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More "Curtain" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... continue from month to month to hold sessions, and supply, each time, new cart-loads of victims to the hangman. But a sudden collapse took place in the machinery, and they met no more. The executive authority intervened, and their functions ceased. The curtain fell unexpectedly, and the tragedy ended. It is not known precisely what caused this sudden change. It is probable, that a revolution had been going on some time in the public mind, which was kept for a while from notice, but at last became too apparent and too serious to be disregarded. ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... we had been led to expect. The window of the low front room, which was large and rather bowed, still retained the remains of its former shop-like appearance, was modestly screened in the inside by a green curtain; and the step of the door was nicely scoured ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... went on, as he drew the curtain aside, "that you are engaged with a friend; but Miss Faulkner is waiting to say good-night, and ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... heavy wheels in the road, and the two horses of the ambulance appeared. The sentries presented arms; the colonel took off his hat; the officers uncovered; the wagon wheeled into the parade; the surgeon stepped out. He exchanged a single word with the colonel, and lifted the curtain ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... overhead behind the curtain, a faint but perfectly distinct radiance was visible. It was no more than a diffused glimmer, but it was unmistakable, and it shone out faintly and clearly upon the medium's face. By its light Laurie could make out every line and every feature, the drooping clipped moustache, the strong jutting ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Laura Hawkins, fair, fascinating and fatal, and with the dissolute Colonel of a lost cause, who has reaped the harvest he sowed, we have nothing to do. But as the curtain rises on this awful tragedy, we catch a glimpse of the society at the capital under this Administration, which we cannot contemplate without alarm for ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner
... watch, but his vigil did not last an hour. At ten minutes of three, peering through the curtain, he saw an automobile stop in front of the house and Eugene Morgan jump lightly down from it. The car was of a new pattern, low and long, with an ample seat in the tonneau, facing forward; and a professional driver sat at the wheel, a strange figure in leather, goggled out of ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... believe that his fears and my own terrors were over-exaggerated, when one night I had a strange dream. I had hardly fallen asleep when I heard my bed-curtains drawn apart, as their rings slided back upon the curtain rod with a sharp sound. I rose up quickly upon my elbow, and beheld the shadow of a woman standing erect before me. I recognised Clarimonde immediately. She bore in her hand a little lamp, shaped like those which ...
— Clarimonde • Theophile Gautier
... that the other was in earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. Tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. He was lifting the curtain to go out, when Nancay, the Captain of the Guard, plucked ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... time to bid farewell to the subject of this tremendous note; and most sincerely do I wish I could 'draw the curtain' upon it, and say 'good night,' with as much cheerfulness and satisfaction at [Transcriber's Note: as] Atterbury did upon the close of his professional labours. But the latter moments of STEEVENS were moments of mental anguish. He grew not only irritable, but outrageous; and, in ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greek, and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him, on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art—'The curtain is the picture.' ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... comes to talking one's common thoughts,—those that come and go as the breath does; those that tread the mental areas and corridors with steady, even foot-fall, an interminable procession of every hue and garb,—there are few, indeed, that can dare to lift the curtain which hangs before the window in the breast and throw open the window, and let us look and listen. We are all loyal enough to our sovereign when he shows himself, but sovereigns are scarce. I never saw ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... intimidated her. Had Gerald left her trunk in the hall? Of course he had. What a question! But what would happen to her? London ... London had merely dazed her. She could do nothing for herself. She was as helpless as a rabbit in London. She drew aside the window-curtain and had a glimpse of the river. It was inevitable that she should think of suicide; for she could not suppose that any girl had ever got herself into a plight more desperate than hers. "I could slip out at night and drown myself," ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... curtain falls. Judging by my first act, Mr. Westwick, tell me truly, and don't be afraid of turning my head:— Am I not capable ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... (he was accustomed to making-up in another sense, as his wig and whiskers could testify) to charming young lady. Such was the scene. He asked her to accept him. Her reply was to show him the heading of this advertisement in the Times:—"YOUTH WANTED." Tableau! Exit Beau. Curtain. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various
... alone, utterly alone, in the midst of the great city, and was soon forced to seek companionship with his fellow beings. It was strange, meanwhile, how black the heavens grew, as if the whole sky were sheeted with a curtain of lead. I saw him now constantly in the streets, the rooms, and in the midst of the people: he fascinated my gaze as if I saw only him. Under the calm of a tranquil face, he concealed bitter torment, intense suffering. Evil thoughts are winding through ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... some dreadful dream?" wailed Rosemary; and Evelyn found no answer. But Hugh had pounced upon a card pinned on the window curtain; and as he held it out, in eloquent silence, she read aloud over his shoulder; "Compliments of Mademoiselle ...
— Rosemary in Search of a Father • C. N. Williamson
... as the pupils continued to stare at the sky where the fleecy clouds floated; he doubled back his neck so that he might still see the light of day, but all too soon he had to go down into the water, and that foul curtain shut out the sight of the world from ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... only understand a word here and there, he obtained an accurate idea of the conversation between her father and the governor, and of her father's calm manner, and the gestures and intonations of apparent friendship but veiled menace. By putting her ears to a keyhole and hiding behind a curtain, she expressed the possibility of there being a spy in the very household, who would listen to the unguarded talk of her father and report it to the governor. Jack determined that he would watch every movement of the domestics, and especially observe if he could detect ...
— Jack Archer • G. A. Henty
... know that it boots to dally longer in a dying chamber. It is an axiom of old that the stage curtain should be drawn before the inexorable one enters in upon his final work. Dr. Finucane did come, but his coming was all in vain. Sir Thomas had known that it was in vain, and so also had his patient wife. There ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... a curtain move at that window on the left a while ago," commented Astro, "and all three ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... in at this old window, to be sure—boarded up, when first we came; a window I can't keep clean, do what I may—and half burns, and nearly blinds me at my sewing, besides setting the flies and wasps astir—such flies and wasps as only lone mountain houses know. See, here is the curtain—this apron—I try to shut it out with then. It fades it, you see. Sun gild this house? ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... his hand and stepping on tiptoe towards a door at one end of the room, partly hidden by a thick curtain. ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... The curtain rings up on his work for the Steelyard,—work which covered many years and more fine paintings than could even be enumerated here—with a superlative exhibition of all his powers. The oil portrait of Georg Gyze, ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... upstairs," she suggested. As she spoke she saw on the floor at her feet a ring of some dull metal, such as is used on light curtain-rods, but under the circumstances there was something a little startling in ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... distinguished by two other odd habits. Having two sets of eyelids, an inner and an outer, we can close one or both at will. The inner one is a thin skin that we blink with, and draw across our eyes in the day-time when the light annoys us, just as House People pull down a curtain to shut out the sun. The outer lids we close only in sleep, when we put up the shutters after a night's work, and at last in death—for birds alone among all animals are able to close their own eyes when they die. The other ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... warbled. "But I shan't open them till the curtain comes down. There, we've finished." He jumped up. "Beautiful, allow me to present to you the Byrds' Christmas tree." With a dramatic gesture he unhooked a cord. The curtain fell. There in the full morning light stood a tree, different from any Mary had ever seen. ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... sympathy, forbids to snore, His anguish doubled by his own 'encore!' Squeezed in 'Fop's Alley,' jostled by the beaux, Teased with his hat, and trembling for his toes, Scarce wrestles through the night, nor tastes of ease Till the dropp'd curtain gives a glad release: Why this and more he suffers, can ye guess?— Because it costs him dear, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... have lived who do not possess elevation of sentiment. His headquarters were not at Athens, but at Ephesus,—a city which also produced Parrhasins, to whom Zeuxis himself gave the palm, since he deceived the painter by his curtain, while Zeuxis only deceived birds by his grapes. Parrhasius established the rule of proportions, which was followed by succeeding artists. He was a very luxurious and arrogant man, and fancied he had reached ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... had pressed aside the heavy curtain framing the window until she could command the stoop. Two men were waiting there. "Oh!" she breathed, almost reeling back upon Tottie. "Oh, don't let 'em in! Don't! I can't see anybody! Say I'm gone! Oh, please, Tottie! I'm gone for good." She was beside Barbara again, ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... and raised the thong used to urge on his animal; but Marcia, hearing the clamour, thrust the curtain aside again and, motioning the slave to restrain himself, threw several denarii to her would-be host. At the same moment, the horses suddenly quickened their gait, and the pursuer, keeping his hold, was jerked ...
— The Lion's Brood • Duffield Osborne
... suddenly appeared in front of the curtain and walked swiftly over the little bridge from the stage to the stalls. He was a small, sturdy, thin-lipped, choleric man, who looked as if he were made up of energy; energy distilled and bottled. Some one had said of him that his hat ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... seem to live back into those days. I feel the helmet on my head; I wave the standard over it: brave men smile upon me; beautiful maidens pull them gently back by the scarf, and will not let them break my slumber, nor undraw the curtain. Corneliolina!... ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... Kings own its potent sway, and humbly bows The gilded diadem upon their brows— Its saving voice with Mercy speeds to all, But ah! how few who quicken at the call— Gentiles the favour'd 'little Flock' detest, And Abraham's children spit upon their rest. Once only since Creation's work, has night Curtain'd with dark'ning Clouds its saving light, What time the Ark majestically rode, Unscath'd upon the desolating flood— The Silver weigh'd for it, in all its strength For scarce three pounds were counted, while ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 35, June 29, 1850 • Various
... we will drop the curtain here. One of our puppets shall appear to-night no more. When a heroine is once on the stage, the public has a right to be indulged with the spectacle of her faults and follies, as well as of her virtues and excellences; yet I love the phantasm of my queenly Cecil too well ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... against the bulwarks at eight o'clock the next morning. White mist was all around us, a sea with no horizon. Suddenly, like the curtain of a theatre, the mist rose. Gradually the horizon-line appeared, then a line of low coast, which, muddy-looking as it was, made one's heart beat thick and fast. Then lines of dark wood; then the shore was dotted with grey huts; then the sun came out, the breeze was soft and ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... fact. The smell of the place, the heat—for the gas made the air vibrant—the very tawdriness of the hangings and gilding, all thrilled him, because they were, as Killigrew would have said, so "in the picture." When the curtain went up he settled himself ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... cloud of smoke, hiding the face of the intrenchments. Then the boys of Louisburg saw bursting through this suffocating curtain a few faces, many faces, long rows of faces, some pale, some red, some laughing, some horrified, some shouting, some swearing—a long row of faces that swept through the smoke, following a line of steel—a line of steel ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man came up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... and Frances knew very well it was in vain to make any objection, as her mamma always made a point of obedience. The medicine was administered, although for some time Frances refused to look at it. When she laid down, her mamma placed the pillow high under her head, and, drawing the curtain to shade the light, left the room that she might be perfectly quiet. And when she returned to the drawing-room, she inquired of the other children what they had been doing, and received a full account of the feast, and the bird's nest, and all the little circumstances ...
— Fanny, the Flower-Girl • Selina Bunbury
... and fiery-pointed sun, Rushing from forth a cloud, bereaves our sight; Even so, the curtain drawn, his eyes begun To wink, being blinded with a greater light: Whether it is that she reflects so bright, That dazzleth them, or else some shame supposed; But blind they are, and ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... were crowned with chaplets of the fresh blossom of the nono or flower-tree (Morinda citrifolia), which the women had gathered in the freshness of the morning dew. On looking round the apartment, though it contained several beds, we found no partition, curtain, or screens; they had not yet been considered necessary. So far, indeed, from concealment being thought of, when we were about to get up, the women, anxious to show their attention, assembled to wish us good morning, and to inquire in what way they could best contribute ...
— The Eventful History Of The Mutiny And Piratical Seizure - Of H.M.S. Bounty: Its Cause And Consequences • Sir John Barrow
... door would open. He waited. In vain. It seemed to him there was nothing alive in that house except his heart. He was stifled with the horror that he glimpsed, that he almost touched, although that door remained closed. He felt along the wall in order to reach the window, and pulled aside the curtain. Window and blinds of the little room giving on the Neva were closed. The bar of iron inside was in its place. Then he went to the passage, mounted and descended the narrow servants' stairway, looked all about, in all the rooms, feeling everywhere with silent hands, assuring himself ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... coming down the alley. Beside her sat Tufik's sister, sobbing at the top of her voice and wearing Aggie's foulard, a pair of cotton gloves, and a lace curtain over her head. Behind in the tonneau were her maid of honor, a young Syrian woman with a baby in her arms and four other black-eyed children about her. But that was not all. In front of the machine, marching slowly and with dignity, were three bearded gentlemen, two ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... [The curtain draws up and shows the same scene as the last, with the mist clearing, and PHARAMOND lying ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... two in Madrid, four in Buenos Aires, and even on the Pacific coast of America before she appeared in New York. She had sung Lucia more than 200 times before her first appearance at Covent Garden, and the twenty curtain calls she received on that occasion came as the greatest surprise of her career. She had begun to believe that she could never be appreciated by English-speaking audiences and the ovation ...
— Caruso and Tetrazzini on the Art of Singing • Enrico Caruso and Luisa Tetrazzini
... beginning. No one seems to have been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had been but a score or so of seekers, there were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had been probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already Chemistry, which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part of a century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to revolutionise the whole life of ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... up; but there was not a faint gleam of light yet at the window, and I resolutely refused to rise, sending my companion back to bed, and going off again, to wake at last with the sun shining brilliantly in by the curtain. This time I jumped up, with the full impression upon me that I had overslept myself; while there lay Mercer on his back, with his mouth wide-open, and giving vent every now and then to a ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... Leston again. However, when Felix crept in, about four o'clock in the morning, anxious at the sounds he heard, he found him asleep, and this lasted for two or three hours; he woke refreshed, and presently said, 'Epiphany! put back the curtain, that I may see the ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 'She won't come, Palmy! It is far too late; she is gone to bed. Come down; you'll wake the village with your caterwauling!' But Leporello waves his broad archdeacon's hat, and resumes a flood of flexible Bregaglian. He has a shrewd suspicion that the girl is peeping from behind the window curtain; and tells us, bending down from the ladder, in a hoarse stage-whisper, that we must have patience; 'these girls are kittle cattle, who take long to draw: but if your lungs last out, they're sure to show.' And Leporello is right. Faint ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... year—every month—almost every week during the stormy seasons of the year. Known only to Him who is Omniscient are the multitudes of heartrending scenes of protracted agony and dreary death that are enacted year by year, all unknown to man, upon the lonely sea. Now and then the curtain of this dread theatre is slightly raised to us by the emaciated hand of a "survivor," and the sight, if we be thoughtful, may enable us to form a faint conception of those events that we never see. We might meditate on those things with advantage. Surely Christians ought not to require strong appeals ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... Coalition a petty duchy, the possession of which had been promised her by a treaty signed after the fall of the great Empire. There were again festivities in Vienna, but not for her, the dethroned sovereign. Once she was curious to see one, and she watched it hiding behind a curtain. On the evening of a court ball given by her father in honor of the members of the Congress of Vienna, she concealed herself near an opening made in the attic of the great hall of the palace,—where the festivities of her wedding had been celebrated,—and from there the ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... heard in a room, from behind a curtain, a soft and harmonious instrument, should we believe that chance, without the help of any human hand, could have formed such an instrument? Should we say that the strings of a violin, for instance, had of their own accord ranged and extended themselves on a wooden frame, whose several parts had glued ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... drawing-room that overlooked the outskirts of the town. The moonlight was flooding the vast bluish Tasajara levels with a faint lustre, as if the waters of the creek had once more returned to them. In the shadow of the curtain beside her Grant was facing ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte
... was in Jellico. It was midnight when the train came in, and he went immediately to his berth. Striking the curtain accidentally, he loosed it from its fastenings, and, doubling the pillows, he lay looking out on the swiftly passing landscape. The moon was full and brilliant, and there was a strange, keen pleasure in being whirled in such comfort through the night. The ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.
... was unpropitious. Foiled in his attempts upon the chastity of a lady of great beauty and high honor, he was rash enough to marry her; rash, we say, for from that fatal hour all became as darkness; the curtain fell upon the comedy of his life, to rise to tragic horrors. When, passion subsided, repentance awoke, and he became anxious for deliverance from the fetters he had so heedlessly imposed on himself, and ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... one of those sudden changes of weather so common in hilly countries had passed over the landscape. The mist was gone, rain fell no more, a sharp, clean breeze blew, the stars began to shine, and the moon rose bright. It was as though a curtain had been lifted. Dieppe's topographical observations stood him in good stead now and saved him some moments' consideration. The fugitive had choice of two routes. But he would not return to the village: ...
— Captain Dieppe • Anthony Hope
... beautiful morning of August 11th that the Prince made his first landfall in the West, and saw in the distance the great curtain of high rock that makes the grim ...
— Westward with the Prince of Wales • W. Douglas Newton
... and I will pause before this landscape. As to the fourth, a curtain covers it, which I may hereafter withdraw, or may not, as suits my convenience and capacity. At any rate, for the present it must hang undisturbed. Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... in the west, where snow-capt mountain's rise, Like marble shafts beneath heaven's stooping dome, And sunset's charming curtain drapes the skies As if Enchantment there ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... embroiling the country in a war with Spain. On the contrary, he held that the true remedy of existing grievances in the first instance was an immediate declaration of war against both belligerents, which, now that the curtain is lifted, we see was the true remedy of the hour; but that, if from prudence a declaration of war was withheld, it was unwise, by a total cessation of our most gainful commerce, to inflict upon our own ...
— Discourse of the Life and Character of the Hon. Littleton Waller Tazewell • Hugh Blair Grigsby
... called their seats sett and stol, a name which we still preserve in the modern stool. The hall was ornamented with rich hangings, and there was generally a traves, which could be used as a curtain or screen to form a temporary partition. The floor was strewn with rushes, which were not removed quite so frequently as would have been desirable, considering that they were made the repository of the refuse of ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... party awakened by the trusty watch-dog's angry bark; and once, when Rodolph hastened to the entrance, and drew aside the curtain, he thought he could descry more than one retreating figure in the uncertain darkness. The continued uneasiness of Fingal prevented his master from again giving way to sleep until after day had dawned, when his faithful guard became ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... A thousand lamps On pit, stalls, boxes, brightly blaze, Impatiently the gallery stamps, The curtain now they slowly raise. Obedient to the magic strings, Brilliant, ethereal, there springs Forth from the crowd of nymphs surrounding Istomina(*) the nimbly-bounding; With one foot resting on its tip Slow circling round its fellow ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... strange silence in the tent. He lay still for a long time, tired and lame from the day's journey, but sleepless. The fire burned lower; the wind in the tree-tops died away; and the thick gray clouds rolled like a massive curtain from under the skies. The stars began to glow white and metallic, and from far in the North there came faintly a crisping moaning sound, like steel sleigh-runners running over frosty snow—the ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood
... their readers—"Young men of power and genius are apt to start with wild notions. He was no exception. Parson Lot's sayings and doings may well be pardoned for what Charles Kingsley said and did in after years; so let us drop a decent curtain ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... but guess. I have tauld ye your mother's purpose, and I ken Teresa was a fiend. She was never mair seen in Scotland, and I have heard that she returned to her ain land. A dark curtain has fa'en ower the past, and the few that witnessed ony part of it could only surmise something of ...
— The Antiquary, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... to the street I directed my steps in the direction of the Place d'Eylau. Two National Guards passed me, bearing a litter between them.—"Oh, you can look if you like," said one. So I drew back the checked curtain. On the mattress was stretched a woman, decently dressed, with a child of two or three years lying on her breast. They both looked very pale; one of the woman's arms was hanging down; her sleeve was stained with blood; the hand had been carried ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... their being before the earth, or any visible creature. "In the beginning God created the heavens" (Gen 1:1), &c. Neither do I think that the heavens were made of that confused chaos that afterwards we read of. It is said, he stretched out the heavens as a curtain, and with his hand he hath spanned the heavens (Psa 104:2; Isa 40:22; 48:13).; intimating, that they were not taken out of that formless heap, but were immediately formed by his power. Besides, the Holy Ghost, treating of the ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... this minute; but a little while ago there was a kind of drawing aside of the thick curtain of falling snow, and I had a view of some terribly grand rocks, and one glimpse ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... happily put aside the curtain which concealed a mystery that no longer gave me uneasiness;" interrupted Ludlow, addressing the free-trader. "Can you do more, and say whence ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... to basses, and sung by him with a face that would have done credit to Othello, received an ovation that confirmed Captain Carteret in his contempt for country audiences. The performance raged to its close in a "Cake Walk," to the inspiring strains of "Razors a-flying through the air," and the curtain fell on what the Enniscar Independent described cryptically as "a tout ensemble a la ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... cataracts, and islets. He saw the beautiful fall to which ever since has been given the name of Rideau—a name also extended to the river, whose waters make the descent at this point—on account of its striking resemblance to a white curtain. Next he looked into the deep chasm of mist, foam, and raging waters, which the Indians called Asticou or Cauldron (Chaudiere), on whose sides and adjacent islets, then thickly wooded, now stand ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... has brought us to the fourth act of the play, and when the curtain rises on this act we see the Court of Justice in Venice. The Duke and all his courtiers are present, the prisoner Antonio, with Bassanio, and many others of his friends. Shylock is called in. The Duke tries to soften the Jew's heart ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... the window and, kneeling on the floor, watched the singers through the curtain—knowing well it wasn't for her, but drinking deep of ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... would respectfully inform you that your dear friend Alice Fletcher is no more—there ain't no such person. She made a noble end in white satin covered with sticky out things, and her stylish aunt's lace curtain. She looked very lovely, what I could see of her through the curtain. My dear Miss Morton, I beseech you when you get married, don't wear a window curtain. Because if you do the groom and the sympathizing friends can't see how hard ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... little front parlor, framed in by the series of doorways, was Harrie, all in a cloud of white. It floated about her with an idle, wavelike motion. She had a veil like fretted pearls through which her tinted arm shone faintly, and the shadow of a single scarlet leaf trembled through a curtain upon ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... table, gay with lights and flowers, that should have commanded the Falls but for the curtain of fog. Niagara, however, might flout them if it pleased; they could do without Niagara. They were delighted that the hotel, apparently, contained no one they knew. All they wanted was to be together, and alone. ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of Polly's!—Mrs. Allen took me upstairs 'n' I saw 'em all. The weddin' veil is looped along the lamberquin with a glove pinned to each curtain, the dress hangs on a frame between against the window shade, 'n' the under things is folded on a table at one side with the stockin's tied together in a true lovers'-knot. I must say they 've done it all real tasty, with the deacon's picture in the ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the Custom-House, our battery, as before related, was only 180 yards from the city, and the crushing fire from this, when in full play, smashed to pieces the Water bastion, overturned the guns, and made a breach in the curtain so wide and practicable that it could be ascended ...
— A Narrative Of The Siege Of Delhi - With An Account Of The Mutiny At Ferozepore In 1857 • Charles John Griffiths
... awakened by the clatter of pursuing cavalry. Lee, like a hunted fox, turned hither and thither; but at last Sheridan planted himself squarely across the front. Lee ordered a charge. His half-starved troops, with a rallying of their old courage, obeyed. But the cavalry moving aside, as a curtain is drawn, revealed dense bodies of infantry in battle line. The Civil War was about to end in one of its bloodiest tragedies, when the Confederate advance was stopped. General Grant had already sent in a note demanding the surrender ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... to drop the curtain over a newly married pair, they recede from the altar; but we cannot but hope our readers may by this time have enough of interest in our little history to wish for a few words on the lot of the personages whose acquaintance they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... impatience mixed with uneasiness; so that, when he heard the sound of his steps, his pale face took a yet more deathlike tinge, while at the same time he raised himself on his elbow and ordered his three friends to go away. They obeyed at once, and scarcely had they left by one door than the curtain of the other was raised, and the monk, pale, immovable, solemn, appeared on the threshold. When he perceived him, Lorenzo dei Medici, reading in his marble brow the inflexibility of a statue, fell back on his ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... my first at Rydal Mount, I slept in the corner room, over the small sitting-room. I had drawn up the blind about half-way up the window before going to bed, and had drawn the curtain aside, over the back of a wooden arm-chair that stood against the window. The window, a casement, was wide open. I slept soundly, but woke quite suddenly, at what hour I do not know, and found myself sitting bolt upright in ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... divisions, and marched three-quarters of a mile beyond the plank-road, through a woody country, following the road, but crossing the ubiquitous Gravelly Run, till he struck the enemy in strong force a mile and a half below White Oak road. They lay in the edge of a wood, with a thick curtain of timber in their front, a battery of field-pieces to the right, mounted in a bastioned earthwork, and on the left the woods drew near, encircling a little farm-land and negro-buildings. General Ayres's ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... The great general is only terrible to the enemy; the great poet is frequently scolded by his wife; the children of the great statesman clamber about his knees with perfect trust and impunity; the great actor who is called before the curtain by admiring audiences is often waylaid at the stage ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... barely finished breakfast when the sun showed over the ridge of Mount Sampson; and almost immediately the thick curtain of fog, which had thus far so effectually hidden the movements of the Japanese troops from the enemy, began to lift and thin. This was the signal for the final movement prior to the storming of the ...
— Under the Ensign of the Rising Sun - A Story of the Russo-Japanese War • Harry Collingwood
... piece of fine furniture. I have no carpets on my floors. I have two small rooms in Topeka in the building I desire to give to the W. C. T. U. for prohibition work. The little cupboard I use is made of a dry-goods box, with shelves in it, a curtain in front. My dishes, all told, kitchen and dining-room, are not worth five dollars. This is what the poor have, and better than some have. It is good enough. It is better than my blessed Lord had. I desire nothing better. I would feel like a reprobate to fill ...
— The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation • Carry A. Nation
... staring now at the elephant then at Saba, they whispered to each other: "If they bewitched even the 'wobo' who in the world can oppose them?" But the most solemn moment did not come until Stas, turning to Nell, first bowed profoundly and afterwards drew aside the curtain-like walls of the palanquin and exhibited to the eyes of the crowd the "Good Mzimu." M'Rua and all the warriors fell on their faces so that their bodies formed a long, living deck. Not one of them dared to move, and fear ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... laughingly replied the young fellow. "One of the most amusing 'stunts' I ever saw was that of a man in Washington, who made a banjo play behind a curtain ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... Behind them, in a curtain of dust, pounded the field. It charged in a flying wedge, like a troop of cavalry. Dolly, searching for a green jacket, saw, instead, a rainbow wave of color that, as it rose and fell, sprang toward her in ...
— The Man Who Could Not Lose • Richard Harding Davis
... told me by the taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer cautious and yet not drunk. We sat in his den together; his library it was, his sitting and his eating-room—separated by a bead curtain, so far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... heavy curtain, Liban entered her sister's room. They saw Fand seated at a little table. A scroll lay on it open before her, but her eyes were not fixed on it. With hands clasped under her chin she gazed into the vacancies with eyes of far-away reflection and longing. There was something ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... sat in turns on the others' knees. Two amongst them at once attracted Patty's notice. One, a fair-haired girl of about the same age as herself, cried persistently and unrestrainedly, burying her face in the window curtain, and refusing all comfort, though her companions pressed chocolates, caramels, mint rock, jujubes, and walnut toffee upon ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... consult on all manner of questions those holy maids to whom God vouchsafed illumination. Such an one the Maid appeared, and her fame as a prophetess had been spread abroad in a very short time. She revealed hidden things, she drew the curtain from the future. We are reminded of that capitoul[1695] of Toulouse, who about three weeks after the deliverance of Orleans, advised her being consulted as to a remedy for the corruption of the coinage. Bona of Milan, married to a poor gentleman in the train of her cousin, ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... generation—the acts of contemporary patriots—now claim our attention; but we are reluctant as yet to turn over the page, and drop the curtain on the scenes with which we have hitherto been dealing, and which we feel we have inadequately described. We have spoken of the men whose speeches from the dock are on record, but we still linger over the history of the events in which they shared, and of the men who were associated ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... of Scripture that "the windows of heaven were opened" seemed to indicate, and those who held that they were kept there to moderate the heat of the heavenly bodies. As to the firmament, he is in doubt whether it envelops the earth "like an eggshell," or is merely spread over it "like a curtain"; for he holds that the passage in the one hundred and fourth Psalm may be ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... meal, I arose and walked to one of the deep-set windows which lighted the apartment. Lifting the curtain, I ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... up in bed. The curtain was drawn up and she saw the moon, and it looked as if it ...
— Dew Drops - Volume 37, No. 18, May 3, 1914 • Various
... did not know was in the room, shuffled across the floor to keep my father from entering. Around the base of his head he had a thin curtain of hair scarcely reaching his shoulders. His nose pointed upward. Its tip was the shape of a candle extinguisher. He wore horn spectacles; and knee breeches, waistcoat and coat of black like the ink which ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... When he enters the palace, if a European, he is obliged to take off his shoes, and having made a second obeisance is seated upon a carpet on the floor, where betel is brought to him. The throne was some years ago of ivory and tortoiseshell; and when the place was governed by queens a curtain of gauze was hung before it, which did not obstruct the audience, but prevented any perfect view. The stranger, after some general discourse, is then conducted to a separate building, where he is entertained ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the full circuit of the place, noble and peaceful while the summer sea, stirring here and there a curtain or an outer blind, breathed into its veiled spaces. She had a vision of clinging to it; that perhaps Eugenio could manage. She was in it, as in the ark of her deluge, and filled with such a tenderness for it that ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... of St. Peter and St. Paul, kept in the last chamber of the Zampieri palace, and covered with a silk curtain, is valued beyond any specimen of the painting art which can be moved from Italy to England. We are taught to hope it will soon come among us; and many say the sale cannot be now long delayed. Why Guido should never draw another picture like that, or at all in ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... A streak of sunshine pierced shutter and curtain. Her mother was supporting herself on one elbow in the bed, and looking at her as if she had just ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... is a Chubb key with eight steps. That nearest the head (8) operates a circular revolving curtain, which prevents the introduction of picking tools when a key is inserted and partly turned, as the key slot in the curtain is no longer opposite that in the lock. Step ...
— How it Works • Archibald Williams
... broad light spread over the floor of beaten earth, like a white cloth. The cottage was illuminated. I saw an old man seated on a wooden stool in a recess, where an ample serge curtain concealed a bed. He held himself slightly bent, the two hands held forth, one over the other, on the knob of a knotty staff, highly polished. In spite of eighty years, Norine's grandfather—le grand, as they say ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... ourselves, and since nature is so jealous and envious that it rejoices not so much in its own blessings as it is pained by those of others, do not look only at the much-cried-up splendour of those whom you envy and admire, but open and draw, as it were, the gaudy curtain of their pomp and show, and peep within, you will see that they have much to trouble them, and many things to annoy them. The well-known Pittacus,[738] whose fame was so great for fortitude and wisdom and uprightness, was once entertaining ...
— Plutarch's Morals • Plutarch
... between the pillars, which opened upon the terrace of the roof, was covered with a heavy curtain of the colour of a ripe pomegranate, embroidered with innumerable golden rays shooting upward from the floor. In effect the room was like a quiet, starry night, all azure and silver, flushed in the cast with rosy promise of the dawn. It was, as the house of a man should ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... defensive system platoons may not be able to advance to the Attack without a barrage, and it is essential that all movements should conform exactly to the timing of the barrage and that the troops should keep under the back edge of the shrapnel curtain, so as to deliver their assault before the enemy has time to bring rifles and machine guns into play. Under such circumstances, Ground scouts must be dispensed with. Such a position will not be attacked without careful previous reconnaissance and the ...
— Lectures on Land Warfare; A tactical Manual for the Use of Infantry Officers • Anonymous
... what was the matter with him, at first, was by the solemn preoccupation of his expression. A little black pickaninny followed him, grinning and carrying a big bundle, covered with a new lace window-curtain. ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... Bureaucracy, a gigantic power set in motion by dwarfs, was generated in this way. Though Napoleon, by subordinating all things and all men to his will, retarded for a time the influence of bureaucracy (that ponderous curtain hung between the service to be done and the man who orders it), it was permanently organized under the constitutional government, which was, inevitably, the friend of all mediocrities, the lover of authentic documents and accounts, and as meddlesome as an old tradeswoman. Delighted ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... a temple service, tall and dignified, with slow pace, each a queen, the sixteen matrons from the temple of Hera pass before the curtain—a dark purple hung between Ionic columns—of the porch or open hall of a palace. Their hair is bound as the marble hair of the temple Hera. Each wears a crown ...
— Hymen • Hilda Doolittle
... Opera House before, and the height of the audience room, the rich color, and the sweep of the balconies were not without their effect upon him. He watched the house fill with a growing feeling of expectation. When the steel curtain rose and the men of the orchestra took their places, he felt distinctly nervous. The burst of applause which greeted the conductor keyed him still higher. He found that he had taken off his gloves and twisted ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... presence lends no different turn or issue to the performance, it surely can lend it no increase of dignity. Nor would indignity come to it were he absent, and did the atoms remain the only actors on the stage. When a play is once over, and the curtain down, you really make it no better by claiming an illustrious genius for its author, just as you make it no worse by calling him ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... his guests to an adjoining chamber. It had a window shut by a curtain of rushes, through the crevices of which the islands of the Alpheus might be seen in the light of the moon. There were in this chamber two excellent beds, with coverlets of warm and ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... fears; but before retiring to rest, she looked out, far and wide, upon the lonely prairie. It was beautiful, but spectral, in the ghostly veil of moonlight. Every bolt was carefully examined, and the tin horn hung by the bedside. When all preparations were completed, she drew aside the window-curtain to look at the children in their trundle-bed, all bathed with silvery moonshine. They lay with their arms about each other's necks, the dark brow nestled close to the rosy cheek, and the mass of black hair mingled with the light brown locks. The little white boy of six summers and the Indian ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 65, March, 1863 • Various
... it was, was played to a dark house with the curtain down. It was exquisite; it was delicious. But straightway thereafter, or course, came the singing, and it does seem to me that nothing can make a Wagner opera absolutely perfect and satisfactory to the untutored but to leave out the vocal parts. I wish I could see a Wagner opera done in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pushed her way through the drift at the mouth of their burrow. Not until she was standing outside did she realize the extent of the storm. The snow was swept across the country in a thick and heavy curtain, with a wind driving it, against which she knew she could ...
— Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp • Alice Emerson
... New Year's Day. The theatre was closed, and only a half- blind porter sat at the entrance to the stage, on which there was not a soul. I stole past him with beating heart, got between the movable scenes and the curtain, and advanced to the open part of the stage. Here I fell down upon my knees, but not a single verse for declamation could I recall to my memory. I then said aloud the Lord's Prayer, and went out with the ...
— The True Story of My Life • Hans Christian Andersen
... for his aching wounds, terrible as they were,—but for the agony of the recollection that rushed upon him. He would have gone staggering out of the pavilion to seek the remains of his Clorinda, and save them from the wolves; but his friends told him they were at hand, under the curtain of his own tent. A gleam of pleasure shot across his face, and be staggered into the chamber; but when he beheld the body gored with his own hand, and the face, calm indeed, but calm like a pale night without stars, he trembled so, that he would ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... without sound. Blue drops fell from the oars and when they touched the sea there flamed up for an instant a little blue spot. The night was growing darker and more silent. The sky no longer resembled a rough sea; the clouds extended over its surface, forming a thick, even curtain, hanging motionless above the ocean. The sea was calmer and blacker, its warm and salty odor was stronger and it did not appear as ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... dusk, and afterward darkness, blacker than the tall hat of Margaret's father. For at the last moment nature had thought better of the fine weather which man had been enjoying for the past month, and drawn a vast curtain of inkiness over the luminaries from one horizon even unto the other, and sent a great puff of wet fog up the valley of the river from the ocean, so that teeth chattered and the ends of fingers became shriveled and bloodless. And had not vanity gone ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... garment being a long flowing robe, reaching from the neck to the heels and having voluminous sleeves. Female headgear was various. A woman walking abroad wore a large hat like an inverted bowl, and when she rode on horseback, she suspended from the rim of this hat a curtain from three ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... to his eyes, puzzled, questioning; his body motionless, they turned towards the middle window of the three, from whence the movement appeared to have come. It was not repeated. The old utter silence lay upon the place; yet Nicholas Danver kept his eyes upon the curtain. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... him, with a vague expectation that some terrible fate would dart at him from the curtain of green behind him. But all was quiet, save that a strange, many-colored bird flew up from under his feet and vanished ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... children who were to take part in Bunny's and Sue's show were in the barn, waiting for the curtain to be pulled back. For grandmother and Mother Brown had made a calico curtain for the children. Bunker Blue and Ben said they would stand, one on either side, to pull the curtain ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue Playing Circus • Laura Lee Hope
... linger fondly, as if loth to resign to winter the enchanted mountains of Greece. Next day the scene had changed: summer was gone. A grey November mist hung low on the hills which only yesterday had shone resplendent in the sun, and under its melancholy curtain the dead flat of the Chaeronean plain, a wide treeless expanse shut in by desolate slopes, wore an aspect of chilly sadness befitting the battlefield where a nation's freedom ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... and on the collar of his gray coat were the stars of a general officer. Even the hasty glance gained told me his identity—Beauregard. As this cavalcade turned at the corner of the house, I drew back, shadowed by the curtain, able thus both to see and hear. At the bottom of the steps the Confederate chieftain halted, ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... than once, but notably on the famous Day of the Dupes, rendered signal service to that minister. My father used often to be startled out of his sleep in the middle of the night by a valet, with a taper in his hand, drawing the curtain—having behind him the Cardinal de Richelieu, who would often take the taper and sit down upon the bed and exclaim that he was a lost man, and ask my father's advice upon news that he had received or on quarrels he had had with the King. When all Paris was in ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to time, ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... least; but she had not been sitting long before she began to feel an extraordinary attraction toward the window. She did her best to look the other way, but she was often unconsciously impelled to glance up at the lattice. Once she fancied she saw the curtain move. Determined to verify her impression, she suddenly raised her eyes, after a prolonged contemplation of the pavement, and caught a momentary sight of a girl's face, which as instantly disappeared, but not before Jasmine ...
— Stories by English Authors: Orient • Various
... liveries, a braided coat here and a pair of striped trousers there, with a sort of timorous pride, a deprecating bravado, as if they expected to be hooted by the spectators and were very glad when they were not. The man who went round with a dog to keep boys from hooking in under the curtain had grown gentler, and his dog did not look as if he would bite the worst boy in town. The man came up and asked the young mother about her sleeping child, and I inferred that the child had been sick, and was therefore unusually interesting to all the great, kind-hearted, ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... luxuries and ornaments we amuse the young people, and guard our retirement. Or if perchance a searching realist comes to our gate, before whose eye we have no care to stand, then again we run to our curtain, and hide ourselves as Adam at the voice of the Lord God in the garden. Cardinal Caprara, the Pope's legate at Paris, defended himself from the glances of Napoleon by an immense pair of green spectacles. Napoleon remarked them, and speedily managed to rally them off: and yet Napoleon, ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... through the glowing furnace was awful and appalling. Huge and ignited fragments were borne away with frightful rapidity. They rode on the rolling volumes of smoke like fire-fiends armed with destruction; but the vast reservoir of flame still glowed on, apparently undiminished. The curtain of night seemed to be suddenly undrawn. Objects the most minute were visible as in the broad view of day. The brown heath, the grey and the mossy stone, were each distinguishable, but clad alike in one bright and unvarying colour, red as the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating "'Tis some visiter entreating entrance at my chamber door— ...
— The Raven • Edgar Allan Poe
... officials, foreign ministers, dilettanti, poets, critics, women of wit and fashion, swelled the gathering of intent listeners, through whom there ran a subdued murmur, a low buzz of whispering, betraying the lively interest felt. Grisi came on after the rising of the curtain and received a most cordial burst of applause. At length the great audience was hushed to silence, and the orchestra played the symphonic prelude which introduces the contralto air "Eccomi alfin in Babilonia." ...
— Great Singers, Second Series - Malibran To Titiens • George T. Ferris
... The green gauze now is also pasted on the straw windows! What about the cosmetic fresh concocted or the powder just scented; Why has the hair too on each temple become white like hoarfrost! Yesterday the tumulus of yellow earth buried the bleached bones, To-night under the red silk curtain reclines the couple! Gold fills the coffers, silver fills the boxes, But in a twinkle, the beggars will all abuse you! While you deplore that the life of others is not long, You forget that you yourself are approaching death! You educate your sons with all propriety, But they may some day, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... pale blue haze that looked like the clear summer sky on a hot day. Except that it wasn't sky, but a curtain that wavered and shimmered before his eyes. Beyond it, he could ...
— Pagan Passions • Gordon Randall Garrett
... their white bridal beauty from cans rescued from the ashes of a camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it came to adorning her home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath trailing green leaves. There was at the window a muslin curtain that in its starched and ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child's frock hastily converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside that the lamp might shed its beam farther on the way of the traveller who came not. There was but one other light in the place, a ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... off?" till they had traversed seven vestibules, when the Wazir said to him, "Mark my words, O Fisherman! Thou standest before the Commander of the Faithful and Defender of the Faith!" Then he raised the great curtain and Khalifah's eyes fell on the Caliph, who was seated on his couch, with the Lords of the realm standing in attendance upon him. As soon as he knew him, he went up to him and said, "Well come, and welcome to thee, O piper! 'Twas not right of thee to make thyself ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... the remnants of food were at length removed, and the windows had been opened for a minute to change the air, a curtain rose suddenly at the end of the room, and revealed a small stage decorated with green branches and artificial flowers, in the center of it a piano, on the piano music, and at the piano Hester, now first seen, having reserved her strength for ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... California with the intention of seeing anything of the state," she admonishes, "do that before you enter San Francisco. If you must land in San Francisco first, jump into a taxi, pull down the curtain, drive through the city, breaking every speed law, to Third and Townsend, sit in the station until a train—some train, any train— pulls out, and go with it. If in crossing Market street you raise that curtain as much as an inch, believe me, stranger, it's all off; you're ...
— Fascinating San Francisco • Fred Brandt and Andrew Y. Wood
... drew aside the curtain that covered the double-latticed windows. The room was so warm that there was no rime on the panes. She gave a little shudder, and he went to her side, putting his ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... out of the window, a noble knight passed that way; and so delighted was he with the rare sweetness of her face, that he forgot himself, and paused a moment to gaze at her. The princess blushed, and let fall the silken curtain; but Zora had seen the knight, and knew he was the royal Prince Reginald. She ground her teeth in rage; for she had determined that the prince should never ...
— Fairy Book • Sophie May
... the walls. In one corner, under a white netting, was a little bed, the woodwork gayly painted with knots of bright flowers. Near it, against the wall, was a black walnut bureau. A work-table with spiral legs stood by the window, which was hung with a green and gold window curtain. Opposite the window the closet door stood ajar, while in the corner across from the bed was a tiny washstand with two ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... good night. Mother and daughter finally retired; but, as for myself, I was nervous and restless, sleeping little, thinking of home and loved ones; not, however, forgetting the little "Wild Rose" that was separated from me only by a curtain partition. ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... impress me, for though when the curtain rose, disclosing the stage full of people, chiefly girls, in delicate and beautiful toilettes, I thought I had never before seen so many lovely and happy faces, after a while, when the faces fell into repose, I thought they were not really lovely ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... desk, which the minister's children, when they were little, used to call the "omnibus," by reason of a certain vast and capacious drawer, the resort of all homeless things,—nails, wafers, the bed-key, curtain-fixtures, carpet-tacks, and dried rhubarb. Perhaps it was to this drawer that the minister's daughter lately referred, when she said that the true motto was, "One place for everything, and everything in ...
— Saint Patrick - 1887 • Heman White Chaplin
... morning was meant for an artist, and it is to be hoped that there was one at Tarr Farm to see the curtain of fog slowly lifting from the bright waters of the Creek, and creeping up the bluff beyond it, until it melted into the clear blue sky, and let the sunshine come glancing down the valley, where groups of derricks, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... paroxysms of rage, but nothing upset him. In hearing of the death of Napoleon, he swore that he would eat the heart of England; the slow agony of the pale and interesting heir of the Empire, inspired him with a passion to tear the vitals out of Austria. When the drama was over and the curtain fell on Schoenbrunn, he dashed away his tears and said: "It is well. I have lived in a moment a man's entire life. Now show me the ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... Mantelot of grey cachmere, the sleeves a la Maintenon; the edges are all scalloped and trimmed with braid. Bonnet of ultra marine velvet; a broad black lace is turned back over the edge; it has a deep curtain. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... of battle-dust may dim, His veil of splendor curtain him, And in the midnight of my fear I may not feel him standing near; But, as I lift mine eyes above, His banner over ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... of my memory, in the leading scenes and events of my first winter on the island, giving prominence to the state and changes of the weather, the occurrences among the natives, and the moral, social, and domestic events around me. But the curtain of the world's great drama is now fully raised, by our free commercial and postal union with the region below us; new scenes and topics daily occur, which it would be impossible to note if I tried, and which ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... I had a faint remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall—green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red. Turning with an effort toward the side whence all the brightness came, in a moment two warm arms were round ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... throng the streets. The shadowy forms of a past generation may still haunt the scenes of their former triumphs, but must rejoice over the life and light that nineteenth-century revels have dowered them with. The world rolls on, and brings in its course new actors, new scenes, a new drop-curtain, but men and women are always men and women. The loves, hopes, fears, disappointments or triumphs of to-day,—these, if nothing else, link us to a past generation. The idler on the club piazza, if not a Lauzun ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... As the curtain rises, Johnny is discovered. "Johnny-The-Priest" deserves his nickname. With his pale, thin, clean-shaven face, mild blue eyes and white hair, a cassock would seem more suited to him than the apron he wears. Neither his voice nor his general manner dispel this illusion ...
— Anna Christie • Eugene O'Neill
... yielding, I followed the narrow cement walk around the corner of the house. Here it was dark in the shadow of the wall, yet one window on the first floor exhibited a faint glow at the edge of a closely drawn curtain. Encouraged slightly by this proof that the house was indeed occupied, I felt my way forward until I came to some stone steps, and a door. I rapped on the wood three times, my nerves tingling from excitement. There was a moment's delay, so that I lifted my hand again, and then the door ...
— Gordon Craig - Soldier of Fortune • Randall Parrish
... portrait that ever was seen. Only a half-length, but such a majesty, such a force, such a splendor, such a simplicity about it! The woman is in a stiff black dress, with a ruff and a few pearls; a yellow curtain is behind her—the simplest arrangement that can be conceived; but this great man knew how to rise to his occasion; and no better proof can be shown of what a fine gentleman he was than this his homage to ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... blinding showers, mighty squadrons of them careering across the plain below. The landscape is involved in a dim, roseate twilight. But occasionally there comes a sickly radiance from behind the curtain of cloud that glimmers lustreless, like an incandescent lamp seen through a fog: it is the sun shining brightly in the pure regions of ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... marks and protects their perception as the curtain of the eagle's eye. Our swifter Americans, when they first deal with English, pronounce them stupid; but, later, do them justice as people who wear well, or hide their strength.—High and low, they are of an unctuous texture.—Their daily feasts argue a savage vigor of body.—Half their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... got home. By 6.30 it had become too dark to see anything. The dust mingling with the strange mist, and also with the smoke of shrapnel and of the hugest and most awful blazing bush fire formed an impenetrable curtain. ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... the curtain, And shows us the people's plight; And everything seems uncertain, And nothing at all looks right. Yet out of the blackness groping, My heart finds a world in bloom; For it somehow is fashioned for hoping, And it cannot ...
— The Englishman and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... side of the ship, a wash-stand in a recess between the bunks and the bulkhead adjoining the saloon, a framed mirror above it, a folding mahogany table against the transverse bulkhead, brass pins upon which to hang clothing, a curtain to draw across the doorway, a handsome lamp with a ground-glass globe hung in gimbals in the centre of the transverse bulkhead, two large travelling trunks and three or four smaller cases, broken open ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... of existing or future historic celebrity in the Netherlands, whose names are so familiar to the student of the epoch, seemed to have been grouped, as if by premeditated design, upon this imposing platform, where the curtain was to fall forever upon the mightiest emperor since Charlemagne, and where the opening scene of the long and tremendous tragedy of Philip's reign was to be simultaneously enacted. There was the bishop of Arras, soon to be known throughout Christendom ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... when the first man but knew Thee by report, unseen, and heard thy name, Did he not tremble for this lovely frame, This glorious canopy of light and blue? Yet 'neath a curtain of translucent dew, Bathed in the rays of the great setting flame, Hesperus, with the host of heaven came, And lo! creation widen'd on his view. Who could have thought what darkness lay concealed Within ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 238, May 20, 1854 • Various
... him demands. There are some books, where it is necessary to let one's self go from beginning to end. There are others where a man may sit as he sits at a play, being himself between acts, or at proper intervals when the author lets down the curtain, and being translated the rest ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... in the only other place left—behind the apparatus used in demonstration. That then was one useful object which the apparatus—and with it the elaborate hypocrisy of class, and speeches, and candidature—served: it was made to act as a curtain, a screen. But had it no other purpose? That question we may answer when we know its name and its nature. And it is not beyond our powers to conjecture this with something like certainty. For the only "machines" possible to use in illustration of simple mechanics are the screw, the wedge, ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel
... dying for freedom, is brought on the stage in a time of great political excitement. Both parties crowd to the theatre. Each affects to consider every line as a compliment to itself, and an attack on its opponents. The curtain falls amidst an unanimous roar of applause. The Whigs of the Kit Cat embrace the author, and assure him that he has rendered an inestimable service to liberty. The Tory secretary of state presents a purse ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... look into the window, and the curtain of that descended relentlessly. The bank had suddenly taken on an aspect of Sabbath blankness. Once more the Colonel rattled the knob, then he turned to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... one part of the practice conform to the other, it was shortly after determined that he should do nothing; his eldest first-cousin of the masculine gender being legally proclaimed his substitute. In the end, the crimson curtain was drawn before the throne. As, however, this cousin might begin to wriggle the stick in his turn, and derange the balance of the tripod, the other two sets of stick-holders next decided that, though his majesty had an ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... the window curtain aside, he seemed to be looking out on another world. The first snow of the winter covered every familiar object, and he thought, in his childish way, that last night's experience had altered his life as the snowdrifts had changed ...
— Big Brother • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... the hour fixed for my appearance on a strange stage, and my readers may judge of the speed required to proceed to the theater in so short a time and make my preparations. It is true that the moments were as well counted as employed, and my curtain had hardly fallen than, rushing toward the stairs, I got before my audience, and jumped into a vehicle that bore me ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Jenny had gone away with the doll and the donkey, you hunched up the blanket and the stiff white counterpane to hide the curtain and you played with the knob in the green painted iron railing of the cot. It stuck out close to your face, winking and grinning at you in a friendly way. You poked it till it left off and turned grey and went back into the railing. Then you ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair
... a sudden buzzing as if a giant swarm of bees were flying about in the center of the hall where the long, cylindrical gas tanks stood, and a six foot square of light flashed on the white curtain which had been lowered ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... lower the curtain on her side, the side on which the procession was to pass. But, when she heard the drums close at hand, seized with a nervous frenzy at her inability to escape that obsession, or, it may be, infected by the unhealthy curiosity that encompassed her, she raised the curtain ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... by it, and looked all the darker for the blackness of the small uncurtained window, through which the ebony face of night was peering in. This bare, uncovered casement troubled him, and from time to time he turned his eyes uneasily toward it. But what need could there be of a curtain, when they were a mile away from any habitation, and where no road crossed the moor, except the rugged green pathway, worn into deep ruts by old Marlowe's own wagon? Yet as if touched by some vague sympathy with ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... to make one weep,— A tender infant with its curtain'd eye, Breathing as it would neither live nor die With that unchanging countenance of sleep! As if its silent dream, serene and deep, Had lined its slumber with a still blue sky So that the passive cheeks unconscious lie With no more life than roses—just to keep The blushes warm, and the ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... wondrous transformation, the dropping of the day's curtain, was for me a rare and perfect moment. As the golden splendor of sunset sought out a peak or mesa or escarpment, I gave it a name to suit my fancy; and as flushing, fading, its glory changed, sometimes I rechristened it. Jupiter's Chariot, brazen ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... way along the landing, and paused at her door. "Remember that we have to appear amongst the guests directly," she said, as though to warn him against any demonstration. Then they entered. She went over to the cot and drew back the fleecy curtain from over the sleeping boy's head. His fingers hungered to take his child to his arms. "He is magnificent—magnificent!" he said, with a great pride. "Why did you never let ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... are much of the same size and pattern, an observing eye would have picked out the Binnie cottage as distinctive and prepossessing. Its outside walls were as white as lime could make them; its small windows brightened with geraniums and a white muslin curtain; and the litter of ropes and nets and drying fish which encumbered the majority of thatches, was pleasantly absent. Standing on a little level, thirty feet above the shingle, it faced the open sea, and was constantly filled with the confused ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... however, to think of such things, for a curtain was suddenly drawn aside, and Redmond and his daughter appeared. Although years had somewhat changed the former, yet Harmon recognized him at once. He stood as if rooted to the floor, so great was his surprise. What happened next he was never able to tell ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... still pale and much moved, passed behind the great curtain which hid the alcove containing his bed, and they heard a prayer of thanksgiving. He then reappeared, grave and calm, as if nothing ...
— The Conspirators - The Chevalier d'Harmental • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... daughter. Mournfully and low the man of God began his eulogy of the dead, and his doleful voice, mingled with the sobbing which it was its purpose to stimulate and sustain, rose and fell, seemed to come and go, like the sound of a sullen sea. The gloomy day grew darker as he spoke; a curtain of cloud underspread the sky and a few drops of rain fell audibly. It seemed as if all nature were ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... earnest, he raised his brows in acknowledgment. Tavannes nodded carelessly in return, looked an instant at the cards on the table, and passed on, pushed his way through the circle, and reached the door. He was lifting the curtain to go out, when Nancay, the Captain of the Guard, plucked ...
— Count Hannibal - A Romance of the Court of France • Stanley J. Weyman
... when the decks were slippery with moisture and a curtain of mist veiled everything beyond a hundred yards, Ralph, who was in the foretop on the lookout, fancied that he detected a sound somewhat different from the usual noises surrounding a vessel even ...
— Ralph Granger's Fortunes • William Perry Brown
... to the best of my ability; one of the panes with the old pillow-case, and the other with a piece of the old stage green curtain. Sure I was as careful as possible all the time you were away, and not a drop of rain came in at that window of all the windows in the house, all winter, ma'am, when under my care; and now the family's come home, and it's summer-time, I never thought ...
— Castle Rackrent • Maria Edgeworth
... hanging again and again gently shook and trembled. They saw not how it was gently opened a little in the middle; nor did they see the sparkling eyes which suddenly peeped through the opening in the hanging; nor suspected they that it was the Princess Elizabeth who had stepped behind the curtain, the better to see and hear what was ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... reply, the curtain which shrouded the door leading to the Countess's rooms was drawn aside, ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... passing. I thought I saw Castro's peaked hat and large cloak flit in the gloom into which fell the light from the small doorway of a sort of guardroom near the closed gate. We continued along the arcaded walk; a double curtain was drawn to right and left before me, ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... Pocock, Specimen, p. 60, 61. From the death of Mahomet we ascend to 68, from his birth to 129, years before the Christian aera. The veil or curtain, which is now of silk and gold, was no more than a piece of Egyptian linen, (Abulfeda, in Vit. Mohammed. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... and for an unheard-of satisfaction of an inconceivable pride. If he had hated her he could not have flung that enormous fortune more brutally at her head. And his unrepentant death seemed to lift for a moment the curtain on something lofty and ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... that the government teachers and books are "all positively heathen or quite destitute of all religion." In some parts of the country the government schools secure the attendance of high-caste girls by allowing them to be placed behind a curtain, and thus screened from the eyes of the male teacher or inspector, as all the women of such classes are screened from male visitors. Even the physician sees only a hand protruded from under a curtain, and by the touch of this, with a few unsatisfactory answers to his questions, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... silver night-lamp, with a short sword, on a marble table which stood close by the head of the couch. Either in order to avoid the light of the lamp, or to hide his countenance from Varney, Leicester drew the curtain, heavy with entwined silk and gold, so as completely to shade his face. Varney took a seat near the bed, but with his back towards his master, as if to intimate that he was not watching him, and quietly waited till Leicester himself led the way to the topic ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... glimpses had from the decks were bound to be disappointing. It was just after daylight. The mist of the night had thickened instead of vanishing. Here and there patchy bits of land could be seen through the haze, but for the most part France was invisible behind a curtain of ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys with Pershing's Troops - Dick Prescott at Grips with the Boche • H. Irving Hancock
... took her lamp, led the way gravely to the alcove, where she softly drew aside the long curtain and motioned to her son to come, without ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that, in my day, at least, that curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... ominous hum in the surrounding atmosphere, when the waves calmed down as if by magic; and then, a large rent disclosed itself in the sombre curtain of cloud to the north-west, the heavy masses of vapour that had been previously piling themselves along the horizon there and spreading up to the zenith falling back again and scurrying away in a retrograde direction, like skirmishers on a battle- field driven-in on to their supports by a ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... I gathered from her tone that the Joan of Arc expression had departed. Had Primgate wanted to paint her at that particular moment I should have suggested Katherine—during the earlier stages—listening to a curtain lecture from Petruchio. "Are you suggesting that all women should ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... that they were not allowed to speak to us. Also Heda was kept in the cart and Nombe insisted that the rear canvas curtain should be closed and a blanket fastened behind Anscombe who drove, evidently with the object that she should not be seen. Further, on the plea of weariness, from the time that we entered Zulu territory Nombe asked to be allowed to ride in the cart with Kaatje and Heda, her real reason, as I ...
— Finished • H. Rider Haggard
... waters, there to quaff the pleasure of life from the foaming goblet of the infinite, and to partake, if but for a moment, even with the confined powers of my soul, the beatitude of the Creator, who accomplishes all things in himself and through himself.... It is as if a curtain had been drawn from before my eyes.... My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature—Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself and every ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... imploring God—by dint of inquiry into the history of man, a ray of the truth has descended on my brow, and the shadows of the past have melted from before my eyes. I have lifted a corner of the curtain: I have seen enough to know that my life, like that of the rest of the human race, has been a series of necessary errors, yet, to speak more correctly, of incomplete truths, conducting, more or less slowly ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... put the soup where it would keep just warm, slipped out of the room, letting the curtain at its entrance fall behind him. The sun was touching the white bedclothes with a lingering ray. Passing softly away, it left the room in shade which felt pleasant after ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... a chair with scant respect for the upholstery, and examined the damaged drapery. Descending, he tugged tentatively at the other curtain, first with his right hand, then with his left; then with both. The fabric gave a little at the last test. Jones ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... the crater, it was equally difficult to ascend, except at one or two places; but these ascents our mariners thought of improving, by making steps, as the animals were effectually excluded from the plain within by means of the sail which served for a curtain at the gateway, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... before an audience of deboshed and shattered ladies. The legend, "Health, Beauty, Strength," below, gave a needed point to his parody. This he hung up in the studio over the oil shop, with a flap of brown paper; by way of a curtain over it ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... not indeed in his arms, but with a strong hand that made her progress over the stones and moss very rapid, and that gave her a great flying leap whenever occasion was, over any obstacle that happened to be in the way. There was need enough for haste. The light veil of haze that had seemed to curtain off the sunlight so happily from the lake and the party, proved now to have been only the advancing soft border of an immense thick cloud coming up from the west. No light veil now; a deep, dark covering was over the face ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... distributes the parts; religion governs the performance; philosophers are the spectators; the opulent occupy the boxes; the powerful the amphitheatre; and the pit is for the unfortunate; the disappointed snuff the candles; folly composes the music; and time draws the curtain. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... proved to be an inner one and unlighted, a bedchamber, as I soon determined, for my outstretched hands encountered the posts of a bed. Then a slight gust of air partially swept aside a hanging curtain, which rustled like silk, and I caught a brief glimpse of the adjacent parlor. It was likewise unillumined, but the door leading into the front hall stood ajar, and through that opening there poured a stream of radiance, together with the incessant hum of ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... possession of the family of Van Hoek, at Amsterdam, will serve to give a good idea of his method of treating his subjects. The picture is much larger than his usual size, being three feet long by two feet six inches wide, inside the frame. The room is divided into two apartments by a curtain of curiously wrought tapestry. In one apartment sits a woman giving suck to her child; at her side is a cradle, and a table covered with tapestry, on which is placed a gilt lamp which lights the room. In the second apartment is a surgeon performing an ...
— Anecdotes of Painters, Engravers, Sculptors and Architects and Curiosities of Art (Vol. 3 of 3) • S. Spooner
... adventures, and the sub-sub-plot of the abduction of a Moorish maiden by her Spanish lover, left me disappointed and detached. Of course Max embraces the heroine on the last page; and I could not but admire the resource with which, having dropped the curtain upon this climax, the authors ring it up again for an added paragraph (my metaphor is getting somewhat uncertain, but no matter), which brings the story to the warlike present. On the whole a readable book, but not quite equal to the best ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 14, 1914 • Various
... his wife and children? Could he not fulfil all his obligations as a Christian by reclaiming the wicked and relieving the poor at La Flche? Plainly, he had doubts that his vocation was genuine. If we could raise the curtain of his domestic life, perhaps we should find him beset by wife and daughters, tearful and wrathful, inveighing against his folly, and imploring him to provide a support for them before squandering his money to plant a convent of nuns ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... in nervous haste up and down the under side of the bow and over the western mountain-wall. They were about one and a half times the apparent diameter of the bow in length, maintained a vertical posture all the way across, and slipped swiftly along as if they were suspended like a curtain on rings. Had these lively auroral fairies marched across the fiord on the top of the bow instead of shuffling along the under side of it, one might have fancied they were a happy band of spirit people on a journey making use of the splendid bow for a bridge. There ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... for a certainty they were honourable scars, and he, the richer for his spent strength. He had sacrificed much for him, but the reward reaped for his devotion was the knowledge that of their friendship was woven a curtain of infinite beauty that helped to shut away ...
— Christopher Hibbault, Roadmaker • Marguerite Bryant
... Pertinax knows next to nothing of Sextus' doings, although he protects Sextus as far as he can and sees him now and then. Sextus' plan is to keep all three rival factions by the ears, so that if anything should happen—" he nodded toward the curtain, from behind which came the sounds of childish laughter and the crashing voice of Commodus encouraging in some piece of mischief—"they would be all at odds and Pertinax could ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy
... takes the child to the window in the morning, raises the curtain, and examines the little one's throat she will see that the hard palate and back of the throat are a dull, angry red. Perhaps there are a few little red spots on the hard palate, and if the mother will look closely at the lining membrane of the cheek she will see some ...
— Measles • W. C. Rucker
... railway trainmen held their division fair at McCloud there was a lantern to be voted to the most popular conductor—a gold-plated lantern with a green curtain in the globe. Cal Stewart and Ben Doton, who were very swell conductors and great rivals, were the favorites, and had the town divided over their chances for winning it. But at the last moment Georgie Sinclair stepped up to ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... Packington was a gentleman of no mean family, and of form and feature nowise disabled, for he was a brave gentleman, and a very fine courtier, and for the time which he stayed there, which was not lasting, very high in her grace; but he came in, and went out through disassiduity, drew the curtain between himself and the light of her grace, and then death overwhelmed the remnant, and utterly deprived him of recovery; and they say of him that had he brought less to her Court than he did, he might have carried away more than he brought, for ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... King and Queen of Sardinia went in state to the Carlo Felice Theatre at Genoa, and presented to the public, says an Italian correspondent, his niece, the betrothed bride of the heir-apparent of the house of Austria. At seven the court arrived, the curtain rose, and displayed the whole corps dramatique, who sang Dio Salve il Re; or an Italian version of the words and music of our "God save the King," in which Madame Caradori took the principal part. Thus our national anthem is getting naturalized in Italy, the parent of song, and once the manufacturer ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... environs. The windows were now occupied by groups turned to stone with distended eyes fixed on the little procession. Sophia had a tightening of the throat, and the hand trembled by which she held the curtain. The central figure did not seem to her to be alive; but rather a doll, a marionette wound up to imitate the action of a tragedy. She saw the priest offer the crucifix to the mouth of the marionette, which with a clumsy ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... striven to brighten the picture and awaken sympathy for the weakness of the woman, who, royal mistress though she was, could not command her love to be requited, the poetic measure of his lines roughens and hardens to the close, when the curtain falls on what is felt to be a ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... turned, passed through the curtain, and made his way out of the tent. Abdool, who was squatting near the entrance, at once rose ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... Cortes made their impression on the public mind, and gave a new impulse to the spirit of adventure. The southern expeditions became a common topic of speculation among the colonists of Panama. But the region of gold, as it lay behind the mighty curtain of the Cordilleras, was still veiled in obscurity. No idea could be formed of its actual distance; and the hardships and difficulties encountered by the few navigators who had sailed in that direction gave a gloomy character to the undertaking, which had hitherto deterred the most daring ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... crescent moon, the symbol of all things earthly, in the midst of a throng of child-angels "hovering in the sunny air, reposing on clouds, or sporting among their silvery folds"—"the apotheosis of womanhood." It is as if an unseen hand had suddenly drawn aside an invisible curtain and we, the children of earth, were for a moment permitted to view the interior of heaven itself. In this vision of a poet, so masterfully painted, the lover of ...
— Great Artists, Vol 1. - Raphael, Rubens, Murillo, and Durer • Jennie Ellis Keysor
... turned her head and glanced across at him. After an interval he laid his cigarette on the edge of a saucer and resumed his work. In the golden gloom of the studio the stillness was absolute, save for the delicate stir of a curtain rustling at his open window. A breeze moved the hair on his temples; his eyes wandered towards the window across the court. The window was so close that they could have conversed together ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the Zambezi forms a natural riverine boundary with Zambia; in full flood (February-April) the massive Victoria Falls on the river forms the world's largest curtain of ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... and did her best to make the room look pleasant and inviting to the little stranger. In fact, before she was through with the work she became really very much interested in it. She had put a clean white quilt upon the bed, and looped up the curtain with a handsome crimson ribbon, taken from the stock in the wardrobe. She had swept and dusted every corner and crevice; she had displayed all her ornaments to the best advantage, and put fresh cologne in the bottles. She had even brought from some sanctum, where it was folded away in the dark, ...
— Gypsy's Cousin Joy • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... she rejoice with me when it is over! While I am pleading, she places persons to inform her from time to time how I am heard, what applauses I receive, and what success attends the cause. When at any time I recite my works, she conceals herself behind some curtain, and with secret rapture enjoys my praises. She sings my verses to her lyre, with no other master but love, the best instructor, for her guide. Her passion will increase with our days, for it is not my youth nor my person, which time gradually ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... bright, sunshiny day, under clear water, the shadow of any object in the sea is unlike any shade in the upper atmosphere. It draws a black curtain over everything under it, completely obscuring it. Nor is this peculiarity lost when the explorer enters the shadow; but, as one looking into a tunnel from without can see nothing therein, though ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... that part of the Merovingian tragedy with which Rouen is connected comes to a close. Nor have I space here to follow out the actors to the curtain's fall. In other pages their various fortunes and their dark calamities may be followed to a conclusion. The next chapter in the history of the town is that of the Northmen, and of the founding of that mighty dynasty which was to spread its rule across the Channel, and to gather the ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... the figure which they did not express. He established a rule of proportion which was followed by all succeeding artists. While many of his pieces were of a lofty character, some were demoralizing. Zeuxis yielded the palm to him, since Parrhasius painted a curtain which deceived his rival, whereas the grapes of Zeuxis had deceived only birds. Parrhasius was exceedingly arrogant and luxurious, and boasted of having reached the utmost limits of his art. He combined the magic tone of Apollodorus with the exquisite ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... rooms, in one of which some secretaries were writing, we stopped at a third door. Over all brooded a silence which could be felt. The usher knocked, opened, and, with his finger on his lip, pushed aside a curtain and signed to me to enter. I did so and found myself behind ...
— Under the Red Robe • Stanley Weyman
... been? And if Cato and Domitius and Lentulus Crus have their way with me, what matter? What matter if a stab in the dark, or open violence, or the sham forms of justice end this poor comedy? I and all others play. All comedy is tragedy, and at its merriest is but dolorous stuff. While the curtain stays down[123] we are sorry actors with the whole world for our audience, and the hoots mingle full often with the applause. And when the curtain rises, that which is good, the painstaking effort, the labour, is quickly forgotten; the blunders, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... cupolas of Quebec, there is a fertile area of meadow and cornfield stretching from Dorchester bridge to the deep ravine and Falls over which the Montmorency, La Vache, hangs its milk-white curtain of spray. On the river shore, in 1759, stood Montcalm's earth and field works of defence. Parallel to them and distant about half a mile, the highway, over which H.R.H. Prince Edward's equipage pranced daily, during the summers ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... gleefully, like a child. She never laughed again in exactly that way. This was the last appearance of the old irresponsible Prudence. The curtain was ...
— Prudence of the Parsonage • Ethel Hueston
... see from this window? If I am not mistaken those are citizens, helmeted and mailed, armed with good muskets, as in the time of the League, and whose eyes are so intently fixed on this window that they will see you if you raise that curtain much; and now come to the other side—what do you see? Creatures of the people, armed with halberds, guarding your doors. You will see the same at every opening from this palace to which I should lead you. Your ...
— Twenty Years After • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the final outdoor chores, Aaron inquired of his wife's day. The Sarki's Paramount Wife, with two servants, had indeed visited, bringing more gifts of food and clothing. Somehow the four of them had managed to breach the Hausa-Pennsylfawnisch Deitsch curtain. "What in the world did you talk ...
— Blind Man's Lantern • Allen Kim Lang
... shilling apiece to sit three or four times in a season in the one-shilling gallery—where you felt all the time that you ought not to have brought me—and more strongly I felt obligation to you for having brought me—and the pleasure was the better for a little shame—and when the curtain drew up, what cared we for our place in the house, or what mattered it where we were sitting, when our thoughts were with Rosalind in Arden, or with Viola at the Court of Illyria? You used to say that the gallery was the best place of all ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... hall, pale and limping, she was received with a general murmur of pleasure. On the part of the audience there was the feeling of impatience gratified which one experiences at the theatre at the end of the last entr'acte of the comedy, when the curtain rises and the conclusion is about to begin. On the part of the judges, it was the hope of getting ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... guidance, they went through the secret passage to the cavern. There they found a lighted lantern hung on the stunted cedar just outside the entrance, the canvas curtain drawn aside, the derrick swung out, and its tackle hanging down to within a foot of the black ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... mine, and told her the sad story as best I could. She listened with a calmness which appeared almost unnatural, until I had finished the mournful narration. She then arose, and going to the bedside, she drew the curtain and gazed silently and fixedly on the quiet face of the child: but the feelings which swelled at her heart could not be suppressed; the tears gushed forth, and sobbing as if her heart would break, she leant over the bed and took the dead child in ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... heard a rustling at the drop scene. In a few moments the scene commenced to rise, being rolled up by an unseen hand, and when it had been raised a few inches I was not a little "struck" to see a man's head appearing underneath the curtain. Now this was a bit of real, earnest acting—none of your unnatural, unfinished style. It was so realistic that I scarce knew what to do. I, of course, first of all concluded that I was going to be robbed, or that something of much more consequence to ...
— Adventures and Recollections • Bill o'th' Hoylus End
... two painters who, being mutually (180) jealous, arranged a competition. 2. One painted a cluster (126) of grapes, so excellently that the birds flew to it. 3. The other deceived his rival (competitor) himself, by a painting of a curtain. 4. The most famous artists, however, often show their skill by painting (222) pictures of the sunset, chiefly, I think, because of the brilliant colors. 5. In fact ("efektive"), I doubt whether there is a more beautiful sight (227, b) than the sunset. 6. It is made ...
— A Complete Grammar of Esperanto • Ivy Kellerman
... I ever saw, "Gente Conocida," impressed me, I remember, at a time when I understood about one word in ten and had to content myself with following the general modulation of things, as carrying on to the stage, the moment the curtain rose, the very people, intonations, phrases, that were stirring in the seats about me. After the first act a broad-bosomed lady in black silk leaned back in the seat beside me sighing comfortably "Que castizo es este ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... fortification, an outwork consisting of two long faces meeting in a salient angle, covering the curtain, and, generally, the shoulders of the bastions; it affords a powerful defence to the ground in front of the latter, which may rarely be approached till after the ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... of 1861 had now arrived,—that eventful spring which was to lift the curtain and show the first scene of the first act in the mighty drama which fixed the eyes of mankind during four bloody years. The little schemes of little people were going on in all our cities and villages without thought of the fearful convulsion which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 121, November, 1867 • Various
... I shall." And while the others played, Mac lay staring at the window curtain as contentedly as if, through it, he beheld "a dream of fair women" from which to ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... The heavy leathern curtain falls by its own weight, and the air is suddenly changed. A hushed, half-rhythmic sound, as of a world breathing in its sleep, makes the silence alive. The light is not dim or ineffectual, but very soft and high, and it is as rich as floating gold dust in the far distance, and ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... opera opens, the curtain rises upon a sooty cave, where the dwarf Mime is alone at work, hammering a sword upon his anvil and complaining bitterly of the strength and violence of young Siegfried, who shatters every weapon ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber
... no longer even old wives' fables. Either death brought an absolute unconsciousness, or the soul soared into space. "Lex non poena mors"—"Death is a law, not a penalty"—was the ancient saying. It was, as it were, the close of a banquet or the fall of the curtain. "While we are, death is not; when death has come, ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... will draw down the curtain now upon the most strange, and pathetic, and wonderful military drama that has been played upon the stage of the world. Joan of Arc ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... empress a brandeum, or veil, which had touched the bodies of the apostles, and assured her that miracles had been wrought by such relics.[34] He promised to send her also some dust-filings of the chains of St. Paul; of which relics he makes frequent mention in his epistles. At Cagliari, a curtain rich Jew, having been converted to the faith, had seized the synagogue in order to convert it into a church, and had set up in it an image of the Virgin Mary and a cross. Upon the complaint of the other Jews, St. Gregory ordered[35] the synagogue ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... in death expire, And the pale shades escape the funeral fire; For Cynthia's form beside my curtain's stood, Lately interr'd near Aniens' murm'ring flood. Thoughts of her funeral would, not let me close These eyes, nor seek the realms of still repose; Around her shoulders wav'd her flowing hair, ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... o'er with artificial molds; 60 Her countenance complete, the beaux she warms With looks not hers: and, spite of nature, charms. Thus artfully their persons they disguise, Till the last flourish bids the curtain rise. The prince then enters on the stage in state; Behind, a guard of candle-snuffers wait: There swoln with empire, terrible and fierce, He shakes the dome, and tears his lungs with verse: His subjects tremble; the submissive pit, Wrapt up in silence and attention, sit; ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... had oppressed me in the garden. Drawing a chair near the fire, I stirred the embers together, and tried to warm myself. Our positions in the room left some little distance between us. I could only see her sidewise, as she sat by the window in the sheltering darkness of the curtain which still ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... to the supposition that the inhabitants facilitated domestic operations by emptying casual vessels out of the windows. The dirty little casements on the ground floor exhibited without exception a rag of red or white curtain on the one side, prevailing fashion evidently requiring no corresponding drapery on the other. The Court was a cul de sac, and at the far end stood a receptacle for ashes, the odour from which was intolerable. Strangely ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... was a smaller apartment, separated from the former room by a corridor, that could be closed, and by a heavy curtain. Here a table, at which the five girls might easily have found room, was placed in a favorable light for Ulrich. He was to draw from plastic models, and there was no lack of these in the Alcazar, for here rose a high, three-story wing, to which when wearied ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... and were alike unanswerable. Unable to withstand inaction any longer I arose to my feet, thinking to pass down the line with a word of encouragement to each man. A glance upward told me the heavy mist was passing, driven away by a light breeze from the south. Through the thick curtain which still clung to the deck, I could perceive the upper spars, already tipped with sunlight, and edges of reefed canvas flapping in the wind. The schooner felt the impulse, the bow swinging sharply to port, and I turned and took a few steps aft, thinking to gauge ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... with steps uncertain On a thousand-year long race, But the bellying of the curtain Kept me always in one place; While the tumult rose and maddened To the roar of Earth on fire, Ere it ebbed and sank and saddened To a whisper ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... sultaness was dressed, she went to the princess's apartment, who was still in bed. She undrew the curtain, wished her good morrow, and kissed her. But how great was her surprise when she returned no answer; and looking more attentively at her, she perceived her to be much dejected, which made her judge that something had happened, which she did not understand "How comes it, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Humour," probably first acted late in the summer of 1598 and at the Curtain, is commonly regarded as an epoch-making play; and this view is not unjustified. As to plot, it tells little more than how an intercepted letter enabled a father to follow his supposedly studious son to London, and there observe his life with the gallants ...
— Every Man In His Humor - (The Anglicized Edition) • Ben Jonson
... through—skulking Indian hordes, as he must, could have no better message reach him than that. The bent of his mind was toward mysticism, and while he did not think the train of reasoning out, could not have said that he believed it so, yet the familiar lines flashing suddenly, clearly, on the curtain of his mind, seemed to him, very simply, to be sent from a larger thought than his own. As a child might take a strong hand held out as it walked over rough country, so he accepted this quite readily and happily, as from ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... movement, and turned around as if he was surprised by an unwonted noise. What was it? Sauvresy only knew too well. Another shadow appeared on the curtain—that of Bertha. And he had forced himself to doubt till now! Now proofs had come without his seeking. What had brought her to that room, at that hour? She seemed to be talking excitedly. He thought he could ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... little in the way of further developments. So still was the insurance stage, indeed, that Mr. Gunterson began to think that there would be no trouble, after all, and Smith to speculate on the ominous stillness and on what new moves would flash from behind this seeming curtain ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... The evening for the lecture came, I went to the Opera House prepared to interest anyone that might put in an appearance; I entered the building in the rear, and took my position on the platform. The signal was given and up went the curtain. I was highly pleased when I saw my audience. The building was packed. The lecture was a financial success. In this manner I secured a nice "stake" for future use. I delivered that lecture for several weeks in Kansas, and made a thousand dollars above expenses. ...
— The Twin Hells • John N. Reynolds
... see the officiating priest, who is always hidden from them by a serge curtain nine feet in height. During the sermon, when the preacher is in the chapel, they drop their veils over their faces. They must always speak low, walk with their eyes on the ground and their heads bowed. One man only is allowed ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... tears which he shed fell down and became a deity .... Thereafter Izanagi-no-Mikoto went after Izanami-no-Mikoto into the Land of Yomi, the world of the dead. Then Izanami-no-Mikoto, appearing still as she was when alive, lifted the curtain of the palace (of the dead), and came forth to meet him; and they talked together. And Izanagi-no-Mikoto said to her: "I have come because I sorrowed for thee, my lovely younger sister. O my lovely ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... the whole thing is a young woman named Marguerite. When the curtain goes up she has the best of intentions, the best character, the prettiest of faces, and two long, yellow braids down her back. She is dressed very prettily indeed, and in the opera house she has a high-sounding name, like Melba, Nordica, Calve ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... by success we try again and come across hand-irons and starch. At length we find a thing like a large concertina which is really a folding bed with pillows and blankets, complete. By great good luck a mosquito curtain is then found and the steward kindly lends ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... foot-board of the bed, and, when the wind shook the window-curtains, made little crimson pools of mottled light over the ceiling,—curdling pools, that he liked to watch: going off, from the clean gray walls, and rustling curtain, and transparent crimson, into sleeps ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... not evaporated the particles of my transported brain, and scorched my intellects into a cinder of stolidity, perhaps the resplendency of my passion might shine illustrious through the sable curtain of my ink, and in sublimity transcend the galaxy itself, though wafted on the pinions of a gray goose quill! But, ah! celestial enchantress! the necromancy of thy tyrannical charms hath fettered my faculties with adamantine chains, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... SMALL BITE and fifty braves engage themselves for six months certain, sharing terms, travelling exes, and one clear benefit. I find front of the curtain and advertising, they provide entertainment, which is to include Ghost-Dance (with banners and red fire) religious rites, war-dance, and scalping expedition with incidentals (SMALL BITE says he knows "some useful knockabout niggers") and procession in and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 6, 1890 • Various
... Electoral Prince, no preparations whatever had been made for his reception. Four years had passed over these chambers without leaving any further trace of their presence than dust and cobwebs, and faded stripes on cushion and curtain. Sighing, the Electoral Prince threw himself into one of the two armchairs. The old piece of furniture creaked under him, as if by this sound it would greet him and remind him of the past. He leaned his head against the back, whose leather cooled his temples as if a cold hand had been laid ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... began better to understand Flora's continued depression, but she thought her self-reproach exaggerated, and said something at once soothing and calculated to encourage her to undraw the curtain ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... exception of one small table and two chairs. Even the pictures had to be taken down, and under the Countess's supervision purple velvet draperies had to be put up, covering the walls and window. These draperies she had brought with her, and they had curtain rings sewn on at the upper edge, which could be attached to ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating "'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door— Some ...
— Le Corbeau • Edgar Allan Poe
... the dark that was like a curtain between us. "I've told him twenty times—all I dared. And he wouldn't listen to a word I said. Ask him: he'll ...
— The La Chance Mine Mystery • Susan Carleton Jones
... she recovers, she believes that he has carried out his threat; and during the rest of the play she is represented as vainly vowing vengeance upon him, whilst she is really falling in love with him under the influence of his imaginary crime against her. Finally she consents to marry him; and the curtain ...
— Mrs. Warren's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... II. ALTOUM discovered on his throne; PANT. and TART. beside it; the eight Doctors seated; Guard under arms. Behind a curtain, in the background, is an altar, with a Chinese idol: a Chinese priest on each side of it. KALAF enters, agitated, and looking suspiciously around him; ...
— Turandot: The Chinese Sphinx • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... the way round with signed photographs of friends. Everything in the room was white, even the piano was laque white, and the furniture, extremely luxurious and comfortable, was in colour a pale and yet dull pink. A curtain separated it from another smaller room, which again had a separate entrance into the hall on the left, and, through a very small dressing-room, led into the street on ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... rising wind. A half moon broke through the rifts of racing clouds. In its cold light I saw beyond the trees a broken fringe of rocks, and the long, low curve of the melancholy moor. I closed the curtain, feeling that my last impression was ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... which replaced a portion of the prison wall, the outlines of a gibbet were descried; and from the cross-beam there hung three ropes, terminating in nooses, just perceptible above the upper edge of the curtain which extended thence to the ground. The grim excrescence seemed to possess a horrible fascination for the multitude. Those in position to see it best stirred not from their post, but faced the fatal cross-tree, the motionless ropes, the empty platform, with an untiring, insatiable ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... choice. The parents then interfere, and the preliminaries being settled, a birnbang takes place. The young women proceed in a body to the upper end of the balli (hall), where there is a part divided off for them by a curtain. They do not always make their appearance before dinner, that time, previous to a second or third meal, being appropriated to cock-fighting or other diversions peculiar to men. In the evening their other amusements take place, of which ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... detours, like a dog, furtive and intent, that desires to draw near to some object without seeming to do so. Slowly it came, tacking this way and that, pausing frequently as if uncertain or alarmed. And Uniacke, standing in the shadow of the red curtain, watched its movements, fascinated. He did not know why, but he had a sensation that Fate, loose-limbed, big-boned, furtive, was shambling over the grass towards his guest. Sir Graham went on quietly painting. The Skipper made a last detour, got behind the painter, stole ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... time the upper and lower schools were divided by a curtain, about which there is a remarkable story. A boy, having torn this curtain, was saved from one of Busby's terrible floggings by his school-mate assuming the fault, and bearing the rod in his place. ...
— Harper's Young People, April 27, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... this spacious courtyard is the shrine of the god, but he is so hidden behind a yellow curtain that it is impossible to catch a glimpse of his image. In front of him are statues of his two secretaries, who, with huge pens in their hands, stand ready day and night to take down the petitions and indictments laid before the god by those ...
— Chinese Folk-Lore Tales • J. Macgowan
... of the family, listening behind a curtain, heard how the valuable stone in her heap could be discovered. She hastened to find and remove it from the pile; and, when her guest had recovered from the effect of the banquet, he saw that the value had departed from his purchase. He went to negotiate again with the seller, and she ...
— Childhood's Favorites and Fairy Stories - The Young Folks Treasury, Volume 1 • Various
... else's place far, far away. The Opera has been, from the first, a big success. Should like to hear Masaniello once again. Perhaps that is a treat in store for all of us. Thus ends the Opera-goer's Diary for 1890, and everybody is highly satisfied and delighted. Curtain. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... enfolding every object in its chilly embrace. The shores faded from their view, the very ocean on which they floated, was heard, but no longer seen. Nature seemed to have lost her identity, covered with that white sheet, which enveloped her like a shroud. Flora strove in vain to pierce the thick misty curtain by which they were surrounded. Her whole world was now confined to the little boat and the persons it contained: the rest of creation had become a blank. The fog wetted like rain, and was more penetrating, ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the door. The beads had been strung so as to form a fantastic figure of some kind of plants; the strings were quietly shaking and it seemed that pale shadows of flowers were soaring in the air. This transparent curtain did not hide the inside of the drawing-room from Foma's eyes. Seated on a couch in her favourite corner, Medinskaya played the mandolin. A large Japanese umbrella, fastened up to the wall, shaded the little woman in black by its mixture ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... his way. Reine Vincart had gone home by the path along the outskirts of the wood and the park enclosure. Julien went hastily back to the chateau, crossed the gardens, and followed an interior avenue, parallel to the exterior one, from which he was separated only by a curtain of linden and nut trees. He could just distinguish, between the leafy branches, Reine's black gown, as she walked rapidly along under the ashtrees. At the end of the enclosure, he pushed open a little gate, and came abruptly out on the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... the wild spirits of the storm had drawn a translucent drapery of vapour from the dark thundercloud hovering overhead to where the fringe of the forest broke the blood-stained bar upon the horizon's verge, and this luminous orange-coloured curtain was crossed every moment upwards and downwards by silvery shafts of lightning. Such an effect of sunset combined with storm was like a new revelation of nature, and the sublimity of the spectacle would have held me fast to the patch of wild heath if ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... the night when the gulfy sky stood over me, flashing with the heavenly host, and nothing was between me and the farthest world. The clouds were like the veil that hid the terrible light in the Holy of Holies—a curtain of God's love, to dim with loveliness the grandeur of their own being, and make his children able to bear it. My eye fell upon the top rounds of the ladder, which rose above the edge of the roof like an invitation. I opened the window, ...
— Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood • George MacDonald
... in casement windows where they are divided by mullions. The English draw curtain is admirable for this purpose. It can be made of casement cloth with narrow side curtains and valance of bright material. A charming combination was worked out in a summer cottage. The glass curtains were of black and white voile with tiny figures ...
— American Cookery - November, 1921 • Various
... her transparent skin of camellia-like whiteness. This unhealthy beauty captivated Rodolphe, and he often during the night spent hours in covering with kisses the pale forehead of his slumbering mistress, whose humid and weary eyes shone half-closed beneath the curtain of her magnificent brown hair. But what contributed above all to make Rodolphe madly in love with Mademoiselle Mimi were her hands, which in spite of household cares, she managed to keep as white as those of the Goddess of Idleness. However, these hands so frail, so tiny, so soft to the lips; these ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... fortunes of France and of Germany; it was played out with ill-omened rapidity in nine days. In regard to the train of causes and consequences that brought France to the tremendous disaster upon which the curtain fell, diverse accounts have been given to the world by the leading actors—by M. de Gramont, by Bismarck, Benedetti, and, the latest by many years, by M. Ollivier. His narrative does raise somewhat higher the ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... behind and explore. The others followed Hussin and were soon at the far end of the roof, where a kind of wooden pavilion broke the line, while I tried to get a look inside. The window was curtained, and had two folding sashes which clasped in the middle. Through a gap in the curtain I saw a little lamp-lit room and a big man sitting at a table ...
— Greenmantle • John Buchan
... stopped, as if by agreement, and were facing each other. There was a look in her eyes I had never seen there before. The twilight hung like a curtain between us and the world. We were alone together in a world ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... There goes the finally," and dashed away to tend his drops and switches. When the curtain was down and the principals had sought ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... of incidents Wagner has translated into tones, or illustrated with tones; but as a prelude to the opera, it is the atmosphere of the sea that counts: the roar of the billows, the "hui!" of the wind, the dashing and plunging. When the curtain rises the storm goes on while Daland's men, with their hoarse "Yo-ho-ho," add even more colour. The motion of the sea is kept up, partly with fresh musical material, until at last it all but ceases; the watchman ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... the grey of the field turned yellow, and long shadows lay upon the grass, and the wet flowers flashed out diamonds. And then as I sat there watching, and intensely happy as I imagined, suddenly the certainty of grief, and suffering, and death dropped like a black curtain between me and the beauty of the morning, and then that other thought, to face which needs all our courage—the realisation of the awful solitariness in which each of us lives and dies. Often I could cry for pity of our forlornness, and of the pathos of our endeavours ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... was placed between the windows, and one curtain had been pulled aside, admitting a flood, of moonlight. Cairn remembered that Myra had mentioned this circumstance in connection with the disturbance of ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... answered. "That's why I brought you here. We are safe from eavesdroppers here, in a house you can never tell who is behind a curtain or a door. But then, Ella is a part of my plans, a very important part. Do you remember I told you I might want you to take a second packing-case away from here ...
— The Bittermeads Mystery • E. R. Punshon
... and the boat, with its dazed occupants, was hurried off in the direction of the Hudson. Night was now beginning once more to drop an obscuring curtain over the scene, and under that curtain the last throes of drowning New York were hidden. When the sun again faintly illuminated the western hemisphere the whole Atlantic seaboard was buried under ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... most apt to be obsequious and conciliating abroad, who are under the discipline of shrews at home. Their tempers, doubtless, are rendered pliant and malleable in the fiery furnace of domestic tribulation; and a curtain lecture is worth all the sermons in the world for teaching the virtues of patience and long-suffering. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects be considered a tolerable blessing, and if so, Rip Van ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... Philip to the side of the bed, and withdrew the curtain. Amine lay insensible, but breathing heavily; her eyes were closed. Philip seized her burning hand, knelt down, pressed it to his lips, and burst into a paroxysm of tears. As soon as he had become somewhat composed, ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat
... types in curtain velocity, ease and speed of operation, simplicity of construction, freedom from ...
— Bromide Printing and Enlarging • John A. Tennant
... surprises. At six, Adam lighted a big log, festooned with leaves and berries so that the flames roared and crackled up the chimney. The early arrivals were the young people who had hung the mantel, gas fixtures, curtain poles and draped the doors with long sprays of bittersweet, northern holly, and great branches of red spice berries, dogwood with its red leaves and berries, and scarlet and yellow oak leaves. The elders followed and piled the table with heaps ...
— A Daughter of the Land • Gene Stratton-Porter
... had caught it up and was already at his elbow. His hand was shaking so that the light danced wildly now upon the carpet, now upon the green walls. This room also was deserted. A black gap in the curtain showed where the material had been ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... house. In front, a whitewashed porch, and a narrow garden-plot, enclosed by a low iron railing, were dimly discernible: behind, the steep fell-side loomed like a monstrous, mysterious curtain hung across the night. He passed round the back into the twilight of a wide yard, cobbled and partially grass-grown, vaguely flanked by the shadowy outlines of long, low farm-buildings. All was wrapped ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... libretto, kept him at it, got the Covent Garden management interested in it, persuaded Annie Meredith to come over from South America to sing the part. An extraordinary woman, ugly, but a will of iron, and an ambition that can't be kept back. Her hour of triumph to-night. There goes the curtain." ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... the attendant had taken down a phonograph case and placed it on the counter. The front was an imitation of a theatre with the curtain down. As I placed the transmitter to my ears, the clerk touched a spring and the curtain rolled up, displaying a perfect picture of the stage in the opening scene. Simultaneously the action of the play began, as if the ...
— With The Eyes Shut - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... put off with the deanery of St. Patrick's, and retired to Ireland to "die like a poisoned rat in a hole." His life was made tragical by the forecast of the madness which finally overtook him. "The stage darkened," said Scott, "ere the curtain fell." Insanity {190} deepened into idiocy and a hideous silence, and for three years before his death he spoke hardly ever a word. He had directed that his tombstone should bear the inscription, Ubi saeva indignatio cor ulterius lacerare nequit. "So great a man he seems to me," ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... by the complete impudence of the fellow, that though one of the box-keepers had found me a place, I determined to return, and see how this petty brawl was to end. Accordingly I took care to be round in time, before the curtain dropped; till which the hero of it had kept quiet possession ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... the lights spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of the sky signs. He knew it all so well, by morning, by noon and night; ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Ellinor in a tone somewhat sharpened from its native sweetness, and who now sate up in the bed, the curtain of which was half-drawn aside, and the soft light of the skies rested full upon her rounded neck and youthful countenance—"nay, Madeline, do not loiter there any longer; the air grows sharp and cold, and the clock struck one several minutes since. ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stronger, stay—I have been up, and in my room, and found all safe, only a mouse within the fender to warm himself, which I could not catch. I smelt nothing there, but now in my bed-chamber I smell it again; I believe I have singed the woollen curtain, and that is all, though I cannot smoke it. Presto is plaguy silly to-night, an't he? Yes, and so he be. Ay, but if I should wake and see fire. Well; I will venture; ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... you observe that he has changed his mind again. He is now going in for amateur theatricals and is using you for a theatre. First thoughtfully draping a little rubber drop curtain across your proscenium arch to keep you from seeing what is going on behind your own scenes, he is setting the stage for the thrilling sawmill scene in Blue Jeans. You can distinctly feel the circular saw at work and you can taste a hod of mortar and a bucket of hot tar and one thing and ...
— Cobb's Anatomy • Irvin S. Cobb
... abandoned. Staring at this uncompleted effort, he felt infused with a hot and overwhelming loyalty. Whatever was good in him he would put into the work. He did not dream of the magnitude of his coming trust, but had a sensation that the curtain was about to rise on a new scene. He was, perhaps, more than the rest impressed with the visitor's force and hypnotic power which seemed prophetic and almost mystical. Then his glance, wandering down stream, caught a trace of smoke where the afternoon ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... "Let be, here's a friend!" Saying nothing, Penfeather thrust away the weapon, and gripping the little man in both hands, with prodigious strength jerked him bodily in through the window; which done, he clapped to the lattice and drawing the curtain ...
— Black Bartlemy's Treasure • Jeffrey Farnol
... deliver me from the dangerous strait I was in, whilst the boat gave not over going on till it reached the Palace gate where they lifted out the chests and amongst them that in which I was. Then they carried them in, passing through a troop of eunuchs, guardians of the Harim and of the ladies behind the curtain, till they came to the post of the Eunuch in Chief[FN563] who started up from his slumbers and shouted to the damsel "What is in those chests?" "They are full of wares for the Lady Zubaydah!" "Open them, one by one, that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... dress was worn by the Padaung women, a kilt and putties of dark cloth, with round the hips and upper part of kilt, many rings of thin black lacquered cane; round the neck were so many brass curtain-rings of graduated circumference, narrowing from the chest to the ear, and so many of them that the neck had become so elongated that the head either actually was dwarfed or seemed to be so small as to be quite ...
— From Edinburgh to India & Burmah • William G. Burn Murdoch
... made their way with the crowd to the Prophet's Mosque in order to worship at the huge bier-like erection called the Kaaba, and the adjacent semi-circular Hatim's wall. The famous Kaaba, which is in the middle of the great court-yard, looked at a distance like an enormous cube, covered with a black curtain, but its plan is really trapeziform. "There at last it lay," cries Burton, "the bourn of my long and weary pilgrimage, realising the plans and hopes of many and many a year,"—the Kaaba, the place of answered prayer, above which in the heaven of heavens Allah ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... (rainbow) has received its name from its various colors in different individuals. It is a thin, circular shaped, contractile curtain, suspended in the aqueous (watery) humor behind the cornea and in front of the lens, being perforated a little to the nasal (nose) side of its centre by a circular opening, the pupil, for the transmission of light. By its circumference it is continuous with the ciliary body, and its ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... she that, in spite of her alarms, sleep took her almost as soon as her head touched the pillow. When she awakened the sun was shining in at her window above the curtain strung ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... September, we stepped on board the boat for Ostend, it was with a thrill of expectation. For weeks we had read and spoken of one thing only—the War—and now we were to see it for ourselves, we were even in some way to be a part of it. The curtain was rising for us upon the greatest drama in all the lurid history of strife. We should see the armies as they went out to fight, and we should care for the wounded when their work was done. We might hear the roar of the ...
— A Surgeon in Belgium • Henry Sessions Souttar
... for the stranger a few of the public characters of Ballytrain, a scene, which we must interrupt them to describe, was taking place in the coffee-room of the "Mitre." As everything, however, has an origin, it is necessary, before we raise the curtain, which, for the present, excludes us from that scene, to enable the reader to become acquainted with the cause of it. That morning, after breakfast, Sir Thomas Gourlay went to his study, where, as usual, he began to read his letters and ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... look down the steps far as could be seen; thence he crossed to the sedan, surveyed its exterior, and opened the door. The interior appearing in good order, he entered and sat down, and closing the door, arranged the curtain in front, drew it slightly aside and peeped out, now to the door admitting from the passage, then to the curbing. Both were perfectly ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... lake that day—the day when they had the mock tournament, and the men rode clumsy farm horses around in a glade in the woods and caught curtain rings on the end of a lance. ...
— The Trimmed Lamp and Others • O Henry
... merely a capricious whim on her part. 'I will give—yes, I will give it up, darling!' 'George! George!' She falls on his neck. Over her shoulder he winks at the audience, who realise that there is more to come. Curtain. In Act 3 the husband is seen sitting alone in his study. His wife has gone to a party. The man searches in a cupboard for something to read. Instead of a novel, however, he lights on a bottle of Skeffington's Sloe Gin. Instantly the old overwhelming craving returns. He ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... adventurous visit, upstairs, to picture books criticised for not being ALL geegees and walking sticks happily more conformable. The young man's window, too, looked out on their acquaintance; through a starched muslin curtain it kept his neighbour before him, made him almost more aware of her comings and goings than he felt he had a right to be. He was capable of a shyness of curiosity about her and of dumb little delicacies ...
— Sir Dominick Ferrand • Henry James
... respectfully, while Maria Nikolaevna vanished behind the curtain over the outside door; and as she vanished turned her head back over her shoulder, and smiled again, and again left behind her the same impression ...
— The Torrents of Spring • Ivan Turgenev
... ardent and sad like a flame which burns through too warm a summer night beside the open window. An imperceptible breeze has suddenly swelled out the curtain ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... the play is ended, and while the curtain drops, I take the final liberty of addressing my kindly and appreciative audience in the following words, borrowed from a ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... disappeared behind a thick curtain of mist. After midnight the breeze freshened, and the Halbrane's progress marked a dozen ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... many of us are familiar, both on these and on other boards, in which the principal objects thrown about are loaves and fishes. But I will try to give the noble lord the reason for these private theatricals, and the reason why, however ardently he may desire to ring the curtain down upon them, there is not the faintest present hope of their coming to a conclusion. It is this:- The public theatricals which the noble lord is so condescending as to manage are so intolerably bad, the machinery is so cumbrous, the parts so ill-distributed, the company so ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... street I directed my steps in the direction of the Place d'Eylau. Two National Guards passed me, bearing a litter between them.—"Oh, you can look if you like," said one. So I drew back the checked curtain. On the mattress was stretched a woman, decently dressed, with a child of two or three years lying on her breast. They both looked very pale; one of the woman's arms was hanging down; her sleeve was stained with blood; the hand ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... into a small room lighted by one narrow lattice, and patched round with shreds of different-coloured paper. In the darkest corner stood something like a bed, before which a tattered coverlet hung by way of curtain. He had not waited long when she appeared. Her face had the glister of new-washed tears on it. "I am ashamed, sir," said she, "that you should have taken this fresh piece of trouble about one so little worthy of it; but, to the humane, ...
— The Man of Feeling • Henry Mackenzie
... stuck between the palings of the fence beside the road. Olof sprang across the ditch—the girl drew her head back behind the curtain. ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... had changed from a soft, appealing tone to one full of angry annoyance, as he saw Max slowly rise up from the other side of the bed, where he had been seated, hidden by the curtain. ...
— Three Boys - or the Chiefs of the Clan Mackhai • George Manville Fenn
... the genius of John Harley than the role of Warwick. He would pose as a President-maker. When the President was made, and the world was saying "President Hanway," that man should be dull indeed who did not look upon John Harley as the power behind the curtain. He would control the backstairs; he would wear a White House pass-key as a watch-charm! John Harley as well as Senator ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... be all right," said Prowler, looking about him nervously. "Just wait till you hear 'em announce the refreshments—that always means a rush, you know. Then slip through the crowd and out by that door behind the curtain, and hustle down to the ship just as fast as ever you can lay your paws ...
— The Wonderful Bed • Gertrude Knevels
... of Caius, or that he contented himself with quietly watching the course of events. It will be observed that his biography is not like that of Cicero, with whose life we are acquainted in most trifling details; but that the curtain rises and falls on isolated scenes, throwing into sudden brilliancy or into the deepest shade long and important periods of his history. Nor are his letters and other writings full of those political and personal ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... us to discharge. Beckford and Barrington abused all who fought for peace and joined in the cry for it, and Beckford added that the reasons of wishing a peace now were the same as at the Peace of Utrecht—that the people behind the curtain could not both maintain the war and their places too, so were for making another sacrifice of the nation to their own interests. After all, the cry for a peace is so general that it will certainly end ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... and who cannot be brought to believe that an English gentleman will pursue a course of policy, as the governor of a colony, which the Queen of England has too much good sense to assume, even if she could do it, in the United Kingdom. Indeed, if a glance is taken behind the curtain, English statesmen will be noticed to have been liberal and well inclined towards the colonists, and have only erred when purposely misled by those whom they had appointed to places of which it was and is a serious mistake for any ministry to have the patronage. Sir Peregrine Maitland did not ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... distinctly intended for the education of princes, and though they may make the young listeners inclined to be superstitious, such superstitiousness is not likely to last long. Children delight in Maerchen as in a kind of pantomime, and when the curtain has fallen on that fairy world they often think of it as of a beautiful dream that has passed away. The stories are certainly more impressive than the proverbs and wise saws which many of them were meant to illustrate, without always saying, haec fabula docet. Even if some ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... and invention, Strong art and beautiful pretension, This radiant pomp of sun and star, Throes that were, and worlds that are, Behold! were in vain and in vain;— It cannot be,—I will look again. Surely now will the curtain rise, And earth's fit tenant me surprise;— But the curtain doth not rise, And Nature has miscarried ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... that the Soviets have run into increasing difficulties. Their hostile policies have awakened stern resistance among free men throughout the world. And behind the Iron Curtain the Soviet rule of force has created growing political and economic ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... was all that had been promised and they sat through its mystic-scenes with rapt attention, comparing notes enthusiastically in the intervals when the curtain was down, and when it was over they came out into the daylight with that peculiar sensation of unreality in the daylight world that follows ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... is like a play": I am playing "Heavy Father" In a "Screaming Farce" to-day, That so "brings down The house," I frown, And fain would "ring the curtain down." ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... there was nowhere to put anything; there was no furniture in the room whatsoever except our straw beds, a table, and a large tin basin behind a curtain in which we all washed—and, of course, the ikon or holy picture which hangs in every Russian room. We all kept our belongings under our beds—not a very hygienic proceeding, but a la guerre comme a la guerre. The patients were very overcrowded too, every corridor was lined ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... with this author knew that the fire of a genius unequalled in its way had gone out. Two or three, who were acquainted with the man even better than with his books, sighed, and thanked God! They thanked God that the old man's prayer had at last been answered, and that the curtain had been drawn on a life which in reality terminated ten years before, when old age became more than ripe. But Landor's walk into the dark valley was slow and majestic. Death fought long and desperately before he could claim his victim; and it was ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... fascinated by the study of this subjective drama. He used to sit and watch the expressive curtain behind which these dark scenes were being enacted, and fancy that he could follow the soul as, in the spirit world, it tracked its foe, fell upon him and exacted its terrible revenge. At times he imagined that he could actually see ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... he was concerned, they might affirm this relationship as often as they wished: the only thing that was interesting him just at that time was a certain knee that was seeking his under the table, transmitting its gentle warmth through a double curtain of silk. ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... its soft, somber curtain upon a handsome southern home. Sadly out of keeping with the peaceful landscape and cheerful hearthstone, were the feelings of a man who crept close to the window shutter, and peered cautiously within the cosy ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... reader care to follow me to my stage-box, I imagine he will hardly see the curtain rise upon just the Venice of his dreams—the Venice of Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper; or upon the Venice of his prejudices—the merciless Venice of Daru, and of the historians who follow him. But I still hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees; and will ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... rust on the steel. Angelo slew him: Rinaldo gave him the cross to kiss. You shall have the whole story by-and-by; but this will be a lesson to Germans not to court our Italian damsels. Lift not that curtain, you Pannonian burglars! Much do we pardon; but bow and viol meet not, save that they be of one wood; especially not when signor bow is from yonderside the Rhoetian Alps, and donzella Viol is a growth of warm Lombardy. Witness to it, Angelo and Rinaldo Guidascarpi! bravo! ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and hear the language of her native land. Beautiful and true enthusiasm, rich with the promise of genius! Boy or man, thou wilt never be a poet, if thou hast not felt the ideal, the romance, the Calypso's isle that opened to thee when for the first time the magic curtain was drawn aside, and let in the world of poetry on the ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... wot's keeping her. She could ha' gone to market and back five times—Hello!" He was peering through the little front window. A huge smile beamed in his face. With a chuckle, he called his visitor to the window. "Sh! Don't let 'er see the curtain move! She'd take our 'eads off. See that chap? That's why she's been so ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... played the opening bars of the martial music. With the first notes the vast audience rose. I looked up at the row of wounded leaning heavily against the rail, their eyes fixed and staring on the curtain. I noticed the officers in the boxes, their eyes glistening. I heard a convulsive catch in the throats of persons about me. Then the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... were below the landmark. Looking up, they saw that a piece of soiled canvas or a skin, held down with a drift-log, fell from under the sled, portiere-wise from the top of the terrace, straight down to the sheltered level, where the camp fire had been. Coming closer, they saw the curtain was not ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... roped up in holy wedlock's bonds, an' p'ints the way to a higher, happier life. That's whatever! an' this dramy of existence, as I once hears Colonel Sterett say, would be a frost an' a failure an' bog plumb down at that, if you was to cut out the leadin' lady roles an' ring up the curtain with nothin' ...
— Wolfville Nights • Alfred Lewis
... stood by the window, holding the lace curtain just sufficiently aside to get a narrow and attenuated view of the fog-enshrouded Green. The outlook was far from inspiriting, and Serena was keenly interested in the conversation going forward between her host ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... time, he leaned nervously backward, and did not allow even his finger to brush the body of the lieutenant. A wound gives strange dignity to him who bears it. Well men shy from this new and terrible majesty. It is as if the wounded man's hand is upon the curtain which hangs before the revelations of all existence—the meaning of ants, potentates, wars, cities, sunshine, snow, a feather dropped from a bird's wing; and the power of it sheds radiance upon a bloody form, and makes the other men understand sometimes that they ...
— Men, Women, and Boats • Stephen Crane
... eastern end of the chapel stood the altar, behind which a very rich curtain of Persian silk, embroidered deeply with gold, covered a recess, containing, unquestionably, some image or relic of no ordinary sanctity, in honour of which this singular place of worship had been erected, Under the persuasion that this must ...
— The Talisman • Sir Walter Scott
... are with the eels, and your lips with the crabs; and your two white hands under the sharp rule of the salmon. Five pounds I would give to him that would find my true love. Ohone! it is you are a sharp grief to young Mary ni-Curtain!' ...
— Poets and Dreamers - Studies and translations from the Irish • Lady Augusta Gregory and Others
... you want anything from me; if not, begone, for your attempts to terrify me are vain. I fear you not.' The only answer returned was a low laugh; and where the moonlight streamed in through the partly-drawn window-curtain, there stood a frightfully-grotesque figure. Its body, as well as Anna could distinguish, resembled that of a beast, but the head, face, and shoulders were those of a human being; the former being decorated with a horn over each shaggy eyebrow. ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... being seen. But there was the fact. There was his attitude—his tiptoeing—his way of leaning toward the mantelpiece at an angle from which he could see what was going on in the Park and yet be protected by the curtain. ...
— The Letter of the Contract • Basil King
... going slow at first. That's how you've got to handle big deals—careful. But you'll sure be a knock-out when that she-undertaker in there gets you rigged out in classy clothes. Then the curtain will go up on the real show—and it's going to be a big show—and you'll be the ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... it be right, This window open to the night? The wanton airs, from the tree-top, 20 Laughingly through the lattice drop; The bodiless airs, a wizard rout, Flit through thy chamber in and out, And wave the curtain canopy So fitfully, so fearfully, 25 Above the closed and fringed lid 'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid, That, o'er the floor and down the wall, Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall. Oh lady dear, hast thou no fear? 30 Why and what art thou dreaming here? Sure thou art come ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... the building; still curving, it sank by a gentle gradient; and then it rose again and turned almost at right angles. Pushing ahead resolutely, although in not a little doubt as to the meaning of my adventure, I thrust aside a heavy curtain, soft to the hand. Then I found myself just inside a large circular hall. Letting the hangings fall behind me, I took three or four irresolute paces which brought me almost to the centre of the room. I saw that ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... entrenchment has the disadvantage that if the enemy gets over your front parapet he has a rear parapet which he can use against you and you have great difficulty in getting him out. Where we were later the line consisted of a series of small redoubts or forts connected up with a parapet or curtain. The redoubts were closed at the back and in them were built the dugouts in which the defenders sleep. The redoubts were very strongly held, and if the Germans got over the single parapets they could be driven back with fire from the ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... noble than those kept by the mountains of the Lecco Lake, as they marshal themselves on either hand, along the approaches to Lombardy and Venetia; bearing aloft, as though on the purple pillars of some majestic gateway, the great curtain of dazzling cloud which, on a sunny day, hangs over the Brescian plain—a glorious drop-scene, interposed between the dwellers on the Como Mountains, and those marble towns, Brescia, Verona, Padua, which ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... banker," replied John Turner, looking with an obese deliberation toward one of the deep windows, where, half-concealed by the heavy curtain, a third person stood gazing down into ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... strong shadows in the face; both Vandyke and Rembrandt do this by making the colour of the background amalgamate with the colour of the hair, or dark shades of the head. Rubens, Reynolds, and Lawrence often used a red curtain in contact with their flesh, to produce the same result. The luminous character of the head is certainly better preserved by its giving out rays or similarity of tone to the surrounding background. It has been remarked that the luminous ...
— Rembrandt and His Works • John Burnet
... hedge of trees and shrubbery. She hesitated not two seconds over her choice, and in a third was struggling and forcing a way through the undergrowth and beneath the low and spreading branches whose shadows cloaked her with a friendly curtain of blackness. ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance
... to the mountain atmosphere were evidenced in the opaque density of the fog that had ensued on the crystalline clearness of the sunset. It hung like a curtain from the zenith to the depths of the valley, obscuring all the world. It had climbed the cliffs; it was shifting in and out among the pillars of the veranda; it even crossed the threshold as the door ...
— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock
... perspective, give to Coptic buildings an air of secrecy and of mystery, which, however, is often rather repellent than alluring. In the high wooden lattices there are narrow doors, and in the division which contains the altar the door is concealed by a curtain embroidered with a large cross. The Mohammedans who created the mosques showed marvellous taste. Copts are often lacking in taste, as they have proved here and there in Abu Sargah. Above one curious and unlatticed screen, near ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... could not make it up with him. A cold curtain seemed to have fallen between them. The old reserve which had only melted after many meetings, was upon him again. He stood, as it seemed, on the former pedestal. A strange, surging sensation filled her head—a sense of helpless fighting against a flood of unhappy ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... little man. And a preposterous store, empty, echoing, bare of wall, the three pianos near the front, the remainder of the floor stretching away like the corridors of the lost. He was going to get a dark curtain, he explained, and furnish the back part of the store as his own room. What dignity in phrasing, but how mean that little room would look—cot bed, washbowl and pitcher, and little mirror—almost certainly a mirror with a wavy surface, almost ...
— Miss Lulu Bett • Zona Gale
... headman of the village to which we went was out cutting wood for a garden, and his wife refused us a hut, but when Kansabala came in the evening he scolded his own spouse roundly and all the wives of the village, and then pressed me to come indoors, but I was well enough in my mosquito curtain without, and declined: I was free from insects and vermin, and ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume I (of 2), 1866-1868 • David Livingstone
... Falls, glaciers and lakes are on a grand scale. The Tasman glacier is eighteen miles long and more than two miles across at the widest point; the Murchison glacier is more than ten miles long; the Godley eight. The Hochstetter Fall is a curtain of broken, uneven, fantastic ice coming down 4,000 feet on to the Tasman glacier. It is a great spectacle, seen amid the stillness of the high Alps, broken only by the occasional boom and crash of a falling pinnacle ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... place where Baumberger fell, and at the cold ashes of Stanley's campfire, and at the Harts and their house, and their horses and all things pertaining in the remotest degree to the drama which had been played grimly there to its last, tragic "curtain." They stared up at the rim-rock and made various estimates of the distance and argued over the question of marksmanship, and whether it really took a good shot to fire from the top and ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... the ladies be blindfolded and seated behind a large screen or curtain or in a tent in an adjoining room which is dimly lighted. A gypsy tent may be improvised with three long sticks tied together at one end, the other ends resting on the floor at equal distances forming a tripod which is covered with a couple of ...
— Games For All Occasions • Mary E. Blain
... said to him, again and again, after I was dressed and in my make up. I was cold first, and then hot. And I trembled in every limb. "They'll have to ring the curtain ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... suddenly. Heavy leaped back, stumbled over another girl, and went sprawling. The flames did not touch her, but they did ignite the curtain ...
— Ruth Fielding and the Gypsies - The Missing Pearl Necklace • Alice B. Emerson
... of the theatre is a phantasy world. With the rising of the curtain we forget our outside life; we live the part of the hero or the heroine. To this day I always leave a theatre with a vague depression of spirits; everyday humdrum life chills me when I come out to the ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... they bit into the reeds, sending spouts of fire twenty feet and more into the air, and making the hot air dance above it in a way that was perfectly dazzling. But the reeds were still half green, and created an enormous quantity of smoke, which came rolling towards me like a curtain, lying very low on account of the wind. Presently, above the crackling of the fire, I heard a startled roar, then another and another. So the lions were ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... when Pascal neglected to shut off the garden hose, she caught herself scolding him as if he were human. Was that a shadow from the curtain waving in the breeze, or did she see a hurt look flit across the mouth of the pumpkin? Corinne put out her hand ...
— Weak on Square Roots • Russell Burton
... front of the curtain and walked swiftly over the little bridge from the stage to the stalls. He was a small, sturdy, thin-lipped, choleric man, who looked as if he were made up of energy; energy distilled and bottled. Some one had said of him that his hat was really a glass stopper, which might fly off ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... was meant for an artist, and it is to be hoped that there was one at Tarr Farm to see the curtain of fog slowly lifting from the bright waters of the Creek, and creeping up the bluff beyond it, until it melted into the clear blue sky, and let the sunshine come glancing down the valley, where groups of derricks, long lines of tanks, engine-houses, counting-rooms ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... on, but within a few minutes darkness dropped a curtain over all that we had seen ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... laid in bed all morning. 4. He will sit out on his journey this morning. 5. Let him sit there as long as he wishes. 6. He sat the chair by the table. 7. He awoke everybody at daylight. 8. He laid down to sleep. 9. Let him lie there until he wakes. 10. The shower has lain the dust. 11. The curtain raised because it was raised by his orders. 12. The river has risen four feet. 13. Falling trees is his amusement. 14. To have been awaked then would have been sad. 15. To have waked then would have been sad. 16. Waking at dawn, they renewed the journey. 17. He has set there all day. 18. ...
— Practical Grammar and Composition • Thomas Wood
... and forty-five—was sitting, plainly garbed in mbugu, upon a carpet spread upon the ground within a curtain of mbugu, her elbow resting on a pillow of the same bark material; the only ornaments on her person being an abrus necklace, and a piece of mbugu tied round her head, whilst a folding looking-glass, much the worse for wear, stood open by her side. An iron rod ...
— The Discovery of the Source of the Nile • John Hanning Speke
... her son. She said, "It is truly extraordinary that the boy should express such affection for a strange dervish. Send for him to your closet, and order him to relate his adventures, to which I will listen from behind a curtain." ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... Dickerson. "But this seat is 'another's,' as they say on the stage; he's gone out 'to see a man,' and I'm keeping it for him. Just caught sight of you before the curtain fell. Couldn't ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... the eggs, having been in the incubator a week, were far enough advanced to be tested. At a south window there hung a heavy green Holland curtain. In this mamma allowed August to cut a hole, a little smaller than an egg, and she ...
— Illustrated Science for Boys and Girls • Anonymous
... each of which is perfect in itself. Each part may be distinct in nature and purpose, yet each and all are inseparably and unitedly connected with each other, and all work harmoniously together for the accomplishment of a definite and specific end, that is, the production of a lace curtain of exquisite design and pattern. As we watch the machine and its workings, we see therein the evidence of the existence of a spirit or power that gave it its birth. A spirit or mind that made and formed the machine, that constituted, arranged, and gave ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... stormy seasons of the year. Known only to Him who is Omniscient are the multitudes of heartrending scenes of protracted agony and dreary death that are enacted year by year, all unknown to man, upon the lonely sea. Now and then the curtain of this dread theatre is slightly raised to us by the emaciated hand of a "survivor," and the sight, if we be thoughtful, may enable us to form a faint conception of those events that we never see. We might ...
— Shifting Winds - A Tough Yarn • R.M. Ballantyne
... Let us lift the curtain now, on the last, an extraordinary, tableau. In the Wimple nest a strange company are met at the bidding of Madeline Splurge, who couches a flashing lance for the life and the honor ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... storm be done; Then out will come the golden sun, And we shall see, upon the run Before his beams, in sparkling streams, What now a curtain o'er him seems. And thus with life it ever goes, 'Tis shade ...
— Parker's Second Reader • Richard G. Parker
... "A curtain on the window would soften the light on hot afternoons," Miss Alice thought. So she made one of some white barred muslin she had and put it up. She also thought that as Jennie still had not much appetite, ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... debouchment (into the garden) of this oscillating road, the splash and roar of falling waters invades your retreat. And then suddenly as if a curtain had arisen or dropped to the earth you emerge upon a great marble terrace of steps, and before you is spread a forest of geysers distributed in entrancing vistas in a lake of tumbling and scintillating waters. The scene is amazing and transporting. Rushing jets of water are enclosed in ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... own generation—the acts of contemporary patriots—now claim our attention; but we are reluctant as yet to turn over the page, and drop the curtain on the scenes with which we have hitherto been dealing, and which we feel we have inadequately described. We have spoken of the men whose speeches from the dock are on record, but we still linger over the history of the events in which they shared, and of the men who were associated with them ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... by as we sat in the dark with our lamp behind the green curtain over the window, but at last the trampling of horses was heard and the red light appeared. Presently Clement came to our door, and exchanged a few words, but he said he must return to the Coadjutor, who was in the best ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... an air of profound seriousness, Mrs. Porter erect and complacent, the other leaning forward and peering through her spectacles. Mamie took advantage of their backs and turned to cast a hurried glance at the water-proof curtain. It was certainly an admirable screen; no sign of Steve was visible; but nevertheless she ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... here for ever?" demanded Stair Garland, lying on the sand of the upper cavern and looking out at the blue curtain of sky, which was all he could see. Outside was a kind of balcony on which they stretched their legs at night, but, as there were preventive officers on the cliffs with telescopes under their arms, it was forbidden to go out there ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... He tells us that after being converted, our heroine 'set herself to proclaim and establish the doctrine,' and that this she did 'seated behind a curtain.' We are no doubt meant to suppose that those of her hearers who were women were gathered round the lecturer behind the curtain. It was not in accordance with conventions that men and women should be instructed ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... that lamp's metallic gauze, That curtain of protecting wire, Which Davy delicately ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... inference of the reader from the letter, the mistake, and the headline—as seen from the outside. The falsehood was serious; the editorial rebuke was serious. The stern editor and the sombre, baffled contributor confront each other as the curtain falls. ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... was getting on. On their reappearance outside, they transmitted orders that the doctor should be sent for. In a little time, a matron reported that the doctor had arrived, and an old nurse invited dowager lady Chia to ensconce herself under the curtain. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... a man's room, where a window is never opened except to let in a dog, or to shout at a gardener, and where years of stale tobacco brood in every nook and curtain, enveloped its occupant with a delicious sense of snug repose, and exerted its usual ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... inside. It was the bell-ringer going his rounds and opening all the doors; first of all a dog came out, stretching his neck as though he was going to bark with hunger, then two men with their caps over their eyes, wrapped in brown cloaks; the bell-ringer held up the curtain ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... old sealer's advice, earnestly urged, all slip back among the trees, the low-hanging branches of which afford a screen for concealment like a closed curtain. The bundles are taken away, and the camp-ground is cleared of everything likely to betray its having been lately occupied by white people. All this they are enabled to do without being seen by the savages, a fringe of evergreens between ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... her cheeks suddenly as she looked toward Oscar. The curtains behind him swayed, but so did the curtain back of her. A May-time languor had crept into the heart of April, and all the windows were open. The blurred murmurs of insects stole into the house. Oscar, half-forgotten by his captor, heard a sound in the window behind him and a hand ...
— The Port of Missing Men • Meredith Nicholson
... for a cabinet, so a curtain was hung across a tiny alcove, just the ordinary "arch" found in most rooms ...
— Seen and Unseen • E. Katharine Bates
... Minnehaha, lay only some seven miles distant. Minnehaha is a perfect little beauty; its bright sparkling waters, forming innumerable fleecy threads! of silk-like wavelets, seem to laugh over the rocky edge; so light and so lace-like is the curtain, that the sunlight streaming through looks like a lovely bride through some rich bridal veil. The Falls of St. Anthony are neither grand nor beautiful, and are utterly disfigured by the ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... the battle of the day. At twilight he had watched the lights spring up one by one, at first like pin pricks in the distance, growing and widening until the grotesque shapes of the buildings from which they sprung had faded into nothingness, and there was left only a velvet curtain of strangely-lit stars. At a giddy distance below he could trace the blaze of Broadway, the blue lights flashing from the electric wires as the cable cars rushed back and forth, the red and violet glimmer of the sky ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... moment a hearty laugh from little Fanny, who had set herself to play behind the curtain, drew my attention towards her. She was twice as big as my companion on the window-seat, though but a few months older; her broad, flat face, showed like the moon in its zenith, set in thin, silky hair: and with eyes as pretty as they could be, expressing neither thought ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... had been to the play a great many times in New Orleans, and was wise in matters pertaining to the drama. So here, in due time, was set up some extraordinary scenery of my own painting. The curtain, I recollect, though it worked smoothly enough on other occasions, invariably hitched during ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the advantage over me," replied Peter. "I have some difficulty in unfolding my lower wings." He shook her hand and held the last curtain aside ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... time. Therefore it behoves us to possess our souls in patience, and only to indulge at intervals in the right to grumble which is by virtue of tradition ours. We have already been here a day and a half, and we know not how much longer it will be before the curtain rises and the first act of ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... which bound the Vermont Delta on the eastward sweep in to close the foot of the Delta's V, and run sheer to the river's brink—rose upon our left. The low tree-covered lands on the Louisiana side lay at our right, and over them hung, center of a most radiant evening curtain, painted in a thousand colors by the mighty brush of nature, the round red orb of day, now sinking to ...
— The Lady and the Pirate - Being the Plain Tale of a Diligent Pirate and a Fair Captive • Emerson Hough
... left came a low murmur of voices. It was this room which he had been directed to enter. But what held his glance fascinated was a small recess immediately on his right, half concealed by a torn velvet curtain. It was directly opposite the left-handed door and, owing to its angle, it also commanded a good view of the upper part of the staircase. As a hiding-place for one or, at a pinch, two men, it was ideal, being about two feet deep and ...
— The Secret Adversary • Agatha Christie
... my name, the stranger gave a sudden start and gazed steadily at me, his eyebrows raised in the extraordinary manner that I have described, something like the festoon of a curtain, and a smile playing on his face as if expecting a joke and ready to enter into it, and enjoy it. All this I observed out of the corner of my eye, without appearing to regard him or notice ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... aside to look into the window, and the curtain of that descended relentlessly. The bank had suddenly taken on an aspect of Sabbath blankness. Once more the Colonel rattled the knob, then he turned ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... the money, and pressed eagerly into the show. The little people had just appeared, and were bowing and paying compliments to the company. But Mother Manikin was not there. Rosalie's eyes wandered up and down the show, and peered behind the curtain at the end, but Mother Manikin was nowhere to be seen. Rosalie could not watch the performance, so anxious was she to know if her dear little friend were within. At last the entertainment was over, and the giant and dwarfs shook hands with the company before ushering them out. Rosalie was the ...
— A Peep Behind the Scenes • Mrs. O. F. Walton
... more'n I can understand these new-fangled ways. Who'd ever 'a' thought that folks'd go to stringin' up bed-coverin's in their doors? And says I to Janie, 'You can hang your great-grandmother's counterpane up in your parlor door if you want to, but,' says I, 'don't you ever make a door-curtain out o' one o' my quilts.' But la! the way things turn around, if I was to come back fifty years from now, like as not I'd find 'em usin' my ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... declare it must be time to get up; but there was not a faint gleam of light yet at the window, and I resolutely refused to rise, sending my companion back to bed, and going off again, to wake at last with the sun shining brilliantly in by the curtain. This time I jumped up, with the full impression upon me that I had overslept myself; while there lay Mercer on his back, with his mouth wide-open, and giving vent every now and then ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... read a profound political pamphlet under the guise of a brilliant novel may find it in "Sibyl, or The Two Nations." The gay overture of "The Eve of the Derby," at a London club, with which the curtain rises, contrasts with the evening amusements of the proletaire in the gin-palaces of Manchester in a more than operatic effectiveness, and yet falls rather below than rises above the sober truth of present history. And we are often ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... on her feet, so that she can't get out by herself? [He rises and lifts the curtain of the cart.] Why, this is n't mistress Vasantasena—this is ...
— The Little Clay Cart - Mrcchakatika • (Attributed To) King Shudraka
... and Asiatic magnificence, I could scarcely suppress the feeling that I was only entering the most stately of theatres; where, with all the temporary glitter of the stage, the sounds of the orchestra, and the passion and poetry of the characters—the fifth act was preparing, and the curtain was to fall on the death of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 358, August 1845 • Various
... An ordinary young woman would have laughed herself into hysterics. Kitty tore off the scribbles, not the least sign of laughter in her eyes, and sought the window-seat in the living-room. There was one word which stood out strangely alien: haberdasher. Why that word? Was it a corner of the curtain she had been striving to look behind? Had Thomas been a haberdasher prior to his stewardship? And was he ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... homes, our kitchen was also the bedroom. Near the fireplace were all the things for the meals—the table, the pots and pans, and the sideboard; at the other end was the bedroom. In a corner stood Mother Barberin's big bed, in the opposite corner, in a little alcove, was my bed under a red figured curtain. ...
— Nobody's Boy - Sans Famille • Hector Malot
... mountain have occupied them for thousands of years, and doubtless a thousand years from now the descendants of these tribes of people and bats will still be there in the cisternlike caverns with the broad fan of sparkling water spreading like a beautiful curtain across the great ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... great Peter Paul, of one of the governesses of the Netherlands. It is just the finest portrait that ever was seen. Only a half-length, but such a majesty, such a force, such a splendor, such a simplicity about it! The woman is in a stiff black dress, with a ruff and a few pearls; a yellow curtain is behind her—the simplest arrangement that can be conceived; but this great man knew how to rise to his occasion; and no better proof can be shown of what a fine gentleman he was than this his homage to the vice-Queen. A common bungler would have painted her in her best clothes, with crown ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... "Our curtain of fire was ahead of us still, an' theirs was behind us an' thick, An' there wasn't a thing we could do for ourselves—the few of us left had to stick. You haven't much chance to get central an' talk on the phone to the music of guns; Gettin' word to the chief is a matter right ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... assumed his right to plead with Lucilla, and that in such a case she should be a welcome refuge, and Phoebe still more indispensable; so her lips opened in a yielding smile, and Phoebe thanked her rapturously, vague hopes of Robert's bliss adding zest to the anticipation of the lifting of the curtain which hid the world ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... improves, always ends at the same goal,—the grave. Millions live and die like the beasts that perish. They aspire, struggle, and are determined to rise, but just when they are fitted to endure, and to enter upon ampler spheres of service, the curtain falls on the tragedy, the stage scenery is changed, a new company of players takes their places, and the farce, for it is a farce as well as a tragedy, goes on from century to century, and there is no meaning in anything. ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... happen in Egypt: and already she regarded my friend as a ram caught in the bushes, for a sacrifice on her altar. Instead of screening him I had dragged him in front of the footlights. But fortunately there was still time to jerk down the curtain. ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... to stir within his breast As though the curtain of old days were torn, And, as he drained the glass with eager zest, "Behold," I thought, "I wronged him. In that nest, So far from turmoil, full of old-world rest (He is about to tell me), he ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 22, 1914 • Various
... form an idea of the Creative Will, by reference to its outward and visible forms of activity. We cannot see the Will itself—the Pressure and the Urge—but we can see its action through living forms. Just as we cannot see a man behind a curtain, and yet may practically see him by watching the movements of his form as he presses up against the curtain, so may we see the Will by watching it as it presses up against the living curtain of the forms of life. There was a play presented on the American stage a few years ago, in which ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... the brink of some terrible disaster. Surji Rao's wife was a clever woman, and she arranged such a feeling in the Maharajah's zenana, that one day as Dr. Roberts passed along a corridor to His Highness's apartment, a curtain opened swiftly, and some one in the dark behind spat at him. Amongst them they managed to make His Highness extremely uncomfortable. But the old man continued to decline obstinately to ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... late. I hope nothing has occurred," Manuel said anxiously, drawing the velvet curtain aside ...
— Dyke Darrel the Railroad Detective - Or, The Crime of the Midnight Express • Frank Pinkerton
... orb of day appearing for a single instant. You couldn't even find its hiding place behind the curtain of mist. And soon this mist began to condense ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... languidly into an arm-chair, and sat sighing and smiling with affectation, not turning a deaf ear to her visitor, but taking in with her eyes a full view of what passed in the shop; having drawn aside the curtain of rose-colored silk, which sometimes covered the window in the wall between the shop ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... later there was a distinct lightening of the gloom, and before many more minutes had passed the boat was forced out suddenly through a curtain of drooping boughs into the dazzling light ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn
... sank behind the hill-tops a long dark curtain fell upon the stage of day, and the intervening hills cut short the time in which light and shade mingle at sunset. I thought of going out for a ride, and was about to get up when I heard a footfall on the steps behind. I looked back, but there ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... not new, and in this case is both uncalled for and ineffective. Gounod made a somewhat similar effort in his "Romeo et Juliette," where a costumed group of singers presents a prologue, vaguely visible through a gauze curtain. Meyerbeer tried the expedient in "Le Pardon de Ploermel," and the siciliano in Mascagni's "Cavalleria Rusticana" and the prologue in Leoncavallo's "Pagliacci" are other cases in point. Of these ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Helena a pleased and grateful look. Her eyes drooped under it—she hardly knew why. She had a penitent feeling somehow. Then the curtain fell, and Ericson went round to visit ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... note Mrs. Mavor stretched out her hands to her little girl, who was sitting on my knee, caught her up, and, holding her close to her breast, walked quickly behind the curtain. Not a sound followed the singing: no one moved till she had disappeared; and then Mr. Craig came to the front, and, motioning to me to follow Mrs. Mavor, began in a low, ...
— Black Rock • Ralph Connor
... play be by Euripides, it ends not with a "curtain," not with a great decisive moment, but with the appearance of a god who says a few lines of either exhortation or consolation or reconciliation, which, after the strain and stress of the action itself, strikes some people as rather ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... At length the curtain fell upon the bloody scenes of the war. Under the mighty blows of Grant and his lieutenants the Rebellion was crushed. On a bright day the President, accompanied by Mr. Sumner, entered the streets of Richmond, and witnessed the grateful ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 3 • Various
... adulterers, false-swearers. Yet they bound themselves to call them all, as they lowered them into their graves, their 'beloved brethren,' and to declare that they committed them to the dust 'in sure and curtain hope of a resurrection to eternal life,' though they believed in their hearts that they would rise to eternal damnation.... They were the hirelings of the king and government. They regarded the ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... I've drawn my curtain so that I can't see those hateful motor ambulances coming in slowly full, and going back empty fast, and must go to sleep. I simply loathe the sight of those M.A.'s, admirable inventions though ...
— Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front, 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... no longer to be seen. The disciples, whose identity had so occupied the minds of the little church-goers and been the subject of week-day discussions, were now hidden with the whole scene from the eyes of all beholders. A red curtain veiled the long-valued painting in its disfigured old age. Against this glowing background was suspended a huge golden cross of the simplest construction. It was, in fact, the work of the carpenter of the neighbourhood, and was gilded by the hand of ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... old antient Church, His monument remayneth to be seen; His memory yet in the mouths of men, That whilst he lived he could deceive the Devill. Imagine now that whilst he is retirde From Cambridge back unto his native home, Suppose the silent, sable visagde night Casts her black curtain over all the World; And whilst he sleeps within his silent bed, Toiled with the studies of the passed day, The very time and hour wherein that spirit That many years attended his command, And often times twixt Cambridge and ...
— The Merry Devil • William Shakespeare
... even respect and pity takes possession of every heart. The devotion of the old man raises the fallen girl, and in the admiration he inspires the fault of Claudie is almost forgotten. But it is too late. The old man takes the arm of his daughter, and leads her away with him. When the curtain rises for the last scene, Dame Rose has retained Claudie and her grandfather at the house, a riot in the village having prevented their departure. Denis has come near being stoned to death. Finally he ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... handsome young king, with mounted postilions and outriders, or a liveried carriage of somebody born with a von before his name. As the twilight comes on, the shutters of the shop windows are put up. It is time to go to the opera, for the curtain rises at half-past six, or to the beer-gardens, where delicious music marks, but does not interrupt, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... begged for quick and thorough work. He was not to be disappointed. Without any formalities the presiding officers of the last session were re-elected—in times of peace and party strife this would have been impossible. This short curtain raiser being over, the first act of the drama began. Before an overcrowded house the Chancellor described simply and clearly the efforts of the Government for the preservation of peace. He stated cold facts, showing unmistakably Russia's double ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... had placed a light upon the table, and was engaged in drawing the curtain of the window. The speakers whom they had heard were two men, who had a pack of cards and some silver money between them, while upon the screen itself the games they had played were scored in chalk. The man with the rough voice was a burly fellow of middle ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... as you saw a determination of the angle at which this weight of 250 grams just slipped on the ice. The lower surface of the weight, the part which presses on the ice, consists of a light, brass curtain ring. This can be detached. Its mass is only 61/2 grams, the curtain ring being, in fact, hollow and made of very thin metal. We have, therefore, in it a very small weight which presents exactly the same surface beneath as did the weight of 250 grams. You see, now, that ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... tapped the customary three blows behind the curtain, and the orchestra began the ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... surrounded by a wall. The circumference of the principal temple is not very considerable, and the sanctuary, which contains the tooth, is a small chamber hardly twenty feet broad. Within this place all is darkness, as there are no windows, and inside the door, there is a curtain, to prevent the entry of any light. The walls and ceiling are covered with silk tapestry, which, however, has nothing but its antiquity to recommend it. It is true that it was interwoven with gold thread, but it appeared never to have been especially costly, and I cannot ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Zalvidea decided to put the box in a safer place. Going to the window, and drawing aside the curtain, he opened it. Listening intently for a moment, and hearing nothing, he returned to the table, lighted a small dark lantern, extinguished the candle, and taking up the box after closing and locking it, he left the room, and walked softly through ...
— Old Mission Stories of California • Charles Franklin Carter
... sweetly, time-beguil'd, One of her bridegroom, one her child, The bridegroom he. They have receiv'd Happy letters, more believ'd For public news, and feel the bliss The heavenlier on a night like this. They think him hous'd, they think him blest, Curtain'd in the core of rest, Danger distant, all good near; Why hath their "Good night" ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt
... in that house except his heart. He was stifled with the horror that he glimpsed, that he almost touched, although that door remained closed. He felt along the wall in order to reach the window, and pulled aside the curtain. Window and blinds of the little room giving on the Neva were closed. The bar of iron inside was in its place. Then he went to the passage, mounted and descended the narrow servants' stairway, looked all about, in all the rooms, feeling everywhere with silent hands, assuring himself ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... it revealed several places on the frame of the mirror over the mantel, where the gold had fallen away and had been replaced by an inferior sort of gilding. By some subtle trickery with the lace curtain that hung at the open window, it laid an arabesque of delicate shadow upon the polished floor. In the room beyond, where Madame's crystal ball lay on the mahogany table, with a bit of black velvet beneath it, the sun had made a living rainbow that carried colour and light ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... drama this would have been the cue for the curtain to fall with a rush, ending the act and leaving the audience a space to wonder how the complication could ever be untangled, but on the Fenelby's porch there was no curtain to fall. ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... as if a curtain had been drawn, the outlines of a rough shanty appeared in front of them. It was a tumble-down sort of a place, seemingly made of driftwood and old sacks and bits of canvas. From a rusty iron stove-pipe on top, a feeble column of ...
— The Girl Aviators' Sky Cruise • Margaret Burnham
... dark blue paper with yellow flowers, the window is "ornamented" with a curtain of red calico in which holes take the place of flowers. There is in front of the window a rush-bottom chair with the bottom worn out; near the chair a stove; on the stove a stewpot; near the stewpot a flowerpot turned upside down with a tallow candle stuck in the hole; near ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... a stately outer drawing-room, filled with old French furniture and fine pictures; then the butler lifted a velvet curtain, pronounced the visitor's name with a voice and emphasis as perfectly trained as the rest of him, and stood aside for ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... certainty that you can never have full strength again, though you live on twenty, forty, sixty years. The flag of your courage may well be down half-mast! Apathy—that creeping nerve disease—is soon your bed-fellow and the companion of your walks. A curtain has fallen before your vision; your eyes no longer range. The Russian "Nichevo"—the "what-does-it-matter?" mood—besets you. Fate seems to say to you: "Take the line of least resistance, friend—you are done for!" But the sacred work says to ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... "Life is like a play": I am playing "Heavy Father" In a "Screaming Farce" to-day, That so "brings down The house," I frown, And fain would "ring the curtain down." ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... As the last curtain fell and Dennis was no longer able to adjust his gloomy contemplation to incongruous orchestration, he hastened from the theater, scrambled down the precipitate stairs and ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... Clifton, the Youngs withdrew, evidently much disappointed, and as the door closed behind them, Electra felt that the circle of doom was narrowing around her. Mr. Clifton approached her, but, averting her head, she lifted the damask curtain that divided the parlour from the studio, and effected her retreat, dreading to meet his glance—putting off the evil day as long as possible—trying to trample the serpent that trailed after her ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... again in the green wood; the fountain bubbled at my feet. Strong hands parted the curtain of green leaves, and through the gap came sunlight—sunlight and the hunter with eyes like mountain lakes; and as I moved to meet him the vision vanished. ...
— The Proud Prince • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... who do things, and if they are really friends of mine, I like to enter into their life, to know of their work, to sympathise, to take an interest in it. It was like that with you at first. Now it has all gone. You have drawn down a curtain. I do not believe that you go to the Admiralty at all. I do not believe that you have any wonderful invention there over which you spend ...
— The Double Traitor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and the hangings. Something strange about the former arrested his eye. It was standing awry on its pedestal—was, indeed, almost toppling over. He looked up and saw that one of the curtains supported by the arm hung loosely from one of the curtain rings. It was as though some violent hand had torn at the curtain in passing, almost dragging it from the pole and precipitating the figure down the stairs. Immediately beyond the landing, in the corridor, was a door on the right, flung ...
— The Hampstead Mystery • John R. Watson
... who made their appearance as a matter of course at a First Night in the height of the Season. Pit and gallery were already packed with a throng, tense, expectant and alert, that waited for the rise of the curtain with the eager patience of a terrier watching a dilatory human prepare for outdoor exercises. Stalls and boxes filled slowly and hesitatingly with a crowd whose component units seemed for the most part to recognise the probability that they were quite as interesting as any ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... and seventy-one transported! What a terrible tragedy committed in the name of law and Christian government! Mary Burton, the Judas Iscariot of the period, received her hundred pounds as the price of the blood she had caused to be shed; and the curtain fell upon one of the most tragic events in all the history of New York or ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... feastings to come. Mrs. McAlister came back from a final survey of the corner house, made her eleventh tour of the parlor, dining-room and kitchen at The Savins, and then took her stand at the front window where she tapped restlessly on the glass and swayed the curtain to and fro impatiently. She was not a nervous woman; but to-night her mood demanded constant action. Moreover, it was only an hour and a quarter before the train was due. If she were not watchful, the carriage might come ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... a tailored suit of blue and looking particularly beautiful, walked haughtily by and disappeared behind the heavy green curtain. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... upstairs to a curtained doorway, guarded by two sentries, in front of whom he paused. At a sign from the former, one of the men disappeared behind the curtain, and the next moment Naoum appeared in the doorway. Waving the guide back he signed to George to enter, and a moment later Helmar stood in ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
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