"Patchwork" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... saw the "tin can on the shingle" between them and their prey. The Monitor and Merrimac then began their epoch-making fight. The patchwork engines of the deep-draught Merrimac made her as unhandy as if she had been water-logged, while the light-draught Monitor could not only play round her when close-to but maneuver all over the surrounding shallows as well. The Merrimac put her last ounce of steam into an attempt to ram her ...
— Captains of the Civil War - A Chronicle of the Blue and the Gray, Volume 31, The - Chronicles Of America Series • William Wood
... and yet is a very smart scholar; Amelie, the next one, was darning the stockings; the boy, who comes third, was out-doors, tidying up the chicken-house; and the two little girls were in the corner, cutting and sewing patchwork, with a doll in the cradle between them. The house is always clean, the children are well and rosy, and play about a good deal, and Christine last year earned thirty dollars. Her mother puts half the money she earns in the bank for her marriage-portion. I was so glad it wasn't ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... of Katy's family. Accordingly, after dinner, he bent his energies to read them all, from Helen down to Aunt Betsy, the latter of whom proved the most transparent of the four. Arrayed again in the pongee, but this time without the hoop, she came into the parlor, bringing her calico patchwork, which she informed him was pieced in the "herrin' bone pattern" and intended for Katy; telling him, further, that the feather bed on which he slept was also a part of "Catherine's setting out," and was made from feathers she picked herself, showing him ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... flowers, and vegetables. But they had left Price Ruyler untroubled. He had been far more interested watching San Francisco rise from its ruins, transformed almost overnight from a picturesque but ramshackle city, a patchwork of different eras, into a staid metropolis of concrete and steel, defiant alike of earthquake and fire. He had liked the new experience of being a pioneer, which so subtly expanded his starved ego that he had, by unconscious degrees, made up his mind to remain out here as the permanent head of the ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... work in the old good thing with the new, not as patchwork though, but making the new thing grow out in such a way as to embrace the ...
— Friends in Council (First Series) • Sir Arthur Helps
... up," called Miss Thomas. The captain entered and found her in bed, the patchwork points and diamonds of the "Rising Sun" quilt covering her to the chin and her head denting the uppermost of the two big pillows. Captain Cy ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... upstairs to his room and, slipping his braces from his shoulders, allow his nether garments to drop to the floor and, without further preparation, roll into bed. Of the effeminacy of a night robe Webster knew nothing except by somewhat hazy rumour. Once under the patchwork quilt he was safe for the night, for, heaving himself into the middle of the bed, he sank into solid and stertorous slumber, from which all Cameron's prods and kicks failed to arouse him till the grey dawn once more summoned him to life, whereupon, resuming ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... Warrender," she said. "I guess the woman that's married him thinks he's A1 and gilt-edged now, poor soul. But he's just a miserable patchwork mummy really, and there isn't any white in him—no, ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... well as the clothes to his patron's wants. The tailor's object, in this volume, is to fit young men, in universities or elsewhere, to be men of the world, equipped for any emergency; and the garment offered to them is meant to show the faults of the patchwork fitted ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of andirons, fenders, shovels, tongs, and bellows; hanging of pictures, curtains, and mirrors—old and new; moving in of sofas, chairs, and rockers; making up of beds with fluted frills on the pillows—a silk patchwork quilt on St. George's bed and cotton counterpanes for ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... said Lund, grinning at them. "If enny of you saw a man hurtin' a dog, you'd probably fetch him a wallop. But you don't think ennything of scarin' the life out of a half-baked kid an' markin' up his hide like a patchwork quilt. Thet kid's stayin' aft after this. One of you monkey with him, an' you'll do jest what he's bin doin', wish ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... of himself as the golden head. Golden head must have golden breast, and a golden breast must have a golden trunk, and golden trunk golden legs, and golden legs must rest on feet of gold. That will stand, and that will represent me better than this patchwork affair of which I dreamed. So he set him up the golden image in the plain of Dura. That represented himself as he regarded himself, the image seen in vision represented him as he was in reality, as God saw him. What followed? God smote him and he went mad. He was driven out as ...
— The Village Pulpit, Volume II. Trinity to Advent • S. Baring-Gould
... was a time of continually deepening intensity of political agitation. The patchwork of compromises and settlements contrived by make-shift politicians like Clay and Douglas would not hold; they tore out, and the rent was made worse. Part of the Compromise of 1850, which was to be something altogether sempiternal, was a Fugitive Slave Law so studiously ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... run on such a day as this must expect to be warm," remarked Aunt Jane sedately, while she measured a hem with a bit of paper notched to show the proper width. "Now if you and Molly would bring your patchwork up here, and sew quietly with your mother and me, you would be quite ...
— Half a Dozen Girls • Anna Chapin Ray
... armed and distrustful of him and that he had forgotten them. What she could not gauge was the full of the effect she had had upon him. He had marked a female form at the fireside, shawled by a shapeless patchwork quilt; out of it, magically it seemed to his startled fancies, there had stepped a superb creature with eyes on fire with her youth, a superlatively lovely creature, essentially feminine. From the flash of her ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... woman was gone; then she crept out and drank all she wanted, and took the best bits of cold potato and bread for her breakfast, and the lazy pigs did not get up till she was done. While they ate and rooted in the dirt, Betty slept as long as she liked, with no school, no errands, no patchwork to do. She liked it, and kept hidden till night; then she went home, and opened the little window in the store closet, and got in and took as many good things to eat and carry away as she liked. She had a ...
— The Louisa Alcott Reader - A Supplementary Reader for the Fourth Year of School • Louisa M. Alcott
... every day in bed-making," ejaculated Mrs. Meredith, making a sudden dive toward the bed, as if she desired to escape the question. She smoothed the gay patchwork quilt, seemed to feel something underneath, and the next moment pulled out the hidden volume, which was bound, as the bookseller's advertisements phrased it, in "half calf, neat, marbled sides." One stern glance she gave the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... pallet bedstead, in a small attic of one of the meanest houses in the lowest portion of a provincial town in the south of England, a woman lay dying. The curtainless window and window—panes, stuffed with straw, the scanty patchwork covering to the bed, the single rickety chair, the unswept floor, the damp, mildewed walls, the door falling from its hinges, told of pinching poverty. On the opposite corner to the bedstead there was a heap ...
— The Ferryman of Brill - and other stories • William H. G. Kingston
... poetry! This is what ranks its writer with the master-spirits of the age! This is what has been described, over and over again, in terms which would require some qualification if used respecting Paradise Lost! It is too much that this patchwork, made by stitching together old odds and ends of what, when new, was but tawdry frippery, is to be picked off the dunghill on which it ought to rot, and to be held up to admiration as an inestimable specimen of art. And what must we think of a system by means of which verses like ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... behind the houses, the little gardens whose breath reached me just now. They are there, divided into small plots of equal size, simple or pretentious, sometimes humble kitchen-gardens, but sometimes also a patchwork adorned with ...
— The Choice of Life • Georgette Leblanc
... those countries retiring isn't a social rite: it's a feat of hardihood. I'm keen for a line of plain, full, roomy old-fashioned flannel nightgowns of the improved T. A. Buck Featherloom products variety. They'll be wearing 'em long after knickerbockers have been cut up for patchwork." ...
— Roast Beef, Medium • Edna Ferber
... and too much allied to petty Court intrigues, with which he was totally unacquainted, to be in the least interesting to Julian. As it continued for more than an hour, he soon ceased to pay the least attention to a discourse consisting of nicknames, patchwork, and innuendo; and employed himself in reflecting on his own complicated affairs, and the probable issue of his approaching audience with the King, which had been brought about by so singular an ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... people active and influential in intellectual things—are still quite untrained in the methods of thought and absolutely innocent of any criticism of method; it is scarcely a caricature to call their thinking a crazy patchwork, discontinuous and chaotic. They arrive at conclusions by a kind of accident, and do not suspect any other way may be found to their attainment. A stage above this general condition stands that minority of people who have at some time or other discovered general ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... dining-room for, although she was nearly thirty, there was still something of girlhood in her tired face. But she seemed engrossed in her own thoughts and returned to her room as soon as she had eaten. There she lay down upon the patchwork quilt which covered her bed, with her hands clasped above her head, staring at the ceiling and trying to forget the past ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... trained her in spelling, in sums in addition, sewing patchwork, and spinning on the small wheel. But there was not enough in the simple living to keep a child busy half the time, and she soon found ways of roaming about, generally guarded by Rover. Aunt Wetherill had said, "In six months you are coming back to us," ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... of stuff. He tears pieces of this stuff apart, and flings them, with apparent malice, at his chief, and, somehow, they seem to stay where he flings them. The chief shouts from a cloud of orange wig and patchwork shirt for a soda-and-milk, and from some obscure place of succour there actually appears a soda-and-milk. A hand darts from the leg of a revolving pair of trousers, grabs the glass and takes a loud swig. The ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... in her father's shack. This log house of Pierre's was a castle by contrast. John Carver and his daughter had shared one room between them; Joan's bed curtained off with gunny-sacking in a corner. She slept on hides and rolled herself up in old dingy patchwork quilts and worn blankets. On winter mornings she would wake covered with the snow that had sifted in between the ill-matched logs. There had been a stove, one leg gone and substituted for by a huge cobblestone; there had been two chairs, a long ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... hid its gray sheets beneath an old patchwork counterpane on one side of the room, and veiled his boxes and suchlike oddments, and invading the two corners of the window were an old whatnot and the washhandstand, on which were distributed the ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... rooted in it, and ply their industry under the happy feeling that, so far as their old landlords are concerned, their lot is one of 'quietness and assurance for ever.' Nowhere—even on the high ranges about Newry, where the population is far too dense, where the patchwork cultivation creeps up the mountain side, and the hand of industry snatches a precarious return from a poor, cold, ungrateful soil, amidst desolating tempests and blighting fogs—not even there ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... vengeance. It was justly anathematized by all Entente peoples as the loathsome creation of a frenzied people. But shortly afterward the Entente governments themselves, their turn having come, wrought what Russians of all parties regard as a political patchwork of variegated injustice more odious far, because its authors claimed to be considered as the devoted friends of their victims and the champions of right. Whereas the Brest-Litovsk Treaty provided for a federative ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... ballad, I have strung together some of the more striking particularities of the Marquesas. It rests upon no authority; it is in no sense, like "Rahero," a native story; but a patchwork of details of manners and the impressions of a traveller. It may seem strange, when the scene is laid upon these profligate islands, to make the story hinge on love. But love is not less known in the Marquesas ...
— Ballads • Robert Louis Stevenson
... beneath the surface, and midway of its depth, a frontier refrigerator reached by a rope ladder, was a narrow chamber in which Margaret Rowland kept her meats fresh, often for a week at a time. For another purpose as well it was used: a big basket with a patchwork quilt and a pillow marking the spot where Baby Rowland, with the summer heat all about, slept away the long, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... let fall a plumb-line from my collar to the floor, which just answered the length of my coat; but my waist and arms I measured myself. When my clothes were finished, which was done in my house (for the largest of theirs would not have been able to hold them), they looked like the patchwork made by the ladies in England, only that mine ...
— Gulliver's Travels - Into Several Remote Regions of the World • Jonathan Swift
... sandbank, some doing a little fishing round its rim, others bringing the washing there, all skylarking and singing. Few prettier sights have I ever seen than those on that sandbank— the merry brown forms dancing or lying stretched on it: the gaudy- coloured patchwork quilts and chintz mosquito-bars that have been washed, spread out drying, looking from Kangwe on the hill above, like beds of bright flowers. By night when it was moonlight there would be bands of dancers on it with bush-light torches, gyrating, intermingling and separating till you could ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... window-seats serving as bookcase and sideboard: holding the Bible and almanac, the old lady's best bonnet, a pot or two of preserves, a nosegay of spring flowers, and a tea-caddy. An old-fashioned four-post bedstead stood in one corner, covered with a patchwork quilt; in another was an impromptu bed, spread on the floor, and occupied by a woman and two children, apparently asleep. A table, covered with oil-cloth, with some cups and saucers on it, stood between the bed and a dresser cupboard, containing rows of shining milk-pans, piled ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... o'er her shoulders hung— Her loins with patchwork cincture were begirt, That more than spoke diversity of dirt. Twain were her teeth, and single was her eye— ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... Vixen knelt down by the arm-chair and tried to get upon intimate terms with the Persian. He was a serious-minded animal, and seemed inclined to resent her advances, so she left him in peace on his patchwork cushion, a relic of those earlier days when Miss Skipwith had squandered her precious hours on the feminine inanity ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... limitations snatched that title away from them again. It sought to do that which can not be done—to establish growth instead of the chance to grow. It was cruel. It was unjust. In the wisdom of a later day its patchwork form must once more be changed. It must be changed as a protection, no more against the former slaves of the South than against the future slaves ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... wrecked in the storms of life! But observe! that which has been dashed to pieces by the tempest, has been refashioned by humble hands into a new dwelling-place. Thus does life spring from death, comfort from desolation, and happiness from shattered hopes, and thus our whole career may be but a patchwork of mere wreckage!" ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... like an old patchwork quilt I hope you will laugh, in token of your acceptance, if not of the book at least of my lasting ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... exhaled the fragrance of sauerkraut, and he had reached the cathedral square, beautified by Farina's shop-signs, where in front of the famous Dom he had been obliged to confess that this facade, this exterior, was a huge piece of patchwork—a delusion. Every part of it was furbished up, and the church sheltered no sculpture under its portals; it was symmetrical, built by peg and line; its rigid forms, its hard outlines were ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... I am, boys, turned up again-a subject of this moral reform school, of moral old Charleston. If my good old mother thinks it'll reform a cast-off remnant of human patchwork like me, I've nothing to say in protest. Yes, here I am, comrades (poor Tom Swiggs, as you used to call me), with rum my victor, and modern vengeance hastening my destruction." This is the exclamation of poor Tom Swiggs (as his ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... belongings were in Aunt Polly's best bedroom, having been moved over from the Eagle while he and David had been in the office. A delightful room it was, in immeasurable contrast to his squalid surroundings at that hostelry. The spacious bed, with its snowy counterpane and silk patchwork "comf'table" folded on the foot, the bright fire in the open stove, the big bureau and glass, the soft carpet, the table for writing and reading standing in the bay, his books on the broad mantel, and his dressing things laid out ready to his hand, not ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... is all to be done in the time; but really something fit to be seen is emerging. Terry is sorting the coins, a pretty job, I should say; but felicity to him. But oh! the industrial articles! There are all the regalia, carved out of cherry-stones, and a patchwork quilt of 5000 bits of silk each no bigger than a shilling. And a calculation of the middle verse in the Bible, and the longest verse, and the shortest verse, and the like edifying Scriptural researches, all copied out like flies' legs, in writing no one can see but ...
— The Three Brides • Charlotte M. Yonge
... eyes, upon the parched, level, treeless land; upon the little patchwork farms of corn and beetroot, oats and fruit, growing undivided, side by side, each looking like a little garden dropped down into the plain; upon the ...
— Diary of a Pilgrimage • Jerome K. Jerome
... had a faint remembrance of jolting in a wagon, and of pitying faces bent over me, but where was I now? Again I opened my eyes, and noted the gay patchwork covering of the bed, and the green paper curtain of the window in the golden wall—green, with a tall yellow flower-pot on it, with sprawling roses of blue and red. Turning with an effort toward the side whence all the brightness came, in a moment ...
— On the Church Steps • Sarah C. Hallowell
... the wall, and framed with oyster-shells; a little bed, which there was just room enough to get into; and a nosegay of seaweed in a blue mug on the table. The walls were whitewashed as white as milk, and the patchwork counterpane made my eyes quite ache with its brightness. One thing I particularly noticed in this delightful house, was the smell of fish; which was so searching, that when I took out my pocket-handkerchief to wipe my nose, I found it ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... a lay here and a lay there— lays now incorporated in the Iliad and Odyssey— scrupulously avoid such faults. They never even introduce a signet ring. These are difficulties in the theory of the Iliad as a patchwork by many hands, in many ages, which nobody explains; which, indeed, nobody seems to find difficult. Yet the difficulty is insuperable. Even if we take refuge with Wilamowitz in the idea that the Cyclic and Homeric poems were at first mere protoplasm of lays of many ages, and that ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... running like golden bays into the green woodland that clothes the sides and tops of all the hills, the wheat, the grass, the oats, and the maize, all making different checkers in the pretty variegated patchwork covering of the ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... in Prussia, all that is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction of ...
— The Barbarism of Berlin • G. K. Chesterton
... consistently and to the limit of its value. The results of various kinds of observation should be correlated so that there should ultimately emerge a unitary and practically valuable account of primate life, to replace the patchwork of information which ...
— The Mental Life of Monkeys and Apes - A Study of Ideational Behavior • Robert M. Yerkes
... as to our ages, the relationships that existed between us, whose squaws the ladies were, and whose were the little blond-haired children. Certain articles of finery seemed to be greatly valued among them, such as red, white and blue umbrellas, like those used as signs in our cities; patchwork and Marseilles quilts; orange shirts and green dresses; pink and pearl shells; little bells; small mirrors; and beads about four inches long made of fine pipeclay. These beads cost a dollar and a half each, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... table beside her stood other borrowed treasures from the Figurehead House—a doll bedstead made by an old sea captain on one of his voyages. Each of its high posts was tipped with a white point, carved from the bone of a whale. Wonderful little patchwork quilts, a feather bed and tiny pillows made especially for the bed, were objects of interest to everyone who crowded around the booth. So were the toys and dishes brought home from other long cruises by the same old sea captain, who evidently was an indulgent father and thought ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... itself a man, in spite of the reality of things. So it stepped into the bar of sunshine. There it stood, poor devil of a contrivance that it was!—with only the thinnest vesture of human similitude about it, through which was evident the stiff, rickety, incongruous, faded, tattered, good-for-nothing patchwork of its substance, ready to sink in a heap upon the floor, as conscious of its own unworthiness to be erect. Shall I confess the truth? At its present point of vivification, the scarecrow reminds me of some of the lukewarm and abortive ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... white thread of science, if under science we may include those simple truths, drawn from observation of nature, of which men in all ages have possessed a store. Could we then survey the web of thought from the beginning, we should probably perceive it to be at first a chequer of black and white, a patchwork of true and false notions, hardly tinged as yet by the red thread of religion. But carry your eye farther along the fabric and you will remark that, while the black and white chequer still runs through it, there rests on the middle portion of the web, where religion has entered most deeply into ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... old Tummus, jumping up and standing upon the patchwork hearthrug in his stockings, "wheerabouts?—wheer is it, owd woman? I'm a-going to look for it 'fore ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn
... the honeymoon! She seemed to be there now, taking off her bonnet and shawl, in the quaint clean chamber, with the heavy oak rafters, and the jasmine coming in at the window, and glancing with pardonable pride at the fair face reflected in the mirror. But as she laid her things on the patchwork coverlet, it seemed to her that the lace veil became fine white linen, and was folded about a figure that lay in the bed; and when she looked round the room again everything was draped in white—white ...
— The Brownies and Other Tales • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... "It is not then indifference to the ecclesia that you complain of. Is it neglect of the ecclesiastic? Ha, ha! you and I, though young, know the colours that make up the patchwork world. Archbishop, I love an easy life; if your brother and his friends will but give me that, let them take all else. Again, I say, to the point,—I cannot banish my lady's kindred, but I will bind your House still more to mine. I have a daughter, failing male issue, the heiress to my crown. ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... sight of Kate standing at the top of the rock talking to Peter M'Shane. In a few days they would come to him to be married, and he hoped that Peter and Kate's marriage would make amends for this miserable patchwork, for Ned Kavanagh and Mary Byrne's marriage was no better ...
— The Untilled Field • George Moore
... the shape of an ideal but impossible patchwork quilt. We learned to sew patchwork at school, while we were learning the alphabet; and almost every girl, large or small, had a bed-quilt of her own begun, with an eye to future house furnishing. I was not over fond of sewing, but I thought it best ...
— A New England Girlhood • Lucy Larcom
... refreshment or variety, while books entailing reasoning and the marshalling of large bodies of facts were being written. Moreover, many of his researches were allowed to drop, and only resumed after an interval of years. Thus a rigidly chronological series of letters would present a patchwork of subjects, each of which would be difficult to follow. The Table of Contents will show in what way I have ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... of the bedroom, and thought how pleasant it looked, with its pink-and-white patchwork quilt and the brown unpainted paneling of ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... Alphabetical Answers. Pitch Basket. Who Am I? Progressive Puzzles. Tit For Tat. Eye-guessing. The Prince Of Wales. Commerce. Laugh A Little. Location. Fashion Notes. Stray Syllables. Quaker Meeting. Magic Music. Patchwork Illustrations. Biography. Orchestra. Who Is My Next-door Neighbor? Fire. The Months. Bell Buff. Postman. Spooney Fun. Cities. Going To China. A Penny For Your Thoughts. Misquoted Quotations. Literary Salad. Broken Quotations. ...
— Games for Everybody • May C. Hofmann
... delighted in a ride in that clumsy old vehicle, nor dreamed that its halting, uncertain gait was other than the very poetry of motion! Even mother's own wooden rocking-chair, a bit of boughten elegance, with its gay patchwork cushion, and dull, contented "creak! creak!" as its dear occupant swayed meditatively to and fro, knitting in hand, in the quiet, restful gloaming, was not quite equal to that dear, delightful old cradle, for a good brisk canter to "Banbury Cross," or to the famous ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... his head to the still open back door, where Mrs. Morran could be heard at her labours. He stepped across and shut it. "I'm no' wantin' that auld wife to hear," he said. Then he squatted down on the patchwork rug by the hearth, and warmed his blue-black shins. Looking into the glow of the fire, he observed, "I seen you two up by ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan
... whatever was the cause, so it was that he did but feel more vividly the sentiment of the old father in the comedy, after consulting the lawyers, "Incertior sum multo quam ante." He saw that the profession of faith contained in the Articles was but a patchwork of bits of orthodoxy, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zuinglism; and this too on no principle; that it was but the work of accident, if there be such a thing as accident; that it had come down in the particular shape in which the English Church now ...
— Loss and Gain - The Story of a Convert • John Henry Newman
... and wonderful portrayal of an otter, and a very fancy stag of unlimited points dazzled the eye. The ceiling was decorated with an elaborate and most effective design in wood—a fashion very common in Srinagar, consisting of a sort of patchwork panelling of small pieces of wood, cut to length and shape, and tacked on to a backing in geometrical designs. At a little distance the effect is rich and excellent, but close inspection shows up the tintacks and the glue, and a prying finger penetrates ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... raised a little above the ground by a frame of split cedars. On these lowly couches lay extended two poor men, suffering under the wasting effects of lake-fever. Their yellow bilious faces strangely contrasted with the gay patchwork-quilts that covered them. I felt much concerned for the poor emigrants, who told me they had not been many weeks in the country when they were seized with the fever and ague. They both had wives and small children, who seemed very miserable. The wives also had been sick with ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... the grass and the potatoes looked greener than elsewhere, owing to the bareness of the neighbouring hills; it was indeed a wild and singular spot—to use a woman's illustration, like a collection of patchwork, made of pieces as they might have chanced to have been cut by the mantua-maker, only just smoothed to fit each other, the different sorts of produce being in such a multitude of plots, and those so small and of such irregular shapes. Add to the strangeness of the village itself, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... several colonies, each to do its part, a pretty poor sort of government to lay at the Lord's door? Why, once these colonies get clear of England, they'll fight among themselves. But, even if they didn't, the country would have a patchwork of little petty governments and nothing in ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... "All roight, ould Patchwork," he called out, with a laugh. "Thare's a shellin' fur ye, which is more, bedad, than yer howl sthock-in-thrade is worth! Changee fur changee, black dog fur whoite moonkey, sure, as my ould fayther used fur ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... the only thread which connects us with the prehistoric past. By picking up and piecing out the scattered remnants of language, we form a patchwork of wondrous design. Oblige us by considering the derivation of the word "sarcophagus," and see if it be not suggestive of potted meats. Observe the significance of the phrase "sweet sixteen." What a world of meaning ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... afternoons. After being duly suppered and scrubbed, we were enjoined to go to bed, and remember that to-morrow was Sunday, and that we must not laugh and play in the morning. With many a sorrowful look did Susan deposit her doll in the chest, and give one lingering glance at the patchwork she was piecing for dolly's bed, while William, John, and myself emptied our pockets of all superfluous fish-hooks, bits of twine, popguns, slices of potato, marbles, and all the various items of boy property, ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Mervyn first forgot her presence, then tolerated her saucer eyes, then found her capable of running his errands, and lastly began to care to please her. Honora had devised employment for her, by putting a drawer of patchwork at her disposal, and suggesting that she should make a workbag for each of Robert's 139 school girls; and the occupation this afforded her was such a public benefit, that Robert was content to pay the tax of telling ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cavalry and of the inhabitants of Mosul, are sent here to graze.... Flowers of every hue enamelled the meadows; not thinly scattered over the grass as in northern climes, but in such thick and gathering clusters that the whole plain seemed a patchwork of many colours. The dogs, as they returned from hunting, issued from the long grass dyed red, yellow, or blue, according to the flowers through which they had last forced their way.... In the evening, after the labour of the day, I ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... should even invite you to make yourself at home." With a laugh he glanced about the bare little room,—at the uncovered rafters, the rough log walls, and the empty cupboard with its swinging doors. In one corner there was a pallet hidden by a ragged patchwork quilt, and facing it a small pine table upon which stood an ash-cake ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... peace of a fine summer evening. Through the upper pane of the station window Police-constable Bennett, who felt that his senses at the moment were abnormally keen, recognised with a sinking heart such reds and yellows as bedecked the best patchwork quilt at home. By contrast the lights of the superintendent's office were subdued, so that within the walls of the police-station sounds seemed of greater importance. Somewhere a drunkard, deprived of his boots, was drumming his criticism of authority on the ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... in several instances that the thread by which the marvellous patchwork of unrelated and varying local myths is joined together, is an indecent ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... valley on the left, as one goes from Amiens to Albert: one looked down into it from the road, a patchwork of greens, browns, greys and yellows. I remember John Masefield said one day it looked to him like a post-impressionist table-cloth; later, white zigzagging lines were ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... tight-ropes. She never remembered Eva Atkinson's carefully prettied face, or her own vivid, work-worn one, at all. She only dreamed that far at the end of the pink Entirely Different Line—a very hard one to walk—there was a rose-garden exactly like a patchwork quilt, where ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... late Mr. Speede recommended the use of the doob grass, but it is so extremely difficult to keep it clear of any intermixture of the ooloo grass, which, when it intrudes upon the doob gives the lawn a patchwork and shabby look, that it is better to use the ooloo grass only, for it is far more manageable; and if kept well rolled and closely shorn it has a very neat, and indeed, beautiful appearance. The lawns in the compound ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... degree of heat till she was able to work with them, and even mend her clothes with tolerable expertness. By degrees, Catharine contrived to cover the whole outer surface of her homespun woollen frock with squirrel and mink, musk-rat and woodchuck skins. A curious piece of fur patchwork of many hues and textures it presented to the eye,—a coat of many colours, it is true; but it kept the wearer warm, and Catharine was not a little proud of her ingenuity and industry,—every new ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... "It's patchwork," she announced, "and I make it my habit to get all the help I can. I'm piecing a quilt, goose-chase pattern, and while I don't know as it's the prettiest there is, yet I don't know as 'tisn't. If you girls expect to sit the morning, and I must say you look like it, ...
— Patty's Summer Days • Carolyn Wells
... Rather would I throw my 'Orpheus' behind the fire, and let every opera I have ever written follow it to destruction. I would bite out my tongue, and spit it in Hasse's face, sooner than go before him with a mouth full of flattering lies, to befool him with praise of that patchwork he has made, and calls AN OPERA! When I was obscure and unknown, I scorned these tricks of trade; and think you that to-day I would stoop to such baseness? Eight years ago, in Rome, a cabal was formed to cause the failure of my 'Trionfo de Camillo,' Cardinal Albini came to assure ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... of developing a specific design cannot be overestimated. No machine on the market, of any type, is one hundred per cent perfect and none on the market should, therefore, be taken as a standard to be met by the new manufacturer. It is a patchwork, only, that is obtained by one common method used to obtain a newly designed machine. Namely, the manufacturer purchases every type of machine, already marketed to perform a given work, and adapts one part from one machine, another part from a second machine and perhaps still another part ...
— The Consumer Viewpoint • Mildred Maddocks
... and then, especially in his earlier essays, there is logical texture and cohesion in his pages; development, evolution, growth; one thing follows another naturally, and each paragraph follows from what went before. But most of his later writings are a kind of patchwork; unrelated ideas are in juxtaposition; the incongruities are startling. All those chapters, I suppose, were read as lectures to miscellaneous audiences in which the attention soon became tired or blunted if required to follow a closely reasoned argument. ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... grim truth had been forced on him, bitterly, bafflingly, after he had climbed the narrow streets of that town which always seemed to him a patchwork of nationalities, a polyglot mosaic of outlandish tongues, climbed up through alien-looking lanes and courts, past Moorish bazaars and Turkish lace-stores and English tobacco-shops, in final and frenzied search of the ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... 'We vex them; let us cease.' I would not play the common part. Tamely I heard the Southrons' brag: I said, 'Their wrongs have made them smart.' At length they struck our ancient flag,— Their flag as ours, the traitors damned!— And braved it with their patchwork-rag. I rose, when other men had calmed Their anger in the marching throng; I rose, as might a corpse embalmed, Who hears God's mandate, 'Right my wrong!' I rose and set me to His deed, With His great Spirit fixed and strong. I swear, that, when I drew this sword, And joined ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in supposing that this age more than any past or future one is destined to see the garments of antiquity exchanged for a new suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; ... and more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in view whether he himself should contend ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... relapsed to a slumber which was more torpor than sleep. Her yellow, old-ivory face was faintly tinged with color; her thin lips were relaxed, and seemed a trifle fuller, so that Mary thought she looked better in sickness than in health; but the limp arm lying on the patchwork quilt seemed to be more skinny than thin, and the hand was more waxen and ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... there were only blocks of wood and a rude bench on one side of the fireplace. The bed was a little platform of poles, on which were spread the furry skins of wild animals, and a patchwork quilt of homespun goods. ...
— Four Great Americans: Washington, Franklin, Webster, Lincoln - A Book for Young Americans • James Baldwin
... miracle! He was altogether reconciled, approved both versions, and did not know which one to choose. We ended with a patchwork. The two quatrains are in verses of ten feet, and the two ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... one evening in December, with a sigh. "Not a word does one hear of clothes, gossip, husbands, or babies. Mrs. Washington told me the day after she returned that she had deliberately thought of nothing but butter and patchwork during the entire recess, that her poor brain might be able to stand the strain of the winter. Shall you have to work ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... them judiciously and lovingly, is not in the least essential to all writing, all speaking; for the sad fact is this, that most of us do our thinking, our writing, and our speaking in phrases, not in words. The work of a feeble writer is always a patchwork of phrases, some of them borrowed from the imperial texture of Shakespeare and Milton, others picked up from the rags in the street. We make our very kettle-holders of pieces of a king's carpet. How many overworn quotations from Shakespeare suddenly ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... they are found all over the province, as a matter of course occupying the best places. But they have not exterminated the aborigines, nor have they assimilated them to any degree. To-day the tribes constitute more than one half the population, and an ethnological map of Yunnan is a wonderful patchwork, for side by side and yet quite distinct, you find scattered about settlements of Chinese, Shans, Lolos, Miaos, Losus, and just what some of these are is still an unsolved riddle. To add to the confusion ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... the cabin at the big map of the United States as they had been, the red and green and blue and yellow patchwork of vanished political divisions. The colors gleamed through the transparent overlay on which this voyage ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... any feeling showed on his face. His voice and his laughter rumbled from his throat, leaving his face unchanged, only his pupils waxed and waned like a cat's in the dark. He was covered with a patchwork of skins and tatters of cloth, and as he set meat before us, venison, it came to me that he must hunt his food in the dark, always in the dark. That cold whiteness was not of the good God's sunlight. As we ate, Dan told him some of our story, and the Nameless Man sat, a handful of his beard in ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... on till evening, each chafed and angry with the other. They wished each other good-night, going through the usual forms in the coolest manner possible. Molly went up to her little bedroom, clean and neat as a bedroom could be, with draperies of small delicate patchwork—bed-curtains, window-curtains, and counter-pane; a japanned toilette-table, full of little boxes, with a small looking- glass affixed to it, that distorted every face that was so unwise as to look in it. This room had been to ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... with the thought of that "To-morrow" which they had promised to one another. The white Italian cities which he had visited alone gleamed whiter than ever before him. Was it possible that he should sit in the great square of St. Mark's with Miriam Gale by his side, the sun making a patchwork of gold and blue among the pinnacles of the Church of the Evangelist? There, too, he saw, as he walked, the Lido shore, and the long sickle sweep of the beach. The Adriatic slumbrously tossed up its toy surges, and lo! a tall ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... world. He could not yet see the citadel clearly, or the heights of Levis; but the ascent to Montmorenci bristled with naked trees, and in the stillness he could hear the roar of the falls. Gaspard ambled along his belt of ground to take a last look. It was like a patchwork quilt: a square of wheat stubble showed here, and a few yards of brown prostrate peavines showed there; his hayfield was less than a stone's throw long; and his garden beds, in triangles and sections of all shapes, filled the interstices of ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... Gloria knew that they would variously and mirthfully designate him. They would find it unusual that King had married her one day and had gone off the next without her. They would hazard endless unpleasant explanations; they would get their heads together; they would make an astonishing patchwork of scraps of distorted rumour and bits of wild speculation.... From upstairs last night she had heard fragmentary outbursts from the "judge." "Irregular; no licence." Now Gloria meant to kill the snake outright, ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory
... is easy to see that his "reconstruction" is as hopeless as that of the famous Greek frieze, outwardly whole andyet always a patchwork. So he chafes continually under what he believes to be the tyranny and despotism of an undefined autocracy, which, in a general way, he calls "the Government," but which really refers to the distribution of certain local offices in his own ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... pride. Well, fetch me your portfolio, if you can vouch for its contents being original; but don't pass your word unless you are certain: I can recognise patchwork." ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... article of furniture bore signs of long though careful use. The spotless boarded floor was bare of carpet, but was strewn with rough-cured skins, timber-wolf, antelope, coyote and bear, and here and there rugs of undoubted home make; these latter of the patchwork order. The centre table was of wide proportions and of solid mahogany, and told of the many services of the apartment; the small chairs were old-fashioned mahogany pieces with horse-hair seats, while the easy-chairs—and there were several of these—were capacious and of divers ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature too". (See {feature}.) The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and another.... When creeping ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... material. That was Eurie's dress. Skirt of one kind and overdress of another. A very economical fashion, and one not destined to last long, because of its economy, and the fact that very elegant ladies rather curl their lips at it, and call it the "patchwork style." Eurie from necessity rather than choice adopted it, and it was also her misfortune rather than her taste that the colors were too light to be really according to the mode. Her gloves were of an entirely different shade from the ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy
... you new ones. A hundred and fifty years ago Cancelmo and Klein did it on a dog, and called it sub-total prosthesis. A crude job—I've seen their papers and films. Vat-grown hearts and kidneys, revitalized vascular material, building up new organ systems like a patchwork quilt, coaxing new tissues to grow to replace old ones—but they got a living dog out of it, and that dog lived to the ripe old age of 37 ...
— Martyr • Alan Edward Nourse
... impossible, and the other characters mostly conventional, The Dangerous Age makes a very charming entertainment at the Vaudeville, a patchwork of humour and pathos ingeniously woven together; of which the humour was as fresh and jolly as anything I have heard on the stage, and the pathos put me in greater danger of being caught "blubbering like a seal" than I have ever been before. It is to Masters Reginald ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... state bed, overshadowing so large a portion of the floor, the births and, as far as may be, the deaths, of the household take place. At the Corneys', the united efforts of some former generation of the family had produced patchwork curtains and coverlet; and patchwork was patchwork in those days, before the early Yates and Peels had found out the secret of printing the parsley-leaf. Scraps of costly Indian chintzes and palempours were intermixed with commoner black and red calico in minute ...
— Sylvia's Lovers, Vol. I • Elizabeth Gaskell
... improving somewhat. The County Council is opening out a few new thoroughfares piecemeal." Oh yes, in an illogical, unsystematic, English patchwork fashion, we are driving a badly-designed, unimpressive new street or two, with no expansive sense of imperial greatness, through the hopelessly congested and most squalid quarters. But that is all. No grand, systematic, ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... completed this process. It is certain that I cannot always distinguish my own thoughts from those I read, because what I read becomes the very substance and texture of my mind. Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew. This patchwork was made of all sorts of odds and ends—pretty bits of silk and velvet; but the coarse pieces that were not pleasant to touch always predominated. Likewise ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... couch was thrown a ragged patchwork quilt, and a pillow covered with calico rested on one end, with the mark of a head dented deep in ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... result. They try an experiment—it succeeds—it fails; they alter it; they alter, perhaps, what they ought to leave alone, and leave what they ought to alter; and so, at last, there always remains but a patchwork, which pleases and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... field of English poetry, and, like everything else of Locker's, it shows the man. "Its charm," writes the editor's collaborator, "is entirely of the editor's individuality"—at least, from his favourites in literature, one may make a very fair guess at some part of his character. So, too, "Patchwork"—a kind of scrap-book, a collection of miscellaneous anecdotes, mostly humorous, but not as a rule broadly or farcically funny—illustrates his delicate and ...
— London Lyrics • Frederick Locker
... in Holland is that there is no national plan, but rather a patchwork, that resembles Joseph's coat of many colors. Each city engineer has designed his own type of apparatus and had it made to order. Also, each company is fenced in by law within a six-mile circle, so that ...
— The History of the Telephone • Herbert N. Casson
... lay a patchwork of small fields all over the slopes of the hills, and the snow had come upon them tentatively, but already the birds of the waste had moved to the sheltered places for every omen boded more to fall. Far away some little hills blazed like ...
— Fifty-One Tales • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... had an odd cheer in it. Much scrubbing had removed from it the objections manifest in Glad's room above. There was a small red fire in the grate, a strip of old, but gay carpet before it, two chairs and a table were covered with a harlequin patchwork made of bright odds and ends of all sizes and shapes. The fog in all its murky volume could not quite obscure the brightness of the often rubbed window and its harlequin curtain drawn ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the clear-smouldering peats; with the pipes on the mantelshelf and the three- cornered spittoons, filled with sea-shells instead of sand, on the floor; with the bare stone walls and the bare wooden floor, and the three patchwork rugs that were of yore its sole adornment—poor man's patchwork, the like of it unknown in cities, woven with homespun, and Sunday black, and sea-cloth polished on the bench of rowing. The room, like the house, had been a sort of wonder in that country-side, it was so neat and habitable; and to ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to-day ain't tomorrer. They're both light-complected. It's jest like patchwork. Put light an' dark together, I say, or you won't git no figger. Here, le's have a mite o' cake! Mis' Tolman's a proper good cook, if her childern have all turned out ducks, an' took to the water. Every one on ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... bed, gay with patchwork quilts—Nancy knew all the patterns: Sunrise on the Peaks; Drunkard's Path; the Rainbow—Mary was making up for all that her forebears had neglected to do. Early and late she spun and wrought—she piled her bed high with the results of her labours; she covered the floor with marvellous rugs; ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... miniature sitting-room at one side, contentedly matching patchwork. Little Jane Vennard, her step-daughter,—usually at work in the mills, but, since their close, making herself busy at home, whither she had brought a cookery-book through which Ray declared he expected to eat his way,—bustled about from room to room. Ray sat before the fire in the kitchen ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... his lips; but they were checked by the stealing sense of duality that so often paralysed his action. He had recovered his lucidity of vision, and his impulses faded before it like mist. He saw life again as it was, an incomplete and shabby business, a patchwork of torn and ravelled effort. Everywhere the shears of Atropos were busy, and never could the cut threads ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... to maintain His jurisdiction over this outlying province as well as they can. The actual presence of God in the world would seem to drag Him down into questionable limitations, not to be assumed without express warrant, as exception, miracle, and in things consecrated and set apart. Hence the patchwork composition of the early painters; we see in it an extreme diversity of value ascribed to the things about them. It is a world partly divine and partly rubbish; not a universe, but a collection of fragments ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... a generous yard from his patchwork-quilt, put it over the child's shoulders, and the ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... said Miss Ruth. "Susie,"—to a little girl sitting close beside her,—"why can't some of you girls get together one afternoon in the week and make a patchwork quilt to ...
— Miss Elliot's Girls • Mrs Mary Spring Corning
... own version of Dryden's line, "Great Wits are sure to Madness near allied" (Absalom and Achitophel, l. 248). By means of these alterations in his sources, Boyer has compiled a passage that has focus and direction, and gives little evidence of its patchwork origin. ...
— The Present State of Wit (1711) - In A Letter To A Friend In The Country • John Gay
... the tendrils at least a yard long. In the other window was a blowzy-looking canary in a cage. A corpulent tortoise-shell cat occupied the turkey-red cushion in one generous rocking chair, There was a couch with a faded patchwork coverlet, several other chairs, and in a glass-fronted case standing on the mantlepiece a model of a brigantine in full sail, at least two ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... had in her life two great holes to fill, and she described herself as dropping social scraps into them as she had known old ladies, in her early American time, drop morsels of silk into the baskets in which they collected the material for some eventual patchwork quilt. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... to speak. The words were forced from him involuntarily. Her tone, her eyes, the eager earnestness in her voice.... He did not say any more, nor did he look at her. Instead he looked at the patchwork comforter which had fallen from his knees to the floor, and fervently hoped that he had not already said too much. He stooped and ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... the river but perfectly dry, in the arms of faithful Tom, who had plunged in to save her, without either so much as wetting his shoes, than if I had been engaged with her in a reckless romp? I could count the white stitches in the loose patchwork, and yet could take it for a story rich and harmonious; I could know we had all intellectually condescended and that we had yet had the thrill of an aesthetic adventure; and this was a brave beginning for a consciousness that was to be nothing if not mixed and a curiosity that ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... set to work at the wood-fire and cooked me a dinner of eggs and bacon and fried potatoes. He was a rough cook, but one very anxious to please. The room where I passed the night had a long table in it, and benches. There was no blanket on the bed, only a sheet and a heavy patchwork quilt. Ah, yes, there was something else, carefully laid upon the quilt. This was a linen bag without an opening, which, when spread out, tapered towards the ends. Had I not known something about the old-fashioned nightcap, I should have puzzled a long time before discovering ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... and plaster, which seemed to have been renewed in patches, and to be a frailer and less durable material than the old oak of their skeletons. They were gabled, with lattice windows, and picturesquely set off with projecting stones, and many little patchwork additions, such as, in the course of generations, the inhabitants had found themselves to need. There was not much commerce, apparently, in this little village, there seeming to be only one shop, with some ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... finer air of the hills-up with a lightening heart, though still carrying a bitter burden of despondency. Night rested upon the hilltops and brooded in the valleys. Below, the shadowy landscape lay like blurred patchwork-still he climbed upwards till Feldwick lay silent and sleeping at his feet and a flavour of the sea mingled with the night wind which cooled his cheeks. Then Douglas Guest threw himself breathless amongst the bracken and ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... extant in the various political units in the United States present a patchwork of overlapping authority and undetermined responsibility. Highway laws are being constantly revised by state legislatures and with each revision there is some change in administrative methods and often the changes are revolutionary in character. In most states, the trend is away ...
— American Rural Highways • T. R. Agg
... Restoration has been carried on, not sparingly, but in good taste, with the result that, in spite of its newness at the present writing, it appears as a consistent and thoroughly conscientious piece of work, and not the mere patchwork that ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... "Cinderella," and going shopping with mother, and our little tea-parties, and the Dutch dolls we made up in the long front chamber. O, don't you remember, Laura? What different pieces we have got into our remembrances already! I feel as if I was making patchwork. Some-time, may-be, I shall tell somebody about living here. Well, they will be beautiful stories! Homesworth is an elegant place to live in. You will see when you ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney |
