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More "Mantel" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in it stood in front of me as though the pool were solid ground that their feet pressed. You were one of them, son, you were one of them," and the old knight paused, supporting himself against the mantel-shelf as though that ...
— Red Eve • H. Rider Haggard
... went away, and the room was silent again. His arms rested upon the desk, and his head slowly sank between his elbows. When he lifted it again the clock on the mantel-piece had tinkled once. It was half-past seven. He took a sheet of note-paper from a box before him and began to write, but when he had finished the words, "My dear wife and Mamie," his fingers ...
— The Conquest of Canaan • Booth Tarkington
... she burst out. "He—he might have thought it was nice, if you hadn't been here with your fool speeches. You just go around laughing at everything, Mr. Max Lyster, and you're just as empty as that china cat on the mantel, and it's hollow. I'd like to hit you sometimes when you say your nice, tantalizing words—that's what I'd like to do; and maybe some day ...
— That Girl Montana • Marah Ellis Ryan
... my narrative. If you be of the rougher mould, cherished reader, just cast yourself back somewhere at your ease, take this most excellently printed book deftly between your fingers, with a good cigar between your teeth; throw your legs over your desk, a gunny-bag, a fence-rail, or the mantel-piece of the bar-room, as the case may be; give me the benefit of your friendship and confidence, and read away at your leisure. But if you be one of those gentle beings placed upon earth to diffuse joy and happiness over the desert of life, I pray you consider me a serf at your imperial foot-stool; ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... parlor mantel," advised Mrs. Pawket. "The twins is comin' up the road. I can hear them hollerin' at that echo down by the swamps. Leave it ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Gretchen! I will hold her in my arms and chafe her cold fingers and kiss her tired face until she feels that her home-coming is a happy one. It must be almost time,' and he glanced at a small cathedral clock which stood upon the mantel. ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... so?" said Hetty, taking a survey of herself in the old-fashioned glass slanted at a steep angle above the mantel-piece. "I don't. I hate fine gowns and flowers on me. If I'd have dared to, I'd have been married in my ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... I had experienced put me in such high spirits at the glorious prospects before me that I could not think of going to bed when eleven o'clock sounded from the mantel-tree. Instead, I believe I actually chuckled, as I slipped my hand into the pocket of my dressing-gown for my tobacco-pouch, and proceeded to fill my pipe again. Method had always been the rule of my life, but that night I put it by for a space. The question paramount was—where should ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... this case a room redeemed by an upright piano with a green-silk-and-gold-lace-shaded floor lamp glowing by. Two gilt-framed photographs and a cluster of ivory knickknacks on the white mantel. A heap of handmade cushions. Art editions of the gift poets and some circulating-library novels. A fireside chair, privately owned and drawn up, ironically enough, beside the gilded radiator, its headrest worn from kindly service ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... it you?" said she, with as much composure as if she had not been caught gazing at herself. "I was looking at this," pointing to an inverted tumbler on the mantel-piece. "Is it not strange that we should see a moth at this cold season? Amilly found it this afternoon on ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood
... chair, and sat for some moments with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "Work—work?" he said at last, looking up, "ah, if I could only begin!" He glanced round the room a moment and his eye encountered on the mantel-shelf the vivid physiognomy of Mr. Barnaby Striker. His smile vanished, and he stared at it with an air of concentrated enmity. "I want to begin," he cried, "and I can't make a better beginning than this! Good-by, Mr. Striker!" He strode across the room, seized a mallet that lay at hand, and ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Mid-Victorian room, and held its stolid own in the riot of Rossettis. Its proportions, its window-sash bisecting the view of garden, its folding-doors (through which I heard the voice of Watts-Dunton booming mysteriously in the front room), its mantel-piece, its gas-brackets, all proclaimed that nothing ever would seduce them from their allegiance to Martin Tupper. 'Nor me from mine,' said the sturdy cruet-stand on the long expanse of table-cloth. The voice of Watts-Dunton ceased suddenly, and a few moments later its owner appeared. He had been ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... did safely trust in her. But when I saw them, that evening, sitting, in erect propriety, in their respective corners each side of the great, stately fireplace, with its tall, glistening brass andirons, its mantel adorned at either end with plated candlesticks, with the snuffer-tray in the middle,—she so collectedly measuring her words, talking in all those well-worn grooves of correct conversation which are designed, as the phrase goes, to "entertain strangers," and the Misses Evans, in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... faint sound in his throat. Isbister moved about the room with the nervousness of an inexperienced host, making little remarks that scarcely required answering. He crossed the room to his portfolio, placed it on the table and noticed the mantel clock. ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... once, although he wore neither uniform nor other insignia of rank. Close beside him stood a colonel of engineers, possibly his chief of staff, while to the right, leaning negligently with one arm on the mantel-shelf above the fireplace, and smiling insolently at me, ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... Halles had been awarded by the State in competition. A most sumptuous Gothic apartment was that styled the "Salle Echevinale," restored with great skill in recent years by a concurrence of Flemish artists, members of the Academy. Upon either side of a magnificent stone mantel, bearing statues in niches of kings, counts and countesses, bishops and high dignitaries, were large well executed frescoes by MM. Swerts and Guffens, showing figures of the evangelists St. Mark and St. John, surrounded by myriads ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... mantel and returned with a flask and two glasses. The quack filled them both and passed one to David. It was the first time in his life that he had ever even smelt an intoxicant. He recoiled a little; but having committed himself to his new ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... farm. He didn't seem to drink much but the boys did. All three did. Dr. Palmer died in 1861. People kept brandy and whiskey in a closet and some had fancy bottles they kept, one brandy, one whiskey, on their mantel. Some owners passed drinks around like on Sunday morning. Dr. Palmer didn't do that but it was done on some places before the Civil War. It wasn't against the law to make spirits for their own use. That is the way it was made. Meal and flour was ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... the hour of midnight by a clock upon the mantel; a single candle, by which he had made a show of reading, was guttering all to a side and an ungracious end in a draught that came from some cranny in the ill-seamed ingle-walls, for all that the night seemed windless. A profound stillness ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... favorite engraving—a picture representing two children straying near a precipice, fearing no danger, and just ready to fall, when behind them, sweeping softly down, comes their guardian angel—hung over the mantel. ...
— Holiday Stories for Young People • Various
... house where I was born! And there was the selfsame clock that ticked From the close of dusk to the burst of morn, When life-warm hands plucked the golden corn And helped when the apples were picked. And the "chany dog" on the mantel-shelf, With the gilded collar and yellow eyes, Looked just as at first, when I hugged myself Sound asleep with the ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... heart, and to remember that in her great preoccupation with the child he had been left to spend many evenings alone, and that he no longer complained of this. She stood up in front of the fire and pressed her hot forehead to the mantel-shelf. How was a woman to know what to do? Was not he that was most helpless and had most need of her the one to devote her time to? There was not a thought in her that was disloyal to Sir Tom. But what if he were to form the habit of doing without her society? This ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... stove, and a small room opened out of the kitchen, with a bed in it, which looked as if it were going to be made, as Ewbert handsomely maintained. There was an old dog stretched on the hearth behind the stove, who whimpered with rheumatic apprehension when his master went to put the lamp on the mantel ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... enthroned still upon that funeral couch, as upon a velvet armchair; he had not abdicated one title of his majesty. God, who had not punished him, cannot, will not punish me, who have done nothing." A strange sound attracted the young man's attention. He looked round him, and saw on the mantel-shelf, just below an enormous crucifix, coarsely painted in fresco on the wall, a rat of enormous size engaged in nibbling a piece of dry bread, but fixing all the time, an intelligent and inquiring look upon the new occupant of the cell. The king could not resist ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... Wullie, and I will. If I hang for it I'll be even wi' him. I haena the proof, but I know—I know!" He groped his way to the mantel piece with blind eyes and swirling brain. Reaching up with fumbling hands, he took down the old blunderbuss from above ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... but as we had no paint and were short of time, we persuaded ourselves it looked beautiful with only its clean, pretty curtain. We didn't make many changes in the kitchen. All we did was to take down the mirror and turn it lengthways above the mantel-shelf over the fireplace. We put the new rocker in the bright, sunny corner, where it would be easier for dim old eyes to see to read or sew. We set the geranium on the broad clean sill of the window, and I think you would have agreed ...
— Letters on an Elk Hunt • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... looking at his watch and at the room door, until Mr Swiveller was roused from a short nap, by the setting-down on the landing-place outside, as from the shoulders of a porter, of some giant load, which seemed to shake the house, and made the little physic bottles on the mantel-shelf ring again. Directly this sound reached his ears, Mr Abel started up, and hobbled to the door, and opened it; and behold! there stood a strong man, with a mighty hamper, which, being hauled into the room and presently unpacked, disgorged such treasures ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... cheapest; but hardly any one within the sound of my voice is so restricted as that; almost if not quite every one buys something every year for his pleasure, a curtain, a rug, a wall paper, a chair, or a table not certainly needed, a vase, a clock, a, mantel ornament, a piece of jewelry, a portrait, an etching, a picture. Now whenever you make such a purchase, to please your taste, to make your parlor or your chamber more attractive, choose that which shows good handiwork. Such a choice will last. You will not tire of it as you will ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... leaning on the mantel, crossed the room impatiently and stood beside the bed. He spoke in French again, dragging the words in his insistent, masterful voice, as if they were something heavy which he ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... the bridegroom, who, though far better acquainted with their full scope and meaning than his father-in-law, was obliged to listen for civility's sake. While the old soldier was still in the midst of his long and confused harangue, a clock struck on the library mantel-piece. ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... for complaint; they had forsaken her less indifferently than she had them; one or the other had left a newspaper, now three days old, propped up where she could not fail to see it on the antiquated marble mantel-shelf. In separate columns on the page folded outermost two items were encircled with rings ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: "Ah, well! I don't know that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel." ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... facing its chief priest. It was all good, without and within. He went across the hall to bid his mother good night. She clung to him convulsively, and they had their own five minutes which arranged matters for these two silent natures on the new basis forever. Jennie was in white before the mantel when he returned, ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... Medlock, putting his hands in his pocket and leaning against the mantel-piece, "you replied to the ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... digressing, I am afraid. I suggest we should have a ballot. I will write "Yes" on five little pieces of paper, and "No" on five, and after distribution we will fold them up, and each of us shall drop one in the vase on the mantel-shelf.' ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... seen that the cloak covered the left arm, the opening being upon the right one, where the brooch reposed on the shoulder, leaving the right arm free. There is a very beautiful and well-known antique statue of Diana, representing the goddess fastening her mantel in the same manner. ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... for you to go home, boy," he answered me, looking at a clock upon the mantel over his large fireplace. "You are still in your evening clothes, I see. But that's easy: you climb into that pink coat and a pair of those corduroy trousers of mine you see hanging in my dressing ...
— The Daredevil • Maria Thompson Daviess
... to the paternal turnip, which hung over the mantel, and showed her that old Time was ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 22, August 27, 1870 • Various
... clock ornamented the mantel-piece representing the templar Bois-Guilbert bearing off a gilded Rebecca upon a silver horse. On either side of this frightful time-piece were placed two plated ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... Friend Hopper was summoned, and immediately went to the rescue, accompanied by one of his sons, about sixteen years old. He found the woman and her son stowed away in a closet, exceedingly terrified. He assured them they would be quite as safe on the mantel-piece, as they would be in that closet; that their being found concealed would be regarded as the best evidence that they were the persons sought for. Knowing it was dangerous for them to remain ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... Mister and Mistress W. in their youth,— New England youth, that seems a sort of pill, Half wish-I-dared, half Edwards on the Will, Bitter to swallow, and which leaves a trace Of Calvinistic colic on the face. 310 Between them, o'er the mantel, hung in state Solomon's temple, done in copperplate; Invention pure, but meant, we may presume, To give some Scripture sanction to the room. Facing this last, two samplers you might see, Each, with its urn and stiffly weeping ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... with facile pen, to furnish the house. There was the Log-Fire Room, with the print of George Washington over the mantel, with Jean's knitting on the table; Muffin on one side of the fire, and Polly Ann on the other. He even started to put Jean in one of the big chairs, but she made him rub it out. "Not yet, Derry. You see, ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... soul, and I was on the verge of becoming excessively sentimental—the unbroken silence, where several people were present, had also its effect upon me, and I felt oppressed and dejected. So sat I for an hour; the clock over the mantel ticked sharply on—the old man in the brown surtout had turned in his chair, and now snored louder—the gentleman who read the Times had got the Chronicle, and I thought I saw him nodding over the advertisements. The father who, with a raw son ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... hand; then, a little ashamed of the passionate act, he forced himself deliberately to smooth it out again, and, folding it accurately, put it in his pocket. A note for Erica remained in the envelope; he placed it on the mantel piece, then fell back in ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... reached the house he sought his host in the billiard-room. The game was over, and Don Roberto, Mr. Polk, and Mr. Washington were seated in front of the mantel-piece with their feet on the shelf. It was Don Roberto's favourite attitude; he felt that it completed the structure of his Americanism. He could only reach the tip of the shelf with the points of his little elegant feet, but he was just ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the suburbs of the City of Brooklyn to see a member of the Allen Street Church, and, after reading God's Word and prayer, our conversation turned to a beautiful portrait that hung over the mantel-piece. The lady remarked, "That is the picture of my departed sister, who died in New York. She was faithfully visited during her sickness by Mrs. Knowles." She continued, "I like to think of her, because she used to tell me after she was gone, 'I pray for you by name every day.'" ...
— Gathering Jewels - The Secret of a Beautiful Life: In Memoriam of Mr. & Mrs. James Knowles. Selected from Their Diaries. • James Knowles and Matilda Darroch Knowles
... a mirror with a deep filigreed frame hanging over the mantel-piece in this room. The glass was cracked and the quicksilver rubbed off or discolored in many places. When it reflected your face you had the singular pleasure of not recognizing yourself. It gave your features the appearance of having been run through a mince-meat machine. ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... sister of my own "Little Lottie" at the ill-fated Fourteenth-street house. This stove, connected with the flue by a small pipe, fitted into what had once been a beautiful open fireplace, but which was now walled up with broken bricks, and surmounted by a mantel of Italian marble sculptured with the story of Prometheus's boon to mankind, and supported on either end by caryatides in the shape of vestal virgins bearing flaming brands in their hands. Overhead the ceiling showed great patches of bare lath, where the plaster had fallen away, and ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... The picture is better, perhaps, than the bricks were, yet it is not enlivening. The only other objects in the room worth mentioning are, a particularly small book-shelf in a corner; a cuckoo-clock on the mantel-shelf, an engraved portrait of Queen Victoria on the wall opposite in a gilt frame, and a portrait of Sir Robert Peel in a frame ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne
... parts by a heavy beam which started from the fireplace, seemed a concession tardily made to luxury. Armchairs, with their woodwork painted white, were covered with tapestry. A paltry clock, between two copper-gilt candlesticks, decorated the mantel-shelf. Beside Madame de la Chanterie was an ancient table with spindle legs, on which lay her balls of worsted in a wicker basket. A hydrostatic lamp lighted the scene. The four men, who were seated there, silent, immovable, like bronze statues, had evidently ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... she started up with resolution. She had been furtively watching the onyx clock on the sitting-room mantel; she had timed herself. She had said that if Agnes was not home by that time she should demand that she be sent for. She rose and stood before Mrs. Dent, who looked up coolly ...
— The Wind in the Rose-bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural • Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
... have a talk with you,' he said. So, in the little parlor we sat down. I see it now, all vividly before me! The carpet—ay, its very hues and figures: The chandelier, the sofa, the engraving Of Wellington that hung above the mantel; The little bookcase, holding Scott and Irving, And Gibbon's Rome, and Eloisa's Letters; And, in a vase, upon the marble stand, An opening rose-bud I had plucked that day— Type of ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent
... glass-fronted cabinet one saw decanters and tumblers. Against one wall stood a large and comfortable couch. The writing-table was supplied with virgin blotting-paper, new pens, works of reference, ash-tray, matches, and the like; and over the mantel hung a full-length portrait of Lord Beaconsfield. There was also an ivory-handled copper kettle, and a patent ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... old lottery-schemes; he did not long buy tickets, because he was too shrewd; but he made endless calculations upon the probability of drawing prizes,—provided the tickets were really all sold, and the wheel fairly managed. A dice-box was always at hand upon the mantel. He had portraits of celebrated racers, both quadruped and biped, and he could tell the fastest time ever made by either. His manipulation of cards was, as his friends averred, one of the fine arts; and in all the games he had wrought out problems ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... Left alone for a moment Dagmar recovered her composure and glanced about the room. It seemed almost fragrant in its clean freshness. She had never occupied such a room, with that peculiar, bracing atmosphere. The small mantel with its prim vases looked a veritable home shrine, and the center table with the sprigs of budding lilacs, seemed to the forlorn girl something to reverence. The rag rugs under her feet were so spotless, ...
— The Girl Scout Pioneers - or Winning the First B. C. • Lillian C Garis
... ajar, and from within Tarzan heard again the same appeal that had lured him from the street. Another instant found him in the center of a dimly-lighted room. An oil lamp burned upon a high, old-fashioned mantel, casting its dim rays over a dozen repulsive figures. All but one were men. The other was a woman of about thirty. Her face, marked by low passions and dissipation, might once have been lovely. She stood with one hand at her throat, crouching against ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was an enormous stone fireplace with high mantel-shelf of stone and the chimney above. The fire-opening was wide enough for an old Yule log, and on either side of it were double glass doors opening into a long porch room, which also had a fireplace on the opposite side of the chimney, and was completely shut ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... softly, "its Holcombe. Are you here?" The room was dark except for the light from the hall, which shone dimly past him and fell upon a gun-rack hanging on the wall opposite. Holcombe hurried toward this and ran his hands over it, and passed on quickly from that to the mantel and the tables, stumbling over chairs and riding-boots as he groped about, and tripping on the skin of some animal that lay stretched upon the floor. He felt his way, around the entire circuit ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... crossed the grinning skull of the gray wolf. They softened the eyes of the antelope's head, and made dark lines behind the long-tined antlers of the elk and of the deer. They brought forth to view in alternate eclipse and definition the great, grim bear's head which hung above the mantel. Every trophy gathered in years of the chase, once perhaps prized, now perhaps forgotten, was brought into evidence, nor could one escape noting each one, and giving to each, for this one night more, the story which belonged to it. I sat and looked upon them all, and so there ...
— The Singing Mouse Stories • Emerson Hough
... "I'm off at full gallop. I've run the broken statue to earth; it's nothing more nor less than a china shepherdess I knocked off the mantel-piece in the hotel coffee-room, when I rang the bell for supper last night. I say, how well we get on; don't we? It's like guessing a riddle. Now, ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... wide mantel was a quantity of homemade cigars from which those of us who were "slaves to the filthy weed" made selections, and on the broad piazza were illustrating the wise man's definition of a cigar, "a roll of nausea with fire on one end and a fool on the other," when the air ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... all over my walls, as you can see—is dancing-girls in silk tights or without them, just as the tobacco shops prefer. I also do sheiks, muffled to their eyebrows in bath towels, and with scimitars—like that one above the mantel. And very profitable, too; MOST profitable, my dear sir. I get twenty doldars for a real odalisk and fifteen for a bashi-bazouk. I can do one about every other day, and I sell one about every other ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... between the United States and that country had now fairly commenced. My sword—a fine Toledo, taken from a Spanish officer at San Jacinto—hung over the mantel, rusting ingloriously. Near it were my pistols—a pair of Colt's revolvers—pointing at each other in sullen muteness. A warlike ardour seized upon me, and clutching, not the sword, but my pen, I wrote to the War ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... want to go down, but her mother said she mustn't be childish, and Marietta had just taken her right down to the library and left her there with Paul, and there she was now." The doctor started up and beat his thin, corded hand on the mantel. He could not speak. His sister got up and laid a tender hand on his shoulder. "Poor ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... he seemed to fall into a reverie and took no part in the conversation that ensued. As the party adjourned to the sitting-room, he paused on the rug, and leaned his elbow on the mantel. Louisa lingered and drew near. He passed his arm around her shoulders, and ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... (Frontispiece) In this hall, simplicity, suitability and proportion are observed Mennoyer drawings and old mirrors set in panelings A portrait by Nattier inset above a fine old mantel The Washington Irving house was delightfully rambling A Washington Irving House bedroom Miss Marbury's bedroom The fore-court and entrance of the Fifty-fifth Street house A painted wall broken into panels by narrow moldings ...
— The House in Good Taste • Elsie de Wolfe
... added to Lakelands at the period during which the property was out of the possession of the Bowers family, but the remainder of the house is of the original building, and the carved wooden doors and mantel-pieces within testify to the skill of old-time workmanship in Cooperstown. The wide stretches of lawn shaded by venerable trees, and the long sweep of lake shore commanded by Lakelands make ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall
... and I frequently passed an hour in the morning with Mrs. Lewis, chatting with her, and looking about her fanciful apartment. She had dozens of birds of all gay colors,—paroquets from Brazil, cockatoos, ring-doves, and canaries; fresh flowers, in vases on the mantel-pieces, and a blue-ribboned guitar in the corner. No books, no pictures. A great many scarfs, bonnets, and drapery generally, fell about on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... brand-new Dresden clock on the mantel-piece chimed the three-quarters. The post leaves at eleven. I took up the ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... any doubt, though, that the past was full and alive to him. There was only the past. And what a memory was his! He would look at the portrait of his old clipper, the Oberon—it was central over the mantel-shelf—and recall her voyages, and the days in each voyage, and just how the weather was, what canvas she carried, and how things happened. Malabar Street vanished. We would go, when he was in that mood, and live for the evening in another year, with ...
— London River • H. M. Tomlinson
... room, simple in its plan, plain in its furnishing, revealed everywhere that touch in decorative adornment that spoke of the cultivated mind and refined taste. A group of rare etchings had their place over the mantel above a large, open fireplace. On the walls were to be seen really fine copies of the world's most famous pictures, and on the panels which ran 'round the walls were bits of pottery and china, relics of other days and ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... tavern, to ponder further what was to be done. The woman opened to him the door of a little parlor, covered with a rag carpet, where stood a table with a very shining black oil-cloth, sundry lank, high-backed wood chairs, with some plaster images in resplendent colors on the mantel-shelf, above a very dimly-smoking grate; a long hard-wood settle extended its uneasy length by the chimney, and here Haley sat him down to meditate on the instability of human hopes and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... at Brighton. The inventive and industrious Parisian workmen had moulded the doors and window-frames; the ceilings were imitated from the middle-ages or those of a Venetian palace; marble veneering abounded on the outer walls. Steinbock and Francois Souchet had designed the mantel-pieces and the panels above the doors; Schinner had painted the ceilings in his masterly manner. The beauties of the staircase, white as a woman's arm, defied those of the hotel Rothschild. On account of the riots and the unsettled times, the cost of this folly was only about eleven hundred thousand ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... bath had given her a delightful fragrance, and her little bare feet were in velvet slippers. Strong in a sense of her advantages she came in stepping softly, and put her hands over her husband's eyes. She thought him pensive; he was standing in his dressing-gown before the fire, his elbow on the mantel and one foot on the fender. She said in his ear, warming it with her breath, and nibbling the tip of it with ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... painted yellow. A large set of drawers with several shelves on top stood between the windows, and a wooden settle was ranged along the wall. A table with a great Bible and two or three religious books, and a high mantel with two enormous pitchers that glittered in a brilliant color which was called British luster, with a brass snuffers and tray and candlesticks, were the only concession to ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... so precious, and his sorrow is so sacred, that I am hardly willing to let strangers pity him, ever so tenderly. When he was a baby he sprang out of mamma's lap, one day, as she was reaching up to take something from the mantel piece. He fell on the andiron-head and injured his spine so that he could never walk. He is twenty years old now; his head and chest and arms are about as large as those of a boy of sixteen, but all the rest of his poor body is shrunken and withered; he has never stood upright, and he ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... room where Isaacson sat at night, a room lined with books, cosy, but perhaps a little oppressive. As Nigel came in quickly with a light coat over his arm and a crush hat in his hand, a clock on the mantel ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... bedstead, a mantel with a blue and white lambrequin, a blue and white toilet set, pretty pictures on the wall, and a small bookshelf, made a very cozy looking nest for a little girl, and so Florence thought, who had no room of her own, but slept with an ...
— A Sweet Little Maid • Amy E. Blanchard
... kiss, no greeting whatever passed between the ladies. Sepia began at once to rearrange a few hot-house flowers on the mantel-piece, looking herself much like some dark flower painted in an ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... retreat she had removed her dripping hat, hung it on the fender to dry, and stretched herself on tiptoe in front of the round eagle-crowned mirror, above the mantel vases of dyed immortelles, while she ran her fingers comb-wise through her hair. The gesture had acted on Darrow's numb feelings as the glow of the fire acted on his circulation; and when he had asked: "Aren't ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... and distributed its contents on the dressing-table. I had carried through all my adventures a folding leather photograph-holder, containing portraits of my father and mother and of John Marshall Glenarm, my grandfather, and this I set up on the mantel in the little sitting-room. I felt to-night as never before how alone I was in the world, and a need for companionship and sympathy stirred in me. It was with a new and curious interest that I peered into my grandfather’s shrewd old eyes. He used to come and ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... the handsomest men I have ever seen, started to his feet as a beautiful Italian mantel clock rang in silver chimes ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... forehead, and her eyes were fine. Her profile, indeed, with the narrow forehead and the sensitive upper lip, might fairly have suggested the mask of Clytie which Richard had bought of an itinerant image-dealer, and fixed on a bracket over the mantel-shelf. But her eyes were her specialty, if one may say that. They were fringed with such heavy lashes that the girl seemed always to be in half-mourning. Her smile was singularly sweet and bright, perhaps because it broke through so ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... would do it for sixpence, he must find sixpence. By fair means or foul it must be done. He'd tried fair means, and there only remained foul. He went softly downstairs to the dining-room, where, upon the mantel-piece, reposed the missionary-box. He'd tell someone next day, or put it back, or something. Anyway, people did worse things than that in the pictures. With a knife from the table he extracted the contents—three-halfpence! He glared at ...
— More William • Richmal Crompton
... called "constitutions." To these decorous assemblies girls only were invited,—no rough Boston boys. She has left to us more than one clear, perfect picture of these formal little routs in the great low-raftered chamber, softly alight with candles on mantel-tree and in sconces; with Lucinda, the black maid, "shrilly piping;" and rows of demure little girls of Boston Brahmin blood, in high rolls and feathers, discreetly partaking of hot and cold punch, and soberly walking and curtsying through the minuet; fantastic in costume, but ...
— Diary of Anna Green Winslow - A Boston School Girl of 1771 • Anna Green Winslow
... good for her. He was quite outside of all their gossip. How could they know that with all his learning—for he could read and write in two languages and took the Vermilionville newspaper—and with all his books, almost an entire mantel-shelf full—he was feeling heart-hunger the same as any ordinary lad or lass unmated? Zosephine found her eyes, so to speak, lifting, lifting, more and more as from time to time she looked upon the ...
— Bonaventure - A Prose Pastoral of Acadian Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... and commented, and enjoyed every word of it, until the little clock on the mantel spoke in silver tones, and said, one, two. ...
— Ester Ried • Pansy (aka. Isabella M. Alden)
... does all this mean?" he asked, rising suddenly from his seat as pale as ashes, and clinging to the mantel-shelf for support ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... little more than casually glance out of the windows. In the room above he took a little longer time. It was a comfortable room, but with rather effeminate indications about its contents. Little pieces of draped silk-work hung about the furniture, and Japanese silk fans decorated the mantel-piece. Near the window was a cage containing a gray parrot, and the writing-table was decorated with two vases ...
— Martin Hewitt, Investigator • Arthur Morrison
... conviction stamped itself on the girl's delicate features. Slowly she turned to pick up her flowers, and went with them to the mantel-piece. There was an empty vase half filled with water, and into it she tried to place the stems, but they seemed hard to manage in her quivering fingers, and she finally took the flowers to her own room across the passage. They heard the sagging door scrape the floor as she ...
— Westerfelt • Will N. Harben
... bookcase in my chamber, broke the glass front, and smashed two chairs; another bookcase fell across the floor; the chandelier was so violently shaken that I thought it would be broken into pieces. The bric-a-brac was thrown from the mantel and tables, and strewed the floor with broken china and glass. It is said to have lasted fifty-eight seconds, but as nearly as I can estimate the violent part was only about ...
— San Francisco During the Eventful Days of April, 1906 • James B. Stetson
... establishment, the "three-million-dollar palace on a desert," as Mrs. Billy Alden had described it. Montague had read of the famous mantel in its entrance hall, made from Pompeiian marble, and costing seventy-five thousand dollars. And the Wallings were the railroad kings who transported ...
— The Moneychangers • Upton Sinclair
... the end. The distrust darkened and darkened on her face as she looked at her sister and Frank; as she saw how close they sat together, devoted to the same interest and working to the same end. The clock on the mantel-piece pointed to half-past eleven before Lucy the resolute permitted Falkland the helpless to shut up his task-book for the night. "She's wonderfully clever, isn't she?" said Frank, taking leave of Mr. Vanstone ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... great fire of birch-logs was blazing in the living-room, and Darragh stood there, his elbow on the rough stone mantel-shelf. ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... practice of either a mother or nurse to leave external applications within the reach of a child. It is also highly improper to put a mixture and an external application (such as a lotion or a liniment) on the same tray or on the same mantel-piece. Many liniments contain large quantities of opium, a tea-spoonful of which would be likely to cause the death of a child. "Hartshorn and oil," too, has frequently been swallowed by children, and in several instances has caused death. Many lotions contain sugar of lead, ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... clock on the marble mantel chimed the hour of four, causing a general movement of surprise. "'Pon my soul! had no idea it was that late," exclaimed Mr. Thornton, taking out his watch, while Hugh Mainwaring, ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour
... and over, over and over, Christmas after Christmas. Every year each of his Grandmothers knit him two pairs of blue woollen yarn stockings, and hung them for him on Christmas Eve, for a Christmas present. There they would hang—eight pairs of stockings with nothing in them, in a row on the mantel shelf, every Christmas morning. ...
— The Pot of Gold - And Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins
... woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot. Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals—which they don't. Over middle of mantel, engraving—Washington ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... difficulty a hat-rack and a table on which rested a card tray with cards. In the course of greeting an elderly woman, he stepped into the parlor. This was a small square apartment carpeted in dark Brussels, and stuffily glorified in the bourgeois manner by a white marble mantel-piece, several pieces of mahogany furniture upholstered in haircloth, a table on which reposed a number of gift books in celluloid and other fancy bindings, an old-fashioned piano with a doily and a bit of china statuary, a cabinet or so containing such things ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... stools were placed; one of these was overturned; on another a violin in its baggy green baize cover was lying. Straight high-backed chairs were pushed against the walls on either side; in front of an open fireplace with a low wooden mantel two small cushioned divans were drawn up, with a claw-footed table between them. A silver salver filled with tall glasses was set carelessly on one edge of the table; a half-open fan of sandal-wood lay beside it; a man's glove had fallen ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... Avenue society swelless—who was visiting the ranch and who had sirened Jack Valentine when he was a wealthy club-man on lower Third Avenue before he lost his money. This girl appeared on the stage only in the photographic state—Jack had her Sarony stuck up on the mantel of the Amagan—of the Bad Lands droring room. Helen was ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... resembled a Ford going into high, and that the Hon. Otis Deeble, mayor of Zenith and candidate for Congress, was a flatulent fool (which was quite true). The Babbitts and Rieslings sat doubtfully on stone-hard brocade chairs in the small living-room of the flat, with its mantel unprovided with a fireplace, and its strip of heavy gilt fabric upon a glaring new player-piano, till Mrs. Riesling shrieked, "Come on! Let's put some pep in it! Get out your fiddle, Paul, and I'll try to ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... comes of Mrs Moss writing a book," he muttered, "and being a philosophical character. What business had she to go publishing all that wonderful big volume above my mantel-piece—'Woman's Dignity; developed in Dialogues?' Without that she never would have found out that I could not be a sympathizing companion without the advantages of travel, and I never should have left number four, to be quarrelled with by every whipper-snapper of a soldier, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... sight of several candlesticks of various sizes and of beautiful workmanship. She was struck by this as by a psychological singularity, and counted the number—four on the table and three others on the mantel, seven in all, the number freighted with so many religious associations. She wondered whether there were some astronomical association also. Were there seven stars in ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... grotesque in his scorn, and yet Stonehouse, leaning with an apparent negligence against the mantel-shelf, felt himself go dead white under the attack. He had lost Cosgrave. And he knew now that he needed him desperately—more now than even in his desolate childhood—that unconsciously he had hugged the knowledge of that boyish affection ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... awfully queer if I say none of them, but after Venice, the little ones, like Assisi, Perugia, and Sienna. I'm so glad we took the time for them. Oh, Sylvia—" And he was off. The little clock on the mantel struck several times, unnoticed by either of them, and it was after one, when, glancing inadvertently at it, Austin sprang to his feet, apologizing for having kept her awake so long, and hastily ...
— The Old Gray Homestead • Frances Parkinson Keyes
... electric lights are everywhere, but the up-to-dateness here stops abruptly; the salle a manger is bare and uninviting, and the rooms above equally so, and the electric light has not penetrated beyond the ground floor. Instead one finds ranged on the mantel, above the cook-stove in the kitchen, a regiment of candlesticks, in strange contrast to the rest of the furnishings. Electric bells, too, are wanting, and there is still found the row of jangling grelots, their numbers half-obliterated, hanging above ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... door opened, was a kitchen or common room. On one side, was a large fire-place, the mantel-piece or shelf, of which was filled with brass candlesticks, large and small, some queer old-fashioned lamps, snuffers and trays, polished to a degree of brightness, that was dazzling. A dresser was carried round the wall, filled with plates and dishes, and underneath were exhibited the ordinary ...
— The Attache - or, Sam Slick in England, Complete • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... haven't got no grapevine, but I've got a wandering-jew-vine in a pot, that I want to set on the mantel." ...
— Patty at Home • Carolyn Wells
... space of very tense silence, during which my eyes roved to the little silver traveling-clock on the mantel, and then I said ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... tension seemed relaxed by the warm common-sense atmosphere of this trim little room, and his brother's composure. His lips were beginning to tremble, and he half turned and gripped the mantel-shelf with his right hand. Ralph noticed with a kind of contemptuous pity how the heavy girded folds of the frock seemed to contain nothing, and that the wrist from which the sleeve had fallen back was slender ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... living-room, their feet pressing without sound into the thick rugs. Everything here was fresh and new, but selected with excellent taste and careful attention to detail. Not a thing; was lacking, from the pretty upright piano to the enameled clock ticking upon the mantel. The dining-room was a picture, indeed, with stained-glass windows casting their soft lights through the draperies and the side-board shining with silver and glass. There was a cellarette in one corner, the Major noticed, and ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces • Edith Van Dyne
... glistening spar and curious fossils; these not gathered by any means in a single summer or in ordinary ramblings, but treasured long, and standing, some of them, for friendly memories—balanced on the one side a like grouping of shells and corals and sea-mosses on the other, upon a broad bracket-mantel put up over a little corner fireplace; for Miss Craydocke's room, joining the main house, took the benefit of ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... gaudy little prints, tempting spoil of pedlars, in honour of George Barnwell, the Prodigal Son, the Sailor's Return, and the Death of Nelson, decorate the walls, and an illuminated Christmas carol is pasted over the mantel-piece: which, among other chattels and possessions, conspicuously bears its own burden of Albert and Victoria—two plaster heads, resplendently coloured, highly varnished, looking with arched eye-brows of astonishment on their uninviting palace, and royally contrasting with the sombre ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... passed on: nothing could possibly be done materially to raise the standard of those wretched accommodations which the house offered. The dilapidated walls, the mouldering plaster, the blackened mantel-pieces, the stained and polluted wainscots—what could be attempted to hide or to repair all this by those who durst not venture abroad? Yet whatever could be done, Hannah did; and, in the mean time, very ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... open window and white netted curtains—Gladys' treasured work—the roses and sunbeams look in together, and the distant mountains are blue and hazy as the sky. Flowers are on the mantel-piece and tables, bridal-favours are scattered here and there. Above all, there is a large white and silver bow, surmounting that 'curiosity' in the corner, towards which all eyes occasionally turn. Perhaps we may as well peep within the little ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... curtains swaying in the breeze, the cool matting on the floor with a rug or two, the light bookcases with their wealth of thought, the comfortable wicker rockers, the bamboo tables holding several half cut magazines, an open work-basket, a vase with a single rose, while on the low mantel a cluster of graceful lilies were reflected in the mirror. "Why, this is home!" she cried and she laid her head against the cushions with a delightful sense ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... himself into an easy-chair, and crossed his legs: "I am not setting him up as a martyr in the least, but I think that, situated as we are, it is ridiculous to defy this man as you do, from morning till night." She took a cigarette from the mantel-piece, lighted it, and replied: "But I do not defy him, quite the contrary; only, he irritates me by his stupidity ... and I treat him as he deserves." Limousin continued impatiently: "What you are doing is very foolish! However, all women are alike. Look here: he is an excellent, kind ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... she sat up wiping away the tears and began to look around. Perhaps this was the home of some friend of her missionary. She felt comforted about staying here now. She lifted her eyes to the wall above the mantel and lo, there smiled the face of her dear friend, the mother, who had just gone home to heaven, and beneath it—as if that were not enough to bring a throb of understanding and joy to her heart—beneath it hung her ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... she said, to a copy of Andrea del Sarto's St. John that hung above the mantel. "This cruel war has taken my real father; it cannot take my godfather too." She gave herself a little shake, "It is that I am lonely that I think such sad thoughts, I will go out to the garden and pick flowers ...
— Lucia Rudini - Somewhere in Italy • Martha Trent
... disrespectfully, and had suggested many other ornaments which might be brought to take his place, but the doctor had never acted upon her suggestions. From the corner of one book-case there hung a huge wasp's nest, and over the mantel-shelf, which was only wide enough for some cigar boxes and a little clock and a few vials of medicines, was a rack where three or four riding whips and a curious silver bit and some long-stemmed pipes found unmolested quarters; and in one corner were some walking sticks and ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... formal room with its white marble centre-table adorned with a few gilt-topped books and a spindly lamp, the square piano, the stiff-looking chairs and rockers, the few pictures against the faded gold paper, the white mantel, set with shells and vases and a few photographs, the quaint curving-backed sofa between the side windows. He closed the door again and ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... day the bungalow has been flooded with poppies. Every vase and earthen jar is filled with them. They blaze on every mantel and run riot through all the rooms. I present them to my friends in huge bunches, and still the kind city folk come and gather more for me. "Sit down for a moment," I say to the departing guest. And there we sit in the shade of the porch while aspiring city creatures pluck ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... carpet on the floor; on the wall were occasional square-shaped interruptions of the general tint of the plaster which betrayed that there used to be pictures in the house—but there were none now. There were no mantel ornaments, unless one might bring himself to regard as an ornament a clock which never came within fifteen strokes of striking the right time, and whose hands always hitched together at twenty-two minutes past anything and ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... out of me though, was when Lucy Lee unpacks her collection of framed photos and ranges 'em on the mantel and dressin'-table. More'n a ...
— Torchy and Vee • Sewell Ford
... her; and she was turning away with a sickening sense of mockery at her own folly in seeking the empty shrine whence the oracle of her life had departed, when her eye fell on the engraving over the mantel-piece. It was the one thing for which Mr. Drake had begged as a memorial of Joe Brownlow, and it still hung in its old place. It was of the Great Physician, consoling and healing all around-the sick, the captive, the self-tormenting genius, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... look after," he said. "I thought I might get down before he went." A deep leathern arm-chair stood before the hearth where the young rector had been sitting, with the ladies at either corner of the mantel; Northwick let himself sink into it, and with a glance at the face of the faintly ticking clock on the black marble shelf before him, he added casually, "I must get an early train for Ponkwasset in the morning, and I still have some things ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... unmistakably his acquaintance of the haggard blue eyes—clothed in tatterdemalion soldier's gear of the sixteenth century. Another was a portrait of a majestic old lady, slightly resembling Marlowe. Trent, mechanically taking a cigarette from an open box on the mantel-shelf, lit it and stared at the photographs. Next he turned his attention to a flat leathern case ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... and Norma, incapable of any effort, at least until she could control the emotion that was shaking her like a vertigo, sank back into her own chair, unseeing and unhearing. The gold clock on the mantel ticked and tocked, the other three women chatted and laughed, and Chris contributed his share to the general conversation. But Norma's one desperate ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... seemed to be one of her earliest characteristics, and the young spring flowers of New England, in their airy delicacy and fragility, were much like herself; and so strong seemed the affinity between them, that not only Mrs. Pennel's best India china vases on the keeping-room mantel were filled, but here stood a tumbler of scarlet rock columbine, and there a bowl of blue and white violets, and in another place a saucer of shell-tinted crowfoot, blue liverwort, and white anemone, so that Zephaniah Pennel was wont to say there wasn't a drink of water ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... kerosene can on the mantel reposes, Its contents were sprinkled all over the fire, And all that poor Kathleen O'Donohue knows is, This dull world has changed for a sphere ...
— The New Pun Book • Thomas A. Brown and Thomas Joseph Carey
... his right hand down upon his knee with a thump that jarred the tin-plate and cups on the mantel-shelf, and then looked around with a severe frown to see what the chairs and the work-bench, and the walls and the rafters, had to say in response to his remarkable argument. He sat thus in a waiting attitude a moment, and then, finding that no response came from anything ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... etchings, foreign photographs, sketches put up with thumb tacks and bright hangings made it odd and attractive. On a low couch piled with cushions lay Helen's mandolin and a banjo. A plaster cast of some queer animal roosted on the mantel, craning its neck down ...
— The Bacillus of Beauty - A Romance of To-day • Harriet Stark
... and then halted in front of a basket of wonderful orchids near the window. On the mantel-piece and table tufts of violets sent forth their perfume, and in the warm, deep silence which seemed to fall from the hangings, the Baron sat down and stretched himself in one of the large armchairs, upholstered in blue satin striped ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... left hand on the edge of the velvet-covered mantel, and cast a furtive, gentle glance at Lissac that recalled a ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... cabinet fortygraph of him for the cabin mantel-piece, Jack," continued the wily father. "He gave it to me o' purpose. She'll see that when she won't see the clerk, an' by-and-bye she'll fall into our way of thinking. Anyway, she's going to stay here till ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... town in West Virginia, my father and I were left alone, except for the spasmodic appearances of the red-haired slattern. Gradually the dust began to settle and thicken on the dried cat-tails in the china vases upon the mantel; the "prize" red geranium dropped its blossoms and withered upon the sill; the soaking dish-cloths lay in a sloppy pile on the kitchen floor; and the vegetable rinds were left carelessly to rot in the bucket beside the sink. The old neatness and order had departed before ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... found, monuments of the "Bad Old Times"—memorials of the "Dark Ages"—when lath and stucco existed not, and the "Jerry-builder" had no being. But where, among them all, might be found such another parlour as this at Dapplemere, with its low, raftered ceiling, its great, carved mantel, its panelled walls whence old portraits looked down at one like dream faces, from dim, and nebulous backgrounds. And where might be found two such bright-eyed, rosy-cheeked, quick-footed, deft-handed Phyllises as ...
— The Money Moon - A Romance • Jeffery Farnol
... chair she had placed for him, and remained standing by the mantel-piece, thinking of the scenes of his early introduction to that kitchen. It wore the same look it had done then; under Barby's rule it was precisely the same thing it had been under Cynthia's. The passing years seemed a dream, and the passing generations of men a ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell
... only a brief description. There were generally but two rooms, one below, the other above, approached by a ladder in a corner. The lower floor was parlor, kitchen, and often bedroom. The fireplace was deep and wide, surmounted, perhaps, by a broad mantel of unpainted oak, on which were a few trinkets and the violin so precious to the backwoodsman. In one corner was a spinning-jenny, in another an uncushioned settle, and opposite the fireplace a bureau or chest of drawers of native wood and home manufacture. These, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... at the foot of the high pulpit and dominie Bogardus told us the story of the Birthday of Our Lord in simple words which we could all understand. Early in the morning we ran down to the sitting room where our stockings were hanging from the mantel shelf filled by Santa Claus with Christmas gifts, with more piled on the table for our friends and for poor families. That was what an effusive writer once called the "halcyon and vociferous" beginning ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... respect on either side of a low marble mantel bearing a wonderful golden clock stood two gentlemen. One of them was my uncle, Monsieur Marbois, and the other, whom I did not know, I learned later was Minister Decres. Gesticulating vehemently and speaking with great excitement, through the center of the room back ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... dinner-table of the late Dr. Kitchiner, and, inter alios, the late George Colman, who was an especial favourite; his interpolation of a little monosyllable in a written admonition which the doctor caused to be placed on the mantel-piece of the dining-parlour will never be forgotten, and was the origin of such a drinking bout as was seldom permitted under his roof. The caution ran thus: "Come at seven, go at eleven." Colman briefly altered the sense of it; for, upon the Doctor's attention being directed to the card, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... saw her looking so well," agreed Hepatica, straightening chairs and settling couch pillows, trailing here and there in her pretty frock with all the energy of the early morning, as if it were not half-after eleven by the little mantel clock. "Didn't you like her, dear?" She threw an eager glance at me. She was in the restless mood of the hostess who wishes to be assured ...
— A Court of Inquiry • Grace S. Richmond
... by our visit, ushered us into a small parlor, which was furnished a little more like a room in a private dwelling than others that we entered, and had a row of religious books and fashionable novels on the mantel-piece. An old lady sat at a bright coal-fire, reading a romance, and rose to receive us with a certain pomp of manner and elaborate display of ceremonious courtesy, which, in spite of myself, made me inwardly question the genuineness of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fireplace. A heavy chair was standing directly in front of it, but curiously enough, with its back to what must have been once a cheery blaze. They moved around it carefully and bent to examine the pretty Delft tiles that framed the yawning chimney-place, below the mantel. Then Joyce stepped back to look at the plates and vases on the mantel. Suddenly she gave ...
— The Boarded-Up House • Augusta Huiell Seaman
... manner, until he had manufactured into delicate shavings the whole of his raw materiel, when he very deliberately resumed a position of more ease and security, by resting his chair on two legs instead of one, and putting both his feet on the mantel piece. Then, lighting his cigar, he said in his usual ...
— The Clockmaker • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... the heavily stuccoed ceiling, admitted to be one of the finest specimens of its kind in Washington, as well as the richness of the carvings ornamenting the mantel of Italian marble rising above the accursed hearthstone, only served to make more evident the extreme neglect into which the rest of the room had sunk. Being anything but anxious to subject myself further to its unhappy ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... contributions is not at all gauged by the space they fill nor by the impression they make on the wondering gaze; articles of great merit and utility often making no figure at all compared with a case of figured silks or mantel ornaments which answer no purpose here but the owner's. And when it is considered that the manufacturers of France, Germany and Switzerland, as well as England, are here displaying their wares and fabrics before the ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... in competition. A most sumptuous Gothic apartment was that styled the "Salle Echevinale," restored with great skill in recent years by a concurrence of Flemish artists, members of the Academy. Upon either side of a magnificent stone mantel, bearing statues in niches of kings, counts and countesses, bishops and high dignitaries, were large well executed frescoes by MM. Swerts and Guffens, showing figures of the evangelists St. Mark and St. John, surrounded by myriads of counts and countesses ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... darkling than usual in the insufficient illumination of the far from brilliant lamps. Mount Dunstan, after standing upon the hearth for a few minutes smoking a pipe, which would have compared ill with old Doby's Sunday splendour, left his coffee cup upon the mantel and began to tramp up and down—out of the dim light into the shadows, back out of the shadows ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... that!" gasped Lieutenant Greg Holmes ironically, and he appeared to need the support of the mantel at ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... mind, so far, the next thing to do (with the clock on the mantel-piece striking midnight) was to go ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... (leaving window and looking at clock on mantel). Ten minutes past nine and Emma not here yet. It does seem too bad that she should worry Ed so much just for independence' sake. I am quite sure I should never want to ride a wheel anyhow, and ...
— The Bicyclers and Three Other Farces • John Kendrick Bangs
... Miss Fidely, brightening up, "we'll settle. If you'll just lift the lid of that old teapot standin' on the mantel-shelf, you'll find three one-dollar bills and a two. I wish 'twas ...
— The Wooing of Calvin Parks • Laura E. Richards
... characteristics, and the young spring flowers of New England, in their airy delicacy and fragility, were much like herself; and so strong seemed the affinity between them, that not only Mrs. Pennel's best India china vases on the keeping-room mantel were filled, but here stood a tumbler of scarlet rock columbine, and there a bowl of blue and white violets, and in another place a saucer of shell-tinted crowfoot, blue liverwort, and white anemone, so that Zephaniah Pennel was wont to say there wasn't a drink of water to be got, ...
— The Pearl of Orr's Island - A Story of the Coast of Maine • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the mirror opposite the flowery window, and so made the room a very bower. They fixed a magnificent crucifix of ivory and gold over the mantel-piece, and they took away his hassock of rushes and substituted a prie-dieu of rich crimson velvet. All that remained was to put their blue cover, with its golden cross, on the table. To do this, however, they had to remove the priest's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... his lordship waiting," said the doctor, quietly going on with his tying; and Aunt Hannah toddled back to look at the drawing-room mantel-clock. ...
— The Weathercock - Being the Adventures of a Boy with a Bias • George Manville Fenn
... up wiping away the tears and began to look around. Perhaps this was the home of some friend of her missionary. She felt comforted about staying here now. She lifted her eyes to the wall above the mantel and lo, there smiled the face of her dear friend, the mother, who had just gone home to heaven, and beneath it—as if that were not enough to bring a throb of understanding and joy to her heart—beneath it hung her own little jewelled riding ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... stopped — not the mantel's; Geneva's farthest skill Can't put the puppet bowing That just ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... coarser folk can judge, to hurt the better feelings of the most exquisite purist. A cherry-red half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and threw quite a glow on the floor. Twelve cockle-shells and a half- penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf. Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust contained sea-shells. And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text. It was patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old brocade and Chinese ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... leant on the mantel-shelf, and commenced a conversation sotto voce on the subject nearest his heart; while Cecil continued ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... went into the drawing-room, where the old, ugly lamp added its light to the candles on the mantel-piece. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... a dark floor is the beginning, and the walls grow lighter as the ceiling is approached. The richest effects should be congregated at the mantel, with the fire as ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... state in which their predecessor left it. The gilding of the pier-glasses was rubbed off; the paint on the cornices was hardly visible through the layers of dust that time had collected. The fine large rooms still retained certain sculptured marble mantel-pieces and ceilings, worthy of Versailles, together with the old furniture of the widow Bidault. The latter consisted of a curious mixture of walnut armchairs, disjointed, and covered with tapestry; rosewood bureaus; round tables on single pedestals, with ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... to the Czaritza, who received me in the same style of simple friendliness, and then, pointing to a money-box which formed a conspicuous object on the mantel-shelf, he added: ...
— The International Spy - Being the Secret History of the Russo-Japanese War • Allen Upward
... "Le COurt Mantel," an old French piece and Mr. Evans (Specimens of Welsh Poetry) from an ancient MS, of Tegan Earfron, one of Arthur's mistresses, who possessed a mantle which would not fit immodest women. See also in Spenser, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... cherry-wood from the neighboring forest; walls that were wainscoted in the black oak of the country, and a few other articles, of a fashion so antique, and of ornaments so ingenious and rich, as to announce that they had been transported from beyond sea. Above the mantel were suspended the armorial bearings of the Heathcotes and the Hardings, elaborately ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... seven inches; carved-wood—Italian—five and three quarter inches each; old glass on mantelpiece—seven inches. And below this, dated the third: Last night, between midnight and daylight, the candle in the glass holder on the right side of the mantel was burned ...
— The Confession • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... such a dainty piece of sewing. Let us buy her some kind of an ornament. It is true that the French clock and the vases and the match receivers and two or three pictures on easels already crowd the mantel-piece, but there is an odd little bronze image which would not be amiss among them. It costs rather more than we can afford to pay, but we love her, and wish to give her something, and are at our wits' end to know what. She receives it ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... ships.—Anthony, go down into the wine-cellar, the inner cellar, Anthony, and bring me a bottle of that old madeira of '37—stop, Anthony; make it '39. I think, judge, it is a little dryer.' Well, Anthony bowed, and left the room, and in a few moments he came back, set a lighted candle on the mantel, and, leanin' over my chair, said in a loud whisper: 'De cellar am locked, suh, and I'm 'feard Mis' ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith
... beautiful dark eyes. As far as we could see the old house plainly showed the change. The furniture and ornaments were of a period long past, but everything was scrupulously neat. Hanging over the old marble mantel was a painting which quite evidently was that of the long since deceased Mrs. Haswell, the mother of Grace. In spite of the hideous style of dress of the period after the war, she had evidently been ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... for her. "Oh, no—it was only the first time," said Margaret, losing the sense of the painful vacancy in her absorbing desire not to distress her father, and thinking only of him as she watched him standing for some minutes leaning on the mantel-shelf with his hand ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... so at once." And La Boulaye took down an inkhorn a quill, and a sheaf of paper from the mantel-shelf behind him. These he placed on the table, and setting a chair, he signed to the aristocrat to ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... Bethlehem manger in the Dutch Reform Church at the foot of the high pulpit and dominie Bogardus told us the story of the Birthday of Our Lord in simple words which we could all understand. Early in the morning we ran down to the sitting room where our stockings were hanging from the mantel shelf filled by Santa Claus with Christmas gifts, with more piled on the table for our friends and for poor families. That was what an effusive writer once called the "halcyon and vociferous" beginning ...
— My Friends at Brook Farm • John Van Der Zee Sears
... a light wine and very soft to an appreciative palate. In some vague way the act was vastly insolent. Temple appeared uncertain, no uncommon thing with him; then, going to set his emptied glass down he put an elbow on the mantel, dropped his head, and spoke ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory
... the mantel—it had wooden works and Martha wound it each night before she went to bed—banged its gong ten times. Mr. Bangs descended from Egypt as if he had fallen from a palm tree, alighting upon reality and Cape ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... corduroy trousers thrust into greased laced boots, and a black cotton shirt open on a chest and throat like pink marble. And David supported his lanky length, in a careless and dust-colored garb, with a capacious hand on the oak beam of the mantel. ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... took off his overcoat, and turned up the light in the tiny parlor. She flung her wraps over a chair, storming back and forth like a little fury. Her eyes were starry with tears of anger, her face was flushed, her hands worked nervously. He leaned against the mantel, watching ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... seems to have been in thrall to six haircloth chairs, a slippery sofa to match, and a very cold, marble-top center table, from the beginning of this century down to comparatively recent times. In all the best homes there was also a marble mantel to match the center table; on one end of this mantel was a blue glass vase containing a bouquet of paper roses, and on the other a plaster-of-Paris cat. Above the mantel hung a wreath of wax flowers in a glass case. In such houses were usually to be seen gaudy-colored ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... had thrown an impenetrable veil over it and left to tradition and fable and conjecture to say what had once been there portrayed. During the rule of many successive governors it had hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the mantel piece of the same chamber, and it still kept its place when Lieutenant-governor Hutchinson assumed the administration of the province on the ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bloodshed was included in Nancy's plan. It must be explained that when young Ensign Carey and Margaret Gilbert had been married, Cousin Ann Chadwick had presented them with four tall black and white marble mantel ornaments shaped like funeral urns; and then, feeling that she had not yet shown her approval of the match sufficiently, she purchased a large group of clay statuary entitled ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... money she earned into the little tin chimney bank which stood on the mantel shelf in her room. She called it the "ring fund" and to Sarah it seemed that there must be money enough already in it to buy several rings. But Rosemary was positive she still needed ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... bookcases, low and topped with bric-a-brac; the etchings and prints on the walls, which the elder Mavering went up to look at with a mystifying air of understanding such things; the foils crossed over the chimney, and the mantel with its pipes, and its photographs of theatrical celebrities tilted about over it—spoke of conditions mostly foreign to Mrs. Pasmer's memories of Harvard. The photographed celebrities seemed to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... replied; and then they went on to tell me that at the hour in question Mr. S. and his son, a young man of about twenty, had entered their dining-room together and seen me standing leaning against the mantel-shelf. They were both hard-headed Scotchmen engaged in business in Edinburgh, and certainly not the sort of people to conjure up fanciful imaginings, nor is it likely that the same fancy should have occurred to both of them; and therefore I can only suppose ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... house made as green as spring-tide with their abundant decorations, tastefully arranged in wreaths and folds and circles, with the great green "Merrie Christmas" welcoming all comers from over the high parlor mantel. All was finished in ample time before the day of Christmas Eve arrived, though there were dozens of final touches still to be made, last happy thoughts that had to be worked out in green, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... vase. I'm going to put a running border of roses and pansies on it,—the sweetest pictures you ever saw,—and I'll put it on the mantel for flowers." ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... Seldom were more than half of them simultaneously busy, and their differences of opinion as to the hour were radical and irreconcilable. The big, emphatic eight-day, opposite the front door, might proclaim that it was eleven, only to be at once contradicted by the little tinkler on the parlor mantel, which announced that it was six, thereby starting up the cathedral case on the stairway and the Grandfather in the dining-room, who held out respectively for eight and two, while all the time it was really half-past one. Thence arose in the early days painful misunderstandings on the part ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... different. I had put it on the mantel over the stove I was using up-stairs the night before, and hadn't touched it since. As I sat staring at it, Terry took it from Peter and ...
— The Case of Jennie Brice • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... ornamented the mantel-piece representing the templar Bois-Guilbert bearing off a gilded Rebecca upon a silver horse. On either side of this frightful time-piece were placed two ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... against the mantel-piece, slid her hands into her pockets and looked down at her mother with faint ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... tidy little place, divided into two rooms—parlour and bedroom. The parlour was pasted all over with cheap prints reminding one of home, mostly taken from 'Punch' and the 'Illustrated London News.' Photographs of old friends were also hung over the mantel-shelf. The floor was neat and clean; the little pot was simmering over the little fire, and all was getting ready for breakfast. A very pleasant picture ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... the gloom a little, and under the influence of the tea they brightened up and gradually got more cheerful. They discussed the sermon and the singing, and the mistake of the sexton in digging the grave in the wrong place, and the large congregation. From the mantel-piece I watched the group. They had waffles for supper,—of which I had been exceedingly fond, but now I saw them ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... the fire got lower and lower; and still Melchior sat, with his eyes fixed on a dirty old print, that had hung above the mantel-piece for years, sipping his 'brew,' which was fast getting cold. The print represented an old man in a light costume, with a scythe in one hand, and an hour-glass in the other; and underneath the picture in flourishing capitals was the ...
— In the Yule-Log Glow, Book II - Christmas Tales from 'Round the World • Various
... the door opened, was well furnished, with an open hearth, and a fire laid ready there, and even a row of saucepans twinkling above the mantel-shelf. ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... painful silence. George rose, and walking to the mantel-piece, looked down at the hearth and tapped the ironwork with his foot. He would fain have made the best of what he ruefully recognized to be a shabby situation by treating it jocosely; but her grave, grieved demeanor forbade. Yet ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... You dare to name yourself to me in the same breath with her? Get up, and look at yourself!" He pointed to a cracked mirror on the mantel-piece. "Look!" he said hoarsely, thrusting her away from him again. "Do you see how coarse and heavy and rough you are? She was light and delicate—like a snowflake. She never seemed to touch the ground. Your hair is like string—your hands are large—your voice is harsh. Her hair was ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... this room for the last century. It is of carved stone in the style of the Louis XV. period, and is ornamented with a mirror, let in to the back with gilt beaded moulding. This anachronism, to which the family is indifferent, would grieve a poet. On the mantel-shelf, covered with red velvet, is a tall clock of tortoise-shell inlaid with brass, flanked on each side with a silver candelabrum of singular design. A large square table, with solid legs, fills the centre of this room; ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... Steyne was standing by the fire sipping coffee. The fire crackled and blazed pleasantly There was a score of candles sparkling round the mantel piece, in all sorts of quaint sconces, of gilt and bronze and porcelain. They lighted up Rebecca's figure to admiration, as she sat on a sofa covered with a pattern of gaudy flowers. She was in a pink dress that looked as fresh as ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... at random, all well-stuffed and of lazy or voluptuous shapes, composed the furniture of that famous room, where the most momentous and the most trivial questions were discussed with the same gravity of tone and manner. There was a beautiful portrait of the duchess on the wall; and on the mantel a bust of the duke, the work of Felicia Ruys, which had received the honor of a medal of the first ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... the least uncomfortable chair in the room, which from his point of view was to say little in its favor; because the newest piece of furniture there, has been made a hundred years before the world understood that lounging was not a crime. Over the high, stone mantel hung a shield, so brightly polished as to fulfil the office of a mirror, and from where Egon sat, perforce upright and rigid, he could see himself ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... notables, Wulf came forth, clad in splendid armour inlaid with gold, wearing on his shoulder a mantel set with gems and on his breast the gleaming Star of the Luck of Hassan. To Rosamund he strode and stood by her, his hands resting on the hilt of ...
— The Brethren • H. Rider Haggard
... of a mahogany sideboard, table, and chairs,—ponderous in pattern; and a series of family portraits, in a sprawling style of art, smirked and postured on the wall. The floor was bare, but shone by reason of repeated scrubbing, and the black mantel-piece was a fine specimen of colonial carving ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... present stimulus has something in {453} common with the stimulus which has in the past aroused a certain perception, we may make the same response now as we did before—especially, of course, if the present mantel ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... On one side shone a brass candle-stick, bright as gold, ornamented with an end of wax candle; on the other side, was one of those lamps formed of a cylinder, with a tin reflector, mounted upon a steel stem, with a leaden stand. A tolerably large glass, in a frame of black wood, surmounted the mantel. ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... the way it is at home. We do not have dinner till supper-time, and there is no mantel or fireplace in my room, although the furniture is grander than anything I ever saw. I set William's photograph on the dresser, and I can tell by the way he looks at me all day long that he would not approve of the way I am carrying on. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... take them for the world!" cried the rabbit. "I didn't know they were yours, it's all a mistake," and he placed the bank right back on the mantel. "But perhaps you could tell me where to find my fortune," said Uncle Wiggily, and he told the pussy ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... the bedroom had an old-fashioned chimney-piece that was fitted with a loose wooden mantel-board, from which hung a border of needlework. It was quite easy to lift up this board and slip the papers between it and the chimney-piece; the border completely screened the hiding-place, and, except at a spring-cleaning, the arrangement was not likely to be disturbed. Ulyth ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... natural grouping of articles of daily use,—swords, belts, pistols, rifles, field-glasses, spurs, canteens, gauntlets,—while wreaths of gray moss above the windows, and a pelican's wing three feet long over the high mantel-piece, indicated more deliberate decoration. This, and the whole atmosphere of the place, spoke of the refining presence of agreeable women; and it was pleasant when they held their little court in the evening, and pleasant all day, with the different ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... of the department, from whom she received her work, was a man of middle-age, of rather stern and forbidding aspect; and as she approached his desk, he pointed to the clock on the mantel-piece. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... that it was handsomely and liberally furnished with luxurious divans, capacious easy-chairs, a piano, a table loaded with the papers and periodicals of the day, an enormous mirror over the black marble mantel-piece, a clock with a set of silvery chimes for the quarters, and a deep, mellow-toned gong for the hours, and so many pictures that the whole available surface of the walls was completely covered with them. These pictures— executed in both oil and water-colour—represented out-of-the-way ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the thousands that were homeless. Bertie,—he was six then,—he listened to the account of the children walking the streets, crying because they hadn't a roof over them or anything to eat. He didn't say a word, but he climbed up to the mantel and took down his little ...
— The Story of the Red Cross as told to The Little Colonel • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... words had hit the victor hard. Who can say what hidden string they touched, or what prescience of evil they awakened? But they went nigh to felling her. Clutching the mantel-piece, Lady Bellamy gasped for air; then, recovering ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... but the up-to-dateness here stops abruptly; the salle a manger is bare and uninviting, and the rooms above equally so, and the electric light has not penetrated beyond the ground floor. Instead one finds ranged on the mantel, above the cook-stove in the kitchen, a regiment of candlesticks, in strange contrast to the rest of the furnishings. Electric bells, too, are wanting, and there is still found the row of jangling grelots, their numbers half-obliterated, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... Slote is a large man at home and a giant to his wife. In his first term he comes to Washington a month ahead of the date set for the assembling of Congress, because he wants the Capital to get used to him gradually. He hires a couple of rooms in a hotel. His wife puts some flowers on the mantel piece in the sitting-room and wears her best dress all the time while she is waiting for the president's consort and the cabinet ladies to call. They do not call. The Hon. Slote is shocked almost to dumbness ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... always after legends when he has tired of collecting antiquities. Was there a Princess born here? Perhaps. At any rate it is not a legend; history nor peasantry make mention of it. Will Herr be so kind as to carry the ladder to the mantel so ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath
... the parlor mantel," advised Mrs. Pawket. "The twins is comin' up the road. I can hear them hollerin' at that echo down by the swamps. Leave it be; they'll attend ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... this crisis, quietly took the opportunity of gliding from the room. Sir Henry stretched his legs on an ottoman, and appeared immersed in the study of a print—the Europa of Paul Veronese—which hung over the mantel-piece. ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... absolution stamped upon them from the eleventh to the thirteenth century; medals and tokens of many local abbeys and confreries; coins of the Dukes of Normandy from 911 to 1216; an eleventh-century Oliphant; some glass mosaics; and the statue of Henri Court Mantel from his tomb in the Cathedral. All these are in the first room. In the next are Roman vases and glassware; some fine bronze weapons; and a large Gallo-Roman mosaic; also "La Capucine," as the first municipal fire-engine was called, which was only instituted in 1719. It was only in 1686 that ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... The onyx marble mantel-piece contained but a single ornament—an orchestra. A coral vase contained a large and perfect tiger lily, made of gold. Each stamen supported a tiny figure carved out of ivory, holding a musical instrument. When they played, each figure appeared instinct with life, like the mythical fairies ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... concerned. His apparent pliability hid a dexterity which evaded every recognized principle. In vain she exerted the influence with which he had pretended to invest her. The first effort proved that it had never really existed. It was no more in his life than the valuable ornament on his mantel-shelf—a thing to be dusted, preserved, and admired in leisure hours, never set to serious use. This last discovery, made shortly after their arrival in Madras, had broken her. From that moment she had felt herself crippled. Her life became a blank, colorless waste, all the more ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... her go out there while you were having your after-dinner smoke. I saw her go out there and stand by the hat-rack and pretend to be patting and admiring that beautiful fur. My back was turned, but the mirror over the mantel showed it." ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King
... the long living room, where a deep fireplace (happily the chimney had drawn well from the first, or the builder would have been sore perplexed) gave a look of hospitality to the otherwise severe furnishings. The fireplace and mantel-shelf were Gaston's pride and delight. Upon them he had worked his fanciful designs, and the result was most satisfactory. There was a low, broad couch near the hearth piled with pine cushions covered with odds and ends of material that had come into a man's ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... room in the Confederate Capitol at Richmond, two days later. A long table is on the right. Two small tables on left. Doors right and left, and mantel center. ...
— A Man of the People - A Drama of Abraham Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... emergency station at the heart of war. We took hold of a room knee-high with battered furniture and wet plaster, cleaned it, spread army blankets on springs, found a bowl and jug, and made a den for the chauffeur. In our own room, we arranged an old lamp, then a shade to soften the light. On a mantel, were puttees, cold cream and a couple of books; in the wall, nails for coats and scarfs. The soldiers, entering, said it was homelike. It was a rest after the dreariness of the trench. We brought glass from Furnes, and patched the windows. ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... bunk. The walls had been papered with old charts, and he saw that most of them were of the New York-New Jersey area. A ship's lantern, wired for electricity, hung so low that it almost brushed Scotty's head. Ship models lined the mantel. ...
— Smugglers' Reef • John Blaine
... broke out sternly, "if it's neither drink, nor a scandal——" There, he stopped; for Hamilton, utterly unconscious of us, moved, rather than walked, automatically across the room. Throwing his hat down, he bowed his head over both arms above the mantel-piece. ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... rhythm to a man's walk, depending on the length of his legs, which beat more or less rapidly as they are longer or shorter, like metronomes differently adjusted, or the pendulums of different time-keepers. Commodore Nutt is to M. Bihin in this respect as a little, fast-ticking mantel-clock is to an ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... he proceeded, with facile pen, to furnish the house. There was the Log-Fire Room, with the print of George Washington over the mantel, with Jean's knitting on the table; Muffin on one side of the fire, and Polly Ann on the other. He even started to put Jean in one of the big chairs, but she made him rub it out. "Not yet, Derry. You see, I am not living ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... sport of heronry. A long massive oak table, with a side board of the same wood and style of construction, and numerous high-backed chairs, completed the furniture of the room, while at the inner end was a huge fire-place, with a mantel-piece high above it, and carved oak seats on either side. The hall was used generally for banquets and other entertainments; smaller rooms leading off it were more ...
— John Deane of Nottingham - Historic Adventures by Land and Sea • W.H.G. Kingston
... containing with difficulty a hat-rack and a table on which rested a card tray with cards. In the course of greeting an elderly woman, he stepped into the parlor. This was a small square apartment carpeted in dark Brussels, and stuffily glorified in the bourgeois manner by a white marble mantel-piece, several pieces of mahogany furniture upholstered in haircloth, a table on which reposed a number of gift books in celluloid and other fancy bindings, an old-fashioned piano with a doily and a bit of china statuary, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... house, was therefore very spacious and comfortable, possessing three large pantries and an out-house or summer kitchen; besides, moreover, it was dark-raftered, ham-hung, with willow-pattern slates in a neat dresser, and peacock feathers over the high mantel; with, in one corner—the darkest—a covered well, into which I used to see myself the beautiful golden pats of butter lowered twice a week in summer time. One window, a small one, curtained with chintz ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... private library, consisting chiefly of the statutes at large, Hansard, the Annual Register, Parliamentary Reports, and legal treatises on the powers and duties of justices of the peace. A portrait of his mother is over the mantel-piece: opposite it a huge map of the county. His correspondence on public business with the secretary of state, and the various authorities of the shire, is admirably arranged: for the duke was what ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... coming in. When I were walking. When I were thinking. When I - ' It seized him again; and he stood up, holding by the mantel-shelf, as he pressed his dank cold hair down with a hand that shook ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... square apartment, with low ceiling, a small hearthstone and an immense bedstead with tester and outer coverings of flowered chintz. The light from the two small candles upon the high mantel-shelf were dimmed by the greater light from ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... tiny clock on the mantel began pealing the hour of eight. As though this were a signal for entrance, the door at the end of the bookcase opened noiselessly and a man, smooth faced, his hair brushed low across his forehead, stepped quietly ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... tavern, that which played the part in this dram-shop of the chandelier of an opera house, was the fire. This cellar was so damp that the fire was never allowed to go out, even in midsummer; an immense chimney with a sculptured mantel, all bristling with heavy iron andirons and cooking utensils, with one of those huge fires of mixed wood and peat which at night, in village streets make the reflection of forge windows stand out so red on the opposite walls. A ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... drawer with fingers that twitched guiltily, and gave a jerk. It was locked. For a moment her disappointment was so great that she was ready to cry, but her face soon cleared and she began a search for the keys. Under the rug, in the vases on the mantel, behind photograph frames, into every crack where a key could be hidden, she peered with eager brown eyes. It was not to be found. Finally she climbed on a chair to the highest closet shelf, where she came across something that made her give a cry of delight. It was ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the house was ransacked from top to bottom, and the robber was about to abandon the search, when a sudden thought occurred to him. On the mantel-piece ticked a wooden American clock, about two feet high. The man opened the door in the case, and fumbled about with his finger. Next moment he had drawn out the nugget. He bent over the fire to get a better look at it, and then ...
— The Monkey That Would Not Kill • Henry Drummond
... became illuminated, bringing the pictures on the walls, the heavy satin curtains, the handsome furniture, the tables covered with costly knick-knacks, the large Japan vases, and a huge clock upon the mantel-piece, into view. All bore a gay and festive appearance, much at variance ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... the opposite side of the room, and was leaning with one arm on the mantel. In spite of the seriousness of the affair, it was impossible not to be amused by this sudden turn. Bell's eyes shifted ...
— Love Under Fire • Randall Parrish
... fell limp in a moment. One hand dropped by her side, the other rested on a fossil on the mantel-shelf, and she stared ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... though inconclusive, had stirred in John's mind an uneasiness which was near to apprehension. He turned and walked about the familiar room, recognizing the well-known furniture, his mother's picture over the mantel, the bookshelves filled with his boyhood's accumulations, the well-remembered pattern of the carpet, and the wall-paper—nothing was changed. It was all as he had left it two years ago, and for the time it seemed as if he had merely dreamed the life and experiences ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... made always stood on Mother's mantel, and they called it the "Home Bank," because every penny that could be spared was dropped in there for the building ...
— Mother Stories • Maud Lindsay
... awaited me, and enchanted with my own idiotic heroism, I went to her in the evening. She received me in the parlour with her mother, and I was delighted to see the pier-glass over the mantel, and the china displayed on a little table. After a hundred words of love and tenderness she asked me to come up to her room, and her mother wished us good night. I was overwhelmed with joy. After a delicate little supper ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... crosses the room, and, taking up a position where his eyes can gloat upon Sybil's face, he rests one elbow upon a mantel, and so, in a comfortable after-dinner attitude, continues his pleasant meditations. Sybil stirs uneasily, but notices his proximity in no other way. Presently her eyes shoot straight past him, and she says to Evan ...
— The Diamond Coterie • Lawrence L. Lynch
... swimming in and out through openings in the rushes, rippling the glassy water, and raising spangles in their wake. The countenance of the lava beds became less and less forbidding. Tufts of pale grasses, relieved on the jet rocks, looked like ornaments on a mantel, thick-furred mats of emerald mosses appeared in damp spots next the shore, and I noticed one tuft of small ferns. From year to year in the kindly weather the beds are thus gathering ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... Fourth's Pavilion at Brighton. The inventive and industrious Parisian workmen had moulded the doors and window-frames; the ceilings were imitated from the middle-ages or those of a Venetian palace; marble veneering abounded on the outer walls. Steinbock and Francois Souchet had designed the mantel-pieces and the panels above the doors; Schinner had painted the ceilings in his masterly manner. The beauties of the staircase, white as a woman's arm, defied those of the hotel Rothschild. On account of the riots and the unsettled ...
— Paz - (La Fausse Maitresse) • Honore de Balzac
... was very small. Edna's round mahogany would have almost filled it. As it was there was but a step or two from the little table to the kitchen, to the mantel, the small buffet, and the side door that opened out ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... starting out to blow myself, or you, Honora," he said, poking with his stick a marmouset of the carved stone mantel, "I'd get a little more for my money ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... gate, and along a long stone passage, and up stone stairs into the great hall of state. Don Loris, as once before, sat peevishly by the huge fireplace. This time he was almost inside it, with its hood and mantel actually over his head. The Lady Fani sat there ...
— The Pirates of Ersatz • Murray Leinster
... the face of the amazed Harvester, who turned to the Girl as she leaned against the mantel. He stood absorbing the glowing picture of beauty and health that she made. She had removed her travelling dress and shoes, and was draped in a fleecy white wool kimono and wearing night slippers. Her hair hung in two big braids as it had during her illness. She was ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... that the winter is especially trying to the moral character of our young men, because some of their homes in winter are especially unattractive. In summer they can sit on the steps, or have a bouquet in the vase on the mantel; and the evenings are so short that soon after gas-light they feel like retiring. Parents do not take enough pains to make these long winter ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... seriousness. Their surroundings may have had something to do with this, for their papers were spread out on the leather-covered table in the directors' room at the bank, immediately under the eye of a former president, whose portrait hung over the mantel-piece, while the large-faced clock on the wall gave forth its majestic ...
— Mr. Pat's Little Girl - A Story of the Arden Foresters • Mary F. Leonard
... like Kitty, had been spending her morning assisting in preparations for the New Year callers who would present themselves later in the day, was dusting the quaint Dresden Shepherdess who presided over a corner of the drawing-room mantel, when a sharp knock at the front door announced a visitor; and she fled out of the drawing-room only to encounter ...
— An Unwilling Maid • Jeanie Gould Lincoln
... reminding you of the BOURBONS. As, although lighting his lamp, he has, abstractedly, almost covered it with his hat, his room is but imperfectly illuminated, and you can just detect the accordeon on the window-sill, and, above the mantel, an unfinished sketch of a school-girl. (There is no artistic merit in this picture; in which, indeed, a simple triangle on end represents the waist, another and slightly larger triangle the skirts, and straight-lines with rake-like ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 11, June 11, 1870 • Various
... Sir Isaac was heard to break a little china figure of the goddess Kwannon, that had stood upon his study mantel-shelf. The fragments were found ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
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