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More "Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... which substitutes the mule-team plodding through the Gallic mire for Catullus' graceful yacht speeding home from Asia, follows the original ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... was with us now again, and we trekked at night, seldom riding, but plodding doggedly through the endless succession of dunes, with the spiritless horses strung out behind us. Their hooves were splayed to an enormous size through this incessant trekking through the sand; yet, though broken and enfeebled, they ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... plodding along, musing upon the past and trying to discern some outline of her future, when the sound of steps following her caused the blood to leap to her face. Looking around she beheld Trot, and ordered him back; but words were of no avail; he had scented her footsteps ...
— Dawn • Mrs. Harriet A. Adams
... on each side the land was barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I left him. I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to see the town, but every time was disappointed. The traces ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... a question which we had not been bright enough to ask. We had been plodding on with the vague idea that it was a delightful book. Certainly the subject was agreeable. The writer was taking us on a ramble through the less frequented parts of Italy. He had a fine descriptive power, and made us see the quiet hill towns, the old walls, the simple peasants, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... had a double meaning, Mr Drummond thought that a cask had surged, when coming out of the lighter, and struck them down. He desired old Tom to be more careful, and walked away, while we proceeded to unload the lighter. The new clerk was a very heavy, simple young man, plodding and attentive certainly, but he had no other merit; he was sent into the lighter to rake the marks and numbers of the casks as they were hoisted up, and soon became a butt to young Tom, who gave him the wrong marks and numbers of all ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... clutched the prey. Following the French as rapidly as wind and canvas could take him, he caught their rearmost vessels, smashed them up, battered the whole fleet successively into flight or splinters, and himself lost only two vessels, which ran upon a shoal. Plodding prose does scant justice to the extraordinary brilliancy of Hawke's victory, described by Admiral Mahan as "the Trafalgar of this war." We cannot pass on without quoting one of Mr. ...
— Laperouse • Ernest Scott
... chin smoothly shaven, his intelligent blue eyes half concealed beneath his hat brim, which had been drawn low to shade them from the glare, one hand pressing upon his saddle holster as he leaned over to rest. No insignia of rank served to distinguish him from those equally dusty fellows plodding gloomily behind, but a broad stripe of yellow running down the seams of his trousers, together with his high boots, bespoke the cavalry service, while the front of his battered campaign hat bore the decorations of two crossed sabres, with ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... direction suggested by his councillors. Philip never originated a thought, nor laid down a plan, but he was ever true to the falsehood of his nature, and was indefatigable in following out the suggestions of others. No greater mistake can be made than to ascribe talent to this plodding and pedantic monarch. The man's intellect was contemptible, but malignity and duplicity, almost superhuman; have effectually lifted his character out of the regions of the common-place. He wrote accordingly to say that the pardon, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... She went plodding heavily over the sand that was soft as velvet. He, on the sandhills, watched the great pale coast envelop her. She grew smaller, lost proportion, seemed only like a large ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England; Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage, Plodding tooth ports and costs for transportation, And that you sit as kings in your desires, Authority quite silent by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed; What had you got? I'll tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... conclude that Haydn, before he commenced writing clavier sonatas, had made acquaintance with those of Paradies and of Alberti. These early Italian influences should be noted, for one is apt to think rather of the young composer as plodding through Fux's "Gradus" and playing Emanuel Bach's sonatas on his "little worm-eaten clavier." During his last years Haydn told his friend Griesinger that he had diligently studied Emanuel Bach, and that he owed very ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... shortly after my arrival, in company with a friend, the latter pointed out to me a stranger, on the opposite side-walk, and desired me to guess who and what he might be. The subject of my examination was a compact, solidly-built man, with a plodding rustic air, and who walked a little lame. After looking at him a minute, I guessed he was some substantial grazier, who had come to Paris on business connected with the supplies of the town. My friend laughed, and told me it was ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... nearly the full length of the bayou. Here a novel form of straggling was introduced through the ever industrious ingenuity of the lazy, many of whom contrived to leave the ranks, and, crossing the levee, seized canoes or made rafts, and tranquilly floated down the bayou ahead of their plodding comrades. ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... a narrow entry, at the end of which a key was turned, and a strong door was opened from within. It admitted them into a lodge or lobby, across which they passed, and so through another door and a grating into the prison. The old man always plodding on before, turned round, in his slow, stiff, stooping manner, when they came to the turnkey on duty, as if to present his companion. The turnkey nodded; and the companion passed in without being asked whom ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... I stood, waiting in the weak early dawn To start my journey; the great caravan's Strange cattle with their snoring breaths made steam Upon the air, and (as I thought) sadly The beasts at market-booths and awnings gay Of shops, the city's comfortable trade, Lookt, and then into months of plodding lookt. And swiftly on my brain there came a wind Of vision; and I saw the road mapt out Along the desert with a chalk of bones; I saw a famine and the Afghan greed Waiting for us, spears at our throats, all ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... conclusions in this way are to be of real value. Of course we must often jump at conclusions from imperfect evidence. I should like to write an essay on species some day; but before I should have time to do it, in my plodding way, I hope you or Hooker will do it, and much better far. I am most glad to be in conference with Hooker and yourself on these matters, and I think we may, or rather you may, in a few years settle the question as to whether ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... of this group is its steady plodding faithfulness. They are not spoken of as brilliant or talented, but faithful in the midst of opposition. He loves them with the sort of deep love drawn out by love freely given. And a special promise is given, a significant promise. A great persecution is coming, an awful ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... the fact that the wind, grown colder, beat upon her cruelly, he dropped behind a pace and took the windy side, that he might shield her with his body. But if she observed the action she gave no sign; her face was turned from him and the wind, and she rode without speaking. After long plodding, the line of posts turned unexpectedly a right angle, and Vaughan took ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... weary while, the shuddering panic left him, and he set to work with renewed calm. Following the single method that offered any possibility of success in his quest for the camp, he spent exhausting hours in plodding hither and yon through the mazes of the wood, guiding his courses in what he vainly believed to be concentric circles, endeavoring by this means to come on the tree under which he had left his pack, through a process of elimination. Smaller and smaller the circle ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... galloped up to the head of a beef trail that strung backward for the better part of a mile, the cattle plodding on wearily, guarded by a dozen or more tired ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... mother, like son," he, too, sat down on the doorsill and laughed as only youth and health and joy can laugh, for, heading straight for the door was the fat young Shorthorn, saddled with an enormous feather-bed, and plodding at her heels was old Billy ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... Billy's back wheel squeak. On down the familiar street, glad of the thick maples to hide him, hunching up the pajama leg that would wave below in the rapidly increasing light, not looking toward the Carters', plodding on, old trusty on the back porch; shinning up the water spout, tiptoeing over the shed roof, a quick spring in his own window and he was safe on his bed again staring at the red morning light shining weirdly, cheerily on his wall and the rooster crowing lustily below his window. Drat that ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... civil," said Godolphin, impatiently. "Allow me to tell you that it is your objects I consider baubles. Your dull, plodding, wearisome honours; a name in the newspapers—a place, perhaps, in the Ministry—purchased by a sacrificed youth and a degraded manhood—a youth in labour, a manhood in schemes. No, Radclyffe! give me the bright, the glad sparkle of existence; and, ere the sad years of age and ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... door of man an increased food-supply of great variety and of improved quality. This is conducive to the health and longevity of the race, as well as to the happiness and comfort of everybody. Moreover, the introduction of agricultural machinery has changed the slow, plodding life of the farmer to that of the master of the steam-tractor, thresher, and automobile, changed the demand from a slow, inactive mind to the keenest, most alert, best-educated man of the nation, who must study the highest arts of production, the greatest economy, and the best ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... the bee's o'erflowing cells; The Pyramids; all things that shall endure; The books on books wherein all wisdom dwells, Are wrought with plodding patience, slow and sure. Yours the time-tempered fashioning that spells Of chaos, ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... thorough-going an Englishman as any of his class in the island. Methodical, plodding, industrious, and regular in all his habits, he was honest by rule, and had no leisure or inclination for any other opinions than those which were obtained with the smallest effort. In consequence of the limited sphere ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... the slow, plodding gait of the packer again, finding it easier now that they were on the crest of a divide where the trail was less obstructed and firmer, and the yellow lines on the peak, their goal, came more plainly ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... securing another trout, waded ashore and glanced with a rueful smile at the dozen this one made. They scarcely averaged half a pound, and he had spent most of a day that could badly be spared in catching them. Plodding back along the shingle with his load, he reached a little level strip beneath a scarp of rock, where a fire blazed among the boulders. A tent stood beneath two or three small, wind-stunted spruces, and a ragged man in long river-boots lay resting on one elbow near the blaze, regardless of the ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... the most hardened old soldier there is something "creepy" in plodding along over a narrow path in a rather dense forest, not knowing at what moment a lurking enemy may pour in a volley that will bowl over ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... twelve years' accumulated glory by the sacrifice of so many heroic lives and all the more glorified because so few,[3348] and because, in these days, a man did not obtain the cross by twenty years of plodding in a bureau, on account of routine punctuality, but by wonderful strokes of energy and audacity, by wounds, by braving death a hundred times and looking it in the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or dim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head, the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... dulness in them which would have beaten down the most facetious companion that the earth ever knew. A jest would have been a crime, and a smile would have faded into a grinning horror. Such deadly, leaden people; such systematic plodding, weary, insupportable heaviness; such a mass of animated indigestion in respect of all that was genial, jovial, frank, social, or hearty; never, sure, was brought together elsewhere ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... enjoyed at Grasmere, and leave smooth, bare, pyramidal Skiddaw and its "ancient" fellows behind. We at last ascended the steep zigzag which begins Sty Head Pass, confirming our resolution now and then by admiring the plodding industry of our mountain horses. It was indeed pleasant when the last gate was opened and we were safe within the wall of rough stones which headed the steep ascent, and we could wind more at leisure beside the foaming "beck" which runs ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... the Lord President before he had been three years in office!...As I told Forster, when he was Vice-President, the whole value of the Examiner system depends on the way the examiners do their work. I have the gravest doubt about — steadily plodding through the disgustful weariness of it as you and I have done, or observing any regulation that did ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... I mean artist—not mere artisan. It was certainly not surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen" exasperating. So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for plodding music-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant turned author, which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman turned philosopher. He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that goes with beefiness, but ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... pine-needles of last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm nursery. And down that narrow foot-path, meandering around the boulders and disappearing among the thickets, see what big loads of brushwood are moving towards us. Beneath them my swarthy and hardy peasants are plodding up the hill asweat and athirst. When I first descended to the wadi, one such load of brushwood emerging suddenly from behind a cliff surprised and frightened me. But soon I was reminded of the moving forest in Macbeth. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... broad and fertile valley, Tracing all its winding ways, Plodding on with dogged patience Through a score of weary days, Camping in the lonely timber, Sleeping on the scorching plain, Bearing heat and thirst and hunger, Sore fatigue and wind and rain— Halting only when the telltale Mark was missing in the track; Only when ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... force. Endless battalions of infantry, very dusty and grimy, but going light and strong (you soon get into the habit of looking attentively at infantry to see how they march); guns, bearer-companies, Colonial Horse, generals and their staffs, go plodding and jingling by in a procession that seems to be going on for ever. And beside and through them the long convoys of the different units, in heavy masses, come groaning and creaking along, the oxen sweating, the dust whirling, the naked Kaffirs yelling, and the ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... exclaimed the Governor-General. "No pleasures to distract her, an atmosphere of plodding commercialism, an abundance of health-giving nourishment! Perhaps the mere change of climate will have the desired effect. We will make the experiment. She is doomed if she remains here, and America seems to be our only hope. I suppose ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... fainting on the skirt of the duchess's robe, who let him lie there and promptly bade them throw water in his face. This was done, and he came to himself by the time that one of the carts with the creaking wheels reached the spot. It was drawn by four plodding oxen all covered with black housings; on each horn they had fixed a large lighted wax taper, and on the top of the cart was constructed a raised seat, on which sat a venerable old man with a beard whiter than the very snow, and so long that it fell below his waist; he was dressed ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called upon. The fable teaches better than an essay can that the dullness which perseveres will arrive at success sooner than brilliancy of mind which wastes its time ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... utterly uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was an able Hanoverian mercenary, despising alike his Livonian colleague, Buxhoewden, and his chief, the servile Russian marshal, Kamenski. The Prussian general Lestocq ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... most wonderful prospects; all the great men the books had ever heard of had been poor lads like himself, who had reached their high estate through good fortune and their own valor. But all the men in town who possessed anything had attained their wealth by wearily plodding forward and sucking the blood of the poor. They were always sitting and brooding over their money, and they threw nothing away for a lucky fellow to pick up; and they left nothing lying about, lest some poor lad should come and take it. Not one of them ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... friendship between Inez and Bertha—a favour of which she availed herself eagerly, though the three were as different from one another as three little girls could be. Bertha was a good-natured romp, hard-fisted, thick of leg, and of a plodding but ineffectual industry. Inez, on the other hand, was so pretty that Laura never tired of looking at her: she had a pale skin, hazel eyes, brown hair with a yellow light in it, and a Greek nose. Her mouth was very small; her nostrils were mere tiny slits; and so lazy was she that ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... adventure can be on the monotonous side, nine-tenths of the time. When a Stanley goes to find a Livingston, he doesn't spend twenty-four hours a day killing rogue elephants or fighting off tribesman; most of the time he's plodding along in the swamps, getting bitten by mosquitoes, or through the bush getting bitten by tsetse flies. So, as a people, we turned it over to the movies, and Telly, where they can do ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... all, as I have said, being in train, I went to the window to observe the weather, and saw a covered car with a black horse plodding along the road that separated Wavecrest Cottage from the seashore. At our modest entrance gates it drew up, and the coachman climbed from his perch with a dignity befitting his flowing grey beard and the silver band on ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... she takes little notice of this exuberant display of affection, beyond running beneath the charger's belly, and playfully trying to plant her tiny heels in his lofty side. When they have been twice round the paddock, "Ninette" plodding gamely on, a long way in the rear, the couple halt at the shed entrance, and look at us with exuberant curiosity, the donkey's long ears shooting backwards ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... moleskin or corduroy trousers, and a slouch hat. Their leader, Captain Cargill, wore always a blue "bonnet" with a crimson knob thereon. They named their harbour Port Chalmers, and a stream, hard by their city, the Water of Leith. The plodding, brave, clannish, and cantankerous little community soon ceased to be altogether Scotch. Indeed, the pioneers, called the Old Identities, seemed almost swamped by the flood of gold-seekers which poured in in the years after 1861. Nevertheless, Otago is still the headquarters ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... made people feel like smiling too, and put them into a good temper in spite of themselves. She was neither dull nor particularly clever, only possessed of average abilities, able to remember lessons when she tried hard, and gifted with a certain capacity for plodding, but not in the least brilliant over anything she undertook. She was never likely to win fame, or set the Thames on fire, but she was one of those cosy, thoughtful, cheery, lovable home girls, who are often a great deal more pleasant to live with than some who have greater talents; ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... poetry did not exist, but who quivered with inarticulate determinations to see Minneapolis, or even Chicago. To him it was sheer romance to parade through town with a tin haversack of carbons for the arc-lights, familiarly lowering the high-hung mysterious lamps, while his plodding acquaintances "clerked" in stores on Saturdays, or tended furnaces. Sometimes he donned the virile—and noisy—uniform of an electrician: army gauntlets, a coil of wire, pole-climbers strapped to his legs. Crunching his steel spurs into the crisp pine wood of the lighting-poles, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... every corner of the room he would peer, to be sure there were no watching eyes, then he would slip over to the fireplace, lift the lion, draw out the cipher message, place it sometimes in his mouth, sometimes in his shoe, and as soon as his morning chores were done he would be seen plodding down the dusty road leading to the farm, where some one was eagerly waiting for the tidings he carried. Well had the ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... far closer to the truths enfolded in mystery than ordinary people, because of that very audacity of imagination which irritates their plodding critics. As only those who dare to make mistakes succeed greatly, only those who shake free the wings of their imagination brush, once in a way, the secrets of the great pale world. If such writers go wrong, it is not for the mere ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... already manly tastes, with a zest which it is in vain to expect that the mere pedantries of school could inspire; and the irregular, but ardent, snatches of study which he caught in this way, gave to a mind like his an impulse forwards, which left more disciplined and plodding competitors far behind. The list, indeed, which he has left on record of the works, in all departments of literature, which he thus hastily and greedily devoured before he was fifteen years of age, is such as almost to startle belief,—comprising, as it does, a range and variety of study, which ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... own soul. He did indeed 'put the things that he had learned in practice,' as he journeyed over both Europe and America, time after time, visiting high and low. His life is one long record of adventures, of perils surmounted, of hairbreadth escapes, of constant toil and of much plodding, humdrum service too. His message brought him into the strangest situations, as he gave it fearlessly. He sought an interview with the Pope at Rome in order to remonstrate with him about the state of the prisons in the Papal States. Stephen ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin
... leisurely. The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... know when we have examined the whole length," replied Thorndyke, plodding on with his eyes on the ground. "Ha! here is something new," he added, stopping short and stooping down eagerly—"a man with a thick stick—a smallish man, rather lame. Notice the difference between the two feet, and the peculiar way in which he uses his stick. Yes, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... tense, striking lines. It is strong and modern enough to be suitable, with some changes, for our present day stage. The day of the playwright's immaturity (noticed in the three preceding plays) is past. With this, as with all of Balzac's work, he improved by slow, laborious plodding, gaining experience from repeated efforts until ...
— Introduction to the Dramas of Balzac • Epiphanius Wilson and J. Walker McSpadden
... be plodding on through the sands and dust, and I'll be all alone. But you, little girl, you will be making your peace with Omkar and dreaming ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... and forced open his heavy eyelids. He first made out the bowed figure of Carmena plodding along, with one backward-dragged hand noosed in the reins of the weary pony. The gray light gradually brightened. He saw that the girl was swaying, almost staggering. He forced out ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... you mean to say that it is some idea about Good that brings order into a man's life? All I can say is that, for my part, I never once think, from one year's end to another, of anything so abstract and remote. I simply go on, day after day, plodding the appointed round, without reflexion, without reason, simply because I have to. There's order in my life, heaven knows! but it has nothing to do with ideas about Good. And altogether," he ejaculated, in a kind of passion, "it's a preposterous thing to tell me that I ...
— The Meaning of Good—A Dialogue • G. Lowes Dickinson
... of the day's life was stirring all along the road, where under clouds of dust the four and six horse-and-mule wagons hauled water for the town, pack outfits of donkeys and plodding miners wended one way or the other, soldiers trotted in from the military post, and Overlanders slowly toiled for the last supply depot before creaking onward ...
— Desert Dust • Edwin L. Sabin
... He was to have many of these cosmic moments, for although his practical brain relied always on hard work, never on inspiration, his divining faculty performed some marvellous feats, and saved him from much plodding; but he never had a moment of insight which left a profounder impression than this. He understood in a flash the weakness of the world, and his own. At first he was appalled, then he pitied, then he vibrated to the ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... the plain, St. Girons or another, along the riverside and under the lime trees ... which reminds me of "Mails"! Little pen, little fountain pen, little vagulous, blandulous pen, companion and friend, whither have you led me, and why cannot you learn the plodding of ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc
... no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes were also on the finish, but for a different ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Irishman, bred a Catholic, who under the influence of Moncure D. Conway had come out as a Unitarian and left his Washington home for a radical environment in the North. He was brilliant and witty with small capacity or taste for persistent plodding, but forever hitting effectively on the spur of the moment. He was as chivalrous as a palladin and went to his early grave light-hearted, as part of the day's work which must not be shirked. I have his image vividly as he laughed and ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... worn by the little rescued boys. Even handkerchiefs and babies' long frocks are conjured out of a petticoat or muslin lining! The work, thus selected and arranged, is put into the hands of those who, though not skilful in originating, have the plodding patience to carry out the designs of the more ingenious, and so garments are produced to cover the shivering limbs of any destitute child that may enter the Refuge as well as to complete the ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... him alone," said Duane; "he's an awfully decent fellow. If a man of that slow, plodding, faithful species ever is thoroughly aroused by a woman, it will be a lively ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... ticket into the lap of the woman, saying, "Here's yo' ticket, missus. I do hopes yo' find dat husban' o' yourn ain' so bad as yo'se afeared." And before her dazed eyes could take in what he was doing, the old man had shuffled out of the car, and as the train pulled on he was seen quietly plodding along, still "bound ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... hand, and sped away to his own quarters higher up. Then came a sound which made me open my door to listen. Dear little Emily! She had burst out of her own room in her dressing-gown, and flung herself upon her brother as he was plodding wearily upstairs in the dark, clinging round his neck sobbing, 'Dear, dear Clarry! I can't bear it! I don't care. You're my own dear brother, and they are all wicked, ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... middle ages is La France au temps des Croisades, by M. Vaublanc, which has lately made its appearance at Paris, in four handsome octavo volumes. It is the fruit of long and conscientious researches, and is written in a style of seductive elegance. The author is no dry chronicler, or plodding statician, but an artist, fully alive to the picturesqueness of his topic. He carries his reader with him into the time and the scenes he describes, and makes him a participant in the romantic and adventurous life ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... along back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, spilling the baby into the mud. Terrible wails arose, and ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... she said the church was near auntie's—it was within three doors; but she was wrong when she kept walking precisely the wrong way. She crossed over to Sixth Avenue. Now, where were the brown houses? She saw the horse-cars plodding along, and tried to read ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)
... calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching at food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless, plodding, and rather ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... seat on top of the high load in the broiling sun, plodding slowly along in the dust and heat, Allison was nodding drowsily, when suddenly a protruding mesquite root gave the wagon a sharp jolt that plunged Clay headlong into the road, where, before he could rise, the great wheels crunched ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... and art, and, during three years' travel in foreign parts, had so improved upon these natural advantages, as to stand acknowledged one of the most elegant and accomplished young men of his country. But it often happens that such high-wrought natures are but poorly versed in the plodding concerns of this nether world. And thus it was with him. Alive to every lofty feeling and generous impulse, he fancied others like himself. Low cunning and artifice were unknown to his bosom, and consequently ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... that work for themselves. They know so well by heart what ought to be, that they run on without seeing what is. They have told me, besides, that a mere plodding head is best and surest for that work ; and that the livelier the imagination, the less it ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... the number of their enemies. If there were only three or four of them left they would not attack in the open. In that event he must watch for ambuscade, and dread the night. He looked down at Celie, buried in her furry coat and hood and plodding along courageously at his side with her hand in his. This was not a time in which to question him, and she was obeying his guidance with the faith of a child. It was tremendous, he thought—the most wonderful moment that had ever entered into his life. ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... they could not, of course, be what they had been; the carriage was by this a forcing- house. And through the long night we ached away an intolerable span of time with, for under-current, for sinister accompaniment to the pitiful strain, the muffled interminable plodding of the engine, and the rack of the wheels pulsing through space to the rhythm of some music-hall jingle heard in snatches at home. At intervals came shocks of contrast when we were brought suddenly face to face with a gaunt and ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... into honourable exile, in quality of an ambassador-extraordinary to the court of France; and Trumball, his friend and creature, was dismissed from the office of secretary, which the king conferred upon Vernon, a plodding man of business who had acted as under-secretary to the duke of Shrewsbury. This nobleman rivalled the earl of Sunderland in his credit at the council-board, and was supported by Somers, lord chancellor of England, by Russel now earl of Orford, first lord of the admiralty, and Montague, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... neck to look at the Poissonniere gate, she remained for a time watching the constant stream of men, horses, and carts which flooded down from the heights of Montmartre and La Chapelle, pouring between the two squat octroi lodges. It was like a herd of plodding cattle, an endless throng widened by sudden stoppages into eddies that spilled off the sidewalks into the street, a steady procession of laborers on their way back to work with tools slung over their back and a loaf of bread under their arm. This ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... little object appeared now dark, now light in colour, but became gradually more distinct. It came always crawling steadily on. Presently an occasional side-blown puff of dust added a certain heraldry, and thus finally the white-topped wagon and its plodding team came fully into view, crawling ever persistently from the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... one, were plodding up the hill by the side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was hidden under almost as many ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... Longface, that God made horses as they are, and gave them such grandeur of appearance and action, and put such an eaglelike spirit between their ribs, so that, quitting the plodding motions of the ox, they can fly like that noble bird and come sweeping down the course as on wings of ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... particularly strong, our greatest obstacle being the low-hanging branches which swept against us. Much of my time was expended in holding these back from contact with Eloise's face, our horses sedately plodding along behind ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... troops, covered with scars and thoroughly inured to War, we must not compare the self-esteem and vanity of a standing Army,(*) held together merely by the glue of service-regulations and a drill book; a certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can never create it; these things therefore have a certain value, but must not be over-rated. Order, smartness, good ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... silence. For a time she kept in advance, then allowed him to gain upon her, and presently fell behind, plodding doggedly on through thick and thin, vainly trying to conceal the hunger and fatigue that were fast robbing her of both strength and spirits. Adam watched her with a masculine sense of the justice of the ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... American forces were all together in a solid mass, moving toward the upper end of the island; plodding through pouring rain, almost dropping from the exhaustion ...
— The Story of Manhattan • Charles Hemstreet
... is it about Elinor? Do I want to become to her what Frederic is to Lucy? Do I want to make her "Mrs. Poor'us"? Do I want to drag her down and keep her plodding all her days, clad in a homespun gown, and she fit to be a lady in her silks and satins? What is ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... possessed— Unconscious of the spiritual power that lives Around, and rules her—by our bliss unblessed— Dull to the art that colors or creates, Like the dead timepiece, godless nature creeps Her plodding round, and, by the leaden weights, The ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... in the fields or plodding along the way, paused in their occupations to regard the novel vehicle with ...
— Trusia - A Princess of Krovitch • Davis Brinton
... in lingering over the long, laborious, monotonous grind up that river on show-shoes. When one has looked forward to pleasant, quick travel, the disappointment at slow, heavy plodding is the keener. The first little bit of trail we had was as we approached Nulato two days later on a Sunday morning, and it was made by the villagers from below going up to church at the Roman Catholic mission. We arrived in time for service, and enjoyed the natives' voices raised in the Latin ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... way by this path, and erelong, stood upon one of the little rustic bridges spanning the ravine, and connecting with a similar flight of ascending stairs upon the other side. There I paused, and well I might. It were a dull, plodding creature indeed, who would not be spellbound by such a scene! On either hand were the sloping wooded sides of the ravine whose depths were shrouded in the mysterious whiteness of the fog; above me, a short ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... although they may practise economy occasionally themselves, usually regard it as a most objectionable virtue in a man. How often in families do we find the mother and sisters will admire the self-indulgent idle youth who spends money freely even if he borrows from them, rather than the steady, plodding son who, by rigid economy and personal self-denial, helps to provide them with the ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... the men up above, the men at the roll-top desks. He saw now that it was not hard, plugging work that earned them their big salaries. In a short fortnight he had begun to look a little contemptuously on the grinders and plodders. Why couldn't they realise how little their patient, plodding service could ever bring them? But some men, he reflected, were born to be merely clerks all their days. He was different—out of the common ruck. He could see largely, like Lars Larssen did. He ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... village stage back and forth between Oldtown and Carlette, the nearest railway station. He and his venerable team were one of the features of the place, and the farmers set their clocks by him as he went plodding past. Everybody knew him, and he knew the past history of every man, woman and child in the place. He was an encyclopedia of the village gossip and tradition for fifty years past. This he kept always on tap, and only a hint was needed to ...
— The Rushton Boys at Rally Hall - Or, Great Days in School and Out • Spencer Davenport
... now in a hot fit, now in a cold fit, of something like to love, such a creature as Mercedes, as she lightly hung upon his arm that evening, had never yet appeared. She was an angel, a being apart, a fairy,—any crude simile that occurs to honest plodding men of such young girls. John took the distrait look for dreamy thought; her irresponsiveness for ethereal purity; her moodiness for superiority of soul. She imposed herself on him now, as she had done before on Jamie, as deserving a higher life than he could give her. ...
— Pirate Gold • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... wore on, one could guess that a great centre of government and trade was near at hand; the traffic was continuous,—coolies bent almost double under their heavy burdens, laden barrows creaking dolefully as they moved, foot travellers plodding wearily along, groups of wild Tibetans from the distant frontier, gorgeous mandarins returning from an inspection tour, all were hurrying towards the capital. Yes, we were nearing Marco Polo's "large and noble" ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this, and tries that,—wants a devilled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect than that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... wind! At times we could scarcely make headway against it, but after most strenuous effort we neared the village. We hoped to find shelter under a bridge, but found innumerable muddy streams running through the planks. So we resumed our plodding, slipping and sliding in the ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... aware that this windfall meant a short cut to things which she had only looked to attain by plodding over economic hills. She could say good-by to singing in photoplay houses, to vaudeville engagements, to concert work in provincial towns. She could hitch her wagon to a star and go straight up the avenue that led to a career, if it were in her to achieve greatness. Pleasant dreams ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... failed in the trust imposed on him. And as Dick developed exceptional brilliance in his school work, together they planned for him, the mother and the older brother, the mother painfully making and saving, the brother accepting as his part the life of plodding obscurity in order that the younger boy might have his full chance of what school and college could do for him. True to the best traditions of her race, the mother had fondly dreamed of a day when she ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... I sat thus, very sick and sorrowful, I heard a sound of wheels and plodding hoofs drawing slowly near, and lifting my head at last, espied a great wain piled high with fragrant hay whereon the driver sprawled asleep, a great fat fellow whose snores rose above the jingle of harness and creak of ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... sign of a trail you can't get me rattled, but cracky, I don't like marshes. You can get lost in a marsh easier than in any other place. Pretty soon I was plodding around deeper than my knees and it gave me a strain every time I dragged my leg out of the swamp. Maybe you'll wonder why I didn't go back, but if you do, that's because you don't know much about marshes. All of a sudden I was right in the middle of it, as you might say, ...
— Roy Blakeley • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... stumpy legs near its tail. About the same distance from its head were two little wings, which it was forever fluttering as if trying to fly with them. Curdie thought it fancied it did fly with them, when it was merely plodding on busily with its four little stumps. How it managed to keep up he could not think, till once when he missed it from the group: the same moment he caught sight of something at a distance plunging at an awful serpentine rate through the trees, and presently, from behind a huge ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... trees, which some deluded dreamer had planted on the flat pavements, had all grown up into abrupt Lombardy poplars, knowing their best policy was to keep out of the way; the boys, playing marbles under them, played sharply "for keeps"; the bony old dray-horses, plodding through the dusty crowds, had speculative eyes, that measured their oats at night with a "you-don't-cheat-me" look. Even the churches had not the grave repose of the old brown house yonder in the hills, where the few field-people—Arians, Calvinists, Churchmen— gathered every ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... straight as the arrow flies they will come, though mountains and deserts and hurrying rivers bar their way. And the plodding, law-abiding citizens who kiss their wives and hold close their babies and fling hasty, comforting words over their shoulders to tottering old mothers when they go to answer the hunting call—they will be your savages when the gold lust grips them. And the towns they ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... two pretty white beds, side by side, in this nice, large, cheerful bedroom. Ermengarde was completely mistress, but she did not object to Marjorie's company, for Marjorie was very plodding and useful and self-forgetful, and Ermie liked to be waited on, and her complaints listened to, ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... I realised that there are hills near. Mr. Lightfoot and I walked to the old stone lion which marks the gateway of Ekmadan—i.e., ancient Hamadan. I think the snow was rather thicker than usual to-day. Mr. Lightfoot and I went to Hamadan, plodding our way through little tramped-down paths, with snow three feet deep on either side. By way of being cheerful we went to see two tombs. One was an old, old place, where slept "the first great physician" who ever lived. In it a dervish kept watch in the bitter cold, and some ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... disregarding the asseverations of my rascally Jehu that the remaining animal was fully equal to the task alone, I descended, and proceeded on foot. But a ten mile walk on the Delhi plain in the hottest part of the day is not a thing to be recommended. After plodding on for about two hours, I was, like Langland, "wery forwandred," and went me to rest, not alas! by a burnside, but in the shadow of one of the innumerable little tombs that stand along the dusty road. There I ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... generally too poor to excite cupidity. A gray-frocked man, hooded, coarsely sandalled, and with a blackened gourd at his girdle for the alms he might receive from the devout, no Islamite meeting him would ever suspect a large treasure in the ragged bundle on the back of the patient animal plodding behind him ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... was on his way home from a westward trudge, plodding along the remoter part of Fulham Road, when words spoken by a woman whom he ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... rest," he exclaimed after a bit, his hands being then blistered, while he was bathed in perspiration from head to foot. He did not wish to give in so long as he saw Fritz plodding on laboriously, especially as he had made light of the matter when they began; but now he really had to confess to being beaten. "I declare," he panted out, half-breathlessly—"my back feels broken, and I couldn't dig another spadeful to ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... streets; but the ox,—what a complete embodiment of all rustic and rural things! Slow, deliberate, thick- skinned, powerful, hulky, ruminating, fragrant-breathed, when he came to town the spirit and suggestion of all Georgics and Bucolics came with him. O citizen, was it only a plodding, unsightly brute that went by? Was there no chord in your bosom, long silent, that sweetly vibrated at the sight of that patient, Herculean couple? Did you smell no hay or cropped herbage, see no ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... suited the restless temper of the youth. It was his maxim that all restraints were unworthy of a lad of spirit, and that it was far more wise to spend freely what his father had painfully acquired, than, by the same plodding and toilsome arts, to add to ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... to him. Some years ago Mr Halgrove had lived several months in the Metropolis, and the boy, spending his summer holidays there, and left entirely to his own devices, had learned in a plodding way about as much of the great city as a youth of seventeen could ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... to the horses, while several passengers, who had alighted to gather blackberries from the ditch, scrambled hurriedly into their places. With a single clanking wrench the stage toiled on, plodding clumsily ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... be affected by her want of knowledge. As to forms, Mrs. Margaret had her own, and she was very attentive to them, but she had very small opportunity of public worship, as there was no church within some miles of the Tower. In the meantime, whilst the old lady went plodding on in her own quiet way, teaching the little girl all she knew herself, Mr. Dymock was planning great things by way of instruction for Tamar. He was to teach her to read her native language, as he called the Hebrew, and to give her various ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... day! Not all day!" Marise kept the thought to herself. She had a vision of the man goaded beyond endurance, leaving his horses plodding in the row, while he fled blindly, to ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... final test arrives When once more he tees and drives. Joy! As soon as he has hit he Sees it toddling down the pretty, Never swerving left or right Till it waddles out of sight, Plodding through a bunker and Braying like ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... a genius of high order, the other scarcely above the point of mediocrity; yet you will see the genius sinking and perishing in poverty, obscurity, and wretchedness; while, on the other hand, you will observe the mediocre plodding his slow but sure way up the hill of life, gaining steadfast footing at every step, and mounting, at length, to eminence and distinction, an ornament to his family, a blessing to ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... friend, what I endure, In slavish, plodding work, from day to day, Which work should be in its own nature pure, And lifted high, from gross ...
— Canada and Other Poems • T.F. Young
... a self-confessed coward, physically. Above all things he feared dogs. His reception by the men, aside from Bud Shoop's greeting, had been cool. Even the friendship of a dog seemed acceptable at that moment. Plodding along the weary miles between the water-hole and the ranch, he had, in his way, decided to turn over a new leaf: to ignore the insistent call of the road and settle down to something worth while. Childishly ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... the road from Paris to Cherbourg, a young man, dressed in the inevitable brown carmagnole of those days, was plodding his way toward Carentan. When the first levies were made, there was little or no discipline kept up. The exigencies of the moment scarcely admitted of soldiers being equipped at once, and it was no uncommon thing ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... patent that dusk found them weary and worn, plodding and wading silently "homewards," shovel on shoulder, across four or five kilos of desolate mud; falling and tripping over stagnant bodies, masses of tangled wire, bricks and jagged wood-work everywhere ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... "She must have passed straight through the yard and got out at the other side before you went in. While you were looking for her, she was plodding away out of sight. Come along, and ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... husband to take one of the glebe fields on a long lease in order to start a hamper trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers. Dolly, the one of her three step-daughters whom she liked least, was fond of gardening, in a dull plodding way, and might be trained ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... many things, especially the shelter tents;—for they were as rigid as sheet-iron and yet had to be rolled up and strapped on the knapsacks. Nevertheless it was not long before the regiment was in motion; and after plodding off for a mile to the left, a line of battle was formed, vedettes sent out, trees felled and breastworks built, and at dinner-time the men were allowed to build fires and cook breakfast. Then, after standing ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... came to him. There was a sharp rustling of bush, and breaking of twigs close by, and the sound of heavy, plodding hoofs. The next moment two horsemen broke from the dense cover about him, and ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... At last the plodding pony stopped again resolutely. Long lines of Lombardy poplars here met the road. They were but as the ghosts of trees; their stately shape, their regular succession, inspired him with some sentiment of romance which he did not stay to ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... Mr. Frisky Squirrel, old Mr. Plodding Turtle, Mr. Bunny Rabbit, and many others; but never until yesterday did she make the acquaintance of the gray goose, and then it was owing to Master Teddy's mischief that she found a new friend among the dwellers ...
— The Gray Goose's Story • Amy Prentice
... to be cared for, at whatever cost, but not to be taken into confidence as to ways and means. Still I had entered into a bond with this woman. I breathed hard. I had always been restive under any bond, though by nature plodding enough when it was removed. I was aware that I was but sullen company while I rolled ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... to him that a gentleman whom he knew very well in the city,—and who had maliciously stayed away from his dinner,—one Mr Brown, who sat just before him on the same side of the House, and who was plodding wearily and slowly along with some pet fiscal theory of his own, understood nothing at all of what he was saying. Here was an opportunity for himself! Here was at his hand the means of revenging himself for the injury done him, and of showing to the world at the same time that he ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... handling of supposititious forces against supposititious enemies; and arranges for the construction, equipment, mobilization, provisioning, fuelling, and moving of supposititious fleets and armies. War strategy is vivid, stimulating and resultful; preparation strategy is dull, plodding, and—for the strategist himself—apparently resultless. Yet war strategy is merely the child of preparation strategy. The weapons that war strategy uses, preparation strategy put into its hands. The fundamental plans, the strength and composition of the forces, the training of officers ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... in vain, Nor taste one beauty they contain, And plodding on in one dull tone, Gain ancient tongues ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... the muddy torrents hastened to precipitate themselves in the sewers below; armies of umbrellas, as far as the eye could reach, now rising, now lowering, to avoid collision; hackney-coaches in active sloth, their miserable cattle plodding along with their backs arched and heads and tails drooping like barn-door fowls crouching under the cataract of a gutter; clacking of pattens and pestering of sweepers; not a smile upon the countenance of one individual of the multitude which passed him;—all appeared anxiety, ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... a female relative he got board at the house of one Walmsley, a plasterer, in Shoreditch. In the history of literature nothing can be found so much to be compassionated as the life led by him during those summer months in the great city. Plodding the streets from day to day with his manuscripts, living mainly upon bread and water, not retiring to bed at night until near the morning, and then seldom closing his eyes, yet in this time guilty of no sort of known ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... enshrouded in darkness. "Am I to be captured?" he cried; "no, not if I can use more activity than my enemies. My safety is now a mere question of speed." At this moment he saw a cab at the top of the Faubourg Poissonniere. The dull driver, smoking his pipe, was plodding along toward the limits of the Faubourg Saint-Denis, where no doubt he ordinarily had his station. "Ho, friend!" ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... bright, dusty fields. He felt as if he were a little to blame for Enid's melancholy. He hadn't been very neighbourly this last year. "People can live in darkness here, too, unless they fight it. Look at me. I told you I've been moping all winter. We all feel friendly enough, but we go plodding on and never get together. You and I are old friends, and yet we hardly ever see each other. Mother says you've been promising for two years to run up and have a visit with her. Why don't you come? It ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... westward through the forest, a drenched and travel-sore cortege was plodding outward. A handful of lean and briar-infested cattle stumbled in advance, yet themselves preceded by a vanguard of scouting riflemen, and back of the beef-animals came ponies, galled of wither and lean of rib under long-borne ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... a man of lively imagination. Had he been an ordinary, prosaic and plodding individual, he would have stayed at home combing wool as did his prosaic and plodding ancestors for several generations. At the age of fourteen he went to sea and soon developed an active curiosity about regions then unknown but ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... centre in you. It was the thought that it was for you that kept me going when I have been so tired doing two men's work that I could scarcely drag one foot after the other. It made me take risks I might otherwise never have dared to take. It kept me plodding on when one failure after another smashed me in the face so fast that I could ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... of a mile, we can easily understand that there were frequent quarrels when two vehicles met half-way. Sometimes one of the opponents would be a puffing engine, and if it happened to be dragging a load of coal, back it had to go until the siding was reached, that the plodding horse might pass. To us such a state of things is hard to imagine, but the railway and it possibilities were not thoroughly understood at first. Even George Stephenson did not think it would be ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... judge either distance or location by sound, when the wind is blowing. The horse hoofs sounded about a quarter of a mile away. I know not how far they really were. Very soon I could see the black moving mass coming quietly along the road. The duffle hoof-wraps made a dull plodding noise near at hand. Nearer the unknown rider came, suspecting nothing. I could see him bent forward, peering out ahead. I could even take stock of him, dark though it was. He was a not very tall man, wearing a full ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... me, and a comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far that, though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plodding son ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... natural curiosities, and as displaying a wonderful exhibition of the creative power. Beheld in any light, they are interesting. Whatever may have been their origin, they adorn the monotony of western scenery, and afford employment to the fancy of the traveller. The plodding foot may tread carelessly over them, the uninquiring eye may pass them, unheeded; but the poet and philosopher linger around the hallowed spot where they stand, to catch inspiration, or to gather wisdom from these ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... subscription lists; where all the creators of the True and the Beautiful and the Good may be seen almost any day tramping the tableland of the average man, fed by the average man, allowed to live by the average man, plodding along with weary and dusty steps to the average man's forgetfulness. And, indeed, it is not the least trait of this same average man that he forgets, that he is forgotten, that his slaves are forgotten, that the world remembers only those ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... keep a sharp look-out, so as not to pass over the dim trail unawares in the dusk and the storm. They followed his advice, and reached camp safely; and after they had left him nobody ever again saw him alive. Evidently he himself, plodding northwards, passed over the road without seeing it in the gathering gloom; probably he struck it at some point where the ground was bad, and the dim trail in consequence disappeared entirely, as is the way with these prairie roads—making ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... the mail without the smallest sign of discomposure, he tramped up the hill again in his customary plodding manner. His friend was sitting on the door sill of one of the new cabins, whittling a stick. He looked as if he might have been reflecting, as one is apt to ...
— Tom Slade at Black Lake • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... durst venture most; and durst make Love where'er my Fancy lik'd: but sometimes running out my Master's Cash, (which was supply'd still by my Father) they sent me, to reform my expensive Life, a Factor, into France—still I essay'd to be a plodding Thriver, but found my Parts not form'd for ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn
... head round and sniffed Ramon's hand. Then he plodded down the street toward the desert. At the tank Ramon let his horse drink. Dex, like a great dog, sniffed the back trail on which he had come, plodding through the night toward the spot where he knew his ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... did not occupy the time you have spent in reading this relation of it. One minute I was plodding quietly homeward; the next, I stood in the middle of the street; beside me a stranger of gigantic proportions; at my feet a black mass of dead humanity, half doubled up in the mud as it had fallen; on the banquette, the ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... first she calls the useful many forth; Plain plodding Industry, and sober Worth: Thence peasants, farmers, native sons of earth, And merchandise' whole genus take their birth: Each prudent cit a warm existence finds, And all mechanics' many-apron'd kinds. ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... North, hitherto so jubilant and hopeful, wore weeds of mourning from Maine to Oregon. Lieutenant Bob was there, and Wilford, too; and so was Captain Ray, digging in the marshy swamps, where death floated up in poisonous exhalations—plodding on the weary march, and fighting all through the seven days, where the sun poured down its burning heat and the night brought little rest. No wonder, then, that the three faces at the farmhouse grew white with anxiety, or that three pairs of eyes grew dim with ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... the patient Master had tenderly said. From earliest boyhood Jose had heard this clarion call within his soul. And striving, delving, plodding, he had sought to obey—struggling toward the distant gleam, toward the realization of something better and nearer the Master's thought than the childish creeds of his fellow-men—something warmer, more vital than the pulseless decrees of ecumenical councils—something to solve men's daily ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... centuries? No, the Bible was not prepared as an Encyclopedia of Knowledge for the successive generations of men. Its writers may anticipate the thought of ages by profound intuitions, pregnant imaginations, visions of the seer, as Plato does. Genius often outstrips the plodding feet of generations. But genius must not put on the airs of omniscience. It must submit its claims to trial by jury. They are to stand, if stand they shall, not because they are in Genesis or the Republic, ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... the villages we passed by a primitive flour-mill moved by a small stream playing upon a horizontal wheel beneath the floor; or, more primitive still, by a blindfolded donkey plodding ceaselessly around in his circular path. In the streets we frequently encountered boys and old men gathering manure for their winter fuel; and now and then a cripple or invalid would accost us as "Hakim" ("Doctor"), for the medical work of the missionaries has given ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... concerned about Noodles, truth to tell, for he knew that Eben, while no great athlete, had a reserve fund in his stubborn qualities, and would shut his teeth hard together toward the end, plodding along with grim determination. Noodles must be watched, and coddled most carefully, if they hoped to carry him with them over the line in time to claim ...
— Boy Scouts on a Long Hike - Or, To the Rescue in the Black Water Swamps • Archibald Lee Fletcher
... a stupid duffer I am! You must find us plain, plodding Americans horribly short-witted ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... bring us back to our starting point. But, with only right living in view, there is no mistaking the way; for there has always been a straight road ahead of us, which we could follow if we would. It is hard to keep plodding along the narrow path, when fields of wealth and power stretch away on either side, but, happily for us, these are about all fenced in, even the great Sahara desert is fenced in. We cannot be tyrants if we would, nor can we despoil ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... which is as oppressive as the tyranny of men, Man falls below himself. Never will a citizen be made out of a poor fellow condemned to remain valet, hireling or beggar, reduced to thinking only of himself and his daily bread, asking in vain for work, or, plodding when he gets it, twelve hours a day at a monotonous pursuit, living like a beast of burden and dying in a alms-house.[2162] He should have his own bread, his own roof, and all that is indispensable for life; he must not be overworked, nor suffer ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... much doubt. It may be that the archaic forms give an additional flavour to his style, since they present few difficulties to the modern reader, and yet sound like echoes from the earlier periods of the language. Generally he is content to follow his author with almost plodding fidelity, but occasionally he makes additions which are eminently characteristic. His author having remarked:—"Il nest an Jour Duy nulle chose qui tant grieue Rome ne ytalie come fait le college Des notaires ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... were possible to convince the struggling youth of to-day that all that is great and noble and true in the history of the world is the result of infinite pains-taking, perpetual plodding, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... been his passion—a passion that grew with his growth; so that his conversation was habitually spiced with phrases and expressions in which there was abundance of sound, but generally an equal lack of sense. Too full of himself to be willing to keep patiently plodding on like ordinary people, he had run through a good many trades without being master of any. Once he was a pastry-cook; at another time a painter; and then an auctioneer—which last business he held to the ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... in appearance, they differ very much. The tame Ass is gentle, and generally fond of the society of man; the wild Ass is one of the shyest creatures in the world; even when caught it is almost impossible to tame him. The tame Ass is slow, plodding, dull, and lazy; the wild Ass is as swift as a race-horse and as wild as a Deer. The best mounted horsemen can seldom approach him, and it is generally necessary to send a rifle-ball after him, if he is wanted very much. His flesh is considered a great delicacy, which is another difference ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... her hand—to make sight possible against the blaze—at a man who is plodding across the nearest opening in the woodland. How drenched he must be! What can possess him, to choose a day like this to go afoot through an undergrowth of bracken a day's raindrift has left water-charged? She knows well what a deluge meets him at every ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... the system-building sage, Who, plodding on from youth to age, Has proved all other reasoners fools, And bound all Nature by his rules,— So fares he in that dreadful hour When injured Truth exerts her power Some new phenomenon to raise, Which, bursting on his frighted gaze, From its proud summit to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... founded in the times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... stopped and flung the paper aside. She did not care even to glance at the exercises prescribed or at the diet and the routine of daily work. How dull and uninspired! How grossly material! Stomach! Chewing! Exercising machines! Plodding dreary miles daily, rain or shine! What could such things have to do with the free and glorious career of an inspired singer? Keith was laughing at her as he hastened away, abandoning her to ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... Governor Brown and General Toombs continued strained. The latter never lost an opportunity to upbraid him in public or in private, and some of his keenest thrusts were aimed at the plodding figure of his old friend and ally, as it passed on its lonely way through the ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... party—Bertrand Barrere in the National Assembly in 1794, when the tide of feeling had been turned by events the well-known taunt—"let Pitt then boast of his victory to a nation of shop-keepers." The instinct for persistent methodical plodding work which extracted this taunt, afterwards vanquished Napoleon at Waterloo, and enabled the English to pass what, when you come to gauge it by our present standard, was one of the darkest and most trying crises in our modern history. We who are on the light side of that great cloud ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... endurance, but knew nought of it since he never complained but masked his suffering in brave and smiling words. And there were times when, burning with impatience, I would quicken my pace (God forgive me) until, missing his plodding figure, I would look back to see him stumbling ...
— Martin Conisby's Vengeance • Jeffery Farnol
... the first time that afternoon the A's made a stand. Oliver's partner at the wickets was Callonby, of the Sixth, a steady, plodding player, who hardly ever hit out, and got all his runs (if he got any) from the slips. This afternoon he hardly scored at all, but kept his wicket carefully ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... Remembering, at the time the above remarks concerning the South American species, we looked carefully for the workers, in this instance, and failed to discover above half a dozen wingless ants above ground, and these were plodding about, very indifferent, as it appeared to us, to the fate or welfare of their winged brothers. And on digging down a few inches, we could find but comparatively few individuals in the nest, and could detect no movements ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... risen from the ranks and gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came to regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were all brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past every obstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the best of that sphere of life ...
— An Australian Lassie • Lilian Turner
... supposititious enemies; and arranges for the construction, equipment, mobilization, provisioning, fuelling, and moving of supposititious fleets and armies. War strategy is vivid, stimulating and resultful; preparation strategy is dull, plodding, and—for the strategist himself—apparently resultless. Yet war strategy is merely the child of preparation strategy. The weapons that war strategy uses, preparation strategy put into its hands. The fundamental plans, the strength and composition of the forces, the ...
— The Navy as a Fighting Machine • Bradley A. Fiske
... and fertile valley, Tracing all its winding ways, Plodding on with dogged patience Through a score of weary days, Camping in the lonely timber, Sleeping on the scorching plain, Bearing heat and thirst and hunger, Sore fatigue and wind and rain— Halting only when ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... quite overcome, and when the hour arrived for closing the school, instead of, as he had expected, tying up the half-dozen books he kept in his desk, shaking hands with the dozen children eager to be turned loose in the delightful pasturage of summer holiday, turning the key in the lock, and plodding alone down the dusty road to Squire Rawson's, he now found the school-room full, not of school-children only, but of grown people as well. He had learned that they expected him to say something, and there was nothing for him to do but to make the effort. For an hour, as he sat during ...
— Gordon Keith • Thomas Nelson Page
... flask tendered him by one of the men did much to revive Paul, and the relief at finding himself well mounted, instead of plodding wearily along on foot, was very great. He was glad enough to be mounted behind one of the stout troopers, for he was excessively drowsy, despite the peril of his situation. He had been unable to sleep, as Edward had done, in the woodman's hut, and it was ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... left to themselves, at the minister's suggestion. Forty years before, Davie had brought her to the house, yet in her soft marriage dress. The wedding journey had been the coming up at sunset to the Ridge from her home in the valley, behind his plough-horses, lifting their plodding hoofs as in the furrows. On the clean straw in the back of the wagon rested her small trunk and a hive of bees, shrouded in calico. Tied to the tail-piece was a homesick heifer. While he unhitched the horses and placed her dowry, she entered ...
— Life at High Tide - Harper's Novelettes • Various
... concealed beneath his hat brim, which had been drawn low to shade them from the glare, one hand pressing upon his saddle holster as he leaned over to rest. No insignia of rank served to distinguish him from those equally dusty fellows plodding gloomily behind, but a broad stripe of yellow running down the seams of his trousers, together with his high boots, bespoke the cavalry service, while the front of his battered campaign hat bore the decorations of two crossed sabres, with a gilded "7" prominent ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... go on plodding through classes and camp without knowing whether or not I am ever going to be rewarded!" grumbled John, so discouraged that every one felt sorry ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... a line of veteran troops, covered with scars and thoroughly inured to War, we must not compare the self-esteem and vanity of a standing Army,(*) held together merely by the glue of service-regulations and a drill book; a certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can never create it; these things therefore have a certain value, but must not be over-rated. Order, smartness, ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... thus, very sick and sorrowful, I heard a sound of wheels and plodding hoofs drawing slowly near, and lifting my head at last, espied a great wain piled high with fragrant hay whereon the driver sprawled asleep, a great fat fellow whose snores rose above the jingle of harness and creak of wheels. Now ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... man. "Luck often comes when one isn't looking for it!" And in an instant he had leaped on the horse, and headed him for the castle of fortune. The little horse started at a fine pace, and in a very few minutes they overtook the other traveller, plodding along on foot. ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... unhappy physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily forward ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... head of Outwood's, he who preferred not to interfere with Stone and Robinson, was a mild, rather timid-looking youth—not unlike what Mr. Outwood must have been as a boy—but he knew how to keep balls out of his wicket. He was a good bat of the old plodding type. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... hundred miles behind us lie, As many more ahead, Through mud and mire on mountains high Our weary feet must tread. So one by one, with loyal mind, The horses swing to place, The strong in lead, the weak behind, In patient plodding grace. "Hy-o, Buckskin, brave boy, Joe! The sun is high, The hid loons cry: ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... something like five hours on the tramp, plodding my way through a deep glen in a pine forest, but have not yet come across any sign of a stag, I started with the Chief and the Count, but the former soon went off at a tangent somewhere on his own hook, and the latter, who had got his Hotchkiss with him and found it heavy ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... expression of his thin white face might have belonged to a little old man of ninety. He was driving two unruly goats towards the house. The chase they led him would have been a laughable sight, had he not looked so small and forlorn plodding along in his clumsy wooden shoes, and a peasant's blouse of blue cotton, several sizes too large for ...
— The Gate of the Giant Scissors • Annie Fellows Johnston
... wonder or protest. If we could be patient under the load of a mere worldly life; if we could bear that burden as the beasts bear it; then, like beasts, we might bend all our thoughts to the earth; and no call from the great Heavens above us would startle us from our plodding and ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... smothered her in dust when he perceived that the little woman in black, under a black parasol, was actually Diane. To his indignant queries as to why she should be plodding her way on foot, with this scorching sun overhead, her replies were cheerful and uncomplaining. A series of small accidents in the stable—such had constantly happened at her own little chateau in the Oise—having ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... took refuge in happy thoughts of the sea. The sea was my real sphere, after all. On the sea, in especial, you could combine distinction with lawlessness, whereas the army seemed to be always weighted by a certain plodding submission to discipline. To be sure, by all accounts, the life was at first a rough one. But just then I wanted to suffer keenly; I wanted to be a poor devil of a cabin boy, kicked, beaten, and sworn at—for a time. Perhaps some hint, some inkling of my sufferings might reach their ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame
... the world for this little experience. And as for me—I have been in Elysium for three months; and that is more than a host of your excellent prudent men can boast of, who plod on day after day only that they may continue plodding to the end of their lives. Adieu! my adorable—my angel that will now vanish from my sight!' And here, in spite of my struggles, he embraced me with the greatest ardour, and then, tearing himself away as if ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... double meaning, Mr Drummond thought that a cask had surged, when coming out of the lighter, and struck them down. He desired old Tom to be more careful, and walked away, while we proceeded to unload the lighter. The new clerk was a very heavy, simple young man, plodding and attentive certainly, but he had no other merit; he was sent into the lighter to rake the marks and numbers of the casks as they were hoisted up, and soon became a butt to young Tom, who gave him the wrong marks and numbers of all the casks, to ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... driving along back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... in the air— And the capricious beams of Dian's light Gave something mystic to the scene most fair. I gave my cousin Dante's divine "Inferno," Imploring her to read il primo canto. "Lo giorno s'andava," she drawled; but, tired of plodding, Directly fell asleep, and pretty soon—was nodding!! "Cousin, sweet cousin," cried I out, "awake! I long for sympathy—compassion on me take: They say yon stars are worlds—dost think 'tis so?" "Really, my—dear (a yawn), I—don't exactly know." "Cousin," said I, "upon ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... the first rains, homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see Captain Jim returning from a visit to him, slowly plodding along the ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... did not hear a laugh or an oath; I did not see a violent gesture, and hardly a smile, that day. The roistering, roaring, terrible 'Reds,' as I saw them, were weary, dull men, doing ill-directed work with plodding indifference. ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... At times we could scarcely make headway against it, but after most strenuous effort we neared the village. We hoped to find shelter under a bridge, but found innumerable muddy streams running through the planks. So we resumed our plodding, slipping and sliding in ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... against any one in the long run. The rule of business is to take what you can get, and keep what you have got; or an eagerness in seizing every opportunity that offers for promoting your own interest, and a plodding, persevering industry in making the most of the advantages you have already obtained, are the most effectual as well as the safest ingredients in the composition of the mercantile character. The world is a ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... left swinging on their hinges as people escaped, scarcely looking behind them as they fled. These were refugees from Rheims itself. There were many others wearily plodding through the City, people who had come from Belgium and the border towns of France. Some who had come from farms drove pitiful cattle before them, and some journeyed in farm wagons, with babies and old people, chickens, dogs, and household goods mixed in a heap upon beds of straw. ...
— The French Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... stout one, Sandy could easily have gnawed his way through it if he had not been too frightened to try. And there he stayed, while all the time old Ebenezer kept plodding along toward ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... once fairly started on any subject whatever, they have no power of self-control; they passively endure the succession of impulses which are evolved out of the original exciting cause; they are passed on from one idea to another and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering from it in endless digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as is very certain, no one would envy the madman ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... two artists more unlike! Just compare "The Dancing Sylphs" and "The Gleaners." The theme of all Millet's work is, "Man goeth forth to his labors unto the evening." Toil, hardship, heroic endurance, plodding monotony, burdens grievous to be borne—these things cover the canvases of Millet. All of his deep sincerity, his abiding melancholy, his rugged nobility are there; for every man who works in freedom simply reproduces himself. That is what true work is—self-expression, self-revelation. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... contemptuous, for it would have looked then as though they were trying to escape the Greek fire, or that they were at least interested in what was going forward. But the steady advance of so many men, each plodding along by himself, with his head bowed and his gun ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... when Vickers regained the top of the cliff and once more looked across the island towards the far-off point, the figure which he had previously seen making for it had turned back, and was plodding steadily across the coarse grass and rock-strewn moorland in his own direction. Chatfield had evidently taken a bird's eye view of the situation from the vantage point of the slope and had come to the conclusion that the higher part of the ...
— Scarhaven Keep • J. S. Fletcher
... conspicuously, and so suddenly ceased to be the special instrument in the hands of the Spirit, kept plod, plod, plodding on, with no bitterness of heart. For twenty years he had no share in the development of Gentile Christianity, of which he had sowed the first seed, but had to do much less conspicuous work. He toiled away ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Bolton encouragingly; "it's made of material as tough as your own sinews, Grim, and won't give way easily, as the thumps it has withstood already prove.—Has it never struck you, Fred," he continued, turning to our hero who was plodding forward in silence—"has it never struck you that when things in this world get very bad, and we begin to feel inclined to give up, they somehow or other begin ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the borders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, "The imagination is the stuff of the intellect"—affords, that is, the material upon which the ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... ["This plodding occupation of bookes is as painfull as any other, and as great an enemie vnto health, which ought principally to be considered. And a man should not suffer him selfe to be inveagled by the pleasure he takes in them."—Florio, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... to see her play. In his small, shabby room in a musty house on one of the old side streets he set to work on his new plan. He wrote now without fervor, without elation, plodding along hour after hour, erasing, interlining, destroying, rewriting. He toiled terribly. He permitted himself no fancy flights. He calculated now. "I must have a young and beautiful duchess or countess," he mused, bitterly. "Our democratic public loves to see nobility. She must peril her ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... Hounds had reached the woods before St. Pierre, found the directions on the tree and turned off toward the beach to follow the shore to the Point of Pines. But after plodding through the thick, soft sand for a while they decided that that mode of traveling was altogether too fatiguing, and went back into the woods where they found a path which ran in the general line ...
— The Campfire Girls on Ellen's Isle - The Trail of the Seven Cedars • Hildegard G. Frey
... sight. I could see the jumping of his heart on his ribs, and the gleam of his yellow eye. When the dog was wholly baulked by the water trick, it was comical to see:—he could not sit still, but rocked up and down in glee, and reared on his hind feet to get a better view of the slow-plodding hound. With mouth opened nearly to his ears, though not at all winded, he panted noisily for a moment, or rather he laughed gleefully, just as a dog laughs ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... over the rim of the basin, disappeared, and then came plodding back through the heat. Johnny had laughed all that while; laughed until his sides were sore; until his eyes were red with the tears he had shed; until he was so weak he staggered when he first crawled out from under the ...
— Skyrider • B. M. Bower
... "The plodding housekeeper, whose picture you drew just now—humble, even mean in your regard though she be—sinks to peaceful sleep when her tasks are done, and rises refreshed at coming dawn. If she is happier than your fine lady, whose dainty hands cannot bear the soil of these common things, why? ...
— The Allen House - or Twenty Years Ago and Now • T. S. Arthur
... for the city, making their way along the South Road, which was the main thoroughfare into this part of the country. Many a time have I seen their covered wagons returning from the city about the time when I was starting for school, the horses wearily plodding along at a walk, the farmer or his boy asleep in the wagon ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... for her," exclaimed the Governor-General. "No pleasures to distract her, an atmosphere of plodding commercialism, an abundance of health-giving nourishment! Perhaps the mere change of climate will have the desired effect. We will make the experiment. She is doomed if she remains here, and America seems to be our only hope. I suppose our beloved Monarch sends a minister ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... sniped at us as we arrived and had the satisfaction of seeing the whole force turned out after a weary march. But of course the Boers are in their element at this kind of game. A hundred of them wish to drive away some stock; they leave a dozen to snipe from a ridge, while we send Tommy plodding round for miles on a flanking movement (for you must keep him out of range); and when the cattle have been driven far enough away, Mr. Boer jumps on his horse and is off also, while we ruefully ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... night when Nona left the little hut, old Nika carrying her bag and plodding behind her. The girl felt that she must return to her two American friends to receive their aid ...
— The Red Cross Girls with the Russian Army • Margaret Vandercook
... feebly in his hands and sat shivering with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the heart ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... started in the first dusk of the coming day; it was now the yellow time of the slant afternoon sunlight; between these two points there had been a body of steady plodding. The girl had looked askance at that gaunt form of Donnegan's when they began; but before three hours, seeing that the spring never left his step nor the swinging rhythm his stride, she began to wonder. This afternoon, nothing he did ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... aglow with the brilliant scarlet berries of the cassena, and on some of the oaks we observed the mistletoe, laden with its pure white, pearl-like berries. Out of the woods the roads are generally bad, and we found it hard work plodding through the deep sand. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... I am sure, but how shall the world, even the Christian world, be convinced that it may have blessed fortastes of heaven while yet plodding upon earth, and faith to go thither joyfully, for the ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... hearing footsteps in front of him, he paused. He went a little distance up the hedge on both sides and held up his light, but did not detect the cowering boys, and at last giving up the search in despair, went slowly home. They heard him plodding back over the field, and it was not until the sound of his footsteps had died away, that Eric cautiously broke cover, and looked over the hedge. He saw the man's light gradually getting more distant, and ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... the University of Oxford, but taking no degree there, he went to Cambridge, and commenced master of arts; he afterwards studied the law in the Inner-Temple, and became a barrister; but his genius being too lively to be confined to a dull plodding study, he chose rather to dedicate his hours to poetry and pleasure; he was the first that wrote scenes in verse, the Tragedy of Ferrex and Perrex, sons to Gorboduc King of Britain, being performed in the presence ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... ahead, I could picture her there behind me, the wind whipping the color to her cheeks and playing with her hair, her eyes bright and gay in the half-light. Save for the steady plodding of the horse, it was very still. I fancied that she had leaned nearer, that her shoulder was touching mine, that I could feel her breath on my cheek. Then she spoke, and her voice was almost ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... higher civilization. They are morally blind and politically treacherous. Their biological condition is that of the lower orders, and the Darwinian law of progress came to them as an inspiration. Darwin's mind, in its absence of the higher vision, was akin to a German mind. In his plodding patience, his devotion to details, and in many other ways, his mind was German. But in his candor, his truthfulness, his humility, his simplicity, he was anything but German. Undoubtedly his teachings bore fruit of a political and semi-political character in the Teutonic mind. The ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... form, find, perhaps, nowadays, more advocates; principally because the first-mentioned list contains articles that give off very offensive odors while being applied, so that the more fastidious are loath to use them. What may not be very offensive to the plodding florist would be highly so to the more refined, or when the general public comes more into contact with the crops while being so applied. In almost all of the cases where the ingredients mentioned are used they are diluted with a large quantity of water, except in the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... old fellow's autograph. What a bad hand for a schoolmaster! I will spare my dear lazy father the trouble of deciphering these villainous pot-hooks. Ha! ha! my good, industrious, quiet, plodding cousin Anthony, heir of Oak Hall, in the county of Wilts, there lies your amiable despatch;" and he spurned the torn document with his foot. "That's the way that I mean to serve all those who ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... complain," said Simon, in answer to the other's questions concerning his prosperity and success. "I was always a plodding sort of fellow, as you remember. Not a genius—I don't think I've the divine gift. Sometimes I hope it may come. I've worked hard, I grant you—very hard; but I've had extraordinary luck—marvellous! What do you think of that imp's tail?—Isn't ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... found Johnny Gamble listening, in awed curiosity, to an insistent telephone bell. Gradually it dawned on him that he must have left a call, and plodding into the bath-room he mechanically turned on the cold water, reflecting dully that this was a cruel world. Suddenly it came to him with a rush that this thirty-first of May was to be the busiest of his life! He had to have a million dollars before ...
— Five Thousand an Hour - How Johnny Gamble Won the Heiress • George Randolph Chester
... gathering the pine-needles of last summer for lighting the fire of the silk-worm nursery. And down that narrow foot-path, meandering around the boulders and disappearing among the thickets, see what big loads of brushwood are moving towards us. Beneath them my swarthy and hardy peasants are plodding up the hill asweat and athirst. When I first descended to the wadi, one such load of brushwood emerging suddenly from behind a cliff surprised and frightened me. But soon I was reminded of the moving forest in Macbeth. The man ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... scholarship and a genuine speculative spirit, combined with tact and firmness in teaching. They are enthusiastically devoted to their work. There is a growing disposition to break away from mechanical and plodding routine, and adopt an intellectual, energizing style of questions in class work, that elicit enthusiasm and aid the student. Lecturing is but little used. The teaching is more of an active, earnest ...
— Colleges in America • John Marshall Barker
... shorthand and two for typing. Her fellow scholars were drawn from all ages and all ranks—clerks, office boys, and grey-headed men; girls with their hair still in pig-tails, and elderly women with patient, strained faces, who would sit at their desks plodding through the intricacies of shorthand and paying very little attention to what went ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... gained by sticking to our stations. So, more for deviltry than from entertaining any real hope of overtaking him, I chucked my rifle to the nearest of the farmers, touched old Bob with the spur, and went away on a hard gallop after the wounded fugitive, who was now plodding onward at the usual long loping canter of his tribe. For about half a mile the wood was open, and sloped gently upward, until it joined the open country, where it was bounded by a high rugged fence, made in the usual snake fashion, with a huge heavy top-rail. This we soon reached; the wolf, ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... landlord's refusal and the miner's angry profanity. A moment later she saw the traveller plodding up ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... wooden sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far down the road, and thither—since the Weymore sleigh had not come—Faxon saw himself under the immediate necessity of plodding through several feet ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... were gathering thickly overhead, and the ground beneath was covered with rustling leaves, which, blighted by the early frosts, lay helpless and dead at the roadside, or were made the sport of the wind. A solitary horseman was slowly plodding along the road but a few miles from the village of Salem. In truth he was so near to the famous Puritan village, that, through the hills and intervening tree-tops, he could have seen the spires of the churches had he raised his melancholy eyes from the ground. The rider ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... an Englishman as any of his class in the island. Methodical, plodding, industrious, and regular in all his habits, he was honest by rule, and had no leisure or inclination for any other opinions than those which were obtained with the smallest effort. In consequence of the limited sphere ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... I will be plodding on through the sands and dust, and I'll be all alone. But you, little girl, you will be making your peace with Omkar and dreaming of the ...
— Caste • W. A. Fraser
... his forces. By the will, constantly educated, the hope and plan are prevented from evaporating into dreams, and a little gain is all the time being added. Enthusiasm keeps the interest up, and makes the obstacles seem small. Young people often call perseverance plodding, and look with impatience on careful, steady efforts of any kind. It is plodding in a certain sense, but by it the mountain is scaled; whereas the impetuous nature soon tires, or is injured, and the climb is over, half-finished. ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... men whatever he does. The strong character needs not be constantly struggling against terrible odds in the most difficult situations in order to be sure of its own solidity, nor must the deep intellect be ever plodding through the mazes of intricate theories and problems that it may feel itself superior to minds of less compass. There is much natural inborn strength of body and mind in the world, and on the whole those who possess ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... to show off what he considers his own good qualities; a certain slow, methodical plodding and a good memory, which are natural gifts, but which he boasts of as if they were acquired virtues. He binds his music because he is a pedant and a prig, and can't help it; a bad fellow to get on with. Now, mein bester, ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... brief silence. Molly's eyes travelled beyond him and rested upon the plodding horses ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the foot of Terrace Hill. She looked up at the beautiful home where she had spent the previous evening, and as she saw the velvet lawn and terraced walks bordered with bright flowers, she half pitied herself because she was only a plodding music teacher. She was not envious, but she had such longing aspirations to be somebody in the world; she wanted so many things, needed so much to complete her education, and starved herself in so many ways for the sake of completing it, that ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... as ever, Time's a jewel in its loss; But, possessed in plenty, never Held as ought but worthless dross. Like lost truant-boys we linger Whimpering in Life's mazy wood, Heedless of the silent finger Ever pointing for our good; Each, in plodding darkness groping, Clothes his day in dreamy night, 'Stead of boldly climbing, hoping, Up the steeps towards the light, Where, as metal plucks the lightning Flashing from the lofty sky, Sturdy purpose, ever heightening, Grasps an Immortality. Let not future peals remind thee, Then, ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... The western mount was close, the mouth of the gorge through which we must pass, now plain before us. It did not seem as though we could reach it before dusk, and Drake and I were reconciled to spending another night in the peaceful vale. Plodding along, deep in thought, I was ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... plays touched upon in the last four paragraphs are in intention realistic. They aim, that is to say, at a literal and sober representation of life. In the other class of plays, which seek their effect, not in plodding probability, but in delightful improbability, the long arm of coincidence has its legitimate functions. Yet even here it is not quite unfettered. One of the most agreeable coincidences in fiction, I take it, is the simultaneous ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... and the five horses were on their long journey. The boy on Auckland sent her to the front at once, and the mare settled into her long, easy stride, close to the rail, saving every possible inch. Pharaoh immediately dropped into last position, plodding through the dust kicked up by the field. The big hammer-head showed nothing in the first mile save dogged persistence. At the end of the second mile Auckland was twenty lengths in front of Pharaoh, and running without ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... it worth while for the camera department to go with them, and so Kearton and Gobbet and the four special porters trailed along with the slow, plodding wagon. In the first place, the wagons would follow the shortest route and the horses would be none the worse for an easy day; in the second, if by the remotest chance the Colonel flushed anything worth while, he could more ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... they are still attractive, as natural curiosities, and as displaying a wonderful exhibition of the creative power. Beheld in any light, they are interesting. Whatever may have been their origin, they adorn the monotony of western scenery, and afford employment to the fancy of the traveller. The plodding foot may tread carelessly over them, the uninquiring eye may pass them, unheeded; but the poet and philosopher linger around the hallowed spot where they stand, to catch inspiration, or to gather wisdom from ...
— The Emigrant - or Reflections While Descending the Ohio • Frederick William Thomas
... beautiful with the grace and power which comes of training. He was a military man, and you have only to look at a dozen common men in a marching regiment and compare them with a dozen of the same class of men who go on plodding to work and loafing at play in their native villages, to see what people can do for their own figures. His eyes, Selina, were bright with intelligence and trained powers of observation; and they were beautiful with ...
— Melchior's Dream and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... wagons, all huddled into a narrow gully slippery with mud, advance so slowly, however eager they may be to push forward, that although the movement was begun at four o'clock, midnight found the rearmost regiment still plodding wearily forward. ...
— "Forward, March" - A Tale of the Spanish-American War • Kirk Munroe
... (Since GERARDO does not answer, with violent irritation.) These anaemic, threadbare, plodding, would-be geniuses who are puffing themselves up today! Whose technique is so sublime, it makes them sterile, impotent at twenty! Meistersingers, philistines, that's what they are, whether they are starving or basking in the public favor. Fellows that go to the cookbook ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... cavalry officer galloped up to the head of a beef trail that strung backward for the better part of a mile, the cattle plodding on wearily, guarded by a dozen or more tired and ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... talk on "The Power of Persistence," he said: "Always keep your eye on the student who seems to be dull, who is slow in his studies, who has to repeat his class, but who keeps plodding along doggedly, determinedly, until he has finished the ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... not say stupid, rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world is ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... for Mul-tal-la and the Shelton brothers when one afternoon the three rode into the village, with Zigzag the packhorse plodding at the rear of the procession. The arrival made a hubbub of excitement, and it seemed as if the whole settlement—men, squaws and children—gathered clamorously round the horsemen, who dismounted and gazed about ...
— Deerfoot in The Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part of it through the amomums, and stumps of the ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... little significance, I believe, as clews to the saner courses of the mind, but he spoke only gently in his imaginary speeches to his wife. I had to listen, plodding wearily along with aching shoulders under the burden of the boat, to fond, affectionate words addressed to her in an incessant string. The thread of his ideas seemed to be that he had arrived home, worn-out and ill, and that he was resting ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... the direction, and, gathering up their things, the cadets hurried off to where he had pointed. There, sure enough, was a man plodding along with a bundle over his shoulder. He was a short, thick-set man, and wore a heavy mustache curled up at ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... the sin for which there is hardly any forgiveness—ingratitude to friendship—in not writing you sooner; but of all men living, I had intended to have sent you an entertaining letter; and by all the plodding, stupid powers, that in nodding, conceited majesty, preside over the dull routine of business—a heavily solemn oath this!—I am, and have been, ever since I came to Edinburgh, as unfit to write a letter of humour, as to write a commentary on the ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... was so thick we could see nothing, therefore, without a word of remonstrance, we followed our pilot, plodding through grass soaked in moisture which reached to our knees, feeling very chilled, wet, and weary, but all trying to keep stout hearts and turn cheery faces ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... battle seems particularly appropriate. It would be difficult to imagine for heroes of this legend two officers of infantry of the line, for example, whose fantasy is tamed by much walking exercise and whose valour necessarily must be of a more plodding kind. As to artillery, or engineers whose heads are kept cool on a diet of mathematics, it ...
— The Point Of Honor - A Military Tale • Joseph Conrad
... mean artist—not mere artisan. It was certainly not surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen" exasperating. So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for plodding music-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant turned author, which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman turned philosopher. He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that goes with beefiness, ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... Nothing there took him by surprise; he foresaw all things, knew all that was happening, and kept his own counsel; he was a diplomatist in his quick comprehension of a situation; and in the routine of business he was as patient and plodding as a soldier on the march. But beyond this business horizon he could not see. He used to spend his hours of leisure on the threshold of his shop, leaning against the framework of the door. Take him from his dark little counting-house, and he became once ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... ravenous man can help snatching at food. And the consciousness that the insult was not yet avenged, that his rancor was still unspent, weighed on his heart and poisoned the artificial tranquillity which he managed to obtain in Turkey by means of restless, plodding, and ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... speeding townwards along the rails Judkin would be plodding his way to the vicarage bearing a vegetable marrow and a basketful of dahlias. ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... the children and I are plodding onward in good health, and in a fair medium state of prosperity; and on the whole, we are quite the happiest family to be found anywhere. We live in the ugliest little old ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... while he assured himself that he had outwitted the Apaches, they had completely checkmated him. Their falling back and giving up the chase was simply a ruse to throw him off his guard. It had succeeded to perfection. While he was plodding along over the prairie, the Apaches had circled around, gone ahead of him, and, ensconcing themselves in the woods, had patiently waited for him to ...
— Through Apache Lands • R. H. Jayne
... out from Eddyville was a short one. When we got to plodding along over the Plains, we made from fifteen to twenty miles a day. That was counted a good day's drive, without ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... were lying amongst some stones and their ponies grazing, Ingleborough coolly filling his pipe and lighting it with a burning-glass, but keeping a watchful eye upon the long train of wagons and horsemen plodding along at the customary rate of about two miles an hour, and ready at any moment to spring upon his pony in case a party of the enemy should make up their minds to try and drive in the two ponies ...
— A Dash from Diamond City • George Manville Fenn
... cannot be so unjust to the plodding genius as to divulge his secret. Our readers must be content to await the time when the young man sees fit ...
— The Huge Hunter - Or, the Steam Man of the Prairies • Edward S. Ellis
... glance could never have suspected him a poet-musician; as little could even such a glance have failed to see in him an honest man. He was powerfully built, over the middle height, but not tall. He spoke very fair old-fashioned English, with the Yorkshire tone and turn. His walk was rather plodding, and his movements slow and stiff; but in communion with his violin they were free enough, and the more delicate for the strength that was in them; at the anvil they were as supple as powerful. On his face dwelt an expression that was not to be read by the indifferent—a waiting in ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... looke. For when would you my Lord, or you, or you, Haue found the ground of studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... the indication of his whip to the spreading, graceful arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... Times reporter yonder running down the events of his career. Poland is in arms again, and the clever compiler farther on means to make twenty pounds out of it by summing up her past risings and ruins. The bruisers King and Mace fought yesterday, and the plodding person close by from Bell's Life is gleaning their antecedents. Half the literati of our age do but like these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... difficulty, through the suite of saloons and galleries, the way which he had followed on his arrival with the King-at-Arms and the Usher of the Black Rod. He saw no one, except here and there some old lord with tardy steps, plodding along heavily in front ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... was my plodding age. Sometimes when I am tingling with impatience here I look back in wonder on the dogged drive of those days. Work is an unhappy man's best friend. I have no concealments from you, Lily. You know I never loved my wife—not this way—though I made her happy; ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... off the valley when she rose for the last time from the seat she had found outside the tent, for there was no doubt now that a faint patter of feet on stones mingled with the clamor of the river. Almost as she did so, a few plodding figures appeared beneath the firs, and she saw that two of them carried a litter between them. Then she saw her husband walking very wearily, and she ran forward with a little cry. She grasped one of the poles between which a sagging blanket hung, and Weston, who held ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... country. He flies rather high, flaunting his wings in the sun, because he wants to show himself off in all his airy beauty: and when he spies a bed of bright flowers afar off on the sun-smitten slopes, he sails off towards them lazily, like a grand signior who amuses himself. No regular plodding through a monotonous spike of plain little bells for him: what he wants is brilliant colour, bold advertisement, good honey, and plenty of it. He doesn't care to search. Who wants his ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... sitting in a bedroom of the master-millwright's house, engaged in the untutored reading of Greek and Latin. It was no tale of Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family woe that inflamed their imaginations and spurred them onward. They were plodding away at the Greek Testament, immersed in a chapter of the idiomatic and ...
— Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters • Thomas Hardy
... as the travellers were plodding onward, Ketch walked for a time at the head of Aunt Amanda's mule. Aunt Amanda leaned forward and ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... cases of the comic seem to consist of little more than a shock of surprise: a pun is a sort of jack-in-the-box, popping from nowhere into our plodding thoughts. The liveliness of the interruption, and its futility, often please; dulce est desipere in loco; and yet those who must endure the society of inveterate jokers know how intolerable this sort of scintillation can become. There is something ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... winds of desolation a voice. Well the great antagonist knew she could not thus stop these men, but so, little by little, she ground them down, wore away the excess of their vitality, reduced them to grim plodding, so that at the moment she would hold them weakened to her purposes. They made no sign, for they were of the great men of the earth, but they bent to the familiar touch of many little ...
— The Silent Places • Stewart Edward White
... Sarawak exceeded 5,000, about one-tenth being children, and perhaps a twentieth women. These settlers lived in communities, were very industrious and very prosperous; they were favoured by the English because of their plodding perseverance, and hard-working habits. They made no complaints, were treated kindly, and were apparently as happy as in their industrial pursuits they were successful. On the night of the 18th of February, marching in a body, the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Lavendar, as he and Goliath came plodding into Old Chester in the May dusk, "I think I'll go and see Willy. He'll tell me how much ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... were plodding lines of people, disciplined, carrying burdens, no bigger than ants at this distance. There was an ominous horror about the quiet beauty of the place. It was somehow like a beautiful woman lying just slain. Yet I could see no wounds ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... far, when the child was again struck by the altered behaviour of Mr Thomas Codlin, who instead of plodding on sulkily by himself as he had heretofore done, kept close to her, and when he had an opportunity of looking at her unseen by his companion, warned her by certain wry faces and jerks of the head not to put any trust in Short, but to reserve all confidences for Codlin. Neither did ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... him. There was a sharp rustling of bush, and breaking of twigs close by, and the sound of heavy, plodding hoofs. The next moment two horsemen broke from the dense cover about him, and ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... envelope, and being anxious to present a clean document to her wondering audience when she should have reached her goal. But oh, it did seem so far up to the Eagles' Nest, and the way was so rough for her little feet! Still she kept plodding wearily along, and at length reached the end of her journey, only to find the house ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... ideal has been conceived to be a great bureaucracy. Mr. Anstey gave humorous and vivid expression to this idea in Punch some years ago, when he represented the citizens of the Socialist state as being all clothed alike, known only by numbers, strangers to all the joys of family life, plodding through their allotted tasks under a race of hated bureaucrats, and having the solace of chewing gum in their leisure time as a specially paternal provision. Some such mental picture must have inspired Herbert Spencer's "Coming Slavery," ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... was pouring. The train rolled out without picturesque circumstance, the men cursing, the oxen, with great heads swinging under the yokes, plodding doggedly through lakes fretted with the downpour. Breakfast was a farce; nobody's fire would burn and the women were wet through before they had the coffee pots out. One or two provident parties had stoves fitted up in their ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... Folgate, and at Kensal New Town. "A hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Patty. I'm not that sort. You know very well I've only a plain, plodding sort of a mind, and I can't keep up with this repartee and persiflage that you carry on ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... Esther North floated across the snowy fields to the hill where the children of Glendour were coasting. Her brother Daniel, plodding up the trampled path beside the glairy track with half a dozen other boys, dragging the bob-sled on which his little sister Ruth was seated, heard the call with vague sentiments of dislike and rebellion. His twelve ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... I made my way by this path, and erelong, stood upon one of the little rustic bridges spanning the ravine, and connecting with a similar flight of ascending stairs upon the other side. There I paused, and well I might. It were a dull, plodding creature indeed, who would not be spellbound by such a scene! On either hand were the sloping wooded sides of the ravine whose depths were shrouded in the mysterious whiteness of the fog; above me, a short distance in front, was the arch of the broad, picturesque bridge with which the driveway ...
— How to Cook Husbands • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... have little significance, I believe, as clews to the saner courses of the mind, but he spoke only gently in his imaginary speeches to his wife. I had to listen, plodding wearily along with aching shoulders under the burden of the boat, to fond, affectionate words addressed to her in an incessant string. The thread of his ideas seemed to be that he had arrived home, worn-out and ill, and that he ...
— In the Valley • Harold Frederic
... thing to be done, however, was to get a definite idea of whereabouts they were; it was obviously useless to continue plodding on, they knew not whither; besides, it was frightfully fatiguing and painful work, this marching through the forest, and George felt that it would be a positive advantage even to deviate somewhat from their direct course, if by so doing they could earlier gain ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes were also on the finish, but for ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... all valueless, just so much dull and sordid plodding; but it is no more dull and sordid than keeping books at sixty dollars a month, adding up endless columns of meaningless figures until one dies. And furthermore, the hack-work keeps me in touch with things literary and gives me time to try ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... an ever-living commonplace, considered to be inaccurate: the donnish historian may, by his plodding want of imagination, give us only the strict facts. The lively writer, perhaps, in the desire to round out a character of a man concerning whom little is known or to perfect the rhythm of a paragraph, will consult his convenient fancy rather than the difficult document. In academic circles, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the same purple promise over the budded woods; the same sharpness in the bustling wind. Since then, Nature has gone through all her plodding processes, and now it is all to do over again. A sense of fatigue at the infinite repetitions of life comes over me. If Nature would but make a little variation! If the seasons would but change their places a little, and the ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... were in the quiet street; here an Alpine soldier strolling with his sweetheart, there an old cure on his way to his little stone chapel, yonder a peasant in blouse and sabots plodding doggedly along about some detail of belated work that never ends for such as he. A few lanterns set in iron cages projected over ancient doorways, lighting the street but dimly where it lay partly in deep shadow, partly illuminated by ...
— In Secret • Robert W. Chambers
... opportunities equal, we should no more equalise the result for the sake of which the opportunities were demanded than we should give every cab-horse in London a chance of winning the Derby by allowing it on Derby Day to go plodding over the course at Epsom. On the contrary, by inducing all to contemplate the same kind of success, we should be multiplying the sense of failure and dooming the majority to a gratuitous discontent with positions in which ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... but the most hardened old soldier there is something "creepy" in plodding along over a narrow path in a rather dense forest, not knowing at what moment a lurking enemy may pour in a volley that will bowl over half of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... you naught compensateth me * The near, the far, two cases only here I see: I yearn for you at every hour and tide as yearns * For water-place wayfarer plodding wearily. With you abide my hearing, heart and eyen-sight * And (sweeter than the honeycomb) your memory. Then, O my Grief when fared afar your retinue * And bore that ship away ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... current not particularly strong, our greatest obstacle being the low-hanging branches which swept against us. Much of my time was expended in holding these back from contact with Eloise's face, our horses sedately plodding along behind their leaders. ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... frequently stole me from myself in Norway. We often passed over large unenclosed tracts, not graced with trees, or at least very sparingly enlivened by them, and the half-formed roads seemed to demand the landmarks, set up in the waste, to prevent the traveller from straying far out of his way, and plodding ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... up, in that plodding and peaceful region, and got to be good-sized boys and girls—big enough, in fact, to begin to know as much about the wars raging perpetually to the west and north of us as our elders, and also to feel as stirred up over ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... as men would have me grow, By ordered plodding to a life complete; Climbing the path with slow and heavy beat Of tedious footsteps from the world below. I cannot like a visible circle flow Until by measured compass I can meet The place I started from with weary feet. That proudly point the obvious path they go. Ah no,—mine ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... the route I am crossing it - is a land of mountains and elevated plateaus, and the inhabitants I should call the "ranchers of the Orient," in their general appearance and demeanor bearing the same relation to the plodding corn-hoer and scythe-swinger of the Morava Valley as the Niobrara cow-boy does to the Nebraska homesteader. On the mountains are encountered herds of goats in charge of men who reck little for civilization, and the upland plains are dotted over with ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... certainly have gone in first. For he was one of those aggravating batsmen who keep a steady bat at everything, who never aspire to a slog, never walk out to a slow, never step back to a yorker, are never too soon for a lob, or too late for a shooter—in fact, who play the safe plodding game in the ...
— The Willoughby Captains • Talbot Baines Reed
... in color pattern with the description of the poisonous snakes, nevertheless had no poison-fangs that even after the most minute examination we could discover. Miller and one of the dogs caught a sariema, a big, long-legged, bustard-like bird, in rather a curious way. We were on the march, plodding along through as heavy a tropic downpour as it was our ill fortune to encounter. The sariema, evidently as drenched and uncomfortable as we were, was hiding under a bush to avoid the pelting rain. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... seeing the whole force turned out after a weary march. But of course the Boers are in their element at this kind of game. A hundred of them wish to drive away some stock; they leave a dozen to snipe from a ridge, while we send Tommy plodding round for miles on a flanking movement (for you must keep him out of range); and when the cattle have been driven far enough away, Mr. Boer jumps on his horse and is off also, while we ruefully "occupy" ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... of the 24th to find six inches of snow on the ground and the storm still raging, with the temperature down to 28. Soon after we began plodding through the snow on a pea-soup breakfast, George left us to hunt geese. The night before he had told Hubbard he would kill a goose in the morning, if he were permitted to go on with a rifle. He had heard the geese flying, and ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... put at a work-bench at twelve years of age and does the same thing day in and day out for seven long years, he may have lost all of the things that youth holds dear, but one thing he is apt to have learned, a dogged, plodding, unquestioning patience that shoves silently along at the appointed task until ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... the 23rd of December, the same night in which Kate Foster received so mysteriously the little Bible which was dropped with the ring into her parlour, that four men were plodding along in the darkness over a field-way which led to the wooden bridge just mentioned. They were dressed in their ordinary mill or foundry working-clothes, and seemed, from their stealthy walk and ...
— True to his Colours - The Life that Wears Best • Theodore P. Wilson
... therefore, prepared to welcome and treat with all kindness their exiled co-religionist, as he himself, twenty-five years after, feelingly narrates.[296] After being refitted at Malmoe, the vessel proceeded on her voyage to France, where Alesius left, and plodding his way along the northern coast, visited Belgium, where he would meet with friendly Scots at Bruges, and probably also at Antwerp. He then passed up the Rhine to Cologne, where, as already suggested, he was favourably received by the Archbishop, Hermann von Wied, who afterwards became a ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... circumstance of glorious war, a very lugubrious procession. The sight of it would have hurt an old-time poet. An experienced regiment has no lovely illusions. It knows what it is going to, and the knowledge makes it serious. It would much rather be in bed or on snug straw than plodding through the rain to four days and nights of eternal mud and stinking high-explosive shell. It sets its teeth and is a very stern, ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... Davout and Lannes and Ney were still faithful and efficient; Augereau in action was utterly uncertain, in morals pompous and wrong-headed; Murat knew where and how the great prizes were to be found, and was as dashing and venturesome as he was selfish and worldly-wise. The Russian generals were plodding disciples of routine. Bennigsen was an able Hanoverian mercenary, despising alike his Livonian colleague, Buxhoewden, and his chief, the servile Russian marshal, Kamenski. The Prussian general Lestocq was capable but inexperienced. The chief ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... would just be one long picnic, while the four children thought it fine fun to "sit on mother's featherbed and go riding," as they said. So they started off for California. A long, long ride these emigrants had before them; a weary trip, plodding along day after day with the patient oxen walking slowly and the burning sun or pelting rain beating down on the wagon cover. There was a train of other wagons with them, some pulled by horses but more by yoked oxen, and the men walked beside the animals and ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... unromantic guidance of the railway: he will find, after a little experience, that the homes of true romance are discovered for him by the locomotive; that solitudes and recesses which he would never find after years of plodding in sandal shoon are silently opened to him by the engineer; and that Timon now, seeking the profoundest cave in the fissures of the earth, reaches it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... has been much caricatured, satirized, and abused, but the soldier had no more faithful or indispensable servant than this same patient, plodding, hard-pulling, long-eared fellow of the roomy voice and nimble heels. The "boys" told a story which may illustrate the mule's education. A "tenderfoot" driver had gotten his team stalled in a mud hole, and by no amount of persuasion could ...
— War from the Inside • Frederick L. (Frederick Lyman) Hitchcock
... rather than being showmen. Actually, most adventure can be on the monotonous side, nine-tenths of the time. When a Stanley goes to find a Livingston, he doesn't spend twenty-four hours a day killing rogue elephants or fighting off tribesman; most of the time he's plodding along in the swamps, getting bitten by mosquitoes, or through the bush getting bitten by tsetse flies. So, as a people, we turned it over to the movies, and Telly, where they can ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... have failed to see in him an honest man. He was powerfully built, over the middle height, but not tall. He spoke very fair old-fashioned English, with the Yorkshire tone and turn. His walk was rather plodding, and his movements slow and stiff; but in communion with his violin they were free enough, and the more delicate for the strength that was in them; at the anvil they were as supple as powerful. On his ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... course, I mean artist—not mere artisan. It was certainly not surprising to hear that Maurice Hewlett found "Jurgen" exasperating. So, too, there is exasperation in Richard Strauss for plodding music-masters. Hewlett is simply a British Civil Servant turned author, which is not unsuggestive of an American Congressman turned philosopher. He has a pretty eye for color, and all the gusto that goes with beefiness, but ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... out the direction, and, gathering up their things, the cadets hurried off to where he had pointed. There, sure enough, was a man plodding along with a bundle over his shoulder. He was a short, thick-set man, and wore a heavy mustache curled up at ...
— The Rover Boys Under Canvas - or The Mystery of the Wrecked Submarine • Arthur M. Winfield
... was a stout one, Sandy could easily have gnawed his way through it if he had not been too frightened to try. And there he stayed, while all the time old Ebenezer kept plodding along toward ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... useful appendage to a party containing his kinswoman, from whom he, of course, saw no reason to be separated. To Edith herself, the delay was far from being disagreable. It promised a gay and cheerful gallop through the forest, instead of the dull, plodding, funeral-like march to which she had been day after day monotonously accustomed. She assented, therefore, to the arrangement, and, like her kinsman, beheld, in the fresh light of sun-rise, without a sigh, without even a single foreboding of ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... story, hasn't it? This summer, I mean. A beautiful story! In the beginning you came to the office—to prison, you said. And I was plodding along, trying to make myself believe that I liked bookkeeping. A pair of lame ducks we were, with broken wings. I'm a little sorry for us yet—aren't you? But now we— Do you think it would hurt you if I raised the shades? It's such a glorious morning ...
— The House of Toys • Henry Russell Miller
... was a man of lively imagination. Had he been an ordinary, prosaic and plodding individual, he would have stayed at home combing wool as did his prosaic and plodding ancestors for several generations. At the age of fourteen he went to sea and soon developed an active curiosity about regions then unknown but believed to exist. ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... ago, I determined to devote myself to the study of Arabic, and not to rest till I could speak and write it like an educated native. This rash resolve, however, was made in ignorance of the sublime difficulties of this language, and after plodding at it with great vigour for a year, and acquiring some facility in speaking it, and the ability to read a sentence so as to sometimes get a faint glimpse into the meaning hidden behind the hieroglyphs which the Arabs call ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... pretty certain his adventurous fancy was suffering all the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, and now ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... through endless hot marches The trail of a plodding desire: Now with night he has lost the fierce fever of getting, Adrowse by his dull-embered fire. Immeasurable silences compass him over, His body grows one with the streams Of sands that slide and whisper around him; The stars draw his soul: ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... my hand, and sped away to his own quarters higher up. Then came a sound which made me open my door to listen. Dear little Emily! She had burst out of her own room in her dressing-gown, and flung herself upon her brother as he was plodding wearily upstairs in the dark, clinging round his neck sobbing, 'Dear, dear Clarry! I can't bear it! I don't care. You're my own dear brother, and they are all ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... longlife.'' For while the Chinese may have little love for country, they have an intense devotion to their own customs. For nearly 5,000 years, while other empires have risen, flourished and fallen, they have lived apart, sufficient unto themselves, cherishing their own ideals, plodding along their well-worn paths, ignorant of or indifferent to the progress of the Western world, mechanically memorizing dead classics, and standing still comparatively amid the tremendous onrush of modern civilization. I say comparatively still, for if we carefully study Chinese history, we shall find ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... "multis ille bonis flebilis occidit." Never have we joined in the senseless clamor which condemned the only tax whereto we became voluntary contributors, the only resource which gave the stimulus without the danger or infatuation of gambling, the only alembic which in these plodding days sublimized our imaginations, and filled them with more delicious dreams than ever flitted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... study and imagination are frequently upbraided by the industrious and plodding sons of care, with passing too great a part of their life in a state of inaction. But these defiers of sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... getting away and seeing something. Still, if you really want me to stay, I'll give it up. But you are a good deal to blame. You have told me of what you saw when you were in the army. You have showed me that there are bigger things in this world than plodding after a plough, and more exciting chases than those after foxes. I want to do more than sit on a nail-keg in the store and discuss big events. I want to have a little ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... Soon they were plodding on by starlight, and by midnight had reached, unmolested, a road that seemed to lead due north. They went around all villages, and learned to consider dogs a nuisance in so doing. At first they were unduly nervous. Faint moonlight played strange games with their fancies. Once a tree-trunk held them ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... boot. I grumbled at Berne over the want of soft curves in the Swiss temperament; but the children of the tangled Tessin are cast in the Italian mould. My friend had as many quips and cranks as a Neapolitan; we walked together for an hour under the chestnuts, while the coach was plodding up from Bellinzona, and he never stopped singing till we reached a little wine-house where he got his mouth full of bread and cheese. I looked into his open door, a la Sterne, and saw the young woman sitting rigid and grim, staring over his ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... on the porch of the hotel, so the enemy was not to be sought that way. I set off full speed for the other corner, fifty yards away, half suspecting an ambush. But at the turn I stopped. The rain-soaked street was empty for a block before me. Far down the next block a plodding figure under an umbrella bent to the gusts of the wind and tried to ward off the driving spray of the storm. But Darby Meeker had disappeared as though the earth had ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... manufactured the usual piece of intellectual mediocrity. He was stuffed with the regulation measure of facts, scraped through the customary examination, and was despatched, much against his will, to the universities of Jena and Zuerich. When I last saw him he was a plodding lawyer of the conventional type, doing his duties in a listless manner, with very indifferent success, and quite broken down in spirit. The Gymnasium, the university, and the parental obstinacy had done their work very effectually. They had succeeded in reducing him to the ...
— The Curse of Education • Harold E. Gorst
... Padre," "Good-night, Don Pepe," the Gobernador would go off, holding up his sabre against his side, his body bent forward, with a long, plodding stride in the dark. The jocularity proper to an innocent card game for a few cigars or a bundle of yerba was replaced at once by the stern duty mood of an officer setting out to visit the outposts of an encamped army. One loud blast of the whistle that hung from his neck provoked instantly ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... still plodding along the dark street under the trees; dull gleams came from their helmets and bayonets in the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... I came around the corner after leaving my competitor Richards in the bank, there came plodding along the old man. Luckily he went down about a block to hitch his horse. I met him as he was coming back and carried him up to my room in the hotel. I laid my proposition before him ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... opinions—generally with tolerable good reason—it happened in this case that love lit the girl's mind to good purpose. She'd laugh with her father sometimes, that Sam hadn't no dazzling sense of fun himself, and it entertained her a lot to see Sam plodding in his mind after her nimble-witted father and trying in vain to see a joke. But what delighted her most was Sam's own dark forebodings about Mr. Green's manner of life, and his high-minded hopes ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... rung sharply, and, on Polly entering, Rhoda called her to the window and showed her two female figures plodding down the street. "Look," said she. "Those are the only women I envy. Sisters of Charity. Run you after them, and take a good look at those beastly ugly caps: then come and tell me how ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... steamship advances upon a still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in her depths, as if she had an iron heart in her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in her progress and the regular beat of her propeller, heard afar in the night with an august and plodding sound as of the march of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the silent machinery of a sailing-ship would catch not only the power, but the wild and exulting voice of the world's soul. Whether she ran with her ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... that moment loyally to protect his comrade against the doom that threatened him. This was the consul's theory and if he had been a bookmaker at a race of wits for life and liberty he would have offered heavy odds against the plodding sheriff from Chatham ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... runneth by but One Grand Power Of which I am in truth a part, An Atom though I be. All things that are, are best— This much Truth I know, Though why things are I can't explain, My Vision still is dim. All answers will be given out When time shall be no more, And so I keep a-plodding on, And on and on my way; My face is to the Light, My heart doth sing for Joy; I strive to do the best I can each day In Act and Thought and Word; I know not just the plan of things that are But back of all is Truth, And Truth I seek; I ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... give an additional flavour to his style, since they present few difficulties to the modern reader, and yet sound like echoes from the earlier periods of the language. Generally he is content to follow his author with almost plodding fidelity, but occasionally he makes additions which are eminently characteristic. His author having remarked:—"Il nest an Jour Duy nulle chose qui tant grieue Rome ne ytalie come fait le college Des notaires publiques Car ilz ne sont mie en accort ensemble"—Caxton ...
— Game and Playe of the Chesse - A Verbatim Reprint Of The First Edition, 1474 • Caxton
... wind his suspicions grow stronger. He settles down to a long chase. In the darkness, we'll say, he loses his man, but when it gets lighter he picks up the trail again. The tracks lead south, across the line into Mexico. Still he keeps plodding on. The man in front sees him behind and gets scared because he can't shake him off. Very likely he thinks it is you on his track. Anyhow, while the child is asleep he waits in ambush, and when Henderson rides up he shoots him down. Then ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... the travellers were plodding onward, Ketch walked for a time at the head of Aunt Amanda's mule. Aunt Amanda leaned forward and said ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... imagination and of a marvellous memory for facts, names and faces. Over him men went "insane in pairs," either devotedly admiring or completely distrusting him. Cleveland was almost devoid of personal charm except to his most intimate associates. He was brusque and tactless, unimaginative, plodding, commonplace in his tastes and in the elements of his character. Men threw their hats in the air and cheered themselves hoarse at the name of Blaine; to Cleveland's courage, earnestness and honesty, they gave a tribute of admiration. When the campaign was at fever heat, Blaine ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... direct eye-and-hand examination of our patients than the doctor of a century ago, we can tell three to five times as much. Signs that he could interpret only by the slow and painful method of two-thirds of a lifetime of plodding experience, or by occasional flashes of half-inspired insight, we are now able to interpret absolutely upon a physiological—yes, a chemical—basis from the revelations of the microscope, the test-tube, and the culture medium. ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... stroke of luck on the voyage across the North Sea this time. Our packet was plodding peacefully along on a hazy, grey forenoon, about half-way to the Tyne, when the faint silhouettes of a brace of destroyers were descried racing athwart our course a good many miles ahead. We were watching them disappear far away on ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... and carry you down with it!... Rafael, my dear boy, don't be foolish. I am all right to have as a friend; but it's too late for me to be anything more ... even if I were to love you. We are of a different breed. I have been studying you, and I see that you are a sensible, honest, plodding sort of fellow. Whereas I—I belong to the butterflies, to the opposite of all you are. I am a conscript under the banner of Bohemia, and I cannot desert the colors. Each of us on his own road then. You'll easily find a woman to make you happy.... The sillier she is, ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... walked out of the office, and the sheriff was given his mount. The Indians swung the pack-horses into line, and the men settled themselves in their saddles as they began the long, plodding journey to the blue hills in the ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... on the gate, watched Mr. Osborn go plodding away toward Vine-Pits and the Cross Roads. This pastor, who had succeeded old Melling a few years ago, was a short, bearded man of sixty, and he lived in lodgings on the outskirts of Rodchurch. Evidently he was not going home to dinner. Perhaps ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... They were plodding down the dazzling road, one on either side of the dusty bicycle under the open sky when ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... he who first spoke about it. Not at that time, but after sunset, when the dusk had fallen upon us, and found us still plodding southward with tired horses; a link outwardly like other links in the long chain of riders, toiling onwards. Then he said suddenly, "Do you know whither we ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... Americans watched the slim, bent old figure plodding homeward. After looking the ground over critically, they stole forward on ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... had been plodding among musty law books and threading legal intricacies, with occasional interruptions, caused by fits of impatience and disgust at the detail and tedium of study, until he had at length fought his way through and placed himself in the front rank of his profession. His brilliant achievement in the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... by a marvellous address that belonged to him, always managed to escape, or at most to receive only some grave admonition from the academic authorities. Johns advised with him, (giving as serious advice then as he could give now,) and added from time to time such assistance in his studies as a plodding man can always lend to one of quick brain, who makes ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... his child. That innocent delight he took To see the virgin mind her book, Was but the master's secret joy In school to hear the finest boy. Her knowledge with her fancy grew; She hourly press'd for something new; Ideas came into her mind So fast, his lessons lagg'd behind; She reason'd, without plodding long, Nor ever gave her judgment wrong. But now a sudden change was wrought; She minds no longer what he taught. Cadenus was amazed to find Such marks of a distracted mind: For, though she seem'd to listen more To all ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... its way, a masterpiece. There was a certain conscientiousness about it, a certain thoroughness of execution—a certain plodding and painstaking carefulness, in a word, such as is possible only to those who have spent years in guiding fat-witted tourists among the antiquities of the Lichfield ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Gaylord, but as I did not respond very freely to their bantering, they finally fell silent with only an occasional imprecation as someone stubbed his toe or caught his clothing on a brier. After a half hour or so of plodding we came to a clear path through the woods and in a few minutes reached the mouth of ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... great as it appeared to be, did not in reality reach below the surface, except in Epirus. The bishops were felt to be foreigners and extortioners. There was no real process of assimilation at work, either in Bulgaria or in the Danubian Provinces. The slow and plodding Bulgarian peasant, too stupid for the Greek to think of him as a rival, preserved his own unchanging tastes and nationality, sang to his children the songs which he had learnt from his parents, and forgot the Greek which he had heard in the Church when he re-entered his home. [353] In Roumania, ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... table with food secured by his own hands direct from nature should feel a strong incentive to do his best. The coarse, unvaried diet, common to many farmers' homes, is the result of stolid minds and plodding ways. A better manhood and womanhood will be developed when we act upon the truth that varied and healthful sustenance improves blood and brain, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... honourable exile, in quality of an ambassador-extraordinary to the court of France; and Trumball, his friend and creature, was dismissed from the office of secretary, which the king conferred upon Vernon, a plodding man of business who had acted as under-secretary to the duke of Shrewsbury. This nobleman rivalled the earl of Sunderland in his credit at the council-board, and was supported by Somers, lord chancellor ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Giant," who had been a rival for the hand of the fascinating Mary Todd, was also Lincoln's chief opponent in politics. Douglas was small and brilliant; used to society ways, he seemed always to keep ahead of his tall, uncouth, plodding competitor. After going to Congress, Mr. Lincoln was encouraged to aspire even higher, so, ten years later, he became a candidate for the Senate. Slavery was then the burning question, and Douglas seemed naturally ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... little hills and it was a strange relief to leave the dead level of the plains: on each side the land was barren and desolate, and in the distance were dark mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the evening was grey and very cold; the solitude was awful. At last I overtook a pedlar plodding along by his donkey, the panniers filled to overflowing with china and glass, which he was taking to sell in Ecija. He wished to talk, but he was going too slowly, and I left him. I had hills to climb now, and at the top of each expected to see the town, but every time was ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... the cow at last allowed herself to be led away, but when she had been plodding along for a little distance, he slowly followed. He pressed the Jews' money in his hand ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... luxuries and indulgences which were never heard of when I was a boy. Why, my father was a common carpenter, and here you are both of you at public schools, costing me ever so many hundreds a year, while I at your age was plodding away behind a desk in my Uncle Fairlie's counting house. What should I not have done if I had had one half of your advantages? You should become dukes or found new empires in undiscovered countries, and even then I doubt whether you would have done proportionately so much as I have done. ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... you will remain as blind about your plodding old husband who couldn't make a fortune ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... when we first performed it. We met a number of farmers returning to their homes from a kind of fair that is annually held in the little metropolis; and as I watched the long caravan-like line of pack-horses and horsemen, wearily plodding over the stony waste in single file, I found it less difficult to believe that these remote islanders should be descended from Oriental forefathers. In fact, one is constantly reminded of the East in Iceland. From the earliest ages the Icelanders have been a people dwelling in tents. ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... the nymphs of Corot, or the laveuses bending at the margin of the lake, the plowman homeward plodding o'er the lea, the shepherd on the distant moor, the woodsman in the forest, the farmer among his fields. We associate our vision of the scene with theirs. When as mere dots they are discerned, the vastness of their surroundings is realized at their expense and the exclamation ...
— Pictorial Composition and the Critical Judgment of Pictures • Henry Rankin Poore
... anywhere, excepting an occasional peasant plodding along a muddy road, sheltering himself under the characteristic flat and bony umbrella of ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... hearts, we pushed on at extra speed toward our night's lodging at Mount Morris. The oak-trees gloomed denser on our right as we plowed along a villainously sandy road. Labourers homing from the day's work greeted us now and again in the dimness, and presently one of these, plodding up behind us, broke forth ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... friendly hand on his collar, he sprang in pursuit of his departing deity,—the loved Master who was leaving him alone and desolate among all these strange scenes and noises. The Master, plodding, sullen and heavy-hearted, toward the gangway, was aware of a cold nose thrust into his ...
— Bruce • Albert Payson Terhune
... hansom whirled you by the Bell and Horns at Brompton, and there he was striding, as with seven-league boots, seemingly in the direction of North-end, Fulham. The Metropolitan Railway sent you forth at Lisson-grove, and you met him plodding speedily towards the Yorkshire Stingo. He was to be met rapidly skirting the grim brick wall of the prison in Coldbath-fields, or trudging along the Seven Sisters-road at Holloway, or bearing, under a steady press of sail, ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... seen exploring the country, in carts, on foot, taking everybody into his confidence, visiting all the inns and alehouses for miles around, stopping people on the road with his questions, looking into the very ditches almost; first in the greatest excitement, then with a plodding sort of perseverance, growing slower and slower; and he could not even tell you plainly how his son looked. The sailor was supposed to be one of two that had left a timber ship, and to have been seen dangling ...
— To-morrow • Joseph Conrad
... by the lights that he saw it at length and guessed he was near the end of his journey. It took some plodding then to reach it. Then a few inquiries brought him where he ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... regardless of winter's snows and winds to hear me expound my views, I can assure you that had it been necessary to come on snow shoes to prevent your loyalty to me from being in vain, I should have made the attempt, and perhaps like the youth who cried 'Excelsior,' might last have been seen plodding through the shades of night into your Alpine fastness, still striving ...
— Mixed Faces • Roy Norton
... that great reform which Wesley and Whitefield introduced to the English people. They taught moral doctrines which we all accept in common, but they did not teach them after the cold and barren way of the plodding, mechanical instructor. They thundered them into the opening ears of thousands who had never been roused to moral sentiment before. They inspired the souls of poor and commonplace creatures with all the zealot's fire and all the martyr's ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... church, and she didn't want him to be behind Nancy Rogers and Jerry Ware, and all the village boys and girls. So he said the answers after her and she explained them, which she certainly did very brightly and very well, and on week-days Angel taught him the earlier ones, in her gentle, plodding way, till he knew them by heart. He had done what his Aunt Betty required of him by the time Angel had taken two more turns, and was having his reward in the story which he called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... inspection, even from a distance. He strode slowly along, looking intently at each house. None of them seemed to him to hold the object of his search. As his steps carried him farther and farther into the beautiful avenue he began to smile to himself and his plodding spirit wavered. After all, thought he, no one but a silly ass would attempt to find a person in a great city after the fashion he was pursuing. He was deciding to board a tramcar and return to the hotel when, at some distance ahead, he saw a young lady run hurriedly ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... questions—the convictions, the fanaticisms, of the vast silver nations—and enormous multitudes of the people of Asia, touching the silver standard—and the possible progress of labor, as a guiding as well as plodding ability increases incessantly in interest, and must grow in inheritance. As the conditions of progressive civilization are developed our interests cannot be wholly dissevered from those of the Asiatics. We would be unwise to contemplate the situation of to-day as one that ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... a brilliant genius, And thou a plodding brain; On thee I think with pleasure, On him with doubt and pain." ("You see, good Ned," says Thomas "What he thought about ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... that my father was sober and industrious by habit; but habit is not uniform. There were intervals when his plodding and tame spirit gave place to the malice and fury of a demon. Liquors were not sought by him; but he could not withstand entreaty, and a potion that produced no effect upon others ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... he had chosen to be maintained by his father, some employment besides that of book-making was an imperative necessity. The alternative of that which was offered—the one his father would have chosen—was that of a plodding jurist in a country where forensic pleading was unknown, and where the lawyer's profession offered no scope for any of the higher talents with which Goethe was endowed. On the whole, it was a happy chance that called him to the little capital ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... not sexless. Though she hadn't the dancing-girl's oblivious delight in pleasure, though her energetic common sense and willingness to serve had turned into a durable plodding, Una was alive, normal, desirous of love, as the flower-faced girl grind of the college so often is not, to the vast confusion of ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... who had been to the river for an early swim, stopped to discuss the weather with a laborer who was plodding across the fields. The old man looked at the blue sky with an air of unutterable wisdom, made some profound remarks about the quarter in which the wind was, added a local saying or two bearing on the case, and summed up to the effect that it was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... front of him, he paused. He went a little distance up the hedge on both sides and held up his light, but did not detect the cowering boys, and at last giving up the search in despair, went slowly home. They heard him plodding back over the field, and it was not until the sound of his footsteps had died away, that Eric cautiously broke cover, and looked over the hedge. He saw the man's light gradually getting more distant, and said, "All right now, ...
— Eric • Frederic William Farrar
... violence. He let Captain Hahn preach his German gospel of system on earth and organization to man, and walked beside him in silence, with pensive eyes fixed ahead, where the prisoner and his escort moved in a plodding ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... as you see in the picture, the three little children seated high up in the wain, and the farmer and the dame plodding ahead. ...
— Pepper & Salt - or, Seasoning for Young Folk • Howard Pyle
... the mesa to the east. Here, as if in glee over their escape from city confines, they redoubled in fury and tore down to earth—and enveloped Felipe Montoya, a young and good-looking Mexican, and his team of scrawny horses plodding in a lumber rigging, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... cup was missing, and he guessed at once that his saintly friend had taken it. In great heat he hastened after the guest, and while passing Crowza Downs he pocketed a few large stones for future use. Presently he saw St. Just plodding along in the distance, and shouted after him. St. Just was too deeply absorbed in religious meditation to notice the cries. Finding shouts were useless, Keverne began to throw his stones, and these proved more effectual. St. Just dropped the chalice and hurried away home. Keverne had ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... times of Kublai Khan. There are Mohammedan mosques, with Chinese muezzins in blue turbans on feast days; Manchu palaces with vermillion-red pillars and archways and green and gold ceilings. There are unending lines of camels plodding slowly in from the Western deserts laden with all manner of merchandise; there are curious palanquins slung between two mules and escorted by sword-armed men that have journeyed all the way from Shansi and Kansu, which are a thousand miles away; a Mongol ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... the guide (who was a real Indian) walking barefoot before, Mr. Adams, Mr. Grigsby and Charley riding in single file after, the two pack bullocks plodding behind, and another Indian, to drive them, trudging at the rear ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin
... solely. He was not "a thinking machine"; for that is a brainless phrase of modern fatalism and materialism. A machine only is a machine because it cannot think. But he was a thinking man, and a plain man at the same time. All his wonderful successes, that looked like conjuring, had been gained by plodding logic, by clear and commonplace French thought. The French electrify the world not by starting any paradox, they electrify it by carrying out a truism. They carry a truism so far—as in the French Revolution. But exactly because Valentin understood reason, he understood the limits of reason. ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... Plodding on, he shortly made the Line that marked the victor's goal; Paused, and found he'd won, and laid the Flattering unction to his soul. Then in fashion grandiose, Like an after-dinner speaker, Touched his flipper to his nose, ...
— Fables for the Frivolous • Guy Whitmore Carryl
... firelight, should come the dreams and thoughts that set us free from sordidness, that teach our minds versatility and sympathy, that create for us hobbies and avocations of worth, that rest and refresh us. If we must be ocean liners all day, plodding between known and monotonous ports, at least we may be tramp ships at night, cargoed with strange stuffs and trafficking for ...
— Journeys to Bagdad • Charles S. Brooks
... night— A mist of melancholy in the air— And the capricious beams of Dian's light Gave something mystic to the scene most fair. I gave my cousin Dante's divine "Inferno," Imploring her to read il primo canto. "Lo giorno s'andava," she drawled; but, tired of plodding, Directly fell asleep, and pretty soon—was nodding!! "Cousin, sweet cousin," cried I out, "awake! I long for sympathy—compassion on me take: They say yon stars are worlds—dost think 'tis so?" "Really, my—dear (a yawn), I—don't exactly know." "Cousin," ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... the "House of the Seven Gables." We of the outside world who know our Concord only by hearsay cannot realize that "The Wayside" and the "Old Manse" and "Sleepy Hollow" are verities,—verities which the plodding language of prose tails to compass, unless the pen is wielded ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... back stop maybe (anyway, that's what Bert said) because the water only beat against it and then went tumbling back into the creek bed and down toward the Hudson. It was down that way that it overflowed mostly and flooded the fields we had been plodding through. ...
— Roy Blakeley's Adventures in Camp • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... covetous man. He had a passion for money-making and he had availed himself of all the opportunities which the country afforded. He had about as much property as his friend. He began to think he had been plodding along in a very slow, unsatisfactory manner. He would make careful inquiries and perhaps Temple would put him in the way of doubling his money. Upon the whole, therefore, he was very glad to see Mr. Temple, and introduced ...
— Herbert Carter's Legacy • Horatio Alger
... related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... to mould your brilliant life to my plodding one," he said wistfully, as if he were reading my thoughts. "But I don't mean to be selfish. I love you—and—you're drifting away ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... came sooner than they anticipated. The ponies were plodding forward with their loads, when, before either of the riders suspected it, they were on the edge of another growth of timber, which promised the ...
— The Young Ranchers - or Fighting the Sioux • Edward S. Ellis
... easily understand that there were frequent quarrels when two vehicles met half-way. Sometimes one of the opponents would be a puffing engine, and if it happened to be dragging a load of coal, back it had to go until the siding was reached, that the plodding horse might pass. To us such a state of things is hard to imagine, but the railway and it possibilities were not thoroughly understood at first. Even George Stephenson did not think it would be very ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... did not look on the fame and fortune brought to him by his book as his chief reward. It had been his desire to be helpful to the plodding, discouraged men and boys. As he expressed it himself: "It seemed to me that the most important results in daily life are to be obtained, not through the exercise of extraordinary powers, but through the energetic use of simple means, and ordinary qualities, with which all ...
— Stories Worth Rereading • Various
... and I are plodding onward in good health, and in a fair medium state of prosperity; and on the whole, we are quite the happiest family to be found anywhere. We live in the ugliest little old red farm-house ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... daybreak George Jones and I were scouring the country in the vicinity of Tule Lake. After having ridden some little distance we ran upon the trail of six Indians, who as we supposed had passed the evening before, and were evidently plodding along in the direction of Lost river. This was without doubt the trail of four bucks and two squaws. After we had followed this trail a few miles we found where they had stopped, built a fire, caught, cooked and ate some fish. We knew they were not many miles ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... brought me round again to the window that was no window, the rumble of wheels, the plodding of a horse's hoofs. Beyond the low arch—or was it a pent?—shone a star or two, and against their pale radiance a shadow loomed—the shadow of the Princess, still seated, still patient, still with her hands in her lap. ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of miracle or revelation ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... the other about the tame herds of the field. In the morning he would follow the young hunter to the distant lick, and, having acquitted himself in the chase, with his wonted address, he would hasten back to the fort, leaving his companion to follow at that plodding pace peculiar to two-footed animals, and so irksome to dogs, to accommodate themselves to which they must needs trot out, on a magnified scale, the ground plan of a straggling worm fence, with wide digression to right ...
— The Red Moccasins - A Story • Morrison Heady
... dark lane, and left him and went away. After a while up came a Nazarene,[FN503] the Sultan's broker who, much bemused with liquor, was purposing for the Hammam bath as his drunkenness whispered in his ear, "Verily the call to matins[FN504] is nigh." He came plodding along and staggering about till he drew near the Hunchback and squatted down to make water[FN505] over against him; when he happened to glance around and saw a man standing against the wall. Now some person had ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... half smothered her in dust when he perceived that the little woman in black, under a black parasol, was actually Diane. To his indignant queries as to why she should be plodding her way on foot, with this scorching sun overhead, her replies were cheerful and uncomplaining. A series of small accidents in the stable—such had constantly happened at her own little chateau in the Oise—having made it inadvisable to take the horses out, one of the men had ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... humble friend Assheton was another of those Etonians who were plodding on to independence, whilst he, set forward by fortune and interest, was accomplishing reputation. Assheton was the son of a worthy man, who presided over the Grammar School at Lancaster, upon a stipend of L32 a year. Assheton's mother had brought to her husband a small ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... and should be readily granted, that patient plodding is less piquant than the by-play of inertia and revolt. The spirit of Nietsche is doubtless even now yawning mightily at such tedious moralizing; fresh proof of the "dull, gloomy seriousness," the ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... to go too fast. In his Forest, Mr. Stewart White gives us some lessons in bushmanship. 'As long as you restrain yourself,' he says, 'to a certain leisurely plodding, you get along without extraordinary effort; but even a slight increase of speed drags fiercely at your feet. One good step is worth six stumbling steps; go only fast enough to assure that good one. An expert woods-walker is never in a hurry.' I was chatting ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... silence, for Breezy eagerly joined his stable companion, and in a short time they were up to, and then passed Jack with his plodding oxen, which were drawing a rough sledge, something similar to that which a farmer at home uses for the conveyance of a ...
— Diamond Dyke - The Lone Farm on the Veldt - Story of South African Adventure • George Manville Fenn
... the knowledge of the value of the load Saxe would gladly have freed himself of the burden by letting it fall on the stones. But these were the crystals of which Dale was in search, and as he saw that his companion was patiently plodding on and making his way over the sharp, rough masses of stone with which the ravine was floored, he bent to his task patiently, though it seemed as though they would never reach the spot ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... of patient plodding; two, three. Raf, led by the hand, helped over rocks and obstacles which were only dark blurs to his watering eyes, raged inwardly and sometimes outwardly, against the slowness of their advance, his own helplessness. His ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... Both silent, laborious, plodding, plotting functionaries, thriftily gathering riches; skilled in routine and adepts at intrigue; steady self-seekers, and faithful to office in which their lives had passed, they might be relied on at any emergency to take part against their master, if ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Wall Street was a perfect Eldorado, and seemed to take pains to drop occasional suggestions as to how an investment shrewdly made by one with his favored point of observation often secured in a day a larger return than a year of plodding business. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... did not, I walked on in the direction of Colombes, vaguely ruminating upon Pompeii, Palmyra, fish dinners at Greenwich, and the mutability of human things. I had hardly left Asnieres, however, and was plodding along a path, when I was recalled to the realities of life by half-a-dozen Mobiles springing up from behind a low wall, and calling upon me to stop, while they enforced their order by pointing their muskets at my head. I stood still, and they surrounded me. I explained ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... hardly be needed. He had just torn his finger upon a thorn. Seeing the blood rise, it occurred that one is never without a bit of red. At the base of the bank he turned his eyes upward. The Chinese was plodding up the stairs, the woman holding his ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... his saddle and galloped away. A few minutes later the whole column was plodding on silently toward its bloody goal. To a civilian, unaccustomed to scenes of war, the tranquillity of these men would have seemed very wonderful. Many of the soldiers were still munching the hard bread and raw pork of their meagre breakfasts, or drinking the cold coffee with which they had ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... garden a pleasant excursion, And into a lily or hollyhock dodging With quiet assurance he takes up his lodging. With a snug little fortune invested in honey, Young Bumble Bee lives like a prince, on his money, And, scorning some plodding relations of his, he Leaves hard labor ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... and the Rangers and Indians were on snowshoes. The regulars followed us, plodding along heavily through the snow. We reached Halfway Brook that night, and the next day got over to Lake George. We waited till it was dark and then marched down the lake to the First Narrows, which we reached about two ...
— Ben Comee - A Tale of Rogers's Rangers, 1758-59 • M. J. (Michael Joseph) Canavan
... to his decision then, with just that nod of the head. And she, forlorn, was glad he had cast this temptation aside. That he was plodding now sturdily along his highway. She flushed with shame at the thought of him, ubiquitous among those egotists at Ravinia, enlisting their interest, reminding Paula ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... took To see the virgin mind her book, Was but the master's secret joy In school to hear the finest boy. Her knowledge with her fancy grew, She hourly pressed for something new; Ideas came into her mind So fact, his lessons lagged behind; She reasoned, without plodding long, Nor ever gave her judgment wrong. But now a sudden change was wrought, She minds no longer what he taught. Cadenus was amazed to find Such marks of a distracted mind; For though she seemed to listen more To all he spoke, than e'er before. He found her thoughts would ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... that they were "thrown off" on the spur of the moment a few hours before. Some of the names appended to them astonished me. Grave, practical business men, sage financiers, fierce speculators, and plodding traders, never before suspected of poetry, or even correct prose, were among the contributors. It seemed as if most of the able-bodied inhabitants of the Pacific Coast had been in the habit at some ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... won across and was plodding up to solid roadway once more and there safe, for the moment at least, he ...
— A Pagan of the Hills • Charles Neville Buck
... make each other hear; so drove the snow and wind through the trees, and into their very faces and ears. They plodded on. It was plodding; the snow lay thick enough now to make their footing uneasy, and grew deeper every moment; their shoes were full; their feet and ankles were wet; and their steps began to drag heavily over the ground. Ellen clung as close to Alice's cloak as their hurried travelling would permit; ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... had been counted too soon, and there was to be no hatching. Colin grew uneasy, and began to sniff up wind. I was maybe a quarter of a mile from the glen foot, plodding through the long grass of the hollow, when the behaviour of the dog made me stop and listen. In that still air sounds carry far, and I seemed to hear the noise of feet brushing through cover. The noise came both from north ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... every inn they passed and, lavishly provided with small coins by Vocco, had provisioned themselves abundantly. These supplies they handed over to their fellows when they took up the litter. All the way back the spare carriers, plodding behind, munched their provender and conversed in undertones. The bearers, necessarily ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... ready to move at once; which was now a difficult order to execute, on account of many things, especially the shelter tents;—for they were as rigid as sheet-iron and yet had to be rolled up and strapped on the knapsacks. Nevertheless it was not long before the regiment was in motion; and after plodding off for a mile to the left, a line of battle was formed, vedettes sent out, trees felled and breastworks built, and at dinner-time the men were allowed to build fires and cook breakfast. Then, after standing until almost night in the snow, which had now turned to sleet, ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... rank scarcely cared to fill. Under these circumstances the choice fell upon Lord Robartes, who had rendered some good service in Cornwall, and who had the reputation of more than respectable abilities, of careful and plodding industry, and of an integrity which was at least above the moderate average standard of Charles's Court. But he had defects of character which were apparent to a judge so acute as the Chancellor, and these soon made themselves plain. Clarendon gives expression to them with all the ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... have been written Munnins, and nn changed into gg for the sake of euphony. Should this conjecture, for it is nothing else, be well founded, one of the most poetical ideas in the whole range of mythology would, in this plodding, practical, spilling-jenny age of ours, have thus undergone a ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 212, November 19, 1853 • Various
... soon came up with the advance. As he passed the men on foot a sudden swirl of snow came in larger flakes from the leaden skies. Before him were a dozen horsemen, riding slowly. The air was now filled with the great white flakes; the men ahead, in their caped overcoats, with their hats drawn low, plodding on tired horses between the hills, all seen vaguely through the snow veil, had a sudden wintry, desolate, and far-away seeming. He said to himself that they were ghosts from fifty years back, ghosts of the Grand Army in the grasp of General January. He made what haste he could and came up with ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... to fire the Lombards' houses: Oh power, what art thou in a madman's eyes! Thou makest the plodding idiot bloody-wise. ...
— Sir Thomas More • William Shakespeare [Apocrypha]
... had picked me up was nothing but a tramp, plodding along with a general cargo from London to Dundee, and its accommodation was as rough as its skipper was homely. But it was a veritable palace of delight and luxury to me after that terrible night, and I was soon hard and fast asleep in the skipper's own bunk—and was still asleep when he laid ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
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