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More "Background" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... struggle mightily to gain a laugh or "a hand," neglecting the theme, the message, the spirit of that which they are professing to interpret. If that which we read is worth while, if it has anything vital in it, the effect will be stronger if the skill and personality of the speaker are kept in the background, and the audience is brought face to face with the spirit of that which has been embodied in the lines. As some readers go through their lines they seem to be saying, Listen to my voice, observe my graceful gestures; isn't this a pretty gown I ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... always had the rapidity and intensity of a climax, it would be intolerable. Music that is all rushing climaxes is unbearable; a picture must not be a glare of high lights. The quiet passages in music, the grays and low tones in the background of the picture, the slow chapters in a story, are as necessary as their opposites; indeed, climaxes are dependent on contrasts in order to ...
— English: Composition and Literature • W. F. (William Franklin) Webster
... obedient struggles with "isn't." Once, a week later, as a result of this experience, he tried to make some ethical suggestions to Lily. She was displaying her latest triumph—a rosebush, blossoming in February! And Maurice, duly admiring the glowing flower, against its background of soot-speckled snowdrift on the window sill, began upon Jacky's ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... that the blue stone of which it is chiefly composed responds immediately to the purple and violet lights that fall from the great East window. On a summer day the blue of the tomb seems almost opaque as though it were made of blue glass, and the gilt on the background of the screen and the brasses of the groins glitter ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... dense forests or by countless coconuts, the only sound besides the plash of our oars being the cry of water fowl or some night bird, while the light beetles [7] flashed their green lights against the dark background of the forest, looking much like falling stars. There are certain moments in life that have made a lasting impression on me, and that moonlight ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... draft by feudal barons in the days before real law obtained, it was something of a historic place. Parts of the structure are said to be no less than five hundred years old, but time and avarice have relegated history to a rather uncertain background, and unless one is pretty well up in the traditions of the town, he may be taken in nicely by shameless attendants who make no distinction between the old and the new so long as ...
— The Prince of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... is kept perennially fresh by the abundant rains. Seen from rising ground, they enrich the landscape with the beauty of their graceful elevations; from the lower levels of the town, and in contrast to the foliage of palm or bamboo, their sheer height is manifested by the intense blueness of the background they afford. ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... seemed to intend to rather keep out of his way and to practise no delicate allurements. When her tennis-playing was at an end, she sauntered about the lawn and terraces with her companion, tilting her parasol prettily over her shoulder, so that it formed an entrancing background to her face and head. She seemed to be entertaining the young man. His big laugh and the silver music of her own lighter merriment rang ...
— Emily Fox-Seton - Being The Making of a Marchioness and The Methods of Lady Walderhurst • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... Jared Ponsonby, Hannibal Hamlin, Master Bobo and Miss Blanche, the poultry, and (aided by mirrors) himself in almost every dress and attitude which it is possible for a man to assume. He must have spent a small fortune in chemicals alone, and all his talk was of light and shadow, background, draperies, foreground, plates, and proofs; every table was strewn with photographs, finished and not finished, mounted or curled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... Out of this background, then, of uncertainty and conjecture emerges, in 1534, Jacques Cartier, a master-pilot in the prime of life, now sworn to the service of His Most Christian Majesty Francis I of France, and about to undertake on behalf of his illustrious ...
— The Mariner of St. Malo: A Chronicle of the Voyages of Jacques Cartier • Stephen Leacock
... shabbily, gave her the end of a smile which had been begun for me. It seemed to relieve her, for what one may call the wild maternal look left her face, and trying to check little gasps of breath, the result of unseemly running, she signed to her confederates to remain in the background, and turned curious eyes on me. Had she spoken as she approached, I am sure her words would have been as flushed as her face, but now her mouth puckered as David's does before he sets forth upon his smile, and I saw that she thought she ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... attached, was a small flag of one of the larger German aerial squadrons. Blaine plucked it forth, jerked the pulley cord, and there unrolled before all eyes the Imperial eagle, with certain other designs, all on a black background, and with a death's head in white at each corner. It was two or three feet square, and as it floated from one of the poles sustaining the biplanes, no one in the clear morning light could ...
— Our Pilots in the Air • Captain William B. Perry
... eyes half closed and a smile hovering about her lips. The wall was curtained with canaryensis, virginia creeper rich in autumn tints, ivy, and giant nasturtiums. Great sunflowers grew up against it, and a row of single dahlias of every possible hue crowded up close to the sunflowers. They made a background to the girl's ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... homeliness of her face—her general aspect indeed—attracted him greatly. She might know Greek; at heart, he believed, she was a good housewife; and when she incidentally mentioned Dutch relations, he seemed to see her with a background of bright pots and ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the constitutional peerage of his gifts and virtues; all those transcendent qualities which placed him at the summit of Roman intellect and manhood being either withheld from the scene or thrown so far into the background that the proper effect of them ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... suggested the disbursement of huge sums for rent. The fact that the house had been lent him rent free was kept with some care in the background. Having weakened the man with pathos, he would strike a sterner note. "A little more of this," he would go on, "and I'll close my account. As it is, I think I will remove my patronage to a firm which will treat me civilly. Why, sir, I've ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... those stirring times I would like to mention: and that is Antonia Avellanos—the "beautiful Antonia." Whether she is a possible variation of Latin-American girlhood I wouldn't dare to affirm. But, for me, she is. Always a little in the background by the side of her father (my venerated friend) I hope she has yet relief enough to make intelligible what I am going to say. Of all the people who had seen with me the birth of the Occidental Republic, ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... their own surroundings by the magnificence of that great Cathedral which rose above the low horizon of their roofs, and opened its doors to poor and rich alike. The buildings that have so long outlived their inhabitants may be taken as the background—like the permanent stone scenery in a Greek theatre—to the shifting kaleidoscope of many-coloured life ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... blowing the puffy fringe from its stem, or tests the faith of the fair one, who is dearer to him than ever in this hour of separation, by picking the leaves from the yellow-hearted daisy. Tiny little violets, set in a background of black or dark green moss, adorn the hill-sides, and many flowers unknown to warmer zones come bravely forth to flourish for a few weeks only, and wither in the August winds. Very few of the flowers, so refreshing and charming to the eye, have any perfume. Nearly all smell ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... aggression in her snarl. Indeed, to her mate, there was a hint of appeal in the salutation, which said clearly: "Be careful! Please be careful!" He advanced with extreme caution into the den, and saw his spouse lying full at length on her side, her bushy tail curled round to form a background for the smallest of four sleek puppies, of a yellowish grey colour, whom she was nursing assiduously. Moving with the utmost delicacy and care, Finn sniffed all round his mate, refraining from touching the ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... The edges are, as it were, too much softened off into the background. The figure before Barwood was fresh, distinct, clear-cut,—pre-Raphaelitish, to take a word from painting. In all the details, from the ribbon in her feathery brown hair to the pretty buttoned boot, there was the ineffable aroma of a ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... to the wide spaces of Salisbury Plain. James Warlock, unlike his father and grandfather, was a little sickly man with a narrow chest, no limbs to speak of and a sharp pale face. Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes hung upon him like a disguise, his eyes burning even upon that faded picture with the fire of his spirit. For James Warlock was a mystic, a visionary, a prophet. He walked and talked with God; in no jesting ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... grass—well in the foreground. For the background, perhaps a thousand miles away or more than half a decade removed in time, is the American Civil War. In the blue sky a meadow lark's love song, and in the grass the boom of the prairie chicken's wings are the only sounds that break the primeval silence, excepting ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... with a fringe of houses crowning the lower heights; half-mountains rising bare in the background and becoming real mountains as they stretched away in the distance to right and left; a confused mass of buildings coming to the water's edge on the flat; a forest of masts, ships swinging in the stream, and the streaked, yellow, ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... come away from yer own country for, young maister, if ye be so wownded about it?" inquired Christopher Coney, from the background, with the tone of a man who preferred the original subject. "Faith, it wasn't worth your while on our account, for as Maister Billy Wills says, we be bruckle folk here—the best o' us hardly honest sometimes, what with hard winters, and ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... aid of reason in our quest for freedom, we shall be following in the footsteps of mathematicians and theoretical physicists. In their arduous and unflinching search after truth they have attained to a conception of the background of phenomena of far greater breadth and grandeur than that of the average religionist of to-day. As a mathematician once remarked to a neo-theosophist, "Your idea of the ether is a more material one than the materialist's own." Science has, however, imposed upon itself its own limitations, ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... "Nothing," and having a great repugnance to consider murder as a factor of politics, I dismissed the subject. It fitted with my ethical sense that an act cruel and absurd should be also useless. I had also the vision of a crowd of shadowy Archdukes in the background, out of which one would step forward to take the place of that dead man in the light of the European stage. And then, to speak the whole truth, there was no man capable of forming a judgment who attended so little to the march of events as I did at that time. What for want of a more definite term ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... raging outside, and for a while, the man at the desk was surrounded by a great hall, with a high, vaulted ceiling, through which figures flitted and vanished. For a while, there were vistas of deep forests, always set in the same background of mountains and always under the same blue cirrus-laced sky. There was an interval of flickering blue-white light, of unbearable intensity. Then the man at the desk was surrounded by the interior of vast ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... shore of shadow, to be lost in seething and suffocating seas without rest. Her eyes felt dried up with fever, and whenever she shut them, the darkness was filled with a jumble of nauseating squares in blue upon a mustard-coloured background. The smell of beans ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... illusion: only in the remote solitudes with their monstrous old trees is it possible to evoke a mind picture of Robin Hood and his devoted followers. And even in the most secluded places the imagined pageant of these folk suggests the theatre. The loveliness seems unreal—a background devised by some scene-painter ...
— The Dukeries • R. Murray Gilchrist
... 'Aurora' set her course to round a headland visible on the north-western horizon. At midnight the ship came abreast of this point and continued steaming west, keeping within a distance of five miles of the coast. A break in the icy monotony came with a short tract of islets fronting a background of dark rocky coastline similar to that at Cape Denison ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... inclosure of white, next to that of the king, was seated the Lady of the Tournament, the Princess Louise, and her maids of honor, arrayed all in snowy garb, and, against the garish brilliancy of the general background, a pompous pageantry of colors, the decoration of this dainty nook shone in silvery contrast. A garland of flowers was the only crown the lady wore; no other adornment had her fair shoulders save their own argent beauty, of which ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... horses, and ponies, and carts, and cats, and blackbirds, and cocks and hens, and ploughmen, and milkmaids, and beggars, all in the foreground; and coaches, and railroads, and steamboats, and palaces, and canals, in the middle distance; with a glorious background of the mighty sea glittering for ever under the blazing beams of a perpetually setting sun, mingled with the pale rays of an eternally rising moon, and laden with small craft, and whale-ships, and seaweed, and fish, and ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... foreground. The second group is, we say, before the attention, and is not at that moment felt as self; while the first group is vague, undifferentiated, not attended to, but felt. Any element in this background can detach itself and come into the foreground of attention. I become conscious at this moment, for instance, of the weight of my shoulders as they rest on the back of my chair: that sensation, however, belongs to my self no more than does the sensation ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... garden plant it should be in every garden. It flowers early, and then dies down. But it should be planted rather in the background, as the whole plant has an evil smell, especially in sunshine. Yet it should have a close attention, if only to study and admire the beautiful interior of the flower. I know of no other flower that is similarly formed, and it cannot be better described ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... earlier home than Luzon, but there are many accounts of migrations from the coast back into the mountains, after the arrival of the Spaniards and the Christianization of the Ilocano. The fact that there is an historical background for these tales is amply proven by fragments of pottery and the like, which the writer has recovered from the ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... crowded the streets included representatives of all the Asiatic races, the native Babylonians being recognisable by their graceful dress, consisting of a linen tunic falling to the feet, a fringed shawl, round cap, and heavy staff terminating in a knob. From this ever-changing background stood out many novel features calculated to stimulate Greek curiosity, such as the sick persons exposed at street-corners in order that they might beg the passers-by to prescribe for them, the prostitution of her votaries within the courts of the goddess Mylitta, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... some people to go away to be missed. There are certain very quiet people in the world, who make no fuss, who think humbly of themselves, who never on any occasion blow their own trumpets, who under all possible circumstances keep in the background, but who yet have a knack of filling odd corners, of smoothing down sharp angles, of shedding the sunshine of kindness and unselfishness over things generally. There are such people, and they are seldom very much missed until ...
— Frances Kane's Fortune • L. T. Meade
... the door a moment later, peering in cautiously, the sunshine casting a rude outline upon the floor, and his figure to those within showing silhouetted against the background of light, beleggined, befringed, and begloved after the fashion of ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... unfailing certainty and precision. Every two or three minutes a floating iron balloon, or a skeleton frame covered with sleeping aquatic birds, would flash into the field of vision ahead, like one of Professor Pepper's patent ghosts, stand out for a moment in brilliant white relief against a background of impenetrable darkness, and then vanish with the swiftness of summer lightning, as the electric beam left it to search for another buoy ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... he makes his entrance into society he knows nothing of its customs, this does not make him shy or timid; if he keeps in the background, it is not because he is embarrassed, but because, if you want to see, you must not be seen; for he scarcely troubles himself at all about what people think of him, and he is not the least afraid of ridicule. Hence he is ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... aimlessly paced the floor once or twice. In the grate a dull fire was burning, and a few fragments of blackened paper lay on the dying coals. Here and there a word stood out in a mouldy grey against a black background. Foyle did not touch the ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... in astonishment at such fine instances of what perseverance could do, and what energy and plodding industry could accomplish, even when surrounded with the difficulties of our ignorance; how much more will they praise this bright example, in the dark background of the historical tableaux, who, without even our means of obtaining knowledge—our libraries or our talent—rose by patient, hard and devoted study, from Brekespere the humble clerk—the rejected of St. Albans—to the proud ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... from the fruit gardens had the golden-brown in their faces, and their plain features were transfigured. They were walking in the dusty road; there was as background a high, dusty hawthorn hedge which had lost the freshness of spring and was browned by the work of caterpillars; they were in rags and jags, their shoes had split, and their feet looked twice as wide in consequence. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... crowded mart, chimes from the quaint belfry, the tragic triumph of vindictive law in the gory heads upon spikes! The veritable and minute history of London Bridge would illustrate the civic and social annals of England; and romance could scarce invent a more effective background for the varied scenes and personages such a chronicle would exhibit than the dim local perspective, when, ere any bridge stood there, the ferryman's daughter founded with the tolls a House of Sisters, subsequently transformed into a college ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... these women we know best that Elizabeth who never lived— Elizabeth Bennet. She is the most real because her inner being is laid open to us by her great creator. I have not dared to touch her save as a shadow picture in the background of the quiet English country-life which now is gone for ever. But her fragrance—stimulating rather than sweet, like lavender and rosemary—could not be forgotten in any picture of the late eighteenth or early nineteenth centuries and among the women whom all the world remembers. They, one ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... and the outer door, against the ardent blue background, stood Sophie Farcinelle—the English faced Sophie—a little heavy, a little slow, but with the large, long profile which is the type of English beauty—docile, healthy, cow-like. Her face, within her sunbonnet, caught the reflected light, and the pink calico of her ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are," said Sylvestre; "it's a customer come for the background of an engraving. I'll be with you in two minutes. Come in!" As he was speaking he drew the curtain in front of me, and through the thin stuff I could see him going toward the door, ...
— The Ink-Stain, Complete • Rene Bazin
... gentleman to handle; and yet, frank as he was intellectually, he was personally altogether a mystery. His professions, somehow, were all half- professions, and his allusions to his work and circumstances left something dimly ambiguous in the background. He was modest and proud, and never spoke of his domestic matters. He was evidently poor; yet he must have had some slender independence, since he could afford to make so merry over the fact that his culture of ideal beauty had never brought him a penny. His poverty, I supposed, ...
— The Madonna of the Future • Henry James
... removed and still unconscious, lay on the floor. The emissaries were grouped around her. In the background, dimly ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... gleamed white, her bosom rose and fell in a storm of angry, unuttered sobs. She was dry-eyed and still speechless, but for all that she was a tigress. A strangely-cut silhouette they formed there upon the housetops, with a background of empty sky, their feet sinking in the ...
— The Tempting of Tavernake • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is frequently mentioned in the following pages, it was no part of my task to deal with the general historical associations of the place, with its interesting background of Court life under James I. These belong strictly to local history, and the references to the town and neighbourhood of Royston simply arise from the accidental association with the district of the materials which have come most readily to my hand in glancing back at the life ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... conflict, in which satire and calumny had not been spared, had heated the minds of men. The cry of Dowgate against Leadenhall Street was louder than ever. Caveats were entered; petitions were signed; and in those petitions a doctrine which had hitherto been studiously kept in the background was boldly affirmed. While it was doubtful on which side the royal prerogative would be used, that prerogative had not been questioned. But as soon as it appeared that the Old Company was likely to obtain a regrant ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... he perceived that the far off Sierras were forming a background for a sinuous coil of smoke from the cabin. For some time he watched it curling up into the great arch of sky. It was as if he were hypnotised by it and, in a vague, shadowy way, he had a sense of being connected, somehow, with the little cabin and its recluse. Was this ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... long given way to her imagination—from the first moment of her imprisonment. Inclined to be very musical, her ear had become keen in the silence, and on this background of silence, out of the meagre bits of reality, the footsteps of the guards in the corridors, the ringing of the clock, the rustling of the wind on the iron roof, the creaking of the lantern—it created ...
— The Seven who were Hanged • Leonid Andreyev
... yellow background the woods resolve into dark patches and the quarries into vast geometric figures. In the valley the Somme zigzags among the poplars; its marshy bed is covered with rushes and aquatic plants; on the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume V (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... background, like the images in a camera, were the distinctly outlined and almost life-size figures of two men. Clad in a long gown, with loose sleeves, Gen'l Darrington stood near the hearth, brandishing the brass unicorn in one hand, the other thrown out and clinched; the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... of white hawthorn, which flowers late in Galloway, blue hyacinths and harebells massed together—yellow marigolds and glorious scarlet poppies, of which Jess with her taste of the savage was passionately fond. She had arranged some of these against a pale blue background of bunches of forget-me- nots, with an effect strangely striking in that cool, ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett
... into use on April 1st, 1868, and are all much alike in design. All values show a profile portrait of Queen Victoria, with head to right, on a background of horizontal lines within a circle, but the ornamentation and disposition of the inscriptions and numerals of value in the surrounding frame is different on each. The Stamp Collector's Magazine for May, 1868, in ...
— The Stamps of Canada • Bertram Poole
... armed with Snider rifles and cutlasses, were eager for their white men to make an assault upon Hayes and the crew of the Leonora. One night they gathered in front of their houses and danced a war-dance, but their white leaders discreetly kept in the background when Hayes appeared coming over toward them. He walked through the throng of natives, and in a very few minutes, although he was unarmed, picked out the biggest man of the lot and gave him a bad mauling about in the presence of every one ...
— Concerning "Bully" Hayes - From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other - Stories" - 1902 • Louis Becke
... woodwork of the demolished church of St.-Gery. Of historical interest, too, is a large Van der Meulen, representing the defeat of Turenne before Valenciennes in 1656, by the Spanish army under Conde. From a bird's-eye view of Valenciennes in the background of this large canvas, we may see how much the city has lost by the gradual destruction ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... all her tapestry and old French furniture, Felicity had a very contemporary air. About everything was the recent look characteristic of the home of a lately married couple. The room looked as if it had been decorated the day before for a twentieth-century Madame de Pompadour. But, if the background was almost archaeological, the atmosphere was absolutely modern. In this incongruity was ...
— The Twelfth Hour • Ada Leverson
... you to a lady who has daughters," said Deronda, immediately. He felt a sort of relief in gathering that the wretched home and cruel friends he imagined her to be fleeing from were not in the near background. Still she hesitated, and said more timidly ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... of Holland in the seventeenth century found its record; yet there is little or no anecdote. The genre, the representation of a group of people united by some common interest and with an appropriate background, has the same legitimacy, if not the same eminence, as the portrait. It does not possess the rank of the portrait because, since the interest is rather in the action or the situation portrayed, the figures are more merely typical, ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats—the tide being low—and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a church of vision or dream, Marychurch Abbey rose above the roofs and chimneys of the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... bright eyes of Evelyn Kirbet, whose father put up the money for the purposes of publicity and propaganda. The transformation of a hamlet into a seaside resort has been treated as a sort of psychological romance by Mr. OLIVER ONIONS in Mushroom Town, where the human beings are a background as it were for the bricks and mortar; Mr. A.S. NEILL, having chosen to make a farce of it, has provided a hero who believes in humorous advertisements, and has evidently persuaded the author to take him at his own valuation. This is hardly to be wondered at, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, February 18th, 1920 • Various
... exhausting. But never have my patience and endurance been more severely tested than during the year of Delancey's masterpiece. He finally decided that in the foreground, there was to be the clash of two human souls and in the background, the collision of two worlds—the old (pre-War) and the new. In fact, ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco
... eyeball is smaller than in the Caucasian, but when we examine the interior we find the same distribution of the blood vessels and same shape of the optic nerves. The pigment deposit in the choroid is excessive and gives, as a background to the retina, a beautiful silvery sheen when examined with the ophthalmoscope. One thing which I noticed particularly was the absence of this excessive deposit of pigment and absence of this watered silk appearance in the half breeds, they taking ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... sure, was daily abroad, toiling with the zest of an Amazon in garden and hay-field. Against the homely background of stubble or brown earth, his sturdy form stood out with the beauty of a Millet painting. But his sisters held themselves aloof, avoiding all possibility of contact with ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... literature of adventure is the grizzly bear. Lewis and Clark were the first white men to give an account of this beast. Many of the Indian lodge-tales to which they had listened rang with the fame of the grizzly, as a background for the greater fame of the narrators. As a matter of course, fact and figment were inextricably blended in these tales; but, while they did not show the animal as it was, they could not exaggerate its untamable ...
— Lewis and Clark - Meriwether Lewis and William Clark • William R. Lighton
... of a strange white marble streaked with yellow. The ground is completely covered with carpets of a sombre red. In the vaults, very elaborately wrought, nothing but blacks and gold: a background of black bestrewn with golden roses, and bordered with arabesques like gold lace. And from above hang thousands of gold chains supporting the vigil lamps for the evening prayers. Here and there are people on their knees, little groups in robe and turban, scattered fortuitously upon the red of the ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... logically, and to express his ideas clearly and effectively—all of which is vital to good special feature writing. In addition, such a course gives a student a knowledge of many subjects that he will find useful for his articles. A liberal education furnishes a background that is invaluable for all kinds of literary work. Universities also offer excellent opportunities for specialization. Intensive study in some one field of knowledge, such as agriculture, banking and finance, home economics, public health, ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... recall the experience of any tumultuous emotion as this messenger of hope appeared on our horizon, but we knew that we were safe. How easy it is to write this simple word of four letters! but, to realize it, one must have a background of despair. Since that morning, the words "safe," "safety," "salvation," have always come to me freighted ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... Artists' Exhibition was a winner. Did you see a memory sketch she did for the final exhibition at the League? It was a tall girl in black standing up singing and a beautiful red-headed girl in diaphanous blue playing an accompaniment on a guitar, with a background of holly and a great bunch of mistletoe at one side." Pierce stopped suddenly in the midst of his description of Judy's picture and, gazing intently at Molly, cried out, "By the great jumping jingo, if Miss Brown isn't the red-headed girl ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... a reverie. It was now Tuesday; she would reach home in the evening—a very late time they would say; but, as the delay was a pure accident, they would deem her marriage to Mr Heddegan tomorrow still practicable. Then Charles would have to be produced from the background. It was a terrible undertaking to think of, and she almost regretted her temerity in wedding so hastily that morning. The rage of her father would be so crushing; the reproaches of her mother so bitter; and perhaps Charles would answer hotly, ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... of vital force, which gives us a glimpse into the innermost sanctuary of a woman's soul—a revelation of the truth that to a woman there may be a greater thing than the love of a man—the story pictured against a wonderful Southern California background. ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... jump and romping over the goal line with tacklers hanging to him like streamers would have made you want to vote for him for Governor. Ole was the greatest man who ever came to Siwash. Prexy had always been considered some personage by the outside world, but he was only a bump in the background when ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... smiling, "that is, a good friend to your back; and though he chooses to keep himself in the background, depend upon it he'll not forsake you so long as you go on as you have done. Therefore, buy away for ready cash as largely as you please, and ...
— Tales from Blackwood, Volume 7 • Various
... bird neighbors, it is now shy and solitary. An ideal resort for it is a grove of oak or swamp maple near a stream or pond where it can bathe. Evergreen trees, too, are favorites, possibly because the bird knows how exquisitely its bright scarlet coat is set off by their dark background. ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... raise our voice against the almost universal conception that people can be made to laugh only when one of us hides a pin on the seat of grandpa's chair. The burden of an entire nation's humour is more than we can sustain. Thank you, sir," and he retired into the background, giving, as he passed, just one tug at Mary Sparks's hair and ...
— The Patient Observer - And His Friends • Simeon Strunsky
... towards the station. Finding the train was, as usual, indefinitely late, he strolled out again and finally drifted back just as the signals had fallen at last. It was quite dark by this time and the platform lamps were lit, but Mr. Carrington chanced to stand inconspicuously in a background of shadows. As the engine hissed ponderously under the station roof and the carriage doors began to open, he still stood there, the most casual of spectators. A few passengers passed him, and then came a young man in a fur coat, on whom some very curious glances ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... Panaetius of Rhodes, the instructor of Scipio and of all Scipio's intimate friends in the Stoic philosophy, who was constantly in his train and usually attended him even on journeys, knew how to adapt the system to clever men of the world, to keep its speculative side in the background, and to modify in some measure the dryness of the terminology and the insipidity of its moral catechism, more particularly by calling in the aid of the earlier philosophers, among whom Scipio himself had an especial predilection for the Socrates of ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... next house, Stella was glad to stand demurely in the background, and this time Molly took her turn at ...
— Marjorie's Vacation • Carolyn Wells
... excited by the traveller. The women know that, sooner or later, he must disappear; and though this is the case with all lovers, they do not like to miss the possibility of delusion. Thus the heroines keep in the background, and the visitor, who is always in a hurry, falls into the net of the ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... for conviction. Indeed it was quite true that he had no faith in other men's ideas for his own use. Yet within sixty seconds of contemplation, this theme had suddenly taken possession of him in a manner joyously well-known. Already the necessary contrast, the shadow-background of Ophelia's silver brightness—the melancholy of her Prince-repudiator, was tingling through him. Could he really relinquish ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... taken refuge with his friend Planus—Sigismond Planus, cashier of the house of Fromont for thirty years—in that little gallery decorated with flowers and hung with a paper representing shrubbery and clambering vines, which forms a sort of background of artificial verdure to Vefour's ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... tense seconds she looked down at us from the top of the lofty column, bending dangerously near its edge. Her form straightened and was stretched to its fullest height; her white, superb body was distinctly outlined against the black background of the upper cavern. Then she stepped backward slowly, without taking ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... the taverns and the talk of the passengers and the steamboat journey through the two lakes and down the river, but behind it all was a dark background. The shadows of my beloved friends fell every day upon my joys. However, I would be nearer Sally. It was a comfort when we were in Albany to reflect that she was somewhere in that noisy, bewildering spread of streets and buildings. I walked a few ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... into the sea a little south of Ajaccio, and the road, for the most part following its course, is generally easy. After leaving Bocagnono, the valley opened. We were among green hills, with the river flowing through a rich plain; the Alpine range, from which we had just descended, making a fine background to this pleasant landscape. Further on, some very picturesque villages, perched as usual on heights, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Oliver, looking up from where he and Maqueda sat whispering to each other while the fat Joshua glowered at them in the background. "Has Higgs appeared?" ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Guards, struck up an air which told that the Emperor was coming. Promptly the small group concerned forgot its grievance, in excitement, crowding together so that Virginia was pressed to the front, and only Miss Portman was pushed ruthlessly into the background. ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... fleetingly across their minds. They walked on side by side, happy that Providence had allowed them this delight, and so little desiring any other blessing that even the transitoriness of that they were now enjoying floated away into the background of their thoughts. ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... stands in memory to this day, Erect, self-poised, a rugged face half seen Against a background of unnatural dark, A witness to the ages as they pass That simple duty ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... grey light of a rainy dawn, which would have suited few women as a background, especially after a night journey, the girl's face looked pearly, and Stephen saw that her lashes, darker at the roots, were bright golden at the ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... brightness that exists between such objects and the atmosphere. It is a question, then, of giving such difference in intensity its maximum of brightness. To do this, Capt. Gaumet proposes to employ silvered signals upon a black background. He uses the simple letters of the alphabet, but changes their value. His apparatus has the form of a large album glued at the back to a sloping desk. Each silvered letter, glued to a piece of black cloth, is seen ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... intricacy of pattern, and blazing, even into autumn, with varied colour. In the midst of it, a large and absolutely symmetrical cedar "spread its dark green layers of shade," and supplied us in summer with a kind of al fresco sitting-room. The background of the garden was formed by the towering trees of Woburn Park; and close by there were great tracts of woodland, which stretch far into Buckinghamshire, and have the character and ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... expose himself to the boundless aplomb and momentum of this woman of forty-odd who was finding amusement in treating him as a "college boy"? "Boy" indeed she had actually called him: well, perhaps his present position made all this possible. He was not yet out in the world on his own. In the background of "down state" was a father with a purse in his pocket and a hand to open the purse. Though the purse was small and the hand reluctant, he must partly depend on both for another year. If he were only in business—if he were only a broker or even a salesman—he should not find ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller
... apparent area. He again saw the dark side of the planet in October, 1759, as did Harding at Goettingen, with Herschel's ten-foot reflector, on January 24th, 1806. This latter observer saw it on this occasion stand out against the background of the sky as of a pale ashen green, while on February 28th following, it seemed to him of a pale reddish gray, like the color of the ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... sun was setting over a landscape that realised one's preconceived ideas of the beauty of the country. On one side, low ridges with rows of picturesque pine-trees just as you know them from Japanese prints, while in the background to the west, above the clouds rose the top of Fuji, nearly 4,000 metres above sea-level. We steamed up in absolute calm, while the long twilight was still further prolonged by ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... south of Ajaccio, and the road, for the most part following its course, is generally easy. After leaving Bocagnono, the valley opened. We were among green hills, with the river flowing through a rich plain; the Alpine range, from which we had just descended, making a fine background to this pleasant landscape. Further on, some very picturesque villages, perched as usual ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... inconsiderable and feathery speck Of no proportions, now augmented, wears A threatening aspect, ominously dark; Enveloping the heaven's canopy In lowering shadow and portentous gloom; In pall of ambient obscurity. The fork-ed lightnings ramify and play Upon a background of sepulchral black; The growling thunders rumble a reply Of detonation awful and profound, To every corruscation's vivid gleam; In deep crescendo and fortissimo, In quavering tremolo and stately fugue Echoes, reverberates ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... revolution; and then we have the weight of the Crown thrown into the scale of this unholy alliance, from the mere influence of personal predilections and antipathies. To such a degree is principle dormant, or so entirely is it thrust into the background by passion, prejudice, or the interest of the ...
— The Greville Memoirs (Second Part) - A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 - (Volume 1 of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... who was sitting in the background, gave a sharp little exclamation of surprise when Barebone stepped ashore, and turned to Dormer Colville to ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... outside the city and met the panchayat and ordered them to get to business quickly. Then the owner of the cow stood up and told his story and the neighbours who had assembled called to him encouragingly, but the jackal sat in the background and pretended to be asleep. When the tale was finished, the Raja told the people who had assembled to give their decision, but they were all so afraid of the Raja that not one ventured to speak. As they kept silence ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... keep separate, and of the teacher of a particular set to keep them separate with himself, that, without saying much about it, he discouraged the printing of other languages besides Mota, and in other ways kept them rather in the background. How things would have arranged themselves if Mota had not by circumstances come into such prominence I cannot say, but the predominance of Mota came in with the internal organisation of the Mission by Mr. Pritt. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to this power as a means of cure. The measure of our success and of our control over disease has been, and is yet, in exact proportion to the extent to which we can relegate this resource to the background and avoid resorting to it. Instead of mental influence being the newest method of treatment it is the oldest. Two-thirds of the methods of the shaman, the witch-doctor, the medicine-man, were psychic. Instead of being an untried remedy, it is the most thoroughly ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... the Hebrews and the desert, and a solemn antique world. Fresh and joyous, a marble statue spoke to him from a twisted column of the pleasure-loving myths of Greece and Ionia. Ah! who would not have smiled with him to see, against the earthen red background, the brown-faced maiden dancing with gleeful reverence before the god Priapus, wrought in the fine clay of an Etruscan vase? The ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... excellent cotton, which is cultivated, however, only in infinitesimal quantities. Indigo, called by the natives anil, grows wild. The tobacco of the district is especially renowned, and in the Cordillera, the tops of which compose the background of the beautiful region lying to the east of the town, mate is grown successfully. The very name of the Cordillera of Caaguazu bears testimony to the abundance of the yerba, caa meaning mate in the Guaranian language, and guazu, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... explain, a hasty introduction of Miss Darpent was made, and all moved in to where Lady Archfield, more feeble and slow of movement, had come into the hall, and the nurse stood by with the little heir to be shown to his father, and Sedley Archfield stood in the background. It was a cruel moment for all, when the words came from Mr. Fellowes, "Sir, I have to tell you, Mr. Archfield is not here. This letter, he tells ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... proprietor at the counter, whereon appear gin and brandy, respectively contained in a tin pint-measure and an earthenware jug, with two or three tumblers beside them, out of which nearly all the party drank; some coming up to the counter frankly, others lingering in the background, waiting to be pressed, two paying for their own liquor and withdrawing. B—— treated them twice round. The pilot, after drinking his brandy, gave a history of our fishing expedition, and how many and how large fish we caught. B—— making acquaintances and renewing them, and gaining great ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... financially-speculative son of a farmer in Dumfriesshire. He was the "projector," or one of the projectors, of the Bank of England of 1694, investing 2000 pounds. He kept the Darien part of his scheme for an East India Company in the background, and it seems that William, when he granted a patent to that company, knew nothing of this design to settle in or near the Panama isthmus, which was quite clearly within the Spanish sphere of influence. ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... July 24, but by the time it could be delivered news arrived which threw into the background all matters of negotiation and illustrated with what respect British naval officers regarded "the instructions, repeated and enforced, for the observance of the greatest caution in impressing British seamen."[188] It is probable, indeed, that the change of ministry, ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 1 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... sweeps and had commenced to row wearily once more, when the fog lifted and before us lay the blessed land. A high range of sparsely wooded hills, crowned with rocky ledges, and with abrupt slopes covered with dry brown grass, running to the water's edge, formed the background of the picture. Nearer, a tongue of high land, brushy and rocky, made out from the main shore, and curving southward, formed a shelter to what seemed a harbor within. Against the precipitous point the sea broke with a heavy blow, and a few ugly peaks of rock lifted ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson
... his performance with the reindeer. He had set the igloo poles wrong end up and, when these had been righted, had spread the long haired deerskin robes, which were to serve as the inner lining of the shelters, hair side out, which was also wrong. He had once more been relegated to the background. This time he had not cared, for it gave him an opportunity to study his fellow travelers. They were for the most part a dark and sullen bunch. Not understanding Johnny's language, they did not attempt to talk with him, but certain gloomy glances seemed to tell him that, though his ...
— Triple Spies • Roy J. Snell
... crudely tinted flags flying from their roofs, the cheery little shops with their cheerier dames de comptoir smiling complacently on the tourists who unwarily bought their goods. Ladies in gay toilets, with scarlet parasols or floating feathers, made vivid patches of color against the green background of the gardens, and the streets were now and then touched into picturesqueness by the passing of some half-dozen peasants who had come from the neighboring villages to sell their butter or their eggs. The men in their blue blouses were mostly lean, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... But as every moment decreased the transparency of this tropical twilight, the tint gradually lost its softness and became darker and darker. It looked as if an invisible painter, unceasingly moving his gigantic brush, swiftly laid one coat of paint over the other, ever changing the exquisite background of our islet. The phosphoric candles of the fireflies began to twinkle here and there, shining brightly against the black trunks of the trees, and lost again on the silvery background of opalescent evening ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... met the other lucky ones and received orders to turn in and parade at 9 a.m. for baths and underclothing. There were no trousers, puttees, or overcoats in the stores, and so we had to come over as we were, a picture that had no fitting background other than the trenches. At dusk we boarded the motor-bus which conveyed us to the rail-head. That old bus had never had such a cargo of light hearts when plying between Shepherd's Bush and Liverpool Street. At the rail-head we transferred to the waiting ...
— One Young Man • Sir John Ernest Hodder-Williams
... discover what had affected Old Swallowtail so strongly. From her present position she could see nothing more than a vista of tumbled stones, but rising until her head projected above the topmost rail she presently saw, far across the valley, an automobile, standing silhouetted against the gray background. ...
— Mary Louise in the Country • L. Frank Baum (AKA Edith Van Dyne)
... college with all the cost of tuition included in the tax bill that must be paid anyway. The children are none the worse for this less guarded education. They are, in fact, benefited for they have a democratic background that makes ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... on the porch in front of his cabin, gazing at the western sky. A royal mantle of purple enwrapped the shoulders of mighty Pisgah against a background of lucent gold. The expression of anxiety and of spiritless longing left the man's face as he watched ...
— A Tar-Heel Baron • Mabell Shippie Clarke Pelton
... uniformly is the case in the Bayeux tapestry, and most other pictorial works of the period. The church is, of course, rudely represented, and the two upper stories of it reduced to a small scale in order to form a background to the figures; one of those bold pieces of picture history which we in our pride of perspective, and a thousand things besides, never dare attempt. We should have put in a column or two, of the real or perspective size, and subdued it into a vague background: the old workman crushed ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... his virtues, weren't much a man for a joke, and at another time this speech would have earned a rebuke from him in the name of law and order. But afore Cicely, and in sound of her voice, he felt amazed to find law and order sink into the background for a minute, though for a minute ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... broke from the main body and led his little flock on to the wide spaces of Salisbury Plain. James Warlock, unlike his father and grandfather, was a little sickly man with a narrow chest, no limbs to speak of and a sharp pale face. Martin had a faded daguerreotype of him set against the background of the old Wiltshire kitchen, his black clothes hung upon him like a disguise, his eyes burning even upon that faded picture with the fire of his spirit. For James Warlock was a mystic, a visionary, a prophet. He walked and talked ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... in background. Scott had been living out of hospital in a small apartment, enjoying as much liberty as he could manage. He had equipment so he could stump around, and an antique car specially equipped. He wasn't complimentary about them. Orthopedic products had to be: unreliable, ...
— A Matter of Proportion • Anne Walker
... they had helped to raise, were compelled to quicken their pace like the Communist leader in Paris who rushed after his men exclaiming:—Je suis leur chef, il faut bien que je les suive. The question of Partition itself receded into the background, and the issue, until then successfully veiled and now openly raised, was not whether Bengal should be one unpartitioned province or two partitioned provinces under British rule, but whether British rule itself was to endure in ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... not already possess, a great charm for Mr. Browning's fancy, since he studied no less than thirty works upon it, which were to contribute little more to his dramatic picture than what he calls 'decoration', or 'background'. But the one guide which he has given us to the reading of the poem is his assertion that its historical circumstance is only to be regarded as background; and the extent to which he identified himself with the figure of Sordello ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... who was awaiting him was an unusually large man, and bestrode an enormous horse. The two were as if they had been carved from ebony, as they stood silent and absolutely still, outlined sharply against the dazzlingly white background. ...
— Ted Strong in Montana - With Lariat and Spur • Edward C. Taylor
... scene, but I have record of only one passage such as one often sees in Italy where moments of the street are always waiting for transfer to the theater. A pair had posed themselves, across the way from our hotel, against the large closed shutter of a shop which made an admirable background. The woman in a black dress, with a red shawl over her shoulders, stood statuesquely immovable, confronting the middle-class man who, while people went and came about them, poured out his mind to her, with many frenzied gestures, but mostly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... an interesting—and illuminating—time, but I'm glad I don't belong to such a family! I should truly rather have the John Grier Home for a background. Whatever the drawbacks of my bringing up, there was at least no pretence about it. I know now what people mean when they say they are weighed down by Things. The material atmosphere of that house was crushing; I didn't draw a deep ...
— Daddy-Long-Legs • Jean Webster
... had come out of her chamber and heard the conversation between her son and the Yorker. Now Enoch ran to one of the loopholes from which he could observe the movements of the man who had shot at him in so cowardly a manner. He saw that the surveyor, who had thus far kept in the background, was expostulating with the angry man. He could not hear what they said, but it was evident that the surveyor was a man of some conscience and could not see such murderous actions without striving to put Halpen ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... have improved upon it, he would surely have become one of the foremost American poets, but a poet cannot live by verse alone, and after he began to be thoroughly in earnest with his painting, his rhythmic genius fell into the background. From Marseilles George W. Curtis proceeded to Egypt, where he wrote his well known book of Nile travels, while Cranch set out for Rome to ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... attached to the ceiling. Then, Madeleine had not forgotten the picturesque use so often made of the ivy in her native land, and had trained the obedient parasite to embower windows, or climb around frames of mirrors, until the gilt background gave but a golden glimmer through ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... The thousand pounds which he was taking home was more than he had been able to save throughout his life. To him it represented immense things. He would probably not spend a dollar more, or indulge in a single luxury, yet the money was there in the background, a warm, ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... parts: the one, the decisions of the community or its recognized organs; the other, the enforcing of those decisions upon all who resist them. The first part is not objected to by Anarchists. The second part, in an ordinary civilized State, may remain entirely in the background: those who have resisted a new law while it was being debated will, as a rule, submit to it when it is passed, because resistance is generally useless in a settled and orderly community. But the possibility of governmental force ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... days later Mrs. Keith and Millicent arrived at Hazlehurst. Lieutenant Walters was sitting in a recess of the big hall when Mrs. Foster went forward to greet them. The house was old and the dark paneling formed a good background for Millicent's delicate beauty, which was of the blond type. Walters studied her closely. He liked the something in her face that hinted at strength of character; and he noted her grace as she accompanied her hostess up ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... people, against monarchs of strong will and of resources secured by their foreign possession, against men of rare capacity, against whole dynasties of born tyrants. And yet that proud prerogative stands out on the background of our history. Within a generation of the Conquest, the Normans were compelled to recognise, in some grudging measure, the claims of the English people. When the struggle between Church and State extended to England, our Churchmen learned to associate themselves ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... against Cordelia in so far as her army is French, and unwilling in so far as she represents her father. This difficulty, and his natural inferiority to Edmund in force and ability, pushes him into the background; the battle is not won by him but by Edmund; and but for Edgar he would certainly have fallen a victim to the murderous plot against him. When it is discovered, however, he is fearless and resolute enough, beside being full of ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... inquirers ten young oxen; and everywhere Buriats in their long red coats and small red caps embroidered with gold helped the Tartars in black overcoats and black velvet caps on the back of their heads to weave the pattern of this Oriental human tapestry. Lamas formed the common background for it all, as they wandered about in their yellow and red robes, with capes picturesquely thrown over their shoulders and caps of many forms, some like yellow mushrooms, others like the red Phrygian bonnets or old Greek helmets in red. They ...
— Beasts, Men and Gods • Ferdinand Ossendowski
... disused iron gate, and to the design, curl within curl of slender, aspiring curves, that grew and branched and overflowed, in tendrils of almost tremulous grace, and in triple leaves, each less like a leaf than a three-tongued flame. Insubstantial as lace-work against the green background of the garden, it hung rather than stood between its brick pillars, its edges fretted and fringed with rust, consumed in a delicate decay. A stout iron railing guarded this miracle of art and time. Thus cut off from the uses of life, it gave ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... remembered the tones of her voice as she had told her Belgian adventures.... Was it love? Was it tenderness? Was it sensuality? The difference was indiscernible; it had no importance. Against the stark background of infinite existence all human beings were alike and ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... palm-trees with their bare trunks and sword-shaped leaves, and he saw the gate flanked by enormous stone figures which, lying on their bellies, stretched out two paws in front of them and lifted huge human heads high in the air. He saw the triangular form of the pyramids rise against the yellow background. Strange odours filled the air, as well as shrill noises made by fantastic figures, and every sound struck hard and sharp on the ear. Joseph's heart was heavy. His home was abandoned, and they were in a strange land in which they must ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... take pictures with the cataract as a background, do they not? I am sure I have seen photos of groups taken at Niagara Falls; in fact, I have seen groups being posed in public for that purpose, and very silly they looked, I must say. I presume that is ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... looking on. The angel had the aspect of a traveller, as if he were passing quickly by, and had but paused a moment to look, when one of the men glancing up suddenly saw him. The picture was dim, but the startled look upon this man's face, and the sorrow on the angel's, appeared out of the misty background with such truth that the tears came into the little Pilgrim's eyes, and she said in her heart, "Oh, that I could go to him and help him!" The other sketches were dimmer and dimmer. You seemed to see out of the darkness gleaming ...
— A Little Pilgrim • Mrs. Oliphant
... on the verge of an altogether desperate scuffle. Never for a moment had violence come between these two since long ago he had, in spite of her mother's protest in the background, carried her kicking and squalling to the nursery for some forgotten crime. With something near to horror ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... followed by a turn upon the piazza, a little stroll to the spring, near which delicious wild strawberries nestle in a background of sweet clover, bright buttercups, and field daisies, or a game of croquet ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... her hand, like a man, and talked to Sir Charles on indifferent topics, till Mr. Oldfield arrived. She then retired into the background, and left the gentlemen to discuss the deed. When appealed to, she evaded direct replies, and put on languid and imperial indifference. When she signed, it was with the air of some princess ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... are five long windows, very unlike the twelfth- century pendants to the western rose. These five windows blaze with red, and their splendour throws the Virgin above quite into the background. The artists, who felt that the twelfth-century glass was too fine and too delicate for the new scale of the church, have not only enlarged their scale and coarsened their design, but have coarsened their colour-scheme also, discarding blue in order to crush us under the earthly ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... use of this talk? Take up the child and the girl, and we can at least ask for the ransom. Ours are the villages on the heights," said a voice in the background. ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... within my own strong-hold, the pulpit. In a moment's weakness I had owned to her that I liked violets—pah! I am sick of the scent of them now. On Sunday morning I found a bunch of them, done up after a well-known fashion, with dried maiden-hair as a background, laid beside the pulpit cushion. I had good reason to know from whence it came. I said to her when she waylaid me on my homeward course that the woman who cleaned the church would have to be reprimanded. She had let fall a bunch ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... she had ceased speaking. At the open door of the operating-room on the fourth floor he paused. On a long white table lay the patient, a white-clad doctor on either side of her, and a nurse in the background sorting a handful of gleaming instruments. With two strides the old man reached ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... a word of her troubles to the Howes—not even to Martin—she set forth to the village, her dreams of redecorating the house being thrust, for the time being, entirely into the background by ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... the Nibelungenlied is that none of those hitherto made has reproduced the metrical form of the original. In the hope of making the outlines of the poem clearer for the modern reader, I have endeavored to supply in the Introduction a historical background by summing up the results of investigation into its origin and growth. The translation itself was begun many years ago, when I studied the original ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... right a sea of hills rose higher and higher, till they culminated in the purple mountains of Assuay. Far to the left, one hundred miles northeasterly, the peerless Chimborazo lifted its untrodden and unapproachable summit above its fellows—an imposing background to lesser mountains and stately forests. The great dome reflected dazzlingly the last blushes of the west, its crown of snow fringed with black lines, which were the steep and sharp edges of precipitous rocks. It was interesting ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... drama which noiselessly displayed itself before him. Over in the east the intense deep blue of the sky softened a little. Then the trees in that quarter began to contrast themselves against the background and reveal their distinguishing shapes. Swiftly, and yet with such even velocity that in no one minute did there seem to be any progress compared with the minute preceding, the darkness was thinned, and resolved itself overhead into pure sapphire, shaded into yellow ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... ankle-deep into the sand, trudged slowly along as if pushed back by the wind. It whipped her skirts about her and blew the ends of her fringed scarf back over her shoulder. She made a bright flash of color against the desolate background. Scarf, cap and thick knitted reefer were all of a warm rose shade. Once she stopped, and with hands thrust into her reefer pockets, stood looking off towards the lighthouse on Long Point. Mrs. Triplett spoke again, ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... faults, Haldane had too much spirit to go through life as one who must be tolerated, endured, kept in the background, and concerning whom no questions ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... of the very finest cambric. As the governor entered, the young man turned his head with a look full of indifference; and on recognizing Baisemeaux, he arose and saluted him courteously. But when his eyes fell upon Aramis, who remained in the background, the latter trembled, turned pale, and his hat, which he held in his hand, fell upon the ground, as if all his muscles had become relaxed at once. Baisemeaux, habituated to the presence of his prisoner, did ...
— Ten Years Later • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... mountains and the sea that I know nothing else in drama to compare with it. This again is followed by one of the finest shipwrecks in all poetry. Scene after scene, the first act portrays the cold and solemn beauty of Norwegian scenery as no painter's brush has contrived to do it. For the woodland background of the Saeter Girls there is no parallel in plastic art but the most classic of Norwegian paintings, Dahl's "Birch in a Snow Storm." Pages might be filled with praise of the picturesqueness of tableau after tableau in each act ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... gas begin to run out. Accordingly, Norway has been saving its oil-boosted budget surpluses in a Government Petroleum Fund, which is invested abroad and now is valued at more than $43 billion. GDP growth was a lackluster 1% in 2002 and 2003 against the background of a ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Here he stood, sniffing the still air with discrimination, testing with initiated ears every faint forest breathing. The infinitesimal and incessant stir of growth and change and readjustment was vaguely audible to his fine sense, making a rhythmic background against which the slightest unusual sound, even to the squeak of a wood-mouse, or the falling of a worm-bitten leaf, would have fairly startled the dark. Once he heard a twig snap, far in the depths on the other side of the trail, and he knew that some one of the wild kindred ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... run-after young man of twenty-seven, who might so easily have made one or other of the trifling or selfish excuses we are all so ready to make, was only a prophecy of those many "nameless unremembered acts" of simple kindness which filled the background of Matthew Arnold's middle and later life, and were not revealed, many of them, even to his own people, till after his death—kindness to a pupil-teacher, an unsuccessful writer, a hard-worked schoolmaster ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the moan of a human being in distress; and its effect upon the minds of our travellers, in the state they then were, was far from being pleasant. They watched the bird with despairing looks, until it was lost against the white background ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... one called in the morning time by the reflex row from the rousing of the five o'clocker. Glorious morning. The scene the reversal of that of last night. The forest to the east shows a deep blue-purple, mounted on a background that changes as you watch it from daffodil and amethyst to rose-pink, as the sun comes up through the night mists. The moon sinks down among them, her pale face flushing crimson as she goes; and the yellow-gold ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... were civil and orderly, officers and men,—greatly beyond the Austrians in behavior." [Kriele, Schlacht bei Kunersdorf; pp. 1-15 (in compressed state).] By these few traits conceive Frankfurt: this, now forgotten in most books, is a background on which things were transacted ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... paused, smilingly taking in the background of this interior. A sunny window full of plants, a bed with ruffled pillow-cases, a gilt clock, a canary, a table set out for two, a writing-desk and books in a corner, and a cooking stove, with a bubbling saucepan sending the cover dancing up and down. ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... a fancy draper's, I acted with cunning. In the centre of the window, on a raised background of silver paper, was displayed a wreath of orange-blossom veiled with tulle. I bought it. The young ladies were hysterical. "May I ask permission to put this little handbill in its place?" I said. They appealed to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 5, 1919 • Various
... cell occupies the background. It is built of mud and reeds, flat-roofed and doorless. Inside are seen a pitcher and a loaf of black bread; in the centre, on a wooden support, a large book; on the ground, here and there, bits of rush-work, a mat or two, a basket and ...
— The Temptation of St. Antony - or A Revelation of the Soul • Gustave Flaubert
... between them in Germany, an alliance could not well be maintained between two courts which professed opposite religious views. The current of the general tendencies of affairs has a power by which the best considered political combinations are swept into the background. ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... nothing but darkness visible, that serves only to discover sights of Wo. I look back through my chinks—I find errors, follies, faults; forward, old age and death, pleasures fleeting from me, no virtues succeeding to their place—il faut avouer, I want all my quicksilver to make such a background receive any other objects! ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... voices, while dim arms pointed to some noiseless thing that floated high above them against the background of the sky, which grew grey with the coming dawn. It appeared and disappeared, appeared again, then seemed to pass downward in the direction ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... most familiar in order to write an historical novel. It was in 1860, while traveling in Italy, that she formed "the great project" of Romola,—a mingling of fiction and moral philosophy, against the background of the mighty Renaissance movement. In this she was writing of things of which she had no personal knowledge, and the book cost her many months of hard and depressing labor. She said herself that she was a young woman when she began the work, and an old woman ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... various night insects and birds, and the weird calling of natives across the valleys. Far out towards the sea a thunderstorm flashed; and after a long interval the rumblings came to us. So very distant was it that we paid it little attention, save as an interesting background to our own still evening. Almost between sentences of our slow conversation, however, it rushed up to the zenith, blotting out the stars. The tall palms began to sway and rustle in the forerunning breeze. ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... enlarge in order to show the character of the fruiting surface, and even large specimens can sometimes have a portion of the hymenium enlarged to good advantage if it is desirable to show the characters clearly. The background should be selected to bring out the characters strongly, and in the exposure and developing it is often necessary to disregard the effect of the background in order to bring out the detail of texture on the plant itself. The background should be renewed ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson
... expressions of art, in a state of insubordination. It is the opera over again, where music and drama keep up an undignified race for prominence. Supposing an illustration were decorative in character echoing in a minor manner the suggested theme, would that not be a fitting background for the story-telling art? The Greeks knew very well what they were about when they introduced the relatively subordinate but decoratively important chorus into their dramas. This as well expresses ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 3, May 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... to add to the attractions of court-dances. Under the Roman empire the pantomimi had represented either a mythological story, or perhaps a scene from a Greek tragedy, by mute gestures, while a chorus, placed in the background, sang cantica to narrate the fable, or to describe the action of the scene. The question is whether mute pantomimic action, which is the essence of modern ballet, was carried through those court entertainments, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... collect in front of me, listening for the most part silently, or occasionally giving vent to low grunts and interjections of approval. One evening, I remember, a young woman joined the group, though keeping somewhat in the background; she listened intently, and after a time gradually turned her face toward me, unconsciously as it were; and the light of a street-lamp at a little distance revealed a countenance youthful, pale, sad, and exquisitely beautiful. It impressed ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... a sinister silence. No silence is sinister until it acquires a background of understandable menace. Here there was only the night quiet of Maternity, the silence of noiseless rubber heels on the hospital corridor floor, the faint brush of starched white skirts brushing through doorways into darkened and ...
— I'll Kill You Tomorrow • Helen Huber
... his note had brought to him in the school; he forgot the pretensions of Mealy Jones; he did not wish to forget the episode of the apple-tree, and for the time Piggy Pennington lived in a most peculiar world, made of hazel eyes and red-ribboned pig-tails, all circling around on a background of black-and-red ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... this to the author, we may say that the work is in style excellent reading, and that if it were not so, the narratives themselves are so thrilling, possess such a heart-reaching interest, that if these were literary crudities, they would be entirely placed in the background in the concentrated blaze of light which the author pours upon the bloody pathway of these victims of injustice, from 1851, when the terrors of the Fugitive Slave Law began, to the hour when Slavery and Rebellion were washed out ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... said elsewhere, I have constantly received the credit of unmasking a scoundrel simply because Quarles chose to remain in the background, but I have never claimed any credit to which I was not entitled. It was distinctly hard, therefore, when all the praise for bringing a series of crimes to light was given to him when justly it should have been accorded to me. I had been engaged on the work at ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... determined to make a settlement at the Bay of Biloxi. On the east side, at the mouth of the bay, as it were, there is a slight swelling of the shore, about four acres square, sloping gently to the woods in the background, and on the bay. Thus this position was fortified by nature, and the French skilfully availed themselves of these advantages. The weakest point, which was on the side of the forest, they strengthened with ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II - The Planting Of The First Colonies: 1562—1733 • Various
... is crowned with a thatched pavilion, the reflection of which shines broken in the water ruffled by the evening breeze. Groups of detached buildings hem in the view on each side, and their flags wave with the sky for a background. Paris is invisible: at this point the grounds are isolated ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... precipitately to a narrow river-valley green with orchards and gardens, and in the neck of the valley, where the hills meet again, the conical white town of Moulay Idriss, the Sacred City of Morocco, rises sharply against a wooded background. ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing with a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... was, and is, a low long dwelling built of dark bricks, and standing among orchards and meadows, green pasture lands and running streams. Its ivied chimneys had for background the sombre lines of a swelling moor, belted by a wood of pines which skirted the hollow wherein the earth nourished the fatness and sweetness of the thrifty farm acres. Along the edge of the moor the road ran that led to Hillsbro' Hall, and a short cut through the wood brought ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... sense it was too much like a stage picture to please a really fine taste. But to Enid Crofton it formed an ideal background for her attractive self. She had sold for very high prices the sound, solid, fine, 18th century furniture, which her husband had inherited, and with the proceeds she had bought the less comfortable but to the taste ...
— What Timmy Did • Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes
... As a flattering background to his interview Mr. Townsend gave the following description of myself, which I hope it will not be egotism to publish. There were so many descriptions of me of a different character that I feel at liberty to quote one ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... with gratitude; and no petition suggested itself to me save one, and that was, "Let me believe and love!" I thought of the fair, strong, stately figure of Christ, standing out in the world's history, like a statue of pure white marble against a dark background; I mused on the endurance, patience, forgiveness, and perfect innocence of that most spotless life which was finished on the cross, and again I murmured, "Let me believe and love!" And I became so ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... I had many interviews and conversations with Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli. I learned to appreciate, more and more, that the oddities attributed to the latter were mainly of society manufacture; while her fine qualities had been kept in the background by the over- shadowing ability, and prominence, of her husband. She was a devoted wife, and the soul of kindness to every one she liked or respected. Peace ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... up!" Maxwell flung down his manuscript in sign of doing so. "The whole thing is a mess, and you seem to delight in tormenting me about it. How am I to give the love-business charm, and yet keep it in the background?" ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... Huk business was the minute scale of the things that happened, compared to the background in which they took place. The squad ship, for example, lifted off Sirene VIII for the second time. She'd been out once and come back for the second batch of multipoly objects. Sirene VIII was not a giant planet, by any ...
— A Matter of Importance • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... they climbed the heights, and the air had the heady quality of wine. It was awesome, this entering into the great company of the mountains. Presently Mary caught the glimmer of something white against the dark background of the hills. It gleamed like a snow-bank, though they were far below the snow-line on the ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... alders fringing their banks, and the grand white oxen pasturing peacefully here and there; beyond these gracious scenes rise wooded hills, or masses of granite, taking weird forms; while as we journey further on we get tremendous panoramas, with a background of violet hills. These heights are about equal to the Cumberland range, the loftiest peak of the Morvan rising to ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... thickets that covered this ridge back for several leagues. Bushes, bogs and briers, and coarse prairie grass roughened the bottom of this valley; matted heather, furze, broom and clumps of shrubby trees, all those hills and uplands arising in the background to the northward horizon. This declining sun, and the moon and stars that will soon follow in the pathway of its chariot, like a liveried cortege, shone upon that scene with all the light they will give this day and night. The rain and dew, and all the genial ministries of the ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... of the gond I should have something to say had not a diversion occurred which relegated that lively and elusive creature to an obscure place in the background. We had finished the beat, and most of us had emerged from the swamp to higher ground where an open space, or maidan, corresponding to a drive in an English preserve, but on the grand scale, divided ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... could so establish themselves as not to greatly feel the hotel atmosphere. Carefully chosen colours textures, and appointments formed the background of their days, the food they ate was a thing produced by art, the servants who attended them were completely-trained mechanisms. To sit by a window and watch the kaleidoscopic human tide passing by on its way to its pleasure, to reach its work, to spend its money in unending ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... where Clara was standing and pressed a button. The heavy fire-proof curtain slowly rose to reveal the author's widow sitting patiently with the dark empty theatre for background. ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... the dowagers of the olden time have carried away with them. She retained the black mantilla trimmed with black lace woven in large square meshes; her caps, old-fashioned in shape, had the quaint charm which we see in silhouettes relieved against a white background. She took snuff with exquisite nicety and with the gestures which young people of the present day who have had the happiness of seeing their grandmothers and great-aunts replacing their gold snuff-boxes solemnly on the tables ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... believe himself to be obeying the insight of some one wiser than himself, or of society as expressed in its customs and institutions. But no man ever admitted that his life was purely a matter of expediency, or that in his dominant ideal he was the victim of chance. In the background of the busiest and most preoccupied life of affairs, there dwells the conviction that such living is appropriate to the universe; that it is called for by the circumstances of ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... light blue background is divided into four quadrants by a white cross; in the center of each rectangle is a white snake; the flag of France is ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... and took counsel together. The chief of the council suddenly presented himself. It was a man in miniature. The masculine shape, as it loomed up in the distance, gradually separating itself from the background of villa roofs and casino terraces, resolved itself into a figure stolid and sturdy, very brown of leg, and insolent of demeanor—swaggering along as if conscious of there being a full-grown man buttoned up within a boy's ragged coat. The swagger was accompanied by a whistle, whose neat ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... the doctors descending the stairs. Dr. Wilkins was looking important and excited, and trying to conceal an inward exultation under a manner of decorous calm. Dr. Bauerstein remained in the background, his grave bearded face unchanged. Dr. Wilkins was the spokesman for the two. He ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... was the first who appeared upon the stand. He had been rather in the background for some time previous to the death of the Prophet. He made but a weak claim. Strong ...
— The Mormon Menace - The Confessions of John Doyle Lee, Danite • John Doyle Lee
... the murmur of their voices. He waited long and then the white drapery vanished, reappeared, and Marishka's figure stood in the window, leaning with one hand upon the casement, in silhouette against the light. And now quite distinctly against the velvety soft background of the breathless night the sound of her voice, refined by the distance between them, but fearful in ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... the top of the basin in which we lay, something flashed up, throwing a glare upon the woody background, and a shell, followed by a shock, crashed ricochetting, directly in a line with us, but leaped, fortunately, above us, and continued its course ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... can be seen doing his work in this world on a great background, a kind of panorama or stage setting in his mind, made up of history and books, newspapers, people, and experiences, which might be called his Theory of ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... We know, for one thing, that out of them come some of the noblest instances of character and of achievement. Ignorance and crime and poverty and vice, stand in fearful contrast to knowledge and integrity and wealth and purity; but they likewise constitute the dark background against which the virtues of human life stand out in radiant relief; virtues developed by the struggle which they create; virtues which seem impossible without their co-existence. For, whence issues any ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... uncertainty as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain. Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers—"St. Malo"—"Cherbourg"—"Jersey"—"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the Havre ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the house, a fine old specimen of the patriarchal Boer, and his son, a poor slip of a man, were standing before him, hat in hand, while women-folk of all ages and fulness of costume peeped from every convenient crevice in the background. The general attitude of the household was that of humility, in contrast to the usual reception which the column had experienced in the majority of Karoo farms. And presently the cause for the deference became apparent. The gaping children in the main entrance were thrust aside, and ...
— On the Heels of De Wet • The Intelligence Officer
... Background: Discovered and claimed by Portugal in the late 15th century, the islands' sugar-based economy gave way to coffee and cocoa in the 19th century - all grown with plantation slave labor, a form of which lingered ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... below them lay the vast and endless background of the sea, throwing every intervening detail of the landscape into insignificance. There it was, steel blue in the brightening sunlight and glimmering here and there in changing white, where perhaps some treacherous rock or bar lay just submerged. And upon it, ...
— Tom Slade Motorcycle Dispatch Bearer • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... a moment through the window, and in Dave's heart some long-forgotten emotion moved momentarily at the sight of the good fellowship prevailing in the old house. Irene, too, was thinking; glimpses of her own butlered home, and then this background of primal simplicity, where the old cow-man cooked the meals and the famous specialist set the plates on the bare board table, and then back of it all her mother, sedate and correct, and very much shocked ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... threatens to become the central unit. I confess that this prospect, as evidenced by Three Pretty Men (METHUEN), fills me with some just apprehension. Mr. GILBERT CANNAN has set out to tell how a Scotch family, three brothers, a mother, and some sisters in the background, determines to make its fortune in a South Lancashire city (very recognisable under the name of Thrigsby), and how eventually all but one of them succeed. It is a long book and a close; and the dialogue (which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, February 16, 1916 • Various
... between the two places is flat, but rich and well cultivated: much rice is grown, and in consequence the whole country easily capable of being laid under water, a thing which I should imagine the Piedmontese would not be slow to avail themselves of; we ought to have had the Alps as a background to the view, but they were still veiled. It was here that a countryman, seeing me with one or two funny little pipes which I had bought in Turin, asked me if I was a fabricante ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... Against this background Isaac glowed like a bird-of-paradise. The writing lesson halted. Bluntly pointed pencils paused in mid-air or between surprise-parted lips, and the First Reader Class drew deep breaths of awe and admiration: for the new boy wore the brightest and tightest of red velvet ...
— Little Citizens • Myra Kelly
... later the saloon and sala were all alight, and the sashes of the jalousies closed, for it was cool at times up there at Escondido. There, too, stood the party of gentlemen, Mr. Mouse being a prominent figure in the background. Then came a rustling of robes, and as the great folding doors swung open, the three ladies lit up the saloon in a halo of loveliness with brighter rays than were shed from the wax-lights in the chandelier. Two fair hands were placed in those of Cleveland, and the ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... should teach us that now and then there comes a time when to hold the olive-branch in one hand and the sword in the other, especially if the olive-branch is kept in the foreground and the sword in the background, involves not only a sad waste of energy, but is mistaken kindness to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... pleasure, but, though it circled round the bowl of milk with grateful purrings, it declined to drink, going up to the stranger instead, whom, with varied mewings, "like man's own speech," it prevailed on to quit the shadowy background and approach the tempting food. At length both came up to the bowl, when the thirsty stranger feasted to its full satisfaction, while the cat of the house stood by in evident satisfaction watching its guest; and not until it would take no more could ...
— Stories of Animal Sagacity • W.H.G. Kingston
... watched the smoke turn gray in the sunlight, it suddenly occurred to him that, in some unaccountable manner, the question of the succession had receded somewhat into the background; it no longer seemed to him of such overwhelming consequence; at least, he had not been thinking of it a moment before, but ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson
... was once the wife of Lot as "a superstition." One little circumstance added enormously to the influence of this book, for, as a frontispiece, he inserted a picture of the salt column. It was delineated in rather a poetic manner: light streamed upon it, heavy clouds hung above it, and, as a background, were ranged buttresses of salt rock furrowed and channelled out by the winter rains: this salt statue picture was spread far and wide, and in thousands of country pulpits and Sunday-schools it was shown as a tribute of science ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... last two years it had been the very center other own individual life. Now the crowded studio, the smell of turpentine, the odd cosmopolitan gathering of fellow students, the little pangs following the bitter criticisms of the master, receded into the background until they became as a ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... as they please," was the answer. "Sometimes they come over here and smoke their pipes a little in the background, and sometimes they go off by themselves. We are very democratic ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... on deck without oilskins, for wind and sea were going down. There was a dry deck; and above, a sky which, still gray with the background of storm cloud, yet showed an occasional glimmer of blue, while to the east the sun shone clear and unobstructed; but on the whole clean-cut horizon there was not a ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... to suck the radiance along. It became a great cone of glowing light that, arrow-like, raced away upward. For a long instant the black length of the ship, and the greenish fan of flame, were outlined against the scarlet background of Jupiter. Then the freighter rocket, flinging herself upward at three gravities or better, passed the edge of ...
— The Indulgence of Negu Mah • Robert Andrew Arthur
... lone figure along the opposite side of the street was the topic of conversation at nearly every dinner table in Crampville that Sunday. It became a sort of small-town epic, so that they still tell how stern the elders looked, and how white Terry's face against the background of black fur which he had thrown across his shoulder in order to free his right hand that he might gravely raise his crimson hunting cap in respectful salutation of families he had known from childhood. And they still tell, too, how Deane Hunter, ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... of our knowledge imply everywhere a background of mystery. But that mystery is at once a stimulus to our inquiry and a prize set before our longing. In some respects it is only a challenge to search, and the horizons of knowledge forever widen before the explorer. At other points the veil never lifts, but ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... retreating into the background, while Colonel Vaughan and the maids pressed round the sofa. He only waited until, after a careful examination, the doctor said, "No bones broken, I'm glad to say, only rather badly bruised," and then, leaving the room unnoticed, found his way to the front door, and in a glow of excitement ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... about the same condition. It was a sad sight, but not at all ugly. Ruins seem to "go" with the French atmosphere and background. It all looked quite natural, and I had to make an effort to shake myself into a becoming frame of mind. If you had been with me I should have asked you to pinch me, and remind me that "all this is not yet ancient history," and that a little sentimentality would have ...
— On the Edge of the War Zone - From the Battle of the Marne to the Entrance of the Stars and Stripes • Mildred Aldrich
... described it would have supposed it had been rebuilt. The bricks fallen or broken by time, and the cement lacking to their edges, were replaced; the slate roof had been cleaned, and the effect of the white balustrade against its bluish background restored the gay character of the architecture. The approaches to the building, formerly choked up and sandy, were now cared for by the man whose duty it was to keep the park roadways in order. The poultry-yard, stables, and cow-shed, relegated to the ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... The gorgeous color of the place stopped him, on the threshold. He saw the broidered vestments upon which gold was the mere background; jacinths were the stamens of the flowers, and pierced diamonds were the dewdrops on their leaves; he saw the chalices and patens of amethyst and jade, the crucifixes of beaten gold, in which rubies were ...
— The Turquoise Cup, and, The Desert • Arthur Cosslett Smith
... shall have to keep you in the background." Lucy bent a severe eye on Katherine. "You are out ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... and repassing, like Oriental empires in history; and scepters wave thick, as Bruce's pikes at Bannockburn; and crowns are plenty as marigolds in June. And far in the background, hazy and blue, their steeps let down from the sky, loom Andes on Andes, rooted on Alps; and all round me, long rushing oceans, roll Amazons and Oronocos; waves, mounted Parthians; and, to and fro, toss the wide woodlands: all the world an elk, ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... thought I cared nothing for speed," he remarked, "but you were mistaken. I thought I would keep my desires in the background until I had succeeded in perfecting a car which I knew it would be impossible to outpace. I could not enter into competition with longer purses than my own, and if I had bought the fastest car in the market somebody else would have ...
— The Motor Pirate • George Sidney Paternoster
... friendship promised to flower in love in due season. The moment had come when the scene and the characters in this village drama were to undergo a change as sudden and as brilliant as is seen in those fairy spectacles where the dark background changes to a golden palace and the sober dresses are replaced by robes of regal splendor. The change was fast approaching; but he, the enchanter, as he had thought himself, found his wand broken, and his power given ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... evenings. He might take in the electric fountain, but in the crowd you couldn't go about and look at people without being in other people's way. Harvey was fond of the great public, but he liked to hold himself in the background. He rode past the Park under the long row of elms, gazing absently at the thronging walk where the middle strata of North Side humanity take their evening promenade. Passing the Park, he decided to go ...
— The Short Line War • Merwin-Webster
... to Calchas: it exhibits not a trace of the legislative and executive power of a regent of the theocracy. He does not bring help; he only descries help and the helper. The very event which, according to chap. viii. seq., involved the removal of Samuel from his place and his withdrawal to the background of the history, is here the sole basis of his reputation: the monarchy of Saul, if not his work, is his idea. He announces to the Benjamite his high calling, interpreting in this the thoughts of the man's own heart (ix. 19). With this his work ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... immeasurably reticent. You know, of a certainty, that you project only the smallest possible fragment of yourself. You yield your universality to the bond of common brotherhood; but your individualism—what it is that makes you you—withdraws itself naturally, involuntarily, inevitably, into the background,—the dim distance which their eyes cannot penetrate. But, from the fraction which you do project, they construct another you, call it by your name, and pass it around for the real, the actual you. You bristle with jest and laughter ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... at the leafy entrance of her lane she was not to know. She spied him standing there; and in her leisurely approach a strange conceit of reincarnation possessed her, and she smiled at the contrast thus summoned up. Despite the jingling harnesses of Bellevue Avenue and the background of Mr. Chamberlin's palace wall; despite the straw hat and white trousers and blue double-breasted serge coat in which he was conventionally arrayed, he was the sea fighter still—of all the ages. M. Vipsanius Agrippa, who had won an empire ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the erotic life, though, under the influence of a false morality and an equally false modesty, it has sometimes been allowed to fall into the background in stages of artificial civilization, has always been clearly realized by those peoples who have vitally grasped the relationships of life. Among most uncivilized races there appear to be few or no "sexually ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of which Mary Magna was the centre, with T-S and myself for background. The reporter had hunted out the Mexican family with which Carpenter had spent the night, and he drew a touching picture of Carpenter praying over Mary in this humble home, and converting her to a better life. Would the "million dollar vamp," as the "Examiner" called her, now take to playing ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... in art matters, inspired by Martin's "Belshazzar's Feast," and contrasts the modern methods of painting as—a Dryad, "a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks" (a figure that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad), with the older method illustrated by Julio Romano's dryad, in which was "an approximation of two natures." "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age" is a graceful, sparkling ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... French would call the place, except the Town House, a new statue, and a graceful copy of an old fountain. We had to turn up an unpromising side street to find at last a beautiful little gateway between dumpy octagonal towers, such as the old masters loved to put in the background of their pictures. Passing through was like walking into one of those pictures, getting round the hidden corner as one always longs to do on canvas. Before our eyes rose majestically the colossal shell of a palace, with carved golden walls, a vast courtyard, cyclopean round towers, and ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... talk about the meaning of the struggle, arises from the obligation that I am under to preserve a proper personal reserve regarding the great figures behind the vast intellectual and political changes which really are in the background of the war. ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... omission being possibly due to the fact that the building was unsuccessful. If an engineer was employed on this particular undertaking, the architect had, even at that early stage of his profession, learned the lesson of keeping all except his own end of the work in the background. ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Vol. LXX, Dec. 1910 • John A. Bensel
... were wrong. No matter how strenuous the work is, you are never out of the background of my thoughts. But at least I am having surcease from grieving for you. I have had no time to dwell on the fact that you cannot belong to me. I am afraid to come out of the Canyon. Afraid that when these wonderful days of adventure are over, the ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... night by contrast, strode out with a high silk hat, a baggy umbrella, and an old carpet-bag. He was evidently intended to represent a lonely traveller, for, as he sauntered along in front of the audience, two other boys of the Gibbs family sprang out of the bushes in the background, with white cloth masks over their faces. One carried a dark lantern and the other a toy pistol, which he held at Jim's head. They proceeded to go through the traveller's pockets, stealing watch, purse, carpet-bag, and umbrella. After that they took to their heels, leaving the poor despoiled traveller ...
— The Little Colonel's House Party • Annie Fellows Johnston
... great distance between them, yet she seemed immeasurable spaces away. Against the bright background of the conservatory her form stood dark, the outlines softened by semi-transparent edges of drapery. But the dull red lamplight lit duskily up the folds of her robe, her golden ornaments, and the black tarns, her eyes. She appeared to waver ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... Jinjur, at Ozma's command, build a fire and put a kettle of water over to boil. The Ruler of Oz stood before the fire silent and grave, while the others, realizing that an important ceremony of magic was about to be performed, stood quietly in the background so as not to interrupt Ozma's proceedings. Only Polychrome kept going in and coming out, humming softly to herself as she danced, for the Rainbow's Daughter could not keep still for long, and the four walls of a room always made her nervous and ill at ease. She moved so noiselessly, however, ...
— The Tin Woodman of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... that rock. I wanted to get back and bring the job as a whole to a finish so as to have a new one to tackle. Even at the end of that first day I felt I had learned enough to make myself a man of greater power than I was the day before. And always in the background was the unknown goal to which this toil was to lead. I hadn't yet stopped to figure out what the goal was but that it was worth while I had no doubt for I was no longer stationary. I was a constructor. I was in touch with a big enterprise ...
— One Way Out - A Middle-class New-Englander Emigrates to America • William Carleton
... pretty; but she had been very faithful. She had not been a favourite with Mr. Furnival, having neither wit nor grace to recommend her, and therefore in the old happy days of Keppel Street she had been kept in the background; but now, in this present time of her adversity, Mrs. Furnival found the benefit of ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... began to ascend the lower slopes of a high range, whose folds formed like a curtain the bold background of the view. This is the landward face of the Ghauts, over which we were to pass before sighting the sea. Masses of cold grey cloud rolled from the table-formed summit, we were presently shrouded in mist, and as we advanced, rain began to fall. The light of day vanishing, ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... and his companions were deceived by false indications of land. They were only vapors of an odd form, which rose in the background. It happened sometimes that these honest men were obstinate in their belief; but, after a certain time, they were forced to acknowledge that they had been dupes of an optical illusion. The pretended land, moved away, changed form and finished ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... make-believe stronger than we have. She play-acts his existence very well. But suppose someone asks her what he eats, or where he gets his exercise, or some other personal question. She hasn't the command of logic to improvise a convincing background." ...
— The Fourth R • George Oliver Smith
... semi-distinctness, that rendered objects sufficiently obvious, and exceedingly beautiful. The rounded, shorn swells of the land, hove upward to the eye, verdant and smooth; while the fine oaks of the park formed a shadowy background to the picture, inland. Seaward, the ocean was glittering, like a reversed plane of the firmament, far as eye could reach. If our own hemisphere, or rather this latitude, may boast of purer skies than are enjoyed by the mother country, the latter has ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... men, and had besides thought her so much younger than she was, that the idea of desire in connection with her, though in the nature of things not entirely eliminated, had yet been kept by him in the background even to himself. He had loved Blanche as unselfishly as only a woman or a boy can love, and now he began to suffer from it in a manner he had not at ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... pavements, which go on and on till the wisest head would be puzzled to know where Rochester ends and where Chatham begins, the disposition of Father Time to have his own unimpeded way therein, and of the gray cathedral towers which loom up in the background of many a sketch and tale. Rochester, too, is on the way to Canterbury, Dickens's best loved cathedral, the home of Agnes Wickfield, the sunny spot in the life and memory of David Copperfield. David was particularly ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... a great pace; lizards and goannas scampered out of the way in dozens, and, clambering trees, eyed us unblinkingly as we passed. Did we see a person or vehicle a tiny speck ahead of us—in a short time they were as far away in the background. ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... pictures; and those figures which are most prominent in the descriptions can be detected in the pictures only by a very close scrutiny. Mr. Martin has succeeded perfectly in representing the pillars and candelabras of Pandaemonium. But he has forgotten that Milton's Pandaemonium is merely the background to Satan. In the picture, the Archangel is scarcely visible amidst the endless colonnades of his infernal palace. Milton's Paradise, again, is merely the background to his Adam and Eve. But in Mr. Martin's picture the landscape is everything. Adam, Eve, and Raphael attract much ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... system of imaginative reason which shall answer the exigencies not only of our more normal moods but of those moods into which we are thrown by the pressure upon us—apparently from outside the mechanical sequence of cause and effect—of certain mysterious Powers in the background of our experience, such as hitherto have only found symbolic and representative expression in the ritual ...
— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys
... authorities—wrote from the point of view of the Order, and consequently are very unreliable in some matters. The treatment that the Maltese received from the Order is very inadequately dealt with, and none of them can seriously estimate the Mediterranean background to the history of the Knights, and especially their relations with the Barbary pirates. General Porter, whose history is the only English one at all worthy of mention, possesses the same faults. Though his ...
— Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 • R. Cohen
... a low coping on the side next the street, and some one had laid a lot of bundles of odds and ends against it; lying down, we could look out between those without any risk of being seen from below, but Goodenough made the Sikhs keep well in the background and only we three peered over the edge. About two hundred yards in front of us the Dome of the Rock glistened in the morning sun above the intervening roofs. The street was almost deserted, although the guards at either end had been removed for ...
— Jimgrim and Allah's Peace • Talbot Mundy
... it. The old man spoke cheerfully, but they could see before them the tragedy depicted by his simple words. His hearers were all silent when he had concluded, feeling they could say nothing to console him or lighten his burden. Only Wampus, sitting in the background, looked scornfully upon the man who had once been ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces and Uncle John • Edith Van Dyne
... rock, and tried to close my eyes; but they would keep opening and staring into the darkness. It was not black darkness—I do not think I could have borne that; a sort of murky half-light seemed reflected from the water, or from somewhere, and glimmered strangely from a background ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... as I shall ever be of anything in my life that she is the only girl for me." Thus he mused after he had left the room rather than listen to his sister's gossip. He was standing on the porch, looking through the trees at the garden beyond, and thinking what an appropriate background it would be for Judith's rare beauty. How he would like to lead her through the box maze and then sit beside her on the marble bench under the syringa bushes! If he could prevail upon the independent girl to listen to him, would his family ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... observed it carefully before he aroused Nadia, who hurried into the control room. Looming large in the shortened range of the plate, their objective hurtled onward in its eternal course, its enormous velocity betrayed only by the rapidity with which it sped past the incredibly brilliant background of infinitely distant stars. Apparently it was a wild jumble of separate fragments; a conglomerate, heterogeneous aggregation of rough and jagged masses varying in size from grains of sand up to enormous chunks, which upon Earth would have weighed millions of tons. Pervading the whole nucleus, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... shouts, carrying their little bows and arrows. The Indian maidens enter gaily, carrying reeds for weaving. They move silently, swiftly, gracefully. Two of their number begin to grind maize between stones. Two others plait baskets. An old medicine-man, with a bag of herbs, comes from the background, and seats himself near the drum, at left, taking an Indian flute from his deerskin belt, and fingering it lovingly. An Indian woman, arriving later than the others, unstraps from her back a small papoose, and ...
— Patriotic Plays and Pageants for Young People • Constance D'Arcy Mackay
... have a similar dichotomous organisation; but it is either not based on the totem kins or they have fallen into the background. ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... bay. This told Raoul the precise position of his enemy, and he was not sorry to see that he was already to the westward of her; a fact that permitted him to slip round the island again, so near in as to be complete concealed by the background of cliffs. By the aid of an excellent night-glass, too, he was enabled to see the frigate, distant about a league, under everything that would draw, from her royals down, standing toward the mouth of the bay on the larboard tack; having ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... appearance of the place; the foreign settlement, with its goodly array of foreign vessels, occupying the foreground of the picture; the junks and native town lying up the river, and dimly perceptible among the shadows of the background; spacious houses, always well, and often sumptuously, furnished; Europeans, ladies and gentlemen, strolling along the quays; English policemen habited as the London police; and a climate very much resembling that which I had experienced in London exactly twelve months ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... the author it was no longer an important event. Jim Smiley's frog as standard-bearer of his literary procession was not an interesting object, so far as he was concerned—not with that vast, empty hall in the background and the insane undertaking of trying to fill it. The San Francisco venture had been as nothing compared with this. Fuller was working night and day with abounding joy, while the subject of his labor felt as if he were on the brink ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... band nor sees the trees, the grim mediaeval fortifications frown upon the valley, and the time-stained dwellings, great and small, rise in rugged irregularity against the lighter brown of the rocky background and the green of scattered olive groves and chestnuts. Those features, at least, have not changed, and show no disposition to ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... to keep that in the background. I want to forget everything but that you are here and that I'm happy," she whispered, with her arms about his neck. "I want to forget everything else—until it's time ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... then,' I asked, 'that the Princess of Conde is kept utterly in the background in spite of her mother-in-law, and that the Prince publishes ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... itself over soon after midday; when I got into a Cab to Chelsea, for the purpose of seeing Carlyle's Statue on the Embankment, and to take a last look at his old House in Cheyne Row. The Statue very good, I thought, though looking somewhat small for want of a good Background to set it off: but the old House! Shut up—neglected—'To Let'—was sad enough to me. I got back ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble (1871-1883) • Edward FitzGerald
... of stories for boys have their background laid either in the city or the country, or possibly on the ocean, and we have read much about the doings of lads both rich and poor ...
— Randy of the River - The Adventures of a Young Deckhand • Horatio Alger Jr.
... legions. We at home have had our own experiences, our deep anxieties, our doubts, our griefs, and always we have been conscious of the might of forces in grapple and the high issues that hung upon the fate of the armies. In the background of all our thoughts at all times has been the solemn consciousness that the destiny of mankind was at work in mighty throes toward an end hidden to our knowledge if not to our faith and hope. We have ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... cathedral, so still and majestic were the woods. Through the dense greenness of the pines there was an occasional flash of a silver birch. The scarlets and yellows of oak and maple trees gleamed here and there, making a rich background for the ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... scale. It is only necessary to keep open house to have the pick of the younger ones as your guests. They will come to entertainments at American houses and bring all their relations, and dance, and dine, and flirt with great good humor and persistency; but if there is not a good solid fortune in the background, in the best of securities, the prettiest American smiles never tempt them beyond flirtation; the season over, they disappear up into their mountain villas to wait for a ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... (1575), representing the collection of Arabian olibanum, and this through his kind intervention I am able to reproduce here. The text (probably after Polo) speaks of the tree as resembling a fir, but in the cut the firs are in the background; the incense trees have some real suggestion of Boswellia, and the whole design ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... there Theodore was born on October 27, 1858. He passed his boyhood amid the most wholesome family life. Besides his brother Elliott and two sisters, as his Uncle Robert lived next door, there were cousins to play with and a numerous kindred to form the background of his young life. He was, fortunately, not precocious, for the infant prodigies of seven, who become the amazing omniscients of twenty-three, are seldom heard of at thirty. He learned very early to read, and his sisters remember that ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... squares. Rinuccini arranged it from the story of Arion. The theater, so we are told, represented a sea dotted with rocks and from many of these spouted springs of living water. At the foot of the mountains in the background floated little ships. Amphitrite entered in a car drawn by two dolphins and accompanied by fourteen tritons and fourteen naiads. Arion arrived in a ship with a crew of forty. When he had precipitated himself into the sea he sang a solo accompanied by a harp, not by a lyre as in the ancient fable. ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson
... traveller has happened to linger here and there in the outposts of the desert, has seen the British camp at Kantara or the graceful French garden town of Ismalia, he comes to take the desert as a background, and sometimes a beautiful background; a mirror of mighty reflections and changing colours almost as strange as the colours of the sea. But when it is first seen abutting, and as it were, advancing, upon the fields and gardens of humanity, then it looks indeed like an enemy, ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... the tent. The youngster looks upon me and the Professor as ordinary braves, only intended as a background to the camp scene. When he is seated on a box of Sum-wah-tah, with the edge of the table sawing his neck, and his mouth full of beefsteak, Little Bear calls for his name. 'Roy,' says the kid, with a sirloiny sound to it. But when the rest of it and his post-office address ...
— Rolling Stones • O. Henry
... complete political convulsions. Who, then, directs? Who commands? The members of the Commune, divided as they are in opinion, do not appear capable, on account of their number and lamentable inexperience, of taking the sole lead in military affairs. Is there not some one either amongst them or in the background, who knows how to think, direct, and act? Is it Bergeret? Is it Cluseret? The future perhaps will unravel the mystery. In the meantime, and in spite of the reverses to which the Federals have had to submit during these last days, the whole of Paris unites in unanimous surprise at the extreme regularity ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... this Antipodean city, looking so white and clean and fair in the morning sunshine, stretching away to right and left, rising in streets and terraces from the shore, cresting the heights with steeples and villa-roofs, and filling up the valleys below. In the far background is the heavy brow of Mount Eden, whose extinct crater we shall explore by-and-by, and whence we shall obtain a splendid view of the entire city, its suburbs, and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... the large bank, with a few rows of spools, is shown in the extreme background. The two sets of threads, from the two wings of the bank, are seen distinctly, and the machine or frame immediately in front of the bank is where the two kinds of lease are made when desired, i.e. at the beginning and at the end of the warp. Between this leasing frame ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... fuller of matter for thought, wonder and delight. At each new reading, too, the things in him that belonged to his own age, the Biblical literalism, the theological prepossessions, the political partisanship, recede more and more into the background and leave us freer to enjoy the things which belong to all time. And to all peoples. Milton is, indeed, intensely English and could not have been anything but an Englishman. His profound conviction of the greatness of moral issues, and his passionate ...
— Milton • John Bailey
... lay close together in the background, on the slope of the nearest chain of hills; still further back lay a plain celebrated for its fertility and the luxuriance of its verdure: Lebanon, with its wooded peaks, was shut in on the north and south, but on the east the mountain sloped downwards almost to the sea-level, furnishing ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... endeavor there are thousands of people who are forced to remain in the background because they lack self-confidence in speech and manner—the very fundamental of success. For just such people Grenville Kleiser has written his book "How to Develop ...
— Successful Methods of Public Speaking • Grenville Kleiser
... tail; it is also somewhat smaller than the Rock Ptarmigan. They nest abundantly near the summits of the ranges in Colorado, making their nests among the rocks, and generally lining them with a few grasses. During June, they lay from six to twelve eggs having a creamy background, speckled and blotched with chestnut brown. Size ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... lower ground, and joined their comrades. All now halted and gazed steadfastly in our direction, forming a superb tableau, their beautiful mottled skins glancing like the summer coat of a thoroughbred horse, the orange-colored statues standing out in high relief from a background of ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... and white by the sterilizer, put out a hand to steady herself. So that was it! No wonder Carlotta had hated her. And those whispering voices! What were they saying? How hateful life was, and men and women. Must there always be something hideous in the background? Until now she had only seen life. Now she felt its hot breath ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... usually are upon matters of moment, much divided. Some thought it a fair promise of the future intention of the Committee to abolish that phalanx of authors who usurp the stage, to the exclusion of a large assortment of dramatic talent blushing unseen in the background; while others contended that the scheme would prevent men of real eminence from descending into an amphitheatre in which all Grub Street (that is to say, all London and Westminster) would be arrayed against them. The event has proved both parties to be in a ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... holiday came round, to the farm of one Dorman. He was glad of the chance to get to Shropshire. There is something about the country there, with its green fields and miniature rivers, that soothes the wounded spirit and forms a pleasant background for sentimental musings. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... must have remarked, a beautiful human countenance is more beautiful than at any other period, when it acquires, from some accidental circumstance, a temporary and extraordinary degree of loveliness. Sometimes it is the mere disposition of light and shade that produces this effect—the background behind it, the objects that surround it. Sometimes it is that the tone of the mind at the moment gives the peculiar expression which harmonizes best with the lines of the features and the colouring of the complexion, and which is in perfect accord with all those expectations which fine, ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... moment when the vision of the cathedral is to appear, the screens marked E E are parted and folded back disclosing the chancel. Perhaps some church nearby has stored in its basement an old stained glass window, which may be borrowed and used as background for the church scene. Such a window was used in a performance of "Much Ado About Nothing" given some years ago at one of the Eastern colleges. It was dimly lit from behind by electric globes and proved very successful in creating a churchly atmosphere. If this can not be done, cover two of the ...
— Why the Chimes Rang: A Play in One Act • Elizabeth Apthorp McFadden
... a picturesque place, and I was glad that I had come. The colouring was charming: there was red rock in the background, here and there covered with grass, and ablaze with flowers. Wild roses and poppies, pink-thrift and white daisies, all contributed to make the old rock gay. But the yellow ragwort was all over; great patches of it grew even ...
— Christie, the King's Servant • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... in the background beckoning, and all my dream vanished away. Yet to my mind came the thought that it was to the lady who gave the necklace that Death stood near, rather than to him to whom it was given. For surely death was written in ...
— The Wanderer's Necklace • H. Rider Haggard
... parents who had had little sympathy with the Confederate cause, attempting to carve out his career in the section of his birth and meeting opposition and defeat from the prejudices with which he constantly found himself in conflict. The story found its main theme and background in the fact that the Southern States were so exclusively living in the memories of the Civil War that it was impossible for modern ideas to obtain a foothold. "I have sometimes thought," said the author, and this passage may be taken as embodying the leading point of the narrative, "that many ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... looked on also, but that which he saw pleased him but moderately. The grace of every movement, the distinction of face and figure, the charm of that finely-poised, honey-coloured head showing up against the background of gray-blue tapestried wall, were enough, he owned—having a very pretty taste in women as well as in horses—to drive many a man crazy.—"But if the mother's a baggage, the daughter's a vixen," he said to himself. "And, upon my soul if I had to choose ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... the same child in a cemetery three miles in the country where I used mounted butterflies from my cases, and potted plants carried from my conservatory, for a graveyard scene. The time was early November, but God granted sunshine that day, and short focus blurred the background. At four o'clock I was at the schoolhouse, and in the best-lighted room with five or six models, I was working on the spelling bee scenes. By six I was in the darkroom developing and drying these plates, ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... "White and brown and yellow. Russian and British and French and German and Chinese and Spanish. They were chosen for technical background rather than ...
— Competition • James Causey
... reached. There they tied the horses and climbed on foot to the upland. The grass among the rocks was yellow now, and high gentians seized on the rare moment to flaunt their wondrous blue against that perfect background. A flock of autumn birds rose up and flew on, as the climbers, reaching the Spirit Rock, paused and turned to look out over the golden plains to the east, over the blue hills to the north, and into the ...
— The Preacher of Cedar Mountain - A Tale of the Open Country • Ernest Thompson Seton
... hate the village magistrate. He looks like a family portrait by a Flemish artist, he himself weighing down the front of the picture with his portliness and his long brown beard, whilst the faces of his family are arranged in two groups for the background. I think he is angry at our intrusion. He is very republican and self-important. But we eclipse him easily, with the aid of a large black velvet hat, and black furs, and ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... severe as she had expected. For the first time in her life she was not lost in eclipse in the blaze of Daisy's brilliant and mature personality. Under such favourable circumstances Loretta came rapidly to the front, while Mrs. Hemingway modestly and shamelessly retreated into the background. ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... but tastefully dressed. The pit was full and the boxes also. The latter were ornamented with mirrors, and on that occasion were all illuminated for some reason or other. It was a magnificent scene, but all this glitter and light put the stage into the background. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... often have watched the evening star as we are watching it now, when he was a boy living in the desert. Later on, when he became the warrior prophet, he must have visualized the heavens as the background of his banner, and taken the evening star and the crescent moon as his symbols—the star and the crescent of Islam." Michael paused. "In the same way, the full rays of the sun became the symbol of Aton, Akhnaton's god ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... into the road dragging his gun after him by the bayonet, and raised his hand for them to halt. His captain followed him from the post-house throwing away a cigarette as he came, and saluted MacWilliams on the box and bowed to the two riders in the background. In his right hand he held one of the long iron rods with which the collectors of the city's taxes were wont to pierce the bundles and packs, and even the carriage cushions of those who entered the city limits from the coast, and who might ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... very heart of the theatrical district. He took a vast pride in his control of it. He even emblazoned the announcement of his London management on the walls of the Empire on Broadway in New York. In his affections it was in England what the Empire was to him in America. It was destined to be the background of his distinguished artistic endeavors, ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... being disturbed, and soon turned back without having been fired at. On the way back, I saw bombs bursting at Douaumont and flew over to get a closer view. There were four or five other German biplanes there; I also noticed several French battleplanes at a distance. I kept in the background and watched our opponents. I saw a Nieuport attack one of our machines, so I went for him and I almost felt I had him; but my speed was too great, and I shot past him. He then made off at great speed; I behind him. Several times I was very near ...
— An Aviator's Field Book - Being the field reports of Oswald Boelcke, from August 1, - 1914 to October 28, 1916 • Oswald Boelcke
... again when, advanced in years, he retraced the journey of his youth that Americans might ever know where led the footsteps of the pioneers. The publication of this book in its Pioneer Life Series carries forward one of the cherished purposes of World Book Company—to supply as a background to the study of American history interesting and authentic narratives based on the personal experiences of brave men and women who helped to push the frontier of our country ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... told a portion of the truth; for there was more in the background, which he did not wish to confide to his friend. Toto Chupin's revolt had disquieted him. Let there be but a single flaw in the axletree, and one day it will snap in twain; and Mascarin wanted to ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
... kind of frozen paleness, the pallor of a marble statue, the outward sign of a sorrow so great that time could never soften its sting. Behind these three stood the friends and kinsfolk of Simone and the friends and kinsfolk of Messer Folco, and made a brave background for the tragedy. So, for a moment, the three stood looking straight into the square before them, and then it was plain that they suddenly became conscious of untoward events, and Messer Simone forgot his triumph, and Messer Folco his pride, and Madonna ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... we not know something of this hidden background of the orchestra? Why should not somebody tell one of the stories that is waiting here? Not I, but some one familiar with this region, who has trodden its paths and shared in its labours; not a mere lover of music, but ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... whole of the seventeenth, as well as the first half of the eighteenth century, it remained one of the favorite subjects of puppet-shows, popular melodramas, exhibitions of ombres chinoises, and pantomimes. The more the awful event, with its moral lessons, receded into the background of time, the more it lost its serious and impressive character, until it became a mere burlesque, and Hanswurst and Casperle ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... family life, of the meannesses of trade, of the flatteries of one class of society by another, of the impediments which the family throws in the way of lofty aims and aspirations. But we are conscious that there are evils and dangers in the background greater still, which are not appreciated, because they are either concealed or suppressed. What a condition of man would that be, in which human passions were controlled by no authority, divine or human, in which there was no shame ...
— The Republic • Plato
... and premonitions of pleasure; a third through social sympathy and moral affinities. Contemplation, sense, and association are none of them the essence nor even the seed of love; but any of them may be its soil and supply it with a propitious background. It would be mere sophistry to pretend, for instance, that love is or should be nothing but a moral bond, the sympathy of two kindred spirits or the union of two lives. For such an effect no passion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the blood and gold banner of Spain, as the priest clothed in vestments of his office asks the blessings of Almighty God upon the land which Columbus claims in the name of the House of Castile. In the background we see waving palms and dark-skinned men who gaze with awe upon the white discoverers. In another scene we see the cold wintry waves surge and dash around the frail craft fighting its way across dark tempestuous ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Jane Austen will enjoy Waitstill Baxter.... The solution the reader must find out for himself. It is a triumph of ingenuity. The characters are happy in their background of Puritan village life. The drudgery, the flowers, the strictness in morals and the narrowness of outlook all combine to form ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... changed silver chloride than the collar, but more than the coat, because the face is lighter than the coat, but not so light as the collar. Finally, the silver chloride would be least affected by the dark tie. The wall paper in the background would affect the plate according to the brightness of the light which fell directly upon it and which reflected to the camera. When such a plate has been developed and fixed, as described in Section 121, we have the so-called negative (Fig. ...
— General Science • Bertha M. Clark
... before the stores young farm hands and clerks sat on store boxes or on the curbing. They did not pay any attention to Hugh who, when he went to stand near them, remained silent and kept himself in the background. The farm hands talked of their work and boasted of the number of bushels of corn they could pick in a day, or of their skill in plowing. The clerks were intent upon playing practical jokes which pleased ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson
... with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas—not, however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates, the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through the Lucia fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff before ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... West Engle, or Mercians, still remained free to conquer and expand on the south of the Humber, as the Englishmen of Deira and Bernicia remained free to the north of that river. It was plain, therefore, that from this moment the growth of these powers would throw their fellow kingdoms into the background, and that with an ever-growing inequality of strength must come a new arrangement of political forces. The greater kingdoms would in the end be drawn to subject and absorb the lesser ones, and to the war between Englishman ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... separated the stream from a belt of forest growth which extended to a hill range, dark with impervious jungle, and cleared here and there for the cultivator's village. Behind it, rose another sub-range, wooded with a lower bush and already blue with air, whilst in the background towered range upon range, here rising abruptly into points and peaks, there ramp-shaped or wall- formed, with sheer descents, and all of light azure hue adorned with glories of silver ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... and her brows had drawn together in an angry frown by the time Gabriel had finished, and Neale, silently watching her from the background, saw her fingers clench themselves. She gave a swift glance at the Earl, and then fixed her eyes steadily ...
— The Chestermarke Instinct • J. S. Fletcher
... town very picturesque. It is so in truth, though some of its picturesqueness is the result of antiquity, dirt and dilapidation. But the fresh green trees lining the quay looked bright and youthful; a contrast with the ancient grey walls that formed their background. Vessels were loading and unloading, people hurried to and fro; many had evidently come down to see the boat in, and not a few were ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1891 • Various
... shop the glow shone out on him through the dull gold curtains, and he traced the crooked pine bough sweeping across the thin silk background like the bold free sketch of a Japanese print. When he rang the bell a minute later, the door was opened by Corinna, who was holding ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... imponderable data. Then he took a chair to the window and sat down. She was very real to him, this woman, and compelling, with her silences, her broken phrases. Rarely, very rarely before in his life, had he had this experience of intimacy without foreknowledge, without background—the sense of dealing with ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... multiplied, and bitterness been diffused through all His life, by that foresight, so clear and constant, of the certain end! How much more gracious and wonderful His quick sympathy, His patient self forgetfulness, His unwearied toil, show against that dark background! ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... with me the picture that Nickols made as he stood tall and handsome and smiling against the background of the wonderful garden he had helped to create, with the women smiling and clinging to him as he looked up at me with a great laughing light in his face. In some ways he was the handsomest man I had ever seen ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... I had many interesting talks together. With the cultural background of Europe he might have been a Rousseau or a Phalanisterian. As it was, he ran a "natural life" magazine which, though crude, benefited hundreds of people. What though it showed pictures of stupid men and women revealing, in poses rivalling the contortionist, their physical development ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... devised a little scheme to which she made me a party. There was a young woman in her train, of surpassing beauty, whose name was Liridi, and the queen was sure that Solomon had never seen her, for it was her custom to keep her most beautiful attendants in the background. This maiden the queen caused to be dressed in the richest and most becoming robes, and adorned her, besides, with jewels and golden ornaments, which set off her beauty in an amazing manner. Then, having made many inquiries of me in regard to the habits ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... on together through the dense alleys of vegetation, and finally came to an opening which showed them a sandy plain, and across it the strong white stone walls of the fort, facing the wide river, and behind it the blue background ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... thought his eyes the victims of an illusion; then he looked closer. And he saw that it was true; instead of the familiar starry points of light against a velvet background, the arrangement was just the reverse. Every constellation was in its place, just as Chick remembered it from the earth; but instead of stars there were jet-black spots upon ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... to enumerate the various physical features by which it is distinguished. Thus the highest and most important mountains are Dormitor in the district of Drobniak, on the Montenegrin frontier, and Velesh, which forms a rugged background to the plain of Mostar, the highest point being 6,000 feet above the level of the sea. Besides these, there are many others of nearly equal altitude, viz. Flam, Hergud, Prievolie, Vrau, Hako, Fartar, Belen, Stermoshnik, Bielevoda, ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... become his sole romance; he gave all his leisure time to her, and not only that (for it no longer sufficed to see her at her mother's), they met on the quay! At times a maid-servant walked with them for appearance sake, at others she kept in the background. Sometimes they would go on board a Norwegian ship, sometimes they wandered about or strolled beneath some great trees. When he saw her in her short frock come out of the door, saw her quick movements, and her lively signals to him with parasol ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... made no motion to take my hand from him, but she said, "I think I have met Mr. Strange," and now I saw in the background, sitting on a camp-stool near a long, lank young man stretched in a hammock, a very handsome girl, who hastily ran through a book, and then dropped it at the third mention of my name. I suspected that the book was the Social Register, and that the girl's search ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells
... there would be something much more modern, of an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of holding in the background unsurmised charges for electric lights, for candles, for washing, for baths, for boots, and for what-know-I, after the most explicit declaration that the first demand included everything. Nothing definite ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... the "Sick-bed" is the Egerton version of "Etain," which is a complete one, and makes a stately romance. It is full of human interest, love being its keynote; it keeps the supernatural element which is an essential to the original legend in the background, and is of quite a different character to the earlier Leabhar na h-Uidhri version, although there is no reason to assume that the latter is really the more ancient in date. In the Leabbar na h-Uidhri version of "Etain," all that relates to the love-story ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... separate shrines, no images, no display of chalice or crucifix on the altar. It was, therefore, a Protestant church upon the Continent. A clergyman, dressed in the Geneva gown and band, stood by the communion-table, and, with the Bible opened before him, and his clerk awaiting in the background, seemed prepared to perform some service of the church ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... dingy, chocolate-colored lobby became suddenly a background to Mr. James Greely, cashier of the Millings National Bank, and the only ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... General received me in a dainty Louis Quinze room done in rose and French gray, and filled incongruously with delicate chairs and heavy brocaded curtains, a background which instantly you felt precisely suited his Excellency. In the English newspapers, which, by the way, are not barred from Berlin cafes, I had read of his Excellency as the "Iron Fist," or the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the rickety little revolver nearly shook itself to pieces, and Amomma the outcast—because he might blow up at any moment—browsed in the background and wondered why stones were thrown at him. Then they found a balk of timber floating in a pool which was commanded by the seaward slope of Fort Keeling, and they sat down together before ...
— The Light That Failed • Rudyard Kipling
... forgetting it in the cares of state, let the cake burn, on which the woman struck him. The moment chose is when she is lifting her 'and to deliver the blow. The king receives it with majesty mingled with meekness. In the background the door of the 'ut is open, letting in the royal officers to announce the Danes are defeated. The daylight breaks in at the aperture, signifying the dawning of 'Ope. That story, sir, which I found in my researches in istry, has since become so popular, ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 'Locksley Hall,' in order to divert my mind from a state of suspense that I am in concerning the will of a relative that is dead. The will still remains in the mental background as an extremely marginal or ultra-marginal portion of my field of consciousness; but the poem fairly keeps my attention from it, until I come to the line, "I, the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time." The words 'I, the heir,' immediately make an electric connection with the marginal ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... not understand the real wrong of the Pharisee's attitude, nor of our own, unless we view it against the background of what God says about the human heart. Said Jesus Christ, "From within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lasciviousness, an evil eye, blasphemy, ...
— The Calvary Road • Roy Hession
... that her eyes were fixed on the river, followed her gaze. Not more than a score of yards from the shore, moving silently through the mist, were the heads of three Indians. Their profiles stood out clearly against the white background; their shoulders seemed to dissolve into the fog. They passed slowly on up the stream, looking straight ahead, without a twitch of the eyelids, like a vision from ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... once for her husband, and withdrew from the conversation as soon as he appeared, leaving him to make all the "frais." We walked a little around the park before leaving. It was really a lovely little place, with its background of forest and the quiet, sleepy little village in front; very lonely and far from everything, but with a certain charm of its own. Two or three dogs were playing in the court-yard, and one curious little animal who made a rush ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... new way. It was somehow different over here, with the thunder of artillery in the near distance, the hovering presence of death not far away, the flashing of signal lights, the hum of the airplanes, the whole background of war. The message of the gospel took on a reality it had never worn before. When this simple girl asked if they would not take Jesus tonight as their Saviour, there were many who raised their hands in the darkness and many more hearts were bowed whose owners could not quite bring ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... English landscape seemed very fair to Clarissa Lovel in that serene light. She watched the shadowy fields flitting past; here and there a still pool, or a glimpse of running water; beyond, the sombre darkness of wooded hills; and above that dark background a calm starry sky. Who shall say what dim poetic thoughts were in her mind that night, as she looked at these things? Life was so new to her, the future such an unknown country—a paradise perhaps, or a drear gloomy waste, across which she must travel ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... the "unrest of the age." Much has already been done in the right direction by divines, philosophers, and physicists, and more still, perhaps, by the great poets, who have striven earnestly to see the spiritual background which lies behind the abstractions of materialistic science. But much yet remains to be done. We may agree with Hinton that "Positivism bears a new Platonism in its bosom"; but the child has not yet ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... and crevices of snow. This was perhaps a dozen miles away, but at first no intervening atmosphere diminished in the slightest the minutely detailed brilliancy with which these things glared at us. They stood out clear and dazzling against a background of starry blackness that seemed to our earthly eyes rather a gloriously spangled velvet curtain than the spaciousness ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... —while the background was filled up by the ghastly, hypocritical countenance of Trois Eschelles—whose eyes were cast up towards Heaven, as if he was internally saying his devotions—and the grim drollery of Petit Andre, who amused himself with ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... that you aren't making any sense about this gambling kick you're on, Tex. You should have laughed my teasing off. Who would seriously suggest that you were a psi personality?" she demanded. "And most of all, with my background in psi, do you think I could be ...
— Card Trick • Walter Bupp AKA Randall Garrett
... and familiar in the Kalewala. Departmental divine beings of natural phenomena we find everywhere, or nearly everywhere, in company, of course, with other elements of belief—totemism, worship of spirits, perhaps with monotheism in the background. That is as much our opinion as Mr. Max Muller's. What we are opposing is the theory of disease of language, and the attempt to explain, by philological conjectures, gods and heroes whose obscure names are the only ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... approaching her the hero of her adventure in the coach, the impulsive youth whose former foolishness had won for him the semi-disapproval of our commentator. It seems possible that the gloomy fancies of shadowy things outside lightened a little, and the war ceased to be a background ...
— A Christmas Accident and Other Stories • Annie Eliot Trumbull
... Evidently he had not taken this side of the matter into consideration, and he put up one of his hands to his eyes. Fortunately the bell for the opening of the session broke in upon the conversation, and not only diverted him, but relegated the whole subject to the background for the time being. Nevertheless, the thought of it continued in Mary's mind as she sat listening to the exercises. How could an attractive girl like this take a fancy to such a trickster? It seemed totally incompatible with ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... his orders and instructions, was dining alone in Russell Square, when a telegram was handed to him. He opened it and spread the thin paper out upon the table-cloth. A word from that far, wild country, which seemed so much fitter a background to his simple bulk and strength than the cramped ways of London society—a message from the very heart ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... down completely, and we had now the pleasure of beholding a peculiar spectacle. We were the only spectators. The scene consisted of a beach covered with stones and washed by foaming breakers, the background of the immeasurable ocean, and the actors of thousands of wonderfully-formed animals. A number of old males lay still and motionless, heedless of what was going on around them. Others crept clumsily on their small short legs between the stones of the beach, or swam with incredible ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... room. I had seen Miss Collett, and the mahogany and ormolu dining-room, with its great gilt mirrors, seemed a fitting background for her. ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... a free hand in departing from the Accepted Design, and in carrying out his more fully developed conceptions. The well worked out designs of the different parts and details, and the combination of these into one harmonious whole with the dome for a background, ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of St. Paul - An Account of the Old and New Buildings with a Short Historical Sketch • Arthur Dimock
... be better imagined than described. Questions in frightened voices filled the air against this background of suppressed weeping. Briefly—Joan's silk tent had been torn, and the girl was in a state bordering upon hysterics. Somewhat reassured by our noisy presence, however,—for she was plucky at heart,—she pulled herself together and tried to explain ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... cover Heaven knows what deeps of passion and of knowledge! Little Rose was glowing and simpering, and the two older ladies were giving each other significant glances. Maurice's "fellows," shepherded by their host, shambled speechlessly along in the background. The instant that they saw the bride they had fallen into dumbness. Brown said, under his breath to Hastings, "Gosh!" And Hastings gave Morton a thrust in the ribs, which Morton's dignity refused to notice; later, when ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... become of Miss Valery? said the bride, her eyes wandering restlessly around. Other eyes followed hers—Major Harper's. Incredulously these rested on the silent lady in the background, whose whole mien, figure, and attire, in the plain dark dress, and close morning cap, marked her a woman undeniably and ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... contains quite a menagerie of most suggestive wild animals, and dozens of angels and demons in friendly intercourse playing upon the surface of a lake and among the entangled branches of trees. In the background a pyrotechnic display of great magnitude is depicted, with rockets shooting up in all directions, while ethereal, large, black-eyed women lie gracefully reclining and unconcerned, upon most unsafe clouds. The result ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... considering the talent of the writer, and his opportunities for personal observation. But he has done enough to render us grateful for his labors. By the vivid delineation of scenes and scenery, as they were presented fresh to his own eyes, he has furnished us with a background to the historic picture, - the landscape, as it were, in which the personages of the time might be more fitly portrayed. It would have been impossible to exhibit the ancient topography of the land so faithfully at a subsequent period, when old things had passed away, ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... is his love of wild nature, which led him to depict many grand or gloomy scenes, partly for their own sake, but largely because they formed a fitting background for human action. Thus, The Talisman opens with a pen picture of a solitary Crusader moving across a sun-scorched desert towards a distant island of green. Every line in that description points to action, to the rush of ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... clutching her excited heart, had not thought of flinging herself upon Momus. She raised herself gradually to watch them as far as she could see, and her fixed and stunned gaze rested with immense homesickness and longing on the taller man radiant against the background of ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... men believe in eternal punishment in the sense of a dark background to the universe, which will always continue, a shadow as permanent as light,—necessary for the full perfection and beauty of an infinite divine creation. Into this shadow man may forever plunge; out of it he may forever emerge: and it will always continue so to be. But this is not the view ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... something compared with which money-making cannot be regarded as a worthy object but must be included in the class of unpleasant necessities, not to say indecencies, which ought to be relegated to the background of life; he will summon up pictures of extreme poverty, where any money received must be expended forthwith to meet urgent needs, as justifying that which in his case is the gratification of shiftless indulgence. Above ...
— Creating Capital - Money-making as an aim in business • Frederick L. Lipman
... neither measles nor chicken-pox, nor any other of the tormenting demons of childhood; and I was assured each time that it was a great piece of good luck that this malady was now past forever. But alas! another again threatened in the background, and advanced. All these things increased my propensity to reflection; and as I had already practised myself in fortitude, in order to remove the torture of impatience, the virtues which I had heard praised in the stoics appeared ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... first chapter we enquired whether there are any religious ideas common to Eastern Asia as a whole and found that they amount to little more than a background of nature worship and ancestor worship almost universally present behind the official creeds. Also the conception of a religious system and its relation to beliefs which do not fall within it are not quite the same in these countries ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... little while, I rambled off to a point where I looked over towards Mont Blanc, and got a most beautiful view of the Glacier de Boisson. Imagine the sky flushed with a rosy light, a background of purple mountains, with darts of sunlight streaming among them, touching point and cliff with gold. Against this background rises the outline of the glacier like a mountain of the clearest white crystals, tinged with blue; and against their snowy whiteness in the foreground ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... clear, warm, and beautiful. The operetta, which was really a spring festival, was to be given in the open-air amphitheater of the school, with the natural scenery of the woods and the lake for a background. The Scouts, in their filmy white and green costumes and flowing hair, looked like the fairy and wood-people they were to represent. Ethel Todd had the leading part; Ruth and Marjorie were merely ...
— The Girl Scouts' Good Turn • Edith Lavell
... distinguishable now, the dust of the posse was blending into the landscape and losing itself against a gray background. ...
— The Seventh Man • Max Brand
... and lost. Throughout the saga the Fians are more than mere mortals, even in those very parts which are claimed as historical. They are giants; their story "bristles with the supernatural"; they are the ideal figures of Celtic legend throwing their gigantic shadows upon the dim and misty background of the past. We must therefore be content to assume that whether personages called Fionn, Oisin, Diarmaid, or Conan, ever existed, what we know of ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... figured them in. But it showed my father's body lying dead upon the floor; it showed his poor corpse weltering helpless in its blood; it showed myself, as a girl of eighteen, standing awestruck, gazing on in blank horror at the sight; and in the background, half blurred by the summer evening light, it showed the vague outline of a man's back, getting out of the window. On one side was the door: that formed no part of my mental picture, because it was at my back; but in the photograph it too was indistinct, as if in the very act of being burst ...
— Recalled to Life • Grant Allen
... sea, disclosing as they passed long tracts of lovely country, bathed in a rich golden glow. The broad Douro, with its transparent current, shone out like a bright-colored ribbon, meandering through the deep garment of fairest green; the darkly shadowed mountains which closed the background loomed even larger than they were; while their summits were tipped with the yellow glory of the morning. The air was calm and still, and the very smoke that arose from the peasant's cot labored as it ascended through ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... length reached the fulness of dramatic energy: in the Idylls we have nothing vague or dreamy to complain of: everything lives and moves, in the royal strength of nature: the fire of Prometheus has fairly caught the clay: every figure stands clear, broad, and sharp before us, as if it had sky for its background: and this of small as well as great, for even the "little novice" is projected on the canvas with the utmost truth and vigour, and with that admirable effect in heightening the great figure of Guinevere, which Patroclus produces for the character of Achilles, and (as some will ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... ruder societies are especially associated with women. Whenever, as in the present great European War, brute force becomes temporarily predominant, the causes associated with Feminism are roughly pushed into the background. It is, indeed, the War which gives a new actuality to this question. War has always been regarded as the special and peculiar province of Man, indeed, the sacred refuge of the masculine spirit and ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... forms in nature defined as flat shapes of colour relieved upon other colours, or flat fields of light on dark, as a white horse is defined upon the green grass of a field, or a black figure upon a background of snow. ...
— Line and Form (1900) • Walter Crane
... ethereal object never arrested the glance of admiration. Again his pencil moved, and I knew he was attempting to delineate her features. I was fearful lest she should move and dissolve the charm; but she sat as still as the tree, whose gray trunk formed an artistic background to her slight figure. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... FELLOW-MINDS Pages 137-160 Another background for current experience may be found in alien minds.—Two usual accounts of this conception criticised: analogy between bodies, and dramatic dialogue in the soul.—Subject and object empirical, not transcendental, terms.—Objects originally ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... are no more. There are yet men of might to fight under the banners streaming with the northern lights of freedom. Douglas, Bell, Sumner, Seward, and Wade are drawing together. Grave-faced Abraham Lincoln moves out of the background of Western woods into the sunrise glow of Liberty's ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... and spars painted dark against the sunset sky; her rigging, to the finest cordage, traced in exquisitely distinct lines upon that shining background—a picture ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... the Naturalist from having been a favourite spot with the celebrated travellers Spix and Martius, during their stay at Barra in 1820. Von Martins was so much impressed by its magical beauty that he commemorated the visit by making a sketch of the scenery serve as background in one of the plates of his great work on ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the middle of the road, waiting. Nor did he have long to wait. The sound of galloping horses came suddenly out of the darkness below him, and a moment later he discerned the moving blotches of lighter color against the solid background of the night. ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... in the Adirondacks was open at one end. Here, against a background of big forest trees, a curious medley of substances had been assembled: old chairs, a couple of broken-down airplanes, a large disused dynamo, a heap of discarded clothing, a miscellany of kitchen utensils on a table, a gas stove, and a heap of metal junk of all kinds. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... of convolutions drifted through his mind—a shape, perhaps, and a color. He felt no curiosity, and let the impression drift. As a sunbather drowsing on a crowded beach, hearing the background hum of the crowd and now and then a more clearly spoken phrase, so he caught the edge of this communication. It was not for him. A second mind entered ... was it a mind? Yes, and yet very different. It was strong, but limited—perhaps childlike, in some ways. Alive after a fashion, ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... cradle, and she considered that his widow had outraged his memory, by marrying again so short a time after his death. For this, above all her other provocations, Barbara never heartily forgave her. And a great struggle it was to her to keep her own feelings as much as possible in the background, from the conscientious motive that she ought not to instil into Clare's baby mind the faintest feeling of aversion towards her mother. The idea of the child being permanently sent to Enville Court was intensely distasteful to ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... said. "Our Old World background, where superstition is the rule, old, very old superstition. Frightened by them when we were young. Now those childhood fixations reveal themselves in ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... his principles of foreign policy are at stake; and he was ready to pounce upon the Prime Minister if he had detected any departure from the narrow and straight path which leads to Radical salvation. In the background were the dim forces of Unionism, more eager—perhaps even more reckless—in readiness to attack Mr. Gladstone than his opponents on the opposite benches. And behind them and above them, in all parts of the House, was that countless host ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... myself. Somewhere in the background of my consciousness I had a vague recollection of having heard mention of such a name before, but exactly when and where I could not, for the life of ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... the last, it is natural that Claude Duval should find a certain want of excitement in the next scene, where he appears as a respectable householder in the apartments of his lawful spouse. This lady, leaving a cradle in the background, and advancing to the footlights, proceeds to hover round her husband, after the manner of stage wives, with neck protruded and arms spread out, like a woman who is a little afraid of a wasp or earwig, but wants to catch the creature ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... preparations for the advance were made, Dr. Gray, who understood perhaps more fully than any one else except O'Neil the gravity of the issue and the slender pivot upon which the outcome balanced, had taken his place in the vanguard of the attacking party instead of in the background, as befitted his calling. The first rush had carried him well into the fray, but once there he had shown his good judgment by refusing ...
— The Iron Trail • Rex Beach
... hitherto lingered in the background, now drew near; a pale face looked over the solicitor's shoulder—yes, it was Mason himself. Mr. Rochester turned and glared at him. His eye, as I have often said, was a black eye—it had now a tawny, nay, a bloody ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... it that she was now and then conscious of a certain dim background of relief in the forced separation from Philip? Surely it was only because the sense of a deliverance from concealment was welcome at ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... upon circumstances. He has better orders than I could give, for I am no hand at scheming. Here we are; or here we stop. Say nothing till I tell you. Pray allow me the honor. You keep in the background, remember, with your veil, or whatever you call it, down. Nobody stops at the very door. Of course that ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore
... she said, addressing herself. "This is all too good to be true. It will fold up in a minute and move away for the next act, and that will be full of tragedy, with an ugly background." ...
— Daphne, An Autumn Pastoral • Margaret Pollock Sherwood
... forget. It was quite unattractive, I believe, so far as variety of contour was concerned—quite level and commonplace. Right across the road from the house was a half-grown windbreak of golden willow. Against that as a background blazed out row upon row of the most brilliant flowers, graduated down to the edge of the road, and extending as far as half a city block or more. Think what a beautiful surprise for every one that turned that corner. I think the occupants of the ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... all doubt in the very subordination of these other characters to Benassis, and in the skilful grouping of the whole as background and adjunct to him, that the appeal of the book as art consists. From that point of view there are grounds for regarding it as the finest of the author's work in the simple style, the least indebted to super-added ornament ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... sawed-off burnt-offering, you can't see the policy that we must use in handling this matter. This is a delicate play, that can't be managed roughshod on horseback. It has food, shelter, and drink in it for us all, but they must be kept in the background. The main play now is to convince Mr. Seigerman that he has a call to serve his country in the office of sheriff. Bear down heavy on the emergency clause. Then make him think that no other name but Louie Seigerman will satisfy the public clamor. Now, my ...
— Cattle Brands - A Collection of Western Camp-fire Stories • Andy Adams
... your mill chances to come into the kitchen and find me in my jupon and camisole preparing dinner (for you know I cannot trust Sarah to cook a single dish), she sneers. If I accept an invitation out to tea, which I have done once or twice, I perceive I am put quite into the background; I have not that attention paid me which decidedly is my due. Of what an excellent family are the Gerards, as we know, and the Moores also! They have a right to claim a certain respect, and to feel wounded when it is withheld from them. In ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... should keep on knowing all the rest of my life about the same sort of people, for the girls who go to college are from the more fortunate classes. There are exceptions, but they are drawn largely from homes that have some cultivation, some sort of background. The experiences of teachers in such institutions are likely to cramp. It's all right later on, but at first, it seems to me better to experiment in the wider circle. Now—" and she broke off with a light laugh, eager ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... sure enough, the dreaded coast of Africa was seen, with a palpable distinctness, within two miles of the vessel. It presented a long broken line of sand-hills, unrelieved by a tree, or by so few as almost to merit this description, and with a hazy background of remote mountains to the north-east. The margin of the actual coast nearest to the ship was indented with bays; and even rocks appeared in places; but the general character of the scene was that of a fierce and burning sterility. On this picture of desolation all stood gazing in ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... her, stood in the background as silent as a bronze statute until the little ceremony was over. If she was impressed by the strangeness of it all, she gave no sign. For so many of the customs of her husband's alien race were strange to her that she had long ago ceased to wonder or desire ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... mean what I say?" Millner glanced past the banker's figure at his rich densely coloured background of Spanish leather and mahogany. He remembered that it was from this very threshold that he had first ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... our box on a table, as the duchess bade us, and I helped M. Etienne to lay out its contents, which done, I retired to the background, well content to leave the brunt of the business to him. It was as he prophesied: they paid me no heed whatever. He was smoothly launched on the third relating of his tale; I trow by this time he almost believed it himself. Certes, ...
— Helmet of Navarre • Bertha Runkle
... the carriage, and at the wind, till the voice of the Doctor sounded in his ear, ordering him sternly to get out of the carriage and drag it out of the way. He sulkily obeyed, and wound up the string of his kite, and betook himself to the background, trembling lest the Doctor should have ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... after the hour of noon, this tree, covered with thick foliage, quite shadowed the water, rendering it of darkish colour, and somewhat obscure. At this hour the fish could not be so easily seen, even against the background of the ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... moved back, but he indicated a bundle of deerskin articles he thought her business was to sell. Her color was high; he noted the vivid white and pink against the dull background of stained leather. ...
— Lister's Great Adventure • Harold Bindloss
... had travelled upon it trying to strike the Victoria River. If Mr. John Chambers's liberality were known, and the way he had entered into the question of exploration generally were known, his name would be brought into more prominence than it had. He had sat in the background, but he had found ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... dazzlingly white, swim in stately fashion. Beneath an old willow, whose drooping boughs form quite a vault of pale verdure, a squadron of multicolored boats remain fastened to the balustrade of a landing stage. Through an opening in the trees you see in the distance fields of yellow corn, and in the near background, behind a row of poplars, ever moving like a flash of silver lightning, the Oise flows on between its ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Dollington, by a majority of two, he kicked the crown out of the grave attorney's chimney-pot, and flung his own wide-awake into the river. He did not show much; his official station precluded prominence. He kept in the background, and did his spiriting gently. But Tom Wealdon, it was known—as things are known without evidence—was at the bottom of all the clever dodges, and long-headed manoeuvres. When, therefore, Mr. Larkin heard from the portly and ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... period of demobilization and reconversion is fraught with uncertainties. There are also serious gaps in our statistical information. Certain tendencies are, however, fairly clear and recognition of them should serve as background for the consideration of next year's Federal Program. In general, the outlook for business is good, and it is likely to continue to be good—provided we control inflation and achieve ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Harry S. Truman • Harry S. Truman
... in front of me, listening for the most part silently, or occasionally giving vent to low grunts and interjections of approval. One evening, I remember, a young woman joined the group, though keeping somewhat in the background; she listened intently, and after a time gradually turned her face toward me, unconsciously as it were; and the light of a street-lamp at a little distance revealed a countenance youthful, pale, sad, and exquisitely beautiful. It impressed me as with a vague reminiscence of something ...
— David Poindexter's Disappearance and Other Tales • Julian Hawthorne
... is an indication of viciousness or perversity. It appears to be an impulse that occurs quite naturally in altogether innocent women. The exciting charm of the risky and dangerous naturally arises on a background of feminine shyness and timidity. We may trace its recognition at a very early stage of history in the story of Eve and the forbidden fruit that has so often been the symbol of the masculine organs of sex. It is on this ground that many ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... length from me on the ground. When I looked again the Indian was gone. I went to the tree. The Indian had had but an instant, but he had secured himself out of reach of my eyesight; had faded into the background as a partridge screens itself behind mottled leaves. If I followed him, a knife would be slipped out at me from behind stump or tree trunk, and the dog might not ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... he walked directly toward the sun, and those who tried to follow him and find out what he did at night in the desert had indelibly imprinted upon their mind's vision the black silhouette of a tall, stout man against the red background of an immense disk. The horrors of the night drove them away, and so they never found out what Lazarus did in the desert; but the image of the black form against the red was burned forever into their ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
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