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Stony   /stˈoʊni/   Listen
Stony

adjective
(compar. stonier; superl. stoniest)
1.
Abounding in rocks or stones.  Synonyms: bouldered, bouldery, rocky.  "Stony ground" , "Bouldery beaches"
2.
Showing unfeeling resistance to tender feelings.  Synonyms: flint, flinty, granitic, obdurate.  "The child's misery would move even the most obdurate heart"
3.
Hard as granite.  Synonyms: granitelike, granitic, rocklike.



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"Stony" Quotes from Famous Books



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

... contemptuously consigned to the waste-basket as unworthy of answer. Long were the talks Constance and Marjorie had on the sore subject of Mary's unreasonable stand, and many were the plans proposed by which they might soften her stony little heart, but none of them were carried out. They were voiced, only to be laid ...
— Marjorie Dean - High School Sophomore • Pauline Lester

... French brandy and French beads. The Iroquois were no longer to pursue a timid foe across the great prairies of the valley of the Messasebe. The Ojibways were not to ambush the scattered parties of the Iroquois. The unambitious colonists of New England and New York were to be left to till their stony farms in quiet. Meantime, the fur trade, wasteful, licentious, unprofitable, was to extend onward and outward in all the marches of the West. From one end of the Great River of the West to the other the insignia of France and of France's king ...
— The Mississippi Bubble • Emerson Hough

... bottom is found sandstone, then alum-stone, then limestone, and above this red-stone, higher still slate, and lastly, trap." And, now that he has seen this, he descends again, and goes on board. He has seen Kinnakulla:—yes, the stony rock here, amidst the swelling verdure, showed him one heavy, thick stone finger, and most of the travellers think that they are like the devil, if they lay hold upon one finger, they have the body—but it is not always so. The least visited side of Kinnakulla is just the most characteristic, ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen

... did I o'erperch these walls; For stony limits cannot hold love out, And what love can do that dares love attempt; Therefore thy kinsmen ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed

... in sandy or stony regions, the color of his mane is more like that of his body, that is, yellow; so he appears to be very much like the color of the ...
— The Wonders of the Jungle, Book Two • Prince Sarath Ghosh

... completely encircled— the task occupying the entire day—without the discovery of the faintest trace or sign of the passage of the missing party, which was not at all surprising, for when the far side of the wood was reached the soil proved to be of so stony a character, thickly interspersed with great outcrops of rock, that even the most skilled and keen-eyed of trackers might have been excused for failing in the search for footprints on so unyielding a surface. It was a little puzzling to ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... along the stony streets, and crossed more than one bridge. The town seemed pervaded by water, a deep narrow stream like a canal, on which the houses looked, as if in feeble mockery of Venice—houses with steep crow-step gables, some of them richly decorated; narrow windows for the most ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon

... if it be a stiffe, blacke clay which you Plow, then can you not Plow too deepe, nor make your furrowes too bigge: if it be a rich hassell ground, and not much binding, then reasonable furrowes, laid closse, are the best: but if it be any binding, stony, or sandy ground, then you cannot make your furrowes too small. As touching the gouerning of your Plough, if you see shee taketh too much land, then you shall writh your left hand a little to the left side and raise ...
— The English Husbandman • Gervase Markham

... bottom, and bands of the same round the body (fig. 6.) Within this body, as in the starfish, a new body is gradually formed. Then, as you see in the picture, the inside of the egg-shaped body takes the form of a long stalk of stony plate, surmounted by a number of square plates pierced with holes, and these last only are destined to survive in the body of the adult. Soon after this stage is reached, the swimming body comes to rest, because the stalked body which it contains has reached its ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... hard at work trying to overcome its handicap now. It was struggling to impress on Baree that the time had now come when he must seek his own food. The fact impinged itself upon him slowly but steadily, and he began to think of the three or four shellfish he had caught and devoured on the stony creek bar near the windfall. He also remembered the open clamshell he had found, and the lusciousness of the tender morsel inside it. A new excitement began to possess him. He became, all ...
— Baree, Son of Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... Indus they crossed one of the ridges of mountains which are styled by the Arabian geographers the "Stony Girdles of the Earth." The highland robbers were subdued or extirpated; but great numbers of men and horses perished in the snow; the Emperor himself was let down a precipice on a portable scaffold—the ropes were one hundred and fifty cubits in length—and before ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... not see in my country what I see elsewhere,—the Past hanging like a mill-stone round a country's neck, or encrusted in stony layers over the living form; so that, to all intents ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... marvellous to tell, Lopped of its limbs, the olive, a mere stock, Still thrusts its root out from the sapless wood, And oft the branches of one kind we see Change to another's with no loss to rue, Pear-tree transformed the ingrafted apple yield, And stony cornels on the plum-tree blush. Come then, and learn what tilth to each belongs According to their kinds, ye husbandmen, And tame with culture the wild fruits, lest earth Lie idle. O blithe to make all Ismarus One forest of ...
— The Georgics • Virgil

... pictures exhibited is worth much more than two-and-sixpence. Borrowed from statuary, in the first place, the color of the paintings seems, as much as possible, to participate in it; they are mostly of a misty, stony green, dismal hue, as if they had been painted in a world where no color was. In every picture, there are, of course, white mantles, white urns, white columns, white statues—those oblige accomplishments of the sublime. There are the endless straight noses, long ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... mining population, above and below ground, filled the scene with animation. Great wagons of coal used to be passing night and day. The rails, with their rotten sleepers, now disused, were then constantly ground by the weight of wagons. Now stony roads took the place of the old mining tramways. James Starr felt as if he was traversing ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne

... and pleasure resort is near the head of Stony Creek, in Shenandoah County, Virginia. It is now universally known by the name of "Orkney Springs." It is beautifully situated near the eastern base of the Church mountain. From the yellow color of the sediment, left by its chalybeate waters, it first ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline

... buck doubled, he was round after him in fine style. I now followed him, leaving Bran and Lena to do their best, and at a killing pace we crossed the plain—through a narrow belt of trees, down a stony hollow, over another plain, through a small jungle, on entering which Killbuck was within a few ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker

... McGill, coming out. His face was a puzzle. His eyes had in them a stony stare as he gazed down at Philip. Then he descended slowly, like one moving in a dream. "Good Heavens," he said huskily, and only for Philip's ears, "do you know ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... source wholly heavenly and divine. Barclay, in quite Cartesian fashion, interprets it to be "a real spiritual Substance," "a substantial Seed" from another world, hidden away within man's soul at birth, lying there "like naked grain in stony ground," until the child is old enough to feel its stirrings and to determine by his own free choices of obedience or disobedience to its movings whether it shall grow and develop or not.[24] We plainly have here a double ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... never overtake us in the night," said Henry. "We've come to stony ground now, and the best trailers in the world couldn't follow ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler

... presided over by his uncle was near a poor hamlet surrounded by arid, stony tracts upon which grew neither tree nor bush. A Siberian temperature reigned in those parts, but the inclemencies of Nature were nothing to bother a little boy, and gave Manuel ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... out. Attempt to continue the exclusive privilege of caste to the free population, and you sow the seeds of a servile rebellion. Open your hands to give concessions and privileges to the emancipists, and you scatter good seed upon the stony rock, you vainly endeavour to satisfy the daughters of the horse-leech. But infuse a christian feeling into all classes, get them to meet in the same church, to kneel at the same table, to partake in the same spiritual blessings, ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... in which I was loved and made much of. And my mother, to think of whom was formerly sufficient to solace me in my troubles, was now the cause of my most poignant grief. I was, as it were, stabbing her with a knife. O God! was it then necessary that the path of duty should be so stony? I shall be derided by public opinion, and with all that the future unfolded itself before me pale and colourless. Ambition was powerless to remove the veil of sadness and regrets which infolded my heart. I cursed the fate which had enveloped me in such fatal contradictions. Moreover, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan

... Red and white butterflies fluttered around; down into the marble cistern ran splashing water from the crooked mouth of a blissfully drunken Satyr; but he sat motionless, like a pale shadow of that other one who, in a far land, at the very gates of the stony desert, also sat motionless ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

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

... great many islands. Here we killed great many bears. After we came to a most delightfull place for the number of stagges that weare there. Thence into a straight river. From thence weare forced to make many carriages through many stony mountains, where we made severall trappes for castors. We tooke above 200 castors there, and fleaced off the best skins. There weare some skins so well dressed that [they] held the oyle of beares as pure bottles. During ...
— Voyages of Peter Esprit Radisson • Peter Esprit Radisson

... can dare to fancy that to-day they will at last find the magic word that will soften marble-like despair, that will lift the stony lid from men's hearts, and will open eyes heavy with so ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz

... said; "take my hand, I will lead you to the light." We ran along the soft grass, following the sound of each other's feet, swiftly. A moment more and we were in the pass; the mist was lighter, and we could see our way. We rushed up the stony path fast and sure, till we reached the clear bright moonlight, blazing forth in silver splendour again. Far down below the velvet pall of mist lay thick and heavy, hiding the camp and its horses and ...
— Mr. Isaacs • F. Marion Crawford

... suffocating heat of our narrow ditch. And suddenly a few more voices take up the song—and the song bubbles up like a wave, growing stronger, louder, as though moving asunder the damp, heavy walls of our stony prison. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky

... his large nose, and a little parting at the corners of his wide mouth and compressed lips, the face might have been thought handsome. The eyes were light blue, set close together, but hard and stony, with no ray of mercy or humanity in them. He wore no beard, and his light brown hair was thin and dry, and carefully parted at the side. He was dressed in a snow-white pair of loose drilling trowsers, cut sailor fashion, straw slippers, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

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

... and animals had to move about along the embankments of countless canals. Now a land of roses, of the vine, olive, sugar-cane, and cotton, where the orange and lemon plants attain the size of our apple-trees, it was in primeval times an arid depression of the stony and sandy ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport

... the fading eyes, the grimed face turned bony, Open mouth gushing, fallen head, Lessening pressure of a hand shrunk, clammed, and stony O sudden spasm, ...
— Fanny Goes to War • Pat Beauchamp

... to empty his pockets on the table, and they began to search him, his eyes flashed with indignation, and a single tear dropped upon his flushed cheek. In an instant he had recovered his stony calmness, and stood up motionless, with his arms raised in the air so that the rough creatures about him could more conveniently ransack him from head to foot, to assure themselves that he had no suspicious ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau

... and many a mother's heart was torn with anguish on that day, when she pressed her noble boy to her bosom, for the last time, as she gave him to his country. Cold, stern men, who had never wept before, wept then—the flesh that was in their stony hearts yielded its unwilling tribute to ...
— The Soldier Boy; or, Tom Somers in the Army - A Story of the Great Rebellion • Oliver Optic

... cowered a child, a miserable squalid child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. And as I looked in the old woman's face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a face of youth—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the Shadow darted forth, and darkened over these phantoms as it had ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton

... really has grown to feel contempt for his master, and wishes to show it? They say no man is a hero to his valet; may it be that even stony-face Time himself is but a short-lived, puny mortal—a little greater than some others, that is all—to the dim eyes of this old servant of his? Has he, ticking, ticking, all these years, come at last to see into the littleness of that ...
— Clocks - From a volume entitled "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" • Jerome K. Jerome

... in health. The residencia stood on the crown of a stony plateau; on every side the mountains hemmed it about; only from the roof, where was a bartizan, there might be seen, between two peaks, a small segment of plain, blue with extreme distance. The air in these altitudes moved freely and largely; great clouds congregated ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson

... was like the lustre of ice; in all her features there was nothing of that human warmth which shows that sympathy has reached the soul beneath the mask of flesh it wears. The look was that of remoteness, of utter isolation. There was in its stony apathy, it seemed to him, the pathos which we find in the blind who show no film or speck over the organs of sight; for Nature had meant her to be lovely, and left out nothing but love. And yet the master could not help feeling that some instinct was ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... the stony and iron things of nature—call up associations of the darker passions: strange scenes of strife and bloodshed; struggles between red and white savages; and struggles hardly less fierce with the wild beasts of the forest. The rifle, the tomahawk, and the knife ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... that walking in the Spirit means walking in hope. If we trust God and do our best, we cannot despair. We shall find the road hard and stony at times, but let us hope and go steadily forward. We shall fall sometimes, we shall make mistakes, we shall suffer defeats, we shall be cast down, and weary. Still let us hope, and ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton

... that down thy Giants' Stair Shall thy old giants bring with thundering tread— The blind crusader standing stony there, And him, the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various

... impotence. See if thou wilt not to my words give ear, What stormy billows of resistless woe Will overwhelm thee. First the Almighty Sire Will with his thunder cleave this beetling rock, And bury thee beneath its shattered base, Within its stony arms enfolding thee; And many an age shall pass ere thou return To daylight. Then the winged hound of Zeus, The ravening eagle with devouring maw, Shall deeply trench thy quivering flesh and come, Day after day, an uninvited guest, To feast upon thy ulcerated heart. Of this thy agony ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith

... the shore, a rather forlorn figure. The peaks of the Mission Range, across the violet-shadowed mirror of Flathead Lake, were a sudden pure rose, in reflection of sunset, then stony, forbidding. Across the road, on the Barmberry porch, she could hear her father saying "Ah?" and ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis

... that extremity of physical and mental anguish more than they suit the serenity of bliss eternal. There is a wretch, twined round with fiends, gazing straight before him as he sinks; one half of his face is buried in his hand, the other fixed in a stony spasm of despair, foreshadowing perpetuity of hell. Nothing could express with sublimity of a higher order the sense of irremediable loss, eternal pain, a future endless without hope, than the rigid dignity of this not ignoble sinner's dread. Just below is the place to which ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... Oglio, and the Addua, which, in the winter or spring, by the fall of rains, or by the melting of the snows, are commonly swelled into broad and impetuous torrents. [37] But the season happened to be remarkably dry: and the Goths could traverse, without impediment, the wide and stony beds, whose centre was faintly marked by the course of a shallow stream. The bridge and passage of the Addua were secured by a strong detachment of the Gothic army; and as Alaric approached the walls, or rather the suburbs, of Milan, he enjoyed the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... Richard—and we need not doubt his accuracy of statement, for he was born five years before Richard fell at Bosworth—is the short, deformed youth, with his left shoulder higher than the right; crafty, stony-hearted, and cruel, so strikingly presented by Shakspeare, who takes More as his authority. "Not letting (sparing) to kiss whom he thought to kill ... friend and foe was indifferent where his advantage grew; he spared no man's death whose life withstood his purpose. He ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee

... his words, there came back, fresh upon me, that touching scene in the great man's life, when he lay upon his couch, surrounded by his family, and listened, for the last time, to the rippling of the river he had so well loved, over its stony bed. I pictured him to myself, faint, wan, dying, crushed both in mind and body by his honourable struggle, and hovering round him the phantoms of his own imagination—Waverley, Ravenswood, Jeanie Deans, Rob Roy, Caleb Balderstone, Dominie Sampson—all the familiar throng—with ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens

... where it lies, gradually sinking in the course of centuries deeper and deeper into the rock, and in new freshets receiving the aid of fresh stones, which are drawn into this trap and doomed to revolve there for an indefinite period, doing Sisyphus-like penance for stony sins, until they either wear out, or wear through the bottom of their prison, or else are released by some revolution of nature. There lie the stones of various sizes, from a pebble to a foot or two in diameter, some ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

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

... like saying something else, and I want to hope, Rosalie, that it won't always be like this. Let us talk about something else." But neither cared to speak for what seemed an hour. They were in sight of home before the stony silence was broken. "I may come over from Bonner Place to see you?" he asked at last. He was to cross the river the next day for a stay of a week or two at ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon

... comparatively uncommon is the fact that a strong prejudice exists against ivy in many minds. It is an erroneous notion that ivy injures buildings against the walls of which it is planted; it never injures a good wall, nor a sound house, but on the contrary, hides and softens the stony bareness of the one and adds beauty and freshness to the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various

... will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you. 26. A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. 27. And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in My statutes, and ye shall keep My judgments, and do them. 28. And ye shall dwell ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... would be interesting to the participants of the gay Newport cotillons of to-day to know the names of the dances with which the company regaled themselves a hundred years ago. They were "The Stony Point" (so named in honor of General Wayne), "Miss McDonald's Reel," "A Trip to Carlisle," "Freemason's Jig" and "The Faithful Shepherd." As Benoni Peckham, the fashionable hair-dresser of the day, advertises in the Newport Mercury a "large assortment of braids, commodes, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various

... both The first stout Martyr has[149] his glorious end Though stony-hard yet speedy; when ours comes I shall tryumph in our affliction. This adds some comfort to my troubled soule: I, that so many have depriv'd of breath, Shall winne two soules to accompany ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various

... discovery, that it was with difficulty he could be supported on his horse by the strong troopers who rode beside him. We tarried not for additional signs, but pushed on with all possible haste. The trail was rough, stony, and over a ledge of basaltic rocks, rendering progression not only tedious but difficult and dangerous; a false step of the horse, and the result might have proved fatal to the rider. The guide spurs ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... rich government behind them to vote billions for defense, no camps that were cities sprung up in a night, no swift trains to whirl them to their destination. Where they went they walked, through dust or mud and over the stony hills. The old tree saw them pass—in its youth and theirs—and by and by saw them return—fewer in numbers, and foot-sore, but triumphant. I mentioned it to Pop. ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine

... places, indicated by the care which Silvertip exercised in walking, the Indian in front of the captives turned and pointed where they were to step. They were hiding the trail. Silvertip hurried them over the stony places; went more slowly through the water, and picked his way carefully over the soft ground it became necessary to cross. At times he stopped, remaining ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey

... deeming it to be desirable for the future welfare of both countries that the state of doubt and uncertainty which has hitherto prevailed respecting the sovereignty and government of the territory on the northwest coast of America, lying westward of the Rocky or Stony Mountains, should be finally terminated by an amicable compromise of the rights mutually asserted by the two parties over the said territory, have respectively named plenipotentaries to treat and agree concerning the terms of such settlement, that ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... African free-city lay in a sort of plain taken between three round hills. One of them, the highest one, which is now protected by a bordj, must have been defended in old days by a castellum. Full-flowing waters moisten the land. To those coming from the stony regions about Constantine and Setif, or the vast bare plain of the Medjerda, Thagaste gives an impression of freshness and cool. It is a laughing place, full of greenery and running water. To the Africans it offers a picture of those northern countries ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand

... whole width of the canyon. Above, as I have said, this was a wild, red, stony gully in the mountains; but below it was a wooded dingle. And through this, I was told, there had gone a path between the mine and the Toll House—our natural north-west passage to civilisation. I found and followed it, clearing my way as I went through fallen branches ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... hundred men, and there we were watched by three times our number. There was a strong post on Cannington hill, between us and Bridgwater; another—and that the main body—between us and the ships, on a little, sharp hill crest across a stony valley two bowshots wide that lay between it and the fort; and so we ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... persistency that was almost pious and seemed like a religious rite. It should be observed that while he drank twice as much as did any other gentleman, not excepting Mr. Harley himself, it in no whit altered the stony propriety of his visage. There came no color to his cheek; nor did the piscatorial eye blaze up, but abode as pikelike as before. Also, with every bumper Mr. Gwynn became more rigid, and more rigid still, as though instead of wine he quaffed ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis

... stirring with the peep o' day. In these half wild spotted steers the habits of an earlier lineage persist. It must be long since they have made beds for themselves, but before lying down they turn themselves round and round as dogs do. They choose bare and stony ground, exposed fronts of westward facing hills, and lie down in companies. Usually by the end of the summer the cattle have been driven or gone of their own choosing to the mountain meadows. One year a maverick yearling, strayed or overlooked by the vaqueros, ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin

... But it was only the devastation wrought by men. As far as she could see the timber was down, and everywhere began to be manifested signs that led her to expect habitations. No cabins showed, however, in the next mile. They passed out of the timbered part of the gulch into one of rugged, bare, and stony slopes, with bunches of sparse alder here and there. The gulch turned at right angles and a great gray slope shut out sight of what lay beyond. But, once round that obstruction, Kells halted his ...
— The Border Legion • Zane Grey

... received the information in stony silence, and, declining tea, made her way to the station and mounted guard over her boxes until the train was due. With the exception of saying "Indeed!" on three or four occasions she kept silent all the way to Binchester, and, arrived there, departed ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs

... Edward began to find the exercise, to which he was unaccustomed, more fatiguing than he expected. The lingering twilight served to show them through this Serbonian bog, but deserted them almost totally at the bottom of a steep and very stony hill, which it was the travellers' next toilsome task to ascend. The night, however, was pleasant, and not dark; and Waverley, calling up mental energy to support personal fatigue, held on his march gallantly, though envying ...
— Waverley • Sir Walter Scott

... terribly sticky in winter, while the grass fields and stubbles are generally as dry as a bone. There is but a small percentage of clay in the soil, but a good deal of lime, and five inches down is the hard rock; therefore this light, stony soil never holds the rain, but allows it to percolate rapidly through, even as a sieve. When the sun is hot after a frost the ploughs "carry" certainly, but this is because they dry so quickly; they seldom remain thoroughly wet for any length of ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs

... enough to be born before the smoke-belching iron dragon had devoured the greater part of the life of its banks; when the landing-stairs descending into its waters, caressed by its tides, appeared to me like the loving arms of the villages clinging to it; when Calcutta, with her up-tilted nose and stony stare, had not completely disowned her foster-mother, rural Bengal, and had not surrendered body and soul to her wealthy paramour, the spirit of the ledger, bound in ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... we went, back and forward, over the stony shingle, and along its outer edge, but still without coming upon the tracks. Whither could the horse ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid

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

... existence. I fearlessly said, "I do not wish to live any longer on these terms; my feet are hanging in the grave, and I must soon die; my remedy is in the power of your highness; whether you may apply it or not, that you only know." At last the Almighty [164] softened the heart of that stony-hearted one; she became gracious and said, "Send immediately for the royal physicians." In a short time they came and assembled [around me]; they felt my pulse and examined my urine with much deliberation; at last it was settled in their praegnosis, that "this person ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... they uttered, Lay down on her bed in silence, 45 Hid her face, but made no answer; Lay there trembling, freezing, burning At the looks they cast upon her, At the fearful words they uttered. Forth into the empty forest 50 Rushed the maddened Hiawatha; In his heart was deadly sorrow, In his face a stony firmness; On his brow the sweat of anguish Started, but it froze and fell not. 55 Wrapped in furs and armed for hunting, With his mighty bow of ash-tree, With his quiver full of arrows, With his mittens, Minjekahwun, ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

... there were stretches of tender, vivid green where the young corn was springing; farther still, on either hand, the plain was yellow with mustard-flower; but in the immediate foreground it was bare and stony. A few thorny bushes pushed their straggling way through the dry soil, ineffectively as far as the grace of the landscape was concerned, for they merely served to emphasise the barren aridness of the land that stretched ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various

... he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills, "they will not take me in." He was absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie

... its good and its bad qualities, in all his complex interests, are exhibited with wonderful distinctness and address. Nor is it at the surface or the outward movements alone that we look; we are taught the mechanism of their characters, as well as shown it in action. The stony-hearted Despot himself must have been an object of peculiar study to the author. Narrow in his understanding, dead in his affections, from his birth the lord of Europe, Philip has existed all his days above men, not among them. Locked up within himself, a stranger ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... the twilight began to glimmer, when Morven started from his seat, and a trembling appeared to seize his limbs. His lips foamed; an agony and a fear possessed him; he writhed as a man whom the spear of a foeman has pierced with a mortal wound, and suddenly fell upon his face on the stony earth. ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... too there were compensations, which we grudged indeed to allow, but which I could easily, even if shyly, have named. One of these was Godey's Lady's Book, a sallow pile of which (it shows to me for sallow in the warmer and less stony light of the Wall Street of those days and through the smell of ancient anodynes) lay on Joey Bagstock's table for our beguilement while we waited: I was to encounter in Phiz's Dombey and Son that design for our tormentor's type. There is no doubt whatever that I succumbed to the spell of Godey, ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... the moonlight they marched on and on for hours. Crow was well named. He led them up the stony ridges where their footsteps left no mark, and where even a dog could not find their trail; down into the valleys and into the shallow streams where the running water would soon wash away all trace of their tracks; then out on the open plain, ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey

... was not much of a castle: to an ancient round tower, discomfortably habitable, had been added in the last century a rather large, defensible house. It stood on the edge of a gorge, crowning one of its stony hills of no great height. With scarce a tree to shelter it, the situation was very cold in winter, and it required a hardy breeding to live there in comfort. There was little of a garden, and the stables were somewhat ruinous. ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... with bare and rounded hills, and seamed with tortuous valleys which open out to the Euphrates, the Orontes, or the desert. Vast, slightly undulating plains succeed the table-lands: the soil is dry and stony, the streams are few in number and contain but little water. The Sajur flows into the Euphrates, the Afrin and the Karasu when united yield their tribute to the Orontes, while the others for the most part pour their waters into enclosed ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... the stormy sea, The lightning leaps with lurid light, The glad gull calls from lea to lea, The whistling whirlwind fills the night; Bears each a message to my love, Whose stony heart I faint ...
— Sir Ludar - A Story of the Days of the Great Queen Bess • Talbot Baines Reed

... great steps, up which the crowd continues to flock, and at the foot of a portico which stands erect with the rigid massiveness of a colossus against the dark night sky; at the foot also of a monster, who stares down upon us, with his big stony eyes, his cruel grimace ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... is being gradually stamped out under the cruel iron heel of the Period—a period not of wisdom, health, or beauty, but one of drunken delirium, in which the world rushes feverishly along, its eyes fixed on one hard, glittering, stony-featured idol—Gold. Education! Is it education to teach the young that their chances of happiness depend on being richer than their neighbours? Yet that is what it all tends to. Get on!—be successful! Trample on others, but push forward yourself! Money, money!—let its chink be ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... World. About six hundred years earlier, Vikings from Norway settled in Iceland, and from the Icelandic chronicles we learn that about 986 A.D. Eric the Red planted a colony in Greenland. His son, Leif Ericsson, about 1000 A.D., led a party south-westward to a stony country which was probably the coast of Labrador or Newfoundland. Going on southward, they came at last to a spot where wild grapes grew. To this spot, probably on the New England coast, Leif gave the name Vinland, spent the winter there, and in the spring went back to Greenland with a load ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster

... and this we can enjoy in England. Give me Tuscany in Middlesex or Berkshire, and the Valley of Ladies between Jack Straw's Castle and Harrow.... To me, Italy had a certain hard taste in the mouth: its mountains were too bare, its outlines too sharp, its lanes too stony, its voices too loud, its long summer too dusty. I longed to bathe myself in the grassy ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various

... corridor and along the passages which she had traversed a brief half-hour ago. From some distant church tower a clock tolled the hour of ten. It had then really only been little more than thirty brief minutes since first she had entered this grim building, which seemed less stony than the monsters who held authority within it; to her it seemed that centuries had gone over her head during that time. She felt like an old woman, unable to straighten her back or to steady her limbs; ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy

... "'The stony hills are dashed together, the giantesses totter; men tread the path of Hel, and heaven is cloven. The sun darkens, earth in ocean sinks, fall from heaven the bright stars, fire's breath assails the all-nourishing tree, towering fire ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London

... roses from the magic tree, and placed them upon his breast, and as the sun approached the western horizon, the comrades drew near to the gate which separated them from the world of common life. The stony barrier opened before the charmed words, and when they had emerged from its gloom, closed again with a clap of thunder. Never since has mortal man profaned ...
— Holidays at the Grange or A Week's Delight - Games and Stories for Parlor and Fireside • Emily Mayer Higgins

... bad land would profit by re-distribution. Many such live in the west and northwest of Ireland. Take a farmer of Donegal. There there's stony, boggy land. Fires must be built about the stones so that the soil will lose its grip upon them and they may be hauled away to help make fences. Immovable boulders are frequent, so frequent that the soil cannot ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell

... this minute, hunting the trail. They are all at it. I stopped at the Vale's on my way here, but they told me she was not at home. From the top step to the curb, on my way out, I was stopped four times by stony-faced young men all anxious to make good with their city editors. 'Was I a friend of the family? Did Miss Vale seem at all upset by the matter? Where was Allan Morris? What brought him so frequently, as Brolatsky said, to see Hume?' I believe they'd have ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre

... she knew where it left the road, and where it reentered it. So she kept on her course, and in a few minutes had reached the narrow country road. There were ruts here and there, and sometimes there were stony places; there were small hills, mostly rough; and there were few stretches of smooth road; but on went Olive; sometimes trying with much effort to make good time, and always with tears in her eyes, dimming the roadway, the prospect, and everything ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton

... said rather gallant things to me when the cheese and port came along, while the girls looked shocked, and Lady Katherine had a stony stare. I suppose he is like this because he is married. I wonder, though, if young married men are the same. I have never ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn

... wishing to take a liberty, were you always the same old pauper you've been since I've known you?" inquired Mahaffy. The judge maintained a stony silence. ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester

... country round Ajaccio differs much from the Cornice. There are very few olive-trees, nor is the cultivated ground backed up so immediately by stony mountains; but between the seashore and the hills there is plenty of space for pasture-land, and orchards of apricot and peach-trees, and orange gardens. This undulating champaign, green with meadows and ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds

... once or twice and tried to persuade myself that the whole thing was a delusion, but every time that I opened them there was the man still regarding me with the same stony, menacing stare. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle

... and cypress grove crown the "top of Fesole." The Dominican convent is situated at the bottom of the slope of olives, distinguished only by its narrow and low spire; a cypress avenue recedes from it towards Florence—a stony path, leading to the ancient Badia of Fiesole, descends in front of the three-arched loggia which protects the entrance to the church. No extended prospect is open to it; though over the low wall, and through the sharp, thickset olive leaves, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... this truth will occur to every one who is familiar with palaeontology; none is more suitable than the case of the so-called Belemnites. In the early days of the study of fossils, this name was given to certain elongated stony bodies, ending at one extremity in a conical point, and truncated at the other, which were commonly reputed to be thunderbolts, and as such to have descended from the sky. They are common enough in some parts of England; ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... "Then this stony smile must have but little expression to-day, for I do not come as a messenger of evil tidings; but if your royal highness will allow me to say so, as ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... certain monetary increments, and the deaths of other relatives from which an additional enlargement of his revenues might reasonably be expected. Indeed, he had not desired to speak of these matters at all, but the stony demeanor of Mrs. Makebelieve and the sullen aloofness of her daughter forced him, however reluctantly, to draw even ignoble weapons from his armory. He had not conceived they would be so obdurate: he had, in fact, imagined that the elder woman must be flattered by his offer to marry ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens

... cloister, and when complaints were heard at first in a whispering murmur, but anon in a stern loud voice of wroth and indignant remonstrance—when in fact the progressive, inquiring spirit of the reformation was taking root in what had hitherto been regarded as a hard, dry, stony soil. This coming tempest, only heard as yet like the lulling of a whisper, was nevertheless sufficiently loud to spread terror and dismay among the cowled habitants of the monasteries. That quietude and mental ease so indispensable to study—so requisite for the growth ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather

... her utmost speed down the steep stony track to Pardisla. New powers seemed to have come to her with the ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... while something in his manner suggested a subtle, cold-blooded, venomous nature. Those swift glances of his, which perpetually came and went with such bewildering rapidity, reminded me, not of the immovable, stony gaze of the serpent's lidless eyes, but of the flickering little forked tongue, that flickers, flickers, vanishes and flickers again, and is never for one moment at rest. Who was this man, and what did he there? Why was he, though manifestly not loved by anyone, ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... secret harmonies of Nature vibrate on his ear, and her fair proportions reveal themselves to his eye. He has a deep faith in the truth of God.' (P. 146.) 'The inspired man is one whose outward life derives all its radiance from the light within him. He walks through stony places by the light of his own soul, and stumbles not. No human motive is present to such a mind in its highest exultation—no love of praise—no desire of fame—no affection, no passion mingles with the divine afflatus, ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers

... awakened from a trance, With hollow and dim eyes and stony stare, Captivity with faltering step advance! Dripping and knotted was her coal-black hair; For she had long been hid, as in the grave; No sounds the silence of her prison broke, Nor one companion had she in her cave, Save Terror's dismal shape, that no word spoke; But to a stony ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles

... no longer desired her. The woman who had haunted his thoughts for over two years, for whom he had made quixotic sacrifices, for whom he had made a mat of his great body so that she should tread stony paths without hurt to her delicate feet, was his now for the taking—nobly self-offered—and with all the world as an apanage he could not have taken her. The phenomenon of sex he could not explain. Once he had desired her passionately. The ivory-white of her daintiness had fired his blood. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... he and John Eames were to dine out together at a certain house in that Bayswater district. It was a large mansion, if not made of stone yet looking very stony, with thirty windows at least, all of them with cut-stone frames, requiring, let me say, at least four thousand a year for its maintenance. And its owner, Dobbs Broughton, a man very well known both in the City and over ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope

... slipped out of the little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the house leading on to the fell. The rain had ceased, but the clouds hung low and threatening, and the close air was saturated with moisture. As she gained the bare fell, sounds of water met her on all sides. The river cried hoarsely ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... and the stony region of Ithome, and they that held Oechalia, the city of Oechalian Eurytus, these were commanded by the two sons of Aesculapius, skilled in the art of healing, Podalirius and Machaon. And with them ...
— The Iliad • Homer

... shore, the path suddenly ended on a rocky terrace, unshaded by trees, and directly over the water. Raspberry bushes made an enclosure there, in the center of which the stumps of two trees held a rough plank to make a seat. A stony beach curved inward from this point, the dark woods rose behind, and the soft waters made music in the hollows of the rock beneath her feet. Delightful with the perfume of the forest, the placid shores of Valcour, sun, ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith

... warned them, the way proved both long and difficult, leading as it did up and down wild ravines, along the dry and stony beds of mountain torrents, through rough and narrow passes, and by the edge of dizzy precipices where a single false step would have meant a fall of hundreds of feet through space; but after ten days ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... general to leave it at all doubtful who should walk by whose side, and who should have the opportunity of appreciating whose merits, but Lady Alicia was quite resolved that the Baron's blandishments should fall on stony ground. ...
— The Lunatic at Large • J. Storer Clouston

... in fury and loathing. The phrase, 'I pinched his little bottom for him,' sent her into a white, stony fury. She could not bear it, she wanted to have the woman taken out at once and strangled. And yet there the phrase was lodged in her mind for ever, beyond escape. She felt, one day, she would HAVE to tell him, to see ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence

... the beaten path for a little while, then left it and tramped out across the fields until he came to a strip of woodland that grew along a stony hillside. He followed this ridge back a short distance and presently emerged upon a sloping meadow that overhung a narrow ravine. Not two hundred yards distant loomed Idle Hour, somber and dark and massive. He found a stump on the edge of the woods and brushed ...
— The Just and the Unjust • Vaughan Kester

... went down by a naked and stony slope to the opposite base of the hill. Then Tutmosis, who had pushed ahead ...
— The Pharaoh and the Priest - An Historical Novel of Ancient Egypt • Boleslaw Prus

... hungry that I tried to get a sandwich out of the pannier, but something made a noise back in the cave, and I'm sure it was a rattle- snake buzzing!" added Barbara, trying to win sympathy from the stony- faced companions. ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... the inhabitants, as at Villerville, turn out en masse to welcome us. The streets, to be quite truthful, were as sedately quiet as any thoroughfares could well be, and proudly call themselves boulevards. The stony-faced gray houses presented a singularly chill front, considering their nationality. But neither the pallor of the streets nor their aspect of provincial calm had power to dampen the sense of our having returned to the world of cities. A girl issuing ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... upon the money-lender. There was no wrath in her face, no anger in her tones; only that horrid, stony purpose which Lablache dreaded. He wished she would hurl invective at him. He felt that it would have ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... passage through the Desert; and that it had thus been handed down through the various generations of men. In his own travels, there was no want of true philosophers here, there, and everywhere. But they were alone; they kept their science to themselves; and they fixed upon the inquirer a stony gaze, which petrified his heart. Pretenders, on the contrary, were as open as day—there was no end to their civilities: but their favours were expensive; they cost altogether, including his travelling expenses, about 13,000 crowns; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various

... was an improvement on Tom Thumb's' bread crumbs. One foot was out of the stirrup. I wrapped the reins around the pommel and clung on. There is a gopher hole—that means a broken leg for him, a clavicle and a few ribs for me. No; on we go. Ah, that stony brook ahead we soon must cross! Ye gods, so young and so fair! To perish thus, the toy ...
— A Woman Tenderfoot • Grace Gallatin Seton-Thompson

... Work of the Holy Spirit. We remind you, that He is able to renovate and sweetly incline the obstinate will, to soften and spiritualize the flinty heart. He saith: "I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of your flesh, and will give you an heart of flesh; that ye may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God." Do not listen to these declarations and promises of God supinely; but arise and earnestly plead them. Take ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd

... you'd think, sir," replied Thomas. "There's certain crops as thrives in stony land, an' a few miles north o' here, towards Huntingdon, the soil's mighty rich 'n' productive. Things ain't never as bad as they seem in this world, sir," he added, turning his persistently smiling face toward ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces on Vacation • Edith Van Dyne

... to her, gradually raising his voice.] — I've said it nowhere till this night, I'm telling you, for I've seen none the like of you the eleven long days I am walking the world, looking over a low ditch or a high ditch on my north or my south, into stony scattered fields, or scribes of bog, where you'd see young, limber girls, and fine prancing women ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge

... he could do he was carried downward, until suddenly he felt a terrible shock, as if he had been hurled against some stony surface, and the next he knew he was floating on the water near the north end of the lake, which was then quite tranquil. He had no difficulty in swimming to the ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood

... Edward Benden, with the black silence of oblivion over his future life. Whether the Holy Spirit of God ever took the stony heart out of him, and gave him a heart of flesh, God alone knows. For this, in its main features, is a true story, and there is no word to tell us what became of the husband and betrayer of ...
— All's Well - Alice's Victory • Emily Sarah Holt

... speaker with a gaze as stony as Antigone herself could have turned upon any impious jester who had hinted that Oedipus, in his blindness and banishment, was groping for some ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon

... VIRTUE is more than a shade or a sound, And Man may her voice, in this being, obey; And though ever he slip on the stony ground, Yet ever again to the godlike way. Though her wisdom our wisdom may not perceive, Yet the childlike spirit ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... testified to the value which they set upon his friendship. Although he looked upon himself as the least of men (cries of "No, no"), yet he should always be proud to remember that some of his criticisms had not fallen on stony ground. (Loud cheers.) He had in his pocket friendly letters from men whose eminence would electrify his hearers. (Sensation.) He would not read them (moans of despair) because that would be to break the seal of secrecy. (Loud cheers and singing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various

... or where this singular courtship had been carried on, I have not been able to learn; nor how she has been able, with the vinegar of her disposition, to soften the stony heart of old Nimrod: so, however, it is, and it has astonished every one. With all her ladyship's love of match-making, this last fume of Hymen's torch has been too much for her. She has endeavoured to reason with Mrs. Hannah, but ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving



Words linked to "Stony" :   rough, hard, granitic, unsmooth, heartless, stone, hardhearted



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