speaking to thee in the English tongue, by thy name, and directly addressing its gracious remonstrances and its loving offers to thy listening ear. I want to sharpen the blunt 'whosoever' into the pointed 'thou.' And I would fain plead with each of my friends hearing me now to believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ is meant for thee, and that Christ speaks to thee. 'I have a message from God unto thee,' just as Nathan ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... essentially require any current of the medium in which the brush appears: the current almost always occurs, but is a consequence of the brush, and will be considered hereafter (1562-1610.). On holding a blunt point positively charged towards uninsulated water, a star or glow appeared on the point, a current of air passed from it, and the surface of the water was depressed; but on bringing the point so near that sonorous brushes passed, then the current of air instantly ceased, and the surface ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... if you in terms direct had asked Whether beloved the mountains, true it is That with blunt repetition of your words He might have stared at you, and said that they Were frightful to behold, but had you then Discoursed with him . . . . . . . . Of his own business and the goings on Of earth and sky, then truly had you seen That in his thoughts there were obscurities, Wonder and ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... your counsel still be true; Blunt truths more mischief than nice falsehoods do; Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown propos'd as things forgot. 575 Without Good Breeding, truth is disapprov'd; That ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... unrestrained, unheeding Genius utter with more fervency? I own Genius is rarely in love. There is an egotism, almost a selfishness, about it, that will not stoop to such common worship. Women know it, and often prefer the blunt, honest, common-place soldier to the wild erratic poet. Genius, grand as it is, is unsympathetic. It demands higher—the highest joys. Genius claims to be loved, but to love is too much to ask it. And yet at this time Sheridan was not a matured Genius. When his development came, ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... one returns to England one can taste, smell, feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious, damp, blunt, good-humored, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter, you tell him you have plenty of time; he muddles your things amiably, with an air of "It'll be all right," till you have only just time. But ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... they are very small, but so they shall serve my purpose the better. Will each of you take one and retire from the table and write upon it the thing he most desires? Now, my dear friends, brevity is ever as the point of the lance. Wit is blunt and Truth half armed without it. I ...
— Vergilius - A Tale of the Coming of Christ • Irving Bacheller
... iron for things like these; The hubs of logs from the "Settler's ellum,"— Last of its timber,—they couldn't sell 'em, Never an axe had seen their chips, And the wedges flew from between their lips, Their blunt ends frizzled like celery-tips; Step and prop-iron, bolt and screw, Spring, tire, axle, and linchpin too, Steel of the finest, bright and blue; Thoroughbrace bison-skin, thick and wide; Boot, top, dasher, from tough old hide Found in the pit when the tanner died. That was ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... her bosom stems upwards. Lenehan's eyes noted approvingly her stout short muscular body. Rank rude health glowed in her face, on her fat red cheeks and in her unabashed blue eyes. Her features were blunt. She had broad nostrils, a straggling mouth which lay open in a contented leer, and two projecting front teeth. As he passed Lenehan took off his cap and, after about ten seconds, Corley returned a salute to the air. This ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... indeed, something to Nash's honour, that he died poor. He delighted, in the poverty of his mind, to display his great thick-set person to the most advantage; he was as vain as any fop, without the affectation of that character, for he was always blunt and free-spoken, but, as long as he had enough to satisfy his vanity, he cared nothing for mere wealth. He had generosity, though he neglected the precept about the right hand and the left, and showed some ostentation in his charities. ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... letter; but at that time my body was distempered, and very likely my mind also.... I know nothing of coming to town; I only know that when I do I shall not be sorry to see you; and this is knowing a great deal; for I shall not be glad to come, and shall only come if it be unavoidable: this is the blunt truth. I own it would look less like indifference if I ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... to have sessions in the forest; in the forest man's heart remains sound; there one knows what is right and what is wrong without Ifs and Buts. With their secret tricks they have put a string of Ifs and Buts to it; in their dusty, moldy offices it has become sick and blunt and withered, so that they can turn and twist it as they like. And now what is right must be put in writing and have a seal to it, otherwise it is not to be recognized as right. Now they have deprived a man's word of all value and degraded it, since one ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in him, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... knightly actions), and of Prince Arthur with Leicester, and sometimes more or less problematical, as that of Artegall with Lord Grey, of Timias the Squire with Raleigh, and so forth. To those who are perplexed by these double meanings the best remark is Hazlitt's blunt one that "the allegory won't bite them." In other words, it is always perfectly possible to enjoy the poem without troubling oneself about the allegory at all, except in its broad ethical features, which are quite unmistakable. On the other hand, I am inclined to ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... unusual length of time; namely, one leaf for ten and the other two for nine days. The bits of bone were surrounded all the time by acid secretion. When examined under a weak power, they were found quite softened, so that they were readily penetrated by a blunt needle, torn into fibres, or compressed. Dr. Klein was so kind as to make sections of both bones and examine them. He informs me that both presented the normal appearance of decalcified bone, with traces of the earthy salts occasionally ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... which was perhaps his reason for drawing aside the heavy leather curtain and going into the church, instead of waiting for her outside. He preferred to meet her on his own ground—in the chill air, heavy with the odour of stale incense, and in the dim light of that place where he laid down, in blunt language, his own dim reading of ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... by asking for the station-master, a big, blunt, businesslike person, who at once averred that he knew Mr. John Dwerrihouse perfectly well, and that there was no director on the line whom he had seen and ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... beginning business, such one found her in the zenith of her fortune. Instead of a woollen gown she wore a silk one, but the color was still black; her language had not become refined; she retained the same blunt familiar accent, and at the end of five minutes' conversation with any one of importance she could not resist calling him "my dear," to come morally near him. Her commands had more fulness. In giving her orders, she had the manner of a commander-in-chief, ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... a few corporations, but as that was unlikely, I pinned my faith in The Wand. It was a seven-column, four-page paper which carried staunchly a strange load of problems and responsibilities. In spite of the New York broker's blunt disbelief in the possibilities of a frontier newspaper, I had become more and more convinced during those weeks that only through some such medium could the homesteaders express their own needs, in their own way; have their ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... Buonespoir, the occasion our coming hither to wait upon the Queen of England and our Lady of Normandy, for such is your well-born Majesty to your loyal Jersiais." And thereupon he plunged into an impeachment of De Carteret of St. Ouen's, and stumbled through a blunt broken story of the wrongs and the sorrows of Michel and Angele and the doings of Buonespoir in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all that had been deferred till the Major's arrival, and he was answering them kindly, but hushing the extra outcry less by word than sign, and his own lowered voice and polished manner—a manner that excessively chafed her as a sort of insult to the blunt, rapid ways that she considered as sincere and unaffected, a silkiness that no doubt had worked on the honest, simple general, as it was now working on the weak young widow. Anything was better than leaving her to such influence, and in pursuance of the intention that Rachel had already ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... herd. There were no stock whips, no needless worrying of the animals in the excitement of sport. Any dog seizing a bullock by his tail or heels would have been called off and punished, and quietness and gentleness were the rule. The horses were ridden without whips, and with spurs so blunt that they could not hurt even a human skin, and were ruled by the voice and a slight pressure on the light snaffle bridle. This is the usual plan, even where, as in Colorado, the horses are bronchos, and inherit ineradicable vice. I never yet saw ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... if I be blunt in discovering my affections, and use little eloquence in levelling out my loves, I appeal for pardon to your own principles, that say, shepherds use few ceremonies, for that they acquaint themselves with few subtleties: to frame myself, therefore, to your ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge
... reflected, and with his blunt good-sense saw at once the dangers of such an arrangement. But he had to argue for a long time, combatting her scared, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant
... turned, as smooth, and as like each other as the blocks which have passed through Mr. Brunel's mill in the dockyard at Portsmouth. Ben's heroic couplets resemble blocks rudely hewn out by an unpractised hand, with a blunt hatchet. Take as a specimen his translation Of a celebrated passage in ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... actually for the time unconscious of his breach of manners. The very crudity of the language used, the oddly sounding, sometimes not easily translatable slang phrases, used as if they were a necessary part of any conversation—the blunt, uneducated bareness of figure—seemed to Penzance to make more roughly vivid the picture dashed off. The broad thoroughfare almost as thronged by night as by day. Crowds going to theatres, loaded electric cars, whizzing and clanging bells, the elevated railroad rushing and ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... cloaks. The sight of all this activity roused up their courage, and made them eager for battle. In all other cases too much care for outward show and display leads to effeminacy and luxury, because the pleasure which our senses receive from these things blunt our better judgment, but in military matters this is not so, for a splendid appearance under arms increases men's courage; as Homer tells us that Achilles, when his new arms were brought to him, was at once excited by a vehement desire to make use of them. ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... have also a fundamental property in their goods, and that no part of them can be taken but by their own consent in parliament. But that the parliament was instituted to check and control the king, and share the supreme power, would in all former times have been esteemed very blunt and indiscreet, if not illegal language. We need not be surprised that governments should long continue, though the boundaries of authority in their several branches be implicit, confused, and undetermined. This is the case all over ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... of shining snow. I could follow the zigzag line of the Grand Canyon splitting the desert plateau, and saw it disappear in the haze round the end of the mountain. From this I got my first clear impression of the topography of the country surrounding our objective point. Buckskin mountain ran its blunt end eastward to the Canyon—in fact, formed a hundred miles of the north rim. As it was nine thousand feet high it still held the snow, which had occasioned our lengthy desert ride to get back of the mountain. I could see the long ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... sword-like, sweet-scented leaves 3 or 4 ft. long and about an inch wide, closely arranged in two rows as in the true Flag (Iris); the tall, flowering stems (scapes), which very much resemble the leaves, bear an apparently lateral, blunt, tapering spike of densely packed, very small flowers. A long leaf (spathe) borne immediately below the spike forms an apparent continuation of the scape, though really a lateral outgrowth from it, the spike of flowers being terminal. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... glass after a minute's trial, exercised herself next in the disguise of her voice and manner. This was the only part of the character in which it had been possible, with her physical peculiarities, to produce an imitation of Miss Garth; and here the resemblance was perfect. The harsh voice, the blunt manner, the habit of accompanying certain phrases by an emphatic nod of the head, the Northumbrian burr expressing itself in every word which contained the letter "r"—all these personal peculiarities of the old North-country ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... all I ask. I'll tell you what I've come for, Joe. You've always been more honest, more painfully blunt and open than any man I've ever known. Be that way now with Sue. Give her the plainest, hardest picture you can of the life ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... was, in the event, handed over to her brooding fancy was the fact that she had done with it all she had designed. She had put her thought to the proof, and the proof had shown its edge; this was what was before her, that she was no longer playing with blunt and idle tools, with weapons that didn't cut. There passed across her vision ten times a day the gleam of a bare blade, and at this it was that she most shut her eyes, most knew the impulse to cheat herself with motion and sound. She had merely driven, on a certain Wednesday, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... he had the smallest right or title to do, but addressing her on the purely medical aspect of the incident, on which he considered that he was entitled, nay, even bound to speak. His manner was a little blunt and brusque rather than suave, like that of a man who had no time to waste in paying compliments or making soft speeches, but it was ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... something, though," she said. "There must be something more than the things they tabulate. Some subtle force of life which isn't physical at all. Something that uses physical things as tools. If its tools are fine, it will do finer work, but if its tools are blunt it will work with them anyway. And it ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... elbow a mere lad, Of a high spirit evidently, though At present weighed down by a doom which had O'erthrown even men, he soon began to show A kind of blunt compassion for the sad Lot of so young a partner in the woe, Which for himself he seemed to deem no worse Than any other scrape, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... but this one didn't like it, and meant to show that he didn't. His money at least was his own, and he could do with it as he liked. The answer did not come until the question had been asked twice. Then in words as brief and manner as blunt ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... grew from the middle of the leg six inches below the knee in a woman of eighty. It was a flattened spiral of more than two turns, and during forty years' growth had reached the length of 14.3 inches. Its height was 3.8 inches, its skin-attachment 1.5 inches in diameter, and it ended in a blunt extremity of 0.5 inch in diameter. Stephens mentions a dermal horn on the buttocks at the seat of a carcinomatous cicatrix. Harris and Domonceau speak of horns from the leg. Cruveilhier saw a Mexican Indian who had a horn four inches long and eight inches in ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... choleric old gentleman, prepared to tear down his bell-rope if dinner were not served that minute); then his podgy little fore-legs would double up, and the next few inches of progress would be made on blunt little pink nose, and round little stomach, his hind-legs being flattened out behind him in the exact position of a frog's while swimming. Several times Finn quite thought he had at length found a teat, and, in its infantile, impotent way, the blind fury ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... out the more in that De Richemont was no friend to her; indeed, he had regarded her as little better than a witch before he came under the magic of her personality. His greeting to her was rough and blunt. ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... an odd, blunt little creature. She added, sotto voce: "Pour assurer votre salut la-haut, on ferait bien de vous ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... hands, so as to put his whole weight behind it, and made a lunge in the direction of a muttered curse. The curse gave way to a roar of pain and rage, and Colden's second follower dropped, spurting blood in the darkness, his shoulder gashed horribly by the blunt end of Peyton's imperfect weapon. Harry now ran back to the parlor, to deal with Colden in the light, the latter's greater length of weapon giving a greater searching-power in the darkness. In the parlor ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens
... me is all beside the mark; somebody has got to give you the chance you are needing, and the fight may just as well be made here in Springville as anywhere. Sit down again and let's dig a little deeper into that Mexican book of Enock's. I do like his blunt English way ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... Crow! Here, sithee! Just grind me these scissors. Our Ralph's been scraping the boiler lid with 'em, till they're nearly as blunt as a ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... single rotten planks. At 8000 feet I met with pines, whose trunks I had seen strewing the river for some miles lower down: the first that occurred was Abies Brunoniana, a beautiful species, which forms a stately blunt pyramid, with branches spreading like the cedar, but not so stiff, and drooping gracefully on all sides. It is unknown on the outer ranges of Sikkim, and in the interior occupies a belt about 1000 feet lower than the silver fir (A. Webbiana). Many sub-alpine plants occur here, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... up to the neck and fed with a shovel!" Jeremy informed him in blunt English after listening to the ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... exact inventory of all our travelling accompaniments, I must not forget a pocket medicine chest, containing blunt scissors, splints for broken limbs, a piece of tape of unbleached linen, bandages and compresses, lint, a lancet for bleeding, all dreadful articles to take with one. Then there was a row of phials containing dextrine, alcoholic ether, liquid acetate of lead, vinegar, and ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... time by climbing up on places, and falling down off them, uniformly damaging her self in the operation. As young as she is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plain spoken in other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all strangers, male or female, with the same ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... so. Let a man have one of these blades, with a hand to wield it and skill to use it, and he may venture upon an angel with it. He need not fear its holding, if he can but tell how to lay on. Its edges will never blunt. It will cut flesh and bones, and soul and spirit, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... "that you will not think it fulsome on my part to say how much I like you. In your public utterances you have let it be known what value you set on pretty phrases; but I speak the blunt truth, as you have taught it. I am only a young man, perhaps awkward ...
— Better Dead • J. M. Barrie
... had been trusting to vague outlines of history; I felt when he began to talk that I was dealing with a man who not only knew history, but had lived it. He talked in the fewest but directest words, and waxed eloquent in a blunt and colossal way. But seeing his wife's eyes fixed on him intently, he suddenly pulled up, and no more did I get from him on the subject. He stopped so suddenly that in order to help over the awkwardness, though I'm not really sure ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... effect that the Bill be read a second time this day six months. This, at least, was the shape that the motion took after some discussion, because Lord Wharncliffe, in the first instance, had concluded his speech against the second reading by the blunt motion that the Bill be rejected; and it was only when it had been pressed upon his attention that such a method of disposing of the measure would be a downright insult to the Commons that he consented to modify his proposal into the ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... twelfth Earl of Dreever ("Spennie" to his relatives and intimates), a light-haired young gentleman of twenty-four, but in reality the possession of his uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Julia Blunt. ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... else and as if he himself did not comprehend their full meaning. He had not a feeling that they were free, but that something awful at the same time had happened which filled him with uneasiness and weighed upon his bosom like a heavy stone. Finally his thoughts began to grow blunt. For a long time he gazed at the big moths hovering above the flame and in the end he nodded and dozed. Kali also dozed, but awoke every little while and threw ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... course appeared. He cudgelled his brain for some plan to account for his absence, and finally took refuge unwittingly in ancient wisdom: "When you don't know a thing to do, don't do a thing." Also, "If you can't find the delicate way, go the blunt way." ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... House was thenceforthe your Home; and in quitting it you committed a Fault you may yet repaire, though this offensive Act has made the Difficultie much greater."—"Oh, what has happened?" I impatientlie cried. Just then, Dick comes in with his usual blunt Salutations, and then cries, "Well, Moll, are you ready to goe back?" "Why should I be?" I sayd, "when I am soe happy here? unless Father is ill, or Mr. Agnew and Rose are tired of me." They both interrupted, there ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... on an ashstock lying In a green wood, in a gloomy vale. Toward the stock wandereth a shaggy wolf. Horned cattle seeking for his sharp white fangs; But the wolf enters not the forest, But the wolf dives not into the shadowy vale, Moon, moon, gold-horned moon, Cheek the flight of bullets, blunt the hunters' knives, Break the shepherds' cudgels, Cast wild fear upon all cattle, On men, on all creeping things, That they may not catch the grey wolf, That they may not rend his warm skin My word is binding, more binding than sleep, ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... makes one righteous. There was Ambrose, Augustine and many others who said it before me. And if one is to read and understand St. Paul, the same thing must be said and not anything else. His words, as well, are blunt—"no works"—none at all! If it is not works, it must be faith alone. Oh what a marvelous, constructive and inoffensive teaching that would be, to be taught that one can be saved by works as well as by faith. That would be like saying that it is not Christ's death ...
— An Open Letter on Translating • Gary Mann
... a man that I could trade with, and not resort to art. He was never schooled in diplomacy, and his blunt nature rejected all subterfuge. I saw that he was willing to allow me to make all that I could, knowing that he would have done the same, had he been situated as ...
— The Gold Hunter's Adventures - Or, Life in Australia • William H. Thomes
... where she was volubly elucidating obscure points in business morality to the forewoman. Of all the women employed in the house, this particular forewoman was the only one who appeared to Gabriella to be without pretence or affectation. She was an honest, blunt, capable creature, with a face and figure which permanently debarred her from the showrooms, and a painstaking method of work. There was no haughtiness, no condescension, about her. She had the manner ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... steel it has in it or how well it is forged—if it has no cutting edge it is not a chisel. It is just a piece of metal. All of which being translated means that it is what a thing does—not what it is supposed to do—that matters. What is the use of putting a tremendous force behind a blunt chisel if a light blow on a sharp chisel will do the work? The chisel is there to cut, not to be hammered. The hammering is only incidental to the job. So if we want to work why not concentrate on the work and do it in the quickest possible fashion? ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... of romance, she would rather have been sought by blandishments than blows, which, from his known prowess in the latter accomplishment, the youthful aspirant had no necessity to detail in the ears of his mistress. She liked not the coarse blunt manner of her gallant, nor the hard gripe and iron tramp for which he was ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... only slightly so by a tooth-like process. Some of the species are apt to be confused with certain species of Omphalia in which the gills are but slightly decurrent, but in Omphalia the pileus is umbilicate in such species, while in Mycena it is blunt or umbonate. The spores are white. A large number of the plants grow on leaves and wood, few on the ground. Some of those which grow on leaves might be mistaken for species of Marasmius, but in Marasmius the plants are of a tough consistency, and ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... of very different quality; that the plain sense of his discourse might do for me, the subtler was certainly for himself. He added that in his younger days he had heard from a person of great parts, and had since profited by it, that ordinary poets are like adders,—the tail blunt and the body rough, and the whole reptile cold-blooded and sluggish: "whereas we," he subjoined, "leap and caracole and curvet, and are as warm as velvet, and as sleek as satin, and as perfumed as a Naples fan, in every part of us; and the ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor
... old lady, rather small in stature, and already bending a little under the burden of years at the time when I first recollect her as mingling in the visions of my childhood, though I know that even from infancy I was the delight of her warm honest heart. She was simplicity itself in manners, her blunt speeches sometimes clashing a little with her son's notions of polish and refinement, as also did her inveterate antipathy to the reigning fashion, whatever that might be. I remember her reading me a lecture upon something novel in the cut of a sleeve, ending ...
— Personal Recollections • Charlotte Elizabeth
... "One-ear" Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed a newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each solid and blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed "One Hundred Dollars Reward." To earn it one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed, or stolen from the Millionaire's mansion. It seemed that grief still ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful Child. Flip, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... Kenkenes was not so bewildering as to blind him to the reason why Nechutes had withheld this news from Ta-meri. The blunt Egyptian was not anxious to ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... direct, blunt and even brutal. It burst like a thunder-bolt on Raymond's head, staggered him, and ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... The positive adjunct leg, and its negative aige (802, 803), are also used to convert nouns into adjectives: the former follows the same rules as those before given for forming the plural: gizu sharpness, becomes either gizule sharp, or gizuge blunt, literally: sharpness-possessing, or, possessing not : from nuki water, we get the form nukile maram the well contains water, or, nukegi maram the well is dry: danagi blind, literally means, ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... divested maimed and sightless Musidora of her flannel mufflings and dressed her in a clean night-gown. Without saying what I meant to do with it I had begged a square of white cambric from Mam' Chloe, and set about notching it with a pair of blunt scissors. Mariposa had described a winding-sheet minutely to me, and I meant that my dead doll-baby should be decently laid out. The notching took a tedious time, and the bows of the blunt scissors left purple furrows upon thumb and fingers. Uncle Ike had ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland
... the door, which stood ajar, opened a little wider, and a dog's head appeared, followed by a tail, which waggled so beseechingly for leave to come farther that Clover, who liked dogs, put out her hand at once. He was not pretty, being of a pepper-and-salt color, with a blunt nose and no particular sort of a tail, but looked good-natured; and Clover fondled him cordially, while Mr. Eels took his cane out of his mouth to ask, "What kind of a dog ...
— What Katy Did At School • Susan Coolidge
... thing in the world that I desire. My experience in that direction in New York quite sufficed me, I assure you. I came here," said he, with rather too blunt an ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... Party indeed represent Ireland in this, Mr. Wilfred Blunt's noble protest in his recent work, The Land War in Ireland, would stand for the contemptuous impeachment, not of a political party but of ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... said he. "So stumpy and blunt. And it has been so very useful always. I could wind it around a stick to hold myself up when my paws were full, and many a time I have rolled eggs across the floor by curling it around them." Then he heard Rat voices and scampered out and down to ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... say that not one solitary voice was raised. 'Tis true it was not raised by any missionary. But there is a rough-looking soldier with a strong face that looks as if it had been hewn out of a block of red sandstone with a blunt hatchet—General Chaffee, of the United States Army. He would be called in England a "ranker." He, not content, as Sir Alfred Gaselee was, with keeping his own men from disgracing their country's flag, wrote a letter of remonstrance ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... Oriental temperament, which tended to pour itself forth in dreams instead of action; vivid emotional sensibilities, which enabled him to exhaust all the resources of pleasure where imagination stimulates sense; and a thorough optimism in his theories, which saw everything at its best, tended to blunt the keen ambition which would otherwise inevitably have stirred the possessor of such artistic gifts. Gottschalk fell far short of his possibilities, though he was the greatest piano executant ever produced by our own country. He ...
— Great Violinists And Pianists • George T. Ferris
... Moncrief—named after the uncle you brought that letter from. He was my godfather, you know. This is my sister, Connie." Connie, who was a pretty, fair girl, looked embarrassed at her brother's blunt method of introduction, but he rattled on. "Rather good for a girl. Not so slow as most of them. Can take a turn with the bells or clubs"—by bells and clubs was meant dumb-bells and Indian-clubs—"and she can scout at cricket. Didn't I hear ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... And once she had thought Irene's manner perfection! Everything that Rilla had prepared to say vanished from her memory. Vainly trying to tuck her unlucky foot under her chair, she blurted out a blunt statement. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... to which Walker led them was plainly but neatly furnished and the windows looked out upon rolling pastures. The Governor abandoned his high-flown talk and asked blunt questions as to recent visitors, apparently referring to criminals who had lodged at the farm. They talked quite openly while Archie unpacked his bag. The restless activity of the folk of the underworld, their ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... gracefully and airily performed in France by Cousin. He had popularized the philosophers. Without the acute, electric perceptions of the great German or the industry and amiable vanities of that De Sevigne among philosophers, Cousin, he presented, by fierce dashes of his crayon, black, blunt, and bluff, to the hitherto ignorant British public, some phases of the great metaphysical bearings of the age upon Literature and Art, as developed in Teutonic poetry and prose. In a word, he familiarized his readers with the AEsthetik of Germany. He published in 1830 his Sartor ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... he has rather a blunt way of saying things, but that very bluntness often places thoughts much more distinctly before us—Paul was speaking of her; he did not suspect anything; if he had, he is good-natured, he would not have spoken thus—well, he said ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... in a circle in the center of which is "It" blindfolded, holding in his hand a blunt stick about 12 or 15 inches long. Those in the circle dance around two or three times, so that the blindfolded player may not know their position. At the command "Stand," given by the one blindfolded, all must stand still. Thereupon, by feeling ...
— School, Church, and Home Games • George O. Draper
... the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy: father is no such far cry from pater:—but oh what a change in sprightliness of habits is here! Time has worn away his head and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just lumps backward or forward, and there is no change ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... wisdom of no one was more widely appreciated, or more frequently drawn upon. "Sumner, Trumbull, and Wade," says McClure, speaking from personal acquaintance, "had intellectual force, but Trumbull was a judge rather than a politician, Wade was oppressively blunt, and Sumner cultivated an ideal statesmanship that placed him outside the line of practical politics. Fessenden was more nearly a copy of Seward in temperament and discretion, but readily conceded the masterly ability of his colleague. ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... perhaps three inches girth about the thickest part of its body. But it was an ugly, repulsive- looking brute, its head being heart-shaped, and its body almost the same thickness for the greater part of its length, terminating in a short, blunt tail. Its ground colour was a dirty grey, upon which occurred large, irregular blotches or markings of dull black with a few splashes of brilliant red here and there. The fellow who had fallen upon ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... being made to Chinese vanity, by the contrasting of the potential might of China with the might of Japan. In an article entitled "China and the World War," Putnam Weale, speaking for the British interests in China, makes some clever but rather blunt suggestions: ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... the tender to the grotesque—would it not have been agreeable to hear something more than two lines from the lips of a lover so stout-hearted, yet so ardent, in his own rough, blunt way, as he who ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... thrown into the street, as well as apple-parings and cabbage-stalks, were voraciously devoured. But hunger did not confine itself within these disgusting limits. More than twenty eye-witnesses can attest that wounded French soldiers crawled to the already putrid carcasses of horses, with some blunt knife or other contrived with their feeble hands to cut the flesh from the haunches, and greedily regaled themselves with the carrion. They were glad to appease their hunger with what the raven and the kite never feed on but in cases of necessity. They ...
— Frederic Shoberl Narrative of the Most Remarkable Events Which Occurred In and Near Leipzig • Frederic Shoberl (1775-1853)
... the General Staff's Operations Division, Lt. Gen. John E. Hull, dismissed the Gillem report with several blunt statements: black enlisted men should be assigned to black units capable of operational use within white units at the rate of one black battalion per division; a single standard of professional proficiency should be followed for white and black officers; ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... Seumas O'Sullivan. They want war songs, plough songs, to nerve the soul to fight or the hand to do its work. I will never make that complaint. I will only complain if the strife or the work ever blunt my senses so that I will pass by with an impatient disdain these delicate snatchings at a beauty which is ever fleeting. But I would ask him to remember that life never allures us twice with exactly the same enchantment. Never again will that tress ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... reaping all this praise and exciting the people to all this applause. He had beaten everybody in racing and boxing and throwing the spear. As Martin came up, Conrad was shouting out and inquiring if there was anybody who would have a merry bout with him with blunt swords. This challenge several stout young patricians, well accustomed to this species of pastime, stepped forward and accepted. But it was not long before Conrad had again, without much trouble or exertion, overcome all his opponents; and the applause at his skill and strength ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... book I have written in a blunt way some episodes of the war as I observed them, and gained first-hand knowledge of them in their daily traffic. I have not painted the picture blacker than it was, nor selected gruesome morsels and joined ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... to preach the National Mission in a peculiarly hostile and irresponsive camp of motor lorry drivers, who much resented the use of "their" Y.M.C.A. hut for such religious purposes. A Wesleyan minister had charge of it, and got far more of their blunt language than I the visitor did; but he worked undismayed and unreservedly for all he was worth, for the National Mission and for me. The alliance was natural, real, inevitable. He and I, and some five or six men of that camp, were clearly on one side, and the rest ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... to Lawrence, and am heartily sorry there should be another picture of me except that which he has finished. The person is remarkably like, and conveys the idea of the stout blunt carle that cares for few things, and fears nothing. He has represented the author as in the act of composition, yet has effectually discharged all affectation from the manner and attitude. He seems pleased with it himself. He dined with us at Peel's yesterday, where, by the way, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... having done as much mischief as a good heart well can do in a walk of an hour, returned home to write a long letter to his mother, against 'learning and all such nonsense, which only served to blunt the affections and harden the heart.' 'Admirable young man!' cried the mother, with tears in her eyes; 'a good heart is better than all the heads in the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... convinced, as I hinted just now, that cheap recurring patterns in a material which has no play of light in it, and no special beauty of its own, should be employed rather sparingly, or they destroy all refinement of decoration and blunt our enjoyment of whatever beauty may lie in the ...
— Hopes and Fears for Art • William Morris
... not perturbed by something that fell under my eye soon afterwards. At a shop door hung certain printed cards, bearing a notice that "wood hay-makers," "wood binders," and "wood mowers" were "sold here." Not in Italian this, but in plain, blunt English; and to each announcement was added the name of an English manufacturing firm, with an agency at Naples. I have often heard the remark that Englishmen of business are at a disadvantage in their export trade because they pay no heed to the special requirements of foreign countries; ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... hardworking, law-loving people, fond of good cheer and strong drink, of shrewd, blunt speech, and a stubborn reticence, when speech would be useless or foolish; a people clean-living, faithful to friend and kinsman, truthful, hospitable, liking to make a fair show, but not vain or boastful; a people with perhaps little play of fancy or great range of thought, ...
— Sutherland and Caithness in Saga-Time - or, The Jarls and The Freskyns • James Gray
... hereditary rogue, and whose father had suffered in rebellion before, a fellow rough and daring, comes boldly to the Prince when the Council rose, and asked him, if he were resolved to engage? He told him, he was. 'Then,' said he, 'give me leave to shoot Philander in the head.' This blunt proposition given, without any manner of reason or circumstance, made the Prince start back a step or two, and ask him his meaning of what he said. 'Sir,' replied the Captain, 'if you will be safe, Philander must die; ...
— Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister • Aphra Behn
... odd, blunt way, that is mistaken by strangers for ill-nature. 'Tis so odd, that there's no describing it but by facts. I'll tell you one that first comes into my head. One evening, Gay and I went to see him: you ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... alarmed now, for his huge forepaws were on a level with the eaves, while his blunt, black snout was quite several inches above the sod roof. What if he could manage to spring on to it after all! He opened his mouth, and she could see his cruel yellow jagged teeth and the grey-ribbed roof of his mouth. He moved his head about and seemed preparing for a spring. ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... observed gently, "the same blunt candor. How refreshing it is, Lawton, after years of intrigue and dissimulation. My son, this is Mr. Lawton, an old, but he will pardon me if I ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... choking white dust, Andrews got now and then a glimpse of the grey-green river, with its tugboats sporting their white cockades of steam and their long trailing plumes of smoke, and its blunt-nosed barges and its bridges, where people walked jauntily back and forth, going about their business, going where they wanted to go. The bags of cement were very heavy, and the unaccustomed work sent racking ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... only woman I have ever met who has any claim to brains," he answered, paying the compliment in his blunt, rough fashion. "Don't you know me well enough to realise that I don't ask people to set my standards for me? Don't you know a man, when you see him, big enough to ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... social warfare, so Mrs. De Peyster believed, of her aspiring rival, Mrs. Allistair. And there was one faint rumor, still daringly breathed around, that the Duke had proposed—had been accepted—had run away: in blunt terms, had jilted ...
— No. 13 Washington Square • Leroy Scott
... it is tragedy, in France it in comedy; here it is a solemnity, there it is monkey-shines; here the duellist risks his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with pistol or sabre, in France with a hairpin—a blunt one. Here the desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... lifetime. If a man has presence of mind enough to shout and make a noise and go towards the brute, the latter withdraws. Otherwise he is lost, for even if he escapes with his life, the wounds inflicted by the jaguar's blunt claws and teeth are terrible and dangerous. There are Indians in South America who are said to hunt the jaguar in the following manner. They wrap a sheepskin round the left arm and in the right hand hold a sharp two-edged ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin
... the mate, who, since the lamented disappearance of its late master and owner, was acting as captain, the deck was as deserted as the wharf. He was smoking an evening pipe in all the pride of a first command, his eye roving fondly from the blunt bows and untidy deck of his craft to her clumsy stern, when a slight cough from the man above attracted ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... you in terms direct had asked Whether beloved the mountains, true it is That with blunt repetition of your words He might have stared at you, and said that they Were frightful to behold, but had you then Discoursed with him . . . . . . . . Of his own business and the goings on Of earth and sky, then truly had you seen That in his thoughts there were obscurities, Wonder ...
— Selections from Wordsworth and Tennyson • William Wordsworth and Alfred Lord Tennyson
... instances; as the genius of the Italians, which is so much addicted to music and ceremony, has moulded all their words and phrases to those particular uses. The stateliness and gravity of the Spaniards shows itself to perfection in the solemnity of their language; and the blunt, honest humour of the Germans sounds better in the roughness of the High-Dutch than it would in ...
— Essays and Tales • Joseph Addison
... A blunt American journal, commenting on the handiwork of the Conference, gave utterance to views which while making no pretense to courtly phraseology are symptomatic of the way in which the average man thought ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... supposed designs, I am rejoiced to think that she had no need of my unskilful arm. But how and why can the count have left England after accepting a challenge? A man so sure of his weapon, too,—reputed to be as fearless of danger as he is blunt in conscience. Explain,—you who know mankind so well,—explain. I cannot." The philosopher could not resist the pleasure of narrating the detection and humiliation of his foe, the wit, ingenuity, and readiness of his friend. So Randal learned, by little and little, the ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... British or American "plain blunt man" regards, and always will regard, such writers as Shelley and Poe and Verlaine and Wilde with a certain uneasy suspicion. These great poets must always seem to him a little weird and morbid and apart from common flesh and blood. He will be tempted to the end to use in reference to ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... perplexed and uncertain, as if not knowing exactly what answer to make to the question. At length he asked the king whether it was his wish that he should respond by speaking the blunt and honest truth, or by saying what would be ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... powerless. She stared straight before her, shivering, as she went over the scene she had just witnessed, her fingers picking nervously at the jade-green silk of her dress. She longed for some power that would deaden her feelings and blunt her capacity for suffering. She looked at Gaston with hard eyes when he came in. He had approved of what the Sheik had done, would have done it himself if he had been able. ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... their next excursion he put Miss Gerald into the victoria with her father and fell back to the point at which he had seen the lieutenant waiting to haunt their farther progress. He put himself plumply in front of the officer and demanded in very blunt Italian: "What do ...
— Between The Dark And The Daylight • William Dean Howells
... the Maid let us have her sword sharpened for her. A curious look came upon her face as Bertrand pointed out that although now clean and shining, its edges were too blunt for real use. She looked round upon us as we stood before her, and passed her fingers lovingly down ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... court stables and private views not ordinarily shown to travellers, which were more interesting from being personally conducted than by the marvels we saw, for several years of continuous travel rather blunt one's ecstasy and effectively wear ...
— Abroad with the Jimmies • Lilian Bell
... BLUNT has scored another brilliant success with The Wonderful Village (MILLS AND BOON). It is one of his Chelsea books of anecdote, gossip and good talk of which he possesses the secret. He knows how to create the right Chelsea atmosphere and he is most artful in leading his readers ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 19, 1919 • Various
... I must confess that I was glad. Not that life looked more attractive than before, but that the decision had been taken out of my hands. I could not go about the shops of Verona buying prussic acid or revolvers or metres of stout rope. And my razors (without Stenson's care) were benignantly blunt, and I would not condescend to braces. I groaned and pished and pshawed, but as it was written that I was to live, I resigned myself to a barren ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... probably blunt one's sensibilities in time, but this constant annoyance by peddlers detracts much from the pleasure of any stroll through Cairo streets. To the new arrival everything is novel and attractive. The main avenues are ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... like this. I was a blunt straight-forward boy; and I thought that my aunt was afraid to back me in what I knew to be ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... in size, ranging sometimes, I am told, to fourteen feet; the horns, of which I saw a great many at Whale-Fish Isles, were from three feet to seven feet in length. The use of this horn is a matter of controversy amongst the fishermen: it is almost too blunt for offence, and its point, for about four inches, is always found well polished, whilst the remainder of it is usually covered with slime and greenish sea-weed. Some maintain that it roots up food from the bottom ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... Washington commander-in-chief of the Continental armies was undoubtedly a political act meant to bind the southern colonies to the war and to blunt charges that this was a New England revolution. Seldom has a political decision borne greater positive benefits. Washington is an enigma and he always will remain so to his countrymen. His greatness as a man and as a commander are difficult to fathom. The contradictions ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education
... she don't know." Miss Lizzie Bettie Pryor's voice was as blunt as usual. "If ever there was a wild woman it's Laura Deford this minute. I've been with her all the morning, and she don't know salt from seaweed. She sent for John Maxwell and says he told her not to dare call Mary Cary's name in his presence, and that he never expects ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... Little leaves of the empalement egg-shaped, sharp. Blossoms blunt; the upper lip ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... evening, in a room where were books and a blazing hearth, a man with a famous name and a long record told me a story, and through his blunt speech flashed in and out all the time the sparkle of the fire and the ripple of the fountain. Unsuspecting, he betrayed every minute the queer thing that had happened to him—how he had never grown up and his blood had never grown cold. So that the story, as it fell in easy sequence, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... no sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of these things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead, thereof, a gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling virtue lingered ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... not go on. Fosdick's nod and answer were not unkindly. "All right, Speranza," he said, "I'm not offended. Hope I wasn't too blunt, myself. Good-day." ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... issued an advertisement: "Whereas I, James Spiller, of Gloucestershire, having received an invitation from Hildebrand Bullock, of Liquorpond Street, London, to exercise the usual weapons of the noble science of defence, will not fail to meet this bold invader, desiring a full stage, blunt weapons, and from him much favour." At another time the same actor announced his benefit in a kind of mock electioneering address, requesting the vote and interest of the public on the ground of his being "a person well affected to the establishment of the theatre." ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... practically a slate. The letters written could be erased with the blunt upper end of the metallic stylus, and the whole surface of the tablet could be made smooth again ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... first appearance I had no rehearsal, for fear of over-fatigue, and spent my morning as usual, in practicing the piano, walking in the inclosure of St. James's Park opposite our house, and reading in "Blunt's Scripture Characters" (a book in which I was then deeply interested) the chapters relating to St. Peter and Jacob. I do not know whether the nervous tension which I must have been enduring strengthened the impression made upon me by ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... him on the whole in good cheer. There was a blunt frankness about him which led me to believe that were I ever to be called upon to meet Captain Lestrange as an enemy, it would be as an honest and generous one. His affected indolence had already been disproved by the service he had rendered ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... this?" he demanded in English, and with such blunt suddenness that she was startled. "Where did ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... me with the smiles and greetings of friends; they express the tenderest wishes for my welfare, and shower upon me the tokens of their affection; then, having fairly won my confidence, they turn upon me when I least expect it, and stab me cruelly. I am a plain, blunt man—often irritable and unjust, I know—still, I never flinch from danger when I can see it; but, the very nature of my bringing up has rendered me unfit to cope with the wiles and subtleties of my fellow man. You, Mr. Pinkerton, it is said, have ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... nearly cold. Strain the lemon juice into a basin, gradually pour on it the cream, and stir it well until the juice is well mixed with it. Have ready a well-oiled mold, pour the cream into it, and let it remain until perfectly set. When required for table, loosen the edges with a small blunt knife, put a dish on the top of the mold, turn it over quickly, and the cream ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... judgment," he began again, "the whole thing resolves itself into a matter of discretion. But now—if you'll pardon me for asking anything so blunt—how am I to know that ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... labor, the 'Dictionary' appeared in 1755. It had distinct limitations. The knowledge of Johnson's day was not adequate for tracing the history and etymology of words, and Johnson himself on being asked the reason for one of his numerous blunders could only reply, with his characteristic blunt frankness, 'sheer ignorance.' Moreover, he allowed his strong prejudices to intrude, even though he colored them with humor; for example in defining 'oats' as 'a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... calm and almost smiling as he answered. Behind him the shrill voices of the crowd sounded, like a background, to the blunt words that ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... very little of either,' was the blunt reply. 'There's no more comparison between them than between settling in Normandy and ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... Perhaps thou'st come, and ah, my cruel pain And wakeful thoughts thee ingress have denied Into my eyes, or hurl'd thee out amain. Since, blundering archer, thou dost shoot aside, Or snapp'st thy every dart my breast upon, To me thy wand be never more applied! Away, away! grim Death can blunt alone My miseries' point, and ne'er till life be spent I shall the hour of dear repose have won. O how the strife within is vehement! Now reason wins, now madness holds the sway; So much my ill can do, nor I prevent. ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... morning I found the few white settlers assembled in front of the old Hutchings Hotel comparing notes and meditating flight to the lowlands, seemingly as sorely frightened as the Indians. Shortly after sunrise a low, blunt, muffled rumbling, like distant thunder, was followed by another series of shocks, which, though not nearly so severe as the first, made the cliffs and domes tremble like jelly, and the big pines and oaks thrill and swish ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... Moti Guj, meaning to hustle him between them. Moti Guj had never, in all his life of thirty-nine years, been whipped, and he did not intend to open new experiences. So he waited, weaving his head from right to left, and measuring the precise spot in Kala Nag's fat side where a blunt tusk would sink deepest. Kala Nag had no tusks; the chain was his badge of authority; but he judged it good to swing wide of Moti Guj at the last minute, and seem to appear as if he had brought out the chain for amusement. Nazim turned round ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... wax tablets.—Ver. 521. Before the tablet was written upon, the wax was 'vacua,' empty; or, as we say of writing-paper, 'clean.' There was a blunt end to the upper part of the 'stylus,' or iron pen, with which the wax was smoothed down when ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... had an excellent feel of period—the texture of it, the fine shades of language, the outlook; Dickie hated people who had a blunt sense of period and in a jumbled fashion referred to old Venetian lace, and the Early Spanish School, and Louise de la Valliere, and a play ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... society, than at the first lull, down comes Drawley again upon you, like a heavy—sterned Dutch dogger, right before the wind—'As I was saying—this unexpected and most unlooked—for honour'—and there you are pinned to the stake, and compelled to stand the fire of all his blunt bird—boltst for half an hour on end. At length his mud has all dribbled from him, and you hug yourself—'Ah,—come, here is a talking man opening his fire, so we shall have some conversation at last.' But alas and alack a day! Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and hems and haws, ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... walking home, deeply immersed in thoughts excited by the hints which had been thus wantonly thrown out to inflame his imagination, when all at once, on lifting his eyes, he saw Clement Lindsay coming straight towards him. Gifted was unarmed, except with a pair of blunt scissors, which he carried habitually in his pocket. What should he do? Should he fly? But he was never a good runner, being apt to find himself scant o' breath, like Hamlet, after violent exercise. His demeanor on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... receiue it, I beseech you, such as it is, rude and plaine; for I know your pure iudgement lookes as soone to see beauty in a Blackamoore, or heare smooth speech from a Stammerer, as to finde any thing but blunt mirth in a Morrice dauncer, especially such a one as Will Kemp, that hath spent his life in mad Iigges{2:2} and merry iestes. Three reasons mooue mee to make publik this iourney: one to reproue lying fooles I neuer knew; the other to commend louing friends, which by the ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... difficulty in not laughing outright, for my superior officer was a man of imposing breadth, and I knew his one weakness was the love of a good meal. The contemplation of the loss of his Christmas dinner had made him forget his usual blunt, hopeful tone of speech, and ...
— A Lover in Homespun - And Other Stories • F. Clifford Smith
... class, she jumps the fourteen rows from the stage to the gallery and looks for a lover among the gallery gods at the back." Puffed up with this delightful chatter. "Come now, confess, won't you," I queried, "is this lady who loves me yourself?" The waiting maid smiled broadly at this blunt speech. "Don't have such a high opinion of yourself," said she, "I've never given in to any servant yet; the gods forbid that I should ever throw my arms around a gallows-bird. Let the married women see to that and kiss the marks of the scourge if they like: I'll sit upon nothing below a knight, ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter
... Caledonians in the first century were, according to Tacitus, long, large, and blunt at the point, and hence in all probability made of iron, whence came the sharp-pointed leaf-shaped bronze swords so often found in Scotland, and what is the place and date of their manufacture? Were they earlier? And what is the real origin of the large accumulation of spears and other instruments ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... Chester, relaxing his face when he was fairly gone, 'is good practice. I HAVE some command of my features, beyond all doubt. He fully confirms what I suspected, though; and blunt tools are sometimes found of use, where sharper instruments would fail. I fear I may be obliged to make great havoc among these worthy people. A troublesome necessity! ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... I essay To turn me from that piteous look away. How strangely doth a single crimson line Around that lovely neck its coil entwine, It shows no broader than a knife's blunt edge! ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Here, sithee! Just grind me these scissors. Our Ralph's been scraping the boiler lid with 'em, till they're nearly as blunt as ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... reason guide thee with her brightest ray, And pour on misty doubt resistless day; Should no false kindness lure to loose delight, Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright; Should tempting novelty thy cell refrain, [p]And sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; Should beauty blunt on fops her fatal dart, Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart; Should no disease thy torpid veins invade, Nor melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade; Yet hope not life, from grief or danger free, Nor think ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... belonged to a lost tribe. As I have said, he was brindled and gray like Rubislaw granite; his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set like a little bull—a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head; his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two—being all he had—gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields of battle all over it; one eye out, one ear cropped as close as was Archbishop ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... gone, and she prepares to write, First hovering o'er the paper with her quill: Conceit and grief an eager combat fight; What wit sets down is blotted straight with will; This is too curious-good, this blunt and ill: Much like a press of people at a door, Throng her inventions, ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... instruments to carry out their principles; they profit to-day by the cervices of a tool which seems to them sufficiently sharp to perform its task, and they cast it aside to-morrow because it has become blunt, and must be replaced by another. This is what happens to the nations and to myself at this juncture. The nations are bitterly opposed to France; the whole German people, both north and south, is unanimous in its intense hatred ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... chimney-corner, and making us play games with him. And all the while he was smoking tobacco in a manner I never had seen before, not using any pipe for it, but having it rolled in little sticks about as long as my finger, blunt at one end and sharp at the other. The sharp end he would put in his mouth, and lay a brand of wood to the other, and then draw a white cloud of curling smoke, and we never tired of watching him. I wanted ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... sorts are, as a rule, most carelessly used, and left about anyhow instead of being hung up. How much loss there is in a year in the careless use of knives and plate! Whenever possible both of these get into the hands of the cook. Her own tools from neglect or misuse have become blunt or worse, and she takes the best blade and the plated or silver spoon whenever she ...
— Nelson's Home Comforts - Thirteenth Edition • Mary Hooper
... discovered in Saxony by A. Breithaupt in 1817, and named by him from the Greek amblus, blunt, and gouia, angle, because of the obtuse angle between the cleavages. Later it was found at Montebras, dep. Creuse, France, and at Hebron in Maine; and on account of slight differences in optical character and chemical composition the names montebrasite and hebronite ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... tall as he. It was a blunt-witted devil who whispered John Bulmer that, inch paralleling inch, the woman is taller than the man and subtly renders him absurd; and that in a decade this woman would be stout. There was no meaning now in any whispering save hers. John Bulmer perceived, ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... midair. Is it from Paphos or Mitylene! What the fable! Music plucked down from the vibrating skies and made visible to the senses. A mere masque laden with the sweet, prim allegories of the day it is not. Vasari, blunt soul, saw but its surfaces. Politian, the poet, got closer to the core. Centuries later our perceptions, sharpened by the stations of pain and experience traversed, lend to this immortal canvas a more sympathetic, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... to take her vacation in June, and she arranged that Miss Milligan should do O'Mally's work while she was away. Miss Milligan was blunt and noisy, rapid and inaccurate. It would be just as well for O'Mally to work with a coarse instrument for a time; he would be more appreciative, perhaps, of certain qualities to which he had seemed insensible of late. Ardessa was to leave for East Hampton on Sunday, and she spent Saturday morning ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... ate, and before I slept, I thought of that annotated Guide Book which is cried out for by all Europe, and which shall tell blunt truths. Look you out 'Garfagnana, district of, Valley of Serchio' in the index. You will be referred to p. 267. Turn to p. 267. You will find there ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... clouding of Elizabeth's face, and her blunt pointing to Miss Leaf as "this 'un." were too much for Hilary's gravity She was obliged to retreat to the press, and begin an imaginary ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... worldling, but foreign travel and entertaining in London are just about as unsuited to me as to Peter. I—I'm glad"—she uttered a quick, little sob—"that I—I played my part well while it all lasted; but you know it wasn't so much me as my looks that did it. And because I didn't care, I was blunt and natural, and they thought it chic. But it wasn't chic; it was that I really didn't care. And I don't think I've ever quite succeeded in taking Peter in either; for he couldn't believe I could really think any sort ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... this blunt statement was sickening. Up to that moment, in spite of every fact brought to my knowledge, I had secretly believed this condition of affairs impossible. Surely somewhere, through some legal form, Judge Beaucaire had guarded the future safety of this young woman, whom ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... opening of cells in central rows, oval, sometimes square below; and the cell frequently produced into a shallow arcuate cavity. A short blunt spine on each side of the mouth. Marginal cells shallow, opening oval, margin much thickened, granulated: usually a short conical spine at the summit; a very minute sessile avicularium behind the outer edge, superiorly. Vibracula very ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... suppose—this brief will show it,— Me, Serjeant Woodward,—counsel for the poet. Used to the ground, I know 'tis hard to deal With this dread court, from whence there's no appeal; No tricking here, to blunt the edge of law, Or, damn'd in equity, escape by flaw: But judgment given, your sentence must remain; No writ of error lies—to Drury Lane: Yet when so kind you seem, 'tis past dispute We gain some favour, if not costs of suit. No spleen is here! I see no hoarded fury;— ...
— The Rivals - A Comedy • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... felt as though they beheld the rising of the sun. As they came near, the young men halted and looked upon the elders with pity, for their clothing of skins was ragged and the weapons they strove to hold were rusted and blunt, and except for their proud bearing and the fire in their old eyes they looked more like aged and worthless slaves in the household of a niggardly lord than men who had once been the flower of ...
— The High Deeds of Finn and other Bardic Romances of Ancient Ireland • T. W. Rolleston
... big face, bronzed by the sun, and his great neck where lines drove into the skin like the rivers they drew with blunt pencils on their tedious maps of Europe. It was several faces in one. The Head Gardener was no stranger to their imaginations, for they remembered him of old somewhere, though not quite sure exactly where. He worked incessantly for others, though these 'others' were only flowers and cabbages and ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... what blunt direct methods the lower classes employ in affairs of the heart. In our walk in life the sending of such lines to a gentleman who had not declared himself would be considered almost indelicate. However, I wrote out the absurd lines ...
— Our Elizabeth - A Humour Novel • Florence A. Kilpatrick
... Tocqueville, 'which you have lost, and which I wonder how you do without,—Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle. You are forced always to substitute the name. They are so mixed in all our forms that half of what we say would appear abrupt or blunt without them. ...
— Correspondence & Conversations of Alexis de Tocqueville with Nassau William Senior from 1834 to 1859, Vol. 2 • Alexis de Tocqueville
... discernible the influence not only of good men, such as the scholarly Melanchthon, the faithful Jonas, the firm and kind Saxon electors, the eager Amsdorf, the alert Link, but also of evil men like the blunt Tetzel, the wily Prierias, and the horde of ignorant monks which the monasteries and chancelleries of Rome let loose upon one man. The course which Luther had to pursue was shaped for him by others. We do not mean to ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... These blunt words, so terrible if taken literally, were received by the other workmen with a roar of laughter. But Parry withdrew, thinking ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of travel, one returns to England one can taste, smell, feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious, damp, blunt, good-humored, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter, you tell him you have plenty of time; he muddles your things amiably, with an air of "It'll be all right," till you have only just ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... western breeze. But not less beautiful than this is the whole broad plain of Lombardy; nor are the nightingales louder here than in the acacia trees around Pavia. As we drive, the fields become less fertile, and the hills encroach upon the level, sending down their spurs upon that waveless plain like blunt rocks jutting out into a tranquil sea. When we reach the bed of the Taro, these hills begin to narrow on either hand, and the road rises. Soon they open out again with gradual curving lines, forming a kind of amphitheatre filled up from flank ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... buffalo of no imagination and no sense. He is buffalo enough to love the British Raj and his squadron of Jat farmers with all his stupid Sikh heart! There could not be a better for the purpose than this Ranjoor Singh! He is stupid enough, and nearly blunt enough, to be an Englishman. He is just of the very caliber to fool a German! Trust me, sahib—I, who picked the ...
— Winds of the World • Talbot Mundy
... sent down the key as soon as he had found that he would not want it, and it had been all night in the custody of the mistress of the establishment. Nevertheless his clothes were examined minutely, but without affording any evidence against him. That Mr. Bonteen had been killed with some blunt weapon, such as a life-preserver, was assumed by the police, but no such weapon was in the possession of Mr. Emilius, nor had any such weapon yet been found. He was, however, in custody, with no evidence against him except that which was afforded by his known and acknowledged ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... get away, others ran to the canoe and brought their spears, with which they ran it through the neck, and quickly killed it. It was an iguana (Iguana tuberculata). Though the head was very different from that of the alligator, being blunt, yet, from having a number of sharp teeth, it could evidently have given a severe bite. Its head was somewhat large, and covered with large scales. It had an enormous wide mouth, while under its chin was a sort of big dew-lap, which, as it had shown me, it could inflate when angry. ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... axe be blunt it demands more strength:[293] Only through intelligence doth exertion avail. 11. If the serpent bites before the spell, Then ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of oak he has noted the following variations: (1) In the length of the petiole, as one to three; (2) in the form of the leaf, being either elliptical or obovoid; (3) in the margin being entire, or notched, or even pinnatifid; (4) in the extremity being acute or blunt; (5) in the base being sharp, blunt, or cordate; (6) in the surface being pubescent or smooth; (7) the perianth varies in depth and lobing; (8) the stamens vary in number, independently; (9) the anthers are mucronate or blunt; (10) the fruit stalks vary greatly in length, often as one to ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... very inaccurate view of England's former industrial glory? If I felt inclined to adopt his language towards myself I might be tempted to say that his choice of years was "artful" and "ingenious," for to say, with blunt frankness, "I will take the last decade and stick to it all through," is an admirable way to score with the unsuspecting public. The pose of impartiality is excellent. Your correspondent's figures are doubtless as correct as they are interesting, but (in the light of the explanation I have ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... 435, has, "and as word of a palm-tree board which is very hard and very heavy, not sharp but blunt, about two fingers thick everywhere, with which as it is hard and heavy like iron, although a man has a helmet on his head they will crush his skull to the ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... the spokesman's left, leaned forward as if to speak, but then sat back again. Menesee thought that Rainbolt's blunt admission had angered him. Bradshaw, white-haired and huge in build, had been for many years the nominal head of the Machine; but in practice the powers of the administrator were less than those of the spokesman, and it would have ...
— Oneness • James H. Schmitz
... pound one thrown into the puddle, To listen to Fiddle, Faddle, and Fuddle! Not to forget the sounds we buy From those who sell their sounds so high, That, unless the Managers pitch it strong, To get a Signora to warble a song, You must fork out the blunt ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... species are apt to be confused with certain species of Omphalia in which the gills are but slightly decurrent, but in Omphalia the pileus is umbilicate in such species, while in Mycena it is blunt or umbonate. The spores are white. A large number of the plants grow on leaves and wood, few on the ground. Some of those which grow on leaves might be mistaken for species of Marasmius, but in Marasmius the plants are of a tough consistency, and ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... have done this deed are honorable! What private griefs they have, alas, I know not, That made them do it! They are wise and honorable, And will, no doubt, with reasons answer you. I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts: I am no orator, as Brutus is; But as you all know me, a plain, blunt man, That love my friend; and that they know full well That gave me public leave to speak of him. For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth, Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech, To stir men's blood:—I only speak right on; I tell you that which you yourselves do know; Show you sweet ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... them," said Master Jonson, in his blunt, outspoken way, "I'll think thee a thought offhand to serve the turn. What? Why, this tanner calls us vagabonds. Vagabonds, forsooth! Yet vagabonds are gallows-birds, and gallows-birds are ravens. And ravens, men say, do foster forlorn children. Take my point? ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... study of the law; and whatever his real ability, the jealousy of the Cecils no doubt prompted the opinion of the queen, that he was not very profound in the branch he had chosen, an opinion which was fully shared by the blunt and outspoken Lord Coke, who was his rival in love, law, and preferment. Prompted no doubt by the coldness of Burleigh, he joined the opposition headed by the Earl of Essex, and he found in that nobleman a powerful friend and generous patron, who used ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... still we have to do that. And surely this is no great sin. But the danger lies in the writer becoming the victim of his own exaggeration, losing the exact notion of sincerity, and in the end coming to despise truth itself as something too cold, too blunt for his purpose—as, in fact, not good enough for his insistent emotion. From laughter and tears the descent is easy ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... surely, the Old Man began to grow old. The thin spot on top of his head grew shiny, so that the Kid noticed it and made blunt comments upon the subject. His rheumatism was not his worst foe, now. He had to pet his digestive apparatus and cut out strong coffee with three heaping teaspoons of sugar in each cup, because the Little Doctor told him his liver was torpid. He had to stop giving ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... person in the rendezvous had come up, and waited with breathless anxiety. We stood face to face, more like two men about to engage in deadly duel than a pair of amateurs with blunt foils. My antagonist was evidently a practised swordsman. I could see that as he came to guard. As for myself, the small-sword exercise had been a foible of my college days, and for years I had not met my match at it; but just then I ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... sergeant, with a thick blunt nose, and a broken row of tobacco-stained teeth; "we're off for the ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... actions), and of Prince Arthur with Leicester, and sometimes more or less problematical, as that of Artegall with Lord Grey, of Timias the Squire with Raleigh, and so forth. To those who are perplexed by these double meanings the best remark is Hazlitt's blunt one that "the allegory won't bite them." In other words, it is always perfectly possible to enjoy the poem without troubling oneself about the allegory at all, except in its broad ethical features, which are quite unmistakable. On the other hand, I am inclined ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... her keenly. "Why don't you march up and read the name, if you want to so much?" was her blunt question. ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... least in his eyes; while Sir Christopher, having done as much mischief as a good heart well can do in a walk of an hour, returned home to write a long letter to his mother, against 'learning and all such nonsense, which only served to blunt the affections and harden the heart.' 'Admirable young man!' cried the mother, with tears in her eyes; 'a good heart is better than all the heads in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 345, December 6, 1828 • Various
... her voice and manner. This was the only part of the character in which it had been possible, with her physical peculiarities, to produce an imitation of Miss Garth; and here the resemblance was perfect. The harsh voice, the blunt manner, the habit of accompanying certain phrases by an emphatic nod of the head, the Northumbrian burr expressing itself in every word which contained the letter "r"—all these personal peculiarities of the old North-country governess were reproduced ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... The blunt club of the lumberman's speech was scarcely a match for the sharp rapier of Raffer's tongue. As the crowd laughed it was evident that the fox-faced man was getting the ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... Riley, and "One-ear" Mike, well and unfavorably known in the tough shoestring district that blackened the left bank of the river. They passed a newspaper back and forth among themselves. The item that each solid and blunt forefinger pointed out was an advertisement headed "One Hundred Dollars Reward." To earn it one must return the rag-doll lost, strayed, or stolen from the Millionaire's mansion. It seemed that grief still ravaged, unchecked, in the bosom of the too faithful ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... elongated beak and great wattles, the Barb with its short broad beak and eye-wattles, the short- faced Tumbler with its small conical beak, the Pouter with its great crop, long legs and body, the Fantail with its upraised, widely-expanded, well- feathered tail, the Turbit with its frill and short blunt beak, and the Jacobin with his hood. Now, if this same person could have viewed the pigeons kept before 1600 by Akber Khan in India and by Aldrovandi in Europe, he would have seen the Jacobin with a less perfect ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the bottom of the soul, more necessary in the clerical than in any other calling. "A prime virtue in the pulpit is mental integrity. The absence of it is a subtle source of moral impotence. It concerns other things than the blunt antipodes represented by a truth and a lie. Argument which does not satisfy a preacher's logical instinct; illustration which does not commend itself to his aesthetic taste; a perspective of doctrine which ...
— The Preacher and His Models - The Yale Lectures on Preaching 1891 • James Stalker
... without rising, and bade him take a chair. Henry spoke not at all, and bent his dim eyes again over his knitting without a smile. Henry Judd had the lank height of his father, and his blunt elongation of face and features, informed by his mother's spirit. The result in his expression was an absolute ferocity instead of severity of gloom, a fury of resentment against his fate, instead of that bitter leaning towards it which is ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... in a similar manner—this being considered a great honour to a guest; and no sooner had we accepted the offer than an old woman made her appearance armed with the necessary implements, and with the aid of a pair of very blunt needles, and a peculiar species of dye obtained from a tree, succeeded, after a good hour's work, in embellishing us—L. with a ring on each shoulder (the sign manual of the tribe), and myself with a bird, whose genus it would ...
— On the Equator • Harry de Windt
... say one cutting thing after another.—You have been as noted, all round our town, for being a kind man, as being a blunt one. ...
— John Bull - The Englishman's Fireside: A Comedy, in Five Acts • George Colman
... busy from morning till night chopping down trees for house-logs. It was a work of time and labour, as the axe was blunt and the oaks hard to cut; but they laboured on without grumbling, and Kate watched the fall of each tree with lively joy. They were no longer dull; there was something to look forward to from day to day—they ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... cordate or reniform, wider than long, scarcely ever lobed, smooth, glabrous on both surfaces at maturity; petiolar sinus wide, shallow; margin coarsely toothed, frequently a sharp, abrupt point at terminal. Cluster small. Berries small, black or purple-black. Seeds small, not notched; beak short, blunt; raphe distinct to indistinct, usually showing as a narrow groove; chalaza pear-shaped, sometimes distinct, but usually a depression only. Leafing, blossoming ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... kingdom to be exhibited on gateways, towers, and bridges. This practice served to provide the public with convincing proof that a traitor was actually dead, and was very necessary in an age when Rumour, "stuffing the ears of men with false reports" held sway over "the blunt monster with uncounted heads, the still discordant wavering multitude." Micklegate Bar was so used. In Shakespeare's Henry VI. Queen Margaret makes, with reference to the Duke of York, this bitter play ...
— Life in a Medival City - Illustrated by York in the XVth Century • Edwin Benson
... was called up-stairs, and made acquainted with the mitigation of his fate; upon which he said, he would down on his marrow-bones to his own master, but would be d—d before he would ask pardon of e'er a Frenchman in Christendom. Pickle, exasperated at this blunt declaration, ordered him out of his presence, and charged him never to appear before his face again; while the officer in vain employed all his influence and address to appease his resentment, and about ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... the doctor, in his blunt way, which nevertheless expressed more sympathy than a lot of fine phrases. Then he said to the mother: 'You're all worn out, and yet she'll need close watching ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And the man-eater turned on me. You know the South Seas, and you know that the tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail. The combat, ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... hostile and irresponsive camp of motor lorry drivers, who much resented the use of "their" Y.M.C.A. hut for such religious purposes. A Wesleyan minister had charge of it, and got far more of their blunt language than I the visitor did; but he worked undismayed and unreservedly for all he was worth, for the National Mission and for me. The alliance was natural, real, inevitable. He and I, and some five or six men of that camp, were clearly on one side, and the rest ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... was exceedingly cordial, and in a blunt way he plunged right into the business in hand. "We are very glad to see you; we have some ...
— Medoline Selwyn's Work • Mrs. J. J. Colter
... Bogle's there was almost a heart tragedy. Tildy with the blunt nose, the hay-coloured hair, the freckled skin, the bag-o'-meal figure, had never had an admirer. Not a man followed her with his eyes when she went to and fro in the restaurant save now and then when they glared with the beast-hunger for food. None of them bantered her gaily to coquettish ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... for the boys to find out that I was not one of themselves, and they began to look at me askance and leave me out of their conversations. I was made to feel once more that I had been born under a malignant star that did not allow me to speak or act as they did. I had not their common sense, their blunt cheerfulness, their complete lack of sensibility, and while they resented my queerness they could not know how anxious I was to be an ordinary boy. When I saw that they mistrusted me I was too proud to accept the crumbs of their society like poor mother F——, and I withdrew ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... steel, but fond of dress, reckless, dissipated, and extravagant. Yet his faults were those of his age, and belonged to the circumstances by which he was surrounded. The Baron de Clairville, while he left his daughter free to make her election, yet, as a plain, blunt soldier, rather than a courtier, secretly inclined to favor the pretensions of Henri. Still, his treatment of the two young guardsmen was the same, for they gave equal promise ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... yellow tawny color. At the time of the discovery of the lake, Messrs. Oswell and Wilson shot two specimens of another variety. One was an old lion, whose teeth were mere stumps, and his claws worn quite blunt; the other was full grown, in the prime of life, with white, perfect teeth; both were entirely destitute of mane. The lions in the country near the lake give tongue less than those further south. We scarcely ever heard them roar ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... never allows that any fulness of inward life can dispense with the duties of every-day life, with mercy, truth, industry, generosity, self-control. The unworthy man who is excluded from the kingdom is not the man of blunt, homely feeling, incapable of ecstatic rapture and exalted emotion, but the man who locks up for himself the gold God gave him for the general good, who shuts his ear to the cry of the poor, who entrenches his heart behind a cold inhumanity, who permits the naked to shiver ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... personal violence could intimidate, and who would cheerfully have risked his life for his cause, yet still a man who could never forget that he was a Tory and a gentleman, who had no grit before lords and ladies, whose Abolitionism was not sufficiently blunt and downright in the good company of cabinet ministers, whose sensitive nature flinched at the thought of being conscientiously impolite and heroically ill-natured, and whose manners were thus frequently in the way of the full efficiency ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... Caleb's blunt expression of resentment again awakened the mirth of the company, which, by the way, he regarded not only as an aggression upon the dignity of the family, but a special contempt of the eloquence with which he himself had summed up the extent ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... wherein he is received, is treated with, and carries back offers of accommodation from the King, the King's attendants upon the occasion are the Prince of Wales, Lord John of Lancaster, the Earl of Westmorland, Sir Walter Blunt, and Sir John Falstaff.—What shall be said to this? Falstaff is not surely introduced here in vicious indulgence to a mob audience;—he utters but one word, a buffoon one indeed, but aside, and to the Prince only. ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... great comfort," declaimed Evangeline with emphasis. She might have been the mother of six comforts. Tenderness crept into her eyes, and her freckles seemed to fade out, and even the small blunt nose of her take on middle-agedness and motherliness. '"Specially when you undress 'em. They're so darlin' an' soft! You ever undressed one—a reg'lar baby one? Of course not one o' your own when you never had ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... his becoming that of other animals: those organs, on the contrary, which softness and sensuality can alone improve, must remain in a state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy; and as his senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste must be extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly if we may believe travellers, it is that of most savage nations. We must not therefore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good ...
— A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of - The Inequality Among Mankind • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... scaly fish; a rough, blunt tar. To have other fish to fry; to have other matters to mind, ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... I have been deeply interested in for forty years past. Let me quote to the reader from one of many letters I have received from Sir Wilfrid Seawen Blunt during the past seven years. His practical knowledge of the English thoroughbred race horse and his blood cause, the Arabian, is the equal if not superior to any other one man of this ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... The girl's eyes passed observantly over him now and then; she was critical of appearances, no doubt. That his aspect and demeanour might be in keeping, he bore himself somewhat bluffly, threw out brief, blunt phrases, and met Miss Elvan's glance with a confident smile. No resentment of this behaviour appeared in her look or speech; as the meal went on, she talked more freely, and something of frank curiosity began to reveal ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... opossums from a tree or sugar bag (wild honey) by means of a tomahawk of green stone; the handle is formed of a vine, and fixed in its place with gum. It is astonishing what a quantity of work is got through in the day with these blunt tomahawks." ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... dropped everything. But—had he hesitated long enough to pick up a Maxim silencer and a blunt-nosed automatic? And was the "row" which Sprague had been so glibly explaining away an ancient one—a row so deadly that, when Nita Selim had refused to heed his written warning, her murder had ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... just a bit drowsy. I managed to make away with the second without inhaling much of the smoke, for my head was in a whirl by this time. It wasn't so much that I was afraid I couldn't take care of myself as it was that I was afraid that it would blunt the keenness of my observation ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... and peeved all the same, for she dearly wanted to talk to Gay and Spiller. At last the modish gadflies got tired of having their smart talk turned against them, and one by one fell off, especially as Huddy, whose blunt speech was not much to their taste, came up and intruded without ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... you an excellent appetite. Wish me the same, for I am coming to see you soon—sooner than I had intended—and shall eat for three. I simply must get away from home, if only for a fortnight. From morning till night I am unpleasantly irritable, I feel as though someone were drawing a blunt knife over my soul, and this irritability finds external expression in my hurrying off to bed early and avoiding conversation. Nothing I do succeeds. I began a story for the Sbornik; I wrote half and threw it up, and then began another; I have been struggling ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... the rock of Sardonix; The steel but grinds, it breaks not, nor grows blunt; Then seeing that he cannot break his sword, Thus to himself he mourns for Durendal: "O good my sword, how bright and pure! Against The sun what flashing light thy blade reflects! When Carle passed through the valley ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Kempis, "that heareth the Lord speaking in him and taketh from His mouth the word of consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of God's whisper and take no heed of the whisper of this world."[96] Though St. John of the Cross has reminded us with blunt candour that such persons are for the most part only talking to themselves, we need not deny the value of such a talking as a means of expressing the deeply known and intimate presence of Spirit. ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... them till his own light, wee structure is as securely placed as the cement bungalow of the bigger bird. So, too, the tyrant flycatcher loves to build his larger nest, often interwoven with waste string till it looks as if he had tied it on. He seeks the very tip of the level limb and the blunt, sturdy, spreading twigs invite his confidence as they do that of the chipping sparrow. This bold exposure of eggs and nestlings invites thieving jays and murderous crows, hawks and owls, but the king-bird's dinner flies by while he waits, ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... old man, emphatically. Another general, and far less equivocal laugh, at the expense of Desire, succeeded this blunt declaration Nothing intimidated by such a manifest assent to the opinion of the hardy seaman, the undaunted ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper
... sit like a giant above all human affairs for the next two decades, and the speech of Mars is blunt and plain. He will say to us all: "Get your houses in order. If you squabble among yourselves, waste time, litigate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, I will certainly come down upon you again. I have taken all your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed and maimed ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... prey, and a portion of the under side of the rock became alive! Two ink-black eyes appeared, bulging, oval, implacable; and between them opened a great, hooked beak, like a giant parrot's. There was no separate head behind this gaping beak, but eyes and beak merely marked the blunt end of a ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... One grafted tree and four seedlings were planted on the Station grounds. They grew well and showed very little killing back and for several years gave quite nice crops of nuts, but of recent years the yield has been rather small. The nut is blunt-oval in shape and of good size with a fairly hard shell which is well sealed but not any too easy to open. The quality is fairly good but the pellicle is rather ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... prime of life, and had been one of the handsomest beavers in the woods, with fur of the thickest and softest and silkiest, and a weight of probably sixty pounds. Now he was thin and lean, his hair was falling out, his teeth were losing their sharp edges and becoming blunt and almost useless, and even his flat tail was growing thicker and more rounded, and its whack was not as startling as of old when he brought it down with all his might on ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... into which he had declined (or, in another sense, to which he had advanced)—denaturalized him. He would often weigh and consider for hours together the meaning of such and such a deed or phrase of hers, when a blunt settling question would formerly have been his first instinct. And now, uneasy at the thought of a passion for Farfrae which should entirely displace her mild filial sympathy with himself, he observed her going and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... Shocked upon swords and shields. A prince's banner Wavered, then staggered backward, hemmed by foes. A craven hung along the battle's edge, And thought, "Had I a sword of keener steel— That blue blade that the king's son bears,—but this Blunt thing—!" he snapt and flung it from his hand, And lowering crept away and left the field. Then came the king's son, wounded, sore bestead, And weaponless, and saw the broken sword, Hilt-buried in the dry and trodden sand, And ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... which he rolled on his belly and began whittling in the hard clay, for Tom had the carving habit—like many a younger boy. Alfred carefully extracted a short pipe from beneath his chaparajos, pushed down with his blunt forefinger the charge with which it was already loaded, and struck a match. He poised this for a moment above the bowl ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... concealing Bismarck was past master. While usually figured as a blunt, bold, tyrannical man, there was also a side of ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... "War and civilization," said one of the great English ministers, "are contradictory terms, even as Christ and Mars." Particularly damaging is the effect of war upon citizens. For does it not blunt the sensibilities, harden the heart, inflame the mind with passions, and deaden the consciences of men? Said the same great English preacher, "The sword that smites the enemy abroad, also lays bare the primeval savage within the citizen at home." ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... began walking about the room, and talking with considerable vehemence, but no more in anger. He would tell her what cause there was for this silly gossip. He would tell her who this girl was who had been lightly mentioned. And in his blunt, frank, matter-of-fact way, which did not quite conceal his emotion, he revealed to his cousin all that he thought of Wenna Rosewarne, and what he hoped for her in the future, and what their present relations were, and then plainly asked her if she ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... of his arrival at Buyukderer that he did not fear her. No woman perhaps ever lived who worried a man less in friendship, or who gave, without any insistence upon it, a stronger impression of loyalty, of tenacity in affection to those for whom she cared. Although often almost delicately blunt in words, in action she was full of tact. She was one of those rare women who absolutely understand men, and who know how to convey to men instantly the fact of their understanding. Such women are always attractive to men. Even if they are plain, and not otherwise ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... he desired, and he was not to hesitate in the expression of any fancy his sickly state might prompt him to make. R—— told him, also, to join the yacht at Cowes when he returned to England. King lived to see the English shores again, and gratefully, in the blunt, pathetic language of a sailor, to thank his amiable benefactor. He fills, at this moment, his ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... takes the spear on the flat of both his hands. The shaft is all black, but the head is of white ivory. It is blunt and ...
— Plays of Near & Far • Lord Dunsany
... Irish Parliamentary Party indeed represent Ireland in this, Mr. Wilfred Blunt's noble protest in his recent work, The Land War in Ireland, would stand for the contemptuous impeachment, not of a political party but ...
— The Crime Against Europe - A Possible Outcome of the War of 1914 • Roger Casement
... mem," he said, giving one look at her pale face, and then turning away in a flurry. "I beg to refer you to Blunt, Hone, and Sharpus, my lawyers, mem," ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that pushed agreeably ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... "Blunt enough," admitted Mr. Hammond, but without excitement. "Let's see: You have a paper of some kind, I suppose, to serve ...
— Ruth Fielding on the St. Lawrence - The Queer Old Man of the Thousand Islands • Alice B. Emerson
... with his reputation of being the largest trader in Orkney, and a very wealthy man. Physically he was of towering stature. His hair was light brown, and rather curly; his eyes large and bright blue, his face broad and rosy. He had great bodily and mental vigor, he was blunt in speech, careless about his dress, and simple in all his ways. His Protestantism was of the most decided character, but he was not a Presbyterian. Presbyterianism was a new thing on the face of the earth; he had been "authoritatively ...
— An Orkney Maid • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... is the prettiest woman you can dream of; a real beauty; springtime! A flower!' 'You must excuse me, but if your mistress is really like springtime and a flower, you (pray excuse me for being so blunt) are not exactly that, and perhaps I should not exactly be in a mood to humor you, my dear lady, in the same way ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... believed in his protestations of friendship, and in his blunt sincerity. She allowed him to conduct her to his wife, the queen, and was received by her and Madame Adelaide with the same cordiality the king had shown. Once only in the course of the conversation did Madame Adelaide forget her cordial disposition. She asked ...
— Queen Hortense - A Life Picture of the Napoleonic Era • L. Muhlbach
... that my absence had passed unnoticed. Nor did my good friend the captain utter a word to them of what he knew. But afterwards he called me to him and set me upon his knee. How big, and kind, and strong he was, and how I loved his bluff soldier's face and blunt ways. And when at last he spoke, his words burnt deep in my memory, so that even ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... parts of Europe, involving the use of a fluid which must often be yellow and sometimes salt, possibly indicate the earlier use of urine. (The Greek water of aspersion, according to Theocritus, was mixed with salt, as is sometimes the modern Italian holy water. J.J. Blunt, Vestiges of Ancient Manners and Customs, p. 173.) Among the Hottentots, as Kolbein and others have recorded, the medicine man urinated alternately on bride and bridegroom, and a successful young warrior was sprinkled in the same way. Mungo Park mentions that in Africa on ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... a wooden box, made the size of the canvas bale, which is suspended therein by hooks from the open top; the box has a movable side, which is loosened out to give exit to the bale when pressed. The pressing is done by the feet, assisted by a blunt spade, and the bales are generally very creditably turned out, the sheep-farmer priding himself on a neatly pressed bale. When pressed the end is sewn up and the bale rolled over to a convenient place for branding, when it is ready for ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... without the aid of a repeller applied against the shoulder, space may be obtained to draw the head into a vertical position, and even to slip the hand down so as to seize the nose. Should it prove impossible to draw the head up with the unassisted fingers, a blunt hook (Pl. XXI, fig. 6) may be inserted into the orbit, on which an assistant may drag while another pushes upon the limbs or repeller. Meanwhile the operator may secure an opportunity of reaching and seizing the nose or of passing a blunt hook into the angle of the mouth. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... kind had ceased to alarm Cytherea. Miss Aldclyffe's blunt mood was not her worst. Cytherea thought of another man, whose name, in spite of resolves, tears, renunciations and injured pride, lingered in her ears like an old familiar strain. That man was qualified for ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... a calm evening in the autumn 1756 when Teddy Maroon, smoking a little black pipe, sauntered towards the residence of old John Potter. On reaching the door he extinguished the little pipe by the summary process of thrusting the point of his blunt forefinger into the bowl, and deposited it hot in his vest pocket. His tap was answered by a small servant girl, with a very red and ragged head of hair, who ushered him into the presence of the aged ...
— The Story of the Rock • R.M. Ballantyne
... said he. 'You see if I don't. When I say a thing I mean it. I will be your brother.' And he took her hand, caressing it, and showing her that he was not in the least afraid of her. He was blunt in his bearing, saying things which her father would have called indelicate and heartless, as though they gave him no effort, and placing himself at once almost in a position of ascendency. This Clara had not intended. She had ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... with an open visor, and without feathers; on his legs was bull's hide. On their left shoulders, they carried shields with coat of arms; on the Teuton's at the top was a chessboard, at the bottom, three lions rampant; on Zbyszko's, a blunt horseshoe. In the right hand they carried broad, huge, terrible axes, set in oaken, blackened helves, longer than the arm of a grown man. The warriors who seconded them were: Hlawa, called by Zbyszko, Glowacz, and van Krist, both dressed in dark iron ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... say that, and help me do my duty." And all the coldness melted out of Phebe's manner as she hugged her little mistress close, feeling the comfort of sympathy even through the blunt sincerity of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... caution that might have enabled him to shelter himself against these blasts. With all his experience of Courts, Hyde never learned the arts of a courtier. He was naively unconscious how little the steadfast honesty of his purpose could render his blunt plainness of diction palatable to a master, the chief feature of whose character was callous selfishness, and whose self-love might for the moment allow him to overlook, but never permitted him to ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... and close as when the fight begun, Their huge unwieldy navy wastes away; So sicken waning moons too near the sun, And blunt their crescents on the edge ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... of cozey fuss Was changed to prospects queering The blunt ran shy, and Bobby brush'd, [6] To get more rag not fearing; [7] To Islington he quickly hied, A traveller there he dropped on; The traps were fly, his rig they spied [8] And ruffles soon they popped on. [9] When evening came, he sought not home, While she, poor stupid woman, Got ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... feelings of an overwhelming interest. Quang, however, maintained with every manifestation of inspired assurance that Yat Huang was to be commended down to the smallest detail, inasmuch as proficiency in the use of both blunt and sharp-edged weapons, and a faculty for passing undetected through the midst of an encamped body of foemen, fitted a person for the every-day affairs of ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... North America in the Oligocene, and are still very primitive in structure, combining features of the hog and the ruminants. Primitive deer and oxen begin in the Miocene, and seem to have an earlier representative in certain American animals (Protoceras), of which the male has a pair of blunt outgrowths between the ears. The first true deer are hornless (like the primitive muskdeer of Asia to-day), but by the middle of the Miocene the males have small two-pronged antlers, and as the period proceeds three or four more ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of these things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead, thereof, a gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace that, notwithstanding these terrible circumstances, so much struggling virtue lingered ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... people—Irene, who was staring at Rilla's feet as if she had never seen feet before! And once she had thought Irene's manner perfection! Everything that Rilla had prepared to say vanished from her memory. Vainly trying to tuck her unlucky foot under her chair, she blurted out a blunt statement. ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... before she took his meaning, so much did his blunt proposal seem a part of the staccato chat of politics ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... feel as you do about it, Evelyn," was her blunt rejoinder. "It shows that you are on the right road. I don't believe it is necessary for you to tell the Southards anything. Still there is another person who ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... as though all the nerve ends in every human body were burnt blunt in the first hot gush of war. Even the casual eyewitness gets it. We got it ourselves; and not until we had quit the zone of hostilities did we shake it off. Indeed, we did not try. It made for subsequent sanity to carry for the time a drugged ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... caught this day some little transparent shells (Cuvieria) of a cylindrical form, and blunt at the end; they put out two little fins ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... state; the usual clatter that attends any important personage in a trivial scrape ensued; Mr. Gladstone's explanations, simple and veracious as the sunlight in their substance, were over-skilful in form, and half a dozen blunt, sound sentences would have stood him in far better stead. 'There was on my part in this matter,' he says in a fugitive scrap upon it, 'a singular absence of worldly wisdom.'[214] To colonial policy ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... hardships and dangers, yet they loved the life with a love which is strange to view and hard to understand. In the oil made from these "royal fish" the colonists found a vast and cheap supply for their metal and glass lamps; while the toothed whales had stored in their blunt heads a valuable material which was at once used for making candles; it is termed, in the most ancient reference I have found to it in ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... suthin' busted there," remarked the sailor, taking the pipe from his mouth and quietly ramming its contents down with the end of his blunt forefinger. ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... from South Africa, and the northern aard-vark (O. aethiopicus) of north-eastern Africa, extending into Egypt. In form these animals are somewhat pig-like; the body is stout, with arched back; the limbs are short and stout, armed with strong, blunt claws; the ears disproportionately long; and the tail very thick at the base and tapering gradually. The greatly elongated head is set on a short thick neck, and at the extremity of the snout is a disk in which the nostrils open. The mouth is small and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sanctity of family, no binding tie of marriage, none of the fine felicities and the endearing affections of home. Few of these things were the lot of the Southern black woman. Instead, thereof, a gross barbarism, which tended to blunt the tender sensibilities, to obliterate feminine delicacy and womanly shame, came down as her heritage from generation to generation; and it seems a miracle of providence and grace that, notwithstanding these ...
— The American Missionary, Vol. XLII. April, 1888. No. 4. • Various
... are thus very simple in form, there are a few other slight variations in detail which assist in distinguishing them. The rods are sometimes very blunt at the ends, almost as if cut square across, while in other species they are more rounded and occasionally slightly tapering. Sometimes they are surrounded by a thin layer of some gelatinous substance, which forms what is called a capsule (Fig. 10). This capsule may ...
— The Story Of Germ Life • H. W. Conn
... militant. There was a feline smoothness about the visitor which had been jarring upon him ever since he first spoke. Billy was of the plains, the home of blunt speech, where you looked your man in the eye and said it quick. Mr. Parker was too bland for human consumption. He offended Billy's ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Mr. G.F. describes this whale as being about twelve yards long, having an oblong blunt head, on which there were two longitudinal furrows, and as many upright ridges. It had small eyes, two semi-lunar apertures, from whence it occasionally spouted the water, and it was mottled all over with white spots. It had two large fins ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... for worship. Did he really think that possibly Jesus would actually worship him? The first flush answer is, surely not. Yet he is putting the thing in a way that has secured actual worship from many a'one who would be horrified at such a blunt putting of his conduct. We must shake off the caricature of a devil with pointed horns, and split hoof, and forked tail, and see the real, to understand better. From all accounts he must be a being of splendor and beauty, of majestic bearing, and dignity. His appeal in effect is this:—These ...
— Quiet Talks about Jesus • S. D. Gordon
... reserved, coy and discreet women much more than blunt, shrewd and boisterous. Falsehood, false hair, false curls, false forms, false bosoms, false colors, false cheeks, and all that is false, men naturally dislike, for in themselves they are a poor foundation on which ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... human affection for which her heart had starved. The love she had hitherto known had been unsatisfying, too impersonal, too restrained, too interwoven with mystical devotion. Mass Craven's affection was of a hardier, more practical nature. Blunt candour and sincerity personified, she did not attempt to disguise her attachment. She had been attracted, had approved, and had finally co-opted Gillian into the family. She had, moreover, great faith in her own judgment. And to justify that faith Gillian ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... too blunt for us all," cried King Media. "His devil is even more subtle than yours, Babbalanja. Let ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... reason objects for some time to the proposed tourney for her hand, in which the already proven invincibility of the Count of Blois makes him almost a certain victor, because it involves a conditional consent to admit another mate. To her scrupulousness, a kind of blunt common-sense, tempering the amiability of Urraca, is a pleasant set-off, and the freshness of Persewis completes ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... bold, blunt compliment, yet it was uttered with evident sincerity; but she had turned the locket so that she could see the likeness and did not catch the double meaning of his words. So she only answered calmly and earnestly, ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... I saw not far from me a meteor—a cloud divided into smaller clouds, some of which were of an azure color, some opaque, and as it were in collision together. They were streaked with translucent irradiations of light, which at one time appeared sharp like the points of swords, at another, blunt like broken swords. The streaks sometimes darted out forwards, at others they drew themselves in again, exactly like combatants; thus those different colored lesser clouds appeared to be at war together; but it was only their manner of sporting with each other. And as this ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... laden with brown catkins, its blunt foliage stained with innumerable shades of lovely colour. Near it was a horse-chestnut, with but a few leaves hanging on its branches, and those a deep orange. The limes, ...
— The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft • George Gissing
... vppermost part, and the extreme coldnesse of the earth in the bottome, the sea there being but of small depth, whereby the one accidentall coldnesse doth meet with the other, and the Sunne not hauing his reflection so neere the Pole, but at very blunt angels, it can neuer be dissolued after it is frozen, notwithstanding the great length of their day: for that the sunne hath no heate at all in his light or beames, but proceeding onely by an accidentall reflection, which ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of The English Nation, Vol. XII., America, Part I. • Richard Hakluyt
... people are very bad, their swords being short and blunt at the points. They have arquebusses also, but they shoot very badly with them. The king keeps great state, sitting in public twice every day, having all his nobles, which they call shemines, sitting on each side at a good distance, and a numerous guard ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... a few blunt words, unsoftened by excuse or justification, he told her, not the fact only, but his dread of ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... are not often those which most readily strike our blunt senses. We see the shell first. To the undeveloped mind the material is all there is. But looking deeper into life there comes an awakening to the fact and the significance of the spiritual, the feeling that the reason, ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... obovate-cuneate leaflets; in front rounded, or truncate, or retuse, or sometimes 3-toothed, flat at the margin; rachis dilated; fruit-bearing pedicels solitary; capsules 3 to 4-celled; valves cymbeo-semiorbicular, all around broadly winged; the wing rounded-blunt on both extremities; dissepiments persistent with the columella. On the ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... certain points in their appearance should also be noted. If eggs of the best quality are desired, medium-sized ones that are uniform in size and color should be selected. With regard to shape, they should have a comparatively long oval shell, one end of which is blunt and the other, ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... hotter than it is here now. I was prepared for intelligent criticisms but I thought they would be so wrapped up in the cotton wool of politeness that no one would be very much impressed. On the contrary, he stated his opinions in the most direct, blunt, telling way. The fact was noted in my report and now his conduct out here has ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume I • Ian Hamilton
... thus furnished with workers capable of taking a share in her task. The Vespa sylvestris builds a paper nest of this kind, hanging to the branch of a tree, like a great grey sphere prolonged to a blunt neck. (Fig. 33.) The Hornet's nest is ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... best expressed by using the possessive pronoun and omitting the derogative adjective altogether. Japanese indirect methods for the expression of the personal relation are thus numberless and subtile. May it not be plausibly argued since the European has only a few blunt pronouns wherewith to state this idea while the Japanese has both numberless pronouns and many other delicate ways of conveying the same idea, that the latter is far in advance of the European in the development ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... of unkempt appearance, cooking his rice. When Yue-ts'un perceived that he paid no notice, he went up to him and asked him one or two questions, but as the old priest was dull of hearing and a dotard, and as he had lost his teeth, and his tongue was blunt, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... hurried to sea without clearing at the custom-house from Boston, Bangor, Portland, and Gloucester. She had carried local authority in the persons of distressed United States marshals to sea with her from three other ports, and landed it on some outlying point before the next meal-hour. With her blunt jib-boom she had prodded a hole in the side of a lighthouse supply-boat, and sailed away without answering questions. The government was taking cognizance, and her description was written on the fly-leaves of several revenue cutters' log-books, while Sunday newspapers in the large ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... time there is the skeleton of a house, which is entirely open in front. The roof and sides must be covered. For this purpose the trunks of great spruces are skinned. The woodman rims the bark near the foot of the tree, and again six feet above, and slashes it perpendicularly; then, with a blunt stick, he crowds off this thick hide exactly as an ox is skinned. It needs but a few of these skins to cover the roof; and they make a perfectly water-tight roof, except when it rains. Meantime busy hands have gathered boughs of the spruce and the feathery balsam, and shingled the ground underneath ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... its short broad beak and eye-wattles, the short- faced Tumbler with its small conical beak, the Pouter with its great crop, long legs and body, the Fantail with its upraised, widely-expanded, well- feathered tail, the Turbit with its frill and short blunt beak, and the Jacobin with his hood. Now, if this same person could have viewed the pigeons kept before 1600 by Akber Khan in India and by Aldrovandi in Europe, he would have seen the Jacobin with a less perfect hood; the Turbit apparently without its frill; ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... renewal of happiness to her heart, wearied with jealousy, to find one to whom old times were precious, and who took her up where he had last seen her. His blunt ways, and downright attacks, were a refreshment to a spirit chafing against the external smoothness and refinement of her way of life, and the pleasure of yielding to his arguments was something new ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... liking loved. The sight could jealous pangs beguile, And charm Malbecco's cares a while; And he, the wandering squire of dames, Forgot his Columbella's claims, And passion, erst unknown, could gain The breast of blunt Sir Satyrane; Nor durst light Paridel advance, Bold as he was, a looser glance. She charmed at once, and tamed the heart, Incomparable Britomarte! So thou, fair city! disarrayed Of battled wall, and rampart's aid, As stately seem'st, but lovelier far Than in that panoply ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... dropped some dreadful hints Of One whose sole decree Governed the views of various prints Not to be named by me; He disapproved of paper rings; In language almost rudely blunt he Dilated on the puppet-strings Pulled by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... much produced, the anterior margin and the tips of the mandibles ferruginous; the cheek with long whitish pubescence. Thorax: the sides of the metathorax, the floccus on the posterior femora and the postscutellum with whitish pubescence, the latter produced in the middle into a blunt tooth; the legs fusco-ferruginous, with the anterior tibiae and apical joints of the tarsi brighter; wings hyaline and iridescent. Abdomen shining and punctured, the apical margins of the two basal segments broadly depressed, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... insignificant, and laid at the height of a table, like the dead warrior's, would look lumbering and tumid. Thus, again, the head of Donatello's Poggio, which is visible and intelligible placed high up in the darkness of the Cathedral of Florence, looks as if it had been gashed and hacked with a blunt knife when seen in the cast at the usual ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... houses of the quai and the wing, topped by a balustrade with great grey stone urns of a domed building of which he did not know the name. Barges were coming upstream, the dense green water spuming under their blunt bows, towed by a little black tugboat with its chimney bent back to pass under the bridges. The tug gave a thin shrill whistle. Andrews started walking downstream. He crossed by the bridge at the corner of the Louvre, turned his back on the arch Napoleon built to receive ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... halo, without which it must have speedily become a prey to the opposition. The right of ejection was retained; but what they chiefly needed was the glitter of the naked blade—the edge of it, which they feared, they took care to blunt. Besides the check involved in the nature of the office—under which the lists of the members of the aristocratic corporations were liable to revision only at intervals of five years —and besides the limitations resulting from the right of veto vested in the colleague ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... prodigious a tumult, that I verily thought half the administration would have run away to Harrowgate. The north Briton was ordered to be burned by the hangman at Cheapside, on Saturday last. The mob rose; the greatest mob, says Mr. Sheriff Blunt, that he has known in forty years. They were armed with that most bloody instrument, the mud out of the kennels: they hissed in the most murderous manner: broke Mr. Sheriff Harley's coach-glass in ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... the uncle you brought that letter from. He was my godfather, you know. This is my sister, Connie." Connie, who was a pretty, fair girl, looked embarrassed at her brother's blunt method of introduction, but he rattled on. "Rather good for a girl. Not so slow as most of them. Can take a turn with the bells or clubs"—by bells and clubs was meant dumb-bells and Indian-clubs—"and she can scout at cricket. Didn't I hear ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting
... entire inability to hold to the salient points; but he still kept his hand on the rudder of the discussion, avoided the fogs of the supernatural and religious on the one side towards which the little old man persisted in pushing, and, on the other, the blunt views of the butcher and the man who had told the foul stories; and contented himself with watching and learning the opinion of the company rather ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... his hands should be Austerely clasped in front, With both thumbs pointing toward the ground," Said Reverend Doctor Blunt. ...
— Good Stories from The Ladies Home Journal • Various
... ye must know, I'll tell ye point blunt to kape out av it. It's an awful thing whin it gits the best ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... the mistress of the house, spoke of him as M. de Rubempre; for his formidable audience he was M. Chardon. Lucien's courage sank under their inquisitive eyes. He could read his plebeian name in the mere movements of their lips, and hear the anticipatory criticisms made in the blunt, provincial fashion that too often borders on rudeness. He had not expected this prolonged ordeal of pin-pricks; it put him still more out of humor with himself. He grew impatient to begin the reading, for then he could assume ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... A poll of young educated Negroes conducted by the NAACP revealed that 71 percent of those of draft age would support the civil disobedience campaign. So impressive was Randolph's support—the New York Times called it a blunt warning from the black public—that one news journal saw in the campaign the specter of a major national crisis.[12-41] On the other hand, the Washington Post cautioned its readers not to exaggerate ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... the letter slowly, line by line, word by word. To tell the truth it was absorbingly interesting to her. Already there had come rumours of the daring and blunt, resistless force with which this new-made millionaire had confronted a gigantic task. His terse communications had found their way into the Press, and in them and in the boy's letter she seemed to discover something Caesaric. ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Hawley had returned to town. No sooner was I apprised of the fact, than I sent him the following blunt and somewhat rude epistle—for I felt too keen a thirst for vengeance on my enemies to admit of my being very choice or respectful in my language, even to ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson
... of Adrienne that Vaudrey thought while Lissac was giving vent to his ironical, blunt complaint. Was Guy mad to speak of Marianne aloud in this way, and in this place, a few feet away from his wife, who could hear everything? Yes, Lissac was over-excited, furious and apparently crazy. He did not lower his tone, in spite of the sudden terror expressed by Vaudrey, who seized ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... writing on the pyramids. And if you will only promise to treat me en bon camarade, without reference to the conventionalities of 'ladies and gentlemen,' taking no thought for your sentences (nor for mine), nor for your blots (nor for mine), nor for your blunt speaking (nor for mine), nor for your badd speling (nor for mine), and if you agree to send me a blotted thought whenever you are in the mind for it, and with as little ceremony and less legibility ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... city spread before you, rich in chimneys and overshadowed by soft elms. At one point a dark, strong steeple lifts itself like a huge gravestone above the surrounding houses, terminating in a square top or a blunt dome; and yonder is another, more ideal in its look, rising slight and fine, and with many ascents and alternating pauses, to reach a delicate pinnacle at great height in the air. It is lighted at intervals with many-paned and glittering windows, ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... treble my venture, would have helped me out. And besides, I had some idea that the Phoenicians had in former times wrought copper in that very spot. That cunning scoundrel, Dousterswivel, found out my blunt side, and brought strange tales (dn him) of appearances of old shafts, and vestiges of mining operations, conducted in a manner quite different from those of modern times; and Iin short, I was a fool, and there is an end. My loss is not much worth speaking about; but Sir Arthur's engagements ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... tribe. As I have said, he was brindle, and gray like Rubislaw granite, his hair short, hard, and close, like a lion's; his body thick set, like a little bull— a sort of compressed Hercules of a dog. He must have been ninety pounds' weight, at the least; he had a large blunt head, his muzzle black as night, his mouth blacker than any night, a tooth or two—being all he had—gleaming out of his jaws of darkness. His head was scarred with the records of old wounds, a sort of series of fields ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... wooden steps and single rotten planks. At 8000 feet I met with pines, whose trunks I had seen strewing the river for some miles lower down: the first that occurred was Abies Brunoniana, a beautiful species, which forms a stately blunt pyramid, with branches spreading like the cedar, but not so stiff, and drooping gracefully on all sides. It is unknown on the outer ranges of Sikkim, and in the interior occupies a belt about 1000 feet lower than the silver ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... adopted the rule of the wise man: "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, that do with all thy might." They speculated, dug, or gambled, with an almost reckless energy. All old forms of courtesy had given place to hearty, blunt good fellowship in their social intercourse. They reminded our traveler of the Jarls and Norse sea-kings, and in the noisy and almost fierce revelry of these bearded gold-hunters around their mountain tires, he seemed to see the brave and jovial ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... lives on fish, but there the resemblance happily ends. In every other respect he presents a pointed antithesis to the man-o'-war hawk; and that is the only pointed thing about him, for he consists wholly of a comfortable body, a blunt neb, and a pair of small, sleepy eyes. He has no neck, for he never requires to look round; no wings, for he never requires to fly; no feet, for he stands firmly on one end, like a 50lb. bag of flour, which, indeed, he closely resembles. His life is unadventurous; some might call it monotonous. ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... Eustace as they called him (to distinguish him from an elder brother, Eudo Count of Saint-Pol), was a blunt copy of his sister, redder than she was, lighter in the hair, much lighter in the eyes. He seemed an affectionate youth, and clung to the great Count Richard like ivy to a tree. Richard gave him the sort of scornful affection one has ...
— The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay • Maurice Hewlett
... repeated. "How do you propose to secure them? By crushing my fingers or dragging me about by my hair? I want to tell you something, Duane: these blunt, masterful men are very amusing on the stage and in fiction, but they're not suitable to have ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... mistaken; perhaps his dislike of the work had got upon his nerves, and showed him everything in the darkest colours. It could scarcely be as bad as he thought, or human society would be impossible. But argument could not blunt the poignancy of his feelings; he preferred, therefore, to leave them inarticulate, striving to forget. In any case, the ordeal would soon be over; it had to be endured for a few hours more, and then he would plunge into his books again, and enjoy ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... likewise draws). Demon! and no half-god! Thou blunt'st the spear; but here's a sword ...
— The Death of Balder • Johannes Ewald
... recommended to the commons the consideration of proper means for lessening the national debt, was a prelude to the famous South-Sea act, which became productive of so much mischief and infatuation The scheme was projected by sir John Blunt, who had been bred a scrivener, and was possessed of all the cunning, plausibility, and boldness requisite for such an undertaking. He communicated his plan to Mr. Aislaby, the chancellor of the exchequer, as well as to one of the secretaries of state. He answered all their ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... The doctor, Mr. Blunt, came, and he too felt the heat, having spent hours in going his rounds in the closeness and dust. He was a rough man, and his temper did not always hold out; he told Alfred sharply that he would have no whining, and when ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and a dog tracing his master's steps over the city pavement is supposed to be a feat no other animal can equal. No doubt the artificial life a horse lives in England, giving so little play to many of his most important faculties, has served to blunt them. He is a splendid creature; but the noble bearing, the dash and reckless courage that distinguish him from the modest horse of the desert, have not been acquired without a corresponding loss in other things. When ridden by night the Indian horse—and sometimes the same habit is found ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... Bronte genius. It would not have been wonderful—in those days—if the quiet Fox How household, with its strong religious atmosphere, its daily psalms and lessons, its love for The Christian Year, its belief in "discipline" (how that comes out in all the letters!) had been repelled by the blunt strength of Jane Eyre; just as it would not have been wonderful if they had held aloof from Miss Martineau, in the days when it pleased that remarkable woman to preach mesmeric atheism, or atheistic mesmerism, as we choose to put it. But there was a ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... in the Filipino forthrightly review, La Solidaridad, of Madrid, in five installments, running from July 15 to September 15, 1890. It was a continuation of Rizal's campaign of education in which he sought by blunt truths to awaken his countrymen to their own faults at the same time that he was arousing the Spaniards to the defects in Spain's colonial system that caused ...
— The Indolence of the Filipino • Jose Rizal
... travel, one returns to England one can taste, smell, feel the difference in the atmosphere, physical and moral—the curious, damp, blunt, good-humored, happy-go-lucky, old-established, slow-seeming formlessness of everything. You hail a porter, you tell him you have plenty of time; he muddles your things amiably, with an air of "It'll ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... who will curtail their consumption if the price has fallen and it is they who constitute the seller's problem, and help to keep down prices for the rest of us. The rest of us—it is well to be quite blunt about it—simply do not count in this connection. We have no cause then to plume ourselves that we have disproved the truth of economic laws when we declare that we seldom weigh the utility of anything against its price. All that this shows is that our ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson
... he had had the good sense to keep company with one Good-conscience; and that friend of his youth kept true to Old Honest all his days, and even lent him his hand and helped him over the river at last. In his own manly, hearty, blunt, breezy, cheery, and genial way Old Honest is a pilgrim we could ill have spared. Old Honest has a warm place all for himself in every ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... pointed instruments, as a nail, or in lacerated wounds, as those made by forcing a blunt instrument, as a hook, into the soft parts, there will be no direct and immediate union. In these cases, apply a soothing poultice, as one made of linseed meal, and also keep the limb still. It is judicious to consult a physician immediately, in punctured ...
— A Treatise on Anatomy, Physiology, and Hygiene (Revised Edition) • Calvin Cutter
... cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you had to feel for it with your finger. It fitted the hollow of your hand, cool and hard, with a blunt nose that ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... it only remains for me to offer apologies for my blunt way of writing. I can but say in excuse of it that I am more accustomed to handle a rifle than a pen, and cannot make any pretence to the grand literary flights and flourishes which I see in novels—for sometimes I like to read a novel. I suppose they—the flights and flourishes—are ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... very blunt," he said contritely. "I came here to find you; what do you want me to talk about,—Stewart's engagement to Miss Polot? It was given the chief place in the ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... rugged, cragged, scraggy; rude, inurbane, burly, unrefined, discourteous, uncivil, blunt, bluff, brusque, austere, abrupt, gruff, boorish, uncourtly; boisterous, tumultuous, tempestuous, stormy; harsh, hard, severe, inclement, drastic, violent; harsh, grating, raucous, discordant, inharmonious; unkempt, disheveled, shaggy; incomplete, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... rather gouty and very choleric old gentleman, prepared to tear down his bell-rope if dinner were not served that minute); then his podgy little fore-legs would double up, and the next few inches of progress would be made on blunt little pink nose, and round little stomach, his hind-legs being flattened out behind him in the exact position of a frog's while swimming. Several times Finn quite thought he had at length found a teat, and, in its infantile, impotent way, the blind fury he displayed was quite terrible, when ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... Winona Penniman, a nurse with the forces overseas. During her months of training in New York the epistolary style of Winona had maintained its old leisurely elegance, but early in the year of 1918 it suffered severely under the strain of active service and became blunt to the point of crudeness. The morale of her nice phrases had ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... them can be taken but by their own consent in parliament. But that the parliament was instituted to check and control the king, and share the supreme power, would in all former times have been esteemed very blunt and indiscreet, if not illegal language. We need not be surprised that governments should long continue, though the boundaries of authority in their several branches be implicit, confused, and undetermined. This is the case all over the world. Who can draw an ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... in haste, signior Baptista, I cannot come every day to woo. You knew my father: he is dead, and has left me heir to all his lands and goods. Then tell me, if I get your daughter's love, what dowry you will give with her.' Baptista thought his manner was somewhat blunt for a lover; but being glad to get Katharine married, he answered that he would give her twenty thousand crowns for her dowry, and half his estate at his death: so this odd match was quickly agreed on, and Baptista went to apprise his shrewish ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... to come from a great distance as he said: "Here, you see, he was stabbed. The knife went to the heart. Here he was hit with something heavy and blunt; but it had enough of an edge to cut the scalp and lay the cheek open. The skull ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... extra intelligence. If he rises higher, he will sink far lower, too. The placid, ordinary youth thinks less, and digests his food better, and has a pleasanter time, on the whole. A sensitive child feels with a keen freshness that only years can blunt. To see some fool of a man crushing a clever child is heart-rending. By curious, misguided instincts, children always look up to their full-grown companions; and the result is, that any adult ass can nip ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and bliss. She seemed a combination of the most divine contradictions, one moment supremely conscious, and in the next adorably child-like and simple, now full of arts and coquettish innuendoes, then again naive, unthinking and almost boyishly blunt and direct; in a word, one of those miraculous New York girls whom abstractly one may disapprove of, but in the concrete must abjectly adore. This easy predominance of the masculine heart over the masculine reason in the presence ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... calling on her dear child, quite helpless at the moment, while Mary took the moaning child. Captain Carbonel, with his own knife (finding it more effective than the blunt old knife on the table), cut off the remains of the little garments which had become tinder, and then handed his wife the flour in a sort of scoop, and as she sprinkled it over the burnt surface, the shrieks and moans abated and gradually died away, the child ...
— The Carbonels • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Occidental service because he had fallen in love with a pretty girl, and thought it his duty to become a "regular," and thus have the chance of seeing her every three months in London. He had conceived a liking for me, reciprocated on my part; the more so, because I knew that behind his blunt exterior there was a warm and manly heart. When he left me I went to my cabin and prepared for dinner, laughing as I did so at his keen, uncompromising criticism, which I knew was correct enough; for of all official posts that of a ship- surgeon ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... a pretty face, Is pretty name enough' And Adelaide is fanciful, And Laura is too fine, But Emily is beautiful, And Mary is divine Maud only suits a high-born dame, And Fanny is a baby name Eliza is not very choice, Jane is too blunt and Bold, And Martha somewhat sorrowful, And Lucy proud and cold; Amelia is too light and gay, Fit for only a flirt; And Caroline is vain and shy, And Flora smart and pert; Louisa is too soft and ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... she put in the time by climbing up on places, and falling down off them, uniformly damaging her self in the operation. As young as she is, she speaks many words tolerably distinctly; and being plain spoken in other respects, blunt and to the point, she opens conversation with all strangers, male or female, with the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... who suits the one to betake himself to the other is more likely to destroy than to save himself.' Nothing that Machiavelli wrote is more sincere, analytic, positive and ruthless. He operates unflinchingly on an assured diagnosis. The hand never an instant falters, the knife is never blunt. He deals with what is, and not with what ought to be. Should the Prince be all-virtuous, all-liberal, all-humane? Should his word be his bond for ever? Should true religion be the master-passion of his life? Machiavelli considers. ...
— Machiavelli, Volume I - The Art of War; and The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... are uniform for the resident population. Of course the summer people have the conventional manners, or lack of manners, of the city. So far as religion has shaped the manners of the old Quaker group, they are often gentle and refined; but as often blunt and imperious. The Irish have the best manners, I observe, and the more transient summer people and farm-hands the worst. In both the last two classes there is too often a pride in rudeness and vulgarity which the native of mature years never exhibits. The Quaker ...
— Quaker Hill - A Sociological Study • Warren H. Wilson
... the decade from 1880 to 1890 abounded with investigations on the reactions of bacteria to heat, so the following decade was remarkable for discoveries regarding the effects of other forms of radiant energy. The observations of Downes and Blunt in 1877 left it uncertain whether the bactericidal effects in broth cultures exposed to solar rays were due to thermal action or not. Further investigations, in which Arloing, Buchner, Chmelewski, and others took part, have led to the proof that rays of light alone are ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... seamanship, and is, besides, a tolerably scientific navigator. He knows the color and taste of the water all along shore from Cape Farewell to the Horn, and can tell the latitude and longitude of any place on the chart without consulting it. Bowditch's Epitome, and Blunt's Coast Pilot, seem to him the only books in the world worth consulting, though I should, perhaps, except Marryatt's novels and Tom Cringle's Log. But of matters connected with the shore Mr. Brewster is ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... be your brother,' said he. 'You see if I don't. When I say a thing I mean it. I will be your brother.' And he took her hand, caressing it, and showing her that he was not in the least afraid of her. He was blunt in his bearing, saying things which her father would have called indelicate and heartless, as though they gave him no effort, and placing himself at once almost in a position of ascendency. This Clara ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... administer the affairs of this country through the support of a party sufficiently powerful to carry their measures. I do not think a Dissolution justifiable to strengthen a party. I think the power of Dissolution is a great instrument in the hands of the Crown, and that there is a tendency to blunt that instrument if it be ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... in the breast of man. Soon, by a righteous judgment, in the line Of his descending progeny was found The first artificer of death; the shrewd Contriver who first sweated at the forge, And forced the blunt and yet unblooded steel To a keen edge, and made it bright for war. Him Tubal named, the Vulcan of old times, The sword and falchion their inventor claim, And the first smith was the first murderer's son. His art survived the ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... Thursday we left Lalpura and marched to Kulgam, a short distance of some eight or ten miles. Mr. Blunt, the forest officer,[1] had most kindly placed the forest bungalows of the Lolab at our disposal; but, as they all lie on the other side of the valley, we are obliged to camp every night. We have been working along the north side of the Lolab, ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... of grass with his hard, blunt fingers. Then he took up his pipe again and turned the stem about between his teeth. And the while he cast glances at ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... experiment. I got a quantity of cast iron garden nails, an inch and a quarter long and 1/8 in. thick in the middle. These I weighed, and selected such as were nearly of the same weight. I then arranged matters so that by removing a prop I could cause the blunt edge of a steel chisel weighted to 4lb. 2oz., to fall from a given height upon the middle of the nail as it was supported from each end, 1-1/16 in. asunder. In order to secure the absolute fairness of the ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... alternative of being with him on decent and distant terms, or of breaking off with him altogether. The first of these courses might perhaps have been the wisest, but the other was the most congenial to the blunt and plain character of Hartley, vol. 2, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... to forty, and they encamped on Major Ridley's plantation. An alarm took place during the darkness,—whether real or imaginary does not appear,—and the men became scattered again. Proceeding to make fresh enlistments with the daylight, they were resisted at Dr. Blunt's house, where his slaves, under his orders, fired upon them, and this, with a later attack from a party of white men near Captain Harris's, so broke up the whole force that they never reunited. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... of the best, was printed. The press had only been recently started at Mr Lucas's expense, but it had put forth a reprint of Shakespeare's sonnets already, as well as his own poems. They were printed in blunt type on thick yellowish paper, the edges of which seemed as if they had been cut by the forefinger of an impatient reader, so ragged and irregular were they, and they were bound in vellum, the titles of these two slim flowers of poetry, "Flotsam" and "Jetsam," were printed ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... connections; the time came when Walpole and he were destined to quarrel; and then Townshend conducted himself with remarkable forbearance, self-restraint, and dignity. He was an honest and respectable man, blunt of speech, and of rugged, homespun intelligence, about whom, since his day, the world is little concerned. Such name as he had is almost absorbed in the more brilliant reputation of his grandson—the spoiled child of the House of Commons, as Burke called him—that Charles ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... pencil out and began to think. I know it sounds an easy game to you now, as you sit at your desk surrounded by dictionaries; but when you are squeezed on to the edge of a sofa, given a very blunt pencil and a thin piece of paper, and challenged to write in five minutes (on your knees) all the words you can think of beginning with a certain letter—well, it is another matter altogether. I thought of no end of things which started with K, or even L; ...
— Happy Days • Alan Alexander Milne
... the way: You dissent from some of these remarks? You've cut your eye-teeth, have you? Possibly you forget that trip in the cars, when you 'cutely passed by the swell in flashy waistcoat and galvanized jewelry, and took a seat by a 'plain blunt man' in snuff-color; and after he had left the cars at the first station, and the conductor came to you and demanded, 'Your ticket, sir!' you probably forgot how in fumbling for it in your pocket, you found it, but not your porte-monnaie. You perhaps set down in your mental ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... languish, decline, flag, fail, have one leg in the grave. render weak &c adj.; weaken, enfeeble, debilitate, shake, deprive of strength, relax, enervate, eviscerate; unbrace, unnerve; cripple, unman &c (render powerless) 158; cramp, reduce, sprain, strain, blunt the edge of; dilute, impoverish; decimate; extenuate; reduce in strength, reduce the strength of; mettre de l'eau dans son vin [Fr.]. Adj. weak, feeble, debile^; impotent &c 158; relaxed, unnerved, &c v.; sapless, strengthless^, powerless; weakly, unstrung, flaccid, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... should have, including locks of gold. But the fact that the poet has slyly changed the word "amber" to "snary" in sonnet xiv., and "golden" to "sable" in sonnet xxxviii., looks as if he desired to shield her personality from too blunt a guess. However, many hints are given; she lives in the "joyful North," ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet-Cycles - Delia - Diana • Samuel Daniel and Henry Constable
... on our long-wrapped senses strike the harsh, blunt-edged realities of every-day existence. The multiplied images which but yesterday peopled our brain and thronged on our notice, have "departed ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... he laughed at the recollection. "Fairbain met us coming out of the dining-room,—you know what a delightful, blunt, blundering old fellow he is! Well, Miss Christie must have made an impression even on his bachelor heart, for he actually requested the privilege of escorting her to the Trocadero, and back to the hotel after the performance to-night—hinted at a lunch, the gay old dog, and pranced about like ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... were full of eager attention and his eyebrows rose higher and higher with wonder. . . . From time to time he dropped back in his chair, gazed without interest straight before him for a minute, and then buried himself in his reading again. The council for the defence moved the blunt end of his pencil about the table and mused with his head on one side. . . . His youthful face expressed nothing but the frigid, immovable boredom which is commonly seen on the face of schoolboys and men on duty who are forced from day to day to sit in the same place, to ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... your word," hastened Colbert to reply with his blunt bonhomie. "And, apropos of Spain, you have not the 'Golden Fleece,' Monsieur d'Almeda. I heard the king say the other day that he should like to see you wear the grand cordon ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... Hester. She shrank from him, frightened by his harsh, blunt manners; she was afraid he led a sinful life in London. Aunt Mary had few doubts on the subject, and her comments made her sister tremble. She spoke of him as a most desirable husband for Maggie. "He will be a peer, my dear James. ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... last analysis, is not so much the possession of unusual vision—some of the most powerful geniuses have a vision quite mediocre and blunt—as the possession of a certain demonic driving-force, which pushes them on to be themselves, in all the fatal narrowness and obstinacy, it may be, of their ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... performed makes the joint the strongest part of the timber. Each member (A, Fig. 212) has a step diagonally cut (B), the two steps being on different planes, so they form a hook joint, as at C, and as each point or terminal has a blunt end, the members are so constructed as to withstand a longitudinal strain in either direction. The overlapping plates (D) and the bolts ...
— Carpentry for Boys • J. S. Zerbe
... he was so long getting the words out, and so slow in swinging the bottle of soda, that the ship was quite beyond his reach when he had finished his oration. He was not to be outdone, however, and, with a quick movement he hurled the bottle at the moving ship. It struck the blunt nose ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
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