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Wizened   /wˈaɪzənd/   Listen
Wizened

adjective
1.
Lean and wrinkled by shrinkage as from age or illness.  Synonyms: shriveled, shrivelled, shrunken, withered, wizen.  "He looked shriveled and ill" , "A shrunken old man" , "A lanky scarecrow of a man with withered face and lantern jaws" , "He did well despite his withered arm" , "A wizened little man with frizzy grey hair"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Wizened" Quotes from Famous Books



... the golden salver, with the wizened pomegranate upon it, and left the room. When he was gone, Proserpina could not help coming close to the table, and looking at this poor specimen of dried fruit with a great deal of eagerness; for, to say the truth, on seeing ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... weeklies! But now he had to have the news, and tired as he was after the day's work, he would sit on his front porch with his ragged feet against a post, spelling out the despatches. Then he would stroll down to the cigar-stand of Comrade Stankewitz, a wizened-up little Roumanian Jew who had lived in Europe, and had a map, and would show Jimmie which was Russia, and why Germany marched across Belgium, and why England had to interfere. It was good to have a friend who was a man of ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair

... hotel, a leading inn at Bristol, was thrown into a wonderful flutter by the announcement that a very beautiful and fabulously wealthy lady, the Princess Cariboo, had just arrived by ship from an oriental port. Her agent, a swarthy and wizened little Asiatic, who spoke imperfect English, gave this information, and ordered the most sumptuous suite of rooms in the house. Of course, there was great activity in all manner of preparations; and the mysterious character of this lovely but high-born ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum

... Lesser Slave Lake, and had spent all her life there since. She had a numerous progeny which she bore to Kisiskakapo, "The man who stands still." She was now blind, and was partly led, partly carried into our tent—a small, thin, wizened woman, with keen features and a tongue as keen, which cackled and joked at a great rate with the crowd around her. It was almost awesome to look at this weird piece of antiquity, who was born in the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... form of pretending to be conceited. It was a sort of family joke, and as strangers to the family we did not like it.... As we came out through the narrow passage from Clifford's Inn to the Strand, Ewart suddenly pitched upon a wizened, spectacled little man in a vast felt hat and ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... I describe it? It was much sweeter afterwards, but now it was so dark and witchlike, so uncanny, almost wicked, so thin and full of inky shadows. She sat up in her bed, a wizened little goblin, and laughed a queer, dry, knowing laugh to herself, a laugh like the scraping of reeds in a solitary place. A strange black weariness seemed to be crushing down her brows, like the 'unwilling sleep' ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne

... the truant was found in the apple-loft, sitting in a corner upon a heap of straw, quite in the dark. She was discovered only by the munching of her little teeth; for she had found some wizened apples, and was busy devouring them. But my father actually did what he had said: a favorite spaniel had pups a few days after, and he took one of them in hand. In an incredibly short space of time, the long-drawn nose of Wagtail, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... be heard the rattling of the carts and the merry whistle of the drivers—the red-faced market woman is arranging fruit temptingly in front of her stall; the shopman in a small street is lowering shutters from his windows; the little old wizened woman has seated herself on the curb stone with a small supply of apples and candy; the one armed beggar has taken his accustomed place; the shop girls are hurrying to their places behind the counters, the brawny workman with muscles of iron, strides along to his days labor, ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt

... Duncan and to me began to take on a rather pathetic quality. The others in the office drifted gradually out of his life. Some of them died, some of them resigned, some of them worked on, plump or wizened parodies of their former selves. I was stouter than ever, and stiffer, and the top of Duncan's head was a shining cone. And the one interesting thing in our ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey

... dimity, a little old lady was lying between lavender-scented sheets. On her breast stood a tall silver candlestick which supported a well-worn volume of "The Mysteries of Udolpho," held open by a pair of silver snuffers. The old lady's face was sharp and wizened, and beneath her starched white nightcap rose the knots of her red flannel curlers. Her eyes, which were very small and black, held a flickering brightness like that ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... inaccessible,—who can measure the horror of it? Till now you have made your will the law of right and wrong, and read your life by no higher light than your own. You read it otherwise to-night, lying here helpless and alone. That lost key has unlocked the fair front of your complacency and revealed the wizened deformity behind it. You have been insane; but the anguish that would craze a sane man clears the mist from your reason. You behold the truth at last; but as the drowning man sees the ship pass ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... the rear, marched a small, lively, wizened little fellow, dressed as nearly as possible like the white man, and carrying as the badge of his office a bulging cotton umbrella and the kiboko—the slender, limber, ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al

... latter, trying to discover which of the two might be Geoffrey. A small, thin-faced man behind the Sheriff was no less eager to discover Montfichet in this favorable apparel; and evidently had sharper eyes than had Robin in piercing disguise. This wizened-faced fellow leaned back with satisfied smile, after one searching glance; then, drawing out his tablets, he wrote on them, and despatched his man in haste to ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick

... perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened; rattling about here like the dried kernel ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James

... indeed marvelous. Ganassi seemed to reign among the jungle folk as royally as any king. He chastised, praised, petted, and scolded; and one and all the beasts loved their wizened little master. Solemnly Ganassi went about his task. From his bosom he took a small object, smoothed, and caressed it. Piang trembled with excitement. Ganassi called each animal, and they responded ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart

... Antonia, wizened and dark, came and went silently. To the people of her race a wedding means a fiesta, a village hubbub, a dance, and varying degrees of drunkenness. She was not herself in this house of a wedding supper for two, and a prosaic attitude ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge

... hour the caravans were stopped, and the wonderful Jinx arrived. He was very short, not taller than Rosalie; he was so humpbacked, that he seemed to have no neck at all; and he had a very old and wizened and careworn face. It was hard to tell whether he was a man or a boy, he was so small in stature, and yet so sunken and shrivelled ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton

... inspectors at Ventimiglia is a small, wizened Frenchman, with a face as cold and impassive as the sand-blown Sphinx. He possesses among other accomplishments a nose, peculiar less for its shape than for its smell. He can "smell out" tobacco as a witch doctor in Zululand smells out a "devil." ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath

... spring should come and bring her a family of kittens, she would have to take on her own shoulders the whole burden of parental responsibility. Or, rather, the burden was already there, for if she did not find enough meat to keep herself in good health the babies would be weak and wizened and unpromising, with small chance of growing up to be a credit to her or a satisfaction to themselves. So she hunted night and day, and, on the whole, with very good results. To tell the truth, I think she ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert

... come about? That's easy tae guess. Sax months syne Lachlan didna ken what father meant, and the heart wes wizened in the breist o' him ...
— Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush • Ian Maclaren

... Jaffery's unmarried sister, as like to her brother as a little wizened raisin is to a fat, bursting ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke

... He was looking in at the door, but scurried away when the Sikh guard inside moved toward him. The little man wore a white canvas navy-cap; but his appearance was dirty and disreputable, and he had the aspect of a beggar. His visage was wizened and villainous and shot with pock-marks under a coppery stubble of red beard, and his little mole-like eyes were that close together that they seemed fastened ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore

... very nervous person, and it was not without much persuasion that I had succeeded in inducing him to join me in my camp under the shadow of the great rock. He feared that it would topple over and crush us, nor was he completely reassured until Saiyid Jasin—the chief of his followers—a shrunken, wizened little man of many wiles, had propped the stone up with a slender sapling, over which he had duly recited certain ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford

... with that little wizened thing who gave you the ring—that prim morsel of feminine propriety who has been clever enough to make you believe that her morality would suffice to make ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... Jessop—only of themselves. Many a father turned pale; many a mother melted into smothered tears. More than one honest countenance that five minutes before had beamed like the rising sun, all friendliness and jocularity, I saw shrink into a wizened, worldly face with greedy selfishness peering out of the corners of its eyes, eager to conceal its own alarms and dive as far as possible into ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... this: a face shrunken and pallid, on which no smile came; great eyes grown wan with gazing into darkness looking out beneath the shaven head, emptily, as the hollow eye-pits of a skull; a wizened halting form wasted by abstinence, sorrow, and prayer; a long wild beard of iron grey; thin blue-veined hands that ever trembled like a leaf; bowed shoulders and lessened limbs. Time and grief had done their work indeed; scarce could I think myself the same as when, ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... downwards from the hidden sun, making the world an enchanted place. And all the curious, fantastic, charming people that one meets, from the boy sitting on the cart-shaft, with all sorts of old love-histories hinted in his clear skin and large eye, to the wizened labourer in his quaint-cut, frowzy clothes, bill-hook in hand, a symbol of the patient work of the world. So helpless a crowd, so patient in trouble, so bewildered as to the meaning of it all; and zigzagged all across it, in nations, in families, in individuals, the ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... sat with his elbow on the desk and his head propped in his hand, and stared miserably at the floor. He had not had his clothes off for two nights, and he had scarcely taken time from his search to eat anything. His face looked old and wizened and haunted from the strain. Yet here and now he was called upon to make his great decision. On the one hand lay the old, helpless life with Kippy, and on the other a future of dazzling possibility with Guinevere. All of his submerged self suddenly ...
— Mr. Opp • Alice Hegan Rice

... hypothesis, of which he was now half-convinced, Stern nodded. By gesture-play he answered: Yes. Yes, this woman and he intended to drink of the water. The obeah-man, grinning, showed signs of lively interest. His eyes brightened, and a look of craft, of wizened cunning crept over ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... "Hola!" exclaimed Perault, a wizened, tough-looking little Frenchman, pulling up his pony with a jerk "Bo jou, Mam'selle," he added, ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... lump of love," called out a mellow voice; and there, close by, sat a wizened old woman, making flowers into nosegays. She had on a quilted hood as soft as her voice, but everything else about her was as hard as the door-stone ...
— Little Folks Astray • Sophia May (Rebecca Sophia Clarke)

... looked as if they saw nothing but Miss Quincey. Indeed, at the moment he had forgotten all about Rhoda Vivian, and did see nothing but the little figure in the bed looking more like a rather worn and wizened child than a middle-aged woman. He was very gentle and sympathetic; but for that his youth would have been terrible to her. As it was, Miss Quincey felt a little bit in awe of this clever doctor, who in spite of his cleverness looked so young, and not only so ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair

... and candles placed upon it. Papa entered just as I did, but by another door: whereupon the priest—a grey-headed old monk with a severe, elderly face—blessed him, and Papa kissed his small, squat, wizened hand. I ...
— Youth • Leo Tolstoy

... the upper world by the colour of the orange which he plays with; for the oranges of those who have just arrived are green; the oranges of those who have been longer dead are ripe; and the oranges of those who died long ago are dry and wizened. There is no night in that blessed land, and no sleep; for the eyes of the spirits are never weighed down with slumber. Sorrow and sickness, decrepitude and death never enter; even boredom is unknown. But it is only the nights, or rather the hours corresponding ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... a little to the scandal of some of the steady old country dowagers; for I had pictures of Boucher and Vanloo to decorate the principal apartments, in which the Cupids and Venuses were painted in a manner so natural, that I recollect the old wizened Countess of Frumpington pinning over the curtains of her bed, and sending her daughter, Lady Blanche Whalebone, to sleep with her waiting-woman, rather than allow her to lie in a chamber hung all over with looking-glasses, after the exact fashion of the ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray

... than you do, my Cherry,' said Wilmet, as she saw that the wizened old fairy look was come back. 'You have been worse ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly adjudged a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced and wrinkled, with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small, well-fleshed man, who seemed to my eye the most normal and least unintelligent specimen that had yet appeared. But Mr. Pike's eye was ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London

... man, with thin grey hair, which stood upright from his narrow head—what his age might have been it was impossible to guess; he was wizened, and dry, and grey, but still active enough on his legs when he had exchanged his slippers for his shoes; and as keen in all his senses as though years ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope

... politely as the great man passed through the office, and Gilray, the wizened senior clerk, opened the outer door. Jefferson Edwards turned as he passed him and clapped him ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... picture in a series of advertisements of some marvellous patent food, and we wondered if she would ever grow like the fat and flourishing last baby of the series. For two months this state of things continued; she grew more wizened every day; and the uncanny spider-limbs and attitude gave her the air of not being a human baby at all, but a terrible little specimen which ought not to be on view but should be hidden safely away ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael

... appeared—a wizened woman with a face like that of a witch. Von Holzen pointed upward to the room above them. ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... brightly lighted, evidently a young lady's boudoir. This much his first glance showed Jack. It showed him also two women—one young and very beautiful, the other wizened and monkey-like, both terrified and speechless. They were Don Fernandez' daughter, Rafaela, and her duenna or chaperone, ...
— The Radio Boys on the Mexican Border • Gerald Breckenridge

... again after a hasty greeting. Miss Prince lived that morning over again as she stood there, old and gray and alone in the world. She could see again the great weather-beaten and tar-darkened ship, and even the wizened monkey which belonged to one of the sailors. She lingered at her father's side admiringly, and felt the tears come into her eyes once more when he gave her a taste of the fiery contents of his tumbler. ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... and when he heard our business was to sell a jewel, left us in a stone-floored hall or lobby, while he went upstairs to ask whether his master would see us. A few minutes later the stairs creaked, and Aldobrand himself came down. He was a little wizened man with yellow skin and deep wrinkles, not less than seventy years old; and I saw he wore shoes of polished leather, silver-buckled, and tilted-heeled to add to his stature. He began speaking to us from the landing, not coming down into the hall, ...
— Moonfleet • J. Meade Falkner

... to the wrong house," she said curtly, "this is Madame de Lera's villa." Then, as she caught sight of the Pargeters' chauffeur, a more amiable look stole over her wizened face,—"Pardon, perhaps Monsieur has brought a letter from Madame Pargeter?" She wiped her hand on her ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes

... Helen, she liked him. She had liked him for five years, ever since her mother had pointed him out on the platform of Knype Railway Station. She saw him closer now. He was older than she had been picturing him; indeed, the lines on his little, rather wizened face, and the minute sproutings of grey-white hair in certain spots on his reddish chin, where he had shaved himself badly, caused her somehow to feel quite sad. She thought of him as "a dear old thing," and then as "a dear old darling." Yes, old, very old! Nevertheless, she felt ...
— Helen with the High Hand (2nd ed.) • Arnold Bennett

... double-barreled fowling-piece, the only gun on board, and fired point blank at the savages. But the women were paddling away vigorously, and the shot splashed in the water on all sides of the canoe, though a howl and a series of violent contortions showed that one, at least, of the pellets had stung the wizened Indian whom Suarez believed ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy

... Uncle Israel's wizened old face, with its fringe of white whisker, beamed with the joy of a scientist who has made a new and important discovery. He had a long, hooked nose, and was painfully near-sighted, but refused to wear glasses. ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed

... came to the top of the low, rolling hill, and ahead in the darkness there gleamed a tiny, wizened light set in a blotch of blackness. Under the great white stars it burned a sickly red and seemed out ...
— A Voice in the Wilderness • Grace Livingston Hill

... reassuring; more, was pathetically glad and proud. He petted Emeline into a sort of reluctant joy, and the attitude of her mother and sisters and the few women she knew was likewise flattering. Important, self-absorbed, she waited her appointed days, and in the early winter a wizened, mottled little daughter was born. Julia was the name Emeline had chosen for a girl, and Julia was the name duly given her by the radiant and ecstatic George in the very first hour of her life. Emeline had lost interest in the name—indeed, in the child and her father ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris

... la Borne looked out through the wizened branches of his stunted trees, to the white-flecked sea rolling in below. The Princess was right. He knew that she was right. Those other thoughts were little short of madness. Jeanne was no coquette at heart, but she was a child. She had great ...
— Jeanne of the Marshes • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Judgment of Daniel." That exhibition, which most people, who know anything about painting in its highest style of religious and monumental art, thought a most interesting display of a painter's career, is described by this most genial of critics as "acres of pallid purple canvases, with wizened saints and virgins ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler

... standing with them. Among the women, of whom several had babies in their arms, was the thin woman with the baby who had the patchwork cap on its head. She held lightly in her arms the bloodless infant, who kept strangely smiling all over its wizened little face, and continually moving its ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... was a little cockney Englishman, a fugitive, like all his countrymen, from the horror which had stricken England suddenly and left her wallowing in her life blood. He looked up at Lance, and a smile broke forth on his wizened, sharp little face. ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various

... Barton's face was wizened and worried ... but, when we took our morning shower, after exercise, under the lifted gates of the dam, his body showed like a pyramid of perfect muscles ... though his legs—one of the boys who had known him a long time said his chief ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp

... last he sat upon the table-tomb. He had escaped notice from the tenements all the morning because the view from most of the windows was blocked by washings, hung out and dripping, then freezing and clapping against the old tombs. It was half-past three o'clock when a tiny, wizened face popped out of one of the rude little windows in the decayed Cunzie Neuk at the bottom of Candlemakers Row. Crippled Tammy Barr called out in ...
— Greyfriars Bobby • Eleanor Atkinson

... bidden, and as he opened the door a flash of lightning showed him, standing at the threshold, a little wizened old man with a small ...
— The Golden Spears - And Other Fairy Tales • Edmund Leamy

... a moment, how they had grown shrunken, and wizened, and old! For out of the radiance of revelation, as Christ of old spoke to His disciples, so now the spirit of Alleghenia ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... don't nobody know more 'bout that, and there ain't nobody had as much of it done to 'em as I have," said a wizened old woman. "I know nobody could stand what I have stood. The first I knowed 'bout conjuration was when a woman named Lucinda hurt my sister. She was always a 'big me,' and her chillun was better than anybody elses. Well her oldest child got pregnant and that worried ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves - Georgia Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration

... colonel's desk sat, or rather lounged, another officer, encased in a uniform so brilliant that it arrested the eye before one could discover its contents. These were a wizened, weather-beaten man of advanced age, yet rugged as hickory. His eyes had a periodical squint; his brows wore a persistent frown. There was a broad scar on his left cheek and another across his forehead. A warrior who had seen service, ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces in the Red Cross • Edith Van Dyne

... Chapel Street, one of those streets in the old North Town of Lowestoft which have seen better days. A wizened, bent, white-haired old lady answered my knock, after a preliminary inspection from a third- floor window of my appearance. This, I learnt afterwards, was old Mrs. Capps, with whom Posh had lodged since the death of his wife, ...
— Edward FitzGerald and "Posh" - "Herring Merchants" • James Blyth

... like him in Ghawalkhand, but she knew him by the peculiar, gibbering movement of the wiry beard that protruded from his chuddah. He was repulsive, but in a fashion fascinating. He made her think of a wizened old monkey who had wandered ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... are often little better than wood-ashes—there is small sign of the sap, and the leafy freshness, and the bursting buds that were once there; but wherever we see wood-ashes, we know that all that early fullness of life must have been. I, at least, hardly ever look at a bent old man, or a wizened old woman, but I see also, with my mind's eye, that Past of which they are the shrunken remnant, and the unfinished romance of rosy cheeks and bright eyes seems sometimes of feeble interest and significance, compared ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot

... mourning, with moustaches of iron-gray carefully waxed and twisted around a pair of lantern-jaws. The monstrous hat and prodigious feather, the enormous ruff and exaggerated trunk-hose, contrasting with a frame shrivelled and wizened, all belonged to a century previous. Yet Father Jose was not astonished. His adventurous life and poetic imagination, continually on the look-out for the marvellous, gave him a certain advantage over the practical and material minded. He instantly detected ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... was a small, wizened old man, of obsolete cut, but with remarkably up-to-date manners, and a pair of keen little eyes, penetrating as Roentgen rays. His hair was weedy, and his clothes snuffy and ill-fitting; but spite of this there was something ...
— A Girl Among the Anarchists • Isabel Meredith

... live until I am seventy— upon this couch! Oh, I shall go mad—I am going mad—I can't bear it a moment longer. The last ten months have seemed like a life-time, but if it goes on year after year; oh, Babs, year after year until I am old—an old, old woman with grey hair and a wizened face, left alone, with no one to care for me! Oh, yes, yes, I know what you would say, but father and mother will be dead, and you will be married in a home of your own, and Spencer very likely at the other end of the ...
— The Heart of Una Sackville • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... at him, his mind occupied with vague garrison rumors connected with this odd personality. The name had long been a familiar one, and he had often had the man pictured out before him, just such a wizened face and hunched-up figure, half crazed, at times malicious, yet keen and absolutely devoid of fear; acknowledged as the best scout in all the Indian country, a daring rider, an incomparable trailer, tireless, patient, and as tricky and treacherous as the wily savages he was ...
— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... dark forest where people seldom went, lived a wizened old Alan. [70] The skin on her wrinkled face was as tough as a carabao hide, and her long arms with fingers pointing back from the wrist were horrible to look at. Now this frightful creature had a son whose name was Sayen, and he was as handsome as his mother was ugly. He was ...
— Philippine Folk Tales • Mabel Cook Cole

... the dinner-bell rang they were feeling at home in their new quarters. At the table they met the usual group of village boarders: the Brann brothers, newsdealers; old man Troutt, who ran the livery-stable—and smelled of it; and a small, dark, and wizened woman who kept the millinery store. The others, who came in late, were clerks in the ...
— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... it, and if he had any idea who had played that prank. I looked to his pew; yes, there he sat, rosy and beaming, bland as ever! I looked for old Peter Dexter, president of the Dexter Trust Company—yes, he was in his pew, wizened and hunched up, prematurely bald. And Stuyvesant Gunning, of the Fidelity National—they were all here, the masters of the city's finance and the pillars of "law and order." Some wag had remarked if you wanted to call directors' meeting after the ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair

... established, the school had been in charge of a very singular little old woman. Nobody had ever known where she came from. The benevolent lady who founded the institution, had brought her to the door one morning in her coach, and the neighbors had seen the little brown, wizened creature, with a most extraordinary gown on, alight and enter. This was all any one had ever known about her. In fact, the benevolent lady had come upon her in the course of her travels in a little German town, sitting in a garret window, behind a little box-garden of violets, sewing patchwork. After ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins

... and wasn't going to leave any room for doubt this time. Didn't propose to have people sizing his wife up for one of his ancestors any more. So he married Lulu Littlebrown, who was just turned eighteen. Chauncey was over fifty then, and wizened up like a late pippin that has been out overnight in ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... at seven in the morning he came to her lodging, in complete armor. From the open helmet his wrinkled face, showing like a wizened nut in a shell, smiled ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell

... earlier flowers had faded; but the pinks and the poppies were still rich in blood; and the sunflower sturdily held up its yellow face like 'a wizened sorcerer of old,' as a fair and gifted friend of my acquaintance puts it. The cottage and the grounds about it were the property of an English gentleman of taste and means. The nearest dwelling had an air of luxury, and round about it stretched wide areas of land ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins

... seemed to combine the functions of station agent and baggage hustler approached, wheeling a truck. He was a small man, gray-headed, with a wrinkled, wizened face, and eyes of faded blue. To him the ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm

... his tree against a wall and began gravely untying the wizened little specimen from his branch, then handed him into the eagerly outstretched hands of Faith with a superb smile, as if he were some great potentate conferring a priceless boon upon a beloved subject. Not that he was anything but the poorest fellah,[2] with scarce ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry

... brushed the soiled table-cloth before them with a towel on his arm, covered its worst stains with a napkin, and brought them, in their order, the vermicelli soup, the fried fish, the cheese-strewn spaghetti, the veal cutlets, the tepid roast fowl and salad, and the wizened pear and coffee which form ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... ever see such a horror?" he asked, pointing it out to his companion; "a curio for ugliness, and just the sort of monster Mrs. Malone would love. I'll try if I can get hold of it. What's the price of the China demon?" he inquired of a wizened old woman, who wore a bashed black bonnet and a pair of ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker

... curtly, as she reached the doorway of the little office, and paused on the threshold. Shifty little black eyes met hers, as the bald head fringed with untrimmed gray hair, was lifted from a battered desk, and the wizened face of an old man was disclosed under the rays of the tin-shaded lamp. He grinned suddenly, showing discolored teeth—and instinctively she drew back a little. He was an uninviting and ...
— The White Moll • Frank L. Packard

... hill Dunchuach, so tranquil, and the bosky deeps of Shira Glen that she knew so well in dusky evenings and in moonlight, and must ever tenant, in her fancy, with the man she used to meet there. Often she would turn her back upon that wizened atomy of quirks and false ideals, and let her bosom pant ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro

... successive ships to whom through many long years he had given the best of a seaman's care. And never a command in sight. Not once!—"I haven't somehow the cut of a skipper about me," he meditated, placidly, while the shipkeeper (who had taken possession of the galley), a wizened old man with bleared eyes, cursed him in whispers for "hanging about so."—"Now, Creighton," he pursued the unenvious train of thought, "quite a gentleman... swell friends... will get on. Fine young fellow... a little more experience." He got up and shook himself. "I'll be back first thing ...
— The Nigger Of The "Narcissus" - A Tale Of The Forecastle • Joseph Conrad

... that we come to a sea-anchor. He knew that we continued to run only in the hope that the decree of the lots might not have to be carried out. He was a noble man. So was Captain Nicholl noble, whose frosty eyes had wizened to points of steel. And in such noble company how could I be less noble? I thanked God repeatedly, through that long afternoon of peril, for the privilege of having known two such men. God and the right dwelt in them and no matter what my poor fate might be, I could but feel well recompensed ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London

... always thought of Frenchmen as small men; for there was not one of that first company who could not have picked me up as if I had been a child, and their great hats made them look taller yet. They were hard, wizened, wiry fellows too, with fierce puckered eyes and bristling moustaches, old soldiers who had fought and fought, week in, week out, for many a year. And then, as I stood with my finger upon the trigger waiting for the word to fire, my eye fell full upon the mounted officer with his ...
— The Great Shadow and Other Napoleonic Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... mum," counselled her companion; and the girl, going on her knees, raised the head, and administered a second swallow of the brandy. She did not resume her seat, but kept her arm about the boy, in an attempt to render his position easier. It was a wizened, pinched little face she gazed down at, and now the mouth was drawn as if there was physical suffering, even in the unconsciousness. Neither head nor hands had apparently ever known soap, but the dirt only gave picturesqueness, and, indeed, to Miss Durant an added pathos; and ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford

... under his son's roof in guise of a servant; but the son said, "No; we fought the world together, and now that it seeks to do me honor, you shall share all the benefits." And Turner never smiled when the little, wizened, old man would whisper to some visitor, "Yes, yes; Joseph is the greatest artist in England, and I am ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... Mollie, enjoying the sensation she was making. "He was an awfully wizened old man, and when he heard we were from Pine Island—well, he told us some mighty ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope

... wizened face was thrust inside Oliver's bedroom door. He was shaking with terror, his eyes almost starting from ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... side. He was a giant of a man, past middle age. His face was so weather-beaten that his skin was like leather. His eyes were blue as only a sailor's eyes can be. On one of the man's shoulders perched a wizened little monkey that every now and then tugged at its master's grizzled hair or chattered ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers

... He was a man of between forty and fifty, thin and wizened. Petra and he got into conversation, while the boy and a little urchin continued to heap up the old shoes. Manuel was looking on, when the boy said ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja

... The wizened little old man, walking with difficulty by the aid of a staff, but armed in proof, with plumes waving gallantly from his iron headpiece, and with his rapier at his side, ordered a chair to be brought to the river's edge. Then calmly seating himself ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... to corner was not easily accomplished. He was a newly fledged reporter, and Amarilly had all the instinct of the lowly for localities. She turned and doubled and dodged successfully. By a course circuitous she returned to Hebrew haunts, this time to seek, one Abram Canter, a little wizened, gnome-like Jew. Assuring herself that there was no other than the proprietor within, Amarilly entered and handed ...
— Amarilly of Clothes-line Alley • Belle K. Maniates

... tyrant,' it is confessed, contrived somehow or other to be popular enough. Mr. Froude tells us the reasons. He was not born a bloated tyrant, any more than Queen Elizabeth (though the fact is not generally known) was born a wizened old woman. He was from youth, till he was long past his grand climacteric, a very handsome, powerful, and active man, temperate in his habits, good-humoured, frank and honest in his speech (as even his enemies are forced to confess). He seems to ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley

... name in to Hayle, Leglosse and I keeping in the background as much as possible. We descended from the carriage and Leglosse rang the bell which we discovered on the wall; presently the door was opened, and a wizened-up little man made his appearance before us. An animated conversation ensued, from which it transpired that the new occupant of the villa was now in the pavilion at the foot ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby

... and a wizened little man appeared suddenly, having evidently waited outside the door ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy

... work one day myself, In the castle ditch where the foxglove grows, A wrinkled, wizened and bearded elf, Spectacles stuck on the top of his nose, Silver buckles to his hose, Leather apron, shoe in ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester

... to herself—a wizened, sallow-faced Macchiavellian individual, whose business in England must needs be connected with conspiracy, treason, commercial fraud, anything ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon

... of rank in spite of all his caution, was within a step of leaving the room out of his proper turn; but the startled pressure of Miss Willoughby's hand on his arm warned him in time. He stopped, to allow the statuesque Miss Chester to sail out under escort of a wizened little man with a horseshoe pin in his tie, whose name, in company with nearly all the others that had been spoken to him since he came into the room, had ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... The wizened little Legate bowed to the ground as the noisy procession started, for though he wore a clerical dress he was only a layman, and the Nuncio was Archbishop of Kerasund, 'in partibus infidelium,' and returned the Governor's salutations with a magnificent benediction from the window of ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... high-priestess of Hathor, Lady of the West, Goddess of Love and Nature. She wore Hathor's vulture headdress, and on it the disc of the moon fashioned of silver. Also were present Roi the head-priest, clad in his sacerdotal robes, an old and wizened man with a strong, fierce face, Ki the Sacrificer and Magician, Bakenkhonsu the ancient, myself, and a company of the priests of Amon-Ra, Mut, and Khonsu. From behind the statues came the sound of solemn singing, though who sang we could ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard

... been taken from them. Peter was somewhere out in the world, living by his wits. God had given him precisely the same kind of wits as his brothers, but with a single added drop of uneasy leaven. He tumbled out of his cradle when he was a baby to see what lay beyond. He was thin, wizened, restless as a strange beast in a cage, though his brothers tirelessly puzzled their slow brains to soothe and satisfy him. When he was a boy he was wretched because he was not taken down into the valley or to far-off towns. His brothers were ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various

... a wizened woman, the tears raining down her checks. "Kidnapped her at the street corner after dark. I didn't know why she hadn't come home last night. God, my ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... now taken by Sylvia to be presented to the wise-ones, at whose instigation I had been brought to the island. These I found to be men, if indeed they could be called such, but they were so wizened in appearance as more to resemble monkeys. Their manner of life is so austere as to make it a matter for marvel that body and soul could cling together. They will not kill an animal for food, or for any other purpose, not ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes

... growing family, whilst toddlers of any age from two to seven, unkempt but bright-eyed and engaging, play around the door-step, watched over by their grandmother, or may be their great-grandam, who with her wizened face enfolded in her yellow kerchief, her skinny neck, and her distaff in the bony fingers, looks as if she had stepped out of some Renaissance painting of the Three Fates in a Florentine gallery. Crimson carnations in earthenware pots stand on the steps of the outside staircase, ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... is renowned. Day by day, the Tenggerese women—gaunt, scantily-clad, and almost unsexed by incessant toil in the teeth of wind and weather—carry down their burdens to the plain, their backs bent under the weight of the huge crates, while the brown and wizened children are prematurely aged and deformed by their share in the family toil. The more prosperous inhabitant carries his vegetables on a mountain pony, trained to wonderful feats in the art of sliding up and climbing down walls of rock almost devoid of foothold, for the riding of Tenggerese ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... wisp of humanity, a starved, slender elf with a freckled face, wizened and peaked, which at times looked a thousand years old. It reminded you of the face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed with the sins and sorrows of a hundred ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour

... interrupted—having reached no conclusion whatever except that we would go over that evening as Mercer had directed—by the arrival of the police chief to see me. He was a little man, curiously thin and wizened for a Mercutian, with wide pantaloons, a shirt, short jacket and little triangular cocked hat. His face seemed pointed, like a ferret. His movements were rapid, ...
— The Fire People • Ray Cummings

... paw, pardner. F-ith! Bad, ain't it?" he appealed to the toothless squaw. Her best friend could not have said her wizened regard was exactly sympathetic, but it was attentive. She seemed intelligent as well ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... feeble, small and thin—that's why everyone called her petite maman—but once she knew what she ought to do, then her spirit overpowered the weakness of her wizened body. ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy

... not long before John Charteris knew of the entire affair, for in those days I had few concealments from him: and the little wizened man brooded awhile over my misery, ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... the members regarded each other in amazement; then, under the impression that Sachar was perpetrating an ill-timed jest of more than questionable taste, they broke into a storm of protest; for Lyga was a little wizened, dried-up man, close upon eighty ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood

... Englishman stood quietly waiting, his quick eyes going from Dalbarade to the wizened figure by the window, and back again to the Minister. His look carried both calmness and defiance, but the defiance came only from a sense of injury and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... seem to have either strength, grit or intelligence to fit them for any useful life. But they could creep forth and beg, the woman could stand in the gutter with a little bit of mortality wrapped in her old shawl, for tender-hearted passers-by to see its wizened face, and the father could stand not far away from her with a few bootlaces or matches exposed, as if for sale. They managed to ...
— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... so she did live and got well, though she never grew a mite from that time. A little wizened-up thing she was, always; but I tell you folks 'round here thought a nawful lot of Aunt Debby! And Eddie, if you'll believe it, never took the sickness at all. They say, sometimes, ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... in its broad curve up to the Abbey, black with moving figures. Gordon slowly walked up to the House. It was the privilege of School House prefects to enter by a small gate near the masters' common room. Haughtily he rang the bell. A wizened old lady opened the door, bowing with a "Hope you 'ad a good 'oliday, sir." It was the first ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh

... He, too, was a riverman, tough and wiry and small. A man whose pinched, wizened body was a fitting cloister for the warped soul that flashed malignantly from the ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... her alone? A little wizened monkey like that!" It was thus that Madame Socani expressed her opinion of her rival. "A creature without an ounce of flesh on her bones. Her voice won't last long. It never does with those little mean made apes. There was Grisi and Tietjens,—they had something of a ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope

... a wizened-looking little man, with sharp eyes that pierced you when they thought they were unobserved, and if any visitor drew near who might be a member of the Board, he disappeared into his house much as a startled weasel makes for its hole. ...
— Auld Licht Idylls • J. M. Barrie

... Rica dove to the Port of Missing Ships. Michael J. Murphy, however, did not turn to see her disappear; he was gazing, instead, at a thin red trickle that came from under Cappy's cap band and was running down his wizened neck. "Mr. Ricks," ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne

... to a wizened and aged man who seemed to be pleading with him earnestly; "am I a dog that these white hyenas should hunt me thus? Is not the land mine, and was it not my father's before me? Are not the people mine to save or to slay? I tell you that ...
— Black Heart and White Heart • H. Rider Haggard

... bright, black eyes, a black mustache and rather prominent teeth. He was short and stout, and drew attention to his figure by wearing light-colored trousers adorned with a striking check. From Victoria Station he drove at once to his office in Jermyn Street. A young and wizened-looking clerk was already at work in ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason

... I made inquiries at once about these two young men, anyhow, "the Companion of St. Michael and St. George responded with fervour, clasping his wizened little hands contentedly over his narrow waistcoat. "It's a precious odd story, and a doubtful story, and not at all the sort of story one likes one's girl to be any way mixed up with. For my part, I shall give them a very wide berth indeed in future; and ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen

... the time? thought the boy, and he presently caught the words addressed to one of the grooms of the Scottish Queen's suite. "Let me show my poor beads and bracelets." The Scotsman instantly made way for her, and she advanced to a wizened thin old Frenchman, Maitre Gorion, the Queen's surgeon, who jumped down from his horse, and was soon bending over her basket exchanging whispers in the lowest possible tones; but a surge among those in the ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the man asked, holding up his lantern to my face. He was an old, wizened, lean fellow. 'It is a break-up, sir, I am afraid, ...
— A Gentleman of France • Stanley Weyman

... look for their sons in among the crowd like hens in search of their chicks; their wizened faces are hard and wrinkled like winter apples, they carry huge baskets on their arms, over-filled with the last delicacies which their fond, toil-worn hands will prepare for the beloved son for the next three years:—a piece of smoked bacon, a loaf ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... there I found him grimly surveying a small and wizened creature, whose arm he had linked to his own by means of ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds

... quite abashed by the man's flowery way of talking—so unlike anything which I had ever heard. He had a wizened face, and sharp little dark eyes, which took in me and the house and my mother's startled face at the window all in the instant. My parents were together, the two of them, in the sitting-room, and my mother ...
— Rodney Stone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... sparer, more wizened and sinewy than ever as he stooped to open the sideboard. 'Where on earth do they keep everything?' he was ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... ready now!" cried Peter Riney, running out to open the other half of the gate. Peter was a wizened little man, with a sandy fringe of beard beneath his chin, a wart on the end of his long, slanting-out nose, light blue eyes, and bushy eyebrows of a reddish gray. The bearded red brows, close above the pale ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... A wizened little Irishman applied for a job loading a ship. At first they said he was too small, but he finally persuaded them to give him a trial. He seemed to be making good, and they gradually increased the size of his load until on the last trip he was carrying a 300-pound anvil under each arm. When he ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers

... every line of the six feet and more of his tireless frame. No man who ever saw John Morgan on horseback but had the picture stamped forever on his brain, as no man who ever saw that coal-black horse ever forgot Black Bess. Behind him came his staff, and behind them came a wizened little man, whose nickname was "Lightning"—telegraph operator for Morgan's Men. There was need of Lightning now, so Morgan sent him on into town with Dan and Jerry Dillon, while he ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox

... very curt nod of a man seated opposite. A second time he met the glance of another diner, a stout, puffy man, who breathed heavily while he ate. Both men alike averted their eyes at once, and both looked towards a little wizened man, doubled up in his chair, who ate sparingly, and bore on his wrinkled face and bent form, the evidence of such a weight of care as few but kings and ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman

... little old man, with a little three-cornered hat on his head, and a blue long-skirted coat and waistcoat, richly laced. He had on also, I afterwards saw, knee-breeches, and huge silver buckles to his shoes. His countenance seemed wizened and dried up like a piece of parchment. Some of the younger passengers especially seemed to think him, by their remarks, a fair subject for their ridicule. The person who pulled was a huge negro. He must have been as tall as Peter Poplar, but ...
— Old Jack • W.H.G. Kingston

... we took our cigars, and went to see the row, and order restored. There was a little crowd struggling and rolling in a ball, and it turned out there was a long Sikh in the middle of it in grips with a diminutive Chinaman, who might have been a wizened little old woman from his appearance. It was the big Sikh who had done the horrible gurgling; the silly ass had joined in with several Chinese, professional gamblers, and of course lost, and unlike a Burman or a Chinaman, the native of ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch

... He was a Cuban. Father had picked him up at Havana, where he was looking out for somebody who could teach him English instead of the queer jabber that he learned, second-hand, from a wizened little French adventurer, who had set up as a teacher of languages, and had nearly forgotten even his own. I did get sold in the most ridiculous way over father's telegram that announced his coming! But that's all over—they ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various

... olive-groves, which extend for six miles out of Beyrout, I saw a dead child lying by the roadside, and from that point the journey became a succession of heartrending sights. Gaunt, lean-faced men, women thin to the point of emaciation, and children whose wizened faces made them look like old men, lined the route weeping for joy at their deliverance. Every one of our men as he passed handed over his day's rations of bully-beef and biscuits to the starving people; I saw one woman hysterically trying to insert a piece of army biscuit into the mouth ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... sing which might disagree with you, or over-tax your digestive powers; it is on the days you do not sing you ought more particularly to exercise your judgment and self-denial. I do not offer the pinched-up pilgarlic who dines off a wizened apple and a crust of bread as a model for imitation; at the same time, I warn you seriously against following the example of the gobbling glutton who swallows every dish that tempts ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... faces drawn with child-bearing, their features shrunken with the struggling toil that never ceases nor stays; the young girls in their sallow youth that was not youth, with their hollow mirth and their empty faces, and their sharp angles or their unnatural busts; the wizened children that served at the stalls, precocious in infancy, with the wisdom of the Jew and the impudence of the witless babe; the old crones that crawled along—the mothers of a nation haggling for pennies as if they had haggled all their lives long. They bore baskets, most of the girls and housewives ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... wizened old man swung suddenly round. He had the face of a bird of prey, yellow as a louis d'or with a great hooked nose, and a pair of beady black eyes that observed me solemnly. The mouth alone was the redeeming feature in a countenance ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini

... in wet autumn weather, and a visit to the shop of Mr. Potts. Tom, alias Betterly, who was trying to sell some mysterious undergarments to a fat old woman, caught sight of me, the Editor aforesaid, and winked. In a shadowed corner of the shop sat Mr. Potts himself upon a high stool, a wizened little old man with a bent back, a bald head, and a hooked nose upon which were set a pair of enormous horn-rimmed spectacles that accentuated his general resemblance to an owl perched upon the edge of its nest-hole. He was busily engaged in doing nothing, and in ...
— The Virgin of the Sun • H. R. Haggard

... to his head and walked about the yard for a few moments. Then he turned abruptly and stood toweringly over the scared survivor—a tough, wizened little Cockney of five ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke

... ye, Matt?" suddenly asked a wizened little man of about sixty, with a questioning grin on his hard ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli

... air of one anxious to say more. In that ruthless light, the advantages of her elegant clothes and graceful carriage were suddenly stripped away from her. She was the abject wreck of a beautiful woman, wizened, prematurely aged. Nothing remained but the eyes, which seemed somehow to ...
— The Vanished Messenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... but a wizened old fellow in his grey wig. I should hardly ha' known him. I gave him a look, as much as to say, 'I could tell tales o' you, my lord judge, if I chose.' I don't know if he heeded me, though. I suppose it were for a sign of old acquaintance that he said he'd recommend me to mercy. But I'd sooner ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell

... little wizened man wanted on Earth. His eyes darted down to the point of the knife that showed under Gordon's sleeve, and he licked his lips, showing snaggled teeth. The wheel hesitated and came to a halt, with the ball ...
— Police Your Planet • Lester del Rey

... passed around, and all was as merry as merry could be. The wizened face of the man of law was twisted into a wrinkled smile, for in his pouch were fourscore golden angels that the Prior had paid him in fee for the case betwixt him and Sir Richard of the Lea. The learned doctor had been paid beforehand, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle

... which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when the change in my sense of beauty took place ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous

... build a Board School there? But why build anything? Clerkenwell is mine: I am a propos of Clerkenwell: Clerkenwell is a propos of me. Morally, if not legally, it is mine; morally it is yours as well, you wizened, pallid, blue-nosed, dunderheaded Metropolitan Citizen! In this jungle of houses, what is wanted is fresh air. Everyone of you toilers should be given the real "Freedom of the City," by having free spaces bestowed on you. It is better to learn how to expand the limbs, ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 93, September 3, 1887 • Various

... in. He saw her clearly for the first time. A thin, wizened little face, framed in curly red hair, with bright, birdlike eyes. Her thin, flat child's figure was outlined in a tight, black satin dress, with a red collar and sash. Her quick glance darted to him, and she smiled. The policeman made his charge. ...
— Bambi • Marjorie Benton Cooke

... he gave Cosmo a round punch on the shoulder next him that made him look from his work, and then began eying him up and down in the most supercilious manner. He was a small, withered, bowed man, with a thin wizened face, crowned by a much worn fur cap. His mouth had been so long drawn down at each corner as by weights of discontent, that it formed nearly a half-circle. His eyebrows were lifted as far as they would go above ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald

... entertainments were never the same again. He never acknowledged any difference, and he gave more parties, and issued more invitations than ever, but at every feast, every dance, every entertainment of any sort, there was always one uninvited guest, a little wizened, weird old man, who sat back in his chair and never spoke to anyone, but gazed all the time at Ezekiel with stern, uncanny eyes which frightened all who caught sight of them. Indeed, the effect he had on the guests was extraordinary; under the chill of his presence they could not talk, ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... the table, and Harry followed her example, Hugh thought it better to rise as well. Mr. Arnold seemed to hesitate whether or not to ask him to resume his seat and have a glass of claret. Had he been a little wizened pedagogue, no doubt he would have insisted on his company, sure of acquiescence from him in every sentiment he might happen to utter. But Hugh really looked so very much like a gentleman, and stated his own views, or adopted his own plans, with ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... through the bars... eyes blank as a graveled yard... and the silence shuffles heavy dice of feet in iron corridors... until the day... that has soiled herself in this black hole to caress the pale mask of your face... withdraws the last wizened ray to wash in the infinite her discolored hands. Can you hear me, Sasha, in ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge

... hamlet gradually became visible. A cafe revealed itself, a collection of wooden settles in a small square, and beyond a big dark doorway. A fat Arab in yellow appeared and gazed at us. Then an old wizened fellow, a haji from his green turban showing he had seen Mecca, came up and they conversed. Green Turban was plainly lamenting. He pointed to our ship, to the telegraph-office, to a squad of Gurkhas marching past wearing ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne

... more of the Councillor of the Prefecture, all the self-importance of the mayor of the arrondissement, the local autocrat, and the soured temper of the unsuccessful candidate who has never been returned since the year 1816. As to countenance—a wizened, wrinkled, sunburned face, and long, sleek locks of scanty gray hair; as to character—an incredible mixture of homely sense and sheer silliness; of a rich man's overbearing ways, and a total lack of manners; just the kind of husband ...
— The Message • Honore de Balzac

... has become a Humbug to these Apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit, with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme tragicality as Apes may; looking out through those blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle

... coldness, laughing, delighted, like some weasel. Anna at once respected her, and was on her guard before her, instinctively attracted by the strange, childlike surety of the Baroness, yet mistrusting it, fascinated. The little baron was now quite white-haired, very brittle. He was wizened and wrinkled, yet fiery, unsubdued. Anna looked at his lean body, at his small, fine lean legs and lean hands as he sat talking, and she flushed. She recognized the quality of the male in him, his lean, concentrated age, his informed fire, his faculty for sharp, deliberate ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence

... over his head since I saw him last? The face that tried to smile at us from the pillow was strangely wizened and old. It was as though a withering blight had touched it. Only the eyes were the same. They glowed in the sunken face, beneath the shock of black hair, with a startling luster ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber

... salon—so fresh and charming and like an English country house—they heard a good deal of noise in the passage, and the Prince came in. He was followed by a sturdy boy of eight, and carried in his arms a tiny girl, whose poor small body looked wizened, while in her little arms ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn

... Jacob Benton was a wizened, dried-up old Yorkshireman. He'd been head man in a good racing stable, but drink had been the ruin of him—lost him his place, and sent him out here. He could be trusted to go right through with a job like ours, for all that. Like many men that drink ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood

... stories. Contrary to custom, the bridal couple were to go to the station unaccompanied, and they vanished from the head of the table with only a nod and a smile to the guests. Ralph hurried them into the light car, where he had already stowed Enid's hand luggage. Only wizened little Mrs. Royce slipped out from the kitchen ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather

... had a glass of ale after dinner, which was quite indefensible, for they had had a sufficiency at that bounteous repast. Evidently, the dominie was in for a good time. A wizened old fellow, named Batiste, with a permanent crick in his back, dug the worms, and presented them to the lawyer in an empty lobster tin, the outside of which was covered with texts of Scripture. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell

... which reflect the ideas of earlier ages, we find this suspension between heaven and earth attributed to beings who have been endowed with the coveted yet burdensome gift of immortality. The wizened remains of the deathless Sibyl are said to have been preserved in a jar or urn which hung in a temple of Apollo at Cumae; and when a group of merry children, tired, perhaps, of playing in the sunny streets, sought the shade of the temple and amused themselves ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... of the hunt had been achieved, and a raccoon treed. They made their way to the dim illumination cast on moving forms and a ring of dogs throwing themselves upward at the trunk of a tree. There was a concerted cry for "Ebo," and a wizened, grey negro in a threadbare drugget coat with a scarlet handkerchief about his throat came forward and, kicking aside the dogs, commenced the ascent of the smooth trunk that swept up to the obscure foliage above. There was a short delay, then a violent agitation of ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer

... back to my room, feeling stupefied. The little, wizened old man had grown great. He had been metamorphosed under my eyes into a strange visionary symbol; he had come to be the power of gold personified. I shrank, shuddering, from life and ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac

... that implies excellence in the smallest compass. None but a fine imagination would have conceived the supernatural agency that works old Scrooge's moral regeneration—the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and to come, that each in turn speaks to the wizened heart of the old miser, so that, almost unwittingly, he is softened by the tender memories of childhood, warmed by sympathy for those who struggle and suffer, and appalled by the prospect of his own ultimate desolation and black solitude. Then the episodes: ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... forget it! What's in your bottle? Gin. Dot's nigger trink. Absinthe? It's doped. You'll go off your chump, Froggy! Cochon! Whiskey, that's the ticket! Where's Paddy? Going asleep. Sing us that whiskey song, Paddy. [They all turn to an old, wizened Irishman who is dozing, very drunk, on the benches forward. His face is extremely monkey-like with all the sad, patient pathos of that animal in his small eyes.] Singa da song, Caruso Pat! He's gettin' old. The drink is too much for him. He's ...
— The Hairy Ape • Eugene O'Neill



Words linked to "Wizened" :   thin, lean



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