|
|
|
More "Quaint" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in several French- Canadian families, manuscript copies then made at Quebec exist to this day, of the Latin and French classics from the difficulty of procuring books; there being little intercourse then with Paris book-stores, in fact, no importations of books. Among many quaint relics of the distant days of the Messrs. Jourdain and of their successor, Monsieur Audiverti dit Romain, we saw a most curiously inlaid Marqueterie table, dating, we might be tempted to assert, from the ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... his comrades, the former whose quips and quiddities, in childhood's happy days, many of us still lovingly remember; the wonderment with which we gazed at the magical tricks wrought by Harlequin and his wand; the quaint conceits and ambling gait of Pantaloon; and, last but not least, bewitching Columbine, with whom, most likely as each year came round, in youthful ardour we fell anew in love's toils, are all rapidly vanishing into ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... that midst their sportive pennons waved Thousands of angels, in resplendence each Distinct and quaint adornment. At their glee And carol smiled the Lovely One of heaven That joy was in the eyes ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... it did, for the best of all magic was shut up in the quaint little case that Polly wore inside her frock, and kissed so tenderly each night and morning. The thought that, insignificant as she was, she yet might do some good, made her very careful of her acts and words, and so anxious to keep head contented and ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... are rather pretty," said Henry. He was conscious of an admiration for the old blue-and-white ware with its graceful shapes and quaint decorations savoring of mystery and the Far East, but he realized that his view was directly opposed to his wife's. This time Sylvia spoke quite in earnest. As far as the Indian china was concerned, she had her convictions. She was a ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... very odd, and it attracted my attention for that reason. I am a great collector of curios, and especially of quaint and curious rings. I have traveled the world over in search of the quaint and curious, and I have a collection of nearly five hundred rings of all patterns, makes and values. This collecting of rings has become a fad, or mania, with me. Whenever I see an odd or peculiar ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... any hour he chose, the prudent Knight [4] Desisted, and the quarry and the mound Are monuments of his unfinished task. The block on which these lines are traced, perhaps, Was once selected as the corner-stone 15 Of that [5] intended Pile, which would have been Some quaint odd plaything of elaborate skill, So that, I guess, the linnet and the thrush, And other little builders who dwell here, Had wondered at the work. But blame him not, 20 For old Sir William was a gentle Knight, Bred in this vale, to which he appertained [6] With all his ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... quaint little bureau which he used, were kept the relics of his father; very few and poor, and of no interest to any one but himself,—only the letter telling of his death, a worn-out watch-chain, and a photograph of Senor Jose ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... The quaint little old-fashioned garments were musty and faded. A frock of blue merino braided in an elaborate pattern in black lay on top. There was a cape to match, and a little cloth cap. Beside these ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... think the promises were not made to be sat on, Sam?" said I, feeling much diverted with Sam's quaint ...
— Out in the Forty-Five - Duncan Keith's Vow • Emily Sarah Holt
... feet, through dark circuitous ways, I plunged and stumbled; round me, far and near, Quaint hordes of eyeless phantoms did appear, Twisting and turning in a bootless chase, — When, like an exile given by God's grace To feel once more a human atmosphere, I caught the world's first murmur, large and clear, Flung from a singing river's ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... does not enjoy her quaint surprise," laughed a light voice behind me, and a slim finger directed my gaze toward the lady whom I ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson
... helplessly with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures. Fanny went softly among these masterpieces; she admitted "she knew so little about them," and she confessed that to ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells
... interior abounding in rich and costly detail; in heavy crimson draperies, precious old Italian cabinets, damascened armor, carved chairs with upright backs and twisted legs, old paintings in massive Florentine frames, and strange quaint pieces of Elizabethan furniture, like buffets, with open shelves full of rare and artistic things—bronzes, ivory carvings, unwieldy Majolica jars, and lovely goblets of antique Venetian glass laced with spiral ornaments of blue and crimson ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... with a well-to-do friend of mine in a beautiful little town up in Connecticut. We went to church. It was an old colonial edifice, quaint, clean, and outside on the green before it were forty or fifty automobiles, for, as my friend told me with pride, it was the richest congregation in that part ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... "You quaint child!" said the man, with a quiver of strong feeling in his tone. "You would like something prized by the giver, would you?" he added, musingly. "Well, ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... the gown was completed, another group of the clever little creatures clambered up to the top of the high-backed chair in which Betty was seated, and began to arrange her hair. Some had quaint little pots in their hands from which they poured delicate perfumes over Betty's head,— Joan picked up one of the pots, which they threw aside when empty, and found to her astonishment that it was only a poppy head. Then they carefully arranged every curl and wave of Betty's hair, until she ...
— Cornwall's Wonderland • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... by the old church and the tomb within, so I went across after leaving you and wandered about the churchyard. Close beside the corner of the north transept was the empty grave, as you know, and beside it a quaint old headstone with an interesting coat-of-arms upon it. I knelt down and tried to decipher ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... The Dragoeiro (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At first it ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... final repose. I should like to feel that my old churches were safe from demolition: that my old convents and monasteries should always shelter the pious indolence of friars and nuns. It would be pleasant to have studious monks exploring quaint corners of my unphilosophized annals, and gentle, snuff-taking abbes writing up episodes in the history of my noble families, and dedicating them to the present heirs of past renown; while the thinker and the reviewer should never penetrate ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... story told by lines of action only in the main group, no accessories being admitted. There is no undercutting anywhere, nor exhibition of technical skill, but the fondest and tenderest appliance of it; and one of the principal charms of the whole is the adaptation of every subject to its quaint limit. The tale must be told within the four petals of the quatrefoil, and the wildest and playfulest beasts must never come out of their narrow corners. The attention with which spaces of this kind are filled by the Gothic designers ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... made, and which is still sometimes used, was fool-happy; but other words, like idlesse, dreariment, drowsihead, are hardly seen outside his poetry. One reason for this is that Spenser was telling stories of quaint and curious things, and he used quaint and curious words which would not naturally pass ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... characteristic act by which Ida had identified the tree—once so bruised and broken—with herself, she sat down again at its foot and thought long and deeply. The deep hush and quiet of the quaint old garden was just what she needed after the delirium of her passion and despair. Her pulse began to grow more even, and her beautiful face sweet and noble with the better thoughts she now was entertaining. As she sat there leaning her head against the bole of the tree, the shadows of the ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... called out,—he always called her that when he wished to annoy her, for Nan had a special dislike to her quaint, old-fashioned name; it had been her mother's and grandmother's name; in every generation there had been a Nancy Challoner,—"come, come, Miss Nancy! we cannot have you playing at hide-and-seek in this fashion. We want some music. Give us something rousing, to keep us all awake." And Nan had reluctantly ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... awe-struck and that Washington himself sat with his head bowed in deep meditation. As the Convention adjourned, Franklin, who was then over eighty-one years of age, arose and pointing to the President's quaint armchair on the back of which was emblazoned a half sun, brilliant with gilded rays, observed: "As I have been sitting here all these weeks, I have often wondered whether yonder sun is rising or setting, but now I know that ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 4 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a note, "read (it well deserves the attention) that quaint, but most curious and learned writer's excellent ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... these profound truths prevented her from gathering some quaint ferns and berries, or from keeping her calm gray eyes open to certain practical changes that were taking place around her. She had noticed a singular thickening in the atmosphere that seemed to prevent the passage of the sun's rays, yet without ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... power. The state of business in all trades and professions may be heartbreakingly bad, but there is one profession in which there are no bad seasons—one that will survive and flourish until the world ceases to play the quaint comedy of love. All the world loves a lover, and none more so than the tattoo artist, or, to give him his professional name, Professor Sylvanus Ruffino, the world's champion, whose studio is in Commercial Road. When a young man of that district has ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... all manner of rich and quaint devices in the garniture of her room, her person, and her feminine belongings. In nothing was this more apparent than in the visiting card which she had prepared for her use. For such an article one would say that she, in her present state, could have but small need, seeing how ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... to the roads?" I said, as I stood on the step looking at the quaint old fellow. "Do, lad? Why, there's plenty of stuff ar'n't there? Cutoff all the tops of the hills, and lay in the bottoms, and there you are, level road all ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... large audience, comprising an extraordinary number of literary celebrities, Mr. Artemus Ward, the noted American humorist, made his first appearance as a public lecturer on Tuesday evening, the place selected for the display of his quaint oratory being the room long tenanted by Mr. Arthur Sketchley. His first entrance on the platform was the signal for loud and continuous laughter and applause, denoting a degree of expectation which ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 6 • Charles Farrar Browne
... handsome matronly lady, standing side by side with the horny-handed mechanic, the office-boy, the overgrown schoolboy, and the Buchanan Street "swell." They all watch the game and surroundings in their own particular way. I once heard a quaint, but nevertheless true, idea of how some of the more familiar visitors give way to a certain failing, which in itself can scarcely be called such, but is not unfrequently looked upon with amazement by the stranger. The Scotchman, it is said somewhere, is not so much respected ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... part was what he offered to the world of routine—the world he hated. The spark part—cheery, warm, enthusiastic, full of dreams, of imaginings, with an absorbing love for little bits of beauty, such as old Satsuma, Cloisonne, quaint miniatures and the like—all good, and yet within reach of his purse—this part he gave ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... of the outlaw confessing to the trembling monk how, besides other crimes, he had once pushed into the Rhine a priest who had just heard his confession, and how the wife of the assassin comforted Suso when he was about to drop down from sheer fright, forms a quaint interlude in the saint's memoirs. But a more grievous trial awaited him. Among other pastoral work, he laboured much to reclaim fallen women; and a pretended penitent, whose insincerity he had detected, revenged ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... still remains in the Catholic Baptistery. The interest of this building consists in the mosaics of its cupola. On the disk, in the centre, is represented the Baptism of Christ. The Saviour stands, immersed up to His loins, in the Jordan, whose water flowing past Him is depicted with a quaint realism. The Baptist stands on His left side and holds one hand over His head. On the right of the Saviour stands an old man, who is generally said to represent the River-god, and the reed in his hand, the urn, from which water gushes, ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... As Lafcadio Hearn described it—"the quaint, whimsical, wonderfully colored little town, the sweetest, queerest, darlingest little city in the Antilles.... Walls are lemon color, quaint balconies and lattices are green. Palm trees rise from courts and gardens into the warm blue sky, indescribably blue, that appears almost to touch ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... movements and heard the words, which attracted her both by their subject and by their accent—a strange one for those parts. It was quaint ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... whether civil or external, which disturbed the repose of the capital; and at the present day, no traces of it remain except the indestructible monoliths on which it stood. A "world of stone columns," to use the quaint expression of Knox, still marks the site of the Brazen Palace of Dutugaimunu, and attests the accuracy of the chronicles ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... more striking picture of desolation than that presented by one of these quaint birds, standing upon a single leg, feeling as the story has it, "den Jammer ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... daffodils danced And jostled, turning sideways to the wind. A dropping cherry petal softly glanced Over her hair, and slid away behind. At the far end through twisted cherry-trees The old house glowed, geranium-hued, with bricks Bloomed in the sun like roses, low and long, Gabled, and with quaint tricks Of chimneys carved and fretted. Out of these Grey smoke was shaken, which the faint Spring breeze Tossed into nothing. Then a ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... it very entertaining," she said. "I never saw so many quaint people. There is one girl, a Miss Dean, whom I am really getting acquainted with. She's as country as can ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln
... perfect ecstasy of flight, and continues in flower among its erect seed capsules until the first cool days of autumn kill the gnats and small winged insects not driven to cover. Then the swallows, dependent on such fare, must go to warmer climes where plenty still fly. Quaint old Gerarde claims that the Swallow-wort was so called because "with this herbe the dams restore eyesight to their young ones when their eye be put out" by swallows. Coles asserts "the swallow cureth ...
— Wild Flowers Worth Knowing • Neltje Blanchan et al
... thistles, and roses; its ceiling, also of oak, beautifully panelled and ornamented. There was a great square recess in the middle of the gallery, and along one side of it a row of bow-windows, through whose diamond panes a fine view was afforded of the quaint old garden and balconies below. Here, doubtless, knights and dames of the olden time had danced, coquetted, quarrelled, and been reconciled. Within those deep embrasures courtiers in ruffs and plumes had sued for ladies' favors, and plotted deep intrigues ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 80, June, 1864 • Various
... had once seen, in marching by, the belfry of his village!" I continued. "The circumstance is quaint enough. It seems to bind up into one the whole bundle of those human instincts that make life beautiful, and people and places dear—and from which it would ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... yet arrived only at the close of the fourth century B.C., and the fall of the Thirty Tyrants. Two of the six compartments in which he proposes, to use his own quaint phrase, "to exhaust the free life of collective Hellas," still remain to be accomplished. But the history of Greece is written. Stirring events and great names are still to come; the romantic enterprise of Cyrus and the retreat of the Ten Thousand, the elective ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang. They have been translated from the modern version written by Sadanami Sanjin. These stories are not literal translations, and though the Japanese story and all quaint Japanese expressions have been faithfully preserved, they have been told more with the view to interest young readers of the West than the technical student ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation. The house was quaint, with clapboards running up and down, neatly trimmed, and there were five rooms, a tiny porch, a rosy front yard, and unbelievably delicious strawberries in the rear. A South Carolinian, lately come to the Berkshire ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ways of amusing his leisure. He was a tolerable actor in private theatricals, and was particularly successful in the part of Lothario. A handsome leg, to which both painters and satirists took care to give prominence, was among his chief qualifications for the stage. He devised quaint dresses for masquerades. He dabbled in geometry, mechanics, and botany. He paid some attention to antiquities and works of art, and was considered in his own circle as a judge of painting, architecture, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... itself was old and quaint and rambling, part of the old wattle and dab walls yet remaining in some of the outhouses, as well as the grey shingle roof. There was a more modern part, for the house had been added to from time to time by different owners, though no additions had been made since Norah's father brought ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... truth is wrenched from its old combinations, and presented to us in new, impassable, abysmal contrast with its opposite error. A trifle, some slender character, some jest, quip, or spiritual toy, is shaped into the most quaint, yet often truly living form; but shaped somehow as with the hammer of Vulcan, with three strokes that might have helped to forge an AEgis. The treasures of his mind are of a similar description with the mind itself; his knowledge is gathered from all the kingdoms ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... seen color on any solid forms, that did not, to my mind, neutralize all other power; the porcelains of Luca della Robbia are painful examples, and in lower art, Florentine mosaic in relief; gilding is more admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly upon figures of quaint design, as on the pulpit of St^a. Maria Novella, while it spoils the classical ornaments of the mouldings. But the truest grandeur of sculpture I believe to be in the white form; something of this ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... have been revealed to the English reader by Mrs. Trollope; and when, some time since, her letters upon the "Social Aspects of Revolution in Italy," were collected and published in book-form, they met with the cordial approbation of the critics. These letters are marked by purity of style, quaint picturesqueness, and an admirable couleur locale. As a translator, Mrs. Trollope possesses very rare ability. Her natural aptitude for language is great. A residence in Italy of seventeen years has made her ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... of rest here captivating?" she continued. "Look at that quaint garden, and this ragged lawn, and the great river in front, and the superannuated fort beyond the river! Everything is peaceful, even down to the poor old General's little bed-room. One would like to lie down in it and sleep a century or two. ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... when it suddenly turned and bolted through the hole into the beehive, I observed that it had no tail—not even a vestige of such a creation,—and thus discovered that it was a "Tottie," or Hottentot boy. The sublime, the quaint, the miserable, the ridiculous, and the beautiful, were before me in that scene. Let me expound these five "heads" ...
— Six Months at the Cape • R.M. Ballantyne
... palm-leaves and covered in at top, a regular native African hut, in short, such as is pictured in books, and such as I once got up from dried palm-leaves, for a fair, at home. This hut is now crammed with men, singing at the top of their voices, in one of their quaint, monotonous, endless, negro-Methodist chants, with obscure syllables recurring constantly, and slight variations interwoven, all accompanied with a regular drumming of the feet and clapping of the hands, like castanets. Then ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... being occupied, and every nook in the garden too, we are accommodated with a rustic table in the "Grand Salon," part of which is screened off as a kind of bar. The "Grand Salon" is also full of quaint pictures and eccentric curiosities; it is cool and airy, bright flowers are in the windows, and the floor is sanded. We had stopped here to refresh the horses, intending to breakfast at Etretat. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... clean streets, handsome buildings, and attractive homes. Many quaint and picturesque old buildings line its avenues; but in the newer parts of the town and in the suburbs ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... of newspapers which had been carefully preserved from time to time, including copies of the "Pennsylvania Gazette," edited by Benjamin Franklin, and also of the latter's publications known as "Poor Richard's Almanack," full of quaint sayings and maxims. Over the shelf were some deer's antlers and on these rested two muskets, with the powder horns and bullet pouches hanging beneath. Behind the door stood another musket, loaded and ready for use, should an enemy or a wild ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... subjects who decided to try their fortune in the Western World after the signing of the Peace of Paris in 1763 was one Andrew Jackson, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian of the tenant class, sprung from a family long resident in or near the quaint town of Carrickfergus, on the northern coast of Ireland, close by the newer and ...
— The Reign of Andrew Jackson • Frederic Austin Ogg
... light, bright though soft, of the tall candles burning in grotesque holders fell on the curtains of violet velvet, starred with the golden lilies of France, on the rare tapestry, that covered the walls, on embroidered cushions and quaint carvings. There were flowers in abundance everywhere; but their scent was killed by something that burned in a cup held by a little bronze Ganymede, the odour of which filled the room with a sweet but heavy scent. This room, like the other, was likewise ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... antagonism between rich and poor, which the collapse of feudal relations had strained to breaking-point, was not perhaps normally so intense as it is to-day; yet there was certainly much oppression and unnecessary hardships to be suffered by the weak, even in that age. The Ancren Riwle, that quaint form of life for ankeresses drawn up by a Dominican in the thirteenth century, shows that even then, despite the distance of years and the passing of so many generations, the manners and ways and mental attitudes of people depended very much as to whether they were among those ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... world And the wide sweep of billows lightly curled. Each page the Master writ she read, close furled In lotus blooms, or, 'mong the storm-clouds whirled; Or traced, star-lettered, on the flaming scroll The night unwinds toward the southern pole. And sometimes wiling idle days, she wove In quaint device, gems from her treasure-trove, Rare garlanded, or set in flashing zone Soft emerald, sapphire pale, and many a stone Out-gleaming amethyst. Her yellow hair Among, the glinting diamonds shone. And there The ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... My two friends had entered upon a theme which they could never exhaust; one pleasantly narrating the wonders and sights of Paris, the other describing with his true native eloquence the beauties of his country, and repeating the old local Irish legends, which appeared to me quaint ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... to divert his thoughts from his crime, and at the same time tried to reap its reward by studying the stolen recipe; but his attempt was not successful. The cramped letters, brown with age, on the brown parchment, danced before his eyes; and the quaint, intricate High German phraseology became more and more involved. He could make nothing of it at all. And the thought occurred to him that perhaps he never would be able to make anything of it—that, without losing any part of the penalty justly attendant upon his crime, ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... moaned and the snow danced fitfully, within a certain quaint farmhouse in Northern New York was warmth and comfort, all the more apparent by the ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... the willows, he caught a glimpse of a mill near-by on a branch stream, and of the thatched roof of the mill-house where the house-leeks were growing. For all ornament, the quaint cottage was covered with jessamine and honeysuckle and climbing hops, and the garden about it was gay with phloxes and tall, juicy-leaved plants. Nets lay drying in the sun along a paved causeway raised above the ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... very romantic, with all its memories of olden times. Nobody should go to Belgium without visiting Bruges, once so famous and now so fallen, not only because it is picturesque, with its old buildings and quaint views such as artists love to paint, but also because it is so quiet that you can watch the customs of a Belgian town without being disturbed by a crowd—the market-folk with their wares spread out on the stones of the street, the small ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Belgium • George W. T. Omond
... timber, which led the eye down by slow descents into the beautiful valley of the Ell. Here the silver river wound its gentle way through lush and poplar-bordered marshes, where the cattle stand knee-deep in flowers; past quaint wooden mill-houses, through Boisingham Old Common, windy looking even now, and brightened here and there with a dash of golden gorse, till it was lost beneath the picturesque cluster of red-tiled roofs that marked the ancient town. Look which way he would, the view was lovely, and ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... balconies and gratings and fretwork of iron painted in gaudy colors gave an Oriental touch. The fronts were a riot of color. The fronts of the joss houses and the restaurants were brightened with many colored lanterns, quaint carved gilded woodwork, potted plants and dwarf trees. Up and down these narrow streets every hour in the twenty-four you could hear the gentle tattoo, for he seemed never to sleep, never to be in a hurry and always moving. Stop on any corner five minutes ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... a tiny old woman with a little, softly-triangular face, and large, soft blue eyes that were alight with unquenchable youth, and as full of hopes as a girl's. She had pink cheeks and snow-white hair which she wore in quaint little puffs ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters, Queens of Sheba, angelic messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... up the picturesque Rue de Seine, let us walk to the Luxembourg, where bonnes, students, grisettes, and old gentlemen with pigtails, love to wander in the melancholy, quaint old gardens; where the peers have a new and comfortable court of justice, to judge all the emeutes which are to take place; and where, as everybody knows, is the picture-gallery of modern French artists, whom ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... you loiter, flowing-gowned And hugely sashed, with pins a-row Your quaint head as with flamelets crowned, Demure, inviting—even so, When merry maids in Miyako To feel the sweet o' the year began, And green gardens to overflow, I loved you once in ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... apple tree?" The children of that distant day Thus to some aged man shall say; And, gazing on its mossy stem, The gray-haired man shall answer them: "A poet of the land was he, Born in the rude but good old times; 'Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes On planting the ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... their picturesque line of gables, their fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their castellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South. Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the baron looked from his upper dais ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... is nothing else appointed.—Tell me, however, what has become of your Book on England? We shall really be obliged to you for that. A piece of it went through all the Newspapers, some years ago; which was really unique for its quaint kindly insight, humor, and other qualities; like an etching by Hollar or Durer, amid the continents of vile smearing which are called "pictures" at present. Come on, Come on; give us the Book, ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... very old and very cunning; but in either state exercising much more influence in life than women in the East do now; of good-natured, capricious, though sometimes tyrannical monarchs; and of life full of quaint mysteries, quite unintelligible in every phasis, and on that account ...
— An Unprotected Female at the Pyramids • Anthony Trollope
... faith and hope had sustained her in those terrible hours, when the shrieks of the mangled and the cries of the dying had pierced her heart, and when torture and death stared her full in the face. Ethan, in his own quaint terms, had confessed that her prayers and her unwavering trust in God had awed him and solemnized his mind, thus raising him to a level with the momentous issues he was to meet. She felt that her prayers for herself and the brave prairie boy had been answered, not only ...
— Hope and Have - or, Fanny Grant Among the Indians, A Story for Young People • Oliver Optic
... why, I love not this day's doings half so well As our quaint meeting-time at Compiegne. A clammy air creeps round me, as from vaults Peopled with looming spectres, chilling me And ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... the doctor's quaint conceit about the garters, but Murphy called them back to the business ...
— Handy Andy, Volume One - A Tale of Irish Life, in Two Volumes • Samuel Lover
... now - it may be, something more - Woman and man were human to the core. The hearts that throbbed behind that quaint attire Burned with a plenitude of essential fire. They too could risk, they also could rebel, They could love wisely - they could love too well. In that great duel of Sex, that ancient strife Which is the very central ...
— The Plays of W. E. Henley and R. L. Stevenson
... about this in a minute, and says how quaint and jolly Bohemian it will be. The Bigler barn is just the place, with no horse there since Metta bought one of the best-selling cars that ever came out of Michigan, and Vernabelle says she has written a couple of stunning ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... Rollick's preserves, for a quiet stroll with my father by the old peach wall,—sometimes silent, indeed, and already musing over the future, while he was busy with the past, but amply rewarded when, suspending his lecture, he would pour forth hoards of varied learning, rendered amusing by his quaint comments, and that Socratic satire which only fell short of wit because it never passed into malice. At some moments, indeed, the vein ran into eloquence; and with some fine heroic sentiment in his old books, his stooping form rose ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... peculiar charm ungranted as yet to her European sisters. It is the charm of freedom, of ease, of a certain external and skin-deep emancipation—an emancipation which goes but a little way down, yet adds a quaint and piquant grace of manner. What she conspicuously lacks, on the other hand, is essential femininity; by which I don't mean womanliness—of that she has enough and to spare—but the wholesome physical and instinctive qualities which go to make up a sound and well-equipped ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... party began to talk in German with great animation. They told each other of the quaint ways of this or the other; they joked loudly over 'Billy'—this being a nickname discovered for the German Emperor—and what he would be saying of the Czar's trip; they questioned each other, and answered each other concerning the places they were going to see, with great interest, displaying ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... franc piece, and waved him off; I had no idea what I owed him; I did not want to hear his voice; it might break the spell; mutely I followed my fate. I overtook the boy in a short time and asked him to come and have a drink, and he said to me in his quaint French way: ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... you might read the 'Odyssey'; the 'Iliad' is fine, but less equal in the translation, as well as less interesting in itself. What is stupidly said of Shakspeare, is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty beauties. Excepting his quaint epithets which he affects to render literally from the Greek, a language above all others blest in the happy marriage of sweet words, and which in our language are mere printer's compound epithets—such as quaffed ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... than that," answered Madam, smiling over the recollection of some of her quaint speeches. "She is lovable. She has 'the divine ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... linger about London of certain ancient societies, the members of which may still occasionally be seen in quaint gilt barges pursuing their own difficult way among the swarming steamers; when on certain days, the traditions concerning which are fast dying out of memory, the Fishmongers' Company, the Goldsmiths' Company, the Mercers' ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... Helped in this quaint fashion and in others the colony prospered and grew ever larger. It would have prospered even more had it not been for the outbreak of a kind of plague, which the colonists simply called "the sickness." It attacked chiefly the new settlers, and was ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... feeling. The brilliant pictures of feudal society in the romances of Scott and Fouque give no faithful image of that society, even when they are carefully correct in all ascertainable historical details.[1] They give rather the impression left upon an alien mind by the quaint, picturesque features of a way of life which seemed neither quaint nor picturesque to the men who lived it, but only to the man who turns to it for relief form the prosaic, or at least familiar, conditions ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... in bringing some quaint, old-fashioned little body, before a gathering of your more fastidious friends, at once to reconcile them to his or her strange, ungainly mien, and to justify yourself for acknowledging an intimacy with so eccentric a creature, by following up the prosy and ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... wind, as wandering winds will do, Brought to the baby there Sweet smells from some quaint flower that grew Out on ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... his own superb chantry as memorials of his architectural skill. Elsewhere in this book is a fuller description of this beautiful tomb demolished by Wyatt. He himself was buried at Windsor; in an arch opposite his tomb was a missal carved in stone with a quaint inscription, beginning, "Who leyde this boke here." He is said to have been the first chancellor of the Order of the Garter, although Dr. Milner assigns that honour to William de Edingdon. Whether the first or not, he and his ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... and her nephew, both felt particularly wide awake. They considered it the finest place they had seen since the capital of Ohio. The people wore quaint, but handsome clothes. They saw Quaker bonnets and broad-brimmed hats. Richmond is yet called the Quaker city of Indiana. But what Robert Day and Corinne noticed particularly was the array of wagons moved ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Luke's Church, Sault Ste. Marie, on the 27th of October; the Bishop took a great fancy to Ningwinnena, became his godfather, and gave him his own name, Frederick. Everyone indeed loved the Neepigon boy; he was so gentle in his ways, so quiet and polite in his manner, and made such quaint efforts to converse in English. He seemed so pleased too at any ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... lead to what was right. Insensibly almost, my pride was quelled, and I became humble and religiously inclined. Even the peculiarities of the sect, their meeting at their places of worship, their drawling, and their quaint manner of talking, became no longer a subject of dislike. I found out causes and good reasons for everything which before appeared strange—sermons in stones, and good in everything. Months passed away—my ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat
... thought, but I value it chiefly as a window through which I can obtain insight on the thinker; and Mr. Hawthorne's personality is peculiar, and specially peculiar in a new country like America. He is quiet, fanciful, quaint, and his humour is shaded by a meditativeness of spirit. Although a Yankee, he partakes of none of the characteristics of a Yankee. His thinking and his style have an antique air. His roots strike down through the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith
... service, to the great joy of that lively little spirit; who, though he had been a faithful servant to his master, was always longing to enjoy his free liberty, to wander uncontrolled in the air, like a wild bird, under green trees, among pleasant fruits, and sweet-smelling flowers. 'My quaint Ariel,' said Prospero to the little sprite when he made him free, 'I shall miss you; yet you shall have your freedom.' 'Thank you, my dear master,' said Ariel; 'but give me leave to attend your ship home with prosperous gales, before you bid ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... pages visited Sulgrave a few years since. It was in a quiet rural neighborhood, where the farm-houses were quaint and antiquated. A part only of the manor house remained, and was inhabited by a farmer. The Washington crest, in colored glass, was to be seen in a window of what was now the buttery. A window on which the whole family arms was emblazoned had been removed ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... these pieces of sculpture are genuine old Italian. This quaint little fountain came from ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... should certainly be the river. Rainham had a set of rooms in the house of his foreman, an eighteenth-century house, full of carved oak mantels and curious alcoves, a ramshackle structure within the dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard. In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—on ...
— A Comedy of Masks - A Novel • Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore
... several of the men on guard were assembled, amusing themselves at the expense of the departing peasantry, whose uncouth physiognomy and strange clownish appearance afforded abundant food for the quaint jokes and comical remarks of the soldiers. The market people were, for the most part, women, old men, and boys; the able-bodied men from the country around Pampeluna, having, with few exceptions, left their homes, either voluntarily or by compulsion, ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... round. Close behind me stood the tall figure of a man, dressed in raiment of quaint and singular fashion, but of goodly materials. He was in the prime and vigour of manhood; his features handsome and noble, but full of calmness and benevolence; at least I thought so, though they were somewhat shaded by a hat of finest beaver, ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... one of which showed Billy Neilson in one pose or another. Up-stairs, where William's chaos of treasures filled shelves and cabinets, the place of honor was given to a small black velvet square on which rested a pair of quaint Battersea enamel mirror knobs. In Cyril's rooms—usually so austerely bare—a handsome Oriental rug and several curtain-draped chairs hinted at purchases made at the instigation of a taste ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... little room. My room was in a wing of the house, over the dining-room, and the windows looked out on the river. It was not large, but was very pretty. The windows were curtained, and the bed was dainty, and the little mantel was draped, and the ornaments and pictures were quaint and ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... Rochester, in Kent—Shakespeare's Gad's Hill, where Falstaff engaged in the robbery—is a quaint little country-house of Queen Anne's time. I happened to be walking past, a year and a half or so ago, with my sub-editor of "Household Words," when I said to him: "You see that house? It has always a curious interest for me, because when I was a small boy ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... characteristic. It passed with several, but an old lady who was a more discerning critic than the others remarked that it was "katta katta saja"—mere conversation; meaning that it was destitute of the quaint and figurative expressions which adorn their own poetry. Their language in common speaking is proverbial and sententious. If a young woman prove with child before marriage they observe it is daulu buah, kadian bunga—the fruit before the flower. Hearing of a person's ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... filled his pipe, while Meyer helped himself to squareface in an absent manner. As for Benita, she stared at the quaint old coin, which had a hole in it, wondering with what scenes of terror and of bloodshed ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... on the ocean wave!" sang out Whopper. "This steam yacht would take the first prize at any cattle show, eh?" And this quaint remark ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill
... gutta-bearing forests. Its inhabitants are a ruffianly lot of Malays, who are preyed upon by a family of Wans, a semi-royal set of nobles who do their best to live up to their traditions. Below the rapids the natives are chiefly noted for the quaint pottery that they produce from the clay which abounds there, and the rude shapes and ruder tracery of their vessels have probably suffered no change since the days when Solomon's fleets sought gold and ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... he the requisite accent, might just have arrived from Bond Street. He has a trim moustache. Awfully attractive blue eyes! He lives on a farm at Sollers, Maryland. No one else, it seems, is so familiar with the unusual corners of New York City, the sort of places that get themselves called "quaint." No one else manages the affairs of young lovers (on paper) with quite so much of the airy spirit of young love. I can think of no one else who could write such a scene as that in The Owl Taxi, where the dead-wagon, on its way in the ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... crowned by the Doctor's residence, with a perpendicular avenue straight up hill, and a negro attendant opening the gate at the foot for Dr. Stevenson, mounted on his horse and returning home. It is a very quaint and ...
— A Military Genius - Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland • Sarah Ellen Blackwell
... a room screened off into three sections. One shaded lamp high up near the ceiling served to light all the cubicles, which were heated by small charcoal stoves. These cubicles were identical in shape and appointment, each being draped with quaint Chinese tapestry and containing rugs, a silken divan, an armchair, and ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... so quiet as during the calm which succeeded the storm of the past week, especially as that calm came on a Sunday, that quietest of all days in the North. Even the twittering of the sparrows on the quaint housetops seemed less noisy than usual, and the women who stood in groups in the narrow street, with their clean mutch caps, their crimson hubbie jackets and coarse blue gowns, suppressed their voices almost into whispers as they talked ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... years before had read the history of Ghent, was greatly interested in the quaint old town; though it was difficult to imagine from the appearance of its quiet streets that its inhabitants had once been the most turbulent in Europe. Here Von Artevelde was killed, and the streets often ...
— One of the 28th • G. A. Henty
... An old English writer, with quaint eloquence, declares, "There is a proportion between an atom and the universe, because both are quantitative. All this excesse vanisheth into nothing as soon as the lowest substance shineth out of that orbe where they ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... oracle, and mothers, who were not troubled with a superfluity of servants, were glad to welcome one to their household who had such a wondrous talent for amusing them, and keeping them still. In spite of all her oddities, she was respected for her industry and simplicity, and a certain quaint, old-fashioned, superstitious piety, that made a streak of light through ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... he decided: "A little man, well groomed, clean shaven, a soldierly appearance." The other smiled: "All right, come along." A quaint building in the form of a chalet appeared to the left; and to the right side, almost opposite, was the main house. It was a strange-looking building, where there was a mixture of everything, a mingling of Gothic fortress, manor, villa, hut, residence, cathedral, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... stayed in John's dirty little shanty, caring for little Murdock as tenderly as a mother. He cooked for the child, he sang to him, he carried him in his arms for hours, and soothed him with a hundred quaint fancies. He superintended the cleaning of the house and scolded John's wife soundly on her shiftless ways; he showed her how to bake bread and cook little dishes to tempt the child's appetite, winning thereby her undying gratitude. She understood but little of the scolding, but ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... no fault of his; but sooner or later all his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the golden calf,—word-images as well as metal and wooden ones. Rough work, iconoclasm,—but the only way to get at truth. It is, indeed, as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation; veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he that will be busie with voe vobis, let him ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the neighborhood assert the origin of the manor and its quaint, happy and not unmusical ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... one passes along High Street, that one might be some days in town without so much as suspecting that one of the finest cathedrals in England was a near neighbor. It was almost by chance, I remember, that as we turned into a long, quaint alley-way, filled up with little, low shops, we caught a glimpse of a green plot of grass and some trees in the distance. Our guiding instinct divined these to ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... the days of church-building—the days of the circular arch, round column, and zigzag moulding; of doorways whose round arch, adorned with border after border of rich or quaint device, almost bewilder us with the multiplicity of detail; of low square towers, and solid walls; of that kind of architecture called Norman, but more properly a branch of ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... not of the quaint type, nor was their home picturesque. The place and the people were merely old-fashioned, and they were almost primitive in their ways. They were kind-hearted and hospitable, but they were of the rugged New England class that has lost the ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells
... ceaseless worry to Lucy, who had developed into a "stylish" girl, and would have died sooner than she would have rejected the universal pompadour of the period. It was the single vanity that Virginia had ever permitted herself, this adhering at middle-age to the quaint and rather coquettish hairdressing of her girlhood: and Fate had punished her by threading the little curls with grey, while Susan's stiff roll (she had adopted the newer mode) remained bravely flaxen. But Susan was one of those women who, lacking a fine fair skin and ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... bully!" she echoed, in such quaint reflection of his exclamation that Peter laughed outright. "Now, sit down again, sar," she invited. And when Peter had again disposed himself at the side of this light-hearted ...
— Peter the Brazen - A Mystery Story of Modern China • George F. Worts
... replied Miss Smith, laughing so that a number of little bracelets jingled most tunefully together. "I came to see you. We smiled at one another in chapel. It was your first time, wasn't it? Didn't you think it all awfully quaint?" ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... nevertheless managed to enjoy herself. She loved the country, and was delighted with the variety of the English landscape. Though less rich than the vineclad south, the greenness of its fields and hedges never failed to amaze her, and she was fascinated by the quaint villages, their thatched roofs, church spires, and flowery gardens. They had been running through Gloucestershire en route for Somerset and Devon, and were to call a halt at various show places on the way. Major ...
— The Princess of the School • Angela Brazil
... mobilisation, and does not necessitate the employment of the pernicious system of enforced celibacy. Lastly, I have scarcely spoken of the domestic and family customs of the Kukuanas, many of which are exceedingly quaint, or of their proficiency in the art of smelting and welding metals. This science they carry to considerable perfection, of which a good example is to be seen in their "tollas," or heavy throwing knives, the backs of these weapons being made of hammered iron, and the edges of ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... to the plane of the vulgar or common-place. The very perfection of his work hinders the reader from perceiving at once how good of its kind it is. * * With the added charm of a most delicate humor—a real humor, mellow, tender, and informed by a singularly quaint and racy fancy—his stories ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... there will be no end of your impertinent scribble, if I don't write to you. I write therefore: but, without entering into argument with such a conceited and pert preacher and questioner, it is, to forbid you to plague me with your quaint nonsense. I know not what wit in a woman is good for, but to make her overvalue herself, and despise every other person. Yours, Miss Pert, has set you above your duty, and above being taught or prescribed to, either by parents, or any body else. But go on, Miss: your mortification ...
— Clarissa, Volume 1 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... pleasant and fertile valley, and is built partly on an island and partly on both sides of the river, which is canalized from this point to the estuary. The streets are narrow, and the houses are mostly picturesque old structures, built of wood, with many quaint gables and dark archways. The most remarkable building is the church of St Vulfran, erected in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The original design was not completed. The nave has only two bays and the choir is insignificant. ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... sea, on the River Loire, in France, stands the quaint, sleepy old town of Nantes. The Erdre and the Sevre, two smaller streams unite with the Loire just here and the town is spread out in an irregular fashion over the islands, the little capes between the rivers, and the hills that stand round about. The ...
— Camilla: A Tale of a Violin - Being the Artist Life of Camilla Urso • Charles Barnard
... head of the steps leading down into the living-room, where Sabella, unconscious of the impending peril, was singing a quaint old hymn as she set the table for dinner. He had heard his mother sing that hymn when he was a boy at home. So long ago, and so far away. A second more and this sweet young life would be blotted out, and the little body, crushed beyond recognition, would be buried ...
— Raftmates - A Story of the Great River • Kirk Munroe
... do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... was quaint, it could scarcely be styled exaggerated, for the swamp was absolutely alive with animal life. The principal occupant of these marshes is the elephant, and hundreds of these monster animals may be seen in one herd, feeding like cattle ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... fifty years ago, but might have been five thousand years old or older. Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shores in the morning of the world, might have combed or curled or braided their blue-black hair into some such quaint patterns. For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall as Cornwall is a corner of England; a tragic and unique race, small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The clan was older than the Vane family, though that ...
— The Trees of Pride • G.K. Chesterton
... astonished that he had to lean out of his box and watch the blasphemer—a quaint figure, bowed as though under a heavy burden, its hands thrust hard into its trousers pockets—stalk away from the great tent and without so much as a backward glance lose itself ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... With what quaint simplicity does the thirteenth chapter tell of the Holy Spirit's initiation of those great missionary journeys of Paul from the new center of world evangelization? "the Holy Spirit said, etc." ...
— Quiet Talks on Power • S.D. Gordon
... treasure was worth more than Bahama Bill had said. Roughly estimated it would foot up to over a hundred thousand dollars, and this figure did not take in some jewelry of quaint design with precious stones which were ...
— The Rover Boys on Treasure Isle - or The Strange Cruise of the Steam Yacht. • Edward Stratemeyer (AKA Arthur M. Winfield)
... brandy sent to him by his creole friend in New Orleans. He had been gone from Vincennes several months when the batteau arrived, having been recalled to Detroit by the British authorities; and he never returned. Meantime the little post with its quaint cabins and its dilapidated block-house, called Fort Sackville, lay sunning drowsily by the river in a blissful state of helplessness from the military point of view. There was no garrison; the two or three pieces of artillery, abandoned and exposed, gathered ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... the cloak-room adjoining the Assembly Room; Miss Matty gave a sigh or two to her departed youth, and the remembrance of the last time she had been there, as she adjusted her pretty new cap before the strange, quaint old mirror in the cloak-room. The Assembly Room had been added to the inn, about a hundred years before, by the different county families, who met together there once a month during the winter to dance and play at cards. ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... west by an immense black beam. The fire-place, which is at the south, is very large and seemingly of high antiquity. The windows, which are two in number and look westward into the street, have a quaint and singular appearance. Of all the houses in Llandovery the old vicarage is by far the most worthy of attention, irrespective of the wonderful monument of God's providence and grace who once ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... Some quaint, old-fashioned air, That all the children knew, Shall run before us everywhere, Like a little maid with flying hair, To guide ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... by a teacher in those schools, and all the examples in it are genuine; none of them have been tampered with, or doctored in any way. From time to time, during several years, whenever a pupil has delivered himself of anything peculiarly quaint or toothsome in the course of his recitations, this teacher and her associates have privately set that thing down in a memorandum-book; strictly following the original, as to grammar, construction, spelling, and all; and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... was drawn to the young man, and her consciousness of it plucked her back to caution with occasional jerks—quaint alternations of the familiar and the harshly ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the birthday of every child in the village, and was fond of hanging on the cottage door some little gift his loving hands had made. He could mend a child's broken windmill and carve quaint faces from walnut shells. He made beautiful crosses of silvery gray lichens, and pressed mosses and rosy weeds from the seashore. The same tender hands were ready to pick up a fallen baby, or carry the water bucket for ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education
... period had married a woman from Heanor, a daughter of the "Black Horse". She was a slim, pretty, dark woman, quaint in her speech, whimsical, so that the sharp things she said did not hurt. She was oddly a thing to herself, rather querulous in her manner, but intrinsically separate and indifferent, so that her long lamentable ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... Song," so it may be worth trying over again. It is more familiar now, and you begin to associate the rapid, whirring phrases with its title—with the idea of "spinning." How clear it suddenly becomes. You even conjure up in your mind the picture of some young woman in quaint garb seated at a spinning wheel in an old-fashioned room—and you find yourself experiencing all the pleasure that comes from association of ideas, the keenest enjoyment that art affords. You are making rapid progress now, so rapid ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... Oh, the gems on tables, walls, and floor— Rare first editions, etchings, and old crockery galore. Why, talk about the Indies and the wealth of Orient things— They couldn't hold a candle to these quaint and sumptuous things; In such profusion, too—Ah me! how dearly I recall How I have sat and watched 'em and ...
— Songs and Other Verse • Eugene Field
... come To the quaint margin of his courtly sphere, And bid us eloquent welcome to his home. Scarce could we pass, so great a crowd was there Of points and lines; and nimble Wit beside Upon the back ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... lying 'twixt two streams, Sung through of birds and haunted of dim dreams; That in its league-long hand of trunk and leaf Lifts a green wand that charms away all grief; Wrought of quaint silence and the stealth of things, Vague, whispering' touches, gleams and twitterings, Dews and cool shadows—that the mystic soul Of Nature permeates with suave control, And waves o'er Earth to make the sad heart whole. There lies the road, they ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... just given, in his driest manner, a description of his recent visit to receive the accolade from the Queen. It was replete with the usual quaint Vicary details—such as the solemn warning whisper of an equerry in Vicary's ear as he walked backwards, 'Mind the edge of the carpet'; and we all laughed, I absently, and yet a little hysterically—all save Vicary, ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... the St. Charles, covered with green fields and ripening harvests, and dotted with quaint old homesteads, redolent with memories of Normandy and Brittany, rose a long mountain ridge covered with primeval woods, on the slope of which rose the glittering spire of Charlebourg, once a dangerous outpost of civilization. The pastoral Lairet was seen mingling its waters with the St. Charles ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... that he is going some day to be somebody, though sorely puzzled to surmise what thing or when, so pleasantly does he take life), from all sorts of out-of-the-way country places, where he lodges with quaint old landladies who wonder maternally why he never gets drunk, and generally mistake him for an author until he pays his bill. When in town he frequented debating societies in Fleet Street and Covent Garden, and made his first speeches; for which purpose he would, unlike some debaters, devote ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... make-up, the Patchwork Girl was magically alive and had proved herself not the least jolly and agreeable of the many quaint characters who inhabit the astonishing Fairyland of Oz. Indeed, Scraps was a general favorite, although she was rather flighty and erratic and did and said many things that surprised her friends. She was ...
— The Lost Princess of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... sociability pervaded the quaint room that the Spectacle Man called his study, when on Friday evening, two weeks after the candy pulling, his ...
— The Spectacle Man - A Story of the Missing Bridge • Mary F. Leonard
... that of the nineteenth century, with its impatience of title, caste, form, and ceremony, its trust in equal right, its insistence on freedom of belief, came suddenly. In shaking off their ancient political and religious bonds the Filipinos may lose some of the quaint and poetic records of their ancient faiths; for the first progress of a nation after a long sleep is a material one, and art, literature, all the more delicate expressions of national taste, history, and tendency, have ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... which, fortunately for the tourist, has no notable church or ruin to be visited nolens volens. The place has, however, a Continental air, caused principally by the very curious clock tower in the market place; a quaint spire, in the background, adding to the effect of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... arms, with the motto, "Floreat semper fidelis civitas." The lower hall contains a collection of interesting specimens of ancient armour, gleaned from the battlefields of Worcester, and one of those quaint old instruments of punishment formerly used for scolds, called a "brank." In the municipal hall, on the second floor, is a portrait of George III., who presented it to the inhabitants, and others of citizens who have done good service to the town, or in some way distinguished ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... the bank of a shallow stream, a tributary of the Severn. Wanley consists in the main of one long street; the houses are stone-built, with mullioned windows, here and there showing a picturesque gable or a quaint old chimney. The oldest buildings are four cottages which stand at the end of the street; once upon a time they formed the country residence of the abbots of Belwick. The abbey of that name still claims for its ruined self a portion of earth's surface; but, as it had the misfortune to be erected ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... in general, Peter Smith's book contains about ninety prescriptions for the cure of as many diseases or forms of disease, to be compounded generally from now well-known medicine, roots, herbs, etc., some of them heroic, others quaint, etc. He did not recommend dispensing wholly with the then universal practice of bleeding patients, but ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer
... Dr. Pusey preach. The crowd was great, and he had to stand, while for an hour and a half or so the great man poured out a learned disquisition against the Jews! Here too, about the same time, the youthful members of the University flocked to hear Burgon's evening sermons—quaint and original as the man himself—in one of which, after describing the episode of Balaam and the ass, he threw up his hands and cried, "To think that that type of brutality should speak with the voice of ...
— Oxford • Frederick Douglas How
... of meeting at my father-in-law Mr. Grogan's, where he often dined, a most worthy priest, Father O'Leary, and have listened frequently, with great zest, to anecdotes which he used to tell with a quaint yet spirited humor, quite unique. His manner, his air, his countenance, all bespoke wit, talent, and a good heart. I liked his company excessively, and have often regretted I did not cultivate ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... N.C.O.s and men was sent to join the 17th H.L.I. at Codford. What was left of "E" Coy. entrained on 26th October, 1915, at Gailes for Ripon. The men were billeted in excellent huts in the South Camp of that quaint old cathedral town, where route marches took place and many excursions were made to many of the interesting ...
— The Seventeenth Highland Light Infantry (Glasgow Chamber of Commerce Battalion) - Record of War Service, 1914-1918 • Various
... to me indirectly through a friend by Mr. Andrew Lang. They have been translated from the modern version written by Sadanami Sanjin. These stories are not literal translations, and though the Japanese story and all quaint Japanese expressions have been faithfully preserved, they have been told more with the view to interest young readers of the West than ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... to be seen in Singapore; their quaint architecture is always interesting to the occidental tourist, and the hideous images to be seen within will repay the trouble of removing one's shoes, which must be ...
— Wanderings in the Orient • Albert M. Reese
... sing, a quaint old Island lullaby, which rang weird and melancholy. William looked at her in alarm, but said nothing, and the other passengers watched her curiously, half in fear. She lifted her child from her knee to her breast, and held it there clasped ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan
... ourselves with the general effect, there still remains a number of details, picturesque, interesting, or quaint. There is the Golden Gate Park, the cypresses and eucalypti at one end of which testify to the balminess of the climate, while the sand-dunes at its other end show the original condition of the whole surface of the peninsula, and add to our admiration of nature ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... was long and trying. In the first stage of it—from Majorca to Malaga—the dangers and difficulties of seafaring were varied, if not relieved by strange experiences, of which Palou has left us a quaint and graphic account. Their vessel was a small English coaster, in command of a stubborn cross-patch of a captain, who combined navigation with theology, and whose violent protestations and fondness for doctrinal dispute allowed his ...
— The Famous Missions of California • William Henry Hudson
... treat. The most penitent of all was the deviser of the original idea. He had generously offered to stay at home with the little patient, which was as generously refused; but the next evening he was allowed to come and sit on his bed, and describe it all for the amusement of his friend. He was a quaint boy, this urchin, with a face as broad as an American Indian's, eyes as bright as a squirrel's, and all the mischief in life lurking about him, till you could see roguishness in the very folds of his hooded Indian winter coat of blue and scarlet. In his hand he brought ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... architectural beauty. Near it there is a large and ancient mosque, with a minaret of singular elegance. It is about 120 feet high, with two hanging galleries; the whole built of blue and red bricks, the latter projecting so as to form quaint patterns or designs. Several ancient buildings near this mosque are surmounted with pyramidal towers, resembling Pagodas of India. Following the long, crooked lanes between mud buildings, we passed these curious structures and reached ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... demanded his opinion of their productions, would mention vaguely, yet with perfect sincerity, a sense of dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, indefinable delight; on being required to point out the source of this so shadowy pleasure, he would be apt to speak of the quaint in phraseology and in general handling. This quaintness is, in fact, a very powerful adjunct to ideality, but in the case in question it arises independently of the author's will, and is altogether apart from his intention. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the quaint old town of Clifton. The gray old buildings never knew the use of paint. Nature was trying her best to make them a part of the landscape. But why use artificial means to create beauty, when Nature all around was so prodigal? How one loves to contemplate architecture like this, ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... all, there glowed with stronger radiance the charm of his quaint genius and his magnetic personality—tragic, homely, gentle, humorous, honest, merciful, ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... above turret and clerestory that it at last becomes a mere line against the ether. In morning, as in afternoon, or in evening, here is a perpetual atmosphere of rest; and not around the great church alone, but in the quaint and ancient houses which fence in the Close. Little less old than the mighty mass of stone on which their ivy-framed windows look, these houses make the casual observer feel that here, if anywhere in the world, life must needs run smoothly. Under those high gables, behind ...
— The Paradise Mystery • J. S. Fletcher
... the meantime taken out a small case, and leaning down from her horse towards me, she said, in a tone in which an effort at her usual quaint lightness of expression contended with a deeper and more grave tone of sentiment, "You see, my dear coz, I was born to be your better angel. Rashleigh has been compelled to yield up his spoil, and had we reached this same village ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Murano hour-glass, filled with sand from the dreary valley of El Ghor. A huge plaster Trimurti stood close to the wall, on a triangular pedestal of black rock, and the Siva-face and the writhing cobra confronted all who entered. Just opposite grinned a red granite slab with a quaint basso-relievo taken from the ruins of Elora. Near the door were two silken divans, and a richly carved urn, three feet high, which had once ornamented the facade of a tomb in the royal days of Petra, ere the curse fell on Edom, now stood an in memoriam of the original Necropolis. For what purpose ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... necessity for continuous labor no longer spurred them to exertion during every moment of daylight, they tackled the box of books and read, not volumes which appealed to them in common, but quaint tomes in the use of which Jenks was tutor and ...
— The Wings of the Morning • Louis Tracy
... that to destroy insects is the only use of birds. The day is far more delightful when the birds sing, and when we see them flit in and out, giving us a glimpse now and then of their pretty coats and quaint ways. By giving them a home we can surround ourselves with many birds, sweet of ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... drawer of the quaint little bureau which he used, were kept the relics of his father; very few and poor, and of no interest to any one but himself,—only the letter telling of his death, a worn-out watch-chain, and a photograph ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, May, 1878, No. 7. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... Sicilian muse, And call the vales, and bid them hither cast Their bells, and flowerets of a thousand hues. Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks, On whose fresh lap the swart-star sparely looks, Throw hither all your quaint enamelled eyes, That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers, And purple all the ground with vernal flowers. Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies, The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine, The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet, The glowing violet, The musk-rose, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... get used to the quaint language of the people, and from the helpless way in which they stare at me, my tongue must be equally unintelligible. A delightful camaraderie exists; every one knows every one else, or they all act as if they did. As ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... reservation. Doctor Holland regarded Mark Twain as a mere fun maker of ephemeral popularity, and was not altogether pleasant in his dictum. Doctor Holmes, in a letter to the author, speaks of the "frequently quaint and amusing conceits," but does not find it in his heart to refer to the book as literature. It was naturally difficult for the East to concede a serious value to one who approached his subject with such militant aboriginality, and occasionally wrote "those kind." William Dean Howells reviewed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... pleasures was to watch Aunt Hannah spinning on her flax-wheel, wetting her thumb and forefinger at her lips to twist the thread, keeping time, meanwhile, to some quaint old tune with her foot upon ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... jokes! Careless person, too, has been hanging my old grey wideawake on the clock in my study. Rather a liberty! Don't like liberties. Always courteous to everybody—consequently, expect everybody to be courteous to me! Still, can't help smiling. It was a quaint idea to hang my old wideawake on the clock in my study. I wonder what put such a freak into the joker's head! Now let me look at the paper that has just reached me from London. Dear me, "The Vacant ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, February 1, 1890 • Various
... appear to be three grey tin-helmeted figures, but I could see nothing of our infantry. The shelling went on, but time pressed, and the colonel, packing up his glasses, led us eastwards again, down to a light-railway junction, and through a quaint little ravine lined with willow-trees. Many German dead lay here. One young soldier, who had died with his head thrown back resting against a green bank, his blue eyes open to the sky, wore a strangely perfect expression of ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... to my mind, neutralize all other power; the porcelains of Luca della Robbia are painful examples, and in lower art, Florentine mosaic in relief; gilding is more admissible, and tells sometimes sweetly upon figures of quaint design, as on the pulpit of St^a. Maria Novella, while it spoils the classical ornaments of the mouldings. But the truest grandeur of sculpture I believe to be in the white form; something of this feeling may be owing to the difficulty, or ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... faithful servant to his master, was always longing to enjoy his free liberty, to wander uncontrolled in the air, like a wild bird, under green trees, among pleasant fruits, and sweet-smelling flowers. 'My quaint Ariel,' said Prospero to the little sprite when he made him free, 'I shall miss you; yet you shall have your freedom.' 'Thank you, my dear master,' said Ariel; 'but give me leave to attend your ship home with prosperous gales, before you bid farewell to the ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... steamships of 4000 and 5000 tons burden can now be berthed at these wharfs, and there is a constant and convenient service of trains between the port and the town. Even to-day the presence of superannuated Dutch warships and quaint craft from China and the Malay islands relieves the monotony of the vast hulls of the steamships of the British India, the Messageries Maritimes, and the Netherlands ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... them, for they were fine, healthy young birds, and although they had rather a quaint air—being covered with a curious, bristly-looking growth, which made them look like young hedgehogs—from the very day they kicked off the thick, glossy, yellowish-white shell which had covered them, they could run about and even pick up ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... side of the square, and half hidden in ivy, was a Noah's Ark church, topped by a quaint belfry holding a bell that had not rung for years, and faced by a clock-dial all weather-stains and cracks, around which travelled a single rusty hand. In its shadow to the right lay the home of the archdeacon, a stately ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... circuit of the aquarium he will have seen and marvelled at some hundreds of curious creatures utterly unlike anything to be found above water. Brightly colored starfishes, beautiful sea-urchins, strange stationary ascidians, and flower-like sea-anemones, quaint sea-horses, and filmy, fragile jellyfishes and their multiform kin—all seem novel and wonderful as one sees them in their native element. Things that appear to be parts of the rocky or sandy bed of the grottos startle one by moving about, and thus discovering ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... train coming down," explained Malcolm with his quaint drawl. "Thought I might as well save the time as long as there wasn't anything else ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... day, a picturesque old town, dominated by the ruins of a fine royal castle, and with a quaint Grammar School and hospital. At the present time it is going through immense transformation. It has become a favorite retiring place for old officers of the army, supplanting in this respect Cheltenham. But at the period of this tale it was a sleepy, ancient, ...
— The Broom-Squire • S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould
... very dreadful cell. A bright, clean, fresh little room, all white and blue. White walls, white bedstead, with oh! such snowy coverings, white dimity curtains at the windows, with old-fashioned ball fringes, a little dimity-covered toilet-table, with a quaint looking-glass framed with fat gilt cherubs, all apparently trying to fold their wings in such a way as to enable them to get a peep at themselves in the mirror, and not one succeeding. Then there was a low rocking-chair, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... jerked herself up, and flirted her wings and tail, as if to say, "I know you. You needn't try to hide." When I went too near, as on the occasion spoken of, while she was much more wary she was not afraid, and I had no compunctions about studying her quaint ways. ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... and makes it play, as if in wanton, upon the ceiling, lies that big book, reverenced of your New England parents—the Family Bible. It is a ponderous, square volume, with heavy silver clasps, that you have often pressed open for a look at its quaint, old pictures, for a study of those prettily bordered pages, which lie between the Testaments, and which ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... stranger, that as the gable-ended houses, which obtrude themselves corner-wise on the widening street, fall vacant, they are pulled down to allow of greater space for traffic, and a more modern style of architecture. The quaint and narrow shop-windows of fifty years ago, are giving way to large panes and plate-glass. Nearly every dwelling seems devoted to some branch of commerce. In passing hastily through the town, one hardly perceives where the necessary lawyer and doctor can live, so little appearance is ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... was secured by The New York Public Library with the manuscripts of the Ford Collection, presented by the late J. Pierpont Morgan. It has a quaint manuscript title-page, as follows: Narative of a Journal [sic] across the "Plains" in 1852 by Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell. Illustrated by several original drawings. And to my relatives, and friends, respectfully subscribed. A later ...
— Across the Plains to California in 1852 - Journal of Mrs. Lodisa Frizzell • Lodisa Frizell
... a history of its own; and this quaint representation of the woman of Samaria was fated to be of great interest to succeeding generations. But the busy worker little guessed what memories would hereafter cling to that morning's labour, nor dreamed that some day those very stitches ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... laughed, Teeth like cream, and lips that quaffed All the genial country's wealth Of large cheer and perfect health, Gown—well, yes—old-fashioned quite, You would call it "just a fright," But I love that quaint attire. (Tildy wore it in ...
— Cap and Gown - A Treasury of College Verse • Selected by Frederic Knowles
... of her paint and powder, her lithe body clad in a prim, navy blue frock, the skirt of which came below the tops of her high-laced boots, approached hastily from the women's section. She was tying the strings of her quaint poke-bonnet under her chin, and her ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... case——" There was little or no excitement. We had most of us seen too much by this time to be either unduly pessimistic or over-confident about our own chances, so that everything seemed to go quietly and smoothly. The first steel helmets had just arrived—quaint, antique, Japanese looking things, with ingenious corrugations to catch the bullets—and were issued to the Machine Gunners, who had also received the first supply of the new Box Respirator, issued in place of ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... animals—deer, for instance, who are hunted successfully with torches; and he relates, further, that in Abyssinia artificers of pottery and iron are thus fearfully endowed, and are consequently forbidden to join in the sacred rites of religion, as fire is their chief agent. Isn't this a strange, quaint volume, to set before a king? and how do you like ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... winds along the side of the valley, following the graceful curves and swellings of the hills. The little towns are so lost in the recesses that one comes upon them quite unexpectedly, and, whirling through their one long main street, catches glimpses of quaint churches and buildings which fairly overhang the highway, and narrow vistas of lawns, trees, shrubbery, and flowers; then all is hidden by the ...
— Two Thousand Miles On An Automobile • Arthur Jerome Eddy
... attired little damsel placed between us had been one of our neighbors. Kindly receive my book with the same indulgent smile, without seeking therein a meaning either good or bad, in the same spirit in which you would receive some quaint bit of pottery, some grotesquely carved ivory idol, or some fantastic trifle brought to you from this singular ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... presence of terror, perhaps because the alternative to jesting is either fear or tears. Others may misunderstand us. Often we do not understand ourselves. It is not easy to think of Sam Weller or Mark Tapley as the hero of a stricken field. Yet it is by men with Sam Weller's quaint turn of wit and Mark Tapley's unfailing cheerfulness that the great battles in France ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... block below Kling's in those other days was the quaint Book Shop owned by Tim Kelsey, the hunchback, a walking encyclopaedia of knowledge, much of it as musty and out of date as most of his books; while overtopping all else in importance, so far as this story is concerned, was the shabby, old-fashioned two-story house known the town over ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... the ancient town of Bruges, In the quaint old Flemish city, As the evening shades descended, Low and loud, and sweetly blended, Low at times and loud at times, And changing like a poet's rhymes, Rang the beautiful wild chimes From the belfry in the market Of the ancient town ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... are undoubtedly romantic; but again I ask, are they stories of romantic love? There is romance and quaint local color in the feat of the girl who, reversing the story of Hero and Leander, swam over to her lover; in the wooing of the two girls proposing to an unseen man up a tree; in the action of the chief who saved the beautiful girl and her father from ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... of candles With their quaint coquettish way, But alas! I wooed too often, And now my ...
— Songs for Parents • John Farrar
... the next summer she had a letter from the place. It was from Dr. Zimmermann. There is no need here to trace the quaint German phrases, the formalism, the cold terms of science in which he made his meaning plain. It spoke of erosion; of the movement of the summer; of the action of the under-waters on the ice. And it told her, with tender sympathy oddly blended with the pride of scientific success, that he had ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 2 • Various
... applauded. It was the delight of the learned, the solace of the indolent, and the refuge of the uninformed. It passed through at least eight editions, by which the bookseller, as WOOD records, got an estate; and, notwithstanding the objection sometimes opposed against it, of a quaint style, and too great an accumulation of authorities, the fascination of its wit, fancy, and sterling sense, have borne down all censures, and extorted praise from the first Writers in the English language. The grave JOHNSON has praised it in the warmest terms, and the ludicrous ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... for it is probable that the Britons had stout ships long before the legions of Cassar set their feet upon our shores. I am inclined to agree with an ancient writer who gives it as his opinion that the British were always a naval people. "For," says he, in somewhat quaint phraseology, "as Britain was an island, the inhabitants could only have come to it across the ocean in ships, and they could scarcely have had ships unless they were nautically inclined." The same writer asserts that the Britons had vessels of large size long before ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... attention and commendation by their quaint delicacy of style, their faithful delineation of Creole character, and a marked originality."—The ...
— The Cavalier • George Washington Cable
... some statement about Orangemen, who of course are nearly all Imperialists. Yet these very Orangemen represent an intense phase of Canadian life; the backwoods era, the simple industries, the old villages, the quaint settlements of the U.E. Loyalists as picturesque on the Upper, as the dormer-windowed villages of the French are on the Lower St. Lawrence. To these men the Empire is as visual, as to the intense Quebecker it is nebulous. And as the politician in Ontario has to regard carefully ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... this stool he had been so long attached—physically—that he had begun to regard it almost as part and parcel of himself, and had made up his mind that he would have to stick to it through life. He even sometimes took a quaint view of the matter, and tried to imagine that through long habit it would stick to him at last, and oblige him to carry it about sticking straight out behind him; perhaps even require him to take it to bed with him, in ...
— The Battery and the Boiler - Adventures in Laying of Submarine Electric Cables • R.M. Ballantyne
... 15th I took a steamer for Richmond, Virginia, and arrived on the 16th at Fredericksburg. Here were standing many chimneys, showing us the waste places and burned houses in this small but quaint old city. I called at the teachers' boarding-house, kept by a good Union family, Wm. J. Jeffries. Mrs. King accompanied me to the soldiers' hospital. Here, as elsewhere, the poor suffering soldier seemed rejoiced to see and hear ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... stood on the floor. On the table were huge earthen dishes ready for the pared fruit. Equipped with a paring knife and a tin pie-plate for parings every member of the household drew near the table and began snitzing. There was much merry conversation, some in quaint Pennsylvania Dutch, then again in English tinged with the distinctive accent. There was also much laughter as Uncle Amos vied with Millie for the honor of making the ...
— Amanda - A Daughter of the Mennonites • Anna Balmer Myers
... to visit Blato, an inland village of 8000 inhabitants. De Michaelis regretted very much that he had no carriage, but a Yugoslav had a quaint little car on which he was learning how to drive and he was kind enough to take us—for which he was afterwards deported to Italy. The good man made so much noise in changing his gears that our progress was advertised in the uttermost fields, and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... explained Betty,—"that lovely one with the amethyst in the centre and the ring of little pearls in a quaint old setting. It used to be her great-grandmother's. Mine wasn't much to lose, and I felt sure until to-day that it would turn up, but it hasn't, and now I'm afraid it was ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... often the dream turns out to have been a half-waking one, presaging a reality. Ovid foreshadowed the discoveries of the geologist: the Atlantis was an imagination, but Columbus found a western world: and though the quaint forms of Centaurs and Satyrs have an existence only in the realms of art, creatures approaching man more nearly than they in essential structure, and yet as thoroughly brutal as the goat's or horse's half of the mythical compound, are ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... Wren with another chop. 'You have changed me wiser, godmother.—Not,' she added with the quaint hitch of her chin and eyes, 'that you need be a very wonderful godmother to do ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... "did you ever hear a quaint Asiatic legend—scarcely a legend, perhaps, but a superstition—that many and many a wise man, four thousand years ago, spent his nights and his days, not as our more modern scientists of a few hundred years ago have done, in the attempt to turn baser metals into gold, but in the attempt ...
— The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... loved indeed in those quaint times, and authors were actually authorities. Gentlemen appealed to Virgil or Lucan in the Courts or the House of Commons. What said Statius, Juvenal—let alone Tully or Tacitus—on such and such a point? Their reign ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... end, outside castle walls, grim and grey, but imposing as ever, though they were in reality but a shell, surrounding a plot of innocent green grass. There were isolated towers still standing, however, approached by winding stone stairways, and short lengths of walks along the ramparts, and quaint little barred windows through which one could view the surrounding country. When Margot thrust her pretty laughing face through one of these latter to greet her friends below, every photographer among ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... traded for himself, and bought Quaint monsters for the market of those times, A gilded dragon, also, for ...
— Enoch Arden, &c. • Alfred Tennyson
... three friends, in the quaint little garden of the hotel, with its purple-flowering vines of Bougainvillea, fragrant orange-trees, drooping palms, and long-tailed cockatoos drowsing on their perches. When people really know each other an unfamiliar ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... if he happen to be the owner of a soke-mill, has always been deemed fair game for the village satirist. Of the numerous songs written in ridicule of the calling of the 'rogues in grain,' the following is one of the best and most popular: its quaint humour will recommend it to our readers. For the tune, see ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... determination it is impossible to say, as the house we saw was burnt to the ground later on, and is now rebuilt on exactly the same lines, but with electric light, every modern comfort, and lovely old red tiles to replace the quaint ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... had driven Leonard to lie on his bed, Aubrey persuaded his sister to come to see his greatest prize; a quaint old local naturalist, a seafaring man, with a cottage crammed with pans of live wonders of the deep in water, and shelves of extinct ones, 'done up in stane pies,' not a creature, by sea or land, that had haunted Coombe for a few million of ages, seemed to have escaped him. Such sea-side sojourns ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... I went softly down the side-wall of the Dial-court (for there was no getting through the place where I had been peeping) to the bottom, where there used to be an old flint wall, and a hedge of sweet-briar in front of it. You remember the pretty conceit I made—quaint and wholesome as one of Herrick's—when you said something—but I verily believe we were better in those days than we ever have been since. Now don't interrupt me about that, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... was taken from The Mariners' Chronicle, compiled by a person named Scott early in the last century—a curious book of narratives of maritime adventures, with exceedingly quaint illustrations. Nothing has ever shown me more plainly that truth is stranger than fiction, for all that is most improbable ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... last he decided: "A little man, well groomed, clean shaven, a soldierly appearance." The other smiled: "All right, come along." A quaint building in the form of a chalet appeared to the left; and to the right side, almost opposite, was the main house. It was a strange-looking building, where there was a mixture of everything, a mingling of Gothic ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... originally printed in India, but subsequently re-issued in an embellished form at home (see over leaf). To the end of his life, Yule looked back to this "social progress up the Irawady, with its many quaint and pleasant memories, as to a bright and joyous holiday."[37] It was a delight to him to work under Phayre, whose noble and lovable character he had already learned to appreciate two years before in Pegu. Then, too, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... hands, and Lennox stiffened himself out, to hang rigidly, feeling his back rest against the wet rock, over which he began to glide slowly, and then faster and faster as he was let down hand over hand, seeing nothing but the black darkness lit up like a quaint halo in front of him, and going down what he felt to be a terrible depth. He fought hard against one horrible thought which would trouble him: should he ever be pulled up again? And no sooner had he mastered this than ...
— The Kopje Garrison - A Story of the Boer War • George Manville Fenn
... ye spritefull Quire with choicest sports, All pastime fit for Phoebus Courts; And Thou great Master of the Revels, joyne The Graces, to thy Daughters nine; Witt pure and quaint, with rich conceits and free From all obscaene scurrilitie: Here free from care, nimbly let's dance a round ...
— The Odes of Casimire, Translated by G. Hils • Mathias Casimire Sarbiewski
... Stiff, quaint, and awkward sounds old Bokenham's translation of the 'Golden Legend,' but to Eleanor it had much power. The whole history was new to her, after her life in Scotland, where information had been slow to reach her, and books had been few. The gewgaws spread out before Jean ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... grateful moisture, but she did not allow them to overflow. She nodded rapidly once or twice in a quaint, characteristic little fashion, and then sat silent, examining the links in her silver-meshed purse, with ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... and Ian's face cleared a little. If all the difficulties perplexing his life would only clear like that! The babe and the suckling had found the way so simple, so natural; and it was a comforting way, for he had a deep and tender regard for this quaint, clever waif who had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Rallywood, a tall figure in a military cloak, turned the corner of a side street and met its full blast. He faced it for some yards along the empty pavements, then ran up the steps of his club. A few minutes later he passed through a lofty corridor and entered a door over which is set a quaint invitation to smokers, which may not be written down here, for it is the jealously guarded copyright ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... his quaint Survey of the Co. of Devon, after mentioning the foundation of the church of High Bickington ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 38, Saturday, July 20, 1850 • Various
... private buffoon is a light-hearted loon, If you listen to popular rumour; From morning to night he's so joyous and bright, And he bubbles with wit and good humour! He's so quaint and so terse, both in prose and in verse; Yet though people forgive his transgression, There are one or two rules that all Family Fools Must observe, if they love their profession. There are one or two rules, Half-a-dozen, maybe, That all family ...
— Songs of a Savoyard • W. S. Gilbert
... grammar," said Aleta. "Mother's never wanted me to talk slang like the other girls. She says if you're careless with your English you get careless of your principles. Mother's got a lot of quaint ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... at last he rose to go. Her slanting rays drew all the houses into new perspective, so that their roofs, already glistening with dew, seemed to stretch much higher into the sky than usual, and their gables and quaint old towers lay far away in its ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... never left alone together, and he is not allowed to pay her any marked attention even before others. They may exchange photographs, and she may work him a little present; but it is all lifeless, passionless, and business-like. Among the peasantry there is more of the picturesque, and many quaint customs still survive. Marriage-brokers do a good trade, and get a percentage on each pair that they see through the ordeal of a wedding. In Frascati, parents with marriageable sons and daughters assemble ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... indeed, that the whole room was a harmony in scarlet, with a scarlet ceiling and scarlet hangings; but the luxury of it was unmistakable, and the feet sank above the ankles in the soft Indian rug, which was ornate with the quaint mosaic-like workings and penetrating colours of all Eastern tapestry. For light, there was an arc-lamp, veiled with gauze of the faintest yellow; and upon the table in the centre stood a decanter of wine and a box of cigars. ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... captain spoke, with his strange, humorous, arrogant abruptness, I observed Jim to be sizing him up, like a thing at once quaint and familiar, and with a scrutiny that was both ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Lansdown fresh as flowers of May, And Berkely lady blithe and gay, And Anglesea, whose speech exceeds The voice of pipe or oaten reeds; And blooming Hyde, with eyes so rare, And Montague beyond compare. Such ladies fair wou'd I depaint In roundelay or sonnet quaint. ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... retreat, inexpensive and simply furnished. But his experience was that of all who buy, and renovate, and build. The farm had on it a small stone Dutch cottage, built about a century before, and inhabited by one of the Van Tassels. This was enlarged, still preserving the quaint Dutch characteristics; it acquired a tower and a whimsical weathercock, the delight of the owner ("it was brought from Holland by Gill Davis, the King of Coney Island, who says he got it from a windmill which ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... of them! This corridor was close to the Dining-rooms, and the Committee (ha! ha! ha!) had called it (he! he! he!) after COOK! (Ho! ho! ho!) Oh, the wit of it! How the Members of the Executive must have nudged one another in the ribs as the quaint idea dawned upon them! And how they must have laughed, too, on the Opening Day, when the Guard of Honour, presenting arms, and the "Greenwich Boys" singing "Ye Mariners of England," were drenched in the rain! And what a capital notion it was on that occasion to put "the Representatives ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 100, May 9, 1891 • Various
... Pleasant old town, which slopes down the hill-side to the old church,—just "restored," though by Lords Minchampstead and Vieuxbois, not without Mark Armsworth's help, to its ancient beauty of grey flint and white clunch chequer-work, and quaint wooden spire. Pleasant churchyard round it, where the dead lie looking up to the bright southern sun, among huge black yews, upon their knoll of white chalk above the ancient stream. Pleasant white wooden bridge, with its row of urchins dropping flints ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... panels at one end of the hall are huge coats of arms carved in stone and gorgeously coloured; and at the other end is a gallery of carved oak with the gilded pipes of an organ shining above it. A great part of the outer wall is taken up by a very large mullioned window with quaint round panes, many of them filled with old stained glass; and on the wall opposite to it is a great fireplace of carved stone, the centre of it showing the crest of a mailed arm and the motto, ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... the wit of the other—men whom nature made rivals, and time made friends or enemies, as it happened. A curious observer, in looking over a collection of the Cambridge poems, which were formerly composed by its students, has remarked that "Cowley from the first was quaint, Milton sublime, and Barrow copious." If then the characteristic disposition may reveal itself thus early, it affords a principle which ought not to be neglected at ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... certainly saw in that house, which, somehow or other, had got a bad name in the neighbourhood. I had the curiosity to go and look at the place for myself. It's a saddening kind of street; the houses are old enough to be mean and dreary, but not old enough to be quaint. As far as I could see most of them are let in lodgings, furnished and unfurnished, and almost every door has three bells to it. Here and there the ground floors have been made into shops of the commonest kind; it's a dismal street in every way. I found Number 20 was ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
