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adjective
Stony  adj.  (compar. stonier; superl. stoniest)  
1.
Of or pertaining to stone, consisting of, or abounding in, stone or stones; resembling stone; hard; as, a stony tower; a stony cave; stony ground; a stony crust.
2.
Converting into stone; petrifying; petrific. "The stony dart of senseless cold."
3.
Inflexible; cruel; unrelenting; pitiless; obdurate; perverse; cold; morally hard; appearing as if petrified; as, a stony heart; a stony gaze.
Stony coral. (Zool.) Same as Stone coral, under Stone.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Stony" Quotes from Famous Books



... October of the same year he exchanged this office for that of Commissioner of Lands, which he held until 1843. In the following year he commenced his most arduous and best-known journey, a journey that has made the names of Sturt's Stony Desert and the Depot Glen known all over the world, and that has, unhappily for Australia, done much to create the popular fallacy that the soil and climate of the interior are such as preclude comfortable settlement by whites. ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc

... see," explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course, delayed because Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the maccaroni, which must be less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; "Lotty, you see, has a ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... his attention, and he remarked how the water, by its continual dropping, was wearing away the solid rock. All at once, with the tact for which he was afterward so noted, he applied the lesson it yielded to himself. "So may the law," he reasoned, "work its way into my hard and stony heart;" and he felt encouraged and pursued his journey. Under the tuition of Rabbi Eliezer, the son of Hyrcanus, and Rabbi Yehoshua, the son of Chananiah, his native ability soon began to appear, his name became known to fame, and he rose step by step until he ranked as a professor ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various

... of storms! whose savage ear The Lapland drum delights to hear, When Frenzy with her bloodshot eye Implores thy dreadful deity— Archangel! Power of desolation! Fast descending as thou art, Say, hath mortal invocation Spells to touch thy stony heart: Then, sullen Winter! hear my prayer, And gently rule the ruin'd year; Nor chill the wanderer's bosom bare Nor freeze the wretch's falling tear: To shuddering Want's unmantled bed Thy horror-breathing agues cease to lend, ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... the first time, she revealed something of her woes. There was that about the mop-headed young man which invited confidences. She told him of the stony-heartedness of music-publishers, of the difficulty of getting songs printed unless you paid for them, of their ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... exit from the station. But just outside, the road from the town passed in a tunnel under the line. To get at the sands one must double back on the line after leaving the station, walk through the tunnel, and then leave the road to your right. The stony edge of the sands came up to the road, which shot away eastwards along the edge of the estuary, a straight white line that gradually lost itself ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. II • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... were no less busy in digging trenches along the stony back of the Buttes-a-Neveu. Every day the English fire grew hotter; till at last nearly a hundred and fifty cannon vomited iron upon them from the walls of Quebec, and May was well advanced before they could plant a single gun to reply. Their vessels had landed artillery ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... Give all drains a good and continuous fall. For single drains and for laterals not over four hundred or five hundred feet long, a two and one-half inch tile is sufficient, unless much water must be carried from swales or springs. In stony countries, flat stones may be used in place of tiles, and persons who are skillful in laying them make drains as good and permanent as those constructed of tiles. The tiles or stones are covered with sods, straw, or paper, and the earth is then filled in. This temporary ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey

... a memory of Rye, it was mixed with a memory of the Mount St. Michael, which stands among the sands of Normandy on the other side of the narrow seas. The first part of the sensation is that the traveller, as he walks the stony streets between the walls, feels that he is inside a fortress. But it is the paradox of such a place that, while he feels in a sense that he is in a prison, he also feels that he is on a precipice. The sense of being uplifted, and set on a high place, comes to him through the ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... passed out of the postern gate which led from the walled garden on to a broad marsh, with dikes running here and there, and lapping tongues of sea water creeping in with the tide. He made his way seaward with uncertain steps until he reached a rough and stony road; here he hesitated for a moment, looked about him, and then turned back at right angles. Soon he came to a little village, a village of ancient cottages, with seasoned, red-brick tiles, trim little patches of garden, a church embowered with tall elm trees, a triangular ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... forth, followed by the dogs. I had taken off my crinoline, because Eleanor said we might have to climb some walls, and I had borrowed a pair of her boots, because my own were so uncomfortable from being high-heeled and narrow-soled. They were too thin for stony roads also, and, though they were prettily ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... of hate; And thus the sons of Raghu hailed: "Fight, and be fortunate." Then from the earth a horrid cloud Of dust the demon raised, And for awhile in darkling shroud Wrapt Raghu's sons amazed. Then calling on her magic power The fearful fight to wage, She smote him with a stony shower, Till Rama burned with rage. Then pouring forth his arrowy rain That stony flood to stay, With winged darts, as she charged amain, He shore her hands away. As Tadaka still thundered near Thus maimed by Rama's blows, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... party. Another personage followed, of inferior rank, with a mule, which carried the chief part of the baggage. The country through which they travelled was of an undulating character, but parched by the suns of summer, the beds of the winter torrents being now stony ravines, and the only green visible being furze and palmetto, and here and there patches of Indian corn not quite ripe, though the stubble of fine wheat and barley extended over a considerable ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... river-valley, at a given moment, to enter the sand, i.e. the desert. Now this is done to-day at two points—near Korosko to rejoin the Nile at Abu-Hammed, and near Wady-Halfah to avoid the part of the Nile called the "Stony belly," Batn el-Hagar. The Korosko route, being the only one suitable for the transit of a body of troops, and also the only route known to Herodotus, seems, I think, likely to be the one which was followed in the present instance; ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... and curving steep flanks it abutted, and curving outwards seemed to encircle the village-flat on the south and west; where it dipped into the river. This was crossed at the height of about 100 feet, by a stony path, leading to the bed of the rapid torrent flowing through shingle and boulders, beyond which was another moraine, 250 feet high, and parallel to it ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... stony interrogation of his eyes and took a few steps away, waiting. A little wind sprang up among the higher trees, the moments passed, and still the great figure stood transfixed in its curious silence. The leathers creaked as the horse turned. The messenger, with an air of surveying the canon, stole ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... who needed it most, the errors of their teacher. "It is time," he concludes, "for me to leave off, if I have been a false prophet. But rather would I find out a way, if there be time, to prevent thee from deceiving the poor people with thy imposture. May God have pity on thee, take away thy stony heart and give thee one so warm, that one can write to thee with joy!" The Council of Zurich also sent an invitation to Eck, along with a letter of safe-conduct, pledging him a safe passage through the canton, coming and going. Eck declined ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... with swollen and deformed bodies, whose grimaces were fortunate enough at times to bring a smile to the majestic, stony face of the Pharaoh, were no more successful; their contortions did not bring a single smile to his lips, the corners of which remained ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier

... her boy she need not, she said to herself, be pleasant besides,—she need not, so to speak, be the primroses on his path of dalliance. Accordingly she behaved as little like a primrose as possible, sitting in stony silence while he skirmished in the passage with Mrs. Pearce, and the instant he came in again asked him where he ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim

... girl of twenty said to him had much more weight than the time-honoured precepts of his father; and yet both, doubtless, had their weight. Each blow told somewhat; and the seed too had been sown upon very stony ground. ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... perhaps some hapless vessel in danger of being wrecked,—it is then dressed in all the congenial horrors of savage sublimity.—No one, a stranger to the sea-coast, would imagine how awfully the surges lash the stony beach in tempestuous weather: the high-curling waves break with a deafening roar, and mounting the lofty cliffs in sheets of dazzling foam, are wafted in misty clouds half over the island—even to Newport, where the windows facing the south are occasionally dimmed ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon

... not speak, mute as the rocks that stand In stony silence now and evermore, She stood, while stars looked down from heaven's shore And pitied her. Unto his proud command Her heart had not yet dared to make reply Lest in those words a deeper pain ...
— Love or Fame; and Other Poems • Fannie Isabelle Sherrick

... these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and pain.... We were in an open place near those great temples at Paestum, at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting down under a bush, resting a little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was standing up watching to see if ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... stony silence, but Dusty Rhoads was eager to talk. The other two had threatened to kill him, he claimed, and had forced him to steal. No one believed this, but Dusty's tale at least showed the connection between ...
— The Scarlet Lake Mystery • Harold Leland Goodwin

... each other,—young men in their prime mostly, with brown, ruddy faces, and eyes of that bright blue lustre which is only gained by a free, open-air life. The hillside was just turning purple with heather bloom, and along the winding, stony road the yellow asphodels were dancing in the wind. Everywhere there was the scent of bog-myrtle and wild-rose and sweetbrier, and the tinkling sound of becks babbling over glossy rocks; and in the ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... in Milan when the news reached him, and after a few moments of stony horror he was seized with such terrific passion that it almost seemed as if he would die of rage. At last he spoke; to those who stood around the voice sounded as the voice ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang

... why that silent old sea-dog, Jonas Wegg, had come into this secluded wilderness to locate was a problem the Millville people had never yet solved. Certainly it was with no idea of successfully farming the land he had acquired, for half of it was stony and half covered by pine forest. But the house he constructed was the wonder of the country-side in its day. It was a big, two-story building, the lower half being "jest cobblestones," as the neighbors sneeringly remarked, while the upper ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne

... change in the cashier's appearance. A strange pallor overspread his once rubicund countenance; it wore the peculiarly sinister and stony look of the mysterious visitor. The sullen glare of his eyes was intolerable, the fierce light in them seemed to scorch. The man who had looked so good-humored and good-natured had suddenly grown tyrannical and proud. The courtesan thought that Castanier had grown thinner; ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... seen from this height, to come within a single glance, lie the green and fertile fields, and gentle, wooded hills. The road to Bishop's Tawton—which was formerly an episcopal seat of the Bishops of Exeter—is a typical Devonshire road, steep and stony, with high green banks and hedges, which, on such an afternoon in spring, are starred with primroses and clumps of dog-violets, celandines and wild-anemones, and wonderfully green. It climbs from the London and South-Western ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland

... of Cambridge almost as horrid a scene as could have been witnessed during the French Revolution. Two body- snatchers had been arrested, and whilst being taken to prison had been torn from the constable by a crowd of the roughest men, who dragged them by their legs along the muddy and stony road. They were covered from head to foot with mud, and their faces were bleeding either from having been kicked or from the stones; they looked like corpses, but the crowd was so dense that I got only a few momentary ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... re-appearance. Dr Pendle was anxious that she should know all at once, so that he could marry her again as speedily as possible, and thereby put an end to an uncomfortable and dangerous state of things. Thus reflecting and thus deciding, the bishop descended the stony street in his usual stately manner, and even patted the heads of one or two stray urchins, who smiled in his face with all the confidence of childhood. Afterwards, the mothers of those especial children ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume

... made my way, by a stony road, towards the manor-house; and presently could see its gables at the end of a pleasant avenue of limes; but no track led thither. The gate was wired up, and the drive overgrown with grass. Soon, however, I found a farm-road which led up to the house from the village. On the left of the manor ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson

... like a turtle's nest, And huge Benvoirlich crown'd with snow Defends the smiling glens below. Dear shady knoll, whose varied view Enfolds green field and mountain blue, How oft at morn and eventide I've strolled around thy stony side And listened to the artless song That swell'd the glorious vale along! Mark'd where the sunbeams kindliest fell On rocky ridge and heathery dell, And yielded all my soul to share The teachings of a scene so fair! In storm ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various

... drop of the milk of human kindness in his composition. Regardless of his own physical wants, he despised the same wants in others. Charity sued to him in vain, and the tear of sorrow made no impression on his stony heart. Passion he had felt—cruel, ungovernable passion. Tenderness was foreign to his nature—the sweet influences of the social virtues he ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... existence of coralligenous polyps, which we might therefore call testaceous polyps, because, like the testaceous molluscs, these polyps have the faculty of forming, by a transudation or a continual secretion of their bodies, the stony and calcareous polypidom on which ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... indicating the various specimens of Ancient Fossils by which he was surrounded, and describing their formation. The audience was probably Petrified with astonishment at the immense learning and research he displayed, for it observed a Stony silence, only ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 26, September 24, 1870 • Various

... certainty, when he opened his umbrella without due precaution. But he was a stranger to fear in equestrian matters, and always mounted his horse again, as soon as he could be caught. The Editor was once riding gently by his side, on the stony beach of Bognor, when the wind suddenly reversing his umbrella, as he unfolded it, his horse, with a sudden but desperate plunge, pitched him on his head in an instant. Providentially he received no hurt, and some fishermen being at hand, the plunging steed was stopped ...
— Lives of the English Poets - From Johnson to Kirke White, Designed as a Continuation of - Johnson's Lives • Henry Francis Cary

... but a tumble of stones before it, which was somewhat uneasy going, yet needed nought but labour to overcome it, and when he had got over this, and was in the very pass itself, he found it no ill going: forsooth at first it was little worse than a rough road betwixt two great stony slopes, though a little trickle of water ran down amidst of it. So, though it was so nigh nightfall, yet Walter pressed on, yea, and long after the very night was come. For the moon rose wide and bright a little after nightfall. ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... hyperborean winds, and when these were passed a tremendous frost won upon the world. Day followed day of weak, clear sunshine and low temperature. The sun, upon his shortest journeys, showed a fiery face as he sulked along the stony ridges of the Moor, and gazed over the ice-chained wilderness, the frozen waters, and the dark mosses that never froze, but lowered black, like wounds on a white skin. Dartmoor slept insensible under granite and ice; no sheep-bell made music; no flocks ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... and read some verses. Instantly the young man's countenance brightened. He knew and believed the truths contained in that sacred book. He had been educated at one of the missionary establishments, afterwards abandoned; but the seed had not fallen on stony ground. Now our kind friend could afford both comfort and consolation. He continued reading to the poor man till a litter could be formed, and some of the balsam I have mentioned could be procured; his ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... broke no subtle rabbinical precept. So they were foiled at every turn, driven off the field of argument, and baffled in their attempt to find ground for laying an information against Him. But neither His gentle wisdom nor His healing power could reach these hearts, made stony by conceit and pedantic formalism; and all that their contact with Jesus did was to drive them to intenser hostility, and to send them away to plot His death. That is what comes of making religion a round of outward observances. The Pharisee is always blind ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren

... into the stony desert in front of the Gare de Lyon in the grey chill of a March morning, he had just two hundred and twenty francs in his pocket, and he felt that he was really adrift in the world. There was nothing for him to hold fast to, no one ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... leisure by the child, pulled apart, and even wasted. This can be done with the objects discussed in this book; they are under the feet of childhood—grass, feathers, a fallen leaf, a budding twig, or twisted shell; these things cannot be far out of the way, even within the stony limits of ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 17, March 4, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various

... sweet, and cool, was found in the bed of the mtoni in deep stony reservoirs. Here also the traces of furious torrents were clearly visible ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... dreamed rough dreams of winning island girls and breeding hardy children. Here reposed old limbs of salty mariners, who had for so long defied the ocean that when they knew themselves taken at the last, they turned their rugged faces down to their enemy with a stony and an ironic wonder. And here, too, among these cast-up bodies of the drowned, lay many women who had loved the prey of the sea, and kissed the cheeks turned acrid by its winds and waters. Some of them had died from heart-sickness, cursing the sea. Some had faded, ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens

... by the evident pleasure which our visit had given and the cordial hospitality which had sought to let us know how welcome we were. And now we left the fertile plain and well-watered land which lay all along the river-bed to climb steep, stony roads, and follow narrow footpaths, where the difficulty of its broad load made my donkey step gingerly as near to the chasm's edge as she could secure a foothold, and I dug my knees into the soft bed-bag and longed for something on which ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... and Mariana listened to him with a sort of stony attention, only stopping him when she thought he was hurrying over things, not giving her sufficient details. However, not all the details of his visit were of equal interest to her; she laughed over Fomishka and Fimishka, but they did not interest ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev

... Her hands were folded before her; her face was rigid and calm; she looked neither to right nor to left, but only upon the King's face. At the edge of the sunlight she halted, so that she stood, a black figure in the bluish and stony gloom of the hall with the high roof a great way above her head. All the lords began to pull off their bonnets, only Norfolk said that he would not uncover before ...
— The Fifth Queen Crowned • Ford Madox Ford

... they were compelled to discard their overalls. Their foot gear was totally inadequate against the thorns and stony ground. Without water and with only a bar of chocolate between them they experienced terrible hardships before they ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman

... Sorrows, teach my lips that often Have told the sacred story of my woe, To speak of Thee till stony griefs I soften, Till hearts that know Thee ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... Dordogne had a very long journey to make before reaching the plains of Perigord. Nearly the whole of this distance the stream would have to thread its way through deep-cut gorges and ravines, where the dense forest reaches down to the stony channel, save where the walls of rock rising hundreds of feet on either side are too steep for vegetation. Above the forest and the rock is the desert moor, horrible to the peasant, but to the lover of nature beautiful when seen in its dress of ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... steps, up which the crowd continues to flock, and at the foot of a portico which stands erect with the rigid massiveness of a colossus against the dark night sky; at the foot also of a monster, who stares down upon us, with his big stony eyes, his ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti

... he said. "It must be meant. Here we might be weeks or months before we could git a ship that suited us, if we got it at all; but along comes Cap'n Rufe here with the very thing we want. If I was superstitious,"—before his stony stare they sat unwinking—"I'd think for sure there was something in this more'n natural. It can't be, after all this, that we're going on a wild ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes

... name is not known obtained the countersign by which Mad Anthony Wayne was enabled to take Stony Point, and guided and helped ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney

... they had to climb a forbidding ridge of rock within half a kilometer. Only a sparse creeper grew along their way, its elongated leaves shimmering with bronze-green reflections against a stony surface; but when they topped the ridge a thick forest ...
— The Talkative Tree • Horace Brown Fyfe

... desperate resolution took me through the tangle of juniper bushes into the red screes of the gully. At first I could not find what I sought. The stream in the ravine slid down a long slope like a mill-race, and the sides were bare and stony. Still I plodded on, helping myself with a hand on Colin's back, for my legs were numb with fatigue. By-and-by the gully narrowed, and I came to a flat place with a long pool. Beyond was a little fall, and up this I climbed ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... and tear? Shall ye see me joined with a lover, who * Still flies or shall meet we in joyful cheer? O hail to the fawn with the Houri eye, * Like sun or moon on horizon clear! He saith to lovers, 'What look ye on?' * And to stony hearts, 'Say, what love ye dear?'[FN299] I pray to Him who departed us * With ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... often I have crept shivering on to my waggon-box just as the sun rose and looked out. At first one would see nothing but a vast field of white mist suffused towards the east by a tremulous golden glow, through which the tops of stony koppies stood up like gigantic beacons. From the dense mist would come strange sounds—snorts, gruntings, bellows, and the thunder of countless hoofs. Presently this great curtain would grow thinner, ...
— Allan's Wife • H. Rider Haggard

... water boiling up from beneath some rocks not far from the brook, on the side toward the clearing. The water from this spring flowed down along a little mossy dell, until it reached the brook. The bed over which this little rivulet flowed was stony, and yet no stones were to be seen. They all had the appearance of rounded tufts of soft green moss, so completely were they all covered and hidden ...
— Mary Erskine • Jacob Abbott

... if I did," cried Molly in a voice fearful to her hearers in its stony hardness and hopelessness. "What does ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... "Ah, stony heart! can thought of sin In all its vileness bring no tears? And canst thou hear God's thunders speak, And weep not though the reckoning nears?" I had no weeping to control, For sorrow came ...
— Hymns from the Greek Office Books - Together with Centos and Suggestions • John Brownlie

... wild, but kind, hospitable, and generally honest. If you wish to study them more closely, go to one of the villages in the province of Frosinone, towards the Neapolitan frontier. Cross the plains which malaria has made dreary solitudes, take the stony path which winds painfully up the side of the mountain. You will come to a town of five or ten thousand souls, which is little more than a dormitory for five or ten thousand peasants. Viewed from a distance, this country town has an almost grand appearance. ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About

... were always those that had some hold upon the riches of the sea; a house that could not harbor a fishing-boat in some neighboring inlet was far from being sure of every-day comforts. The land alone was not enough to live upon in that stony region; it belonged by right to the forest, and to the forest it fast returned. From the top of the hill where we had been sitting we had seen prosperity in the dim distance, where the land was good and the sun shone upon fat barns, and where warm-looking ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... they walked the horses until they were quite clear of the town, to find themselves on a road that had the sea to the left, and to the right a stretch of flat land, some of it cultivated, above which rose the steep and stony sides of hills. Here on this road the brethren trotted and cantered the horses to and fro, till they began to be at home in their strange saddles who from childhood had ridden barebacked in the Essex marshes, and to learn what pressure on the bit was needed to check or turn them. When they ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard

... jumps while the fly-wheels turned smoothly, with great speed, at the foot of the mainmast, flinging back and forth with a regular impetuosity two limp clusters of men clinging to the handles. They abandoned themselves, swaying from the hip with twitching faces and stony eyes. The carpenter, sounding from time to time, exclaimed mechanically: "Shake her up! Keep her going!" Mr. Baker could not speak, but found his voice to shout; and under the goad of his objurgations, men looked to the lashings, dragged out new sails; ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... of the village were proud to think that they could claim the great man, for it was said he bore an exact likeness to the Great Stone Face—so much so that they called him "Old Stony Phiz." ...
— A Child's Story Garden • Compiled by Elizabeth Heber

... circumstance can erase affection from the constant mind. Mind is more obdurate than steel; and love, the tenderest of the train of passions, is, in its memory, as indestructible as gold;—gold that resists the all-corroding fire. No; the fire may melt the impress from the seal, the sun the angles from the stony ice; the jagged rocks may from encounter with the wind and rain grow smooth; this hilly globe may grow at length to be as level as is the sea, and every jutting headland of the shore may crumble and disappear; ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege

... any country that may be claimed by either party on the northwest coast of America westward of the Stony Mountains shall, together with its harbors, bays, and creeks, and the navigation of all rivers within the same, be free and open for the term of ten years from the date of the signature of the present convention to the vessels, citizens, and subjects of the two powers; it being well understood ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... list. British travellers distort things the same way. They land at Halifax, where they see the first contrast between Europe and America, and that contrast ain't favourable, for the town is dingy lookin' and wants paint, and the land round it is poor and stony. But that is enough, so they set down and abuse the whole country, stock and fluke, and write as wise about it as if they had seen it all instead of overlooking one mile from the deck of a steamer. The military enjoy it beyond anything, and are far more comfortable than in ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton

... gain, Then sat him down and waited for the rain. He sailed in borrowed ships of usury— foolish Jason on a treacherous sea, Seeking the Fleece and finding misery. Lulled by smooth-rippling loans, in idle trance He lay, content that unthrift Circumstance Should plough for him the stony field of Chance. Yea, gathering crops whose worth no man might tell, He staked his life on a game of Buy-and-Sell, And turned each field into a gambler's hell. Aye, as each year began, My farmer to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various

... heard GEDGE beginning to describe purport of his new Clause. Was going to move it then? Yes. After moment's horrified pause, Ministerialists broke into angry cries of, "Divide!" Opposition convulsed with laughter; HICKS-BEACH pale and stern, and stony silent; SYDNEY GEDGE flushed, conversational, dogged. Even if Tithes Bill were lost he would explain the bearing of his new Clause. Scene increasing in hilarity; lasted three minutes: then Midnight sounded, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100. February 14, 1891. • Various

... looked through a space between the side timbers. This brook was a sturdy little torrent at all times; in spring it was a river. Now, under the white concave of wintry moonlight, it broke over its stony bed with a fierce persistency of advance. Jerome looked down at the rapid, shifting water-hillocks and listened to their lapsing murmur, incessantly overborne by the gathering rush of onset, then nodded his head ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... in England. And he left South Africa with ten bob of mine in his pocket, after he'd paid his passage! and from what I can hear, he never did a day's work after he landed. And me over there working thirteen and fourteen hours a day, and half the time stony-broke! There's a brother for you! Cain was a fool ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... but not in the Book of Friendship; which calls hatred Nature, and Love a conspiracy; whose law is an iron chain and whose mercy is debility and chagrin; the blind fiend who would impose his own blindness; that unfruitful loin which curses fertility; that stony heart which would petrify the generations of man; before whom life withers away appalled and death would shudder again to its tomb. Repentance! they wiped the inadequate ooze from their eyes and danced joyfully for spite. They could do no more, so they fed the children lovingly and carried ...
— The Crock of Gold • James Stephens

... me in stony silence. Twice she opened her lips, and I am quite sure that if words had come they would have been unkind ones. Twice apparently, however, her command of ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... French convicts assigned to him. He had no objection, as he thought that he could manage them easily. What was his astonishment, when the party arrived at the farm, to recognise among them, in a little wizened-looking old man, his once dreaded enemy La Roche! He determined to try and melt the man's stony heart by kindness. At first he was almost hopeless in the matter, but he succeeded at last. La Roche confessed that he had placed himself within the power of the British laws in consequence of a visit he paid to England after ...
— James Braithwaite, the Supercargo - The Story of his Adventures Ashore and Afloat • W.H.G. Kingston

... the fibrous knots of clay, And the sun-dried clots of earth Cleave, and the sunset cloaks the grey Waste and the stony dearth! ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes

... some monastic scrivener in his cell, Sensing a chill along the stony crypt, Might labour yet more gorgeously to spell The final, splendid entries of his script,— So with bright rubrics has the Autumn writ A coloured chronicle of things that pass, Thumbing a yellow parchment that is lit With brief, ...
— Ships in Harbour • David Morton

... added the birds that enliven the waters. Wild-ducks in spring-time hatch their young in the islands, and upon reedy shores;—the sand-piper, flitting along the stony margins, by its restless note attracts the eye to motions as restless:—upon some jutting rock, or at the edge of a smooth meadow, the stately heron may be descried with folded wings, that might seem to have caught their delicate hue from the blue waters, by the ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... following day William James was killed by a saber-tooth tiger—September 13, 1916. Beneath a jarrah tree on the stony plateau on the northern edge of the Sto-lu country in the land that Time forgot, he lies in a lonely grave ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... said she, "don't sell whiskey to that boy: if he has one drink he will want another, and he may die a drunkard." "Madam, I will sell to him if it sends his soul to hell," was the awful reply. The last man is a peculiarly hard, stony sort of man; his lips look as if chiseled out of flint, a man to be afraid of. One morning, when the visiting band reached his door, they found him in a very bad humor. He locked his door and seated himself on the horse block in front in a perfect ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... as soon as I got over the hill, out of sight, I looked out for a hard, stony place, where Lightfoot couldn't be tracked; and, soon finding one, I leaped her over the fence, and made full speed for the woods, which I luckily reached jest in time to wheel round in safety, and ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... teacher, and then lowered her eyes. Her beautiful little face was beginning to have its usual effect upon most of the ladies present. Some of the stony despair had left it; the color came and went in her cheeks. She ceased to fiddle with her apron, and clasped her two little ...
— The Rebel of the School • Mrs. L. T. Meade

... than the legislature Could read, much less digest or understand. The people beat him and the leaders flogged him. They shut the door against his face until He had no place to go except a farm Among the stony hills, and there he went. And thither we were going to see the knight, And call him from his solitude to the ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters

... though they were, and describing the death and misery of thousands, compared to what I felt in looking on the corpse of this unhappy stranger. This indeed was the plague. I raised his rigid limbs, I marked the distortion of his face, and the stony eyes lost to perception. As I was thus occupied, chill horror congealed my blood, making my flesh quiver and my hair to stand on end. Half insanely I spoke to the dead. So the plague killed you, I muttered. How came this? Was the coming painful? You look as if the enemy had ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... sacerdotis Hebrorum Liber, opera Fogginii, Romae, 1743, p. 30), a precisely similar description of the mode of finding jacinths in Scythia. "In a wilderness in the interior of Great Scythia," he writes, "there is a valley begirt with stony mountains as with walls. It is inaccessible to man, and so excessively deep that the bottom of the valley is invisible from the top of the surrounding mountains. So great is the darkness that it has the effect of a kind of chaos. To this place certain criminals are condemned, whose ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... at last in having a glimpse of the object of his search. Ne-naw-bo-zhoo ran to overtake him, and chased him all over the world; and every now and then he would be close enough to reach him with his war-club and to strike at him, but he would only break a piece of the monster's stony body, which was like a mountain of hard flintstone. So the legend says that whenever we find a pile of hard flints lying on the face of the earth, there is where Ne-naw-bo-zhoo overtook his brother ...
— History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan • Andrew J. Blackbird

... town to take our afternoon's collation, and make up two or three parties at mall, or mallet. As I had neither strength nor skill, I did not play myself but I betted on the game, and, interested for the success of my wager, followed the players and their balls over rough and stony roads, procuring by this means both an agreeable and salutary exercise. We took our afternoon's refreshment at an inn out of the city. I need not observe that these meetings were extremely merry, but should not omit that they were equally innocent, though ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau

... for the dance and flurry of leafy shadows on the sward; for stilly wayside pools whose waters, deep and dark in the shade of overhanging boughs, are yet dappled here and there with glory; for merry brooks leaping and laughing along their stony beds; for darkling copse and sunny upland,—oho! for youth and life and the joy ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al

... found ourselves floundering through a stream nearly up to our saddle-girths. My horse had had a hard day's work. He began to be unsteady on his pins. So I drew up, preferring the hazards of a night-ride across the prairie to a fall upon the stony road. The impetuous old soldier, followed by his companions, rushed into the darkness, and the clatter of their hoofs and the rattling of their sabres faded from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... weary climb, while night dyes deep, Down the broken and stony steep, How our jaded bodies are shaken By each step in half-blindness taken — One's thoughts lie heaped ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens

... flying down the stony road, some distance from the cottage, in the very face of the coming tornado, her heart beating like a trip-hammer, her eyes bent on the little light up the mountain-side, before it occurred to her that this last flight was not only senseless ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... fitted loosely, and the man gave it a vindictive shake, as if he thought that the poor house had somehow been to blame, and that after a long desperate struggle for life under its roof and among the stony fields the family must go away defeated. It is not likely that any one else will ever go to live there. The man to whom the farm was mortgaged will add the few forlorn acres to his pasture-land, and the thistles which ...
— Deephaven and Selected Stories & Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... near a tiny source at the edge of a large sand dune, and was a small, earth-coloured building with a pink tiled roof, minute arched windows, and an open stable for the horses and mules. All round the desert rose in humps of sand, melting into stony ground where the saltpetre lay like snow on a wintry world. There were but few signs of life in this place; some stockings drying on the wall of a ruined Arab cafe, some kids frisking by a heap of ...
— The Desert Drum - 1905 • Robert Hichens

... burst out again, filling this great hollow with lava, till the accumulation of the molten matter broke through the weaker part of the wall, and rolled away there, out of that gap to the northward, and forming what you now call the 'stony rises,'—turning yon creek into steam, which by its explosive force formed that fantastic cap of rocks, and, swelling into great bubbles under the hot lava, made those long underground hollows which we now know as the ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... Cotton, Denham, Shirley, Selden, and the rest. "Yes, by Saint Anne! and ginger shall be hot I' the mouth too." In the gladness of getting back "from the dull confines of the drooping west," he writes a glowing apostrophe to London—that "stony stepmother to poets." He claims to be a free-born Roman, and is proud to find himself a citizen again. According to his earlier biographers, Herrick had much ado not to starve in that same longed-for London, and fell into great misery; but Dr. Grosart disputes this, ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... realities, are flashed upon a darkened world in the face of Jesus Christ. How cold, how hard, how superficial, in comparison with that fleshly table of the heart of Christ on which grace and truth were written, are the stony tables of law, which bore after all, for all their majesty, only words which are breath and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren

... his two companions scrambled up the stony beach over the grey stones and boulders alongside the tumbling brook for over a hundred yards. Turning to the right they were lost to sight from the water-edge. Captain Morgan was just following them when he heard a terrified yell from the crew ...
— The Book of Missionary Heroes • Basil Mathews

... fifty miles. In the general appearance of the country, Mr. Fearon had been somewhat disappointed. All the houses within sight from the road were farm-houses. He remarks that, in Connecticut and Rhode Island, the land was stony, and the price of produce was not commensurate ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley

... stood with the broom in one hand, and tipped forward a piece of broken looking-glass on his shaving-shelf. A new, unforeseen Clethera, whom she had never been obliged to deal with before, gave her a desperate, stony stare out of a haggard face. She was young, her skin had not a line. But it was as if she had changed places with her wrinkled grandmother, to whom the expression of complacent ...
— The Mothers Of Honore - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... of a trail here, the ground being too stony to leave any traces; but the great stream was our guide, and we climbed and stumbled on, Quong in front bending down under his load, and always patient, calm, and smiling, as if it was quite natural to him to be doubled up under a big bundle which went along in front of us like some curious ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn

... her down the bank of shingle, exclaiming: 'By goom, ye're stony cauld.' Once or twice she slipped: he supported her, roughly gripping her knuckles. The stones rolled down the steps, noisily, disappearing ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various

... "inner light" and not phosphate deposits in those days, yet certain men of God, roaming about these same stony wildernesses, made discoveries in natural history no less surprising than that of Monsieur Philippe Thomas. Saint Anthony encountered a faun—half-man, half-goat; he spoke to the creature and was charmed by its edifying discourse. You will object that Saint ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas

... for it, but you can't gammon me. I know what it is; I've read about 'em. It's one of them out-of-the-way stony places where they used to send convicks to. 'Rubbish may be shot here' spots. And a lot of the rubbish used to be shot there if they tried to escape. Oh, it is a dismal horror place. Give me the miserables as soon as I saw it, after spoiling my night's ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... tightly, and lashed his horse. With one spring he cleared the stone wall of the field, and then dashed furiously over the stony ground. It was a fearful sight. Emily saw it as she clung closely to her horse, and the yawning gulf and the fearful deed of Melville took away all thought of herself. She ...
— The Duke's Prize - A Story of Art and Heart in Florence • Maturin Murray

... longer any sign of life. The veins ceased to carry blood; the neck stiffened; arms and feet grew rigid; the whole body was transformed into cold and lifeless stone. Nothing living remained to her except her tears, which continued flowing from her stony eyes. ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various

... auditory. I cannot easily believe that the Gospel of Saint John, which Jacques Cartier ordered to be read in the Latin tongue to the Canadian savages, upon his first meeting with them, fell altogether upon stony ground. For the earnestness of the preacher is a sermon appreciable by dullest intellects and most alien ears. In this wise did Episcopius convert many to his opinions, who yet understood not the language in which he discoursed. The chief thing is that the messenger believe that he has an authentic ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... put the cherry pits into the pie instead of the cherries," said the rabbit. "That's no way to do. You must take out the stones from inside the cherries and put the outside part of them inside the pie, and throw the inside or stony part of the ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Adventures • Howard R. Garis

... gravel path which would take him behind the tower. The path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, was browned over with a thin coating of mud. At one place in the path he saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundle of tendons. He picked it up—surely it could not be one of the primroses he ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... said above, are each and all things of the mineral kingdom, which are materials of various kinds, of a stony, saline, oily, mineral, or metallic nature, covered over with soil formed of vegetable and animal matters reduced to the finest dust. In these lie concealed both the end and the beginning of all uses which are from life. The end of all uses is the endeavor to produce uses, and ...
— Angelic Wisdom Concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom • Emanuel Swedenborg

... until far after midnight, when, coming into stony ground, he found excellent shelter under a great ledge, one projecting so widely that when he awoke in the morning and found it raining, he was quite dry. It poured heavily until the afternoon, and ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... pulpits at either side, and here again the Apostles stood in solemn guardianship on its broad parapet—but emblems, rather; of the stony rigidity of doctrines which have been shaped by the minds of men from some little phase of truth, than of that glowing, spiritualized, human sympathy which, as the soul of man grows upward into comprehension, is the apostle ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull

... another carriage, made one start in mirthful response. Sudden meetings with dear friends, or friends who seemed almost dear in the cheerful hurly-burly, became part of the funny scrimmage. At each side-street sat on a stony standing horse a beautifully proportioned and equipped guard, in gleaming helmet and ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop

... she rose up and sought her husband. He denied everything except the ownership of the watch. She besought him, for his Soul's sake, to speak the truth. He denied afresh, with two bad words. Then a stony silence held the Colonel's Wife, while a man could draw his breath ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... it is applied to the production of new dispositions of mind and soul utterly opposite to those previously existing. "Create in me a clean heart;" which God thus explains: "A new heart will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh."[229] The Hebrew word bra has as many derivative meanings as our English word create; as we speak of "creating a peer," "long abstinence creating uneasiness," etc.; but these no more change the primitive idea in ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... materials that the name of "lavas" is properly applied. Lavas present a general resemblance to the slags and clinkers which are formed in our furnaces and brick-kilns, and consist, like them, of various stony substances which have been more or less perfectly fused. When we come to study the chemical composition and the microscopical structure of lavas, however, we shall find that there are many respects in which they differ entirely from these artificial ...
— The San Francisco Calamity • Various

... years were passed here upon the pleasant hill-slopes that stretch away to the Catskill ridges and the rugged wildness of the Stony Clove; and then, in the fall of 1779, when the boy patroon had reached his fifteenth birthday, it was determined to send him, for still higher education, to the College of New Jersey, at Princeton. Of that eventful journey of the lad and his half-dozen school-fellows, under military ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks

... gray pony was unharnessed and tied to a tree in a cool, grassy place where he also could be happy, and the two others took the winding stony path. ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... are never ready-made here. You must go out for them and stumble upon them, wondrously, in dark places, being sure that whatever you may want London will give you. She asks nothing; she gives everything. You need bring nothing but love. Only to very few of us is she the stony-hearted stepmother. We, who are all her lovers, active or passive, know that she loves each one of us. The passive lover loves her as he loves his mother, not knowing his love, not knowing if she be beautiful, not ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke

... This languor of my soul to-day, And why I muse in piteous frame While all the glowing world is gay, I could not tell, I only mourn, And wonder how to life it stirred, The memory of that distant morn, As then I wondered had I heard That grief could ever sink to sleep Nor aye that stony vigil keep. ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer

... smaller than the other, whose waters unite immediately below. Both sources are on level ground, amongst rocks of tufwacke. The larger source immediately forms a river twelve or fifteen yards across, which rushes rapidly over a stony bed into the lower plain. There are no ruins of any kind near the springs; but the hill over them seems to have been built upon, though nothing now is visible. At a quarter of an hour to the N. of the spring are ruins of ancient habitations, built of the black tufwacke, the ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt

... to have one measure for those which are bestowed upon the opulent, and another for the destitute. It will therefore not seldom happen that powers susceptible of the noblest uses may be cast, like "seed sown upon stony places," where they have scarcely any chance to be unfolded and matured. In a few instances they may attract the attention of persons both able and willing to contribute to their being brought to perfection. In a few instances the principle may be so ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin

... scarcely safe for sheep. They are besides so meagre that in dry summers no hay can be made, and the peasants are forced to sell their beasts at a loss or else see them die for want of food. The addition of a little salted meat to the half-grown potatoes and the stony bread is a luxury of only the most prosperous years. The bald mountain-slopes furnish no fuel, and it is of course only in the smallest quantities that the people can afford to buy wood in the valley of the Durance. Their resource ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various

... gospel of the day without fanaticism, yet with a grand simplicity which needed not to ransack the world for its wisdom, its figures of speech, or its scholastic arts. It was no religious study, hurled in its three divisions at the heart of stony sinners; nor was it what some would call a current article of pulpit manufacture. It was no cold, heathen, moral lecture, which sought nothing but Socrates in the Bible, and would therefore teach that we can do without both Christ and the Scriptures. ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... the brigade filed off along the stony beach to the left, halted frequently, while stray bullets passed with a low whirr overhead and out to sea; and turned finally up a deep ravine ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie

... would not reply. There came over his withered features that stony stare of resolute contempt which he evidently intended to maintain to the last in ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne



Words linked to "Stony" :   heartless, stone, rocky, obdurate, granitic, unsmooth, flint, bouldery, Stony Tunguska, bouldered, hard, flinty, rough, hardhearted, stony-broke, rocklike



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