|
|
|
More "Rubicund" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the table she occupied. Her coarse-featured, heavy fare, surrounded by a broad, muslin cap frill, that nearly covered her harsh yellow hair, was lighted up by a pair of small gray eyes, expressing a mixture of cunning and curiosity. Her rubicund visage, gaudy-colored chintz dress, and yellow bandanna handkerchief, produced a sort of glaring sun-flower effect, not mitigated by the contrast afforded by the ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... tell you, sir," the handsome, fair-haired young aide-de-camp was emphatically assuring that stout, rubicund personage, the Mayor, "the loveliest girl I ever saw in my life, or ever shall see—bar none! I saw her first on the Recreation Ground, the day a gang of Boer blackguards insulted some nuns who were in charge of a ladies' school, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with me ...if I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There's someone who's pleased with himself," she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived his mistake. "He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... ladies then proceeded westward. Dismissing the cab in Waterloo Place, they went along Pall Mall on foot, where in place of the usual well-dressed clubbists—rubicund with alcohol—were to be seen, in linen pinafores, flocks of house-painters pallid from white lead. When they had reached the Green Park, Cytherea proposed that they should sit down awhile under the young elms at the brow of the hill. This ...
— Desperate Remedies • Thomas Hardy
... his person has undergone a similar metamorphosis. He has been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always laughing. The picture would have surprised his friends no less than himself. There have been portraits painted of Rabelais; I have seen many such. They are all of the seventeenth century, ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... are drunk, Hubschle, you are exceedingly shrewd, and for that reason, I pardon your impertinence. Your rubicund nose has scented the matter correctly. The ambassador has demanded his passports already. But go now. Take this dispatch to the second courier and tell him to carry it immediately to the French embassy. As for yourself, you must hasten to the commander of Vienna, and take this paper to ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... A kind, rubicund, moon-round face, full of large blue eyes smiling a gentle and kindly welcome ... if the face of Shelley's father, plump and methodic-oracular, could have been joined to the wild, shining ecstasy of Shelley's countenance itself—you would have had Mackworth's face before its ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... and not stir up strife," quoth the rubicund prior, who looked at once a benevolent and a strong-willed man. "We will pray for the restoration—the permanent restoration of the good king; but we must avoid stirring up the hearts of his subjects in such a way as will make them ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... fat, wheezy young man, with a reputation for humor based entirely upon his size and his rubicund face, for he had really never said anything humorous in his life. He came panting into the room now with a "Well, what can ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the window, which presented a happy combination of grange scenery with marine. Upon the irregular slope between the house and the quay was an orchard of aged trees wherein every apple ripening on the boughs presented its rubicund side towards the cottage, because that building chanced to lie upwards in the same direction as the sun. Under the trees were a few Cape sheep, and over them the stone chimneys of the village below: outside ...
— The Hand of Ethelberta • Thomas Hardy
... constant use. For a long while he used to console himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village; which held its sessions on a bench before a small inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third. Here they used to sit in the shade through a long lazy summer's day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or telling endless sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have been ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... seneschal or chamberlain—to the editorial apartment, where I found Arncliffe giving audience to his news editor, Mr. Pink, and one of his leader-writers, a very old Advocate identity, Mr. Samuel Harbottle—-a white-whiskered and rubicund gentleman, who was entitled to use most of the letters of the alphabet after his name should he so choose. I was presented to both these gentlemen, and in a few minutes they took ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... man: he was about twenty-eight, and he was writing some work of fiction. He was a small, sturdy, rubicund creature, with beady eyes and pink cheeks, cherubic in aspect, entirely good-natured and lively, full of not very exalted humour, and with a tendency to wild and even hysterical giggling. I used to think that Father Payne did not like him very much; ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... found himself confronting the rubicund countenance and imposing form of Heriot Walkingshaw. Over the shoulder of this apparition he looked into the clear eyes of Frank. They were trying to convey a caution to use whatever tact he possessed; but the artist was too dumbfounded to ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders. The torso was supported by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek-bones bore testimony to a rollicking life. The lower part of the cheeks, which were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for wear. Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous gold ...
— The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... one of them, who had a red face and a large carbuncle on his nose, which served to distinguish him from his companions, who though they had both very rubicund faces had ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... came on deck, having only slept away half of the sixteen, and a taste of the seventeenth salt-water glass of gin-toddy. He rubbed his grey eyes, that he might peer through the grey of the morning; the fresh breeze blew about his grizzly locks, and cooled his rubicund nose. The revenue-cutter, whose name was the Active, cast off from the buoy; and, with a fresh breeze, steered her course for ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... day, seeing that I had gone down to the place where we used to receive the holy communion, called Communichino, the conversa of my aunt rang the bell for the priest to come with the pyx.[2] He was a man of about fifty years of age, very corpulent, with a rubicund face, and a type of physiognomy as vulgar ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... terms at either University. Spenser is, of course, the glory of the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellowships of that college made to depend upon passing a yearly examination in the Faerie Queen, to be conducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubicund walls. Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St. John's, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Jesus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King's, Herrick was first at St. John's, but migrated to the Hall, where he is still ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a head of hair which has changed from dark to blond? What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one laugh at a negro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing one, for it has been asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin and Lipps, and all have given different replies. And yet I rather fancy the correct answer was suggested to me ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... his personal appearance had undergone a marked change. He was rubicund, and more youthful of countenance; shabbily smart in dress; excessively "horsey," and ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... with a laugh on its rubicund face; Methinks, by the way, it's in pretty good case, For a spirit unblest with a body; "On the claret bee's-wing," says the sprite, "I regale; But I'm ready for all—from Lafitte down to ale, From Champagne to a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 400, November 21, 1829 • Various
... of my father's rather garish copy) was a panelled chamber, hung round with rubicund portraits of the male O'Neills from the early ones of the family who had been Lords of Ellan down to the "bad Lord Raa," who had sworn at my grandmother ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... suffering client. In other respects, he permitted himself a more profitable freedom of action, thereto compelled, he was wont apologetically to remark, by the wretchedly poor remuneration obtained by his medical practice. If, however, specie was scarce amongst his clients, spirits, as his rubicund, carbuncled face flamingly testified, were very plentiful. There was a receipt in full painted there for a prodigious amount of drugs and chemicals, so that, on the whole, he could have had no great ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... rubicund Mexican priest is the celebrant, while two old Mexicans in modern dress, and a Pueblo Indian in a red blanket, are acolytes. When the host is elevated, an Indian at the door beats a villainous drum and four musket shots are discharged. After the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... of the house, pausing before an extensive row of masculine portraits, "are very valuable, and you must be very careful when dusting. They are old masters." Mary's jaw dropped, and a look of intense wonder overspread her rubicund face. ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... prevail, but the guide was a little alarmed, and the Professor horrified, on looking at their companions' faces, to observe that they were pinched, haggard, and old-looking, as if they all had aged somewhat during the last few hours! Captain Wopper's rubicund visage was pale, and his nose blue; the face of Lewis was white all over, and drawn, as if he were suffering pain; Dr Lawrence's countenance was yellow, and Slingsby's was green. The Professor himself was as bad as his comrades, and the porters were ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... their names like a fragment from a choir book, from Homer to Victor Hugo. Then his glance would seek another head equally glorious although less white, with blonde and grizzled beard, rubicund nose and bilious cheeks that in certain moments scattered bits of scale. The sweet eyes of his godfather—yellowish eyes spotted with black dots—used to receive Ulysses with the doting affection of an aging, old bachelor ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... uncle. Father dead, mother divorced and leading a pleasant existence amongst the capitals of Europe. The uncle, although maintaining a decent appearance of grief, was obviously, at heart, relieved to be rid of his nephew so easily. Poor Carfax! For so rubicund and noisy a person he left strangely little mark upon the world. Within a fortnight the college had nearly lost account of his existence. He lent to Sannet Wood a sinister air that caused numberless undergraduates to cycle out in that direction. ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... serves one the same in regard to jokes as in food. One is never satiated with them, and there are no morbid, worn distinctions of taste—an old one, an exceedingly mild one, have all the convulsive power of the keenest flash from less healthy and rubicund intellects. ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... to be a rubicund, rather portly gentleman, with white side whiskers and an air of urbane courtesy that set her at her ease at once. She told him who she was, hopefully, and was delighted to find that he placed her ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... forehead was high, his eyebrows scanty, his eyes, grey and sly, with a downward tendency, his nose was slightly aquiline, his mouth rather large—a kind of sneering smile played continually on his lips, his complexion was somewhat rubicund. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... and pull steadily upward and inward again. There is Madame Baudot at the doorway, hearing the distant wheels, ready to welcome us with all her heart; there appear her daughter, Madame Julie, and the rubicund serving-woman; and even the square, white cap of the chef bobs up and down behind ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... Allister McBess!" cried the rubicund personage, grasping a rather unwilling hand and shaking it wildly, "Allister McBess, oh yes, inteet, an' they will pe telling me you will pe a real Hielanman, though how coult a Hielanman pe hafing such a name as Egerton, it is ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... fifty years old, neither fat nor lean, neither short nor tall, neither rubicund nor pale, neither gay nor sad, neither contented nor discontented, neither energetic nor dull, neither proud nor humble, neither good nor bad, neither generous nor miserly, neither courageous nor cowardly, neither too much nor too little ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... craftsmen, the religious orders marched past, from the Dominicans to the Carthusians, from the Carmelites to the Capuchins. They advanced slowly, their eyes cast down, their step austere, their hands on their hearts; some faces were rubicund and shining, with large cheek-hones and rounded chins, herculean heads upon bullnecks; some, thin and livid, with cheeks hollowed by suffering and penitence, and with the look of living ghosts; in short, here were the two sides ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - NISIDA—1825 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... The Inspector's rubicund countenance was white with fury. His head kept turning in the direction of Laura, to whom the Professor was ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ascending for hours through open pasture lands, arrived at some rocks interspersed with stunted ilex, where a lamb was roasting for our dinner. The meridian sun had long ere this pierced the clouds that overhung our departure, and the sight of the lamb completely irradiated the rubicund visage of the plethoric clerk. A low round table was set down on the grass, under the shade of a large boulder stone. An ilex growing from its interstices seemed to live on its wits, for not an ounce of soil was ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... riding round the store-wing and dismounting. One of the two remained in the background screened by the trails of native cucumber overhanging the veranda end. The other—a wiry, powerful figure in uniform, with a rubicund face, black bristling moustache and beard and prominent black eyes, reminding one of the eyes of a bull—walked forward and spoke with an ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... goin' to-morrow marnin' up to the Five Sisters with ne'er a tool and ne'er a man,—Leach 'ull be that wild!" said Spruce, his rubicund face paling at the very thought—"If I could but 'ave ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... the degeneracy of the moderns, as if men now-a-days were in every respect inferior to their 99ancestors; but I maintain, and challenge contradiction, that there are many stout rubicund gentlemen in this metropolis that might be backed for eating or drinking with any Bacchanalian or masticator since the days of Adam himself. What was Offellius Bibulus, the Roman parasite, or Silenus Ebrius, or Milo, who could knock down an ox, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the other hand, had followed the hint of his father's figure in his make-up, and appeared as a rubicund old gentleman, large in the waist, bald, with an apoplectic tendency, a wheezy asthmatic voice, and a ...
— The Old Folks' Party - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... now before me, with his jolly red face, twinkling black eyes, and rubicund nose. No thin, weasel-faced Yankee was he, looking as if he had lived upon 'cute ideas and speculations all his life; yet Yankee he was by birth, ay, and in mind, too; for a more knowing fellow at ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... west, where the waysides were blue with the flowers of the wild chicory. A priest astride upon a rough old cob passed me, his hitched-up soutane showing his gaitered legs. The French rural priests are generally rubicund, but this one was cadaverous. He would have looked like Death on horseback, swathed in a black mantle, but for the dangling gaitered legs, which spoilt the solemn effect. A very curious figure did ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... of quicker perceptions than Mr. Wheelwright—but fortunately his wife was the earliest riser. It happened that as his spouse was exchanging some rather undignified jokes with the milkman, a jolly son of Erin came along, whose rubicund visage kindled with a thousand smiles as his eyes rested on ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... A rubicund, easy-going old judge, Fraser by name, sat on the bench, the royal arms painted large in oils on a canvas behind him. In front were a lawyer or two and a few clients—a slack court. Rottot, with a flourish, read ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... ever penetrated into the Rue de 24 Fevrier, though it forms one of the external galleries of the Palais Royal, and one may see there the smoky kitchens, dirty cooks, the night-side in fact, of the splendid restaurants, whose gilt fronts attract attention inside. Rubicund apples, splendid game, truffles, and ortolans, deck the one side; smoke, dirty plates, rags, and smutty saucepans may be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... queer story for the Pilgrim. But time soon grew horribly long, and to kill it he volunteered to act as witness to the butcher's marriage, one being wanted. The effects of a jovial night, fortified by some matutinal potations, were still visible in the small black eyes of the rubicund butcher—a huge man, apparently of cheery disposition; he swung to and fro before the shiny oak table as might one of his own carcasses. His bride, a small-featured woman, wrapped in a plaid shawl, evidently fearing that his state, if perceived by the ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was his head, which was bald, and shone like polished ivory, nothing more white, smooth and lustrous. Some people have said that he wore false calves, probably because ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... Vanderbilt," said the other, the wearer of a rubicund face, and great blue eyes. "My forte was oysters and economy. I grew wondrous fat and conservative, and one day awoke with a stomach that exclaimed, 'I have become round, so that you can trundle me ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... cared to make had she not been interested in the man by her side, whose inquisitiveness was based upon friendship, and whose most persistent interrogations had been touched with a quiet and sober tact which contrasted pleasantly with Mr. Lawrence's dictatorial manner. That genial and rubicund person was now seen approaching with Sir John, and suggested that they 'ought to ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... observation, and took in quickly the fact that all the men were armed, and looked shabbier than their leader, though not so stout; for he was rubicund and portly, where he ought not to have been, for activity, though in a barrel a tubby space does indicate strength. Neither were the noses of the other men so red as their leader's, albeit they ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... mean?" Captain Snaggs managed to stammer out after a bit, his long face perceptibly longer and his rubicund complexion turned to an ashy grey. He was conscience-stricken and thoroughly frightened at the second-mate thus bringing up again, as he thought, his cruel murder of the negro cook; for, Jan Steenbock spoke in the same tone of voice, and pointed his finger at him like an accusing judge, ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... beside his wife, stood looking out of the window, against which came sweeping the great volumes of mist. I glanced out also. Not only was the sea invisible, but even the brow of the cliffs. When he turned towards me, as I passed him, I saw that his face had lost much of its rubicund hue, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... Opperman looked a picture of misery, and would come to us and speak of his resolve to shoot his wife and children and perish in the defence of the capital. Dr. Gunning was an amiable little Hollander, fat, rubicund, and well educated. He was a keen politician, and much attached to the Boer Government, which paid him an excellent salary for looking after the State Museum. He had a wonderful collection of postage stamps, and was also engaged in ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... had gone on to lecture with a cheerful combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year he has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to people as part of our innumerable enrichments, and obviously he knew it. He has become now almost the leading Character in a little donnish ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... greeted by the sight of an immense car decked with many-coloured festoons and drawn by four horses. Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin helmet like those which grace the heads of officers of the Italian marine, and a coat of many colours embellished with strange devices, adorn the outward man of this stately personage. His left hand rests on the arm of the chair, while ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... journals, great and little, bounding with young blood and health—journals whose editors and writers did not desire better sport than to attack the Constitutionnel at right and at left, and to tumble the dear, fat, rubicund, old gentleman, head over heels. Among these was the Charivari, which incontinently laughed at the whole system of the establishment, from the crapulous, corpulent, and Voltairien Etienne, down ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... canon came in glowing hot. "Pouf!" and he wiped his rubicund, round visage with a handkerchief as brilliant. Coming straight from the glare out of doors, he was not aware of the stranger in the salon till his eyes were used to the gloom. Then madame and Bessie effected Harry's introduction, and ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... nails. Pretending to look earnestly at this respectable person's stomach, Roderick assured him that his snake was a copper-head and had been generated by the immense quantities of that base metal with which he daily defiled his fingers. Again, he assaulted a man of rubicund visage, and told him that few bosom serpents had more of the devil in them than those that breed in the vats of a distillery. The next whom Roderick honored with his attention was a distinguished clergyman, who happened just then to be engaged in a theological controversy, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... incident happened that day at dinner. Grandpapa, like a great many other persons in Finland, being a vegetarian, had gone to the rubicund and comfortable landlord that morning and explained that he wanted vegetables and fruit for his dinner. At four o'clock, the time for our mid-day meal, we all seated ourselves at table with excellent appetites, the Judge ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... not that assumption too sweeping?" put in the fourth man, of cheerful, rubicund countenance and, like Gay, inclined to corpulency. "What about yourself and Mr. Gay? Is there anyone more conscious of his talents and has done more to foster and encourage them than you? Who spoke and wrote in higher praise of Will Congreve ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... they want to stop my star performance for?" asked Santa Claus, pulling off his beard and revealing the rubicund face of Ben Tremont, who was slowly baking beneath the heavy robes ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... afternoon about this time, Franz might have been found together with his friends Krafft and Schilsky, at the latter's lodging in the TALSTRASSE. He was astride a chair, over the back of which he had folded his arms; and his chubby, rubicund face glistened ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... you," whispered Jupp to comfort him; however, before he could say any more, the panting female had drawn nearer from the doorway and come up close to the fireplace, the flickering red light from which made her somewhat rubicund countenance appear ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... comes as a pleasant shock. Is it possible that the morning has passed? It seems to have but commenced. I rouse myself and descend to the cabin. Toward the end of the meal a rubicund Frenchman opposite makes the startling proposition that if I wish to send a message home he will undertake to have it delivered. It is not until I notice the little square of oiled paper he is holding out to me that I understand ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... said, "here we have many friends and all fine blades. This is indeed a pleasure party." His eyes travelled from the table to the window, where the man in black still sat and read quite unconcernedly. Something like surprise puckered Cocardasse's rubicund face. "You here, ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... away." And he handed me a seal-skin pouch of tobacco and a pipe. We sat smoking together in this little sea-cabinet of his, till it began to look much like a state-room in Tophet; and notwithstanding my host's rubicund nose, I could hardly see ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... Rubicund, musclebound, hairynostrilled, hugebearded, cabbageeared, shaggychested, shockmaned, fat-papped, stands forth, his loins and genitals tightened into a pair of black ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... son entered with others who found their way into the court. A short, though somewhat corpulent-looking gentleman, with ferrety eyes and rubicund nose, telling of numerous cups of sack which had gone down between the thick lips below it, occupied the ...
— A True Hero - A Story of the Days of William Penn • W.H.G. Kingston
... send the train to one of two places five hundred miles asunder: it may depend upon whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers and earnest bishops, or be laboring in chains at Norfolk Island, a brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch, without a hope for this life or the other. Oh, how much may ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... over the melting snow. The day was unclouded for a wonder, and the sun proved its increasing power by turning the sleigh-tracks in the road into gleaming rills. The visage of my new acquaintance formed a decided contrast to the rubicund face of the beef-eating marketman. He was sandy even to his eyebrows and complexion. His scraggy beard suggested poverty of soil on his lantern jaws. His frame was as gaunt as that of a scare-crow, and his hands and feet were enormous. He had one redeeming feature, ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... in session and Hal sat for a while in the court-room, watching Judge Denton. Here was another prosperous and well-fed appearing gentleman, with a rubicund visage shining over the top of his black silk robe. The young miner found himself regarding both the robe and the visage with suspicion. Could it be that Hal was becoming cynical, and losing his faith in his fellow man? What ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... liberty with Judge Lomax than he would have done it with an old lion. Just one man, possibly, might have thought of it, but he would not have done it—and this was Aleck Thompson, the Sheriff of the county, a jovial man past middle age, a rubicund bachelor, who had courted half the girls in the county and was intimate with more than half the people in the circuit. He was daring even to rashness. He had held the office of Sheriff—not so long, perhaps, as the Judge had sat on the bench, but, at least, since he first stood for the ...
— The Sheriffs Bluff - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... along, talking to himself and saying, "Who knows but that in time to come, when the veracious history of my famous deeds is made known, the sage who writes it, when he has to set forth my first sally in the early morning, will do it after this fashion? 'Scarce had the rubicund Apollo spread o'er the face of the broad spacious earth the golden threads of his bright hair, scarce had the little birds of painted plumage attuned their notes to hail with dulcet and mellifluous harmony the coming of the rosy ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Bridget knocked; a spectacle, indeed,—a walking sermon on the perils that may follow what are termed "good times." His face would have been pale, except that his nose, which was as puffy as an omelette soufflee, and his left eye with a drooping lid sustained by a livid crescent, gave it a rubicund expression. His knees were shaky, his pulse feeble, his head top-heavy. He declined assistance rather sulkily, and descended holding by the stair-rail and stepping gingerly. Number Two, in spite of his genial, unruffled temper, could not repress his surprise, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... the window. There he saw as he looked out upon the lawn something that interested him; that caused a grin to fasten itself upon his rubicund countenance. Phil, under a fire of snowballs from a group of boys who were waiting with their Christmas sleds for a chance to hitch to a passing vehicle, gained Amzi's gate, ducked behind the fence ...
— Otherwise Phyllis • Meredith Nicholson
... brigadier, however, Bourgain-Desfeuilles, in whose command the 106th was, was certain to be there, brawling as loud as ever, and trundling his fat body about on his short, pudgy legs, with his red nose and rubicund face, vouchers for the good dinners he had eaten, and not likely ever to become top-heavy by reason of excessive weight in his upper story. There was a stir and movement about the farmhouse that seemed to ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... all sides the vehicles and pedestrians, the bicycles and motor bicycles, the trams and the outside cars rush to the solitary policeman, who directs them all with his severe but tolerant eye. He knows all the tram-drivers who go by, and his nicely graduated wink rewards the glances of the rubicund, jolly drivers of the hackneys and the decayed Jehus with purple faces and dismal hopefulness who drive sepulchral cabs for some reason which has no acquaintance with profit; nor are the ladies and gentlemen who saunter past foreign to his encyclopedic eye. ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... out as I came up to him. He had a chubby, rubicund face with reddish brown eyes—previously I had seen him only against the light. "One moment, sir," said I as he turned. He stared. "One moment," he said, "certainly. Or if you wish to speak to me for longer, and it is not asking too much—your moment is up—would ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... in the artistes' restaurant. At the small tables sat bony, close-cropped men of a peculiar rubicund type, having dinner with some girl or other from the neighborhood. They were acrobats, clowns, and wrestlers, people of a homogeneous type, dressed in loud checks, with enormous cuffs and boots with almost armor-plated toes. They chewed well and ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... gentleman hummed a song under his breath and slapped his reins against the flanks of the plodding horse to keep time. He came into a piece of woodland. He seemed to take cheery and fresh interest in this place. He poked his rubicund face out from the shadow of the chaise's canopy and peered to right and to left. There was a smile in his puckery eyes. When there were trees ahead of him, trees behind him, and trees all about he pulled his old horse to ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... begins talking forthwith in a fluty, but not unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first ineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow of talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund, knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as botryoidal, and about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair. He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears over these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that give him ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... men was in the ultimate stage of deterioration. As far as rain and wind and sun could wreck the garments he wore, it had been done. In his person the ravages of drink were as plainly visible. And yet, upon his high-bridged, rubicund nose was jauntily perched a pair of shining and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... but the jolly Kadee sallied forth into the street and 'fell upon my neck' with such ardour that my Frankish hat was sent rolling by contact with the turban of Islam. The Kadee of Keneh is the real original Kadee of our early days; sleek, rubicund, polite—a puisne judge and a dean rolled into one, combining the amenities of the law and the church—with an orthodox stomach and an orthodox turban, both round and stately. I was taken into the hareem, welcomed and regaled, and invited to the festival of Seyd Abd ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... was full of fat squiresses, buying muslin ammunition, to make the ball go off; and the attics, even at four o'clock, were thronged with rubicund damsels, who were already, as Shakspeare says of waves in ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... short in the waist and long in the sleeves, coalscuttle bonnets, and grand-maternal caps. So he made his toilet with care, and put his best hat on to hide his shaven crown. He then kept his door ajar, and waited for a chance of speaking to the justices. One soon came: a portly old gentleman, with a rubicund face and honest eye, walked slowly along the corridor, looking as wise as he could, cringed on by Cooper and Dr. Bailey; the latter had arrived post haste, and Baker had been sent for. Alfred came out, touched his ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... tap came at the door. A hand, evidently accustomed to the outside management of the latch, lifted it, and Mr. Twitt entered, his rubicund face ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... enjoy a fair amount of fun, whether it was genuine or not is another point, nor would I like to vouch for its being altogether devoid of irony. "Father Christmas" paid us his customary visit anyway, in his mantle of snow—fancy snow within fifteen degrees of the line!—which merry, rubicund, and very ancient man was ably personated by a gigantic marine, the necessary barrel-like proportions being conveyed ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... is a gaunt figure, with a hatchet face, spare of flesh. Our Little Man is a chubby lad, standing about four foot ten in his stockinged feet, rubicund and corpulent, and he wears a mackintosh with a very mackintoshy smell in all weathers. He never did a day's work, and he never means to try, but he is a genius at getting it out of others. Some say he is of Swiss origin, some say he is American, and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, October 27, 1920 • Various
... physically and financially speaking; possessed of an ill-kept house, bad servants, and nine neglected children. This prospect, however alarming to others, had great charms for Prue; nor was the Reverend Gamaliel Bliss repugnant to her, being a rubicund, bland personage, much given to fine linen, long dinners, and short sermons. His third spouse had been suddenly translated, and though the years of mourning had not yet expired, things went so hardly with Gamaliel, ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... shortly after the proposed elopement, and which cannot be passed over without mention, was a call from Squire Hennion on Mr. Meredith. The master of Boxely opened the interview by shaking his fist within a few inches of the rubicund countenance of the master of Greenwood, and, suiting his words to the motion, he roared: "May Belza take yer, yer old—" and the particular epithet is best omitted, the eighteenth-century vocabulary being more expressive than refined—"fer sendin' my boy ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... dress, a curious contrast to the antiquated garb and parchment face of old Cazalette, who sat by her, watchful and doubting; the officialdom-suggesting figure of the police-inspector, erect and rigid in his close-fitting uniform; the detective, rubicund and confident, though of what one scarcely knew; Lorrimore and myself, keen listeners and watchers, and last, but not by any means the least notable, the bland, suave Chinaman in his neat native dress, sitting modestly in the background, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... and thick, though in the earlier part of his life he had been thought handsome. His face, latterly, became somewhat rubicund, and his utterance so confused, that Johnson compared it to the gobbling of a turkey. The portrait of him by Reynolds, besides the resemblance of the features, is particularly characterized by the manner ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary
... was,' replied the rubicund damsel, as she moved briskly about her work. She had a peculiarity of wearing very short skirts, lest they should impede her progress; but once that Andy ventured a complimentary joke on her ankles, he met with such scathing scorn that he kept ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... was of the short, stout, bald-headed type, sometimes called aldermanic. It was plainly to be seen that his was a jocund nature, and the awe which he felt in this dreadful presence of death, though clearly shown on his rubicund face, was evidently a rare emotion with him. He glanced round the room as if expecting to see everything there materially changed, and though he looked toward the figure of Mr. Crawford now and then, it was with difficulty, and he averted his eyes as quickly as possible. He was ...
— The Gold Bag • Carolyn Wells
... a medium-sized, slightly portly gentleman of fifty-eight, though he did not look his age, thanks to the correct life he led. He had a military carriage, a rubicund face, a heavy mustache, keen, twinkling eyes, and a head of iron-gray hair. He was a childless widower, and Victor Nevill, the son of his dead sister Elizabeth, was his nephew, and presumably his heir. ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... bereft of doors, and could only be closed by stuff curtains, just now drawn wide open. Pontius could therefore look in, unhindered and unperceived, at the table on which a three-branched bronze lamp was standing between a dish and some plates. The stout man was sitting with his rubicund moon-face towards the architect, who, indignant as he was, would have gone straight up to him with swift decision, if, before entering the second room, a low but pitiful sob had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... watchful for the avenger of fat, who, perhaps, was even now at his heels. A slouch-hat, crowning hollow eyes and haggard beard, filled him with joy: it marked a bran-bread man and a brother. He smiled approvingly at a shrivelled form with hobbling gait; but from the fat and the rubicund he turned with severest frown. They were fleshly sinners, insults to himself, corrupters of youth, gorged drones, law-breakers. He was ready to say, with the statesman of old: "What use can the state ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... The master-goldsmith was a rubicund man, with a face which Jake, in a rage, had once described as that of "a pig with the measles." But this was, without doubt, a gross perversion of the truth. Benjamin Tresco's countenance was as benign as that of Bacchus, and as open as the day. Its chief peculiarity was that ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... truth in the observation, this is certain, that business did not prosper: it has been surmised that Jonathan's tall, lank, lean figure injured his custom, as people are but too much inclined to judge of the goodness of the ale by the rubicund face and rotundity of the landlord, and therefore inferred that there could be no good beer where mine host was the picture of famine. There certainly is much in appearances in this world; and it appears, that in consequence of Jonathan's cadaverous ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... Esther's pawnbroker was a rubicund portly man. He knew the fortunes of a hundred families by the things left with him or taken back. It was on his stuffy shelves that poor Benjamin's coat had lain compressed and packed away when it might have had a beautiful airing in the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in evident delight, as I stood dipping my nose in the second cupful of the cool, revivifying liquid, and peering in a congratulatory kind of way at the blurred and rubicund reflection of my features in the bottom of the cup, "well-sir, blame-don! ef it don't do a feller good to see you enjoyin' of it thataway! But don't you drink too much o' the worter!—'cause there's ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... was red in ordinary hours, no epithet sufficiently rubicund or sanguineous can express its colour at this appeal. "The man's mad," he said, at last, with a tone of astonishment that almost concealed his wrath,—"stark mad! I take his child!—lodge and board a great, positive, hungry child! Why, sir, many and many a time ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. "He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his neighbors said when others pitied him and blamed Rigou. "He wanted ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... really very comfortable here," said he, after scattering these greetings with a cackle of loud laughter that hardly moved the rubicund muscles of his ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... heron's feather. The hero of Sherwood was personated by a tall, well-limbed fellow, to whom, being really a forester of Bowland, the character was natural. Beside him stood a very different figure, a jovial friar, with shaven crown, rubicund cheeks, bull throat, and mighty paunch, covered by a russet habit, and girded in by a red cord, decorated with golden twist and tassel. He wore red hose and sandal shoon, and carried in his girdle a Wallet, to contain a roast capon, a neat's tongue, or ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... personal friend of my uncle, whose ready tongue, and still readier pistol, made him a personage of some consequence, not more to his own people than to the enemy. While of such material were the company, the fare before them was no less varied: here some rubicund squire was deep in amalgamating the contents of a venison pasty with some of Sneyd's oldest claret; his neighbor, less ambitious, and less erudite in such matters, was devouring rashers of bacon, with liberal potations of potteen; some pale-cheeked ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... his wife. Whereas she was tall and thin, he was comparatively short and broad; indeed, though of the regulation height, his width made him appear shorter than he really was; while his countenance, though burnt and tanned by southern suns and exposure to all sorts of weather, was fat and rubicund. He held his sides and laughed so heartily at the account his wife gave him of the questions which had been put to her, that Willy and Peter wished they had not ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... great promoter of innocence. And I thought how many of the poor, half-starved, cadaverous wretches who crowded into the dock in all their emaciated wretchedness and rags would, under other conditions, have become as portly and rubicund and as moral as the row of worthy aldermen who sat looking at them with contempt from their ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... a young man, not more than thirty-two or three years of age, though he lacked the ultra robust and rubicund appearance which is typical of so many Englishmen of his class at this period of life. A heavy bout of blackwater fever acquired on service in West Africa, which would have killed anyone of weaker constitution, had robbed ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... who carried the plate was slowly making his way towards the pew in which she sat, and with her gaze fixed on him, she began fumbling with the clasp of her purse, under cover of her muff. She had never seen such a rubicund portly gentleman, with two double chins and expansive bald spot on his crown. She held the coin between her fingers awaiting his slow approach. Just as he reached the end of their pew where Phil was sitting, she sneezed. Not a loud sneeze, but one of those inward convulsions that ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... with dread a few months before. "I begin to think," he remarked often, "that by continuing this life, as simple as that which a bird leads flying from bough to bough, I am to grow stout and elderly, and go on getting gray, rubicund, with an amplitude of white waistcoat, until I am seventy years of age or so. My father and mother each died young, but both by accident as it were: the habit of both families was of long life and great strength. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... some eighteen stone, an exceedingly florid countenance and good features, eyes full of quickness and shrewdness, but at the same time beaming with good nature. He wears white pantaloons, white frock, and white hat, and is, indeed, all white, with the exception of his polished Wellingtons and rubicund face. He carries a whip beneath his arm, which adds wonderfully to the knowingness of his appearance, which is rather more that of a gentleman who keeps an inn on the Newmarket road, "purely for the love of travellers, and the money which they carry about them," than of ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... his friend to the house of his brother-in-law, a German named Burkhardt, proprietor of a jeweller's and watchmaker's shop in the Strand. Herr Burkhardt, a well-to-do tradesman, with a rubicund face and an inexhaustible stock of good humour, was excessively fond of showing strangers the sights of London; and his guests had no sooner arrived, than he wanted to take them to Covent Garden theatre. John Clare was very anxious to go, on hearing that Madam Vestris was reciting one of his ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... is a very small man with a black beard, the only thing notable about him being his nose, which, to judge from its size, ought not to belong to him. The other is a rubicund youth, who seems to have arrived but recently in the country. With him the Franciscan is ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... of great public interest, under the eyes of Europe. Its members came back covered with distinction, and were much feted through the London season. Old Mr. Boyce came up from Mellor to see Dick's success for himself, and his rubicund country gentleman's face and white head might have been observed at many a London party beside the small ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... follows. A rubicund Mexican priest is the celebrant, while two old Mexicans in modern dress, and a Pueblo Indian in a red blanket, are acolytes. When the host is elevated, an Indian at the door beats a villainous drum and four musket shots are discharged. After the services are concluded, a ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... it is,' said Havill, who was also present, in the tone of one who, though sitting in this rubicund company, was not of it. 'I could have told you the truth of it any ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... fifty-eight and a bachelor. Why had it not occurred to him before? Out of the sky there appeared to Commander Raffleton the vision of "Cousin Christopher" as a plump, rubicund angel in a panama hat and a pepper-and-salt tweed suit holding out a lifebelt. Cousin Christopher would take to Malvina as some motherly hen to an orphaned duckling. A fairy discovered asleep beside one of the ancient menhirs of Brittany. His only fear would be that you might ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... was with his run, he sprang to the mound of bodies, and the first that met his eyes was that of his uncle. But he had hardly recognized the rubicund face now furrowed with blue lines, and seen the stiffened arms and the gunshot wound before he gave a stifled cry, exclaiming, "Let us ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... the rubicund veteran Simpson, the departing Andrew Fraser said solemnly, "The Prince is to be the master here until my return." With a joyous heart the London sewing girl embarked as Miss Johnstone's one personal attendant, forgetful of her devoted lover, Joseph Smith, who had temporarily ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... him now before me, with his jolly red face, twinkling black eyes, and rubicund nose. No thin, weasel-faced Yankee was he, looking as if he had lived upon 'cute ideas and speculations all his life; yet Yankee he was by birth, ay, and in mind, too; for a more knowing fellow at a bargain never crossed the lakes to abuse British ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and thin; Mrs B. was short and stout. The face of the manager and proprietor of Blewcome's Royal Menagerie was sallow and cadaverous. The face of his spouse was rubicund to a degree. In fact, in everything, the pair were admirably suited, according to the principle, that the more unlike two people are, the better they will agree; and they led a very prosperous "Jack Sprat and his wife" sort of life, roaming from place to place, with their caravans of ...
— Wilton School - or, Harry Campbell's Revenge • Fred E. Weatherly
... the "hotel," did come at last. Alas! however, for dreams of ruddy welcome—rubicund host, and capon turning on the spit. In spite of German accents, we were walking in America, after all. A shabbily-lit glass door admitted us into a dreary saloon bar, where a hard-featured, gruff-mannered young countryman, after serving beer to two farm-labourers, admitted with ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... ample form, filled up a large portion of the side of the table she occupied. Her coarse-featured, heavy fare, surrounded by a broad, muslin cap frill, that nearly covered her harsh yellow hair, was lighted up by a pair of small gray eyes, expressing a mixture of cunning and curiosity. Her rubicund visage, gaudy-colored chintz dress, and yellow bandanna handkerchief, produced a sort of glaring sun-flower effect, not mitigated by the contrast afforded by the other members of ...
— Adele Dubois - A Story of the Lovely Miramichi Valley in New Brunswick • Mrs. William T. Savage
... whether it was genuine or not is another point, nor would I like to vouch for its being altogether devoid of irony. "Father Christmas" paid us his customary visit anyway, in his mantle of snow—fancy snow within fifteen degrees of the line!—which merry, rubicund, and very ancient man was ably personated by a gigantic marine, the necessary barrel-like proportions being conveyed ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... degeneracy of the moderns, as if men now-a-days were in every respect inferior to their 99ancestors; but I maintain, and challenge contradiction, that there are many stout rubicund gentlemen in this metropolis that might be backed for eating or drinking with any Bacchanalian or masticator since the days of Adam himself. What was Offellius Bibulus, the Roman parasite, or Silenus Ebrius, or Milo, who could knock down an ox, and eat him up directly ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... fore part of his crown; his forehead was high, his eyebrows scanty, his eyes, grey and sly, with a downward tendency, his nose was slightly aquiline, his mouth rather large—a kind of sneering smile played continually on his lips, his complexion was somewhat rubicund. ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... on the American minister to Paris, Judge John Young Mason, a simple and amiable personage. He was rubicund and stolid, and talked like a man with a grievance; but, as my father afterwards remarked, it was really Uncle Sam who was the aggrieved party, in being mulcted of seventeen thousand dollars a year in order ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... slopes towards the west, where the waysides were blue with the flowers of the wild chicory. A priest astride upon a rough old cob passed me, his hitched-up soutane showing his gaitered legs. The French rural priests are generally rubicund, but this one was cadaverous. He would have looked like Death on horseback, swathed in a black mantle, but for the dangling gaitered legs, which spoilt the solemn effect. A very curious figure did he cut ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... along the North Parade. There is always a great shew of the clergy at Bath: none of your thin, puny, yellow, hectic figures, exhausted with abstinence, and hardy study, labouring under the morbi eruditorum, but great overgrown dignitaries and rectors, with rubicund noses and gouty ancles, or broad bloated faces, dragging along great swag bellies; the emblems of sloth ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... Then one of the speakers rose. At first sight the preacher looked like anything but an apostle; his plump, rounded body gave no hint of asceticism, and his merry, pure eye twinkled from the midst of a most rubicund expanse of countenance. He looked like one who had found the world a pleasant place, and Jim gruffly described him as a "jolly old bloke." But the voice of this comfortable, suave-looking missionary by no means matched his appearance. He spoke with a grave and silvery pitch that made his words ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... open. Pontius could therefore look in, unhindered and unperceived, at the table on which a three-branched bronze lamp was standing between a dish and some plates. The stout man was sitting with his rubicund moon-face towards the architect, who, indignant as he was, would have gone straight up to him with swift decision, if, before entering the second room, a low but pitiful sob had not fallen ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Jack, my boy, do you smoke?—Well then, load away." And he handed me a seal-skin pouch of tobacco and a pipe. We sat smoking together in this little sea-cabinet of his, till it began to look much like a state-room in Tophet; and notwithstanding my host's rubicund nose, I could hardly see him for ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... days after the visit to Cadurcis, when Lady Annabel was sitting alone, a postchaise drove up to the hall, whence issued a short and stout woman with a rubicund countenance, and dressed in a style which remarkably blended the shabby with the tawdry. She was accompanied by a boy between eleven and twelve years of age, whose appearance, however, much contrasted with that of his mother, for he was pale and slender, with long curling black hair and large ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... it all to you," replied Tavender. Traces of the old Quaker effect which had been so characteristic of him still hung about his garb and mien, but there shone a new assurance on his benignant, rubicund face. Prosperity had visibly liberalized and enheartened him. He shook Thorpe's hand again. "Yes, sir—it must have been all through you!" he repeated. "I got my cable three weeks ago—'Hasten to London, urgent business, ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... departure of Travers Gladwin left Whitney Barnes and the shirt-sleeved Michael Phelan staring blankly at each other. The unfrocked policeman was anything but an imposing figure and the contortions of distress in his rubicund countenance were grotesque enough to kindle the sense of humor in a far less volatile mind than that of Whitney Barnes. His smile came to the surface and spread out in full blossom. But it failed to find reflection in the features of Mrs. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... the target, and it was highly amusing and characteristic to watch these burghers gathered round and firing at the bird or some other object on the top. Now they were all returning carrying their bows, and in high good-humour. A young and rubicund priest was of the party, regarded evidently with affection and pride by his companions; for all that he seemed to say and do was applauded, and greeted with obstreperous Flemish laughter. When an old woman came to offer cakes from her basket for sale, ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... Foley, and a young rubicund gentleman, beautifully clothed, and with fair curly locks, named Ziegler. Mr. Ziegler was far more perfectly at ease than anybody else at the table, which indeed as a whole was rendered haggard and nervous by the precarious state of the conversation, expecting its ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... curled round his shining headpiece. So the throng moved on, until at the very gate it was brought to a stand by a wondrously fat man, who came darting forth from the town with rage in every feature of his rubicund face. ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... summons to luncheon comes as a pleasant shock. Is it possible that the morning has passed? It seems to have but commenced. I rouse myself and descend to the cabin. Toward the end of the meal a rubicund Frenchman opposite makes the startling proposition that if I wish to send a message home he will undertake to have it delivered. It is not until I notice the little square of oiled paper he is holding out to me that I understand this reference to the “pigeon post” with which the ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... host, in evident delight, as I stood dipping my nose in the second cupful of the cool, revivifying liquid, and peering in a congratulatory kind of way at the blurred and rubicund reflection of my features in the bottom of the cup, "well-sir, blame-don! ef it don't do a feller good to see you enjoyin' of it thataway! But don't you drink too much o' the worter!—'cause there's some sweet milk over there in one o' them crocks, maybe; and ef you'll jest, kind o' keerful-like, ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley
... hammock, one foot used to propel herself gently back and forth. The newly-acquired striped dress was such a tight fit for her rubicund form, that it cracked ominously every time the wearer took a deep breath. But the short-coming of the two fronts over her ample bosom was camouflaged with the plaid ribbon and many pins. The corsage bouquet was tucked high under her chin ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... V and pull steadily upward and inward again. There is Madame Baudot at the doorway, hearing the distant wheels, ready to welcome us with all her heart; there appear her daughter, Madame Julie, and the rubicund serving-woman; and even the square, white cap of the chef bobs up and down behind them, within ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... and stopped with a friendly, "You are taking the air, my son. The night is warm." He was rubicund, and his little eyes looked ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... in his hands. Denial was useless, since he had asked the Mayor to make a draft for him, and since he had shown that functionary the deed signed by Mme Lacoste. Here, word for word, is the explanation given by the rubicund Joseph: ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... contrast otherwise, however, the two presented. The man next the aisle was well past sixty, rotund of abdomen, rubicund of countenance, beetle-browed. He was elaborately well-groomed, almost foppish in attire, and wore the obvious stamp of worldly success, the air of one accustomed to giving orders and seeing them obeyed before ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... few months before. "I begin to think," he remarked often, "that by continuing this life, as simple as that which a bird leads flying from bough to bough, I am to grow stout and elderly, and go on getting gray, rubicund, with an amplitude of white waistcoat, until I am seventy years of age or so. My father and mother each died young, but both by accident as it were: the habit of both families was of long life and great strength. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... talked, Addison, a short, heavy, rubicund man with grayish-brown sideburns extending to his ear-lobes and hard, bright, twinkling gray eyes—a proud, happy, self-sufficient man—munched his apple and contemplated Cowperwood. As is so often the case in life, he frequently liked or disliked ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... of the Legion of honor, which met with difficulty over a gastronomic stomach in keeping with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, and a pair of powerful shoulders. The torso was supported by a spindling pair of legs, while the rubicund tints on the cheek-bones bore testimony to a rollicking life. The lower part of the cheeks, which were deeply wrinkled, overhung a coat-collar of velvet the worse for wear. Among other adornments, the ex-dragoon wore enormous gold rings ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... sight of the funeral had only increased the gloom of Frances. When she entered the church, seven or eight persons, scattered about upon chairs, alone occupied the damp and icy building. One of the distributors of holy water, an old fellow with a rubicund, joyous, wine-bibbing face, seeing Frances approach the little font, said to her in a low voice: "Abbe Dubois is not yet in his box. Be quick, and you will have the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... while and the canon came in glowing hot. "Pouf!" and he wiped his rubicund, round visage with a handkerchief as brilliant. Coming straight from the glare out of doors, he was not aware of the stranger in the salon till his eyes were used to the gloom. Then madame and Bessie effected Harry's introduction, and as Harry, with a rare wisdom, had practised ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... workmen was tall and spare, with the forward thrust of head and neck seen in vultures and other unclean birds. The other, who held the sacks while his companion shovelled, was on the contrary stout and short, of a notably jovial, rubicund countenance, in habit like the hostler of an inn, or perhaps a well-to-do carrier upon ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... at the office window threw the light of the glass-framed candle straight upon Hart's rubicund face, and that face was a study. He faltered ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King
... an humble class; the third, who sat apart with a large glass of beer before him, more deserving of notice. His age might be about sixty. His hair was grizzled; his face, and especially his nose, large and rubicund, and his belly portly. He wore a black frock and dingy white neckcloth; and he made no use of a pipe. All this we noticed while advancing towards the hostess, who, as usual, looked cold upon us for an instant, and then became ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Stump, whose rubicund visage was burnt brick-red by the desert, took a keen interest in Abdur Kad'r's daily outpourings. He had no Arabic, but he ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... of his person has undergone a similar metamorphosis. He has been credited with a full moon of a face, the rubicund nose of an incorrigible toper, and thick coarse lips always apart because always laughing. The picture would have surprised his friends no less than himself. There have been portraits painted of Rabelais; I have seen many such. They are ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... talking forthwith in a fluty, but not unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, this man, and a fairly respectable gesticulator, and to him it is we make our first ineffectual tentatives at explaining who indeed we are; but his flow of talk washes that all away again. He has a face of that rubicund, knobby type I have heard an indignant mineralogist speak of as botryoidal, and about it waves a quantity of disorderly blond hair. He is dressed in leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears over these a streaming ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the sun came down—the tinge of many mountains and the distant sea—until the sun himself settled quietly into it, and there grew richer and more ripe (as old bottled wine is fed by the crust), and bowed his rubicund farewell, through the postern of the scaur-gate, to the old Hall, and the valley, and the face of ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... quickness and shrewdness, but at the same time beaming with good nature. He wears white pantaloons, white frock, and white hat, and is, indeed, all white, with the exception of his polished Wellingtons and rubicund face. He carries a whip beneath his arm, which adds wonderfully to the knowingness of his appearance, which is rather more that of a gentleman who keeps an inn on the Newmarket road, "purely for the love of travellers, and the money which they carry about them," than of a native of the rock. ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... Father dead, mother divorced and leading a pleasant existence amongst the capitals of Europe. The uncle, although maintaining a decent appearance of grief, was obviously, at heart, relieved to be rid of his nephew so easily. Poor Carfax! For so rubicund and noisy a person he left strangely little mark upon the world. Within a fortnight the college had nearly lost account of his existence. He lent to Sannet Wood a sinister air that caused numberless undergraduates ...
— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole
... in the blue tam-o'-shanter, that's the one I was tellin' you about,' said a red-haired man, with a cheerful and rubicund face. ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... was quick at observation, and took in quickly the fact that all the men were armed, and looked shabbier than their leader, though not so stout; for he was rubicund and portly, where he ought not to have been, for activity, though in a barrel a tubby space does indicate strength. Neither were the noses of the other men so red as their leader's, albeit they were ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... old coach swayed to and fro, with its dignified elderly gentlemen and rubicund Lord Mayor, rejoicing in countless turtle feeds—for, reader, it was ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... stared hard at a big man with a bronzed skin and a rubicund laugh who expected to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... astonished at the change he saw upon the strong man of rubicund countenance, and his heart filled with compassion. The factor was sitting up in bed, looking very white and worn and troubled. Even his nose had grown thin and white. He held out his hand to him, and said to his wife, "Tak the door to ye, Mistress Crathie," ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... looked up, pleased to have him home so early. She was about to say as much, but at sight of him the words perished on her tongue. It was as though her heart were touched with ice. Mr. Harley's countenance had been of that quasi claret hue called rubicund. It was now turned gray and pasty, and his cheeks, as firmly round as those of a trumpeter, were pouched and fallen as with the palsy of age. He looked ten years worse than when he went forth two ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... marnin' up to the Five Sisters with ne'er a tool and ne'er a man,—Leach 'ull be that wild!" said Spruce, his rubicund face paling at the very thought—"If I could but 'ave 'ad ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... remain in my memory, when better ones pass away by the score. There is a picture of Venus, combing her son Cupid's head with a small-tooth comb, and looking with maternal care among his curls; this I shall not forget. Likewise, a picture of a broad, rubicund Judith by Bardone,—a widow of fifty, of an easy, lymphatic, cheerful temperament, who has just killed Holofernes, and is as self-complacent as if she had been carving a goose. What could possibly have stirred up this pudding of a woman (unless ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the future to a man of quicker perceptions than Mr. Wheelwright—but fortunately his wife was the earliest riser. It happened that as his spouse was exchanging some rather undignified jokes with the milkman, a jolly son of Erin came along, whose rubicund visage kindled with a thousand smiles as his eyes ...
— Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman • William L. Stone
... in the day, seeing that I had gone down to the place where we used to receive the holy communion, called Communichino, the conversa of my aunt rang the bell for the priest to come with the pyx.[2] He was a man of about fifty years of age, very corpulent, with a rubicund face, and a type of physiognomy as vulgar as it ...
— The Priest, The Woman And The Confessional • Father Chiniquy
... deck to satisfy himself that all was going on properly, the mate stepped forward to attend to some duty. As the former's rubicund visage disappeared beneath the ...
— Charley Laurel - A Story of Adventure by Sea and Land • W. H. G. Kingston
... I'm an immoral woman. If I were an immoral woman I could have made her husband fall in love with me ...if I'd cared to. And, indeed, I did care to. There's someone who's pleased with himself," she thought, as she saw a fat, rubicund gentleman coming towards her. He took her for an acquaintance, and lifted his glossy hat above his bald, glossy head, and then perceived his mistake. "He thought he knew me. Well, he knows me as well as anyone in the world knows me. I don't know myself. I know my appetites, as the French ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... merely sots. The following is a specimen. A certain Velu, a born vagabond, formerly in the alms-house and brought up there, then a shoemaker or a cobbler, afterwards teaching school in the faubourg de Vienne, and at last a haranguer and proposer of tyrannicide motions, short, stout and as rubicund as his cap, is made President of the Popular club at Blois, then delegate for domiciliary visits, and, throughout the reign of Terror, he is a principal personage in the town, district and department. (Dufort de Cheverney, "Memoires," ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... and his rubicund cheeks lost something of their high colour, for here was a possibility that had not entered into his calculations. But Mistress Quinn stayed not to answer him. Already she was making for the door, wiping the dough from her hands on to her apron ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... no longer, and burst into a roar of laughter; for my uncle, stumpy, fat, and rubicund, presented an ...
— The Strand Magazine: Volume VII, Issue 37. January, 1894. - An Illustrated Monthly • Edited by George Newnes
... going so soon? The night's young yet, boy! Come, sit down and have some of the 'rosy,'" shouted a rubicund-faced youth, with a generous proportion of carrotty hair crowning ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... by a flourish of silver trumpets, was borne in by liveried servants walking two and two, with rubicund marshals strutting in front and behind, bearing white wands in their hands, not only as badges of their office, but also as weapons with which to repel any impertinent inroad upon the dishes in the journey from the kitchen to the hall. Boar's heads, enarmed and endored with ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... representatives in her pages will convince us. In "Adam Bede," there is Mr. Irwine, the vicar, with avowedly no qualification for his profession, placidly playing chess with his mother, stroking his dogs, and dipping into Greek tragedies; there is the excellent Martin Poyser at the Farm, good-natured and rubicund; there is his wife, somewhat too sharply voluble, but only in behalf of cleanliness and honesty and order; there is Captain Donnithorne at the Hall, who does a poor girl a mortal wrong, but who is, after all, such a nice, good-looking fellow; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... out of condition: it is suffering from moral and intellectual "trench-feet." Heavy drafts have introduced a large and untempered element into our composition. Many of the subalterns are obviously "new-jined"—as the shrewd old lady of Ayr once observed of the rubicund gentleman at the temperance meeting. Their men hardly know them or one another by sight. The regiment must be moulded anew, and its lustre restored by the beneficent process vulgarly known as "spit and polish." So every morning we apply ourselves with thoroughness, ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village; which held its sessions on a bench before a small inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of His Majesty George the Third. Here they used to sit in the shade through a long lazy summer's day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or telling endless, sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have been worth any statesman's money to have heard the profound ...
— Legends That Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... wife, stood looking out of the window, against which came sweeping the great volumes of mist. I glanced out also. Not only was the sea invisible, but even the brow of the cliffs. When he turned towards me, as I passed him, I saw that his face had lost much of its rubicund hue, and ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... an hour and you will see them come back again each man laden with the spoils of the shrubberies—holly, mistletoe, and evergreens—ruthlessly plundered under cover of the darkness. A couple of days before "the day," the sergeant-major enters the barrack-room, a smile playing upon his rubicund features. We all know what his errand is and he knows right well that we do; but he cannot refrain from the customary short patronising harangue, "Our worthy captain—liberal gent you know—deputed me—what you like for ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... consciousness of two men riding round the store-wing and dismounting. One of the two remained in the background screened by the trails of native cucumber overhanging the veranda end. The other—a wiry, powerful figure in uniform, with a rubicund face, black bristling moustache and beard and prominent black eyes, reminding one of the eyes of a bull—walked forward and spoke with an air of ...
— Lady Bridget in the Never-Never Land • Rosa Praed
... with constant use. For a long while he used to console himself, when driven from home, by frequenting a kind of perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village, which held its sessions on a bench before a small inn, designated by a rubicund portrait of his Majesty George the Third. Here they used to sit in the shade through a long, lazy summer's day, talking listlessly over village gossip, or telling endless, sleepy stories about nothing. But it would have been worth ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... whim. Strong ones I believe it would need To recall, to our side of the limit, Subjects of Pluto King of the Dead: But, from the Germanic Empire Into the gallant and cynical abode Of Messieurs your pretty Frenchmen,—A jolly and beaming air, Rubicund faces, not ignorant of wine, These are the passports which, legible if you look on us, Our troop produces ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... chaff. Now follow heavy instruments of husbandry—ploughs and harrows—while rakes, scythes, and reaping-hooks form a picturesque trophy behind them. A shout of laughter greets the next figure in the procession, for it is no other than the jolly god Bacchus. And a hearty, rubicund, big-bellied god he is, and very decent, too, being decorously clad in a brown suit turned up with red, and cut in the fashion of the time of Maximilian I., or thereabouts. A perpetual smile mantles over his broad face, and complacently he pats his huge rotundity of stomach as he rolls ...
— A Tramp's Wallet - stored by an English goldsmith during his wanderings in Germany and France • William Duthie
... to come was Courtecuisse, in whom you would scarcely have recognized the once jovial forester, the rubicund do-nothing, whose wife made his morning coffee as we have before seen. Aged, and thin, and haggard, he presented to all eyes a lesson that no one learned. "He tried to climb higher than the ladder," was what his ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... milliner's shop was full of fat squiresses, buying muslin ammunition, to make the ball go off; and the attics, even at four o'clock, were thronged with rubicund damsels, who were already, as Shakspeare says of ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... devices he, at last, wandered out into the foggy streets. After a while he found himself outside a public-house and, after a moment's hesitation, he went in. He asked the stout, rubicund young woman behind the counter for a whisky. She gave him one; he drank that, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... forth into the street and 'fell upon my neck' with such ardour that my Frankish hat was sent rolling by contact with the turban of Islam. The Kadee of Keneh is the real original Kadee of our early days; sleek, rubicund, polite—a puisne judge and a dean rolled into one, combining the amenities of the law and the church—with an orthodox stomach and an orthodox turban, both round and stately. I was taken into the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... old Lady, daughter of the GROSSE KURFURST, and so very fat and rubicund, had a Son once: he too is mentionable in his way,—as a milestone (parish milestone) in the obscure Chronology of those parts. Her first husband was the Duke of Courland; to him she brought an heir, who became Duke in his turn,—and was the final Duke, LAST of the "Kettler" or native Line of ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the perils that may follow what are termed "good times." His face would have been pale, except that his nose, which was as puffy as an omelette soufflee, and his left eye with a drooping lid sustained by a livid crescent, gave it a rubicund expression. His knees were shaky, his pulse feeble, his head top-heavy. He declined assistance rather sulkily, and descended holding by the stair-rail and stepping gingerly. Number Two, in spite of his genial, unruffled temper, could not repress ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... must walk warily, and not stir up strife," quoth the rubicund prior, who looked at once a benevolent and a strong-willed man. "We will pray for the restoration—the permanent restoration of the good king; but we must avoid stirring up the hearts of his subjects in such a way as will make them ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... white hat, who stood with his hands in his breeches-pockets, looking about him. He was tall and stout, and carried himself in what seemed to me a stately manner. As I drew near him I felt somewhat encouraged by a glimpse of his face, which was rubicund and, I thought, good-natured; but, approaching him rather from behind, I could not see it well. When ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... writes his erstwhile pupil; "he really looked what he was, a gentleman of the law—there was nothing of the pettifogger about him: somewhat under middle size, and somewhat rotund in person, he was always dressed in a full suit of black, never worn long enough to become threadbare. His face was rubicund, and not without keenness; but the most remarkable thing about him was his head, which was bald, and shone like polished ivory, nothing more white, smooth and lustrous. Some people have said that he wore false calves, probably because his black silk ...
— George Borrow in East Anglia • William A. Dutt
... table glittering under the soft radiance of many candles and surrounded by a numerous company—fat and thin, old and young, red-faced and pale, gentle and simple. At the end farthest from the street one figure stood erect—a short, round, rubicund little man, wearing a gown of rusty black, one thumb stuck into his vest, and a rosy benignity in the glance with which he scanned the table. He threw back his head, cleared his tight throat sonorously, and began, in tones perhaps best described as ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... respect he showed to a coroneted head, even when cracked; and a bishop under his charge was always secured, as far as possible, from the least whisper of heretical conversation. He possessed besides a pleasant rubicund countenance and an immaculate wardrobe. He was further fortunate in having in his assistants, Dr Escott and Dr Sherlaw, two young gentlemen whose medical knowledge was almost equal to the affability of their manners and the ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston
... the Red School-House, at five, crowded the men, ay, and the women and children, of Rangeley and thereabout. They came as the winds and waves come when forests and navies are rended and stranded. Horse, foot, and charioteers, they thronged toward the rubicund fountain of education. From houses that lurked invisible in clearings suddenly burst forth a population, an audience ardent with patriotism, eager for politics even from a Cockney interpreter, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... an awful thing to be turned adrift in a world of sin and suffering with this agonizing sense. He could look, whether he would or not, beneath the smiling and rubicund countenance of the hail-fellow-well-met to that corrosive spot within where the trust of the widow and fatherless had been betrayed; or see beyond the stolid and heavy appearance proper to the ox the quivering features of the man who ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... was in session and Hal sat for a while in the court-room, watching Judge Denton. Here was another prosperous and well-fed appearing gentleman, with a rubicund visage shining over the top of his black silk robe. The young miner found himself regarding both the robe and the visage with suspicion. Could it be that Hal was becoming cynical, and losing his faith in his fellow man? What he thought of, in connection ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... happened shortly after the proposed elopement, and which cannot be passed over without mention, was a call from Squire Hennion on Mr. Meredith. The master of Boxely opened the interview by shaking his fist within a few inches of the rubicund countenance of the master of Greenwood, and, suiting his words to the motion, he roared: "May Belza take yer, yer old—" and the particular epithet is best omitted, the eighteenth-century vocabulary being more expressive than refined—"fer sendin' my boy ter Boston, ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... I did not see him very often and was in no way intimate with him, I kept my ears open for any account of his doings. From one point of view, the Club Window outlook, he was a very usual figure, one of those stout, rubicund, jolly men, a good polo player, a good man in a house party, genial-natured, and none too brilliantly brained, whom every one liked and no one thought about. All this he was on one side of the report, but, on the other, there were certain stories that ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... at his climax in a state of suppressed emotion, which culminated in a chuckle, which shook his rubicund visage and brought a series of twitches to his aching toe. As for Montague, he ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... however, his personal appearance had undergone a marked change. He was rubicund, and more youthful of countenance; shabbily smart in dress; excessively "horsey," ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... a somewhat unprepossessing assistant district attorney lounging in front of the jury box, taking apparently no great interest in the proceedings, and a worried-looking young Italian sitting at the prisoner's table between a rubicund little man with a round red face and a tall, grave, longish-haired lawyer with a frame not unlike that of Abraham Lincoln, over whose wrinkled face played from time to time the suggestion of a smile. Behind a balustrade ...
— Tutt and Mr. Tutt • Arthur Train
... he said, "except the old Frenchman. That woman had no business to sing in public, and as for those youths who call themselves artists—why aren't they in the trenches?" And hastily touching Mrs. Dobson's hand, he slipped away: the expression in her rubicund face was pained ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... A solid gentleman, both physically and financially speaking; possessed of an ill-kept house, bad servants, and nine neglected children. This prospect, however alarming to others, had great charms for Prue; nor was the Reverend Gamaliel Bliss repugnant to her, being a rubicund, bland personage, much given to fine linen, long dinners, and short sermons. His third spouse had been suddenly translated, and though the years of mourning had not yet expired, things went so hardly with Gamaliel, that he could no longer delay casting his pastoral eyes over the flock ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... a rubicund man, with a face which Jake, in a rage, had once described as that of "a pig with the measles." But this was, without doubt, a gross perversion of the truth. Benjamin Tresco's countenance was as benign as that of Bacchus, and as open as the day. Its chief peculiarity was that ...
— The Tale of Timber Town • Alfred Grace
... They are not content with their own success in cheating, they throw discredit upon honest folk. How many a faithful pocket-piece has been pulled out by its disappointed owner and actually set wrong to make it agree with one of these rubicund old sinners? Such is the overpowering effect of impudent ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... garment that putteth the roses to shame. Hath the red of thy cheek clad that vest upon thee Or in heart's blood of lovers hast tinctured the same?" Quoth he, "'Twas the sun lately gave me the wede; From the rubicund hue of his setting it came. So my garment and wine and the colour so clear Of my cheek are as ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... her hand and spoiled the gallantry by squeezing her shoulder—half her little body it seemed to be—and emerging from the compartment joined us on the platform. He put a great finger on the arm of the rubicund, thickset, black-moustached Jornicroft. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... now, in some ten minutes—a fat, rubicund, spectacled man, with a cast in his left eye and two fingers missing, to remind him of early days in experimental work on explosives. Under his arm he carried several tomes and pamphlets; and so, bowing first to one financier, ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... stout stick, was a short, thickset, elderly man, clad in brown habiliments from head to foot: a brown, broad-brimmed beaver, an antiquated brown spencer (a brown wig must not be omitted), brown gaiters, and brown cloth boots, completed his attire. His linen was spotless and fine, his countenance rubicund and benevolent; and when he took off his green spectacles, a pair of the clearest and honestest brown eyes ever set in mortal's head looked you full in the face. He was a nice, comfortable-looking ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 448 - Volume 18, New Series, July 31, 1852 • Various
... commanded by Brigadier Corbett, of the Bengal Army; he had been nearly forty years in the service, was mentally and physically vigorous, and had no fear of responsibility. Robert Montgomery[9] was then chief civil officer at Lahore. He was of a most gentle and benevolent nature, with a rubicund countenance and a short, somewhat portly figure, which characteristics led to his being irreverently called 'Pickwick,' and probably if he had lived in less momentous times he would never have been credited with the great qualities ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... reached us faintly through the high windows. There was a burst of voices, and several men came out in high good-humour into the gallery. They were exchanging jocular reminiscences of the donkeys in Cairo. A pale anxious youth stepping softly on long legs was being chaffed by a strutting and rubicund globe-trotter about his purchases in the bazaar. "No, really—do you think I've been done to that extent?" he inquired very earnest and deliberate. The band moved away, dropping into chairs as they went; matches flared, illuminating for a second ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... quite near the door; for my guide, in order to show his goodwill and to atone for what might seem rudeness, was bent on marshalling me almost up to the high seats that faced the congregation, where sat my rubicund old Friend lady, whose aspect betokened that she had just the ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Commodore Vanderbilt," said the other, the wearer of a rubicund face, and great blue eyes. "My forte was oysters and economy. I grew wondrous fat and conservative, and one day awoke with a stomach that exclaimed, 'I have become round, so that you can trundle me for the exercise you ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... monopolized the water—he diminished it. It became every day small by degrees and beautifully less. "There is not now," he said, "gentlemen of the jury, a tenth of the ordinary quantity. The stream is running dry—and so low is it, and so little of it is there, that," continued he, turning to the rubicund attorney, and naming him, "there isn't enough in it ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... laconic note. I looked at him curiously as we jogged along over the melting snow. The day was unclouded for a wonder, and the sun proved its increasing power by turning the sleigh-tracks in the road into gleaming rills. The visage of my new acquaintance formed a decided contrast to the rubicund face of the beef-eating marketman. He was sandy even to his eyebrows and complexion. His scraggy beard suggested poverty of soil on his lantern jaws. His frame was as gaunt as that of a scare-crow, and ...
— Driven Back to Eden • E. P. Roe
... was by this time a little stricken in years, yet by dint of keeping up a good heart, and having never known care or sorrow (having never been married), he was still a hearty, jocund, rubicund, gamesome wag, and of great capacity in the doublet. This last was ascribed to his living a jolly life on those domains at the Hook, which Peter Stuyvesant had granted to him for his gallantry at ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... is a work in tapestry representing Jesus Christ bursting forth from the sepulchre, but he has a visage far too rubicund and wanting in dignity; he looks like a person flushed with wine issuing from a tavern; in the countenance there is depicted (so it appears to me) a vulgar, not ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... of the expectant multitude are greeted by the sight of an immense car decked with many-coloured festoons and drawn by four horses. Mounted on the car is a huge chair, on which sits enthroned the majestic figure of the Carnival, a man of stucco about nine feet high with a rubicund and smiling countenance. Enormous boots, a tin helmet like those which grace the heads of officers of the Italian marine, and a coat of many colours embellished with strange devices, adorn the outward man of this stately personage. His left hand rests on the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... right, are we," asked a rubicund-visaged man, who puffed away heartily "to smoke in the parlor? I condone that much to my wife's dislike of the weed. She makes a great ado about ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... addressed happened to possess the outward and visible signs of alcoholic excess, so much the worse for him—Mr. Creddle was touchy on the subject of his family and did not wish to please. His own nose was slightly rubicund, but it was solely owing to the east winds which constantly blew across it as he worked for the Council on the long roads near the sea; for he was a sober man, and when he did have a glass of beer on a Saturday night, he brought it home in a jug ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... window, and then wandered back to the well-worn interior of the coach. Suddenly, as the startling realization of her position came to her, she uttered a loud cry, sprang toward the door, and, with nervous fingers, strove to open it. The man's face became more rubicund as he placed a detaining hand on her shoulder, and roughly thrust her toward ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... representations of maids and swains, who combined a pastoral occupation with the gratification of a musical talent; while they gazed with a languishing air on their protrusive neighbour, a portly individual with a highly-coloured, rubicund, and grinning physiognomy, and scalpless cranium, from which he invited the lovers of the narcotic weed to extract a supply of that universal solace. These were supported, on the background, by a mirror of ordinary ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... Pretoria, Opperman looked a picture of misery, and would come to us and speak of his resolve to shoot his wife and children and perish in the defence of the capital. Dr. Gunning was an amiable little Hollander, fat, rubicund, and well educated. He was a keen politician, and much attached to the Boer Government, which paid him an excellent salary for looking after the State Museum. He had a wonderful collection of postage ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... A large looming, rubicund visage smiles kindly on me, bringing back into my heart the old, odd mingling of instinctive liking held in check by conscientious disapproval. I turn from it, and see a massive, clean-shaven face, with the ugliest ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... himself into a light slumber. This was the time for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these appliances we all had something warm to drink, including the Aged, who was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer to see ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... playing off the trick of the "honest landlord" on some stranger. The decanters and wine-bottles on the move, and the beer and soda founts pouring out continual streams, with a whiz. Stage-drivers, etc., asked to drink with the aristocracy, and mine host treating and being treated. Rubicund faces; breaths odorous of brandy-and-water. Occasionally the ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... condoling with the new arrival. The new arrival also condoled with himself, so that Mrs. White said, "Tut, tut!" and coughed gently as her husband entered the room, followed by a tall, burly man, beady of eye and rubicund of visage. ...
— Lady of the Barge and Others, Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... at a head of hair which has changed from dark to blond? What is there comic about a rubicund nose? And why does one laugh at a negro? The question would appear to be an embarrassing one, for it has been asked by successive psychologists such as Hecker, Kraepelin and Lipps, and all have ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... the cousin who was said to be prettier than the sisters, and as soon as the banker had gone I went downstairs to satisfy my curiosity. I met the father and asked him which was Le Duc's room, and thereon I went to see my fine fellow. I found him sitting up in a comfortable bed with a rubicund face which did not look as if he were ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... well look horrified," said Miss Crewys to the canon, whose admiration and delight were very plainly depicted on his rubicund countenance. "Where are our cloaks and umbrellas? That's what I say to Isabella. Where are our goloshes? Where is anything, indeed, that one would expect to find in a gentleman's hall? Not so much as a walking-stick. ...
— Peter's Mother • Mrs. Henry De La Pasture
... was obvious; he hailed him with acclamations. "I've been meaning to ride over your way for ages," he declared, his rubicund face shining with geniality as he wrung his friend's hand hard. "I was up-country when you came along last with your bride. Dark horse that you are, Burke! I should as soon have thought of getting married myself, as of seeing you in ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... that lady, emerging from her towel with a rubicund visage. "Drop that braid half an inch lower, and pull the worked end of her handkerchief out of the right-hand pocket, Vic. There! Now, Dora, don't run about and get rumpled, but sit quietly down and practise ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I was,' replied the rubicund damsel, as she moved briskly about her work. She had a peculiarity of wearing very short skirts, lest they should impede her progress; but once that Andy ventured a complimentary joke on her ankles, he met with such scathing scorn that he ...
— Cedar Creek - From the Shanty to the Settlement • Elizabeth Hely Walshe
... tossed tress, flown vaunt 'tis! Suffer my singing, Gipsy of Seasons, ere thou go winging; Ere Winter throws His slaking snows In thy feasting-flagon's impurpurate glows! The sopped sun—toper as ever drank hard - Stares foolish, hazed, Rubicund, dazed, Totty with thine October tankard. Tanned maiden! with cheeks like apples russet, And breast a brown agaric faint-flushing at tip, And a mouth too red for the moon to buss it, But her cheek unvow its vestalship; Thy mists enclip Her steel-clear circuit ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson
... knight stands royally forth in them, clothed with his entire panoply of agile intellect, robust humour, and boundless comic effrontery. But the arrogant and expeditious Falstaff of The Merry Wives—so richly freighted with rubicund sensuality, so abundant in comic loquacity, and so ludicrous in his sorry plights—is a much less complex person, and therefore he stands more level than the real Falstaff does with the average comprehension of mankind. The American stage, accordingly, by which more than ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... the religious orders marched past, from the Dominicans to the Carthusians, from the Carmelites to the Capuchins. They advanced slowly, their eyes cast down, their step austere, their hands on their hearts; some faces were rubicund and shining, with large cheek-hones and rounded chins, herculean heads upon bullnecks; some, thin and livid, with cheeks hollowed by suffering and penitence, and with the look of living ghosts; in short, here were the two ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... thoroughfare, leading out of the New Kent Road, a little way from the Elephant and Castle; and the caravanserai bearing the title of the Jolly Butchers is an unpretending beershop, with no outward and visible signs of especial joviality. On entering I met mine host, rubicund and jolly enough, who politely pioneered me upstairs, when I reported myself as in quest of the linnets. The scene of contest I found to be a largish room, where some twenty or thirty most un-Arcadian looking ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... Pilgrim. But time soon grew horribly long, and to kill it he volunteered to act as witness to the butcher's marriage, one being wanted. The effects of a jovial night, fortified by some matutinal potations, were still visible in the small black eyes of the rubicund butcher—a huge man, apparently of cheery disposition; he swung to and fro before the shiny oak table as might one of his own carcasses. His bride, a small-featured woman, wrapped in a plaid shawl, evidently fearing that his state, if perceived by the Registrar, might cause a postponement of her ...
— Mike Fletcher - A Novel • George (George Augustus) Moore
... at which the little angle of rail may be pushed in or pushed back that shall send the train to one of two places five hundred miles asunder: it may depend upon whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers and earnest bishops, or be laboring in chains at Norfolk Island, a brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch, without a hope for this life or the other. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... will pe McBess, Allister McBess!" cried the rubicund personage, grasping a rather unwilling hand and shaking it wildly, "Allister McBess, oh yes, inteet, an' they will pe telling me you will pe a real Hielanman, though how coult a Hielanman pe hafing such a name as Egerton, it is ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... the Cambridge Pembroke, though were the fellowships of that college made to depend upon passing a yearly examination in the Faerie Queen, to be conducted by Dean Church, there would be wailing and lamentation within her rubicund walls. Sir Thomas Wyatt was at St. John's, Fulke Greville Lord Brooke at Jesus, Giles and Phineas Fletcher were at King's, Herrick was first at St. John's, but migrated to the Hall, where he is still reckoned ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
