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Roughness   /rˈəfnəs/   Listen
Roughness

noun
1.
A texture of a surface or edge that is not smooth but is irregular and uneven.  Synonym: raggedness.
2.
The quality of being unpleasant (harsh or rough or grating) to the senses.  Synonym: harshness.
3.
An unpolished unrefined quality.  Synonym: crudeness.
4.
Used of the sea during inclement or stormy weather.  Synonyms: choppiness, rough water.
5.
Rowdy behavior.  Synonyms: disorderliness, rowdiness, rowdyism.
6.
The formation of small pits in a surface as a consequence of corrosion.  Synonyms: indentation, pitting.
7.
Harsh or severe speech or behavior.  "The roughness of her voice was a signal to keep quiet"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Roughness" Quotes from Famous Books



... wall of huge rough blocks of stone, presenting a great contrast to the dressed slabs of which the inner walls are formed. They are placed alternately with their broad faces and their narrow edges outwards. The roughness of this enclosure wall gives the structure a remarkably wild and craggy appearance from a distance. The northern half of Mnaidra is clearly ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet

... white wings gleamed in the sun, as they scattered away in radii from the central and sacred point, some north, some east, and some veering south around Holy Island. Sergius and Herrmann gave them smooth seas, and light, favorable airs; for the least roughness would have carried them, overladen as they were, to the bottom. Once more the bells of Valaam chimed farewell, and we turned the point to the westward, steering ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various

... continuous bombardment from one thousand German guns. It was a city of the dead. The military authorities of the Allies told the civilians they must leave. They had to go, there was no alternative. The liberation they had hoped for was in sight, but their road to it was of a roughness unspeakable. ...
— Private Peat • Harold R. Peat

... the very edge of the abyss there was scarcely a handhold. Possibly in floods the waters may have swept the wall in a curve, smoothing down the inner part and leaving the outer to its natural roughness. There was one place where I had to hang on by a very narrow crack while I scraped with the axe a hollow for my right foot. And then about twelve feet from the ground I struck the first of ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... knew would delight the company. Reformer as Mrs. Lee was, and a little alarmed at the roughness of Ratcliffe's treatment, she could not blame the Prairie Giant, as she ought, who, after knocking poor French down, rolled him over ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... completely, and we next hear of him in London in 1665, a nobleman's chaplain, setting the table in a roar by making fun of his former friends, "a mimical way of drolling upon the puritans." "He followed the town-life, haunted the best companies and, to polish himself from any pedantic roughness, he read and saw the plays with much care and more preparing than most of the auditory." In 1667 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Sheldon, a very mundane person indeed, made Parker his chaplain, and three years later Archdeacon of Canterbury. He reached ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell

... little difference here. Ten sat down, including the principal medical officer and a captain—the head of the station intelligence department, Major Wingate, being at present at Wady Halfa. Except for the roughness of the surroundings, it was like a regimental mess, and the presence of the General commanding in no way acted as a damper to ...
— With Kitchener in the Soudan - A Story of Atbara and Omdurman • G. A. Henty

... seemed to Mademoiselle Noemie quite in harmony with the impressiveness of his title, but the graceful brevity of her own response made no concession to underbred surprise. She turned to Newman, putting up her hands to her hair and smoothing its delicately-felt roughness. Then, rapidly, she turned the canvas that was on her easel over upon its face. "You have not ...
— The American • Henry James

... laughter and of amused voices—voices of men, women, and children—resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths, shaking ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens

... men. But they soon began to fall back, and retreated to the hill where Captain Woodbine had observed the first part of the struggle. The cavalry could not operate to advantage here on account of the roughness of the ground, and the trees. They resorted to the carbine, and kept up an ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic

... taught you this wisdom?' asked the old woman, after she had passed her hands twice or thrice over the cloth and could find no roughness anywhere. But the girl only smiled and did not answer. She had learned early ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various

... Dutch, English, and French in succession discover New Zealand, and forthwith come into conflict with its dauntless and ferocious natives. The skill and moderation of Cook may be judged by comparing his success with the episodes of De Surville's roughness and the troubles which befel Tasman, Furneaux, and Marion du Fresne. Or we may please ourselves by contrasting English persistency and harsh but not unjust dealing, with Dutch over-cautiousness and French carelessness and cruelty. One after ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves

... suitcase—his only luggage—from the carriage to the car. They gave Maieddine two hours' grace, and having started on, always slowed up whenever Nevill's field-glasses showed a slowly trotting vehicle on the far horizon. The road, which was hardly a road, far exceeded in roughness the desert track Stephen had wondered at on the way from Msila to Bou-Saada; but Lady MacGregor had the courage, he told her, of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... (from a Greek word signifying rough) from the roughness, or inequalities, of the cartilages of which it ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... of line in different degrees of firmness, roughness, raggedness, or smooth and flowing. There are the degrees of direction of line, curvilinear or angular. On the angular side all variations from the perpendicular and horizontal, or rectangle, within which we may find all these degrees, and on the curvilinear ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane

... and the vessel had to contend with the tide, which began to flow soon after she passed the rock. When the steamer arrived off the Floating-light, which is stationed about fifteen miles from Liverpool, the roughness of the sea alarmed many of the passengers.—One of the survivors stated, that Mr. Tarry, of Bury, who, with his family, consisting of himself, his wife, their five children, and servant, was on board, being, in common with others, ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... sharpness of muzzle, length of head, lightness of ear, and depth of chest, as the English dog; but the general frame is stronger and more muscular, the hind quarters more prominent, there is evident increase of size and roughness of coat, and there is also some diminution of speed. If it were not for these points, these dogs might occasionally be taken for each other. In coursing the hare, no north-country dog will stand against the lighter southern, although the southern would be unequal to ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt

... that he is mean, and that feeling will rob him of all his comfort. Hunting men in England wish to pay for their own amusement; but they desire that more shall be spent than they pay. And in this there is a rough justice, that roughness of justice which pervades our English institutions. To a master of hounds is given a place of great influence, and into his hands is confided an authority the possession of which among his fellow-sportsmen is very pleasant to him. For this he ...
— Hunting Sketches • Anthony Trollope

... the earth and looking at it and holding it in his hand. It would be about like a billiard-ball to him, and he would turn it over in his hand and rub it with his thumb, and where he rubbed over the mountain ranges he might say, 'There seems to be some slight roughness here, but I can't detect it with my eye; it seems perfectly smooth to look at.' The Himalayas to him, the highest peak, would be one-sixty-thousandth of his height, or about the one- thousandth part of an inch as compared with ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine

... through his things now entire. I got 'em all with me. If there's such a thing as a recordin' angel, you'll go down on the book. Will was a bad lot, but he's done with it now, dearie. I never seen the roughness crop up in a man so sudden the way it did in Will. You can imagine, dearie, when the men in the troupe horsewhipped him one night for the way he lit in on me one night in drink. That was the night he quit. O Gawd! maybe I don't ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst

... at the drop of the hat if necessary. In the phrase which he had just used, he would "go through" anything he undertook. Men who had bucked blizzards with him in the old days admitted that Clint would do to take along. But Ridley's awe of him was due less to his roughness and to the big place he filled in the life of the Panhandle than to the fact that he was the father of his daughter. It was essential to Arthur's plans that he stand well with ...
— Oh, You Tex! • William Macleod Raine

... places, after nightfall, as a protection against ghosts. At length the daylight died entirely away, and he could only learn from Angus that the smithy was further off than ever; and, to add to his trouble and perplexity, the roughness of the ground showed him that they were wandering from the road. First they went toiling athwart what seemed an endless range of fields, separated from one another by deep ditches and fences of stone; ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... which leads to a certain apparent contradiction in a woman's emotions. On the one hand, rooted in the maternal instinct, we find pity, tenderness, and compassion; on the other hand, rooted in the sexual instinct, we find a delight in roughness, violence, pain, and danger, sometimes in herself, sometimes also in others. The one impulse craves something innocent and helpless, to cherish and protect; the other delights in the spectacle of recklessness, audacity, sometimes even effrontery.[79] ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... in the mausoleum of the brain. And that solemn, kingly, gracious old man, who had been to him a father, he had forgotten; the homely tenderness which, from fear of its own force, concealed itself behind a humorous roughness of manner, he had — no, not despised — but forgotten, too; and if the dim pearly loveliness of the trustful, grateful maiden had not been quite forgotten, yet she too had been neglected, had died, as it were, and been buried in the churchyard of the past, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... southern forests is their open nature; so far as the roughness of the mountains will permit, one may go anywhere in the saddle without being hindered by underbrush. Outside of their limits, however, and on many hillsides within the reserves, the chaparral offers an impenetrable barrier; in some of them this ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various

... convenient to ourselves; and for your sake and that of the children, I think it is better that I should go first. Dr. Grant being a professional man, and such an old friend of my brother's, will be an excellent escort, and I am really desirous of seeing a little of the roughness of colonial life. We will stay all night at Mr. Ballantyne's, and reach Wiriwilta in good time the second day. I will see to have everything comfortable for you, Lily, my dear, before you come up. I wish you could accompany me. ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... beginning to be old. Even while he detested his own thoughts, they rode him. She was old, he winced. Old! He noted how the soft flesh was creasing into webby folds beneath her chin, below her eyes, at the base of her wrists. A patch of her throat had a minute roughness like the crumbs from a rubber eraser. Old! She was younger in years than himself, yet it was sickening to have her yearning up at him with rolling great eyes—as if, he shuddered, his own aunt were making love ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis

... representatives of ancestral force and quality as in older days were long lines of Claudii and Valerii. His conservative doctrine was a profound instinct, in part political, but in greater part moral. The accidental roughness of the symbol did not touch him, for the symbol was glorified by the sincerity of his faith and the compass ...
— Burke • John Morley

... supreme self-denial they went to work again. General Lauriston, who had been sent by the emperor to learn the cause of the new accident, pressed Eble's hand and, shedding tears, said to him: For God's sake, hasten! Without showing impatience, Eble, who generally had the roughness of a strong and proud soul, answered with kindness: You see what we are doing, and he turned to his men to encourage, to direct them, and notwithstanding his age—he was 54 years old—he plunged into that ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose

... owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery from colthood—though if all had their rights, he ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some Eastern plain instead of tugging ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... Captain Lingo, "would I be rude to a lady. I trust you will find my conduct towards the lady beyond reproach. There shall be no rudeness of any kind. Merely a quick stroke, and all will be over. No violence, no roughness of any kind; not a word to offend the most sensitive ears. A single stroke, and the affair is done. And let me tell you, I have here with me a Practitioner who is very expert in this sort of business: our friend Ketch, in fact, who was ...
— The Old Tobacco Shop - A True Account of What Befell a Little Boy in Search of Adventure • William Bowen

... trying to act at the same time like a beast of prey, a pure spirit and the "most generous of men." Too big an order clearly because he was nothing of a monster but just a common mortal, a little more self-willed and self-confident than most, may be, both in his roughness and in ...
— Chance • Joseph Conrad

... overhanging mass. She caught his arm with both hands. He told her to look up. Steep granite rock was above them all round, on one side dark, on the other mottled with the moon and the thousand shadows of its own roughness; over the gulf hung vaulted the blue, cloud-blotted sky, whence the moon seemed to look straight down upon her, asking what they were about, away from their kind, in such a place ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... away into the jungle because of her cruel stepmother, and, finding the house, had lived there ever since; and having finished her story, she began to cry. Then the Prince said to her, "Pretty lady, forgive me for my roughness; do not fear. I will take you home with me, and you shall be my wife." But the more he spoke to her the more frightened she got, so frightened that she did not understand what he said, and could do nothing but cry. Now she ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various

... Indians—Pampangos, who were willing to go to war, and gave much assistance, because of the damages received by them from the Cambales. They approached that country, which had never before been entered, by six routes; and although they were troubled by the roughness of the roads and the large brambles, they hid themselves and destroyed all the food and the crops which were either harvested or growing. In that region those whom they killed and took captive amount, men and women, to more than two thousand five ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair

... of emotion the power of self-control must never be lost; you must never allow yourself to sing in a slovenly, that is, in a heedless, way, or to exceed your powers, or even to reach their extreme limit. That would be synonymous with roughness, which should be excluded from every art, especially in the art of song. The listener must gain a pleasing impression from every tone, every expression of the singer; much more may be ...
— How to Sing - [Meine Gesangskunst] • Lilli Lehmann

... of the year, but especially at those when of custom he wore his crown, he would always have put on his bare body a rough hair shirt, that by its roughness his body might be restrained from excess, or more truly that all pride and vain glory, such as is apt to be engendered by pomp, ...
— Henry the Sixth - A Reprint of John Blacman's Memoir with Translation and Notes • John Blacman

... words with a superfluous quantity of breath. It is not broadher and widher that he should say, but the d, and every other consonant, should be neatly delivered by the tongue, with as little riot, clattering, or breathing as possible. Next let him drop the roughness or rolling of the r in all places but the beginning of syllables; he must not say stor-rum and far-rum, but let the word be heard in one smooth syllable. He should exercise himself until he can convert plaze into ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... another company of Cossacks formed a line across the street, from wall to wall, and swept everybody before it into stores, courtyards, and other openings. Even this did not do much good, for as soon as the horsemen passed, the mob fell in behind and cheered the Cossacks. There was no roughness, but at the same time it was easy to see that the crowd did not yet know to what extent the army could ...
— The Russian Revolution; The Jugo-Slav Movement • Alexander Petrunkevitch, Samuel Northrup Harper,

... evil way; eyes glittering and round and black as ink. After a time the mouth opened in a silent snarl, showing great white fangs and recurved simitars of teeth. The head was snow white, leperous in its scabby, scaly roughness, with here and there a patch of what looked like greenish fungus. From the rounded body trailed a short, unnatural, sickening growth of—feathers. Old and evil and very wise the Feathered Serpent seemed as his forked tongue flickered in and out and he stared ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... in the streets meant the encounter of roughness and rudeness which would now be thought intolerable. There were no police to keep order: if a man wanted order he might fight for it. Fights, indeed, were common in the streets: the waggoners, the hackney coachmen, the men with the wheelbarrows, ...
— The History of London • Walter Besant

... year, Thor had seen the seamy side of life, had lived, grown and developed among men. In his wanderings in the Klondike, the wild Northwest, in Panama, his experiences as cabin-boy, miner, cowboy, lumber-jack, and Canal Zone worker, he had existed where everything was roughness and violence, where brawn, not brain, usually held sway, where supremacy was won, kept, and lost by fists, spiked boots, or guns! In his adventurous career, young Thorwald had but seldom encountered the finer things of life, ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice

... with affectionate roughness. "I told you I was done with that. I bought 'em and paid for 'em, all right, with ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry

... sound. Henceforth farewell, then, feverish thirst of fame; 350 Farewell the longings for a poet's name; Perish my Muse—a wish 'bove all severe To him who ever held the Muses dear— If e'er her labours weaken to refine The generous roughness of a nervous line. Others affect the stiff and swelling phrase; Their Muse must walk in stilts, and strut in stays; The sense they murder, and the words transpose, Lest poetry approach too near to prose. See tortured ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill

... diluted may be used, but is dangerous in excess. Messrs Rivers in "The Miniature Fruit Garden" (p. 144) say: "Washing the parts affected with a mixture of soot, lime and sulphur will remove the roughness and restore the tree to health; the above mixed with skim milk is more enduring." As a believer from experience in soot and lime, I prefer this receipt, if the trees were ...
— The Book of Pears and Plums • Edward Bartrum

... a six-foot Irish-Canadian in early manhood, now led away to the log shanty where the very scarcity of luxuries and the roughness of their lives were sources of merriment. For the Colts, though born and bred in the backwoods of Canada, had lost nothing of the spirit that makes the Irish blood a world-wide synonym of ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton

... recourse to a common measure, which may decide the question with the utmost exactness; and this, I take it, is what gives mathematical knowledge a greater certainty than any other. But in things whose excess is not judged by greater or smaller, as smoothness and roughness, hardness and softness, darkness and light, the shades of colors, all these are very easily distinguished when the difference is any way considerable, but not when it is minute, for want of some common measures, which perhaps may never come to be discovered. In these nice cases, supposing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... gentlemen!" said the Captain in a quick imperious manner—the roughness of his old life on the Mississippi would still break out—"See here, gentlemen! It seems I'm not to know if we are to return from the Moon. Well!—Pass that for the present! But there is one ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne

... Of late he had begun to develop a manner which had just a hint of roughness in it sometimes. This manner was the expression of a strong inward effort he was making. If, as his mother believed, already Rosamund was able to live with the child, Dion's solitary possession of the woman he loved was definitely over, probably forever. Something within him which, perhaps, ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... I shall not." I felt a necessity for contradicting him; I was irritated with hunger, and irritated at seeing him there, and irritated at the continued roughness of ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

... passengers over a specified distance; and consequently the application of the steam-engine to traffic conducted on the railway line was a success. Many inventors at once jumped to the conclusion that, by making some fixed allowance for the greater roughness of an ordinary road, they would be able to construct a steam-traction engine that would suit exactly for road traffic. In a rough and rudimentary way an attempt to provide for the special effort required at steep or stony ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland

... survive in them. They expected from a new reign the same glory abroad, the same security at home, the same relative prosperity, with a yoke less rough and a discipline less severe, not understanding that the very roughness of the yoke and the severity of the discipline were conditions necessary to the duration of the work. The mercantile protective system, which had built up industry; the administration of taxes, which poured money into the State coffers; the economy, which immobilized this money in the treasury, hampered ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... may serve, and I can count upon Green. He is satisfied that Caryll befooled him at Maidstone, and that he kept the papers he carried despite the thoroughness of Green's investigations. Moreover, he was handled with some roughness by Caryll. For that and the other matter he asks redress—thirsts for it. He's a very willing tool, as I ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... With schoolboy roughness he flung his arm round her shoulders. She was a little taller than he, but she did not withdraw herself; she was curiously aware that her point of view was changing. She looked for an instant in his eyes, and then she laid her lips ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... at last, his voice unduly harsh, as if to cover emotion with its roughness, and they noticed that he ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady

... on so smoothly and to think of the roughness of the suitors' lives and deaths; to see all that full dress and ceremony and to think of the waste, and want, and beggared misery it represented; to consider that while the sickness of hope deferred was raging in so many hearts this polite show went calmly on from day to day, and year to ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... offended with this roughness, but ere he could so express himself, the object darted her own severe retort on Kirkpatrick, and then, turning to her husband, with an hysterical sob, exclaimed, "It is well seen what will be my fate when Wallace ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter

... mind! She imagines that a pleasant word may often be used to cover a treacherous action, and if a man is as rude and blunt as myself, for example, she prefers that he should be rude and blunt rather than that he should attempt to conceal his roughness by an amiability which it is not his nature to feel." Here he looked up at me from the careful scrutiny of his nearly flayed ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli

... the midshipmen that the defeat of Condor established Edgar as the most popular member of the mess. During the voyage out, Condor had already rendered himself obnoxious to the men by the roughness of his tone when speaking to them, and by his domineering manner whenever the officer of the watch was engaged elsewhere, and the report of the manner in which he had been punished excited great delight ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty

... pronounces, with great emphasis, that such self-sacrifice should be written in letters of gold. A unanimous sounding of her praises convinces Mrs. Swiggs that she is indeed a person of great importance. There is, however, a certain roughness of manner about her new friends, which does not harmonize with her notions of aristocracy. She questions within herself whether they represent the "first families" of New York. If the "first families" ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams

... extended itself not only over all Spain, but even round about to foreign nations. Multitudes from all parts of the world came to visit it. Many others were deterred by the difficulty for the journey, by the roughness and barrenness of those parts, and by the incursions of the Moors, who made captives many of the pilgrims. The canons of St. Eloy afterwards (the precise time is not known), with a desire of remedying these evils, built, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... have no buttons to the sharp weapons they prod and strike each other with in a sportive spirit. I have often witnessed the games of wild and half-wild horses with astonishment; for it seemed that broken bones must result from the sounding kicks they freely bestowed on one another. This roughness itself would be a sufficient cause for the action of the individual, sick and out of tune and untouched by the glad contagion of the others, in escaping from them; and to leave them would be to its advantage (and to that of the race) since, if not fatally ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... has been spread, it may be found that the surface is not so smooth as it should be. Any roughness that may occur, however, may be removed as soon as the icing has become entirely cold by dipping a clean silver knife into hot water and, as shown in Fig. 24, running it gently over the entire surface. This treatment takes only ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 4 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences

... deserved not. It might have been refused; but wherefore barb And venom the refusal with contempt? Why dash to earth and crush with heaviest scorn The grey-haired man, the faithful veteran? 75 Why to the baseness of his parentage Refer him with such cruel roughness, only Because he had a weak hour and forgot himself? But nature gives a sting e'en to the worm Which wanton power treads on in sport ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... divine in the tragedy, he was asking Pierre for particulars, when his son Luigi suddenly entered the room, breathless from having climbed the stairs so quickly and with his face full of anxious fear. He had just dismissed his contractors with impatient roughness, giving no thought to his serious financial position, the jeopardy in which his fortune was now placed, so anxious was he to be up above beside his father. And when he was there his first uneasy glance was for the old man, to make sure whether the priest by some imprudent word ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... of Cromwell's changes four Suffolk youths broke into a church at Dovercourt, tore down a wonder-working crucifix, and burned it in the fields. The suppression of the lesser monasteries was the signal for a new outburst of ribald insult to the old religion. The roughness, insolence, and extortion of the Commissioners sent to effect it drove the whole monastic body to despair. Their servants rode along the road with copes for doublets or tunicles for saddle-cloths, and scattered panic among the ...
— History of the English People, Volume III (of 8) - The Parliament, 1399-1461; The Monarchy 1461-1540 • John Richard Green

... was within five-and-twenty yards or so, hoping that the roughness of the ground would cause him to stumble and the shield to shift so that I could get a chance at him behind it. But I did not, so at last, again praying to St. Hubert, I drew the big bow till the string touched my ear, and let drive. The shaft, pointed with tempered steel, struck the shield full ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... to leave the place until about ten o'clock. They marched along the bank of the river, and made but eighteen miles in two days, when they were obliged to stop and build two rafts with which to cross the stream. Discovering that their rafts were very strong and able to withstand the roughness of the current, instead of crossing, they ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... the same old-fashioned phrases, and certain others, quite simple and familiar, but so placed by him, in such prominence, as to hint at a particular quality of taste on his part; and also, in the sad parts of his books, a sort of roughness, a tone that was almost harsh. And he himself, no doubt, realised that these were his principal attractions. For in his later books, if he had hit upon some great truth, or upon the name of an historic cathedral, he would break off his narrative, ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... to his roughness. In the midst of actual peril, impressions are apt to be cameo-cut in their preciseness, and she liked him all the more because he treated her quite roughly. Of course, the mere presence of a woman at such a time was a hindrance. But she was determined ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... to get along all right in this craft. But be careful at first, and don't try any frolicking when you're aboard. Remember, a canoe isn't a craft that can be handled with roughness. Don't anyone try to 'rock the boat,' either. In a canoe everyone has to sit steadily ...
— The High School Boys' Canoe Club • H. Irving Hancock

... the Americans pressed forward in a narrow file, until they reached the block-house and picket. Montgomery, who was himself in front, assisted with his own hands to cut down or pull up the pickets, and open a passage for his troops; but the excessive roughness and difficulty of the way had so lengthened his line of march, that he found it absolutely necessary to halt a few minutes, in order to collect a force with which he might venture to proceed. Having reassembled about two hundred men, whom ...
— An interesting journal of Abner Stocking of Chatham, Connecticut • Abner Stocking

... Bobbie at the cabin door, and flung her aside very roughly indeed; if they had been playing, such roughness would have made Bobbie weep with tears of rage and pain. Now, though he flung her on to the edge of the hold, so that her knee and her elbow were grazed and ...
— The Railway Children • E. Nesbit

... sole purpose of not being again left out of their invitation when the time comes. But I begin already to regret having done so, and any amount of enthusiasm cannot make me appreciate this abominable race of professors. But you will see by my having made the attempt that I wish to get rid of my roughness, in order to be quite amiable at your next visit. Did I recently write something stupid to the dear Child? I cannot remember exactly, but God must forgive me all my sins, just as I forgive Him many things in His world, and where God forgives, the Child should not be sulky. You ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)

... promises." Lanfrey, vol. i. pp. 201, says of this pamphlets "Common enough ideas, expressed in a style only remarkable for its 'Italianisms,' but becoming singularly firm and precise every time the author expresses his military views. Under an apparent roughness, we find in it a rare circumspection, leaving no hold on the ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... privation was the increasing roughness of the sea. It was a blithesome wind, rollicking across a sparkling carpet of blue, with the little white clouds in flocks above, like lambs at play. But the raft was more and more tossed about and the ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine

... All Signorelli's energies have again gone into the figures of the executioners, but, fine as they are, they are not treated with the same breadth as in the earlier picture, albeit the painting is free almost to roughness. The background, instead of the carved wall, now opens out of the court ...
— Luca Signorelli • Maud Cruttwell

... spiteful neglect every warning that came from Sir C.J. Napier, because he had a rough, fiery way of expressing his opinion of the folly of those who are perpetually giving occasion for warnings which they never heed,—as if in all ages roughness and fire had not been especial ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... that he was a gentleman, from those very reasons that proved he was not one; and to show himself a fine gentleman, by a behavior which seemed to insinuate he had never seen one. He was, moreover, a man of gallantry; at the age of seventy he had the finicalness of Sir Courtly Nice, with the roughness of Surly; and, while he was deaf himself, had a voice capable of ...
— Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon • Henry Fielding

... from the church itself. This encroachment over the ambulatory shows well in the illustration (fig. 7). The north triforium was the parish school, which, with its noises, interfered with the services of the church, and, with the roughness of its occupants, endangered the safety of the groining below, and of the north wall which then leaned dangerously from the upright. The whole area of the church, which had been raised in the fifteenth century, was filled with graves, many of which were dug below the ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... 'I was a warm, and might become a useful partisan; and he told the Duke of Grafton he hoped I might occasionally write a pamphlet for their administration.'[668] Warburton complains with characteristic roughness of 'the Church being bestrid by some lumpish minister.'[669] Even Dr. Johnson, that stout defender of the Established Church, and of everything connected with the administration of its affairs, was obliged to own that 'no man can now be made a bishop for his learning and piety; his ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... surprise, and perhaps with indignation; though, after a time, those of our sex, at last, become reconciled, if not pleased with it, because there is a kind of military frankness interwoven with the military roughness. Our ladies, however (I mean those who have seen other Courts, or remember our other coteries), complain loudly of this alteration of address, and of this fashionable innovation; and pretend that our military, under the notion of being frank, are rude, and by the negligence of ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... induration, or fixed discoloration, it was looked upon as visible evidence and demonstration of guilt. A physician or "chirurgeon" was required to be present at these examinations. In conducting them, there was liability to great roughness and unfeeling recklessness of treatment; and the whole procedure was barbarous and shocking to every just and delicate sensibility. There is reason to believe, that, in the trials here, there was more considerateness, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... and the author, avowedly a beginner, has succeeded in gaining a high position in the ranks of contemporary writers.... All his characters are delightful. In the heat of sensational incidents or droll scenes we stumble on observations that set us reflecting, and but for an occasional roughness of style—elliptical, Carlyle mannerisms—the whole is admirably ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen

... wrist, feeling her pulse beat madly. She really had a very little hand, though to his sensitive vision the roughness of the skin seemed to swell it to a size demanding a boxing-glove. He bought her six pairs of tan kid, in a beautiful cardboard box. He could ill afford the gift, and made one of his whimsical grimaces when he got the bill. The young lady who served ...
— Merely Mary Ann • Israel Zangwill

... but remnants of the old battlements and machicolations are interspersed with the homely chambers and earthen-tiled housetops; and all along its extent both grapevines and running flower-shrubs are encouraged to clamber and sport over the roughness of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... to know, be relevant in this regard. She was much younger than her husband, and had gone through a cruel experience for him. Moreover, she had proper ambitions and was accustomed to proper conventional refinements; so her husband's exterior roughness tried her sorely, not the less we may be sure because of her real pride in him. Wife and tailor combined could not, with any amount of money, have dressed him well. Once, though they kept a servant then, Lincoln thought it friendly to ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... all those waters which are on the side towards the sun. The outside or surface of the waters forming the seas of the moon and of the seas of our globe is always ruffled little or much, or more or less—and this roughness causes an extension of the numberless images of the sun which are repeated in the ridges and hollows, the sides and fronts of the innumerable waves; that is to say in as many different spots on each wave as our eyes find different positions to view them from. This could ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... very much agitated, opened a window; then she threw water into Samuel Brohl's face, rubbed his temples with a vivacity that was not altogether exempt from roughness, and made ...
— Samuel Brohl & Company • Victor Cherbuliez

... know. Maybe you would," the doctor said, with a roughness of tone intended to hide the sinking of his heart and the faltering of his voice. "All I know is, that you had better get away from here. Some of Sotillo's men may turn ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... out and ride around, or do something beside stick right here in this coulee like a—a cactus?" he demanded, with a roughness that somehow was grateful to her. "I'll bet you haven't been a mile from the ranch since Man brought you here. Why don't you go to town with him when he goes? It'd be a whole lot better for you—for both of you. Have you got acquainted with any of the women here ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower

... beats will serve you as a guide in testing by fifths, up to about an octave and a half above the highest tone of the temperament; but beyond this point they become so rapid as to be only discernible as degrees of roughness. The beats will serve as a guide in tuning octaves higher in the treble than the point at which the beats of the fifth become unavailable; and in tuning unisons, the beats are discernible almost ...
— Piano Tuning - A Simple and Accurate Method for Amateurs • J. Cree Fischer

... delicate matter to settle. The weather was another important consideration. June would be early enough, in all probability, and if the lake should be tolerably smooth the grand affair might come off some time in that month. Any roughness of the water would be unfavorable to the weaker crew. The rowing-course was on the eastern side of the lake, the starting-point being opposite the Anchor Tavern; from that three quarters of a mile to the south, where the turning-stake was fixed, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... the other side? There was the greatest difficulty, the greatest puzzle. She had not failed to understand the roughness of Aunt Maria's tones, her frightened eyes and the shaking of her hands. It would be very strange to see an end of him, to know that he would never be Prime Minister and so forth, to look on at a world ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope

... else. She was lying low upon the pony, clinging to his neck, too faint to cry out, too weak to stop the tears that slowly wet his mane. Then suddenly she was caught in the embrace of a low hanging branch, her hair tangled about its roughness. The pony struggled to gain his uncertain footing, the branch held her fast and the pony scrambled on, leaving his helpless rider behind him in a little huddled heap upon the rocky trail, swept from the saddle by the tough ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... crash of the waters. He was numbed. He wanted to weep, to vomit, to die, to sink away. But a voice was whispering to him: "You will have to go through with this. You are in charge of this." He thought of HIS wife and child, innocently asleep in the cleanly pureness of HIS home. And he felt the roughness of his coat-collar round his neck and the insecurity of his trousers. He passed out of the room, shutting the door. And across the yard he had a momentary glimpse of those nude nocturnal forms, unconsciously attitudinizing in the bakehouse. And down the stairs came the protests of Dick, driven ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... saw her purpose, and seating herself with her heels set against the roughness of the bark, grasped her by the ankles. Supporting some of her weight on one hand, with the other Rachel reached downwards all the length of her long arm, and just as the grasp of the old woman below was slackening, contrived to grip her by the wrist. The dwarf swung loose, hanging in the ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard

... problem. The physical problem may be stated as follows: to find in the physical world, or to construct from physical materials, a space of one of the kinds enumerated by the logical treatment of geometry. This problem derives its difficulty from the attempt to accommodate to the roughness and vagueness of the real world some system possessing the logical clearness and exactitude of pure mathematics. That this can be done with a certain degree of approximation is fairly evident If I see three people A, B, and C sitting in a row, I become aware of the ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell

... rides over roads that would strike terror into our souls, for even in towns the cobble stones are so awful that no one, who has not trudged over Finnish streets on a hot summer's day, can have any idea of the roughness. A Finlander does not mind the cobbles, for as he says, "they are cheap, and wear better than anything else, and, after all, we never actually live in the towns during summer, so the roads do not affect us; and for the other months of the year they ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie

... the modifications of limbs—the fin for swimming, the wing for flying, the foot for walking—so the fine wool for warmth, the hair for additional warmth and to protect the wool, and both together for a fabric to wear well in mountain roughness and ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... to the whole body, we proceed to those of particular parts. The affections of the tongue appear to be caused by contraction and dilation, but they have more of roughness or smoothness than is found in other affections. Earthy particles, entering into the small veins of the tongue which reach to the heart, when they melt into and dry up the little veins are astringent ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... in the language spoken in England before the period of French influence. That influence upon English at first seemed to be disastrous; the language became broken up and spoilt: but this was only for a time; and by and by, out of roughness and chaotic grammar there grew up a beautiful and stately speech meet for great poets to sing in, and great men and women to use. So it is that what for a time seems to be disastrous may one day be ...
— Our Catholic Heritage in English Literature of Pre-Conquest Days • Emily Hickey

... to no concealments—it answered for him before he spoke a word. "Don't tell your husband till I am gone," he said, with a roughness quite new in his sister's experience of him. "I know I only deserve to be laughed at; but it hurts me, ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... dryness of that season would make the streams and swamps in the path less formidable. An alternative route lay through Georgia; but its saving of distance was offset by the greater expanse of Indian territory to be crossed, the roughness of the road and the frequency of rivers. The viewing of the delta country, he thought, would require three or four months of inspection before a choice of location ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... controlling her emotion; then, bending forward, laid her lips upon the roughness of his hair. It might have been the stirring of the breeze, for all the sign ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... there," he said, in the roughness of an emotion she saw plainly, "what is there I wouldn't do to save your life? To save you from being knocked about, touched"—he was about to add "violated," the purity of her seemed so virginal, but he stopped ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... governess, "and out authority says this tree is distinguished by its leaves being in threes—the white pine, you know, has them in fives—by the rigidity and sharpness of the scales of its cones, by the roughness of its bark, and by the denseness of the brushes of its stiff, crowded leaves. Its usual height is from forty to fifty feet, but it is sometimes much taller. The trunk is not only rough, but very dark in color; and from this ...
— Among the Trees at Elmridge • Ella Rodman Church

... horn also one of them (in his time) that (indeed) shall hate the whore. As the sins of God's people brought them into captivity; so their sins can hold them there; yea, and when the time comes that grace must fetch them out, yet the oxen that draw this cart may stumble; and the way through roughness, may shake it sorely. However, heaven rules and over-rules; and by one means and another, as the captivity of Israel did seem to linger, so it came out at the time appointed; in the way that best pleased God, most profited them, and ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... explained that on such an occasion as this there need be no fear on that head; he and his brother were going away together, and there was a certain feeling of jollity about the trip which would divest Sir Hugh of his roughness. "And besides," said Archie, "as you will be there to see me off; he'll know that you're not going to stay yourself." Convinced by this, Doodles consented to ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope

... in front. A score or so, borne to the ground by the charge, cleared a path for the horsemen, and, without waiting the assault of the rest, the Knight wheeled his charger and led the way down the hill, almost at full gallop, despite the roughness of the descent: a flight of arrows despatched after them fell ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... turning to the lowering faces around him, he said, with a flash of his white teeth, "Well, boys, I'm calculating to leave the Divide in a few minutes to follow some friends in the buggy, and it seems to me only the square thing to stand the liquor for the crowd, without prejudice to any feeling or roughness there may be against me. Everybody who knows me knows that I'm generally there when the band plays, and I'm pretty sure to turn up for THAT sort of thing. So you'll just consider that I've had a good game on the Divide, and I'm reckoning ...
— The Three Partners • Bret Harte

... was at last satisfied he turned to the actual forgery, which was a longer matter and required greater skill and patience. Nothing was omitted which could make the fraud complete. The parchment assumed the exact shade under his marvellous manipulation. The smallest roughness was copied with faultless precision, and then by many hours of handling and the use of a little dust collected among the books in the library, he imparted to the whole the appearance of age which was indispensable. When he had finished he showed his work to ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... sank their heels in the broken rubbish and dragged on the rope until they could lay violent hands on Roddy's shoulders. With unnecessary roughness they pulled him out of the opening and let ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis

... ocean is probably little more than five miles, although Ross let down 27,000 feet of sounding-line in vain on one occasion. So that the earth's surface is very irregular; but its mountainous ridges and oceanic valleys are no greater things in proportion to its whole bulk, than the roughness of the rind of the orange it resembles in shape. The geological crust—that is to say, the total depth to which geologists suppose themselves to have reached in the way of observation—is no thicker in proportion ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various

... Rotunda rotondo. Rouble rublo. Rough (surface) malglata, malebena. Rough (rugged) sxtonplena. Rough (manner) malafabla. Rough, in the krude. Rough draft malneto. Roughen malglatigi. Roughness malglateco. Round rondigi. Round, to turn turni, turnigi. Round (form) ronda, rondforma. Round (of ladder) sxtupeto. Round (sentry) patrolo. Rouse eksciti. Rouse (waken) veki—igi. Rout malvenkego. Route vojo. Routine kutimo. Rove vagi. Row (noise) ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... said. "The sea is rough, and they can't do much at long range, and they won't get more than one shot close to us." At that moment the men in the British boat fired a volley, after the manner which was in vogue with British troops at that day. The two boats were not a hundred yards apart, but the roughness of the water, on which the row boat bobbed about like a cork, rendered the ...
— Captain Sam - The Boy Scouts of 1814 • George Cary Eggleston

... Paulette. He muttered something about all the decent men who'd met their death because he wouldn't listen to Paulette when she tried to tell him the truth about Macartney, damned him up and down, and turned to Paulette with a sweet sort of roughness: ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones

... boast. As Ann well know, he was almost as much at home in the water as he was on land. And presently, when it had been decided that only the three men should risk the roughness of the breakers, she stood watching him with quiet, unstinted admiration as, timing his plunge to a nicety, he met a large billow as it rose, dived sheer through its green depths, and emerged into the comparatively smooth water on ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... though she had struck him. He started and drew himself away. "Shut up, Bella," he said with boyish roughness and limped past her into ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt

... deferential, even toward his superiors; there was barely enough discretion in his roughness to save him from offending. Among those of his own station, he dispensed even with discretion. And he had looked upon Alwin with unfriendly eyes ever since Leif's first manifestation of interest ...
— The Thrall of Leif the Lucky • Ottilie A. Liljencrantz

... grace, Of his great goodness all that we have we purchase. By him are we like to have a better increase, Than ever we had by the law of Moses. In Moses' hard law we had not else but darkness, Figure and shadow. All was not else but night; Punishment for sin; much rigour, pain and roughness. An high change is there, where all is turned to light, Grace and remission anon will shine full bright. Never man lived that ever see God afore, Which now in our kind man's ruin will restore. Help me to give thanks to ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume I. • R. Dodsley

... John the whisky, and then with a certain roughness pushed his friend into the bedroom, and closed the door ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson

... running between beautiful green shores. There is a place in the river, near the mouth, which has somewhat the appearance of rapids, when the tide is coming in. This, the people say, is the site of a sunken city, whose towers and turrets make the roughness of the water. The whole city can be seen every seven years, but, as the sight is said to be unlucky, every body avoids it. The whole story is about as probable as the one I have told you of the damp and dubious palace of ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... man of about forty, lean and brown, with an unmistakable air of breeding about him that put her at her ease at once. His quiet manner was a supreme contrast to Mercer's roughness. She was quite sure that he ...
— Rosa Mundi and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... picture in him an everlasting grumbler. Not at all; he laughs with those who laugh, he chats and jokes with children, he rallies his housekeeper."[139] He was not so civil to all the world, and occasionally turned upon his pursuers with a word of most sardonic roughness.[140] But he could also be very generous. We find him pressing a loan from his scanty store on an outcast adventurer, and warning him, "When I lend (which happens rarely enough), 'tis my constant maxim never to count on repayment, nor ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... readily distinguish an Indian from a white man by the smell, and give a preference to the former. Yet the Indians, in general, are hard riders, and, however they may value their horses, treat them with great roughness and neglect. Occasionally the Cheyennes joined the white hunters in pursuit of the elk and buffalo; and when in the ardor of the chase, spared neither themselves nor their steeds, scouring the prairies at full speed, and plunging down precipices and frightful ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving

... "surely this quarrel might be arranged without fighting. Monsieur de Fontaine addressed my principal, doubtless under a misapprehension, with some roughness, which was not unnaturally resented. If Monsieur de Fontaine will express his regret, which he certainly could do without loss of dignity, for the manner in which he spoke; my principal would, I am sure, gladly ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty

... right, Giusippe, for the roughness in the ancient mosaics would, of course, break up the great plain surfaces and make them more interesting. But Salviati did Venice a service, nevertheless, in reviving the art. And there is, too, another virtue about mosaics, and that is ...
— The Story of Glass • Sara Ware Bassett

... when little conversation was encouraged. But after supper the real fun began. None love dancing more than Scots; so dancing must needs form the climax of every gathering for social enjoyment. The bashful roughness which characterized the commencement had worn off; lads and lasses were thoroughly enjoying the somewhat rare opportunity of taking part in so large an assembly; Archie Cattanach, the piper, was ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... this subject by the language, the essential attributes of mind. By this qualifier we wish it understood that mind, like body, has its accidental or acquired qualities. Vice, virtue, folly, wisdom, malignity and benevolence are not essential to mind, but like the accidents of matter known as roughness or smoothness, softness, hardness, blackness, etc., are merely qualities or attributes of its conduct. Vice is vicious action and virtue is virtuous action. But action arises from will and will from thought. All minds are free agents, being vicious or virtuous from their own choice. There ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various

... bundle as though of clothes that she had beside her, and, scared and alarmed, endeavoured to take flight; but before she had gone six paces she fell to the ground, her delicate feet being unable to bear the roughness of the stones; seeing which, the three hastened towards her, and the curate ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... uncertain, though in parts still placid and slow. There appeared also that which I take to be an infallible accompaniment of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers (however canalized or even overbuilt they are), I mean a certain roughness all about them and the stout protest of the hill-men: their stone cottages and their lonely paths off ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc

... inside of a ring. It was on the third finger of the left hand. He had never seen Eve wearing rings before. Suddenly he reached out and caught her hands in his. He turned them over with almost brutal roughness. Eve tried to withdraw them, but ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum

... to the whole separately and individually considered."—Murray's Gram. 8vo, ii, 24 and 190. "I understood him the best of all who spoke on the subject."—Murray's Key, 8vo, p. 192. "I understood him better than any other who spoke on the subject."—Ibid., "The roughness found on our entrance into the paths of virtue and learning, grow smoother as we advance."—Ib., p. 171. "The roughnesses," &c.—Murray's Key, 12mo, p 8. "Nothing promotes knowledge more than steady application, and a habit of observation."—Murray's ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... clear, and, to be clear, qualifications and attenuations must be reduced to a minimum. The reader will surely understand that many more "perhapses" and "abouts" were in the mind of the author than will be found in print; he will make, in his benevolence, due allowance for the roughness of that instrument, speech, applied to events, ideas, theories, things of beauty, as difficult to measure with rule as "the myst on Malverne hulles." He will know that when Saxons are described as having a sad, solemn genius, and not numbering ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... there was also time nearly every day for other things more in the line of his tastes; for even if he were hard on the boys in work hours, Raften saw to it that when they did play they should have a good time. His roughness and force made Yan afraid of him, and as it was Raften's way to say nothing until his mind was fully made up, and then say it "strong," Yan was left in doubt as to whether or ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... heard from some of the circus men accounts of the roughness and brutality of the miners, or at least of a certain class of them, for some were quiet and peaceable men, and he knew that there was no extreme of which they were not capable. Life is sweet, and to a ...
— The Young Acrobat of the Great North American Circus • Horatio Alger Jr.

... pipe of this size only when it is true in form and carefully laid, so that there shall be no retarding of the flow at the joints from the intrusion of mortar, or any other form of irregularity. Unless the joints are wiped quite smooth, the roughness remaining will serve as a nucleus for the accumulation of hair, shreds of cloth, and other matters which will hold silt and grease, and form in time a serious obstruction. Nothing smaller than six-inch pipe should be adopted for a street sewer. ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring

... of readings, with the fact that she often wrote in pencil and not always clearly, have at times thrown a good deal of responsibility upon her Editors. But all interference not absolutely inevitable has been avoided. The very roughness of her rendering is part of herself, and not lightly to be touched; for it seems in many cases that she intentionally avoided the smoother and ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson

... opportunity to belittle Luther's scholarship. Incentives to study at home, they say, he received none. His common school education was wretched. During his high school studies he was favored with good teachers, but hampered by his home-bred roughness and uncouthness and his poverty. He applied himself diligently to his studies, but gave no sign of being a genius. At the University of Erfurt, too, he was studious, but he seems to have made no great impression on the University. "He paid little attention to grammatical ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau

... life would be safe in making so long a journey with Mr Harrel in his present state of mind: his character, she said, was totally changed, his gaiety, good humour, and sprightliness were turned into roughness and moroseness, and, since his great losses at play, he was grown so fierce and furious, that to oppose him even in a trifle, rendered him quite outrageous ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... crushing up the thinner ice between them, having their edges shattered and piled up into pressure ridges—the surface of the polar sea during the winter may be one of almost unimaginable unevenness and roughness. ...
— The North Pole - Its Discovery in 1909 under the auspices of the Peary Arctic Club • Robert E. Peary

... oldest friends and her companion on many adventures. Jack's body was very crude and awkward, being formed of limbs of trees of different sizes, jointed with wooden pegs. But it was a substantial body and not likely to break or wear out, and when it was dressed the clothes covered much of its roughness. The head of Jack Pumpkinhead was, as you have guessed, a ripe pumpkin, with the eyes, nose and mouth carved upon one side. The pumpkin was stuck on Jack's wooden neck and was liable to get turned sidewise or backward and then he would ...
— Glinda of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... multiplied. Honest men of all ranks sought admission into them as into spontaneous Vigilance Committees to supply the place of the constabulary which ought to have been, but was not, established; and if they did their work with some roughness and irregularity, the work nevertheless was done. By the spring of 1797 they could place twenty thousand men at the disposition of the authorities. In 1798 they filled the ranks of the Yeomanry, and beyond all other ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... we should not describe the Country in it's Fatigues, it's Roughness, or it's Meanest, take these Few Considerations. For, as no Writer whom I have read (but that excellent Frenchman FONTENEL,) has raised his Shepherds and Shepherdesses above the vulgar and common sort of Neat-herds and Ploughers, I am oblig'd to dwell a little the longer ...
— A Full Enquiry into the Nature of the Pastoral (1717) • Thomas Purney

... put a small quantity of lard or suet into a clean frying pan, let it simmer a few minutes, then remove it; wipe the pan dry with a towel, and then put in a tablespoonful of butter. The smoothness of the pan is most essential, as the least particle of roughness will cause the omelet to stick. As a general rule, a small omelet can be made more successfully than a large one, it being much better to make two small ones of four eggs each, than to try double the number of eggs in one ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette

... of God's people brought them into captivity, so their sins can hold them there; yea, and when the time comes that grace must fetch them out, yet the oxen that draw this cart may stumble, and the way, through roughness, may shake it sorely. However, heaven rules and overrules: and by one means and another, as the captivity of Israel did seem to linger, so it came out at the time appointed, in the way that best pleased God, that most profited them, and that most confounded those that were their implacable ...
— The Riches of Bunyan • Jeremiah Rev. Chaplin

... cried she, "I have taken quite a fancy to Moreland? He is so good-natured, such a sterling character, and his roughness wears off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLV. July, 1844. Vol. LVI. • Various

... own lives, as the enemy were firing at us all the time from a fort situated a short distance from the river. The man was not at all willing at first to walk, so we dragged him by the leg along the ground for some way; but owing to the roughness of the road, he soon found that he preferred walking. We searched him and found a doubloon and a half on his person, which Towser and I divided equally between us. The colonel reprimanded me for running such a risk for one prisoner, but he was satisfied with my answer, ...
— The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence - A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns • William Lawrence

... history of Rome figures of women are rare, because only men dominated there, imposing everywhere the brute force, the roughness, and the egoism that lie at the base of their nature: they honoured the mater familias because she bore children and kept the slaves from stealing the flour from the bin and drinking the wine from the amphore on the sly. They despised the ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero

... Pharisee to invite Jesus to eat with him. "Yes, let John the Baptist come. Court life is dreary and monotonous enough. It will make a little diversion, like a breath of fresh air on a sultry day. It is worth risking a little roughness in his speech, and uncouthness in his manner, if only he while away an afternoon. Besides, it will please his following, which is considerable. Let him come, ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer

... I was saying, pray believe me that though from the roughness of my manner, being now unused to social intercourse, I seem to be ungracious and forbidding, I am grateful and mindful, and that in the tablets of my heart I have written you down as one in whom I could trust,—were it given to me ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope



Words linked to "Roughness" :   crudeness, granularity, tweediness, knot, disorderliness, unpleasantness, spininess, corrosion, bristliness, graininess, thorniness, corroding, burl, abrasiveness, storminess, scratchiness, hoarseness, intensification, rough, prickliness, smoothness, indentation, shagginess, texture, inelegance, scaliness, gruffness, rough water, bumpiness, erosion, slub, disorder, coarseness, nubbiness, huskiness



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