"Checkered" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... own, from the time when I took moral comfort from the flight of Mr. Bryant's "Wild Fowl" across the ocean, and took the best lesson of life from the Psalm of Longfellow. Since then I have ever been with you in all your intellectual progress, and in the necessarily checkered course of your constitutional history, and never more than in the late solemn years, in all the national difficulties which you have so energetically, so ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... change about; waffle, blow with the wind (irresolute) 605; oscillate &c. 314; vibrate between, two extremes, oscillate between, two extremes; alternate; have as man phases as the moon. Adj. changeable, changeful; changing &c. 140; mutable, variable, checkered, ever changing; protean, proteiform|; versatile. unstaid[obs3], inconstant; unsteady, unstable, unfixed, unsettled; fluctuating &c. v.; restless; agitated &c. 315; erratic, fickle; irresolute &c. 605; capricious &c. 608; touch and go; inconsonant, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 1804, son of the preceding and of M. Husson —army-contractor; led a checkered career, explained by his origin and childhood. He scarcely knew his father, who made and soon lost a fortune. The previous fast life of his mother, who afterwards married again, gave rise to or upheld some more or less ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... of silken blue; Bind it all fondly—with a nuptial cord, Unto the widowed present! bear it through All change—all chance! Love, friendship! hold it fast: Let it no more be wedded to the past! And human hearts through all life's checkered scenes, Shall ever tarry ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2 No 4, October, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... mismanagement of the Regents." It appeared at first as a large 16-page pamphlet, three columns to the page. At the same time the Chronicle was established, a sophomore annual appeared, The Oracle, which had a long and checkered career ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... again, his eyes seemed able to pierce the fantastic veil of creepers and leaves, to look past the solid trunks, to see through the forbidding gloom—and the mystery was disclosed—enchanting, subduing, beautiful. He looked at the woman. Through the checkered light between them she appeared to him with the impalpable distinctness of a dream. The very spirit of that land of mysterious forests, standing before him like an apparition behind a transparent veil—a veil woven ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... the mud-hole where we last took leave of the reader, we pursued our way for some time along the narrow track, in the checkered sunshine and shadow of the woods, till at length, issuing forth into the broad light, we left behind us the farthest outskirts of that great forest, that once spread unbroken from the western plains to the shore of the Atlantic. Looking over an intervening belt ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... de Girardin, was present, with his pale face, lymphatic complexion, glassy eye, and forehead checkered with a Napoleon-like lock. He was then, and has remained ever since, the most exact personification of a pasteboard man of genius lighted by histrionic foot-lights. He was a compound of the dandy, the sophist, and the agitator. His talents ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the southeast were mountains of moderate height, the nearest about two miles off, but the whole chain ranging to the east, south, and southwest, as far as the eye could reach. Their summits were crowned with extensive tracts of pitch-pine, checkered with small patches of the quivering aspen. Lower down were thick forests of firs and red cedars, growing out in many places from the very fissures of the rocks. The mountains were broken and precipitous, with huge bluffs protruding from ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... door, meaning to stay but for a good-natured five minutes of gossip. She had lived here forever, set in the picture with ash-tree and boulder. But when he came to the door he found sitting with her, in the checkered space behind ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston
... pleasure to the women, when allusion was made to their religion; but when they spoke of their tradition, I felt as a miser would, had he discovered a mine of gold. I had read the legends of the Maiden's Rock, and of St. Anthony's Falls. I asked Checkered Cloud to tell them to me. She did so—and how differently they were told! With my knowledge of the language, and the aid of my kind and excellent friend Mr. Prescott, all the dark passages in her narration were made clear. I thought the Indian tone of feeling was not ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... window, the sun cast a medley of lines and lights on her hands, and on the checkered table-cloth. There were two rough benches, and a square table; the coffeecups stood on a metal tray; the lid of the pot was odd, did not match the set: all these inanimate things, which, a moment ago, Maurice had seen without seeing them, now ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... of Mr. Gilfil's Love Story—"a wonderful little church, with a checkered pavement which had once rung to the iron tread ...
— George Eliot Centenary, November 1919 • Coventry Libraries Committee
... dearly as it is possible for parents to do. Take her, Captain Sinclair, from my hands, and take with her our blessings and best wishes for your happiness, which I do not doubt will be as great as we can expect in this checkered world; for a dutiful daughter will always become ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... to watching the girl. She was frightened. She sat all alone, plucking nervously at the red-and-white checkered tablecloth. She sat with her back to the light, bunching the cloth up into little folds, then smoothing ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... talk back, to allow any sign of defiance to show. He would go through the motions as if he were a bad little boy who had realized his errors. It was a meek-and-mild act that had paid off more than once in Ross's checkered past. So he faced the man seated behind the desk in the other room with an uncertain, diffident smile, standing with boyish awkwardness, respectfully waiting for the other to ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... the place came to the door, a Scotch-woman. She had a mole on her chin, I remember, a brownish-black mole with three hairs in it. She wore an apron, too, that was kind of checkered, and three buttons were open at the neck of her dress. I recall a lot more of little things about her, though the rest of what happened ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... Gracely determined the proper vibrations of his oscillating current to coincide with all the other material factors he was using, the final result was before him-real invisibility. He used a patterned background—a symmetrically checkered surface, most difficult of all. The light rays coming from this background passed through the magnetic field surrounding the invisible colorless cube, and were bent into a curved path. But their own color-spectrum—in actuality the color, shape, all the visible characteristics of the background—was ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... inches in diameter; for three, a GLOBE four inches in diameter; for five, a GLOBE six inches in diameter. PRANG'S CHROMOS will be given as premiums at the publisher's prices. Send stamp for a catalogue. GAMES, &c.—For two new subscribers, we will give any one of the following: The Checkered Game of Life, Alphabet and Building Blocks, Dissected Maps, &c., &c. For three new subscribers, any one of the following: Japanese Backgammon or Kakeba, Alphabet and Building Blocks (extra). Croquet, Chivalrie, Ring Quoits, and any other of the popular games of the ...
— The Nursery, Volume 17, No. 101, May, 1875 • Various
... to living jewels; spreading a golden veil over the sun or a white gauze around the midnight moon; sporting in the glacier; folding its bright snow-curtain softly about the wintry world; and weaving the many-colored bow whose warp is the rain-drops of earth, whose woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered over with the ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... have not lost my senses. Such as they are, I have them all. I do not expect to find this ancestress of mine in the flesh, nor sitting in any one of the splint rockers behind the checkered window-panes of the old South East houses. It is only her portrait for which I am searching ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... be heard beyond them, and a hundred times a year the Pacific fogs came creeping over them long before dawn, and Santa Paloma awakened in an enveloping cloud of soft mist. Here and there the slopes of these hills were checkered with the sharp oblongs and angles of young vineyards, and hidden by the thickening green of peach and apple orchards. A few low, brown dairy ranch-houses were perched high on the ridges; the red-brown moving stream of the cattle home-coming in mid-afternoon could ...
— The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne • Kathleen Norris
... a sorry partner, but she undertook to instruct me. O'Brien was our vis-a-vis with Miss Euterpe. The other gentlemen were officers from the ships, and we stood up twelve, checkered brown and white, like a chess-board. All eyes were fixed upon Mr Apollo Johnson, who first looked at the couples, then at his fiddle, and lastly, at the other musicians, to see if all was right, and then with a wave of his bow-tick the music began. "Massa lieutenant," cried Apollo ...
— Peter Simple and The Three Cutters, Vol. 1-2 • Frederick Marryat
... Jimmy's sharp eyes caught the first sign of a boat builder's establishment, and presently the three little craft that had come through such a checkered experience with credit, were secured to landings within the enclosed space of ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... were pitiless, No little waist or coat or checkered dress But knew her needle's deftness; and no skill Matched hers in shaping pleat or flounce or frill; Or fashioning, in complicate design, All rich embroideries of leaf and vine, With tiniest twining ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... checkered scene. But it was the peculiar lot of Theodosia to experience during the first twenty-one years of her life nothing but prosperity and happiness, and during the remainder of her existence nothing but misfortune and sorrow. Never had her ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... sickly sensitive nature the anodyne of feminine sympathy. Why so close and tender a friendship never ripened into marriage is an inquiry that may be consigned to the limbo of questions insoluble. It is enough that in the checkered chronicle of the loves of the poets, "blue-eyed Patty Blount" has an immortality almost as secure as ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... little chamber, nor was there over much of furniture, nor was that even of a high order—there was a bed with a red-checkered crazy-quilt; a washstand with severe, heavy white crockery; a rocking chair, homemade, of hickory; a rag mat, round, many-colored; and white muslin curtains on the windows. It wasn't luxurious, the little chamber—it was fresh ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... all the pleasant things of this checkered life, it came to an end all too soon. The day arrived when he sat up in his easy chair by the open window, with the scented breezes blowing in his face, and watched dreamily the cows grazing in the fields, and the dark-eyed French girls tripping up and down the dusty road. Then, a little ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... I know the ways of the valley! That day when we rode into it every tree seemed to be waving its green arms in salute. As we swung through the gap, around the bend at the saw-mill and into the open country, checkered brown and yellow by fields new-ploughed and fields of stubble, a flock of killdeer arose on the air and screamed a welcome. In their greeting there seemed a taunting note as though they knew they had no more to fear from me and could be generous. ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... hung over the burning cottage. Somewhere inside those doomed walls the man who had once upon a time in his checkered career served as a fireman on a city force, was groping his way about, seeking to stumble over the unconscious form of the poor little cripple whom the pungent smoke had caused to collapse before she could creep ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... it plunged, and slowly sank, The calm wave rippled to the bank; I watched it as it sank, methought Some motion from the current caught Bestirred it more,—'twas but the beam That checkered o'er the living stream: I gazed, till vanishing from view, 380 Like lessening pebble it withdrew; Still less and less, a speck of white That gemmed the tide, then mocked the sight; And all its hidden secrets sleep, Known but to Genii of the deep, Which, trembling in their ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron
... her meeting with Florrie? Was it true that her youth was slipping from her before she had grasped all the happiness that life offered? Or was it only the stirring of the spring winds, of the young green against the blue sky, of the mating birds, of the roving, provocative scents of flowers, of the checkered light and shade on the grassy strip under the maples? Was it all these things, or was it none of them, that awoke this longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... was in affection, and in all the happiness that affection can bestow, it was soon checkered by distress and difficulty. The health of the wife became precarious; and Mozart's ignorance of the world, as well as his generous and joyous disposition, joined to the precarious and varying amount of his earnings, and the disappointment in his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... huge room. The morning sunlight streamed in through the high mullioned windows and spread a diamond-checkered pattern across the tapestry on the far wall, lighting up the brilliant hunting scene in a blaze ...
— The Eyes Have It • Gordon Randall Garrett
... seemingly about to dart forward, was the largest serpent they had ever seen; the sunlight checkered its bright colored folds. Its red tongue darted wickedly in and out as it faced the ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... Frank Millet's checkered career, with opposites so much mingled in it, that such work as he has done for Harper should have had as little in common as possible with midland English scenery. He has been less a producer in ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... story, not an older person's. Therefore it did not draw the line between pleasant and unpleasant, fair and unfair, right and wrong, which make up for each of us the history of our checkered human day. It separated life as a swimmer separates the sea: there is one water which he parts by his passage. So the child, who is still wholly ...
— A Cathedral Singer • James Lane Allen
... Beautifully checkered stock, octagon barrel. No ramrod, nor is the gun provided with fittings for one. In the best of condition. Almost new. This gun was made for use by a member of some early German "Scheutzen" rifle club, period of 1855-'75. Mark on lock, "Rein, ...
— A Catalogue of Early Pennsylvania and Other Firearms and Edged Weapons at "Restless Oaks" • Henry W. Shoemaker
... not love, and beauty's smile That lures with soft, resistless wile? 'Tis thrilling hope! 'tis rapturous fear 'Tis heaven upon this mortal sphere; When at her feet we bend the knee, And own the glance of kindred ecstasy For ever on life's checkered way, 'Tis love that tints the darkening hues of care With soft benignant ray: The mirthful daughter of the wave, Celestial Venus ever fair, Enchants our happy spring with fancy's gleam, And wakes the airy ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... the far-distant open country where it had been breathing all night the quivering pines, and brown swamps, and the white and gray checkered fields that would soon be upturned by the plowshares—a vagrant wind wandered ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... light of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune—when the dismal emergencies which checkered his life arose, he acted with as much promptitude and vigor as if he had never penned a stanza nor taken a glass too much, or was strung with herculean sinews. None of those temptations, in which misery is the most potent, to hazard a lavish expenditure ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... diagonal bracing, as is shown on Figs. 2 and 7. The carriage road on the platform consists of buckled plates resting on transverse girders spaced 6 ft. 6 in. apart, and covered with road metal, and for the sidewalks checkered plates are used. The ironwork in the bridge weighs 400 tons, and cost 8,400 l.; the abutments cost 3,600l., making the total outlay on the structure 12,000l. The bridge was tested by a uniformly distributed load of 82 lb. per sq. ft., and under ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 492, June 6, 1885 • Various
... the eloquent grandeur of these shades, Alone with nature,—but it may not be; I have to struggle with the stormy sea Of human life until existence fades Into death's darkness. Thou wilt sing and soar Through the thick woods and shadow-checkered glades, While pain and sorrow cast no dimness o'er The brilliance of thy heart; but I must wear, As now, my garments of regret and care,— As penitents of ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... long enough, however, to know that love is governed by no rules or regulations and besides, she had kept through all the changes and chances of her checkered life, a belief in true love as fresh as a girl's. This was too sacred a thing to be carelessly handled—only, it was not what she would have chosen.... Yet—was ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... what is termed the Schwarzpanier House, situated on a slope or glacis in the outskirts of Wahring. The evening was so far advanced, that candles already twinkled from the upper windows of the building, while the fires of the kitchens checkered the shrubs and gravel with patches of glaring light. Through the flowerbeds, and along the intricate paths of the shrubbery, the Alchemist strolled at a languid pace, musing upon the things he had already witnessed, when his vigilant ears caught the tones of a musical instrument. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... celestial day. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land. The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... to the Insane Asylum. The reader has already seen how abnormal was his mind, and will not be surprised that his storm-tossed soul lost its rudder at last. But mid all its veerings he never lost sight of the Star that had shed its light upon his checkered path of life. He raved, and prayed, and wept, by turns. The horrors of mental despair would be followed by gleams of seraphic joy. When one of his stormy moods was upon him, his mighty voice could be heard above all the sounds of that sad and pitiful company of broken and wrecked souls. The old ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... so cruel and inexorable that one would have thought he was going to engage in bloody strife with his fellow men rather than to hunt a small animal. Around the hind legs of his horse the hounds gambolled like a cluster of checkered, restless balls. If one of them wished to stop, it was only with the greatest difficulty that it could do so, since not only had its leash-fellow also to be induced to halt, but at once one of the huntsmen would ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... Beauty forms, when properly treated, it is quite often unfortunate in forms of life, unless careful attention is given to arranging the material beforehand. The effect of a barn, for instance, with its front view checkered with violet, red, and yellow squares, may be imagined, or of a pigeon-house with a parti-colored green and blue roof, an orange standard, and red supports. Yet these are no fancy pictures I have painted, ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... prime at that particular moment in his checkered career. It afforded him much pride to thus be in sole charge of a captured rum-runner with a cargo of contraband aboard. Then, too, all doubts concerning his ability to serve as an engineer were already dissipated for the sloop was making fair time and carried a bone in her teeth, as the white ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... a checkered year; One summer month, of sunlight, moonlight, mirth With not a hint of shadows ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... floor, a row of clerestory windows, unglazed, admitted arrows of sunlight through a golden fretwork; and these arrows, piercing the incense vapor, checkered intricate patterns on the enormous, deep-piled Persian rugs of ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... Yuen-nan has had a checkered career ever since it became a part of the empire. In the thirteenth century Kublai Khan, the invincible warrior, annexed this Switzerland to China; and how great his exploits must have been at the time of this addition to the land of the Manchus might be gathered from ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... grand death, but by an act of cowardly treachery on the part of his American foes; it is one of the darkest stains on the checkered pages of frontier history. Early in 1777 he came into the garrison at Point Pleasant to explain that, while he was anxious to keep at peace, his tribe were bent on going to war; and he frankly added that of course if they did so ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... management of the blue-checkered border is seen. It is the means of drawing your colored diaper work toward that blue background, the sky, and is superb in its ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... hill, the road is carried along a rampart lined, with horse-chestnut trees—clumps of massy foliage, and snowy pyramids of bloom, expanded in the rapture of a southern spring. Each pair of trees between their stems and arch of intermingling leaves includes a space of plain, checkered with cloud-shadows, melting blue and green in amethystine haze. To right and left the last spurs of the Alps descend, jutting like promontories, heaving like islands from the misty breadth below: and here and there are towers, half-lost in airy azure; and cities ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... with very low banks until the last ten or fifteen miles. After an intervale of half a mile to two miles, the land rises gently on the right to an altitude of some two to five hundred feet, the slope covered and checkered the whole distance with vineyards, meadows, woods, &c. The Poplar and the Pollard are still planted, but the scale of cultivation is larger and the houses much better than between Paris and Dijon. The intervale (mainly in meadow) ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... beaks, and sleek, unruffled plumage, were swimming out to sea,—how another river, not quite so unique as the last, was also in sight, coiling among emerald steeps and crags and precipices and forest,—while beyond, green woodlands, checkered fields, groves, orchards, villages, hills, farms, and villas, all glowed in an exceedingly charming manner in the morning sun;—and then, still further, to say something as brilliant as possible about a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... painted green, stood near the narrow window, which threw a checkered square of sunshine upon the garret floor, and as Linda raised the cover she gave a little scream of rapture, for it seemed almost as if she had found a broken rainbow, there was such a glitter of gay colors in ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various
... a motley assemblage this! The world is checkered here not less than in the noisy and elegant capital; and man's peculiarities, man's excellencies, and man's defects, follow him even into the heart of these wild mountains, showing themselves in these smaller groups, not less strongly than amid the crowded streets ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... stretching to the lake, which is only dimly seen, with the peaks of Madera and Ometepec more distinct, the latter bearing south-west by west. Alone on the summit of a high peak, with surging green billows of foliage all around, dim misty mountains in the distance, and above the blue heavens, checkered with fleecy clouds, that have travelled up hundreds of miles from the north-east, thoughts arise that can be only felt in their full intensity amid solitude and nature's grandest phases. Then man's intellect strives to grapple with the great mysteries of his existence, and like a fluttering ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... faces too—faces dark, truculent, and smiling; the frank audacious faces of men barefooted, well armed and noiseless. They thronged the narrow length of our schooner's decks with their ornamented and barbarous crowd, with the variegated colours of checkered sarongs, red turbans, white jackets, embroideries; with the gleam of scabbards, gold rings, charms, armlets, lance blades, and jewelled handles of their weapons. They had an independent bearing, resolute ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... had left the hot town for a stroll and a chat, And wandered on looking at this and at that,— Plumed grass with pink clover that waltzed in the breeze, Ruby currants in gardens, and pears on the trees,— Till a green church-yard showed them its sun-checkered gloom, And in they both went and sat down on a tomb. The dead name was mossy; the letters were dim; But they spelled out "James Woodson," and mused upon him, Till Harry said, poring, "I wish I could know What manner of man used the bones down below." Answered Tom,—as he took his cigar from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... my friends—all you who are so situated as to be able to avail yourselves of this privilege—go and see for yourselves how greatly we are bound by prejudices, how checkered and uncertain are many of our own advances, how very nearly all is balanced. No nation has all that is best, neither is any bereft of some advantages, and no nation, or tribe, or people is so unhappy that it would be willing to exchange its condition for that of any ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... into the farm-lands that checkered the valley and climbed the green slopes of the Helderbergs, went the orders of the boy patroon, summoning all "our loyal and loving tenantry" to take of their stock and provender all that they could spare, save the slight amount needed for actual home use, and to deliver the same to the commissaries ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... The Column, Verrey (vair, variegated, checkered with argent and azure), and the Balls or (Palle d'oro), were arms of old families. I do not trouble the reader with notes upon mere family-names, of ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... individual so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say that happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better is it to dare mighty things to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows ...
— American Boy's Life of Theodore Roosevelt • Edward Stratemeyer
... English history are more pregnant with events, or more interesting to the antiquary, and general reader, than that which comprised the fortunes of Wolsey. The eventful life of the Cardinal, checkered as it was by the vicissitudes of fortune, his sudden elevation, and finally his more sudden fall and death, display an appalling picture of "the instability of human affairs." This prelate and statesman, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume XII, No. 347, Saturday, December 20, 1828. • Various
... commanders, and I see no good reason why I too may not ask for it, and this simple concession, involving no public interest, will much soften the blow, which, right or wrong, I construe as one of the hardest I have sustained in a life somewhat checkered with adversity. With ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and guards hunting for an escaped insane criminal. Besides, there are still a few more hours left for a new batch of exciting happenings. I tell you, boys, this little side trip proposed by Alec and engineered by Hugh bids fair to equal anything we've endured in our whole checkered career." ...
— The Boy Scouts with the Motion Picture Players • Robert Shaler
... plate-glass window of the Snake Drug Store in San Francisco. Just back of this plate glass, and within eighteen inches of my very nose, were fifty-seven varieties of the reptiles, big and small, streaked and checkered, quiet and active. After much remonstrance and waiting, I came-to—gazed at the markings, beautiful in their exactness—while slowly the change of mind took place. Faith took the place of fear, calmness subdued panic, and I was wondrously delivered from the veritable bondage ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... laughing face away from the whimsical painter to look down at the small drama going on among the checkered border of spectators, when at the angle of the marble steps in front of the Duomo, nearly opposite Nello's shop, he saw a man's face upturned towards him, and fixing on him a gaze that seemed to have more meaning ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... "What a checkered career!" said Newman. "Are you very fond of children?" He was certain that she was, but he wished to ...
— The American • Henry James
... of tint, a pattern on the folded surface will help you. Try whether it does or not: and if the patterned drapery confuses you, keep for a time to the simple white one; but if it helps you, continue to choose patterned stuffs (tartans and simple checkered designs are better at first than flowered ones), and even though it should confuse you, begin pretty soon to use a pattern occasionally, copying all the distortions and perspective modifications of it among ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... wellnigh out of the imagination of all those who are younger by a generation than I. You cannot see, as I can see, the dark empty way between the mean houses, the dark empty way lit by a bleary gas-lamp at the corner, you cannot feel the hard checkered pavement under your boots, you cannot mark the dimly lit windows here and there, and the shadows upon the ugly and often patched and crooked blinds of the people cooped within. Nor can you presently pass the beerhouse with its brighter gas and its queer, screening windows, ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... that was a proverb in Greenfield, conquered at last, and Hitty became conscious, to find herself in a chamber whose plastered walls were crumbling away with dampness and festooned with cobwebs, while the uncarpeted floor was checkered with green stains of mildew, and the very old four-post bedstead on which she lay was fringed around the rickety tester with rags of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... thoughts were turned, when, just as she attained the middle of the avenue, the imperfect and checkered light which found its way through the silvan archway, showed her something which resembled the figure of a man. Lady Peveril paused a moment, but instantly advanced;—her bosom, perhaps, gave one startled ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... character for honesty, integrity, and sincerity of purpose and action than Andrew Johnson. The life of each of these two great men had been a series of obscure but heroic struggles; each had experienced a varied and checkered career; each reached the highest political station of earth. Their official state papers are of supreme interest, and comprise the utterances of President Lincoln while he in four years placed in the field ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... were crowded with folks in motley garments showing signs of wear and tear. Their possessions were done up in bags and shapeless bundles, rolled in pieces of sacking, old shawls, red-and-white-checkered table-cloths. The men, with drawn and heavy faces, waited patiently. The women collected and watched their restless flocks. The baby tugged at its mother's breast. The little sister carried the next-to-baby in her arms. The boys, as usual, wandered everywhere ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... was a slow process, but it was peaceful, progressive, and certain, especially when Texas should have been checkered by railroads, and her system connected with that of the South and of Mexico. I desired then, however, to accelerate this action, by making it a part of the compact of Texas with the Federal Government, ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... form an impressive chapter in the history of Europe; and one of the most striking episodes in the narrative is the checkered life of the last king of France—one week among the mightiest monarchs on the loftiest pinnacle of ambition, he was, the next, an exile in a foreign land—his past supremacy ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... was deplorably true. And yet no one could say that Kitty in this checkered year had done her husband much harm. Ashe was no longer her blind slave; and his career had carried him to heights with which even his mother might have been satisfied. Sometimes Margaret was inclined to think that Kitty had now less influence ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Nellie sat down beside the red-and-white-checkered cloth spread on the ground, and Wade, after passing the still fretting baby to his wife, ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... apparently not a little disturbed. She hammered the beetle rather excitedly upon the limb a few times, as if it were in some way at fault, then dropped down to try for her nest again. Only vacant air there! She hovers and hovers, her blue wings flickering in the checkered light; surely that precious hole MUST be there; but no, again she is baffled, and again she returns to her perch, and mauls the poor beetle till it must be reduced to a pulp. Then she makes a third attempt, then a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... by moralists for the coarseness of his novels. But had he not been coarse he would not have been true. He described life as it was in the eighteenth century, as he had seen it in the ups and downs of a checkered career. His characters were taken from the higher ranks and the lower. He placed the house, the amusements, the habits of a country gentleman before the reader with the faithfulness of a man who had hunted, feasted, and got drunk ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... political administration of the Philippines, then, we must be prepared to find it a sort of outer garment under which the living body is ecclesiastical. Against this subjection to the influence and interests of the Church energetic governors rebelled, and the history of the Spanish domination is checkered with struggles between the civil and religious powers which reproduce on a small scale the mediaeval ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... glass, profusely decorated with the armorial bearings of the founder of the fane, and the many alliances of his descendants. The sheen of their blazonry gleamed bright in the darkness, as if to herald to his last home another of the line whose achievements it displayed. Glowing colorings, checkered like rainbow tints, were shed upon the broken leaves of the adjoining yew-trees, and ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and wore a striped skirt and a white jacket fitted to her waist. The checkered shadows cast by the tree made spots of light and darkness over her face and her uncovered neck, the top button of her camisole being unfastened on account of the heat. De Buxieres had been perfectly well ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... found the chief white man in control there so drunk that he soon died of delirium tremens. John Clarkson, however, brother of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, eventually took the lead, founded Freetown, and the colony began its checkered career. In 1896 the colony was saved from insurrection by the exiled Maroon Negroes from Jamaica. After 1833, when emancipation in English colonies took place, severer measures against the slave trade was possible and the colony began to grow. To-day its imports ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... and advanced into the province of Masovia, the country around Praga rose at every step in fresh beauty. The numberless chains of gently swelling hills which encompass it on each side of the Vistula were in some parts checkered with corn fields, meadows, and green pastures covered with sheep, whose soft bleatings thrilled in my ears and transported my senses into new regions, so different was my charmed and tranquillized mind from the tossing ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... close brimmed blue bonnet filled with lilacs and tied with an old rose ribbon, was more compelling than Jasper Penny had remembered her for, actually, years. A coffee-coloured India shawl, with a deep fringe and trace of a lining checkered in cherry and black slipping from her shoulders, toned her appearance to ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... loving discipline meant to perfect our characters. We read the past best from the vantage-ground of the Temple. From its height we understand the lie of the land. Communion with God explains much which is else inexplicable. Solomon's judgment of Israel's checkered history will be our judgment of our own when we stand in the higher courts of the heavenly home, and look from that height upon all the way by which the Lord our God hath led us. In the meantime, it is often a trial for faith to repeat these words; but ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... anxiety. Persis had friends of whose existence he was unaware. She corresponded with men in distant cities. These apparently trivial facts took on greater import as he mused. His own chances to win her, dishearteningly small at the best of times in view of his checkered record, suddenly sank below the level of insignificance ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... she had been committed, and by putting up a piteous tale she was harbored on the West Side by an Irish family whose two daughters were clerks in a large retail store. Through these Claudia became a cash-girl. Thereafter followed an individual career as strange and checkered as anything that had gone before. Sufficient to say that Claudia's native intelligence was considerable. At the age of twenty she had managed—through her connections with the son of a shoe manufacturer and with a rich jeweler—to amass a little cash and an ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser
... equal warmth in winter, as a refreshing coolness in the summer season, when the tops of the houses, which are planted with a variety of flowers, exhibit at a distance the spacious view of a beautifully checkered parterre."—Forster. ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... white Mouldiwarps friends to thy house," she told him—"the Mouldiwarp who is the badge, and the Mouldiwarp who is the crest, and the Great Mouldiwarp who sits on the green and white checkered field of the Ardens' shield of arms. It was the first two who talked ...
— Harding's luck • E. [Edith] Nesbit
... him to be good if he could possibly prevent it. And he certainly did do a great deal to prevent it. He knew what having to be good meant. Some of the boys who had escaped from the Home had told him all about that. It meant wearing shoes and a blue and white checkered apron, and making cane-bottomed chairs all day, and having to wash yourself in a big iron tub twice a week, not to speak of having to move about like machines whenever the lady teacher hit a bell. So when the green-goods men, of whom the genial ...
— Gallegher and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... and the banana, with its magnificent ribbon leaves, producing a marked tropical effect—not semi-tropical, as they are so fond of saying here, while speaking of their fruits. Nothing I have noticed strikes me as semi, save the brusque little bits of civilization with which the wilderness is checkered. These are semi-barbarous or less; everything else in the region has a most exuberant pronounced wholeness. The city held me but a short time, for the San Gabriel Mountains were in sight, advertising themselves grandly along the ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... clapped her hands with glee at sight of the flaming hollyhocks and the trees laden with golden pippins. It was, indeed, a pretty scene: silvery traces of the brook sparkled in the green meadow below the orchard, and the hills beyond were checkered by the fields of buckwheat in broad patches of white bloom, and these again were skirted by masses of luxuriant wood that crowned all the heights. To the eye of Adele, used only to the bare hill-sides ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... under the roof of a cottage, and cross its threshold, all ceiled and banked up with snow. They are glad and warm still, and as genial and cheery in winter as in summer. As we stand in the midst of the pines, in the nickering and checkered light which straggles but little way into their maze, we wonder if the towns have ever heard their simple story. It seems to us that no traveller has ever explored them, and notwithstanding the wonders which science is elsewhere revealing every ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... pink sunbonnet and the little, checkered dress She wore when first I kissed her and ...
— An Old Sweetheart of Mine • James Whitcomb Riley
... a brown coat, something like a dressing gown, and a checkered cap; he was leaning on an English bamboo cane, and his newly-shaven face shone with satisfaction; he was on the round of inspecting his ...
— Virgin Soil • Ivan S. Turgenev
... his action, as well as that of the cavalry, about him is admirably expressed: he appears on the pinnacle of triumph; his charger snuffs the very gale of glory, and the uncurbed energy of exultation seems to animate those immediately around him. The eye descends to the checkered toil beneath: the brawny soldier bearing the delicate form of his lovely wife, which is well contrasted with the bold, muscular figure of the former: the exhausted youth, and the veteran directing the army, but especially the former, are finely drawn and painted: the bare head of the aged ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 541, Saturday, April 7, 1832 • Various
... leaping downward through the checkered glades, his pockets stuffed with chestnuts. Like an angel with healing in his wings, Angelo comes to Gigi. When he spies him out, Gigi rises, unsteady on his little feet—rises up, forgetting all, and clasps ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... his accession to office Count Rossi was sixty years of age. He was no stranger to politics. His life, indeed, had been spent in the midst of political turmoil. As may be supposed, he suffered much in the course of his checkered career. He had, at the same time, learned much at the stern school of experience. He had been several times an exile, and had thus become the citizen of more than one country. In 1815 he was banished from the Peninsula, on account of the part which he had ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... see the pink sunbonnet and the little checkered dress She wore when first I kissed her and she answered the caress With the written declaration that, "as surely as the vine Grew round the stump," she loved me—that ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... of graces, has taken in hand, but more commonly in connection with the very highest breeding of the most thoroughly trained society. She was a splendid scowling beauty, black-browed, with a flash of white teeth which was always like a surprise when her lips parted. She wore a checkered dress, of a curious pattern, and a camel's-hair scarf twisted a little fantastically about her. She went to her seat, which she had moved a short distance apart from the rest, and, sitting down, ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Aix-la-Chapelle (1748): in this, she completely played her role of a youthful favourite, fond of peace, the arts, the pleasures of the mind, and advising and protecting all things happily. There was a second period, greatly checkered, but more frequently disastrous and fatal; this was the whole period of the Seven Years' War, the attempted assassination by Damiens, the defeat of Rosbach, and the insults of the victorious Frederick. ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... wooded slopes of the Taunus Mountains. To the Hardtwald I bent my steps, and strolled for an hour through mossy glades and the still, perpendicular gloom of the fir-woods. Suddenly, on the grassy margin of a by-path, I came upon a young man stretched at his length in the sun-checkered shade, and kicking his heels towards a patch of blue sky. My step was so noiseless on the turf that, before he saw me, I had time to recognise Pickering again. He looked as if he had been lounging there for some time; his hair was tossed about as if he ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... equal horizontal bands of red (top), white, and blue superimposed by the Croatian coat of arms (red and white checkered) ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... graduate of West Point, and while still a young man had served with marked credit for some twelve years in the army. But he had more than a military education. Through a checkered career in civil life, he had enlarged his knowledge of the country, his acquaintance with men, his experience in affairs. He had been a banker in California, a lawyer in Kansas, President of a college in Louisiana, and, when the war began, he was about to take charge of a railroad in Missouri. It ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... I am a thinker. My mind is full of pictures when your fancy is checkered with red and blue lines. So you are willing to forgive her?" he ...
— An Arkansas Planter • Opie Percival Read
... clear and bright over its stony bed, and changing the brown rock, the water weed, or the leaf beneath, into gems by the magic of its own brightness. The boughs were waving over head, covered with many-colored foliage, and the sun, glancing through, not only enriched the tints above, but checkered the mossy path along which they wandered like a chess-board of brown and gold. Some of the late autumn birds uttered their short sweet songs from the copse hard by, and the musical wind came sighing up from the valley, as ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... his popularity, though still a prisoner. The Jacobins were exhibiting signs of terror, though still masters of every thing. The recruits were running away, though the decree for the general rising of the country was arming the people. In short, the news was exactly of that checkered order which was calculated to put us all in the highest spirits. The submission of Paris, at least until we were its conquerors, would have deprived us of a triumph on the spot, and the proclamation of a general peace would have been received as the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... a pleasant place,' I said; and indeed it was so to me, I hardly know why, being a very plain apartment, with a checkered pavement of blue and white stones, and furnished only with bright oaken tables and settles, and a great chair or two; also the great fireplace was well garnished with green boughs and flowers, it being summer. I looked all about it that evening as we sat ...
— Andrew Golding - A Tale of the Great Plague • Anne E. Keeling
... commanded the prairie ran back to the horizon, brightly green, until its strong coloring gave place in the distance to soft neutral tones. It was blotched with crimson flowers; in the marshy spots there were streaks of purple; broad squares of darker wheat checkered the sweep of grass, and dwarf woods straggled across it in broken lines. In one place was the gleam of a little lake. Over it all there hung a sky of dazzling blue, across which great ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... or pumps without heels * * * Few besides gentlemen wear the truis, that is, the breeches and stockings all of one piece and drawn on together; over this habit they wear a plaid, which is usually three yards long and two breadths wide, and the whole garb is made of checkered tartan or plaiding; this with the sword and pistol, is called a full dress, and to a well proportioned man with any tolerable air, it makes an agreeable figure."[2] The plaid was the undress of the ladies, and to a woman who adjusted it with an important air, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... rose higher in the British service than a half-pay major. As a "soldier of fortune" he was vastly more successful. In all the pages of American history, indeed, it would be difficult to find anybody whose career was more interestingly and picturesquely checkered than ...
— The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees • Mary Caroline Crawford
... "My clothes, too, began to decay; as to linen, I had had none a good while, except some checkered shirts, which I carefully preserved, because many times I could bear no other clothes on. I had almost three dozen of shirts, several thick watch coats, ...
— The Delicious Vice • Young E. Allison
... respected her silence, trying in vain to guess the thoughts that were stirring behind her shining eyes, as green and golden as the sea under a noonday sun. What a wealth of romance must be hidden in that woman's past! What tragedies must have been woven into the checkered ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... peculiar construction of novels. Their structure is similar to that of dramatic compositions. They exhibit characters to view. They have their heroes and heroines in the same manner. They lay open the checkered incidents in the lives of these. They interweave into their histories the powerful passion of love. By animated language, and descriptions which glow with sympathy, they rouse the sensibility of the reader, and fill his soul with interest in the tale. They fascinate therefore in the same manner ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... usual and looked out across the valley to learn if anything had happened in the vicinity of the pitfall. The hoar frost, lying heavily on the herbage, made the valley resemble a sea of silver, checkered and spotted all over darkly. These dark spots and lines were the traces of such animals as had been in the valley during the night or toward early morning. Leading everywhere were heavy trails and light ones, telling the story of the night. But very little heed to these things was ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... from which was derived the name of one of its higher degrees; and its armorial bearings, consisting of pictures of the Lion, the Bull, the Waterman, and the Flying Eagle, which representing the signs at the cardinal points, constituted the genii of the seasons. Besides these, we have the checkered flooring or mosaic work, representing the earth and its variegated face, which was introduced when temple worship succeeded its grove form; the two columns representing the imaginary pillars of heaven ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... I really am married," Isabel said reflectively; "for I certainly object most decidedly to my father's way of talking to you. Heavens! If I have to go through life resenting the things people say of my husband, I shall certainly lead a checkered career." ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... club at Ballymahon. He emerged, however, unscathed from this dangerous ordeal, more fortunate in this respect than his comrade Bryanton; but he retained throughout life a fondness for clubs; often, too, in the course of his checkered career, he looked back to this period of rural sports and careless enjoyments as one of the few sunny spots of his cloudy life; and though he ultimately rose to associate with birds of a finer feather, his heart would still yearn in secret after the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... me!" cried Laddie, as he glanced down at his suit, which was speckled and checkered ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Aunt Jo's • Laura Lee Hope
... hand through life we'll go; Its checkered paths of joy and woe With cautious steps ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... the sons of Pandu went with Draupadi into exile, and passed twelve years in the wilderness; and many were the incidents which checkered their forest life. Krishna, who had stood by Yudhishthir in his prosperity, now came to visit him in his adversity; he consoled Draupadi in her distress, and gave good advice to the brothers. Draupadi with a woman's pride and anger still thought of her ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... below. Behind them was the solid wall of thick woods, over them time spreading boughs, and far above the trees the blue summer sky, all the bluer for the little white clouds that sailed serene like ships upon a sea. At their feet lay the open country, checkered by the snake fences into fields of yellow, green, and brown, and rolling away to meet the woods ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... stones to which they adhere are variegated with brown and purple blotches of incipient Coralline, and the shells are beautifully mottled with every shade of those colors. Some are lilac, heightening nearly to crimson; others are dark chocolate and white, sharply checkered. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... corner, with their bannered bosoms open to the sun, and with the thrush in the air, like a song of joy in the morning; I would rather live there and have some lattice work across the window, so that the sunlight would fall checkered on the baby in the cradle; I would rather live there and have my soul erect and free, than to live in a palace of gold and wear the crown of imperial power and know that my soul was slimy with hypocrisy. It is not necessary ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... It seemed to him that a bold course of action was the best to be taken under the circumstances. "For instance, I have a pretty accurate knowledge of the checkered past of Dr. Bentwood and the malignant scoundrel who calls himself Carl Sartoris. Of Miss Mary Sartoris I will say nothing. There are others here, too, whose past is not altogether wrapped in mystery. There are General ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... arriving. They were by this time drawn up five rows deep, and a dense mass of them spread along the barriers, checkered by the light coats of white horses. Beyond them other carriages stood about in comparative isolation, looking as though they had stuck fast in the grass. Wheels and harness were here, there and everywhere, according as the conveyances to which they belonged were side ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... representation of a centipede, and as the slab remained stationary just before it reached the perpendicular, I began to dive into my mental reticule for the scraps of prayers that had been caught and held through a rather checkered career in places where the efficacy of prayer was looked upon with ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... now at work, or ever have been at work, upon our planet. The Catastrophists, believing that the globe is but, as it were, the birth of yesterday, were driven of necessity to the conclusion that its history had been checkered by the intermittent action of paroxysmal and almost inconceivably potent forces. The Uniformitarians, on the other hand, maintaining the "adequacy of existing causes," and denying that the known physical forces ever acted in past time ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... unconscious mother. The poor lady could not even understand whence the flowers came that he laid on her couch, the flowers thrown to the young man—yesterday unknown, and to-day the most famous of contemporary names. All this tale of triumph, checkered by enmities and diversified by duels, Dumas tells with the vigour and wit of his novels. He is his own hero, and loses nothing in the process; but the other characters—Taylor, Nodier, the Duc d'Orleans, the spiteful press-men, the crabbed old officials—all ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... crown of Blackford, Marmion gazed on the martial scene. It was a Kingdom's vast array. Thousands on thousands of pavilions, white as snow, dotted the upland, dale, and down, and checkered the heath between town and forest. The relics of the old oaks softened the glaring white with a background ...
— The Prose Marmion - A Tale of the Scottish Border • Sara D. Jenkins
... and thought little of it. That was war. Then all my senses were strung up to attention: a small bay horse lay stretched out on the pathway, his head near the kerb. There was a shapeliness of the legs and a fineness of the mud-checkered coat that seemed familiar. I stepped over to look. Yes, it was my own horse "Tommy," that old Castle, our ex-adjutant, had given me—old Castle's "handy little horse." A gaping hole in the head told all that needed to be told. I found "Swiffy" and the doctor in the workman's cottage that ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... and "old soldiers," and a stove with a door hanging by its upper hinge. The chief editor had a long-tailed black cloth frock-coat on, and white linen pants. His boots were small and neatly blacked. He wore a ruffled shirt, a large seal ring, a standing collar of obsolete pattern, and a checkered neckerchief with the ends hanging down. Date of costume about 1848. He was smoking a cigar, and trying to think of a word, and in pawing his hair he had rumpled his locks a good deal. He was scowling fearfully, and I judged that he was concocting a particularly ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... but storm signals still showed in the south where the heavy clouds hung over the horizon. Overhead the sun shone, making kaleidoscope effects of the spring flowers in the checkered beds. Against the gray wall of the terraced garden the peach trees had been trained in foreign fashion and were full ...
— Glory of Youth • Temple Bailey
... moves and is, and that which life animates not nor mortality knows,—annihilates falsehood, and chills even self-delusion into awe. Come, then, and look upon the picture of a past day and of a gone being, without apprehension of deceit; and as the shadows and lights of a checkered and wild existence flit before you, watch if in your own hearts there be aught which mirrors ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... jestingly, if he had ever, during his checkered, plaided, mottled, pied and dappled career, conducted an enterprise of the class to which the word "trust" had been applied. Somewhat to my surprise he acknowledged ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... the sun benignant Looked upon them through the branches, Saying to them, "O my children, Love is sunshine, hate is shadow; Life is checkered shade and sunshine; Rule by love, O Hiawatha!" From the sky the moon looked at them, Filled the lodge with mystic splendors, Whispered to them, "O my children, Day is restless, night is quiet, Man imperious, woman feeble; Half is mine, although I follow; Rule by patience, ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... somehow, sometime during his checkered career, Pig Head had heard, or read, of a way of ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars |
