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Updated: October 13, 2025
John Garfield Madison went into the smoking compartment of the car for a cigar several cigars until Needley was reached some two hours later, when the dusky attendant, as he pocketed Madison's dollar, set down his little rubber-topped footstool with a flourish on a desolate and forbidding-looking platform.
Rastignac, out of his winnings at cards, would pay his jeweler exorbitant prices for gold watches and chains, and then, to meet the exigencies of play, would carry them to the pawnbroker, that discreet and forbidding-looking friend of youth; but when it was a question of paying for board or lodging, or for the necessary implements for the cultivation of his Elysian fields, his imagination and pluck alike deserted him.
At the further end two rusty leather arm-chairs flanked a cast-iron stove in the corner, and were balanced in the other and darker corner by a knee-hole writing-desk littered with seeds and bulbs and spurs and bits of fishing tackle, and equipped for its real purpose with a forbidding-looking pen and inkpot, and a torn piece of weather-beaten blotting-paper.
Wretched, forbidding-looking places they were! Never a tree or a bush to give shade, never a sign of comfort or home. Our tents were pitched near Packwood's, out in the broiling sun. They were like ovens; there was no shade, no coolness anywhere; we would have gladly slept, after the day's march, but instead we sat broiling in the ambulances, and waited for the long afternoon to wear away.
The house, the remaining rooms of which were unoccupied, was a dark forbidding-looking one, with a heavy door beneath a portico, and containing deep cellars into which nobody ever penetrated save the Starets himself. On the morning of my first visit there, I was, from the beginning, much mystified.
"The women" rode with Marthy a mile farther, stopping before a lonely log-house, with corn-fields climbing to meet the timber half-way up the mountain in the rear. Marthy ushered her guests into the porch with the words, "Here 's the fotch-on women, Maw." The tall, gaunt, forbidding-looking old woman sitting there turned sightless eyes toward them, putting forth a strong hand.
Forbidding-looking swamps, giving rise to swarming myriads of mosquitoes and to malaria through their dank, decaying vegetation, have been converted into flourishing cranberry-meadows, and the dry land into fine vineyards and fruit-orchards surrounding homes of every grade of elegance, from the simple vine-covered cottage to the costly villa with carefully-kept evergreen hedges enclosing exquisite lawns, statues, fountains and rare flowers.
Who, think you, gentle reader who now, perhaps, recoils from these unpleasant but truthful minutiæ officiated upon this gallows high? a female! a middle-aged, stout-made, dark-eyed, swarthy-complexioned, but by no means forbidding-looking woman the celebrated Lady Betty the finisheress of the law the unflinching priestess of the executive for the Connaught circuit, and Roscommon in particular, for many years.
I could not help thinking, as I thanked the honest fellow who had come to our assistance, how easily one may be deceived by appearances, for a more forbidding-looking face, under its fur cap, I never saw. That of his son, who presently returned with a four-wheeler which Carr had sent for, was not more prepossessing. In fact, they were two as villanous-looking men as I had ever seen.
Who was that forbidding-looking individual sitting there smoking under that swaying, smoky, dimly-burning, miserable apology for a lamp? And, finally, what had happened that my limbs should feel heavy as lead, and that I should be too weak to turn upon my cruelly-hard, box-like pallet?
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