"Plodding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... excursion, And into a lily or hollyhock dodging With quiet assurance he takes up his lodging. With a snug little fortune invested in honey, Young Bumble Bee lives like a prince, on his money, And, scorning some plodding relations of his, he Leaves hard labor to them,—his ...
— The Nursery, August 1877, Vol. XXII, No. 2 - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest Readers • Various
... A Plodding Student is a kind of alchemist or persecutor of Nature, that would change the dull lead of his brain into finer metal, with success many times as unprosperous, or at least not quitting the cost, to wit, of his own oil and candles. He has a strange forced appetite to learning, and ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... fortnight, and were no more heard of, while others could not even live out that short span of existence. Every evening produced new schemes, and every morning new projects. The highest of the aristocracy were as eager in this hot pursuit of gain as the most plodding jobber in Cornhill. The Prince of Wales became governor of one company, and is said to have cleared 40,000 pounds by his speculations. [Coxe's Walpole, Correspondence between Mr. Secretary Craggs and Earl Stanhope.] The Duke of Bridgewater started a scheme for ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Poor Janetta, plodding away at her music lessons and doing the household work of her family, never guessed that she was about to become a bone of contention. But such she was fated to be, and that between persons no less distinguished than Lady Caroline Adair and ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... for Peter or bottle-green hat for Vic—what did it matter if neither of them ever again owned a hat, if Helen May must stay here in the city and face the doom that had been pronounced upon her? What did anything matter, if Babe died and left him plodding along alone? Vic did not occur to him consolingly. Vic was a responsibility; a comfort he was not. Like many men, Peter could not seem to understand his son half as well as he understood his daughter. He could not see why Vic should frivol away his time; why he should have all those funny little ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... no more thrilling sensation I know of than sailing. It comes as near to flying as man has got to yet - except in dreams. The wings of the rushing wind seem to be bearing you onward, you know not where. You are no longer the slow, plodding, puny thing of clay, creeping tortuously upon the ground; you are a part of Nature! Your heart is throbbing against hers! Her glorious arms are round you, raising you up against her heart! Your spirit is at one with hers; your limbs grow light! The voices of the air are singing to ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... plodding I suppose they'd call me, but once I'm on to something I never let go until I've won. Things are black, sweetheart, but something is telling me that I shall find ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... themselves from the ferocity of the tempest. To right and left nought could be descried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together—a miserable few—often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wonderful stories concerning the Sample Gentry; relating, perhaps, to a Spunkville merchant, who, having retreated precipitately down his cellar stairs several tunes during the day, to avoid "them confounded drummers, with their everlasting samples," was, while plodding his lonely way homeward, seized upon by these commercial freebooters, conveyed forthwith to the Half-Way House, and there deluged with such a perfect torrent of brow-beating eloquence as to reduce him to an imbecile ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... decided on its own evidence, and not on analogy, if our conclusions in this way are to be of real value. Of course we must often jump at conclusions from imperfect evidence. I should like to write an essay on species some day; but before I should have time to do it, in my plodding way, I hope you or Hooker will do it, and much better far. I am most glad to be in conference with Hooker and yourself on these matters, and I think we may, or rather you may, in a few years settle the question as to whether Agassiz's or Hooker's views are correct; ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... suspected him a poet-musician; as little could even such a glance have failed to see in him an honest man. He was powerfully built, over the middle height, but not tall. He spoke very fair old-fashioned English, with the Yorkshire tone and turn. His walk was rather plodding, and his movements slow and stiff; but in communion with his violin they were free enough, and the more delicate for the strength that was in them; at the anvil they were as supple as powerful. On his face dwelt ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... the pangs of starvation. It had certainly nothing to feed upon in this new calling. It was distressing to see him at it, though he tackled it with a stubborn serenity for which I must give him full credit. I kept my eye on his shabby plodding with a sort of notion that it was a punishment for the heroics of his fancy—an expiation for his craving after more glamour than he could carry. He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious racehorse, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... air was filled with floating rime, which shimmered and sparkled in the sunshine, and Jimmy's garments were covered with it, but, plodding disconsolately on and on, his heart heavy with the tragedy and his thoughts filled with Bobby and the happy years of comradeship that were ended, he did not feel or heed the cold or dazzling glitter of the snow, until in mid-afternoon ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... hurried inspection, even from a distance. He strode slowly along, looking intently at each house. None of them seemed to him to hold the object of his search. As his steps carried him farther and farther into the beautiful avenue he began to smile to himself and his plodding spirit wavered. After all, thought he, no one but a silly ass would attempt to find a person in a great city after the fashion he was pursuing. He was deciding to board a tramcar and return to the hotel when, at some distance ahead, he saw a young lady run hurriedly down the ...
— Castle Craneycrow • George Barr McCutcheon
... That minister had unfortunately embraced all the prejudices of the mercantile system, in its nature and essence a system of restraint and regulation, and such as could scarce fail to be agreeable to a laborious and plodding man of business, who had been accustomed to regulate the different departments of public offices, and to establish the necessary checks and controls for confining each to its proper sphere. The industry and ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... has an unbounded range, can scarcely conceive of the immense value of a limited space to his equally acquisitive though less favored brother. Thousands, whose feet had wandered amid all the wonders of the earth, came back to their every-day plodding life with vacant brains and unexpanded souls, while Archibald Mackie, in his non-suggestive hovel, gathered big thoughts and exalted ideas, and grew majestic in intellect, even as he was diminutive in his outward frame. Not a stone upon the waste ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... the serene, haughty house, the repose of the well-ordered garden, still blooming with belated flowers, seemed at once to deride and to invite the young outcast plodding along the dusty road. "This is your birthright," whispered the clambering rose-trees by the gate; and the closed portals of carven bronze said: "You have sold it for a ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... to his horse and started him plodding up the hill. Every time a wheel struck a stone Miss Kitty gritted her teeth. She never did enjoy riding in a wagon, anyhow. And this one was ...
— The Tale of Miss Kitty Cat - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... O'Sullivan Addicks was born in Philadelphia in 1841, and was in the eighties plodding along the ordinary, uneventful path of a seller of flour to the people of that city which since the death of William Penn holds the record for the highest and densest percentage of sleep per ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... her best at gathering firewood with a hatchet. The pass leading over this range, through which the white crystalline flakes were driven wildly in one's face, was a half-moon of smooth rock actually worn away by the endless tramping of myriads of pack-ponies, who then were plodding through ruts of steps almost ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... falls into idle, drinking habits, and so is obliged eventually to sell his property: or he finds, if more shrewd and adventurous, that the "beck" running down the mountain-side, or the minerals beneath his feet, can be turned into a new source of wealth; and leaving the old plodding life of a landowner with small capital, he turns manufacturer, or digs for coal, or ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... Amos was glad. Plodding sadly home, he was greeted by three glowing faces in the open door as soon as his foot sounded on the porch. The base burner in the living-room was clear and glowing. The dining-room was fragrant ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... on, that much was certain; but the uproar was so distributed that one could hardly tell whether it was in front or behind. However, the transport was steadily advancing—horse-wagons, mule-wagons, motor-wagons, all plodding patiently, paying no heed to the shell-bursts. And then Jimmie took a look behind, and saw that infernal red-headed Orangeman! He imagined a raucous voice, shouting: "C'mon here! Whatcher waitin' fer?" Jimmie bounced on to his machine and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... she heard the landlord's refusal and the miner's angry profanity. A moment later she saw the traveller plodding ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... significance in that time of blood and pain. In these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters, but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They looked up as one woman ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown
... a little unequal, isn't it, aunt?" she said. "One feels inclined to wonder what we have done that we should have exemption from the charge laid upon the first tiller of the soil that we, and the men who are plodding through the dust there, ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... aware of her status in Fairbridge, and she was not without a steady, plodding ambition of her own. That utterly commonplace, middle-aged face had some lines of strength. Mrs. Sturtevant was a member of the women's club of Fairbridge, which was poetically and cleverly called ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... native home of speculation. In this respect they were as remarkably contrasted to the English as they are now, though, in those ages, England was as devoted to the Holy See as it is now hostile. The Englishman was hard-working, plodding, bold, determined, persevering, practical, obedient to law and precedent, and, if he cultivated his mind, he was literary and classical rather than scientific, for Literature involves in it the idea of authority and prescription. On the other hand, in Ireland, the intellect ...
— The Idea of a University Defined and Illustrated: In Nine - Discourses Delivered to the Catholics of Dublin • John Henry Newman
... of beauty, and the graceful white heath growing up its sides loaded the air with a sweet scent. The wide expanse of the Argeles valley, with the busy farmers ploughing, sowing, or cutting the heavy clover crop; the lazy oxen ever patiently plodding beneath their heavy burdens; the Chateau de Beaucens—where the orchids grow—perched up on the hillside; the surrounding peaks throwing off their snowy garb; and the beautiful young leaves and tints, everywhere ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... toiling to support a surviving parent, sisters toiling for their brothers. And all done not only without a murmur, but with cheerfulness and thankfulness to God that their condition was no worse. I have heard hopeful accents from the plodding charwoman, that have made me ashamed, as Wordsworth stood rebuked before the 'leech-gatherer, upon the lonely moor.' Let England look to it. These women, mothers of men, are abandoning her shores for foreign lands. When good and dutiful children desert the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... said the principal occupant of the boat, merrily, "you shut yourself up so much in your bungalow, and lead such a serious plodding life over your merchandise and cargoes, that you see danger in a paddle ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... Marjorie slept in two pretty white beds, side by side, in this nice, large, cheerful bedroom. Ermengarde was completely mistress, but she did not object to Marjorie's company, for Marjorie was very plodding and useful and self-forgetful, and Ermie liked to be waited on, and her complaints listened to, and ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... slope where the trail seemed tunneled through deep green, so thick stood the young spruce. Cash was swinging his arms in that free stride of the man who has learned how to walk with the least effort. He did not halt when he saw Bud plodding slowly up the trail, but came on steadily, his keen, blue-gray eyes peering sharply from beneath his forward tilted hat brim. He came up to within ten ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... to this task in his own queer, plodding, English way. To the niceties of style and form he paid little attention. He tells the story as best he can, in his own slangy, cumbrous, Latin-English, but idiomatic way—there is little selection or self-suppression, but ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... for which was furnished from a superior kind of clay underlying the land all around them, and thenceforward maintained themselves from the products of the soil, then, as now, proverbial for its fruitfulness. It descended to their children, most of whom were equally plodding and unambitious with themselves. All continued the old occupation of looking to the soil for subsistence; and so long as the forty acres were kept together, they lived well. But as descendants multiplied, and one generation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... "there are times when I conceive a sort of respect for your commonplace and plodding intellect. Now, let me have my little inning. I used to commute—on the Jersey and Delaware Short Line. There's a station on that line, Pearlington by name, that's a combination of Mosquitoville, Lonesomehurst and Nutting ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... may think of the cosmic process generally, the human part of that process does not encourage a theological interpretation. Man is working out his own destiny, and doing it ill. We see him, like some pedlar plodding along a country road under his burdens, carrying through whole centuries institutions and ideas and follies that he will eventually shed. When he drops them, there is no more element of miracle or revelation in his action than when he ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe
... still, as ever, Time's a jewel in its loss; But, possessed in plenty, never Held as ought but worthless dross. Like lost truant-boys we linger Whimpering in Life's mazy wood, Heedless of the silent finger Ever pointing for our good; Each, in plodding darkness groping, Clothes his day in dreamy night, 'Stead of boldly climbing, hoping, Up the steeps towards the light, Where, as metal plucks the lightning Flashing from the lofty sky, Sturdy purpose, ever heightening, Grasps an Immortality. Let not future peals remind thee, Then, of wasted ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... in the morning, from various tenement homes near by, sturdy 'longshoremen and laborers might have been seen plodding silently from their respective homes, careful not to disturb their wives and families, and heading straight for the new kitchen on the corner. From trains running along "Death Avenue" came blackened trainmen after their night's work. They, too, stopped at the corner kitchen. By the time the attendant ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... direction. It is related that one of the tunnel men, two miles from town, met one of these self-reliant passengers with a carpetbag, umbrella, Harper's Magazine, and other evidences of "Civilization and Refinement," plodding along over the road he had just ridden, vainly endeavoring to find the ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... the average girl in college who determines the character and reputation of that college. It is not the brilliant girl, it is not the girl whose earnest plodding barely carries her through, it is not the failure, it is the average girl. If the average girl should leave her college a good athlete, interested in everything athletic, that fact would determine the general character of the college. If the average ...
— The Girl and Her Religion • Margaret Slattery
... greeted Teddy, as he espied Mr. Sparling plodding about with a keen eye to the safety of ...
— The Circus Boys In Dixie Land • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... two girls,—plodding over the sharp stones, splashing through the puddles,—Rebecca beating the old drum with might and main; Sarah blowing the fife with ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... their ornamental labels or covers. To accomplish this operation with necessary speed, much practice and dexterity in the handling is required. The coolies—a thousand of whom are employed on the establishment—are, however, great adepts at the art, and patient and plodding as beasts of burthen. But among the celestials there is one master-hand who distinguishes himself above all the others by his superior skill. Piles of loose cigarettes and gummed labels are before him. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... out of breath. Her heart labored. An unreasonable antipathy seemed to attend her efforts. Only her ridiculous vanity held her to this task. She wanted to please Glenn, but not so earnestly that she would have kept on plodding up this ghastly bare mound of cinders. Carley did not mind being a tenderfoot, but she hated the thought of these Westerners considering her a weakling. So she bore the pain of raw blisters and the miserable sensation of staggering ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... think wistfully of the police, now plodding over the hills after my wraith. They at any rate were fellow-countrymen and honest men, and their tender mercies would be kinder than these ghoulish aliens. But they wouldn't have listened to me. That old devil with the eyelids had not taken long to get rid of them. I thought he probably ...
— The Thirty-nine Steps • John Buchan
... Visioned the herd huddled together in the night while the heavens were split with lightning, and the rain came down in white-lighted streamers of water. Visioned the cattle humped in the snow, tails to the biting wind, and the riders plodding with muffled heads bent to the drive of the blizzard, the fine snow packing full the wrinkles in ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... just as they stood, till she come back to claim them. So she went to China with her young husband, and it was a parting sorrowful and heavy, and I got the boy I had another service; and so as of old, when my child and wife were gone, I went plodding along alone, with my whip over my shoulder, at the old ...
— Doctor Marigold • Charles Dickens
... interfere with Stone and Robinson, was a mild, rather timid-looking youth—not unlike what Mr. Outwood must have been as a boy—but he knew how to keep balls out of his wicket. He was a good bat of the old plodding type. ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... Earth, absorbed my mind with more than passing interest. Looking carefully into one of these canon depressions, I saw a class of human beings in a low state of civilization; nevertheless, they were expert in agriculture and seemed to labor contentedly with a dull, plodding ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... husband to take one of the glebe fields on a long lease in order to start a hamper trade in fruit, vegetables and flowers. Dolly, the one of her three step-daughters whom she liked least, was fond of gardening, in a dull plodding way, and might be ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... did. Suddenly she tossed her head and flung out her curls to the breeze, and swung Merry Roger's bridle-rein, and was away at a gallop and I after her, measuring the ground with wide paces on my tall thoroughbred. In this fashion we soon left the plodding blacks so far behind that they became a part of the distance-shadows. Then, all at once, Mistress Mary swerved off from the main road and was riding down the track leading to the plantation-wharf, whence ...
— The Heart's Highway - A Romance of Virginia in the Seventeeth Century • Mary E. Wilkins
... saddle, looking back past Neb—who swayed in his seat, with head lolling on his breast as though asleep, his horse plodding after the others—along the slight trail they had made across the desert. So far as eye could reach nothing moved, nothing apparently existed. Fronting again to the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... believe, where we looked at a great many water-color and crayon drawings of scenes in Italy, Greece, and Switzerland. The artist was a quiet, respectable, somewhat heavy-looking old gentleman, from whose aspect one would expect a plodding pertinacity of character rather than quickness of sensibility. He must have united both these qualities, however, to produce such pictures as these, such faithful transcripts of whatever Nature ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... his own genius for languages, his unconquerable plodding directed by a divine motive, his colleagues' co-operation, the encouragement of learned societies and the public, and the number of pundits and moonshees increased by the College of Fort William, would have failed to open the door of the East to the sacred Scriptures ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... children out of the perpetual holidays of infancy and into the treadmill of schooling that begins with b, a, ba and sometimes never ends. Side by side, the two small youngsters entered the low doorway of the primary school; side by side, a few years later, a pair of lanky striplings, they were plodding through their intermediate studies which seemed to them unending. Catie was eagerly looking towards the final pages of her geography and grammar, for beyond them lay the entrance to another perpetual holiday, this time of budding maturity. Scott's eyes were ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... men,—a stumbling-block which they can only surmount under the most favourable circumstances of early education. Hence, nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers; the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing, as well as they can, what practical work lies ready to their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence (Thackeray, Dickens), or give themselves ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... weeks back, when T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., had made his memorable speech, explaining to his fellow-students the "Billon-Dollar Mystery," and arousing in them a vast admiration for the slow-minded, plodding John Thorwald, every collegian had done his best to befriend the big Freshman. Upperclassmen helped him with his studies. Despite his almost rude refusal to meet any advances, the collegians always had a cheery greeting for him, and his class-mates, in fear and trembling, invaded his den at ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... the plodding hoofs! O creaking wheels, O tinkling pots and pans, had I but possessed the wisdom to understand your oft-repeated message, how much of doubt, of grief and pain I ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... are frequently upbraided by the industrious and plodding sons of care, with passing too great a part of their life in a state of inaction. But these defiers of sleep seem not to remember that though it must be granted them that they are crawling about before the break of day, it can seldom be said that they are perfectly awake; they ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... a question which we had not been bright enough to ask. We had been plodding on with the vague idea that it was a delightful book. Certainly the subject was agreeable. The writer was taking us on a ramble through the less frequented parts of Italy. He had a fine descriptive power, and made us see the quiet hill towns, ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... picked me up was nothing but a tramp, plodding along with a general cargo from London to Dundee, and its accommodation was as rough as its skipper was homely. But it was a veritable palace of delight and luxury to me after that terrible night, and I was soon hard ...
— Dead Men's Money • J. S. Fletcher
... political means and practical ends exclusive to themselves? Who among us has the single right to claim for himself, and the likes of him, the divine title of a workingman? We are all workingmen, the earnest plodding scholar in his library, surrounded by the luxury and comfort which his learning and his labor have earned for him, no less than the poor collier in the mine, with darkness and squalor closing him round about, and want ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... but know! I would sacrifice everything to her except my duty and my conscience. Yes, if God exacted of me, in order to spare her this pain, that I should extinguish my thought and condemn myself to a plodding, vulgar existence, I would submit. Many a time I have endeavoured to deceive myself, but it is not in human power to believe or not to believe at will. I wish that I could stifle within me the faculty of self-examination, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... appear to be affected by her want of knowledge. As to forms, Mrs. Margaret had her own, and she was very attentive to them, but she had very small opportunity of public worship, as there was no church within some miles of the Tower. In the meantime, whilst the old lady went plodding on in her own quiet way, teaching the little girl all she knew herself, Mr. Dymock was planning great things by way of instruction for Tamar. He was to teach her to read her native language, as he called the Hebrew, and to give her various accomplishments, ...
— Shanty the Blacksmith; A Tale of Other Times • Mrs. Sherwood [AKA: Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood]
... assurance was that four days and forty-one dollars would carry us to our first objective point. His helpers were a lively young half-breed, son-in-law of the murdered chief Hole-in-the-Day, another big mongrel, fat, plodding and reticent, and a young Indian who could speak a few English words, but was destitute of ideas in either English or Chippewa. Their motive-power was grazing on the open prairie back of the ragged village. The Reservation Indian, denied liquor at home, reckons upon a trip out of bounds as fair ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... ever saw!" he exclaimed. Then "like mother, like son," he, too, sat down on the doorsill and laughed as only youth and health and joy can laugh, for, heading straight for the door was the fat young Shorthorn, saddled with an enormous feather-bed, and plodding at her heels was ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... civil," said Godolphin, impatiently. "Allow me to tell you that it is your objects I consider baubles. Your dull, plodding, wearisome honours; a name in the newspapers—a place, perhaps, in the Ministry—purchased by a sacrificed youth and a degraded manhood—a youth in labour, a manhood in schemes. No, Radclyffe! give me the bright, the glad sparkle of existence; and, ere the sad years of age and sickness, ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was a stout one, Sandy could easily have gnawed his way through it if he had not been too frightened to try. And there he stayed, while all the time old Ebenezer kept plodding along toward ...
— The Tale of Sandy Chipmunk • Arthur Scott Bailey
... with the brilliant scarlet berries of the cassena, and on some of the oaks we observed the mistletoe, laden with its pure white, pearl-like berries. Out of the woods the roads are generally bad, and we found it hard work plodding through the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... plodding up the slope, turning these thoughts over in my mind, and had reached a point which may have been half-way to home, when my mind was brought back to my own position by a strange noise behind me. It was something between a snore and a growl, low, deep, and exceedingly menacing. Some strange ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... * * * * Thus through life with thee I'll glide, Happy still what'er betide, And while plodding sots complain Of ceaseless toil and slender gain, Every passing hour shall be Worth a golden ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... As Goodenough was plodding at his accustomed pace in his morning's work, he met Wright on horseback, who asked him if he had any commissions that he could execute in York, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... thrives and waxes fat. He would fain be a soldier, and swagger like his neighbors; but his domestic, quiet-loving, uxorious nature continually gets the upper hand; and though he may mount his helmet and gird on his sword, yet he is apt to sink into the plodding, painstaking father of a family; with a troop of children at his heels, and his womenkind hanging ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... understand. There were plodding lines of people, disciplined, carrying burdens, no bigger than ants at this distance. There was an ominous horror about the quiet beauty of the place. It was somehow like a beautiful woman lying just slain. Yet I could see no wounds of war, no reason for ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... the desolate scene was a large, hulking boy. He had been plodding heavily with a sack upon his back. As he stopped, he set this upon the ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... evening, as the travellers were plodding onward, Ketch walked for a time at the head of Aunt Amanda's mule. Aunt Amanda leaned forward and ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen
... say he was plodding along? A reactionary is immovable except in the wrong direction. ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of his whip to the spreading, graceful arms of a free so far up the bed of the stream that he could make out only its top. The ponies, refreshed, resumed their methodical plodding. ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... shaven, his intelligent blue eyes half concealed beneath his hat brim, which had been drawn low to shade them from the glare, one hand pressing upon his saddle holster as he leaned over to rest. No insignia of rank served to distinguish him from those equally dusty fellows plodding gloomily behind, but a broad stripe of yellow running down the seams of his trousers, together with his high boots, bespoke the cavalry service, while the front of his battered campaign hat bore the decorations of two crossed sabres, with ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish
... of war; yet even in the stubble we may judge what the wheat has been. From my youth up I lived amidst the clash of shield and spear, and loved battle and ambush, siege and foray. But I cared not for plodding industry, which gives increase unto a house, and fills it with the bright faces of children. Such I was as Heaven made me, a ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... Esther North floated across the snowy fields to the hill where the children of Glendour were coasting. Her brother Daniel, plodding up the trampled path beside the glairy track with half a dozen other boys, dragging the bob-sled on which his little sister Ruth was seated, heard the call with vague sentiments of dislike and rebellion. His twelve years rose up in arms against being ordered ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... or bring us back to our starting point. But, with only right living in view, there is no mistaking the way; for there has always been a straight road ahead of us, which we could follow if we would. It is hard to keep plodding along the narrow path, when fields of wealth and power stretch away on either side, but, happily for us, these are about all fenced in, even the great Sahara desert is fenced in. We cannot be tyrants ...
— A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 4 • Charles C. Cook
... existence, and there was very little probability that they would make farther progress toward the setting sun. The individual who had determined to start for the new, but delusive, western mountainous El Dorado, must perforce make his wearisome journey by slowly plodding ox-teams, pack-mules, or the lumbering stage-coach. Such means of travel had just been inaugurated by Mr. W. H. Russell (then the senior partner of the firm of Russell, Majors, & Waddell) and a Mr. John S. Jones of Missouri, who conceived ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... to grow dark, and we were still plodding along. I was foot-sore, discouraged, and woe-begone. All the former trials of my life, which had seemed at the time so hard to bear, now appeared like ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... behind one of those low hemlocks, or even a cross old "lucivee" to rush out from some of those thick cedar clumps. For thoughts of these things had begun to pop into my mind. I was but seventeen then, and hadn't quite outgrown my fear of the dark. And thus plodding timorously onward, thinking on many things injurious to a boy's courage, I had begun to think I should have to make a night of it there, somewhere, when the red gleam of a fire, from the crest of the ridge before me, suddenly burst ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... behind glass doors, stood some hundred more or less complete bodies shrouded in sheets. They retained, or had been arranged, in the same form they had presented in life—peon carriers bent as if still under a heavy burden, old market women in the act of haggling, arrieros plodding behind their imaginary burros. Some had their mouths wide open, as if they had been buried alive and had died shouting for release. One fellow stood leaning against a support, like a man joking with an elbow on the bar, a glass between his fingers, in ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... stayed aloof, the problem of a national American music has been solving itself. Aside from occasional attentions evoked by chance performances, it may be said in general that the growth of our music has been unloved and unheeded by anybody except a few plodding composers, their wives, and a retainer or two. The only thing that inclines me to invade the privacy of the American composer and publish his secrets, is my hearty belief, lo, these many years! that some of the best music in the world is being written here at home, and ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... before we reached Buffalo River, the column plodding along in the wooded ravine. I had turned out from the road to wait for the brigades to pass, and have a word with the commanders in turn, and was picking my way to the head of column again, when I overheard ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... Gathers had been a careful, canny man, and he had need to be doubly careful on this summer morning. Having disposed of the mud on his feet, he settled his white straw hat down firmly upon his head, and, crossing the road, he climbed a stake-and-rider fence laboriously and went plodding sedately across a weedfield and up a slight slope toward his house, half a mile away, upon the crest of ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... greatness. The vast landed estates which now acknowledge lordly owners were then only in inception. The Lenox estate was a range of wild land, far away even from the suburbs of the city, and owned by a plain, plodding merchant, whose son is the munificent and benevolent James Lenox, of whom New York may be justly proud. A strong-minded German of unpolished aspect, and with something of a foreign accent, kept a fur store at the corner of Pearl and Pine Streets, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Yet these plodding and undramatic notes arouse in Germany a feeling very different from one of ridicule. The resentful respect for our notes is there admirably summed up by a member of the Reichstag who to the correspondent of the United Press exclaimed bitterly: 'Our present ...
— Germany, The Next Republic? • Carl W. Ackerman
... afternoon their concert was cut short before its finish. Commandant Balliot came back to the launch with satisfaction on his streaming face, and two armed black soldiers plodding at his heels. ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... to mould your brilliant life to my plodding one," he said wistfully, as if he were reading my thoughts. "But I don't mean to be selfish. I love you—and—you're drifting away ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... he wrote to Lady Abercorn about his poems (June 9,1808), "that I am not very good or patient in slow and careful composition; and sometimes I remind myself of the drunken man, who could run long after he could not walk." Scott could certainly run very well, though averse to a plodding motion. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... letters he ever wrote. Where, for example, is the literary correspondence in which he engaged so enthusiastically with his Kirkoswald schoolfellows? "Though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger." Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then "a youth and all ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... well, and does what he is expected to do. But it does not enter into his mind to do anything beyond what is required, nor to enlarge his capacities by reading or reflection. He is, at the best, a steady plodding man, who will go forward, if at all, very slowly, and will rise, if at all, to no great elevation. He is not the sort of person who is looked for to occupy a higher position. One opportunity of advancement after ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... of snow, lying thinly under a pale greenish sky in which the sunset clouds were just beginning to gather. The land before her sloped to a broad frozen river up which a wagon and a team of horses was plodding its way—the steam rising in clouds round the bodies of the horses and men. On a track leading to the river a sledge was running—the bells jingling in the still, light air. To her left were the great barns of the homestead, and beyond, the long low cowshed, with a group of Shorthorns and Herefords ...
— Lady Merton, Colonist • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... rather the unimaginative, the practical and the plodding. The stubbornest person in the world is one ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... his wife were plodding through life in a routine affection, reminding Dona Luisa, in her limited imagination, of the yokes of oxen on the ranch who refused to budge whenever another animal was substituted for the regular companion. Her husband certainly was quick tempered, holding her responsible for all the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... things as opposed to ideas; incidents as opposed to propositions. Sometimes, it is true, the author of a story is in reality dealing with ideas. In the fable about "The Hare and the Tortoise," the tortoise stands for the idea of slow, steady plodding; while the hare is the representative of quick wits which depend on their ability to show a brilliant burst of speed when called upon. The fable teaches better than an essay can that the dullness which perseveres ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... of tea that had come across the desert of Gobi from Peking, left Irkutsk, every day, for Nizhni Novgorod. They moved in solid caravans, a quarter of a mile to a mile in length, and in every such caravan there were from fifty to two hundred sledges. As the tea-horses went at a slow, plodding walk, their drivers were required, by law, to turn out for private travellers and give the latter the road; but they seldom did anything of the kind. There were only twelve or fifteen of them to a caravan of a hundred sledges; and as they usually curled up on their loads at ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... back of the advance lines. On the road before us was a company of territorial infantry who had been eight days in the trenches and were now to have two days of repose at the rear. Plodding along the same road was a refugee mother and several little children in a donkey cart; behind the cart, attached by a rope, trundled a baby buggy with the youngest child inside. The buggy suddenly struck a rut in the road and overturned, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... over large unenclosed tracts, not graced with trees, or at least very sparingly enlivened by them, and the half-formed roads seemed to demand the landmarks, set up in the waste, to prevent the traveller from straying far out of his way, and plodding through the ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... crucifix as it hung there beside my portrait. It was twilight; outside the wall the bell was tolling heavily in the invisible church, calling the believers together; in the distance, over the deserted field, overgrown with high grass, an unknown wanderer was plodding along, passing into the unknown distance, like a little black dot. It was as quiet in our prison as in a sepulchre. I looked long and attentively at the features of Jesus, which were so calm, so joyous compared with him who looked silently and dully ...
— The Crushed Flower and Other Stories • Leonid Andreyev
... into his saddle and galloped away. A few minutes later the whole column was plodding on silently toward its bloody goal. To a civilian, unaccustomed to scenes of war, the tranquillity of these men would have seemed very wonderful. Many of the soldiers were still munching the hard bread and ...
— The Brigade Commander • J. W. Deforest
... jolting of the wheels. At the Neuilly bridge a cart full of cabbages and another full of peas had joined the eight waggons of carrots and turnips coming down from Nanterre; and the horses, left to themselves, had continued plodding along with lowered heads, at a regular though lazy pace, which the ascent of the slope now slackened. The sleeping waggoners, wrapped in woollen cloaks, striped black and grey, and grasping the reins ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Nature's surface. I name not The servile copyists of the greater masters, Or of th' archangels, Raphael and Michael; But such as paint our cheap and daily marvels. Sometimes I fear lest they degrade our art To a nice craft for plodding artisans— Mere realism, which they mistake for truth. My soul rejects such limits. The true artist Gives Nature's best effects with far less means. Plain black and white suffice him to express A finer grace, a stronger energy Than ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... out of the office, and the sheriff was given his mount. The Indians swung the pack-horses into line, and the men settled themselves in their saddles as they began the long, plodding journey to the blue hills in ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman
... confess. I quite approve of it. It's just the kind of thing for people like Miss Bride, plodding and practical; no doubt they'll make it very useful. But I have rather lost my keenness for work of that sort. Perhaps I have grown out of it. Of course I wish as much as ever for the good of the lower classes, but I feel that my own work ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... The cart was plodding along through the smooth lanes at the rate of less than a mile an hour, the oxen swaying from side to side with their slow, patient steps. The level country around lay sleepily still under the hot afternoon sun; it was rarely that any human stir was to be seen, save only ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... reins feebly in his hands and sat shivering with the cold. Sometimes when there was a lull in the wind, he could see the horse struggling through the snow with the man plodding steadily beside him. Again the blowing snow would hide them from him altogether. He had no idea where they were or what direction they were going. He felt as though he were being whirled away in the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... plodding horse measure a full half-mile before he turned and looked at her with anger and despair glooming in ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... earl of Rochester; two of which, sent to the duke of Buckingham, have particular merit, both for the archness of the turns, and the acuteness of the observations. He gives his lordship a humorous description of some of the Germans, their excessive drunkenness; their plodding stupidity and ostensive indelicacy; he complains that he has no companion in that part of the world, no Sir Charles Sedleys, nor Buckinghams, and what is still worse, even deprived of the happiness of a mistress, for, the women there, he says, are so coy, and so narrowly ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... hundred and fifty feet at a jump, sailing through the air stretched out like a spear, and landing on his beak. He seemed surprised at my plodding, but after a few moments he fell in beside me, only every few minutes he'd go into one of his leaps, and stick his nose into the sand a block ahead of me. Then he'd come shooting back at me; it made me nervous at first to see that beak of his coming at me like a spear, but ...
— A Martian Odyssey • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
... differ very much. The tame Ass is gentle, and generally fond of the society of man; the wild Ass is one of the shyest creatures in the world; even when caught it is almost impossible to tame him. The tame Ass is slow, plodding, dull, and lazy; the wild Ass is as swift as a race-horse and as wild as a Deer. The best mounted horsemen can seldom approach him, and it is generally necessary to send a rifle-ball after him, if he is wanted very much. His flesh ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... shoulders sprang a white figure, weak as yet and shadowy, but pointing against the god the shadow of a spear; and underneath was written, "At last he knoweth what he made." In the second, the figure which grovelled and that which sprang from its shoulders were plodding along a high-road at night, chained together by the wrist. The white figure halted behind, the other pressed on; and underneath was written, "They know each other not." In the third the figures marched level, that which ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... Devil's Playground, and when convinced had looked upon Payne and Higgins with the admiration of experts for masters. Higgins had remained at Citrus Grove to organize ox-team transport for the material and labor which had been ordered, and Payne had started southward at once. A sure, plodding ox team had carried him in a wide circuit through the flooded lands east of Devil's Playground to Deer Hammock. Signs on the hammock told that it had been visited several times during their absence. Payne found tracks of a size which he ...
— The Plunderer • Henry Oyen
... on this occasion, as she had done at Christmas, but in the rest of the merry-making she naturally could take no part. Austin, however, proved the most enthusiastic reveller of all, put through his work like chain lightning, and was out and off before the plodding Thomas had fairly begun. Manlike, it did not occur to him to give up any of these festivities because Sylvia could not join in them. For years he had hungered and thirsted, as most boys do, for "a good time"—and done so in vain. For years his work had seemed so endless and yet so futile—for ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... bias was for Greek and Latin, but Mr. Hayes had recommended her to take up modern languages as well, and she was steadily plodding through the French and German, for which she had not so strong a liking as for her beloved classics. Prissie was a very eager learner, and she was busy now looking over her notes of the last lecture and standing close to the ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... forgets, as he strips and runs With a brilliant, fitful pace, It's the steady, quiet, plodding ones Who win in the lifelong race. And each forgets that his youth has fled, Forgets that his prime is past, Till he stands one day, with a hope that's dead, In the glare of ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... thickets lies couched the lordly stag, The dreaming terrier's tail forgets its customary wag; And plodding ploughmen's weary steps insensibly grow quicker, As broadening casements light them on towards home, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... nature and art, and, during three years' travel in foreign parts, had so improved upon these natural advantages, as to stand acknowledged one of the most elegant and accomplished young men of his country. But it often happens that such high-wrought natures are but poorly versed in the plodding concerns of this nether world. And thus it was with him. Alive to every lofty feeling and generous impulse, he fancied others like himself. Low cunning and artifice were unknown to his bosom, and consequently he would fall the easier victim to Hardin's scheme ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... and all the village boys and girls. So he said the answers after her and she explained them, which she certainly did very brightly and very well, and on week-days Angel taught him the earlier ones, in her gentle, plodding way, till he knew them by heart. He had done what his Aunt Betty required of him by the time Angel had taken two more turns, and was having his reward in the story which he called godpapa and the acorn. It was his favourite of all Betty's tales, and it was the sort she liked best to ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... eye brethren of our own Mission with whom I was associated—Buyers, with his intimate acquaintance with the native languages, his large knowledge, and his kindly disposition; Shurman, the keen, impetuous, plodding German scholar, whose great monument is his translation of the Old Testament into Hindustanee; Mather, first of Benares and afterwards of Mirzapore, one of the most enterprising and devoted missionaries ever sent to India, whose peculiarity ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... my Lord, or you, or you, Haue found the ground of studies excellence, Without the beauty of a womans face; From womens eyes this doctrine I deriue, They are the Ground, the Bookes, the Achadems, From whence doth spring the true Promethean fire. Why, vniuersall plodding poysons vp The nimble spirits in the arteries, As motion and long during action tyres The sinnowy vigour of the trauailer. Now for not looking on a womans face, You haue in that forsworne the vse of eyes: ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Celtic at Oxford, bespoke the attention of the English public to those elements in the national literature which come from the Celtic strain in its blood. Arnold knew very little Celtic, and his essay abounds in those airy generalisations which are so irritating to more plodding critics. His theory, e.g., that English poetry owes its sense for colour to the Celts, when taken up and stated nakedly by following writers, seems too absolute in its ascription of colour-blindness to the Teutonic races. Still, Arnold probably defined fairly enough the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... think, girls, I would have you always prosaic, plodding, self-satisfied, unambitious? Oh, no! do not understand me so. Why, I believe that even dreaming about doing, and seeing, and having things is sometimes very helpful, and not at all inconsistent with the commonplace. It is almost necessary ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... a quarter of a minute he was drenched to the skin. So fiercely it went howling inland along the ridge that he half expected to see the horse urged into a gallop before it. But the rider, now standing high for a moment against the sky-line, went plodding on. For a while horse and man disappeared over the rise; but Taffy guessed that on hitting the cross-path beyond it they would strike away to the left and descend toward Langona Creek; and he began to slant his course to the left ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... original. There is a talent in industry which every industrious man does not possess; and even taste and imagination may lead to the deepest studies of antiquities, as well as mere undiscerning curiosity and plodding dulness. ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Love should seek its match; and that is, love Or nothing! Station—fortune—find their match In things resembling them. They are not love! Comes love (that subtle essence, without which Life were but leaden dulness!—weariness! A plodding trudger on a heavy road!) Comes it of title-deeds which fools may boast? Or coffers vilest hands may hold the keys of? Or that ethereal lamp that lights the eyes To shed the sparkling lustre o'er the face, Gives to the velvet skin its blushing glow, And burns as bright ...
— The Love-Chase • James Sheridan Knowles
... plodding steadily along the road, fifteen miles from town. Leof took him up on his horse, and they reached Guildford just as the sun was setting. The inn, which stood in the principal street of the town, was a low building built with a ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... o'clock we are off down to Buea. At 10.15 it pours as it can here; by 10.17 we are all in our normal condition of bedraggled saturation, and plodding down carefully and cheerfully among the rocks and roots of the forest, following the path we have beaten and cut for ourselves on our way up. It is dangerously slippery, particularly that part ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... impotently as in the madman; once fairly started on any subject whatever, they have no power of self-control; they passively endure the succession of impulses which are evolved out of the original exciting cause; they are passed on from one idea to another and go steadily forward, plodding along one line of thought in spite of the amplest concessions of the hearer, or wandering from it in endless digression in spite of his remonstrances. Now, if, as is very certain, no one would envy the madman the glow and originality of his conceptions, why must we extol the cultivation of that ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... fertile valley, Tracing all its winding ways, Plodding on with dogged patience Through a score of weary days, Camping in the lonely timber, Sleeping on the scorching plain, Bearing heat and thirst and hunger, Sore fatigue and wind and rain— Halting only when the telltale Mark was missing in the track; Only when he called a greeting, As he passed ...
— Nancy MacIntyre • Lester Shepard Parker
... it seemed a very probable contingency, and she was beginning to weary of plodding over the boggy land, alternately slapped by outstanding branches or—when a little puff of wind raced overhead—drenched by a shower of garnered raindrops from some tree which seemed to shake itself in the breeze just as a dog may shake himself after a plunge in the sea, and with apparently ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... wave of immigration receded the Teutonic wave rose and brought the second great influx of foreigners to American shores. A greater ethnic contrast could scarcely be imagined than that which was now afforded by these two races, the phlegmatic, plodding German and the vibrant Irish, a contrast in American life as a whole which was soon represented in miniature on the vaudeville stage by popular burlesque representations of both types. The one ...
— Our Foreigners - A Chronicle of Americans in the Making • Samuel P. Orth
... veteran troops, covered with scars and thoroughly inured to War, we must not compare the self-esteem and vanity of a standing Army,(*) held together merely by the glue of service-regulations and a drill book; a certain plodding earnestness and strict discipline may keep up military virtue for a long time, but can never create it; these things therefore have a certain value, but must not be over-rated. Order, smartness, good will, also ...
— On War • Carl von Clausewitz
... before; when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this and tries that,—wants a deviled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step, finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny that life often begins with health little less perfect than that of ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... crusty state of mind set forth upon his long walk home to Springhaven. As Harry Shanks had said, and almost everybody knew, an ancient foot-path, little used, but never yet obstructed, cut off a large bend of the shore, and saved half a mile of plodding over rock and shingle. This path was very lonesome, and infested with dark places, as well as waylaid with a very piteous ghost, who never would keep to the spot where he was murdered, but might appear at any shady stretch or woody corner. Dan Tugwell knew three courageous men who had ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... entertaining any real hope of overtaking him, I chucked my rifle to the nearest of the farmers, touched old Bob with the spur, and went away on a hard gallop after the wounded fugitive, who was now plodding onward at the usual long loping canter of his tribe. For about half a mile the wood was open, and sloped gently upward, until it joined the open country, where it was bounded by a high rugged fence, made in the usual snake fashion, with a huge heavy top-rail. This we soon reached; the ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... mill lane, and a shaggy dog that lay in a wagon shed pursued me about a mile. The road was full of mire; no dwellings adjoined it, and nothing human was to be seen in any direction. I came to a crumbling negro cabin after two plodding hours, and, seeing a figure flit by the window, called aloud for information. Nobody replied, and when, dismounting, I looked into the den, it was, to my ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... vitality and elasticity, a stodgy, plodding way of working, much indulgence in gregarious eating and drinking, and very mild forms of exercise and holiday-making, comparatively little sport, almost no game-playing where boys and men hustle one another about as in foot-ball and polo, and very long hours of application, from ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier |
