"Iron-gray" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Lorenza Feliciani, the daughter of a girdle-maker of Rome. Balsamo professed alchemy and free-masonry, practised medicine and sorcery, and raised money by various methods of imposture. He rode about in his own coach, attended by a numerous retinue in rich liveries. His attire consisted of an iron-gray coat, a scarlet waistcoat trimmed with gold lace, and red breeches. His jaunty hat was adorned with a white feather, and handsome rings encircled his fingers. He carried a sword after the fashion of the times, and his shoe-buckles shone like ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... of which I was the bearer, chosen by Grant himself because of the reputation of my mare. What riding that was! We started, ten riders of us in all, each with the same message. I parted company the first hour out with all save one, an iron-gray stallion of Messenger blood. Jack Murdock rode him, who learned his horsemanship from buffalo and Indian hunting on the plains—not a bad school to graduate from. Ten miles out of Knoxville the gray, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... trunk hose, with great bunches or bows at the knees; and a pair of russet boots, very large at top, and standing widely from his legs. His hat was broad and slouched, with a feather trailing over one side. His iron-gray hair hung in thick masses on his neck; and he had a short grizzled beard. He walked slowly round the room, as if examining that all was safe; then, hanging his hat on a peg beside the door, he sat down in the elbow-chair, and, leaning his elbow on the table, he ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... but every feeling of propriety demanded that it should be recognized, and to a certain degree revived. Lord Culloden was a black Scotchman, tall and lean, with good features, a hard red face and iron-gray hair. He was a man who shrank from scenes, and he greeted Lothair as if they had only parted yesterday. Looking at him with his keen, unsentimental, but not unkind, eye, he said: "Well, sir, I thought you would have been ...
— Lothair • Benjamin Disraeli
... large iron-gray widow of sixty, insatiably greedy of such fleshly comforts as had ever come within her knowledge—soft cushions, heavily sweetened dishes, finer clothing than her neighbors. She had cold eyes, and nature had formed her mouth and jaw like the little silver-striped adder that I found one day, ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... "Herald." He was of an ornate presence, though entirely neat. A sumptuous expanse of linen exhibited itself between the lapels of his low-cut waistcoat, and an inch of bediamonded breastpin glittered there, like an ice-ledge on a snowy mountain side. He had a steady, blue eye and a dissipated, iron-gray mustache. This personage was Mr. Ephraim Watts, who, following a calling more fashionable in the eighteenth century than in the latter decades of the nineteenth, had shaken the dust of Carlow from his feet some ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... an elderly man, tall, thin, iron-gray, with a round head, a short, thick neck, a good, brown eye, a square jowl that betokened resolution, and a complexion so sallow as to be almost cadaverous. Hard as iron: but a certain stiff dignity and respectability sat upon ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... him at once, by the likenesses that had been {p.182} published of him. He came limping up the gravel walk, aiding himself by a stout walking staff, but moving rapidly and with vigor. By his side jogged along a large iron-gray staghound, of most grave demeanor, who took no part in the clamor of the canine rabble, but seemed to consider himself bound, for the dignity of the house, to give me a ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... seriously, you are now the male hope of the family; you are now-" My uncle stopped, and his face darkened. I saw that he thought of his son,—that mysterious son! And looking at him tenderly, I observed that his deep lines had grown deeper, his iron-gray hair more gray. There was the trace of recent suffering on his face; and though he had not spoken to us a word of the business on which he had left us, it required no penetration to perceive that it had come to no ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Arts was as notable a man in his outside presentment as one will find among five hundred college alumni as they file in procession. His strong, squared features, his formidable scowl, his solid-looking head, his iron-gray hair, his positive and as it were categorical stride, his slow, precise way of putting a statement, the strange union of trampling radicalism in some directions and high-stepping conservatism in others, which made it impossible to calculate on his unexpressed ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... magnificently enough even to be conspicuous among that crowd of well-dressed women, and she wore a large picture hat, crowned by expensive plumes. Close behind was her escort, a middle-aged, stockily built man, with iron-gray hair, also immaculately dressed. As the couple passed, the people at the tables turned and whispered. When the newcomer drew nearer, Madison could see that she was very young, and he was struck by her laughing, dimpled beauty. She appeared little more than a child, and the ...
— The Easiest Way - A Story of Metropolitan Life • Eugene Walter and Arthur Hornblow
... stroke, by which to replenish his purse, and furnish means whereby to indulge his consuming and all absorbing love of gaming. After entering the street, he glanced cautiously around, and then advancing to the iron-gray charger that was tied with a stout bridle to the horse-shoe at the doorpost, adjusted the accoutrements, leaped to the saddle, and rode hurriedly along the road leading ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... form at his feet. The little German was lying on his face, his iron-gray head resting on his arm. His blue overalls and faded red sweater were covered with a light sifting of dust. His pack lay beside ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... was dressed in a rough homespun garment. Her feet were clad in unbleached cotton stockings, also made at home; her little, iron-gray curls lay flat at each side of her hollow cheeks. She wore list slippers, very coarse and common in texture. Her whole appearance was the essence of the homely, ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... mule. He is generally soft, and can stand but little hardship. I refer particularly to those that have a white skin. Next to the white and cream, we have the iron-grey mule. This color generally indicates a hardy mule. We have now twelve teams of iron-gray mules in the park, which have been doing hard work every day since July, 1865; it is now January, 1866. Only one of these mules has become unfit for service, and that one was injured by being kicked by his mate. All our other teams have had more or less animals made ...
— The Mule - A Treatise On The Breeding, Training, - And Uses To Which He May Be Put • Harvey Riley
... turned. CASSOCK has dropped from the front, and JUDEX, an iron-gray, has the lead. But look! how they have thinned out! Down flat,—five,—six,—how many? They lie still enough! they will not get up again in this race, be very sure! And the rest of them, what a "tailing off"! Anybody can see who is going ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... kingdom for a horse!" for the feeling was in his heart, and he ran up to the stately animal without a fear. Duke put back his ears and swished his tail as if displeased for a moment; but Ben looked straight in his eyes, gave a scientific stroke to the iron-gray nose, and uttered a chirrup which made the ears prick up as if recognizing a ...
— Under the Lilacs • Louisa May Alcott
... they struck the fence, a brisk, elderly gentleman, with iron-gray hair, and spectacles, and a queer twinkle in his eye as he glanced up at the mass of clouds piling up in the mountains, walked hurriedly down a narrow sheep-path through the leafless woods, and entered the sugar-camp. ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... bottom of the mystery, and made us more impatient for further developments. These were never to come. Bradford pined away an Belle Isle, and grew weaker, but no less reserved, each day. At length, one bitter cold night ended it all. He was found in the morning stone dead, with his iron-gray hair frozen fast to the ground, upon which he lay. Our mystery had to remain unsolved. There was nothing about his person to give any hint as to ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... President got up to introduce the speaker of the evening whom all had come to hear. "The man who was just talking with me says he is really worth hearing. If he grows tiresome we will slip out. I wonder which one he is? He must be that man with the iron-gray hair ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... they caught and reflected the light, were brighter and more startling than any eyes could have been. He was dressed in a long surtout, which he wore closely buttoned, high dickey, and high black-silk stock, which covered his throat to his chin. His iron-gray hair was brushed somewhat pompously backward over his forehead, and his whole effect was that of a gentleman of the generation which wore bell-crowned hats and carried enormous canes with tassels. But what attracted Mr. Bixby's particular ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... old at all," I returned, indignantly; for, in spite of his iron-gray hair, Mr. Lucas could hardly be forty, and ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Bouchard, nature had meant him to be a wheel-horse. He had never had any hope of being chief of staff. Hawk-eyed, with a great beak nose and iron-gray hair, intensely and solemnly serious, lacking a sense of humor, he would have looked at home with his big, bony hands gripping a broadsword hilt and his lank body clothed in chain armor. He had a mastiff's devotion to its ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... was fine, and every evening this man and woman walked together. The woman envied by all the women; the man by all the men. Yet they walked side by side like the ghosts of lovers. And, since he was her betrothed, one or two iron-gray hairs in the man's head had turned white, and lines deepened in his face. The victim had unwittingly ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... room filled with plaster casts and studies, which was Mr. Browning's retreat,—and, dearest of all, the large drawing-room, where she always sat. It opens upon a balcony filled with plants, and looks out upon the old iron-gray church of Santa Felice. There was something about this room that seemed to make it a proper and especial haunt for poets. The dark shadows and subdued light gave it a dreamy look, which was enhanced by the tapestry-covered walls and the old pictures ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... at me. She was a bit hard-mouthed, with iron-gray hair, but her eyes looked as though they'd seen a lot and learned not to flinch, though they still felt like it. I knew that kind of look—I'd seen ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... bull-fighters offered to leave the national sport and show us the House of Miranda, but it was the cathedral which was dominating our desire, as it everywhere dominates the vision, in Burgos and out of Burgos as far as the city can be seen. The iron-gray bulk, all flattered or fretted by Gothic art, rears itself from the clustering brown walls and roofs of the city, which it seems to gather into its mass below while it towers so far above them. We needed no pointing of the way to ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... salmon-blue, with pink ribbons. Altogether it was a fearful get-up, and, involuntarily, I looked about me expecting to see people stopping, a crowd forming. But no one appeared to notice the little old woman except myself, and as she drew near I discovered that she wore spectacles and a fringe of iron-gray hair around her face. Her eyes were piercingly bright and on her lips was etched a sardonic smile. Not quite knowing how to explain my rude stare, I was preparing to turn in another direction, when the stranger accosted me, ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... colleague did not pray; Under the weight of his fourscore years He stood apart with the iron-gray Of his strong brows knitted to hide his tears; And a fair-faced woman of doubtful fame, Linking her own with his honored name, Subtle as sin, at his side withstood The felt ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... from the bed and, half pulling him behind her, groped her way to the side door of the ranch house and into the blackness of the night. Tied to a bush, by a hackamore, was an iron-gray colt, the fastest on the ranch. After that night's work he was known to be the fastest in ...
— Injun and Whitey to the Rescue • William S. Hart
... the bowed figure, struck by a laxity of manner that was foreign to the Honorable Milton Waring. His thick iron-gray hair, usually so carefully brushed, was rumpled on end where his fingers had plowed and held his head while he figured with the other hand. He had removed his collar and tossed it aside impatiently; it lay on the floor behind the chair, leaving the tie still hanging loosely around the neck, ...
— Every Man for Himself • Hopkins Moorhouse
... talked with Mrs. Viney. The fisherman's wife was a woman of fifty, with a dragging voice, a faint curiosity in her manner. Her iron-gray hair smoothed flat was tied in a little knot behind. Her husband, a good ten years older, had the vitality of a young man compared with his wife. He was grizzled and squat, with thick red face and powerful shoulders. His eyes twinkled sharply under their fleshy lids; ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... large, stout man, sixty-two years of age, with a smooth, plump face, long iron-gray hair and fiery blue eyes. He was high-tempered, kind, and generous, with a youthful smile and a formidable, stern voice that did not always mean what it sounded like. Mr. William was a milder man, correct in deportment and absorbed in business. The Weymouths formed ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... nothing of it. The boy did not understand, but in the blue eyes of the Celt, peering from under the mop of iron-gray hair, there was no mistaking ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... attention; but here, where a traveller was not of every-day occurrence, he was soon surrounded by a little crowd, who, when his eye was averted, seized the opportunity diligently to peruse his person. He was rather a thickset man, but with no superfluous flesh; his hair was of iron-gray; he had a few wrinkles; his face was so deeply sunburnt, that, excepting a half-smothered glow on the tip of his nose, a dusky yellow was the only apparent hue. As the people gazed, it was observed that the elderly men, and the men of substance, gat themselves silently ...
— Fanshawe • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... orange-colored horse, with which, or rather upon which, he had made his first appearance in the world. Truth to say, from the moment he crossed this new steed, it was no longer D'Artagnan who was travelling,—it was a good man clothed in an iron-gray justaucorps, brown haut-de-chausses, holding the medium between a priest and a layman; that which brought him nearest to the churchman was, that D'Artagnan had placed on his head a calotte of threadbare velvet, and over ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... wide, low, vine-roofed porch Jane found Brandt's wives entertaining Bishop Dyer. They were motherly women, of comparatively similar ages, and plain-featured, and just at this moment anything but grave. The Bishop was rather tall, of stout build, with iron-gray hair and beard, and eyes of light blue. They were merry now; but Jane had seen them when they were not, and then she feared him as she had feared ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... of powerful build, and gave one the impression of great size, although not in reality above medium height. His shoulders, however, were very broad and thick, his neck short and powerful, his head large, with heavy iron-gray hair. A short beard of the same color covered the lower part of his face, while through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles his eyes shone with piercing brightness. Grace thought, as he came toward her, that she had seldom seen ...
— The Ivory Snuff Box • Arnold Fredericks
... weathers many shades of red and purple, deepening in places almost to black. There is some gleaming white quartzite mixed with both these shales. Next above lies more than four thousand feet of Siyeh limestone, very solid, very massive, iron-gray with an insistent flavor of yellow, and weathering buff. This heavy stratum is the most impressive part of the Glacier landscape. Horizontally through its middle runs a dark broad ribbon of diorite, a rock as hard as granite, which once, while molten, burst from below and forced ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... loss of Mr. Stephens made life lonely. His younger brother Gabriel, himself in the shadow of a great affliction, was with him constantly. They were devotedly attached to each other. Mr. Gabriel Toombs is, in personal appearance, very much like his brother. The long, iron-gray hair, brushed straight out from his head, reminds one of Robert Toombs. He is smaller in stature, and is a man of strong abilities, even temperament, and well-balanced mind. His brother had great regard for his business judgment and political ...
— Robert Toombs - Statesman, Speaker, Soldier, Sage • Pleasant A. Stovall
... thereafter, Yagorsha, imperturbable, the only one who had not laughed, smoothed his lank, iron-gray locks down on either side of his wide face, and went on renewing the sinew open-work in ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... tall, solidly-built man with a kindly expression. He wore gray flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket, which made an interesting color contrast with his iron-gray hair. His teeth were clenched so firmly on the bit of a calabash pipe with a meerschaum bowl that Malone wondered if he could ever get loose. Malone shut the door behind him, and Sir Lewis rose ...
— Occasion for Disaster • Gordon Randall Garrett
... field. And now, quite desperate, she rushed through the house and out of the front-door, actually in search of a man! Just down the street she saw one. Had she been composed, she might have noticed the threadbare cleanliness of his dress, the odd cap that crowned his iron-gray locks, and the peculiar manner of his walk; for our little old maid had stumbled upon no less a person than Monsieur Jean Leclerc, the dancing-master of Dalton. Not that this accomplishment was much in vogue in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... be plenty of movement, when the Lafitte diligences went clattering by, starting for Paris, before the voracious railway marched victoriously in and swallowed diligence, horses, postilions—bells, boots and all! The gay crowd passing across the place was making for the huge iron-gray cathedral, quite ponderous and fortress-like in its character. Here is the grand messe going on, the Swiss being seen afar off, standing with his halbert under the great arch, while between, down to the door, are the crowded congregation ...
— A Day's Tour • Percy Fitzgerald
... for a moment speechless. He was a tall, lean man, having a bald head but a thick, iron-gray beard, and his black eyes sparkled brightly from behind a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. After attentively regarding the boy for a time he said, in ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... gray &c adj.; neutral tint, silver, pepper and salt, chiaroscuro, grisaille [Fr.]. [Pigments] Payne's gray; black &c 431. Adj. gray, grey; iron-gray, dun, drab, dingy, leaden, livid, somber, sad, pearly, russet, roan; calcareous, limy, favillous^; silver, silvery, silvered; ashen, ashy; cinereous^, cineritious^; grizzly, grizzled; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with the battle-ax; this line of cut runs to above and somewhat back of the ear, the hair of the scalp below it being cut close to the head. When the men age, a few gray hairs appear, and some old men have heads of uniform iron-gray color. I have never seen a white-haired Igorot. A few of the old men have their hair thinning on the crown, but a tendency to baldness is by no ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... was to bless and crown my good fortune, when I heard a step at the door and a young man came in—a tall, blonde, supple fellow not much older than I. Then the Judge appeared, ponderous, slow of tread, immaculate of dress; the same, unless his iron-gray locks have retreated yet farther from his wall of a brow, that I have remembered him ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... business from the start. He jumped into it at once, so that I had no time to take notice of anything except that he talked without an accent, was probably French only in name and that he wore clothes which were superfine. I never saw such a dresser for a man with iron-gray hair and fifty-five years to contend against in the youth-preserving business, which I calculated was one of his pleasures in life, if not his vocation. Nothing I figured on coming up-town happened except that I ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... of paternity, and absolutely without precedent, the patient, the iron-gray head of Mr. Becker fell forward, a fearful and silent storm of sobs ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... From his manner and appearance and also from his pronunciation it was self-evident that he was a Frenchman. Moreover, he revealed a certain intellectual distinction typically French. Monsieur Georges Duval was of middle age with clear-cut, aristocratic features, keen dark eyes and iron-gray hair. In comparison with him Mrs. Burton ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... Minister of Internal Affairs. Spawn had mentioned him to me. A South American. A man in his fifties. Thin and darkly saturnine, with iron-gray hair, carefully plastered to cover his half-bald head. He sat listening to the President's harangue, twirling the upturned waxen ends of his artificially black mustache. A wave of perfume enveloped him. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... leaned far back in his chair; He ran his hands through his iron-gray hair, And stole ten minutes from work to write A valentine ...
— When hearts are trumps • Thomas Winthrop Hall
... a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur's. Save that his back was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he showed little mark of his sixty years. He seemed to me the very type of an English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and conservative to the point of fanaticism. When I thought of trying to persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford |
