Allan and what would be nicest and most agreeable to her," said Marilla, hitting for once in her life on a very sound and
pithy piece of advice.
Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief,
pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul.
'Wir sind gewohnt das die Menschen verhoehnen was sie nicht verstehen.' Goethe is always
pithy."
Uncas pressed closer to his side, and regarded the speaker with a look of commendation, while his father expressed his satisfaction by the ordinary
pithy exclamation of approbation.
"They may be said, in few and
pithy words, to have ill served a poor purpose.
Then, his preaching was ingenious and
pithy, like the preaching of the English Church in its robust age, and his sermons were delivered without book.
Regaining his faculties by slow and faint glimmerings, he at length sat upright; and, displaying a very yellow face, a very red nose, and a very bristly beard: the joint effect of which was considerably heightened by a dirty white handkerchief, spotted with blood, drawn over the crown of his head and tied under his chin: stared ruefully at Ralph in silence, until his feelings found a vent in this
pithy sentence:
He is supreme in epigrams, the terse statement of
pithy truths; his poems have furnished more brief familiar quotations to our language than those of any other writer except Shakspere.
The proposal originated with himself, and was couched in the
pithy terms, 'If your John is weak enough, ma'am, not to take it, that is no reason why you should be, don't you see?
We shall not detain the narrative, to relate the quaint morals with which he next endeavoured to cheer the drooping spirits of his more sensitive companion, or the occasional
pithy and peculiar benedictions that he pronounced, on all the bands of the Dahcotahs, commencing with those whom he accused of stealing or murdering, on the banks of the distant Mississippi, and concluding, in terms of suitable energy, with the Teton tribe.
They could always talk; and their discourse, witty,
pithy, original, had such charms for me, that I preferred listening to, and sharing in it, to doing anything else.
As Wolfert waxed old and rich and corpulent he also set up a great gingerbread-colored carriage, drawn by a pair of black Flanders mares with tails that swept the ground; and to commemorate the origin of his greatness he had for his crest a full-blown cabbage painted on the panels, with the
pithy motto, ALLES KOPF, that is to say, ALL HEAD, meaning thereby that he had risen by sheer head work.