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More "Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... church Father Tom remembered that he had caught sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage was ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... countries to study their educational systems, and have returned home with innumerable fads—but no system. Everything of the fantastic has been copied, but no foundations have been laid; with the result that England's educational system to-day resembles a piece of patchwork containing a rich variety of colours and a still greater variety of stuff-quality. It were better for us to have done with educationists who preach about 'the rigid uniformity of system which is alien both to the English temperament and to the ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... replied Morey without turning from his station at the window. Below them now, less than half a mile down on the patchwork of the Nile valley, men were standing, staring up, collecting in little groups, gesticulating toward the strange thing that had materialized in the air ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... getting ready of the machine, the brief examination of the controls, first Archie and then his observer, a young officer named Carleton, taking their seats, the word given, and then all other sound shut out by the dull roar of the engine—-it was always like that. Lines of trees, patchwork patterns made by the fields, and oddly grouped farm buildings swept along beneath the soaring plane, growing smaller with uncanny rapidity. The day's work started. That was all it amounted to. In the airdrome they had left behind, the eyes that had followed their first moments ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Flying Corps • James R. Driscoll
... heart and its cares. Upon his wishing to confess to him all his many small sins, Staupitz insisted first on distinguishing between what were really sins, and what were not; as for self-imagined sins, or such a patchwork of offences as Luther laid before him, he would not listen to them; that was not the kind of seriousness, he would say, that God wished to have. Luther tormented himself with a system of penance, consisting of actual pain, punishments, and expiations. ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... Semiramis is a motley patchwork of the French manner and mistaken imitations. It has something of Hamlet, and something of Clytemnestra and Orestes; but nothing of any of them as it ought to be. The passion for an unknown son is borrowed from the Semiramis of ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... -aediles- and -tresviri- are grotesquely mingled with -agoranomi- and -demarchi-; pieces whose scene is laid in Aetolia or Epidamnus send the spectator without scruple to the Velabrum and the Capitol. Such a patchwork of Roman local tints distributed over the Greek ground is barbarism enough; but interpolations of this nature, which are often in their naive way very ludicrous, are far more tolerable than that thorough alteration of the pieces into a ruder shape, which the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... the interstices of the foliage of a poplar, sensitive to a slight breeze, came between the lattices in trembling patchwork on the bed, flickering over her face and losing itself in ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... The view is bounded north and west only by hills: on the north by the North Downs, with Leith Hill standing forward, as if advancing to meet a southern champion, and in the west, Blackdown, Hind Head and the Hog's Back. The patchwork of the Weald is between. The view from the Dyke Hill, looking north, is comparable to that from Leith Hill, looking south; and every day in fine weather there are tourists on both of these altitudes gazing towards each other. The ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... artfully transposed; Charles Wilmot's (1774) was only an abridgment like Florian's, but not so skilfully executed; and the version published by Miss Smirke in 1818, to accompany her brother's plates, was merely a patchwork production made out of former translations. On the latest, Mr. A. J. Duffield's, it would be in every sense of the word impertinent in me to offer an opinion here. I had not even seen it when the present ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... "All roight, ould Patchwork," he called out, with a laugh. "Thare's a shellin' fur ye, which is more, bedad, than yer howl sthock-in-thrade is worth! Changee fur changee, black dog fur whoite moonkey, sure, as my ould ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... after dinner, he bent his energies to read them all, from Helen down to Aunt Betsy, the latter of whom proved the most transparent of the four. Arrayed again in the pongee, but this time without the hoop, she came into the parlor, bringing her calico patchwork, which she informed him was pieced in the "herrin' bone pattern" and intended for Katy; telling him, further, that the feather bed on which he slept was also a part of "Catherine's setting out," and was made from feathers she picked herself, ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... is any evidence to support Mr. Darley's view? Milton has been charged with having borrowed the design of Paradise Lost from some Italian author; and this allegation, coupled with that made by Mr. Darley, would, if founded, reduce our great national epic to what Hazlitt has described as "patchwork and plagiarism, the beggarly copiousness of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 208, October 22, 1853 • Various
... may have written the tales that we have, known even to men who in the tenth and eleventh centuries copied them and commented upon them; but the romances as they now stand do not look like pieces of patchwork, but like the works of men who had ideas to convey; and to me at least they seem to bear approximately the same relation to the Druid legends as the works of the Attic tragedians bear to the archaic Greek legends ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... letters. Maybe, it might be from his long lost father, though they had all reason to believe him dead. Or maybe— Oh, what if Albert Gaston had come back and kidnapped Billy! The thought was too awful. She dropped right down in the kitchen where she stood by the old patchwork rocking chair that always stood handy in the window when she wanted to peel potatoes, and prayed: "Oh, God, don't let it be! Don't bring that bad man back to this world again! Take care of my Billy and bring him back to me, Amen!" Over and over again she prayed, and it seemed to comfort her. Then ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... of his voice was a remembering of long muletrains jingling through the gate, queens in litters hung with patchwork curtains from Samarcand, gold brocades splashed with the clay of deep roads, stained with the blood of ambuscades, bales of silks from Valencia, travelling gangs of Moorish artisans, heavy armed Templars on their ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... higher, that when the sun had once disappeared behind its lofty roof, the garret soon became dark. The light, passing through the dirty panes of the small window, fell faintly on the blue and white patchwork of the old mattress, on which Mother Bunch was now stretched, covered with rags. Leaning on her left arm, with her chin resting in the palm of her hand, she looked after her sister with an expression of heart-rending ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... incomparable variety and complexity. His lack of learning was of advantage to him in judging most men. Their stock of ideas, sentiments and desires had been his for years, and if he now viewed the patchwork quilt of their morality with indulgent contempt, at least he was familiar with all the constituent shades of it. But he could not make the Professor out—and this added to his dislike of him; he recognized that Roberts was ...
— Elder Conklin and Other Stories • Frank Harris
... of highway administration extant in the various political units in the United States present a patchwork of overlapping authority and undetermined responsibility. Highway laws are being constantly revised by state legislatures and with each revision there is some change in administrative methods and often the changes are revolutionary in character. In most states, the trend ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... likewise disabled his right arm, and being well off through the payment of some ransoms, he had come home partly to look after his family, and partly to provide himself with a full suit of English harness, his present suit being a patchwork of relics of numerous battle-fields. Only one thing he desired, a true Spanish sword, not only Toledo or Bilboa in name, but nature. He had seen execution done by the weapons of the soldiers of the Great Captain, and been witness to the ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... University galleries are rich in possessing. At the distance at which I hold it, you see nothing but a checker-work of brilliant, and, as it happens, even glaring colors. If you come near, you will find this patchwork resolve itself into a Visitation, and Birth of St. John; but that St. Elizabeth's red dress, and the Virgin's blue and white one, and the brown posts of the door, and the blue spaces of the sky, are painted in their own ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... colors, polychrome, maculation, spottiness, striae. spectrum, rainbow, iris, tulip, peacock, chameleon, butterfly, tortoise shell; mackerel, mackerel sky; zebra, leopard, cheetah, nacre, ocelot, ophite[obs3], mother-of-pearl, opal, marble. check, plaid, tartan, patchwork; marquetry-, parquetry; mosaic, tesserae[obs3], strigae[obs3]; chessboard, checkers, chequers; harlequin; Joseph's coat; tricolor. V. be variegated &c. adj.; variegate, stripe, streak, checker, chequer; bespeckle[obs3], speckle; besprinkle, sprinkle; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the mouth of a man of his class throws a suspicion of high coloring over the whole story; but it can be readily imagined what a capital campaign-cry it would be in the heat of a popular movement. The tide of feeling swept away Walpole's patchwork of compromise, and war was declared against Spain by Great Britain on the 19th of October, 1739. The English ultimatum insisted upon a formal renunciation of the right of search as claimed and exercised by the Spaniards, and upon an ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... being absolutely nothing to sit up for; and the bed was as hard as the nether millstone. As she put her tired head on a cast-iron pillow covered by a cotton pillow-slip, and lay crushed under three pairs of hard blankets, topped by a patchwork quilt worked by Bella's mother and containing samples of the clothes of all the family—from the late Mrs. Bathgate's wedding-gown of puce-coloured cashmere to her youngest son's first pair of "breeks," the whole smelling strongly of ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... door, and somewhat reluctantly went in. It was decent, that room was; and this disabled old woman lay under a patchwork quilt, on a bed that seemed comfortable. But the window was shut, and the air was ...
— Opportunities • Susan Warner
... of the least considerable of hamlets, and consists of a few cottages on a green beside a burn. Some of them (a strange thing in Scotland) are models of internal neatness; the beds adorned with patchwork, the shelves arrayed with willow-pattern plates, the floors and tables bright with scrubbing or pipeclay, and the very kettle polished like silver. It is the sign of a contented old age in country places, where there is little matter for gossip ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... did not share the attempt at elegance of the front part of the house; plain as a cottage kitchen, it was warm and comfortable withal. The large bed with patchwork quilt stood in a corner; in the middle was an iron stove in which logs crackled and sparkled. The air was hot and dry, but the priest, being accustomed to the atmosphere of stoves, took no notice, in fact, he noticed nothing but the room's one inmate, who from ...
— A Dozen Ways Of Love • Lily Dougall
... was gay with a bright, silk spread of "crazy" patchwork, and piled generously with dainty cushions, too evidently made for ornamental purposes than for use. But Kent piled the cushions recklessly around her, tucked her smudgy skirts close, went and got a towel, which he immersed recklessly ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... living room and through the door and down the hall. A mahogany bed with a patchwork quilt for a spread, a mahogany dresser and a huge wicker chair, upholstered in a bright chintz. It was ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault
... Skirt of one kind and overdress of another. A very economical fashion, and one not destined to last long, because of its economy, and the fact that very elegant ladies rather curl their lips at it, and call it the "patchwork style." Eurie from necessity rather than choice adopted it, and it was also her misfortune rather than her taste that the colors were too light to be really according to the mode. Her gloves were of an entirely different shade from the rest of the attire, and were mended with ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... shrink with a senseless fear from using a plain word twice in the same page, and often from using a plain word at all. This unmanly dread of simplicity, and of what is called "tautology," gives rise to a patchwork made up of scraps of poetic quotations, unmeaning periphrases, and would-be humorous circumlocutions,—a style of all styles perhaps the most objectionable and offensive, which may be known and avoided by the name of Fine Writing. Lastly, there is the danger ...
— How to Write Clearly - Rules and Exercises on English Composition • Edwin A. Abbott
... was restless. She had helped Mammy sweep the floor, had wiped the dishes, and rocked Baby Squealer to sleep. She did not wish to sew any more patchwork squares. ...
— The Graymouse Family • Nellie M. Leonard
... is easy to see that his "reconstruction" is as hopeless as that of the famous Greek frieze, outwardly whole andyet always a patchwork. So he chafes continually under what he believes to be the tyranny and despotism of an undefined autocracy, which, in a general way, he calls "the Government," but which really refers to the distribution of certain local offices ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... "Man and nature." But such distinctions, useful as they are, and therefore admissible, are none the less arbitrary and liable to mislead. Birds and men are alike parts of nature, having many things in common not only with each other, but with every form of animate existence. The world is not a patchwork, though never so cunningly put together, ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... System. It would perhaps be more courageous in him, and more informing, to confess that he never really understood the British Party System. The planks in the two American platforms may easily be exhibited as very disconnected and ramshackle; but our own party was as much of a patchwork, and indeed I think even more so. Everybody knows that the two American factions were called 'Democrat' and 'Republican.' It does not at all cover the case to identify the former with Liberals and the latter with Conservatives. The Democrats are the party of the South and have some ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... depends on its farms and natural resources. American farmers took heart in 1961—from a billion dollar rise in farm income—and from a hopeful start on reducing the farm surpluses. But we are still operating under a patchwork accumulation of old laws, which cost us $1 billion a year in CCC carrying charges alone, yet fail to halt rural poverty or boost ...
— State of the Union Addresses of John F. Kennedy • John F. Kennedy
... peasant costumes are not inviting; they are simply squalid. Costumes in the towns are much better. Still, on festal days the village women deck themselves out with bright-hued shawls, and the men wind brighter scarfs round their waists to keep up their patchwork trousers, and thus relieve what would otherwise be the intolerable dinginess of the whole scene. The farmer himself, mounted on his mule, with high-peaked saddle and enormous wooden stirrups decorated with brass, his cloak, with the bright scarlet or blue lining ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... seems to unfold itself to our view like an immense and variegated map, the predominant colour of which is green in all its shades and tints. The irregular division of the country into fields made it resemble a patchwork counterpane. The size of the houses, churches, fortresses, was so considerably diminished as to make them resemble nothing so much as those playthings manufactured at Carlsruhe. This was the effect produced by a microscopic train, which ...
— Wonderful Balloon Ascents - or, the Conquest of the Skies • Fulgence Marion
... and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, and even had they gone, they would soon have been forgotten in the delights which that modest little sanctuary offers. The sunshine of four hundred years ago that glows in mellow warmth upon Carpaccio's canvases, the vigour and the piety and the fun of that "wayward patchwork," are more vital and more ...
— A Venetian June • Anna Fuller
... traffic, the sky was glorious with the far peace of a fine summer evening. Through the upper pane of the station window Police-constable Bennett, who felt that his senses at the moment were abnormally keen, recognised with a sinking heart such reds and yellows as bedecked the best patchwork quilt at home. By contrast the lights of the superintendent's office were subdued, so that within the walls of the police-station sounds seemed of greater importance. Somewhere a drunkard, deprived of his boots, was drumming his criticism of authority on the walls of his cell. ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... held one, or a part of one, of my slaughtered race. Frequently there were parts of two or three varieties on one hat—a tail of one kind, a wing of another, or a head of a different species. The ends of the world had been searched to make this patchwork of blood. The women raved over the cruel display; they gloated over our beauty; but they cared nothing for the pathetic story the hats told of ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... rather characterless pink. This home was different. Even the pungent oak logs crackling in the fireplace did so with indefinable distinction. The general tone of the surroundings was as little in keeping with the patchwork personality of its mistress as one could imagine. It was as if the singular completeness of Mrs. Flint's home left no time nor energy for a finished individuality. Claire got all this in the briefest of flashes, just a swift, inclusive ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... done in the time; but really something fit to be seen is emerging. Terry is sorting the coins, a pretty job, I should say; but felicity to him. But oh! the industrial articles! There are all the regalia, carved out of cherry-stones, and a patchwork quilt of 5000 bits of silk each no bigger than a shilling. And a calculation of the middle verse in the Bible, and the longest verse, and the shortest verse, and the like edifying Scriptural researches, all copied out like flies' legs, in writing no one can see but Julius with his spectacles off, ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... in 1527, having left for himself a greater fame in the masonry of the central tower, whose base he rebuilt after the old stone spire had been destroyed by fire, and especially in the tomb of Cardinal d'Amboise, than ever he will gain by the patchwork of the west facade. What he could do with a free hand and his own designs to begin with, may be imagined from the fact that he built the Bureau des Finances on the opposite side of the Parvis and laid ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... maid found it difficult to repeat this patchwork of truth and fiction in proper order, but the ex-schoolmaster impressed it so firmly on his sweetheart's mind that at last it flowed from her lips as fluently as his pupils in Stanstadt had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of developing a specific design cannot be overestimated. No machine on the market, of any type, is one hundred per cent perfect and none on the market should, therefore, be taken as a standard to be met by the new manufacturer. It is a patchwork, only, that is obtained by one common method used to obtain a newly designed machine. Namely, the manufacturer purchases every type of machine, already marketed to perform a given work, and adapts one part from ...
— The Consumer Viewpoint • Mildred Maddocks
... purposes of hospitality; but in the state bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... marshalling of large bodies of facts were being written. Moreover, many of his researches were allowed to drop, and only resumed after an interval of years. Thus a rigidly chronological series of letters would present a patchwork of subjects, each of which would be difficult to follow. The Table of Contents will show in what way I have attempted to avoid ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... came and went, they brought nothing to her but a little round of chores, a bit of patchwork, or straw braiding, and occasionally a walk to the village store to buy ...
— The King's Daughter and Other Stories for Girls • Various
... each chafed and angry with the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... steady him. Miss Martha called to say that she had left a lighted lamp in the bedroom. Beyond the fact that the room itself was of good size Galusha noticed little concerning it, little except the bed, which was large and patchwork-quilted and tremendously inviting. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair looking as if it must tear the sheets to ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... Wieroo doors he had seen, being made up of countless narrow strips of wood from four to six inches in length laid on in patches of about the same width, the strips in adjacent patches never running in the same direction. The result bore some resemblance to a crazy patchwork quilt, which was heightened when, as in one of the doors he had seen, contiguous patches were painted different colors. The strips appeared to have been bound together and to the underlying framework of the door with gut or fiber and also glued, after which a thick coating of paint had been applied. ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... shrub growing; yet the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... consists simply of a series of rooms which have been "knocked into one" by the removal of the partition walls. As all these rooms were not of the same height, the ceiling presents a curious patchwork appearance. A long counter occupies one end of the hall, at which refreshments and liquors are served. There is a stage at the other side, on which low farces are performed, and a tall Punch and Judy box occupies a conspicuous position. Benches and chairs are scattered about, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... ones bring blessings all their own, Sadie," she said, giving the hand on the patchwork quilt ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... cathedral with so fine a site as this, rising up out of the center of a beautiful green, extensive enough to show its full proportions, relieved and insulated from all other patchwork and impertinence of rusty edifices. It is of gray stone, and looks as perfect as when just finished, and with the perfection, too, that could not have come in less than six centuries of venerableness, with a view to which these edifices ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... as a sort of reward you might say, she opened her mouth wide and showed me what was left of her own teeth—about two-thirds of them, a patchwork ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... success, to fitness and to survival unto eager, ignorant hands, and then by its own limitations snatched that title away from them again. It sought to do that which can not be done—to establish growth instead of the chance to grow. It was cruel. It was unjust. In the wisdom of a later day its patchwork form must once more be changed. It must be changed as a protection, no more against the former slaves of the South than against the future slaves ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... buckles, belts and bracelets, gay kerchiefs, spotted ones, striped ones; ivory bobbins, sprigs of coral, and sea-shells from far places, they'll murmur you secrets o' nights if you put em under your pillow; here are patterns for patchwork, and here's a sheet of ballads, and here's a pack of cards for telling fortunes. What will ye buy? A dream-book, a crystal, a charmed powder that shall make you see your sweetheart ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... country to be nailed on. Let us examine this metaphor: The wall of our church and country is built of those who love the constitution in both: Our domestic enemies undermine some parts of the wall, and place themselves in the breach; and then they cry, "We are the wall!" We do not like such patchwork, they build with untempered mortar; nor can they ever cement with us, till they get better materials and better workmen: God keep us from having our breaches made up with such rubbish! "They stand upon the watch-tower;" they are indeed pragmatical enough to do so; but who assigned them that post, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... by motives of pride, party, or resentment to espouse the doctrine of separation and independance; I am clearly, positively, and conscientiously persuaded that it is the true interest of this continent to be so; that every thing short of THAT is mere patchwork, that it can afford no lasting felicity, —that it is leaving the sword to our children, and shrinking back at a time, when, a little more, a little farther, would have rendered this continent the ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... the northerly tower. Restoration has been carried on, not sparingly, but in good taste, with the result that, in spite of its newness at the present writing, it appears as a consistent and thoroughly conscientious piece of work, and not the mere patchwork ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... are some with extraordinary force of command in the rooms of the sick, who believe that whiskey is nourishing and that milk is liquid food; that doses go into human stomachs to travel the rounds of the circulation, and finally drop off at the right place for either patchwork ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... fast, even you, Alec, have to shoot passim," said a witty Hebrew, and Delgrado did not appreciate the mot until some one told him that passeem in Hebrew meant "patchwork," and that Jacob's offense to Joseph's brethren lay in the gift of a Prince's robe ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... industrial school, which meets two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... bedding. At length a brigantine worthy of Robinson Crusoe floated on the waters of the Chenonceau. They laid in what provision they might, gave all that remained of their goods to the delighted Indians, embarked, descended the river, and put to sea. A fair wind filled their patchwork sails and bore them from the hated coast. Day after day they held their course, till at length the favoring breeze died away and a breathless calm fell on the face of the waters. Florida was far behind; France farther yet before. Floating idly on the glassy waste, the craft ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... was no blatant display of wealth, and every article of furniture bore signs of long though careful use. The spotless boarded floor was bare of carpet, but was strewn with rough-cured skins, timber-wolf, antelope, coyote and bear, and here and there rugs of undoubted home make; these latter of the patchwork order. The centre table was of wide proportions and of solid mahogany, and told of the many services of the apartment; the small chairs were old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and there were several of these—were capacious and of divers descriptions. A ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... it, the map of the West Coast is like a mosaic, like the edge of a badly constructed patchwork quilt. In trading along the West Coast a man can find use for five European languages, and he can use a new one at ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... quite startling in so dark a face. Of all the beggar-men that I had seen or fancied, he was the chief for raggedness. He was clothed with tatters of old ship's canvas and old sea cloth; and this extraordinary patchwork was all held together by a system of the most various and incongruous fastenings,—brass buttons, bits of stick, and loops of tarry gaskin. About his waist he wore an old brass-buckled leather belt, which was the one thing ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Applique: Design an applique unit in a 7-inch square that might be applied to a pin cushion top, a bag or a square for a patchwork quilt. Use geometric units or conventional flower or bird forms suggested by cretonnes. Work out in cotton materials using two tones of one color or closely related colors, as brown and orange; grey ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... heart good. There were books lying on the table and flowers in the window, a handsome cat purred in front of the fireplace, and on a bracket in one corner an asthmatic clock ticked off the hours with wheezy vigor. In an adjoining room Evadne could see a bed with its gay patchwork quilt of Dyce's making, and in the little kitchen beyond she heard her singing as she trod to and fro. A couple of dainty muslin dresses were draped over chairs, for Dyce was the finest clear starcher in Marlborough, and her kitchen was ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... course none of the little dainty luxuries about it with which I was familiar in my mother's bedroom. A long, low window opposite the head of the bed threw a strong light upon it. There were check curtains drawn round it, and a patchwork-quilt, and rough, homespun linen. Every thing was clean, but coarse and frugal—such as I expected to find about my Sark patient, in the home of ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... poetry! This is what ranks its writer with the master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, over and over again, in terms which would require some qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost! It is too much that this patchwork, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable specimen ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... undertaken by the Kings. That is the gravest thing to be taught you. The overtures of liberality made by the masters who have made the world what it is are only comedies. They are only ways of blockading completely the progress to come, of building up the past again behind new patchwork ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... extremely varied ways. The cloud may be rubbed between opposite currents, and so flattened out into a long streamer; it may take the same form by being carried off by a current in the manner of smoke from a fire; the spheres may be kept together, so as to form the patchwork which we call "mackerel" sky; or they may be actually confounded with each other in a vast common cloud-heap. In general, where the process of aggregation of two cloud bodies occurs, changes of temperature are induced in the masses which are mixed together. If the temperature ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... taking off her bonnet and shawl, in the quaint clean chamber, with the heavy oak rafters, and the jasmine coming in at the window, and glancing with pardonable pride at the fair face reflected in the mirror. But as she laid her things on the patchwork coverlet, it seemed to her that the lace veil became fine white linen, and was folded about a figure that lay in the bed; and when she looked round the room again everything was draped in white—white blinds hung before the windows, ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... places against the walls; but in the further corner stood the chief piece of furniture, and the one which drew the attention of the visitors with the most powerful attraction. It was a large clumsy four-post bedstead, hung with blue and white homespun curtains, and covered with a gay patchwork quilt. The curtains on both sides were drawn back, and the face and figure of the sleeper were in full view. She lay as if under the influence of a narcotic, so still that her breathing could scarcely be distinguished. Two or three days of intense suffering had given her ...
— A Canadian Heroine, Volume 2 - A Novel • Mrs. Harry Coghill
... died in the old Valley Farmhouse. The big, ugly clock, too, with the pendulum showing through a wreath of flowers on its glass door, has attained the dignity of age, and earned a right to its place on the crowded mantelpiece by ticking out the years for these same generations. There are patchwork cushions and others embroidered with worsted and beads, on the sofa and in the great horse-hair-covered armchair, and the two or three hospitable-looking chairs with rockers. Curious shells, and wax ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... house without the blinds down is like a verandah. All the green in front was surrounded with sheds, some of flapping canvas, some of green palm boughs, where (in three sides of a huge oblong) the natives sat by villages in a fine glow of many-hued array. There were folks in tapa, and folks in patchwork; there was every colour of the rainbow in a spot or a cluster; there were men with their heads gilded with powdered sandal-wood, others with heads all purple, stuck full of the petals of a flower. In the midst there was a growing field of outspread food, gradually covering ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... favored youngsters delighted in a ride in that clumsy old vehicle, nor dreamed that its halting, uncertain gait was other than the very poetry of motion! Even mother's own wooden rocking-chair, a bit of boughten elegance, with its gay patchwork cushion, and dull, contented "creak! creak!" as its dear occupant swayed meditatively to and fro, knitting in hand, in the quiet, restful gloaming, was not quite equal to that dear, delightful old cradle, for a good brisk canter to "Banbury Cross," or to ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... simply happened because her window was right across the alleyway from ours. The Ponsonby house was next to us, on the right, and between us were only a fence, a hedge of box, and a sprawly acacia tree that shaded Miss Ponsonby's window, where she always sat sewing—patchwork, as I'm alive—when she wasn't working around the house. Patchwork seemed to be Miss Ponsonby's sole and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... figure. The tailor adapts the manikin as well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... had leave to lie unless their bodies were in the way of their fellows' feet. And so, patch upon patch, and a patch over all, the starboard supporting-column was clouted; but when they thought all was secure, Mr. Wardrop decreed that the noble patchwork would never support working engines; at the best, it could only hold the guide-bars approximately true, he deadweight of the cylinders must be borne by vertical struts; and, therefore, a gang would repair to the ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... level, and this fine old structure, called Caesar's Tower, is no exception to the rule. Nothing can be more picturesque than its appearance from the broken ground around, above, and below, and no less imposing is the quaint straggling indescribable old church of St. Quiriace close by, now a mere patchwork of different epochs, but in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries one of the most remarkable religious monuments in Brie and Champagne. Here was baptized Thibault VI., the song-maker, the lover of art, the patron of letters, and the importer into Europe of the famous ...
— Holidays in Eastern France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... is that Vicksburg is a patchwork city. The National Park Hotel, its chief hostelry, is an unusually good hotel for a city of this size, and Washington Street, in the neighborhood of the hotel, has the look of a busy city street; yet on the same square with the hotel, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... pillow where I laid my lonely head! Sinking, like a shipwrecked sailor, in a patchwork sea of bed, While the moonlight through the casement cast a grim and ghastly glare O'er the stiff and stately presence of each dismal haircloth chair; And it touched the mantel's splendor, where the wax fruit used to be, And the alabaster ...
— Cape Cod Ballads, and Other Verse • Joseph C. Lincoln
... is that this heroic romance was foredoomed to inefficiency. It was not a genuine kind at all: but a sort of patchwork of imitations of imitations—a mule which, unlike the natural animal, was itself bred, and bred in and in, of mules for generations back. It was true to no time, to no country, to no system of manners, life, or thought. ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... the cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this voyage of re-discovery ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... car," he said, "I swear that I will stop and come back. I will shoot you where you lie, like a dog. Be brave, man! Be thankful that you are going to your death in honorable company and in honorable fashion! It's better, this, than the guillotine, isn't it? Look at the country below, like patchwork, coming up to us. Listen to the wind rushing by. You see the trees, how they bend? You feel the rain stinging your cheeks? Sit still, man, and fix your thoughts where you will. Think of mademoiselle la danseuse, think of her kisses, think of ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and a half months' hard work, the ladies of a certain Dorcas Society were so delighted with the completion of a beautiful silk patchwork quilt for the dear curate that everybody kissed everybody else, except, of course, the bashful young man himself, who only kissed his sisters, whom he had called for, to escort home. There were just a gross of osculations altogether. How much longer would the ladies have taken over their needlework ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... to the north-west, two midget mountains wavered in the sky. John Wesley nodded at their unforgotten shapes and pieced this vast landscape to the patchwork map in his head. Those toy hills were San Mateo and Magdalena. Pringle had passed that way on a bygone year, headed east. ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments from various ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... count upon patching up the mistakes which may later appear under the stress of actual use. The educational engineer should emulate this example. Tests and forethought must take the place of failure and patchwork. Our efforts have been too long directed by "trial and error." It is time to leave off guessing and to acquire a scientific knowledge of the material with which we have to deal. When instruction must be repeated, it means that the school, ...
— The Measurement of Intelligence • Lewis Madison Terman
... institution, responding as they do to the mechanical elements of modern work and of the mechanical worker-mind, admitting also of ready multiplications as patterns, ensure the wide extension of the prevalent style of imitating past styles, designing patchwork of these; and even admit of its scientific reduction to a definite series of grades, which imitative youth may easily pass onwards from the age of rudest innocence to that of art-knowledge and certificated art-mastery. Our School of ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... she. Aunt Hannah was making a crazy patchwork quilt, and she frowned hard at a triangular piece of red silk and circular piece of pink, wondering how to fit them ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... duties of free Levi's castle, I should even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... in her miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... the nails may be driven in from below, and a little shrinkage is not conspicuous. It is practicable, if a rabbet or mitered joint is used in the sides, but if the side pieces are butted or dadoed, the rabbet for the bottom shows. This may be cleverly concealed by an insert, but that is patchwork, ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... were old cribs, in which the infant limbs of Mamie and Abner had been tucked up; old looking-glasses, that had reflected their shining, soapy faces, and Mamie's best chip Sunday hat; an old sewing-machine, that had been worn out in active service; old patchwork quilts; an old accordion, to whose long drawn inspirations Mamie had sung hymns; old pictures, books, and old toys. There were one or two old chromos, and, stuck in an old frame, a colored print from the "Illustrated London News" of ...
— A Millionaire of Rough-and-Ready • Bret Harte
... rather than exhaustive. Continuous discourse is better adapted to the lecture-room than to the tea-table. There is quite enough of it, I fear too much,—in these pages. But the reader must take the reports of our talks as they were jotted down. A patchwork quilt is not like a piece of Gobelin tapestry; but it has ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... fishing round its rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling and separating till you could think ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... Beauty of childhood, is wholly incongruous. If the fragment had ended abruptly at the moment when the lady arises in her shroud from the coffin, Sir Bertrand would have been a more effective tale of terror. From the historical point of view Mrs. Barbauld's curious patchwork is full of interest. She seems to be reaching out wistfully towards the mysterious and the unknown. Genuinely anxious to awaken a thrill of excitement in the breast of her reader, she is hesitating ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... the foreground, I see, behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with grottoes, arbours and ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... into the patchwork of her husband's perceptions warranted no step so decisive. Rather, if anything, it pointed to a gradual resumption of his status quo of a few days ago. After all, had he not had (and completely forgotten) recurrences like that ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork. I should tell Plato that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... cloak. Then old Speckle, squawking all the way, flew over to Grannie's bed! She ran the whole length of it. She left a little path clear across the patchwork quilt. Larry stood in one corner of the room waving his arms. Eileen was flapping her apron in another, while Grannie Malone chased old Speckle with the broom. At last, with a final squawk, she flew out of the ...
— The Irish Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... old, and Prudy was between three and four. Susy could sew quite well for a girl of her age, and had a stint every day. Prudy always thought it very fine to do just as Susy did, so she teased her mother to let her have some patchwork, too, and Mrs. Parlin gave her a few calico pieces, just to keep her little ...
— Little Prudy • Sophie May
... just finished the book, and, turning over the pages, found myself wondering how you will like it. It has been written in so many different moods and places and noises and temperatures that the general effect is rather patchwork. But, after all, it was written chiefly for the amusement of two people, and (as I believe all story-books ought to be written) out of some curiosity on the Author's part ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... helped her out, and up the narrow steep staircase, which certainly was not a gain, but when landed in the drawing-room, the space seemed to her magnificent. And their own furniture, the two or three cherished portraits brought from Vale Leston, their father's chair, their mother's sofa, the silk patchwork table-cover that had been the girl's birthday present to Mamma, the bookcase with Papa's precious books, ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... winner,- it is his earliest victory, and the prelude to his great renown among nymphs and shepherds. In this version the strophes are arranged as in Fritzsche's text. Some critics take the poem to be a patchwork by various hands. ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... on their bed, thinking they was a patchwork quilt," he said, coldly; "it's a mistake anybody might make. Have ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... to the child, by stamping on his infancy and nonage traits borrowed from his mature years. Mingled with the species of legendary lore attaching to every generation, there is a foundation more or less of authentic annals. It is as affording an example of this human patchwork of fancy and fact, and as illustrating the impression deeply engraved on the popular mind, that the following incidents of the Queen's childhood and ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... deck, jumping ashore and going home, as I could easily have done at any time within an hour of boarding the boat. I buried my face in the dirty pillow with no pillow-case on it, and filled my mouth with the patchwork quilt. It seemed as though I should die of weeping. My breath came in long spasmodic draughts, as much deeper and bitterer than sighs as sighs are sadder and more pitiful than laughter. My whipped back pained ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... children. It is not all play for them, to be sure; but then, work is often even more charming than play, as I think some little girls know when they have been helping their mothers,—running of errands, dusting the furniture, and sewing little squares of patchwork that the baby may have a cradle-quilt made entirely by her ...
— The Seven Little Sisters Who Live on the Round Ball - That Floats in the Air • Jane Andrews
... England forest, conspicuous by its great height, massive trunk and branches, and by its magnificent, wide-spreading, dome-shaped or pyramidal, open head. The sunlight, streaming through the large-leafed, rusty foliage, reveals the curiously mottled patchwork bark; and the long-stemmed, globular fruit swings to every breeze till spring ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... is a patchwork made up of kind deeds and kind thoughts from one or other of you. You do ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... as that nothing perishes, that the Providence of God is not a patchwork of uncontinued efforts, but a plan and a progress, as surely as the Pilgrim embarkation at Delfshaven has a relation to the battle of Gettysburg, and to the civil rights bill giving the colored man permission to ride in a public conveyance and to be buried in a public cemetery, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... clothes, and was hanging them out to dry. The children had loitered on their way to school, and were wondering what the master would say to them. The father had gone to the fair to help a neighbour to choose a horse. The mother sat making a patchwork quilt. No one thought of the sandy cat; it sat by the ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... reappearance, rescued from the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... distrustful of him and that he had forgotten them. What she could not gauge was the full of the effect she had had upon him. He had marked a female form at the fireside, shawled by a shapeless patchwork quilt; out of it, magically it seemed to his startled fancies, there had stepped a superb creature with eyes on fire with her youth, a superlatively lovely creature, essentially feminine. From the flash of her eyes to the curl of her hair, she was all girl. And ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... be carried home for the amusement of cottage children. The noises of hobnailed shoes on the oak floors, and of unrestrained clownish and churlish voices everywhere, were tremendous. Here a fat cottager might be seen standing on a lovely quilt of patchwork brocade, pulling down, rough in her cupidity, curtains on which the new-born and dying eyes of generations of nobles had rested, henceforth to adorn a miserable cottage, while her husband was taking down the bed, larger ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... The artist, too, has his properties. And the recognition of this truth caused Massillon to say, "The great preacher has but one sermon, yet out of this he makes many—by giving portions of it backwards, or beginning in the middle and working both ways, or presenting patchwork pieces, tinted and colored by his mood." All public speakers have canned goods they fall back upon when the fresh fruit ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style—this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... a faint remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall—green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red. Turning with an effort toward the side whence all the ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... decorated with glowing masses of pelargoniums and vincas, belts of rich coleuses and fiery alternantheras, patchwork of feverfew and mesembryanthemum, and scroll-work of house leeks, but amid this gay checkering it is wonderful how few flowers there are for cutting for bouquets. As tender plants, except the few that may have been wintered in windows and ...
— Scientific American Suppl. No. 299 • Various
... should be in equal correspondence to one another. And, where a dance is expletively introduced in the intervals of the acts, the subject of it should have, at least, some affinity to the piece. A long custom has made the want of this attention pass unnoticed. It is surely an absurd and an unnatural patchwork, between the acts of a deep tragedy, to bring on, abruptly by way of diversion, a comic dance. By this contrast both entertainments are hurt; the abruptness of the transition is intolerable to the audience; and the thread, especially of the tragic fable, is unpleasingly broken. ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... as they are much superior to coverlids; the perspiration will more readily pass through a blanket than a coverlid. A thick coverlid ought never to be used; there is nothing better, for a child's bed, than the old-fashioned patchwork coverlid, as the perspiration will easily ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse
... earlier than these heresies. Still more convincing is the vehement and pathetic energy which marks this Epistle. There is a ring of reality in its broken sentences and earnest appeals. It displays none of the careful patchwork which we should expect from a forger; it consists only of the quick hot words of a man who is ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... had learned quite a few lessons, I realised that the years which rob us so in passing throw us a few compensations in return for all the wealth they steal, and that although the pattern had all gone wrong, still, there was no sense in leaving my particular square of the patchwork with the edges all frayed. So I took my brains off the shelf and dusted them, with a very fair result on the whole. If I had been a man in a novel I should of course have gone to the New Forest, and lived the simple life in sandals and ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... he dedicated to the two judges at Taunton, Sir John Walter and Sir John Denham, and to the archdeacon of Wells and the chancellor of the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The book was, indeed, a truly remarkable patchwork. All shades of opinion from that of the earnestly disbelieving Scot to that of the earnestly believing Roberts were embodied. Nevertheless Bernard had a wholesome distrust of possessions and followed Cotta in thinking that catalepsy and other ...
— A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718 • Wallace Notestein
... governs the world, there is a tendency in descendants to be like their progenitors, and yet a tendency also in descendants to DIFFER from their progenitors. The work of nature in making generations is a patchwork—part resemblance, part contrast. In certain respects each born generation is not like the last born; and in certain other respects it is like the last. But the peculiarity of arrested civilisation is to kill out varieties at birth almost; that ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... who have gone astray, keep astray, rather than bring Milton into disrepute by pushing themselves into his company and imitating his manner. Milton is none of these: and his language is never a patchwork. We find daily, in almost every book we open, expressions which are not English, never were, and never will be: for the writers are by no means of sufficiently high rank to be masters of the mint. To arrive ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... see the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could hear the roar of the falls. Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground to take a last look. It was like a patchwork quilt: a square of wheat stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone's throw long; and his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... the most feeble. The reason for this strange phenomenon is, that nature is always on the watch; always aiming to attain her ends. The desire for love is, in a woman, a large part of her nature. Her virtue is nothing but a piece of patchwork. ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... adders cast their skins And keep their venom, so kings often change; Councils and counsellors hang on one another, Hiding the loathsome 130 Like the base patchwork of a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... moment outside the hut, studying the sky, which was a patchwork of clouds scattered across grey splotches that would turn to blue with the coming of the sun. Evidently the sky had been quite overcast during the night, but the clouds were broken now, though by ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... yellow lanterns, and then great stretches of land, some light with the grain silvered by the waning moon, some dark from the plough's drastic hand, undivided by hedge or wall, yet as evenly marked out as a chess-board, reminding Jill of a very great patchwork quilt held ...
— Desert Love • Joan Conquest
... whom I took over my troop was a German, Baron Herbert von Ritter. He had served as an aide-de-camp to the King of Bavaria, and his face was a patchwork of sword-cuts which he had received in the students' duels. No one knew why he had left the German army. He had been in command of the troop with the rank of captain, but when the next morning Laguerre called him up and ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... "I'll tell you, ma'am. If it's agreeable to you, ma'am, the boys and I might go on to Brading and see the remains of that Roman villa I was talking about yesterday. That is, unless you would like us to wait till you've done your patchwork there, and all of ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... Jefferson Davis contemptuously stigmatized all the schemes of compromise as "quack nostrums," and he sneered justly enough at those who spun fine arguments of legal texture, and consumed time "discussing abstract questions, reading patchwork from the opinions of men now mingled with ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... is the patchwork-quilt, the Midway Plaisance, the national chain-gang of Europe; a state that is not a nation, but a collection of nations, some with national memories and aspirations and others without, some occupying distinct ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... executed in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had, in many places, given way; the laths had been removed; and, where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs. Over an old crazy bedstead was thrown a squalid, patchwork counterpane; and upon the counterpane lay a black hood and scarf, a pair of bodice of the cumbrous form in vogue at the beginning of the last century, and some other articles of female attire. On a small shelf near the foot of the bed stood a couple of empty phials, a cracked ewer and basin, a ...
— Jack Sheppard - A Romance • William Harrison Ainsworth
... gray sheets beneath an old patchwork counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the simple appliances of ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... seasoning, infusion, soupcon. [Compound resulting from mixture] alloy, amalgam; brass, chowchow^, pewter; magma, half-and-half, melange, tertium quid [Lat.], miscellany, ambigu^, medley, mess, hotchpot^, pasticcio^, patchwork, odds and ends, all sorts; jumble &c (disorder) 59; salad, sauce, mash, omnium gatherum [Lat.], gallimaufry, olla-podrida^, olio, salmagundi, potpourri, Noah's ark, caldron texture, mingled yarn; mosaic &c (variegation) 440. half-blood, half-caste. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... on a roughly-made but comfortable garden sofa, and was knitting on a strong stocking in sweet composure. A gay-coloured parallelogram stared out from the grass beside him; for there, covered with a patchwork quilt, lay, in a great basket, the baby, the little girl, the pride of the household, fast asleep. So the curate could not be said to be exactly idle, though he was taking a delicious morning rest. His wife meanwhile—a large-hearted, practical woman—was making ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... travellers were thrown into the shade by the immortal discoverer, James Cook, who, in the New Hebrides, as everywhere else, combined into solid scientific material all that his predecessors had left in a state of patchwork. Cook's first voyage made possible the observation of the transit of Venus from one of the islands of the Pacific. His second cruise, in search of the Australian continent, led him, coming from Tongoa, to the New Hebrides, of which he ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser
... gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words, 'Let me ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... saw the "tin can on the shingle" between them and their prey. The Monitor and Merrimac then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught Merrimac made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught Monitor could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The Merrimac put her last ounce of steam into an attempt to ram her ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... and yet is a very smart scholar; Amelie, the next one, was darning the stockings; the boy, who comes third, was out-doors, tidying up the chicken-house; and the two little girls were in the corner, cutting and sewing patchwork, with a doll in the cradle between them. The house is always clean, the children are well and rosy, and play about a good deal, and Christine last year earned thirty dollars. Her mother puts half the money she earns in the bank for her marriage-portion. I was so glad it wasn't ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... of Katy's family. Accordingly, after dinner, he bent his energies to read them all, from Helen down to Aunt Betsy, the latter of whom proved the most transparent of the four. Arrayed again in the pongee, but this time without the hoop, she came into the parlor, bringing her calico patchwork, which she informed him was pieced in the "herrin' bone pattern" and intended for Katy; telling him, further, that the feather bed on which he slept was also a part of "Catherine's setting out," and was made from feathers she picked herself, showing him ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... flowers, and vegetables. But they had left Price Ruyler untroubled. He had been far more interested watching San Francisco rise from its ruins, transformed almost overnight from a picturesque but ramshackle city, a patchwork of different eras, into a staid metropolis of concrete and steel, defiant alike of earthquake and fire. He had liked the new experience of being a pioneer, which so subtly expanded his starved ego that he had, by unconscious degrees, made up his mind to remain out here as the permanent head of the ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... work in the old good thing with the new, not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way as to embrace the ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... up," called Miss Thomas. The captain entered and found her in bed, the patchwork points and diamonds of the "Rising Sun" quilt covering her to the chin and her head denting the uppermost of the two big pillows. Captain Cy ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... upstairs to his room and, slipping his braces from his shoulders, allow his nether garments to drop to the floor and, without further preparation, roll into bed. Of the effeminacy of a night robe Webster knew nothing except by somewhat hazy rumour. Once under the patchwork quilt he was safe for the night, for, heaving himself into the middle of the bed, he sank into solid and stertorous slumber, from which all Cameron's prods and kicks failed to arouse him till the grey dawn once more summoned him to life, whereupon, resuming ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Warrender," she said. "I guess the woman that's married him thinks he's A1 and gilt-edged now, poor soul. But he's just a miserable patchwork mummy really, and there isn't any white in him—no, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of andirons, fenders, shovels, tongs, and bellows; hanging of pictures, curtains, and mirrors—old and new; moving in of sofas, chairs, and rockers; making up of beds with fluted frills on the pillows—a silk patchwork quilt on St. George's bed and cotton counterpanes for ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... said Lund, grinning at them. "If enny of you saw a man hurtin' a dog, you'd probably fetch him a wallop. But you don't think ennything of scarin' the life out of a half-baked kid an' markin' up his hide like a patchwork quilt. Thet kid's stayin' aft after this. One of you monkey with him, an' you'll do jest what he's bin doin', wish ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of himself as the golden head. Golden head must have golden breast, and a golden breast must have a golden trunk, and golden trunk golden legs, and golden legs must rest on feet of gold. That will stand, and that will represent me better than this patchwork affair of which I dreamed. So he set him up the golden image in the plain of Dura. That represented himself as he regarded himself, the image seen in vision represented him as he was in reality, as God saw him. What followed? God smote him and he went mad. He was driven out as ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... was a time of continually deepening intensity of political agitation. The patchwork of compromises and settlements contrived by make-shift politicians like Clay and Douglas would not hold; they tore out, and the rent was made worse. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was to be something altogether sempiternal, was a Fugitive Slave Law so studiously ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... run on such a day as this must expect to be warm," remarked Aunt Jane sedately, while she measured a hem with a bit of paper notched to show the proper width. "Now if you and Molly would bring your patchwork up here, and sew quietly with your mother and me, you would be quite ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... armed and distrustful of him and that he had forgotten them. What she could not gauge was the full of the effect she had had upon him. He had marked a female form at the fireside, shawled by a shapeless patchwork quilt; out of it, magically it seemed to his startled fancies, there had stepped a superb creature with eyes on fire with her youth, a superlatively lovely creature, essentially feminine. From the flash of her ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... woman was gone; then she crept out and drank all she wanted, and took the best bits of cold potato and bread for her breakfast, and the lazy pigs did not get up till she was done. While they ate and rooted in the dirt, Betty slept as long as she liked, with no school, no errands, no patchwork to do. She liked it, and kept hidden till night; then she went home, and opened the little window in the store closet, and got in and took as many good things to eat and carry away as she liked. She had a ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... every day in bed-making," ejaculated Mrs. Meredith, making a sudden dive toward the bed, as if she desired to escape the question. She smoothed the gay patchwork quilt, seemed to feel something underneath, and the next moment pulled out the hidden volume, which was bound, as the bookseller's advertisements phrased it, in "half calf, neat, marbled sides." One stern glance she gave the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... pallet bedstead, in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... those countries retiring isn't a social rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork." ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... and too much allied to petty Court intrigues, with which he was totally unacquainted, to be in the least interesting to Julian. As it continued for more than an hour, he soon ceased to pay the least attention to a discourse consisting of nicknames, patchwork, and innuendo; and employed himself in reflecting on his own complicated affairs, and the probable issue of his approaching audience with the King, which had been brought about by so singular an ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... people active and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... trained her in spelling, in sums in addition, sewing patchwork, and spinning on the small wheel. But there was not enough in the simple living to keep a child busy half the time, and she soon found ways of roaming about, generally guarded by Rover. Aunt Wetherill had said, "In six months you are coming back to us," ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of stuff. He tears pieces of this stuff apart, and flings them, with apparent malice, at his chief, and, somehow, they seem to stay where he flings them. The chief shouts from a cloud of orange wig and patchwork shirt for a soda-and-milk, and from some obscure place of succour there actually appears a soda-and-milk. A hand darts from the leg of a revolving pair of trousers, grabs the glass and takes a loud swig. The ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there had been two chairs, a long ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... rooted in it, and ply their industry under the happy feeling that, so far as their old landlords are concerned, their lot is one of 'quietness and assurance for ever.' Nowhere—even on the high ranges about Newry, where the population is far too dense, where the patchwork cultivation creeps up the mountain side, and the hand of industry snatches a precarious return from a poor, cold, ungrateful soil, amidst desolating tempests and blighting fogs—not even there ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... vengeance. It was justly anathematized by all Entente peoples as the loathsome creation of a frenzied people. But shortly afterward the Entente governments themselves, their turn having come, wrought what Russians of all parties regard as a political patchwork of variegated injustice more odious far, because its authors claimed to be considered as the devoted friends of their victims and the champions of right. Whereas the Brest-Litovsk Treaty provided for a federative ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... ballad, I have strung together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beneath the surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the long, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which just answered the length of my coat; but my waist and arms I measured myself. When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of theirs would not have been able to hold them), they looked like the patchwork made by the ladies in England, only that mine ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... sandbank, some doing a little fishing round its rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling and separating till you could ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... window-seats serving as bookcase and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser cupboard, containing rows of shining milk-pans, piled ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... o'er her shoulders hung— Her loins with patchwork cincture were begirt, That more than spoke diversity of dirt. Twain were her teeth, and single was her eye— ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Vixen knelt down by the arm-chair and tried to get upon intimate terms with the Persian. He was a serious-minded animal, and seemed inclined to resent her advances, so she left him in peace on his patchwork cushion, a relic of those earlier days when Miss Skipwith had squandered her precious hours on the feminine inanity ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... limitations snatched that title away from them again. It sought to do that which can not be done—to establish growth instead of the chance to grow. It was cruel. It was unjust. In the wisdom of a later day its patchwork form must once more be changed. It must be changed as a protection, no more against the former slaves of the South than against the future slaves ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... wrecked in the storms of life! But observe! that which has been dashed to pieces by the tempest, has been refashioned by humble hands into a new dwelling-place. Thus does life spring from death, comfort from desolation, and happiness from shattered hopes, and thus our whole career may be but a patchwork of mere wreckage!" ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... like an old patchwork quilt I hope you will laugh, in token of your acceptance, if not of the book at least of my lasting ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... exhaled the fragrance of sauerkraut, and he had reached the cathedral square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous Dom he had been obliged to confess that this facade, this exterior, was a huge piece of patchwork—a delusion. Every part of it was furbished up, and the church sheltered no sculpture under its portals; it was symmetrical, built by peg and line; its rigid forms, its hard outlines were ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... I am, boys, turned up again-a subject of this moral reform school, of moral old Charleston. If my good old mother thinks it'll reform a cast-off remnant of human patchwork like me, I've nothing to say in protest. Yes, here I am, comrades (poor Tom Swiggs, as you used to call me), with rum my victor, and modern vengeance hastening my destruction." This is the exclamation of poor Tom Swiggs (as his ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... belongings were in Aunt Polly's best bedroom, having been moved over from the Eagle while he and David had been in the office. A delightful room it was, in immeasurable contrast to his squalid surroundings at that hostelry. The spacious bed, with its snowy counterpane and silk patchwork "comf'table" folded on the foot, the bright fire in the open stove, the big bureau and glass, the soft carpet, the table for writing and reading standing in the bay, his books on the broad mantel, and his dressing things laid out ready to his hand, not ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... is all to be done in the time; but really something fit to be seen is emerging. Terry is sorting the coins, a pretty job, I should say; but felicity to him. But oh! the industrial articles! There are all the regalia, carved out of cherry-stones, and a patchwork quilt of 5000 bits of silk each no bigger than a shilling. And a calculation of the middle verse in the Bible, and the longest verse, and the shortest verse, and the like edifying Scriptural researches, all copied out like flies' legs, in writing no one can see but ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eyes, upon the parched, level, treeless land; upon the little patchwork farms of corn and beetroot, oats and fruit, growing undivided, side by side, each looking like a little garden dropped down into the plain; upon the ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... had a faint remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall—green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red. Turning with an effort toward the side whence all the brightness came, in a moment ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... the wall, and framed with oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was just room enough to get into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its brightness. One thing I particularly noticed in this delightful house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching, that when I took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... a lay here and a lay there— lays now incorporated in the Iliad and Odyssey— scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the Iliad as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... running like golden bays into the green woodland that clothes the sides and tops of all the hills, the wheat, the grass, the oats, and the maize, all making different checkers in the pretty variegated patchwork covering of the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... in Prussia, all that is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... consistently and to the limit of its value. The results of various kinds of observation should be correlated so that there should ultimately emerge a unitary and practically valuable account of primate life, to replace the patchwork of information which ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... as to our ages, the relationships that existed between us, whose squaws the ladies were, and whose were the little blond-haired children. Certain articles of finery seemed to be greatly valued among them, such as red, white and blue umbrellas, like those used as signs in our cities; patchwork and Marseilles quilts; orange shirts and green dresses; pink and pearl shells; little bells; small mirrors; and beads about four inches long made of fine pipeclay. These beads cost a dollar and a half each, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... table beside her stood other borrowed treasures from the Figurehead House—a doll bedstead made by an old sea captain on one of his voyages. Each of its high posts was tipped with a white point, carved from the bone of a whale. Wonderful little patchwork quilts, a feather bed and tiny pillows made especially for the bed, were objects of interest to everyone who crowded around the booth. So were the toys and dishes brought home from other long cruises by the same old sea captain, who evidently was an indulgent father and thought ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... white thread of science, if under science we may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion has entered most deeply into ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... old Tummus, jumping up and standing upon the patchwork hearthrug in his stockings, "wheerabouts?—wheer is it, owd woman? I'm a-going to look for it 'fore ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... the honeymoon! She seemed to be there now, taking off her bonnet and shawl, in the quaint clean chamber, with the heavy oak rafters, and the jasmine coming in at the window, and glancing with pardonable pride at the fair face reflected in the mirror. But as she laid her things on the patchwork coverlet, it seemed to her that the lace veil became fine white linen, and was folded about a figure that lay in the bed; and when she looked round the room again everything was draped in white—white ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "It is not then indifference to the ecclesia that you complain of. Is it neglect of the ecclesiastic? Ha, ha! you and I, though young, know the colours that make up the patchwork world. Archbishop, I love an easy life; if your brother and his friends will but give me that, let them take all else. Again, I say, to the point,—I cannot banish my lady's kindred, but I will bind your House still more to mine. I have a daughter, failing male issue, the heiress to my crown. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage was no better ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... refreshment or variety, while books entailing reasoning and the marshalling of large bodies of facts were being written. Moreover, many of his researches were allowed to drop, and only resumed after an interval of years. Thus a rigidly chronological series of letters would present a patchwork of subjects, each of which would be difficult to follow. The Table of Contents will show in what way I have ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... of the bedroom, and thought how pleasant it looked, with its pink-and-white patchwork quilt and the brown unpainted paneling of ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Alphabetical Answers. Pitch Basket. Who Am I? Progressive Puzzles. Tit For Tat. Eye-guessing. The Prince Of Wales. Commerce. Laugh A Little. Location. Fashion Notes. Stray Syllables. Quaker Meeting. Magic Music. Patchwork Illustrations. Biography. Orchestra. Who Is My Next-door Neighbor? Fire. The Months. Bell Buff. Postman. Spooney Fun. Cities. Going To China. A Penny For Your Thoughts. Misquoted Quotations. Literary Salad. Broken Quotations. ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... delighted in a ride in that clumsy old vehicle, nor dreamed that its halting, uncertain gait was other than the very poetry of motion! Even mother's own wooden rocking-chair, a bit of boughten elegance, with its gay patchwork cushion, and dull, contented "creak! creak!" as its dear occupant swayed meditatively to and fro, knitting in hand, in the quiet, restful gloaming, was not quite equal to that dear, delightful old cradle, for a good brisk canter to "Banbury Cross," or to the famous ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... his head to the still open back door, where Mrs. Morran could be heard at her labours. He stepped across and shut it. "I'm no' wantin' that auld wife to hear," he said. Then he squatted down on the patchwork rug by the hearth, and warmed his blue-black shins. Looking into the glow of the fire, he observed, "I seen you two up by ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... whatever was the cause, so it was that he did but feel more vividly the sentiment of the old father in the comedy, after consulting the lawyers, "Incertior sum multo quam ante." He saw that the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident; that it had come down in the particular shape in which the English Church now ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... and wonderful portrayal of an otter, and a very fancy stag of unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and the glue, and a prying finger penetrates ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... raised a little above the ground by a frame of split cedars. On these lowly couches lay extended two poor men, suffering under the wasting effects of lake-fever. Their yellow bilious faces strangely contrasted with the gay patchwork-quilts that covered them. I felt much concerned for the poor emigrants, who told me they had not been many weeks in the country when they were seized with the fever and ague. They both had wives and small children, who seemed very miserable. The wives also had been sick with ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes. Add to the strangeness of the village itself, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... several colonies, each to do its part, a pretty poor sort of government to lay at the Lord's door? Why, once these colonies get clear of England, they'll fight among themselves. But, even if they didn't, the country would have a patchwork of little petty governments and nothing in ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... the only thread which connects us with the prehistoric past. By picking up and piecing out the scattered remnants of language, we form a patchwork of wondrous design. Oblige us by considering the derivation of the word "sarcophagus," and see if it be not suggestive of potted meats. Observe the significance of the phrase "sweet sixteen." What a world of meaning ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... afternoons. After being duly suppered and scrubbed, we were enjoined to go to bed, and remember that to-morrow was Sunday, and that we must not laugh and play in the morning. With many a sorrowful look did Susan deposit her doll in the chest, and give one lingering glance at the patchwork she was piecing for dolly's bed, while William, John, and myself emptied our pockets of all superfluous fish-hooks, bits of twine, popguns, slices of potato, marbles, and all the various items of boy property, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Mervyn first forgot her presence, then tolerated her saucer eyes, then found her capable of running his errands, and lastly began to care to please her. Honora had devised employment for her, by putting a drawer of patchwork at her disposal, and suggesting that she should make a workbag for each of Robert's 139 school girls; and the occupation this afforded her was such a public benefit, that Robert was content to pay the tax of telling ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cavalry and of the inhabitants of Mosul, are sent here to graze.... Flowers of every hue enamelled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as in northern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the whole plain seemed a patchwork of many colours. The dogs, as they returned from hunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according to the flowers through which they had last forced their way.... In the evening, after the labour of the day, I ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... should even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... peace of a fine summer evening. Through the upper pane of the station window Police-constable Bennett, who felt that his senses at the moment were abnormally keen, recognised with a sinking heart such reds and yellows as bedecked the best patchwork quilt at home. By contrast the lights of the superintendent's office were subdued, so that within the walls of the police-station sounds seemed of greater importance. Somewhere a drunkard, deprived of his boots, was drumming his criticism of authority on the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... in several instances that the thread by which the marvellous patchwork of unrelated and varying local myths is joined together, is an indecent ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... valley on the left, as one goes from Amiens to Albert: one looked down into it from the road, a patchwork of greens, browns, greys and yellows. I remember John Masefield said one day it looked to him like a post-impressionist table-cloth; later, white zigzagging lines were ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line—a very hard one to walk—there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... late Mr. Speede recommended the use of the doob grass, but it is so extremely difficult to keep it clear of any intermixture of the ooloo grass, which, when it intrudes upon the doob gives the lawn a patchwork and shabby look, that it is better to use the ooloo grass only, for it is far more manageable; and if kept well rolled and closely shorn it has a very neat, and indeed, beautiful appearance. The lawns in the compound ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... degree of heat till she was able to work with them, and even mend her clothes with tolerable expertness. By degrees, Catharine contrived to cover the whole outer surface of her homespun woollen frock with squirrel and mink, musk-rat and woodchuck skins. A curious piece of fur patchwork of many hues and textures it presented to the eye,—a coat of many colours, it is true; but it kept the wearer warm, and Catharine was not a little proud of her ingenuity and industry,—every new ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... "It's patchwork," she announced, "and I make it my habit to get all the help I can. I'm piecing a quilt, goose-chase pattern, and while I don't know as it's the prettiest there is, yet I don't know as 'tisn't. If you girls expect to sit the morning, and I must say you look like it, ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... Rather would I throw my 'Orpheus' behind the fire, and let every opera I have ever written follow it to destruction. I would bite out my tongue, and spit it in Hasse's face, sooner than go before him with a mouth full of flattering lies, to befool him with praise of that patchwork he has made, and calls AN OPERA! When I was obscure and unknown, I scorned these tricks of trade; and think you that to-day I would stoop to such baseness? Eight years ago, in Rome, a cabal was formed to cause the failure of my 'Trionfo de Camillo,' Cardinal Albini came to assure ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... and then, especially in his earlier essays, there is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned argument. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied search of the ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... 'We vex them; let us cease.' I would not play the common part. Tamely I heard the Southrons' brag: I said, 'Their wrongs have made them smart.' At length they struck our ancient flag,— Their flag as ours, the traitors damned!— And braved it with their patchwork-rag. I rose, when other men had calmed Their anger in the marching throng; I rose, as might a corpse embalmed, Who hears God's mandate, 'Right my wrong!' I rose and set me to His deed, With His great Spirit fixed and strong. I swear, that, when I drew this sword, And joined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in supposing that this age more than any past or future one is destined to see the garments of antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; ... and more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... relapsed to a slumber which was more torpor than sleep. Her yellow, old-ivory face was faintly tinged with color; her thin lips were relaxed, and seemed a trifle fuller, so that Mary thought she looked better in sickness than in health; but the limp arm lying on the patchwork quilt seemed to be more skinny than thin, and the hand was more waxen and ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... there were only blocks of wood and a rude bench on one side of the fireplace. The bed was a little platform of poles, on which were spread the furry skins of wild animals, and a patchwork quilt of homespun goods. ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... miracle! He was altogether reconciled, approved both versions, and did not know which one to choose. We ended with a patchwork. The two quatrains are in verses of ten feet, and the two ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... one evening in December, with a sigh. "Not a word does one hear of clothes, gossip, husbands, or babies. Mrs. Washington told me the day after she returned that she had deliberately thought of nothing but butter and patchwork during the entire recess, that her poor brain might be able to stand the strain of the winter. Shall you have to work ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... they are found all over the province, as a matter of course occupying the best places. But they have not exterminated the aborigines, nor have they assimilated them to any degree. To-day the tribes constitute more than one half the population, and an ethnological map of Yunnan is a wonderful patchwork, for side by side and yet quite distinct, you find scattered about settlements of Chinese, Shans, Lolos, Miaos, Losus, and just what some of these are is still an unsolved riddle. To add to the confusion ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... any feeling showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good God's sunlight. As we ate, Dan told him some of our story, and the Nameless Man sat, a handful of his beard in ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... on till evening, each chafed and angry with the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with the thought of that "To-morrow" which they had promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist? There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido shore, and the long sickle sweep of the beach. The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! a tall ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... world. He could not yet see the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could hear the roar of the falls. Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground to take a last look. It was like a patchwork quilt: a square of wheat stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone's throw long; and his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the interstices of ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Gloria knew that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the "judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake outright, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don't pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork." ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... article of furniture bore signs of long though careful use. The spotless boarded floor was bare of carpet, but was strewn with rough-cured skins, timber-wolf, antelope, coyote and bear, and here and there rugs of undoubted home make; these latter of the patchwork order. The centre table was of wide proportions and of solid mahogany, and told of the many services of the apartment; the small chairs were old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and there were several of these—were capacious and of divers ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". (See {feature}.) The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and another.... When creeping ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... material. That was Eurie's dress. Skirt of one kind and overdress of another. A very economical fashion, and one not destined to last long, because of its economy, and the fact that very elegant ladies rather curl their lips at it, and call it the "patchwork style." Eurie from necessity rather than choice adopted it, and it was also her misfortune rather than her taste that the colors were too light to be really according to the mode. Her gloves were of an entirely different shade from the ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, and called it sub-total prosthesis. A crude job—I've seen their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones—but they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of 37 ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... impossible, and the other characters mostly conventional, The Dangerous Age makes a very charming entertainment at the Vaudeville, a patchwork of humour and pathos ingeniously woven together; of which the humour was as fresh and jolly as anything I have heard on the stage, and the pathos put me in greater danger of being caught "blubbering like a seal" than I have ever been before. It is to Masters Reginald ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... state bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red calico in minute ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... completed this process. It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind. Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew. This patchwork was made of all sorts of odds and ends—pretty bits of silk and velvet; but the coarse pieces that were not pleasant to touch always predominated. Likewise ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... couch was thrown a ragged patchwork quilt, and a pillow covered with calico rested on one end, with the mark of a head dented deep in ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... result. They try an experiment—it succeeds—it fails; they alter it; they alter, perhaps, what they ought to leave alone, and leave what they ought to alter; and so, at last, there always remains but a patchwork, which pleases and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... field of English poetry, and, like everything else of Locker's, it shows the man. "Its charm," writes the editor's collaborator, "is entirely of the editor's individuality"—at least, from his favourites in literature, one may make a very fair guess at some part of his character. So, too, "Patchwork"—a kind of scrap-book, a collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, mostly humorous, but not as a rule broadly or farcically funny—illustrates his delicate and ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... in Holland is that there is no national plan, but rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle, so that ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... lay a patchwork of small fields all over the slopes of the hills, and the snow had come upon them tentatively, but already the birds of the waste had moved to the sheltered places for every omen boded more to fall. Far away some little hills blazed like ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... had an odd cheer in it. Much scrubbing had removed from it the objections manifest in Glad's room above. There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain drawn ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the mantelshelf and the three- cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment—poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to-day ain't tomorrer. They're both light-complected. It's jest like patchwork. Put light an' dark together, I say, or you won't git no figger. Here, le's have a mite o' cake! Mis' Tolman's a proper good cook, if her childern have all turned out ducks, an' took to the water. Every one on ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... bed, gay with patchwork quilts—Nancy knew all the patterns: Sunrise on the Peaks; Drunkard's Path; the Rainbow—Mary was making up for all that her forebears had neglected to do. Early and late she spun and wrought—she piled her bed high with the results of her labours; she covered the floor with marvellous rugs; ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room to room. Ray sat before the fire in the kitchen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his lips; but they were checked by the stealing sense of duality that so often paralysed his action. He had recovered his lucidity of vision, and his impulses faded before it like mist. He saw life again as it was, an incomplete and shabby business, a patchwork of torn and ravelled effort. Everywhere the shears of Atropos were busy, and never could the cut threads ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... a generous yard from his patchwork-quilt, put it over the child's shoulders, and the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... said Miss Ruth. "Susie,"—to a little girl sitting close beside her,—"why can't some of you girls get together one afternoon in the week and make a patchwork quilt to ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... own version of Dryden's line, "Great Wits are sure to Madness near allied" (Absalom and Achitophel, l. 248). By means of these alterations in his sources, Boyer has compiled a passage that has focus and direction, and gives little evidence of its patchwork origin. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... the tendrils at least a yard long. In the other window was a blowzy-looking canary in a cage. A corpulent tortoise-shell cat occupied the turkey-red cushion in one generous rocking chair, There was a couch with a faded patchwork coverlet, several other chairs, and in a glass-fronted case standing on the mantlepiece a model of a brigantine in full sail, at least two ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... to speak. The words were forced from him involuntarily. Her tone, her eyes, the eager earnestness in her voice.... He did not say any more, nor did he look at her. Instead he looked at the patchwork comforter which had fallen from his knees to the floor, and fervently hoped that he had not already said too much. He stooped and ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... set to work at the wood-fire and cooked me a dinner of eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. He was a rough cook, but one very anxious to please. The room where I passed the night had a long table in it, and benches. There was no blanket on the bed, only a sheet and a heavy patchwork quilt. Ah, yes, there was something else, carefully laid upon the quilt. This was a linen bag without an opening, which, when spread out, tapered towards the ends. Had I not known something about the old-fashioned nightcap, I should have puzzled a long time before discovering ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and plaster, which seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled, with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be only one shop, with some ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... finer air of the hills-up with a lightening heart, though still carrying a bitter burden of despondency. Night rested upon the hilltops and brooded in the valleys. Below, the shadowy landscape lay like blurred patchwork-still he climbed upwards till Feldwick lay silent and sleeping at his feet and a flavour of the sea mingled with the night wind which cooled his cheeks. Then Douglas Guest threw himself breathless amongst the bracken and ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... extant in the various political units in the United States present a patchwork of overlapping authority and undetermined responsibility. Highway laws are being constantly revised by state legislatures and with each revision there is some change in administrative methods and often the changes are revolutionary in character. In most states, the trend is away ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... "Cinderella," and going shopping with mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made up in the long front chamber. O, don't you remember, Laura? What different pieces we have got into our remembrances already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time, may-be, I shall tell somebody about living here. Well, they will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to live in. You will see when you ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
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