"Blackening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wanting was a quantity of clay to form a hearth; but clay, while the waters covered the earth, it was impossible to obtain. We had therefore to light our fire, as before, on the thick branch, on which it had as yet made no impression, beyond burning off the bark and blackening it. As soon as our platform was finished we moved on to it, though Kallolo and Sambo preferred sleeping among the boughs. I was very glad to get so comparatively comfortable a place for poor Marian; ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... testimony whereof, there were the scalps of his enemies taken by his own hand in secret ambush and in open fight, and which, strung together like pods of red pepper, or cuttings of dried pumpkin, hung blackening in ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... no sons, Though oft I said, 'When I am old, his babes Shall climb my knees.' My boast was mine in youth; But now mine age is made a barren stock And as a blighted briar." In grief she turned; And as on blackening tarn gust follows gust, Again came wail on wail. On strode the night: The jagged forehead of that forest old Alone was seen: all else was gloom. At last With voice, though kind, upbraiding, Patrick spake: "Daughter, thy grief is wilful and it errs; Errs like those sad and tear-bewildered ...
— The Legends of Saint Patrick • Aubrey de Vere
... no more, and, forgetful of that gallantry which should never desert the male sex, burst through the phalanx with an anathema, blackening alike the beauty and the virtue of those on whom it fell, that would have justified a cry of shame from every manly bosom, and which at once changed into shrill wrath the supplicatory tones with which he had been hitherto addressed. Down the street he hurried and down the street followed ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the song and ceremony of blackening the Leader's face, I had seen the Leader take the pipe belonging to the society, fill it, and ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... and you deserve it, in much stronger language than I can use. You have been the means of blackening Mr. Good's character in this place, when it was all clean and unimpeachable. You have been the means of weakening his influence in the pulpit, and out of the pulpit. You have injured him, injured his wife and family; and the good man, through you, ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... declaration of the patriarch, that Alexius might be considered as dead, so soon as he was committed to the custody of his guardian. But his death was preceded by the imprisonment and execution of his mother. After blackening her reputation, and inflaming against her the passions of the multitude, the tyrant accused and tried the empress for a treasonable correspondence with the king of Hungary. His own son, a youth of honor and ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... far into this aceldema when we came to a space cleared from pots, and to a great pool of blood and dust mingled, blackening in the sun, then another and another, till there were five of them almost close together, with splashes of blood upon the adjacent pots, and blood trodden into the thirsty ground. Against the wall opposite, a rudely constructed cross was resting, dark here and there with patches ...
— The Golden Chersonese and the Way Thither • Isabella L. Bird (Mrs. Bishop)
... extreme discomfort, yet daubs himself with grease and paint, and decorates his head with feathers, his neck with bear's claws, and his feat with gaudily-stained porcupine's quills? What of your black barbarian, whose daily life is a succession of unspeakable abominations, and who embellishes it by blackening his teeth, tattooing his skin, and wearing a huge ring in the gristle of his nose? Either of them will give up his daily food, and run the risk of starvation, for a glass bead or a brass button. This desire for ornament is plainly, then, no fruit of individual development, no ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... necessary operations of erecting houses and bringing the land, on the most available spots near them at the points first settled, under culture. Originally, communication from farm to farm, through the woods, was by marking the trees,—sometimes by burning and blackening spots on their sides, and sometimes by cutting off a piece of the bark. The traveller found his way step by step, following the trees thus marked, or "blazed," as it was called whichever method had been adopted. When the branches and brush were sufficiently cleared away, horses could be used. At ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... in our orchard; but it supplies us with a daily abundance, and probably will do so for at least a week to come. Meantime other trees begin to cast their ripening windfalls upon the grass; and when I taste them, and perceive their mellowed flavor and blackening seeds, I feel somewhat overwhelmed with the impending bounties of Providence. I suppose Adam, in Paradise, did not like to see his fruits decaying on the ground, after he had watched them through the sunny days ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 2. • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... while the birds began to gather at Allfowlsness, in thousands and tens of thousands, blackening all the air; swans and brant geese, harlequins and eiders, harolds and garganeys, smews and goosanders, divers and loons, grebes and dovekies, auks and razor-bills, gannets and petrels, skuas and terns, ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... at midnight, a great dull disc of soft light touching the antique gables and cloistered streets of the little city to glamour, blackening the shadows under the arches, and streaking the many channels of the swift river with long reflections. Herr Haase, returning from the telegraph office, walked noiseless as a ghost through those ancient streets, for he had soft bedroom slippers on ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... the blackening host behind. As when from sea a storm-cloud sweeps to shore, The weather breaking, and the trembling hind Foresees afar the ruin and the roar, The shattered orchards, and the crops no more, While, landward borne, the muttering winds betray The coming storm; so down the Trojan bore ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... The habit of blackening the teeth has long prevailed among married women in Japan, but the Yamato tombs have thus far furnished only one example of the practice, and no mention occurs in the ancient annals. Face painting, however, would seem to have been indulged in by both sexes. Several of ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... fairly like summer this morning; the trees are blackening out of their spring greens; the warmer suns have melted the hoarfrost of daisies of the paddock; and the blackbird, I fear, already beginning to "stint his pipe of mellower days"—which is very apposite (I can't spell anything ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... ranks appear, With all the united labours of the year; Some to unload the fertile branches run, Some dry the blackening clusters in the sun, Others to tread the liquid harvest join: The groaning presses foam with floods of wine Here are the vines in early flower descried, Here grapes discolour'd on the sunnyside, And there in autumn's ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... the chain into it, holding his hands as far apart as possible in the attitude of a player about to catch a bounced ball. But immediately the pain of that grew unendurable too, and he leaped back, jerking his hands away. He had succeeded only in blackening the steel and putting a big water blister on one of his wrists right where the shackle bolt would ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... the village: it is merely one cross of brief streets, lined with blackening wooden dwellings there are no buildings worth looking at, except the queer old French church, steep-roofed and bristling with points that look like extinguishers. Over broad reaches of lava rock a shallow river flows by the village to the sea, gurgling under shadows of tamarind foliage. ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... free will when leagued with free power, have never failed to blazon forth the so-called madman of Macedonia as one of the most glaring examples. Without doubt, many of these writers adopted with implicit credence traditional ideas and supposed, with uninquiring philanthropy, that in blackening Alexander they were doing humanity good service. But also, without doubt, many of his assailants, like those of other great men, have been mainly instigated by "that strongest of all antipathies, the antipathy of a second-rate mind to a first-rate one," [De Stael.] ...
— The Fifteen Decisive Battles of The World From Marathon to Waterloo • Sir Edward Creasy, M.A.
... lights twinkled out ashore—lights rocked here and there on passing ships and barges: tubes of light projected themselves out from the portholes on to the blackening water, that swished and washed past the sides with a sound of desolation; to the landward an uncoiled serpent glittered out into the water and then seemed to cover itself in a grey veil of darkness as the Oriana passed the pier of some little watering-place. ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... but not quite. In plastered walls the process was carried a step farther, and the surface was finished by the application of a final coat of mud made quite liquid. The interior plastering of kivas was always much more carefully done than that of any other walls. Owing to blackening by smoke and recoating, the thickness of the plastering in kivas can be easily made out. Often it is as ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff
... closets. The large engraving of Lincoln over the mantel is an artist's proof, and was placed there by Whittier forty years ago. An ancient mirror in this room, surmounted by a gilt eagle, was broken by a lightning stroke in September, 1872. The track of the electrical current may still be seen in the blackening of a gilt moulding in the upper left corner. The broken glass fell over a member of the family sitting under it, and Whittier himself, who was standing near the door of the "garden room," was thrown to the floor. All in the house were stunned and remained deafened ...
— Whittier-land - A Handbook of North Essex • Samuel T. Pickard
... considered. The evening after we arrived was most beautiful. The house, situated on its white plateau of barbicues, as the coffee platforms are called, where large piles of the berries in their red cherry like husks had been blackening in the sun the whole forenoon, and on which a gang of negroes was now employed covering them up with tarpawlins for the night, stood in the centre of an amphitheatre of mountains, the front box, as it were, the stage ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... the trenches and climbed out upon the earth—along a great incline which hid the enemy horizon from us and protected us against him. The blackening dampness turned the cold into a thing, and laid frozen shudders on us. A pestilence surrounded us, wide and vague; and sometimes lines of pale crosses alongside our march spelled out death in ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... admirably in blackening our young hero's reputation. Mr. Goldwin now looked upon Herbert with ill favor, and even disgust. And this change was all caused by the cunning and falsehoods of young Mortimer. He had poisoned Mr. Goldwin's mind, and thus succeeded in establishing himself in the banker's ...
— The Boy Broker - Among the Kings of Wall Street • Frank A. Munsey
... bosom of the dreary grave, Tho' Sweden's sons no earthly hope retain, Tho' not one spark of ancient fire remain, Tho' hostile banners crowd her blazing sky, And stretch'd in dust her smoking castles lie: Yet, Lord of all! from ruin's blackening ware, Thy arm is till omnipotent to save: Thy arm can stop the whirlwind's rushing breath, And light with hope the funeral ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... after God, if haply they may find him, will shorten the polemic sword of the professional converter whose only purpose is destructive hostility without tactics or strategy, or whose chief idea of missionary success is in statistics, in blackening the character of "the heathen," in sensational letters for home consumption and reports properly cooked and served for the secretarial and sectarian palates. Yet, if true in history, Greek, Roman, Japanese, it is also true in the missionary wars, that "the race that ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... us admits of further illustration from the example of Mr. Paine himself. In this country, where his opposition to the corruptions of government has raised him so many adversaries, and such a swarm of unprincipled hirelings have exerted themselves in blackening his character and in misrepresenting all the transactions and incidents of his life, will it not be a most difficult, nay an impossible task, for posterity, after a lapse of 1700 years, if such a wreck of modern literature as that of the ancient, should intervene, to ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... over at his stars, ribbons, embroidery; we think within ourselves, O you unfathomable schemer! O you warrior invincible! O you beautiful smiling Judas! What master would you not kiss or betray? What traitor's head, blackening on the spikes on yonder gate, ever hatched a tithe of the treason which has worked ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Princesse de Lamballe to Paris till I left it in 1792, what between milliners, dressmakers, flower girls, fancy toy sellers, perfumers, hawkers of jewellery, purse and gaiter makers, etc., I had myself assumed twenty different characters, besides that of a drummer boy, sometimes blackening my face to enter the palace unnoticed, and often holding conversations analogous to the sentiments of the wretches who were piercing my heart with the remarks circumstances compelled me to encourage. Indeed, I can safely say I was ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 6 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... crevice, so that it was difficult to breathe. High before us, bursting out of a hill at the top of the mountain, shaped like this [HW: A], the fire was pouring out, reddening the night with flames, blackening it with smoke, and spotting it with red-hot stones and cinders that fell down again in showers. At every step everybody fell, now into a hot chink, now into a bed of ashes, now over a mass of cindered iron; ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... write a good book or a good play, or to invent a good picture, and having invented paint it. But it always was hard, except to those—to whom it was impossible. Bunglers will not mend matters by blackening the great canvases they can't paint on, nor the ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... a little shiver.] They'll say bad enough things about her without your blackening ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... most futile one, in the consideration that it would be of no use for him alone to consume his smoke, when there are hundreds of others over whom he has no influence to persuade them to follow his example. But you sometimes see one of these foul-mouthed chimneys blackening a neighbourhood generally free from such things, and it does not seem to occur to the owner of the chimney that he is doing any thing wrong, provided he is legally secure. Probably he gives away in the course of the year such a sum ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... rippled in the sunshine, All her lovely vines, sweets-laden, bowed; Yet some weeks to harvest and to vintage: When, as one man's hand, a cloud Rose and spread, and, blackening, burst asunder In rain and fire ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... strength of Hawkhurst had enabled him to bear down the body of his opponent with his knee, and he was fast strangling him by twisting his handkerchief round his throat, while Clara shrieked, and attempted in vain to tear the pirate from him. As the prostrate Francisco was fast blackening into a corpse, and the maiden screamed for pity, and became frantic in her efforts for his rescue, the boat dashed high up on the sand; and, with the bound of a maddened tiger, Edward sprang upon Hawkhurst, tearing him down on his back, and severing his wrist with ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... remarked a painting on the wall, which was probably a portrait of one of Lord Polperro's ancestors—a youngish man (the Trefoyle nose, not to be mistaken) in a strange wild costume, his head bare under a sky blackening to storm, in his hand a sort of hunting knife, and one of his feet resting on a dead wolf. When his host reappeared Gammon asked ...
— The Town Traveller • George Gissing
... cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of everything at the day's end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey went down to get a doughnut ...
— "Captains Courageous" • Rudyard Kipling
... the twilight stillness of the cloister and the aisle; and if his heart saddens at the endless repetition of the one heavenward gaze, at least no merchant traffics in what he loves. There, where his pictures have been born, mouldering in the dampness of the wall, blackening in the smoke of the altar, amidst a silence broken only by prayer, they may 'gently' and 'surely' die." He asks himself, as he again subsides into mournful resignation, whether the applause of men may ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... my prospects. However, you know her; is she clever, or sensible, or good-tempered? either would do—I scratch out the will. I don't ask as to her beauty—that I see; but my circumstances are mending, and were not my other prospects blackening, I would take a wife, and that should be the woman, had I a chance. I do not yet know her much, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... explosions, say that the effect was very beautiful. On one occasion, the water rose in a splendid column above fifty feet high, the spray sparkling like diamonds in the sun; then the large fragments of the wreck came floating to the surface; soon after the mud from the bottom, blackening the circle of water, and spreading to a great distance around; and with it rose to the surface great numbers of fish, who, poor things, had found a hiding-place in the wreck, but were dislodged and killed by ...
— Thrilling Stories Of The Ocean • Marmaduke Park
... brilliant heads on worthless hearts, Like things that quicken after Nilus' flood, The venomed birth of sunshine and of mud,— Already has she poured her poison here O'er every charm that makes existence dear; Already blighted, with her blackening trace, The opening bloom of every social grace, And all those courtesies, that love to shoot Round virtue's stem, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... as much amazed as any of the rest. He saw the imminent danger of his host, whose face was blackening above the grip of this fierce antagonist, and he ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... slowly, the boat's bow fell off toward the island. Griswold was enough of a sailor to know that it was the thing to do, but there was a perilously narrow margin. The storm squall was already tearing across from the western shore, blackening the water ahead of it and picking up a small tidal wave as it came. If it should strike them before they were ready for it, it meant one of two things: a capsize, or an instant driving of the catboat upon the ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... and faced Stonewall Jackson. He had come upon them silently, out from the screen of blackening cedars. Now he blocked their path, his lips iron, his eyes a mere gleaming line. "Two squabblers rolling in the snow—two staff officers brawling before a disheartened army! What have you to say for ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... are generally bothered by the vibrator contacts blackening, thus giving a high resistance contact, whenever there is any connection made at all. This trouble may be done away with by departing from the old single-contact vibrator and using one with self-cleaning contacts as shown. An ...
— The Boy Mechanic: Volume 1 - 700 Things For Boys To Do • Popular Mechanics
... wishes for his welfare here and hereafter. I have so contrived it that you will see a person at the Prince's tomorrow, who will interpret for you. In mentioning my fate to him, you will not much serve your own interest by blackening my character and memory. I subjoin the reward of my villainies and the correct balance of the account. Count Edmond's regular bills I have not received; his valet will give you them; the others are in a pocket-book, which will be ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... streams even into Peru itself, and had trodden the cinchona groves of Loxa, ignorant, as all the world was then, of their healing virtues. They had seen the virgin snows of Chimborazo towering white above the thundercloud, and the giant cone of Cotopaxi blackening in its sullen wrath, before the fiery streams rolled down its sides. Foiled in their search at the back of the Andes, they had turned eastward once more, and plunged from the alpine cliffs into "the green and misty ocean of the Montana." Slowly and painfully ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... march, over fields still ghostly and foot-worn, under a sky where ragged clouds unfurl themselves upon the blackening expanse—which seems to have befouled itself by prolonged contact with so many multitudes ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... make of automobile. Of course, the title contains the words 'Cupid' and 'Chauffeur'—an article on naval strategy, illustrated with cuts of the Spanish Armada, and the new Staten Island ferry-boats; another story of a political boss who won the love of a Fifth Avenue belle by blackening her eye and refusing to vote for an iniquitous ordinance (it doesn't say whether it was in the Street-Cleaning Department or Congress), and nineteen pages by the editors bragging about the circulation. The whole thing, Sammy, is ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... on the flaming storm, that there seemed to be no time for a moment's thought. Driven by necessity, we plunged into the thick grass to the south; but our progress was not equal to that of the fire, which was now fast approaching, blackening the air with smoke, and roaring every moment louder and louder. Our destruction seemed almost certain; when Ponokah, judging, I suppose, by the comparative thinness of the smoke eastward, that we ...
— History, Manners, and Customs of the North American Indians • George Mogridge
... fresh and bright morning of early autumn, the sheaves were on the acres, and the grapes were blackening to the vintage, and the beasts and birds at least were merry. But little merry were the husbandmen whom they met, either carles or queans, and they were scantily and foully clad, and sullen-faced, ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... would have thought that you went on fooling him for the fun of the thing. And perhaps that was your object. Well, I must say I personally wouldn't condescend to that sort of thing. It is not to my taste. No, no. Blackening a friend's character is not my idea of fun, if it were to fool the ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... from the village Brought the fire upon the birch-bark, Brought it on the tips of pine-wood; And the fire and smoke commingled Roll and roar about the hero, Blackening the suitor's visage, And the hostess ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... father sate on, dead, in the selfsame place, With an outburst blackening still the old bad fighting-face: But the son crouched all a-tremble like any ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... an extra supply of nail-polish, nail-tint, rouge, face-paint, blackening for painting eyebrows and eyelashes, and of perfumery, cosmetics, unguents and such like. If I were sufficiently whitened, reddened, rouged, and painted I hoped I should be well enough disguised to face Gratillus or even Flavius ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... is blackening! Yet the race is never slackening; Swift, continual, and strong, Streams the torrent slope along, Like a tidal surge of faces Molten into one despair; Each the other now displaces, A continual whirl of spaces; Ah, ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... successful youth your hopes engage; But shun the example of declining age: Behold him setting in his western skies, The shadows lengthening as the vapours rise. He is not now, as when on Jordan's sand 270 The joyful people throng'd to see him land, Covering the beach and blackening all the strand; But, like the prince of angels, from his height Comes tumbling downward with diminish'd light: Betray'd by one poor Plot to public scorn: (Our only blessing since his cursed return:) Those ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... chiefs, encircled by the wave-lightning of swords and the thunders of ten thousand gongs: above him undulated the silken folds of the Black Dragon, while a vast fire rose bickering before him. Also Tchin-King saw that the tongues of that fire were licking human bones, and that skulls of men lay blackening among the ashes. Yet he was not afraid to look upon the fire, nor into the eyes of Hi-lie; but drawing from his bosom the roll of perfumed yellow silk upon which the words of the Emperor were written, and kissing it, he made ready to read, while the multitude ...
— Some Chinese Ghosts • Lafcadio Hearn
... shadow. It was shaped like an L, with a low arched door in front, and lines of small windows like the open ports of a man-of-war. Above was a dark roof, breaking at the corners into little round overhanging turrets, the whole lying silent in the moonshine, with a drift of ragged clouds blackening the heavens behind it. A single light gleamed in ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... though they were and had many times sharply ordered other people not to crowd. They could see at a glance that Burns was very faint, that his right arm hung helpless at his side, that his forehead wore a blackening bruise, and that his clothes were torn and covered with dirt. For the rest they ...
— Red Pepper Burns • Grace S. Richmond
... olivine never appears; this substance, I believe, would be classed as bole by mineralogists. (Chlorophaeite, described by Dr. MacCulloch ("Western Islands" volume 1 page 504) as occurring in a basaltic amygdaloid, differs from this substance, in remaining unchanged before the blowpipe, and in blackening from exposure to the air. May we suppose that olivine, in undergoing the remarkable change described at St. Jago, passes ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... rock, a maiden's form, Far o'er the wave a white robe flashing, Around, before the blackening storm, On the loud beach the billows dashing; Along the waves, now red, now pale, The lightning-glare incessant gleameth; Whirling and fluttering in the gale, The snowy robe incessant streameth; Fair is that sea in blackening ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... creeping footsteps behind him. He turned like a panther, but was not in time. The heavily driven toes of the right boots of the younger St. Johns lifted him clear of the stairs, and clean to the bottom of them. There he sat, his uniform a thing of the past, his left eye blackening and closed, and roars ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... doctrines he disliked, had of late become very fond of dress, sat hours together at her toilet, and even put on rouge:—Johnson. 'She is better employed at her toilet, than using her pen. It is better she should be reddening her own cheeks, than blackening other people's characters.' ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... in a voice which sounded like mine, but was not mine, told her—told her the truth, which sounded so like a lie. Some one, myself, yet not myself, went on, cruelly, blackening all the sweet blue sky for her. Some one—I suppose it was myself, late free—felt the damp of an iron yoke upon ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... my path! while earth and sky Thus wed their charms, in bridal light arrayed, Why in this bright hour, walkst thou ever nigh; Blackening my footsteps, with thy length ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... the National Armory at Springfield, Mass., has made a steel covered projectile which he prevents from rusting by blackening by a niter process. Several grooves are pressed in the base of the bullet which carry a lubricant, and when the bullet is inserted in the cartridge case the grooves are covered by it. Furthermore, these grooves prevent the lead filling ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 821, Sep. 26, 1891 • Various
... Don Serafino, that imprudent nobleman required of me services so incompatible with my cloth that disobedience became a duty; whereupon, not satisfied with dismissing me in disgrace, he punished me by blackening my character to his uncle. To defend myself was to traduce Don Serafino; and rather than reveal his courses to the Bishop I sank to the state in which you see me; a state," he added with emotion, "that I have travelled this long way to commend to the adorable pity ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... sight was horrible; the limbs once so round and lovely shrivelling up into nothings; the eyes,—those eyes that shone like heaven—being quenched into black dust; the lustrous golden hair now lank and discoloured. The last throe came. I beheld that final struggle of the blackening form—and I fainted. ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... satisfaction for him, and the open snarls with which, more recently, he resented her irritating goads. These little rows were really precipitated by an atmosphere which was surcharged with dissension. That it would shower, with a sky so full of blackening thunderclouds, would scarcely be thought worthy of comment. Thus, after leaving the breakfast table this morning, raging inwardly at his blank declaration of indifference at her plans, Mrs. Hurstwood encountered Jessica in her dressing-room, ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser
... have preferred postage-stamps," she said, gazing out of the window at a kiln that was blackening all the sky. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... praise and exaggerated condemnation. It is ever thus with individuals who by talent or favourable circumstances are raised above their fellow-creatures. Bonaparte himself laughed at all the stories which were got up for the purpose of embellishing or blackening his character in early life. An anonymous publication, entitled the 'History of Napoleon Bonaparte', from his Birth to his last abdication, contains perhaps the greatest collection of false and ridiculous details about his boyhood. Among other things, it is stated that he fortified ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... day Miss Dallas and Mrs. Sharpe sat sewing together; Harrie cramping her shoulders and blackening her hands over a patch on Rocko's rough little trousers; Pauline playing idly with purple and orange wools,—her fingers were white, and she sank with grace into the warm colors of the arm-chair; the door was opened into the hall, and ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... own soul vanquisheth, Held in the bonds of his own thought, Whence very death can take off nought, Nor sleep, with bitterer dreams than death, What though thy thousands at thy knees Lie thick as grave-worms feed on these, Though thy green fields and joyous places Are populous with blood-blackening faces And wan limbs eaten by the sun? Better an end of all men's races, Better the world's whole work were done, And life wiped out of all our traces, And there were left to time not one, Than such ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... keep away from the door. Sometimes she pressed against it soundlessly, as if the passionate throbbing of her heart might send a wave through to reach them, to help them understand. How else could she help them to understand? Only by blackening now the memory of a father who was not there to defend himself, a father whom she herself had taught them to respect and ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... companion stood in awed silence and gazed at the blackening and distorted corpses of the thunder-blasted Boers. Then they passed by them to the tree which grew some ten paces or more on the other side of the place of death. There was some difficulty in leading the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... acknowledged and supported Lambert Simnel, an avowed imposter. It is remarkable that Mr. Carte, in order to preserve the weight of the duchess's testimony in favor of Perkin, suppresses entirely this material fact: a strong effect of party prejudices, and this author's desire of blackening Henry VII., whose hereditary title to the crown was defective. (15.) There never was, at that time, any evidence or shadow of evidence produced of Perkin's identity with Richard Plantagenet. Richard had disappeared when near nine years of age, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been ...
— Pygmalion • George Bernard Shaw
... from our boat in various places, but declined going down the Cento Camerelle to have a second face-blackening. All the ruins, said to be of Caesar's and Marius's Villas, Agrippina's Tomb, Caligula's Bridge, &c., may be anything; they are nothing but shapeless fragments, only on a rock I saw a bit of marble or stucco in what they call Caesar's Villa. The Stygian Lake presented no horrors, nor the Elysian ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... squares would be cut into the wheat, and the sheaves rising, bound about the middle, hour-glass fashion; some breadths of wheat yellow, some golden-bronze; besides these, white barley and oats, and beans blackening. Turtle-doves would be in the stubble, for they love to be near the sheaves. The hills after or during rain look green and near; on sunny days, a far and faint blue. Sometimes the sunset is caught in the haze on them and lingers, like ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... the general, was a fairly real personage to Pierston. He had watched the marble images of her which stood in his working-room, under all changes of light and shade in the brightening of morning, in the blackening of eve, in moonlight, in lamplight. Every line and curve of her body none, naturally, knew better than he; and, though not a belief, it was, as has been stated, a formula, a superstition, that the three Avices were inter-penetrated with ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... to Siders' affairs, of which I told only what every one here in the village knew. I did not consider it incumbent upon me to disclose to the police the disgrace of the man's early life. I had been obliged to hurt him cruelly enough because of that, and I saw no necessity for blackening his name, now that he was dead. Also, as according to what the commissioner said, it was a case of murder for robbery, I did not wish to go into any details of our connection with Siders that would cause the name of my ward to ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... "The blackening wave is edged with white; To inch and rock the sea-mews fly; The fishers have heard the Water-Sprite, Whose screams forbode ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... to make me angry. You can't do it. Nor shall you succeed in blackening Kari in my eyes. You were hoping that I should hurt him by telling him what you have said. I shall ...
— Modern Icelandic Plays - Eyvind of the Hills; The Hraun Farm • Jhann Sigurjnsson
... when he seemed to float away into a weird dreamland and at times into nightmare, and yet it was not a day of unmixed suffering. The sun glared down pitilessly through the hot hours, the tormenting flies swarmed in their millions, the dead lay thick around, already blackening in the heat, the dying raved in delirium for water which never came, and the battle raged on with unceasing violence. Lying uncomfortably on a slope, propped against a dead Turk, he scarcely seemed to feel the burning heat of ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... countenance, by reason of its clouding up in gusts of pitchy blackness acquired the power, like darkening skies, of discharging thunderbolts, it would have been, I am sure, a hot and heavy one which Mopsey, blackening and blazing, had delivered, as she departed to the kitchen, lowering upon Mr. Tiffany Carrack,—"'He thought he saw her son Elbridge!' The vagabone has no more feeling nor de bottom of a ...
— Chanticleer - A Thanksgiving Story of the Peabody Family • Cornelius Mathews
... infinite briskness. And this impression of briskness, by no means excluded by the sense of utter isolation and repose, is greatly increased by a special charm of this place, the quantity of birds to listen to and watch; great blackening flights of rooks from the woods along the watercourses and sheltered hillsides (for only solitary ashes and wind-vexed beeches will grow in the open); peewits alighting with squeals in the fields; blackbirds and thrushes in the thick coverts (I found a poor ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... arm with pain. They took off his waistcoat and pushed back his shirt. A nasty blackening wound, with ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... England or America. An imitation of them in England might not be amiss; but in America, where land is a drug, and where possession of it does not give half the consideration that proceeds from the ownership of "stocks" or funds, it would be as much out of place as a mixture for blackening negroes, or a machine for converting New England soil into rocks. "Stein's main idea," says Vehse, "was, 'the burgher must become noble.' With this view, he tried to call forth a strong feeling of nationality and a new spirit in the people. His first step ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... what he was doing. 'Without the same queen beckoner too!' he added presently; 'and there is pride there, not to be forgotten—witness our own acquaintance!' With that he fell into a deeper reverie, and sat pondering over the blackening grate, until he rose up like a man who had been absorbed in a book, and looking round him took his hat and gloves, went to where his horse was waiting, mounted, and rode away through the lighted ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... never seemed so high and dark before. Then they saw that it was a cloud, black, sullen-looking—great masses of vapor heaped in billowy folds, blackening the slopes with shadow, and barely ...
— The Little Gold Miners of the Sierras and Other Stories • Various
... park was the buzz of the approaching throng which was blackening the roads. The invasion was beginning again, but with a refluent movement. For hours at a time great strings of gray trucks went puffing by; then regiments of infantry, squadrons, rolling stock. They were marching very slowly with a deliberation that ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... see their way to a conclusion; and notwithstanding all the school and church building, the extended episcopate, and the religious newspapers, a general doubt is coming up like a thunderstorm against the wind, and blackening the sky. Those who cling most tenaciously to the faith in which they were educated, yet confess themselves perplexed. They know what they believe; but why they believe it, or why they should require others to believe, they cannot tell or cannot agree. Between the authority of the ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... thrifty Holland the river seems to give itself up wholly to business, for between Cologne and Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle) are miles upon miles of manufactories, workshops and mills; warehouses connected with coal-mines; dirty barges blackening the water; iron-works and carpet-mills; cloth and paper-mills and glass-works—a busy region, the modern translation of the myth of gnomes making gold out of dross in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... its poisonous qualities, but because it was used at one time for blackening the eyes ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... there, though it was sometimes late autumn, so that the boys could have some use for the caves they dug at the top of the bank, with a hole coming through the turf, to let out the smoke of the fires they built inside. They had the joy of choking and blackening over these flues, and they intended to live on corn and potatoes borrowed from the household stores of the boy whose house was nearest. They never got so far as to parch the corn or to bake the potatoes in their caves, but ...
— A Boy's Town • W. D. Howells
... in soothing him that his eyes lost their savage gleam, and were suffused with a look of unnatural tenderness when they rested on her face. He did not ask her how she came by the ring, for he knew it had been sent as an insult to him, and he felt a glow of satisfaction in knowing that it was blackening on the grate. Ben's voice was now heard in the hall, asking if they intended staying there all night, and in a whisper Mr. Browning bade Rosamond go down and apologize for him. She accordingly descended to the parlor, telling Mrs. Van Vechten that her brother was too much indisposed to come down, ...
— Rosamond - or, The Youthful Error • Mary J. Holmes
... have done above, the number of rays concerned in forming the halo. In doing so we assume some value for the age of the halo. Let us take the maximum radioactive value. A halo originating in Devonian times may attain a certain central blackening from the effects of, say, rob rays. But now suppose we find that we cannot produce the same degree of blackening with this number of rays applied in the laboratory. What are we to conclude? I think there is only the one conclusion open to us; that some ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... It seemed as if he had been trained just for this. It called to him and him alone. The greatest struggle of history; a death-struggle of sore-pressed Freedom against hideous Oppression was shaking the earth, and the smoke of the conflict was blackening the heavens—and through it all Gavin Grant remained at peace in his home! Every old Belgian woman of whom he read, driven from her ruined home, was Auntie Elspie. Every Belgian girl, suffering unspeakable wrong, was Christina. And they were crying night and day to him for help ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... him come by all means. I shall be glad to see this Cyclops, who is blackening all the valley. But come, you have, no doubt, brought me some fresh documents in reference to our ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... on duty to-day,—I see flocks of our familiar redwings, cowbirds, and blackbirds, all mingled together as though the hard and fast lines of species had been obliterated and made as meaningless as the concededly evanescent shades of variety, trooping busily over the lawn and blackening the leafless China-trees. But they have a crony never seen by us. This is the crow-blackbird of the South, or jackdaw as it is wrongly called, otherwise known as the boat-tailed grackle, from his over-allowance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... and crime into the incurring or the supposed incurring of the most hideous guilt without any actual consciousness of guilty action may seem an almost hopeless thing to treat probably. Yet it is so treated here. And the final gathering and blackening of the clouds of despair (though here again there is a very slight touch of Hogg's undue prolongation of things) exhibits literary power of the ghastly kind infinitely different from and far above the usual raw-head-and-bloody-bones ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... call to the horses and pull upon the reins. As in a hideous dream, he saw his own Earth, his beautiful home and the home of all men, his kindred, parched by the fires of this mad chariot, and blackening beneath him. The ground cracked open and the sea shrank. Heedless water-nymphs, who had lingered in the shallows, were left gasping like bright fishes. The dryads shrank, and tried to cover themselves from the scorching heat. The poor Earth lifted her withered face in a last prayer ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... try to tell what passed in his bosom while he was sitting alone, under those cliffy rocks, gazing on the silent and innocent sea, thinking of that dreadful work, more hideous than the horrors of winds and waves, with which blinded men, in the lusts of their idolatry, were then blackening the ethereal face of heaven; but he was ever unable to proceed for the struggles of his spirit and the gushing of his tears. Verily it was an awful thing to see that patriarchal man overcome by the recollections of his youth; and ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... Nor doth he know how there prevail, Despotic on that sea, Trade-winds which cross it from eternity. Awhile he holds some false way, undebarr'd By thwarting signs, and braves The freshening wind and blackening waves. And then the tempest strikes him; and between The lightning-bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguish'd face and flying hair Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to make some port he knows not where, Still standing for some false, impossible ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... look, and he saw blackening wreckage immersed in roaring flames. The flames were monstrous. They rose sky-high, it seemed—more flames than forty-five minutes of gasoline should have produced. As he looked, something blew up shatteringly, and fire raged even more furiously. Of course in such heat the delicately ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... He felt that in letting Dunstan have the money, he had already been guilty of a breach of trust hardly less culpable than that of spending the money directly for his own behoof; and yet there was a distinction between the two acts which made him feel that the one was so much more blackening than the other as to ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... fell back. Our course was crooked now. And suddenly A grim black speck began to grow behind us, Grow like the threat of death upon old age. Then, thickening, blackening, sharpening, foaming, swept Up the bright line of bubbles in our wake, That armoured wherry, with its long twelve oars ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... occurred, and, as he called in Parson Sampson to supervise the document, no doubt it contained none of those eccentricities in spelling which figured in his ordinary correspondence at this period. He represented to poor Maria, that after blackening the eye and damaging the nose of a son of the house, he should remain in it with a very bad grace; and she was forced to acquiesce in the opinion that, for the present, his absence would best become him. Of course, she wept plentiful ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was! idiot!—upon my return to the fort, to have been anxious about my personal appearance, and to have spent a couple of hours in removing the artificial blackening from my beard and complexion, instead of going to examine my prisoner—when his escape would have been prevented. O foppery, foppery!—it was that cursed love of personal appearance which had led me to forget my ...
— Burlesques • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the coming storm, as she goes slowly homewards, dismissing her little flock; and she lingers long and sadly outside her cottage door, looking out over the fast blackening sea, and listening to the hollow thunder of the groundswell, against the back of the point which shelters ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... sudden-opened doors we heard them sing: The nodding elders mixed good wine with chat. Well knew we that Life's greatest treasure lay With us, and of it was our talk. "Ah, yes! Love dies!" I said: I never thought it less. She yearned to me that sentence to unsay. Then when the fire domed blackening, I found Her cheek was salt against my kiss, and swift Up the sharp scale of sobs her breast did lift:— Now am I haunted by ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... coming as soon as she saw the frost grapes blackening, and the maples shedding their crimson and gold. There was nothing to do but care for their health and keep them in the ...
— Wild Animals I Have Known • Ernest Thompson Seton
... loud-ticking clock on the mantelpiece showed that midnight was near before he had finished his work. Then he sat a little while before the dying fire, thinking much of Mr Sharnall, whom the picture had recalled to his mind, until the blackening embers warned him that it was time to go to bed. He was rising from his chair, when he heard behind him a noise as of something falling, and looking round, saw that the bottom of the picture-frame, which he had temporarily pushed into position, had broken away ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner
... of every object visible, the murky atmosphere, the paths of cinders and brick-dust, the deep-red glow of furnace fires in the distance, the volumes of dense smoke issuing heavily forth from high toppling chimneys, blackening and obscuring everything around; the glare of distant lights, the ponderous wagons which toiled along the road, laden with clashing rods of iron, or piled with heavy goods—all betokened their rapid approach to the ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... been a trial to him. He knew that her social status was not of the highest; nevertheless, her reputation was far better than his, and among all except the newest arrivals in Dawson she bore a splendid name. To be, himself, the cause of blackening that name, in order to match his own, gratified his feelings of resentment. All in all, it was a night of nights for him and he was at no pains to conceal his satisfaction. From one place to another he led her, taking malicious enjoyment from ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... not upbraid you. I would spare you the pang I myself endure,—but think of the agonies in which a spirit like mine must writhe, to know that your name, that the name of my wife is blazoned to the world, associated with that of a vile forger, an abandoned villain, whose crimes are even now blackening the newspapers, and glutting the greedy appetite of slander! O rash, misguided girl! what demon tempted ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... the work of destruction would take some time. A fire had been laid that morning, but had not been lighted. He put back the coals into the vase and filled the grate with his manuscripts. Then, striking a match, he watched the blaze blackening and curling up the edges of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... from the margin, blackening over heath and holt, Cramming all the blast before it, ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... him kneeling at the bed, his arms outflung across the counterpane, his head bowed between, with a blackening stain beneath his clay-cold lips, beneath his face scarred with immeasurable suffering, fixed in ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... luxury's pinions fanned, His cup with roses crowned. He dashes down The cup, he leaves the bowers; he flies to aid His native land. Out leaps his patriot blade! Quick to the van he darts. Again the frown Of strife bends blackening; once again his ear War's furious trump with stern delight drinks in; Again tho Battle-Bolt in red career! Again the flood, the ...
— Three Years in the Federal Cavalry • Willard Glazier
... of the surface of objects, particularly wooden objects, occurred in Hiroshima up to a radius of 9,500 feet from X; at Nagasaki burns were visible up to 11,000 feet from X. The charring and blackening of all telephone poles, trees and wooden posts in the areas not destroyed by the general fire occurred only on the side facing the center of explosion and did not go around the corners of buildings ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... clear that the law assists in blackening reputations even in the grave, I claim that other Miss Brownes who take advantage of life, and time by the forelock to put up monuments in the sufficiently hideous thoroughfares should be pronounced non compos mentis. The perpetrators of the erection in High Street, ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... valuable, most to be lived for, was dropping from men's lips into a kind of an abyss of dishonourable suggestion. There was no way out of it or around it. It was a cloud which encompassed them, suddenly blackening down. ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... round my head, and set on becomingly. But seriously, my dear Helen," continued Lady Cecilia, "I am unhappy about papa and mamma, I assure you. I have seen little clouds of discontent long gathering, lowering, and blackening, and I know they will burst over their heads in some tremendous ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... place." Savage, he kicked a soft, unanswering heap, And flashed his beam across the livid face Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore Agony dying hard ten days before; And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound. ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... precipice and lingered there in dread of the alternative they must take, saw a strange sight. A dull gray mass, with two ghostly hands reaching out and slapping at it, and a wild-eyed face completely framed by its charred and blackening shroud, emerged from amid the fire and smoke ...
— Tom Slade at Temple Camp • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... derided by her passing foes; Her heart beat calmly 'neath their look of scorn; Their rage in blackening billows round her rose— Her brow, meanwhile, ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... driven so fiercely before the hurricane, that a man was half-blinded if he turned his face towards it for a moment—the forked lightning shooting from pitch-dark clouds, leaping and running fearfully over the level ground, blackening, splitting, tearing from their places the stoutest rocks on the moor. Three masses of granite lay heaped together near the spot where we had halted—the furze-cutter pointed to them with his bill-hook, ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... Imperial Parliament like Verdi. They were "poor devils" like Haydn. Porpora was a great man, no doubt, in his own metier. But it is surely odd to hear of Haydn acting the part of very humble servant to the singing-master; blackening his boots and trimming his wig, and brushing his coat, and running his errands, and playing his accompaniments! Let us, however, remember Haydn's position and circumstances. He was a poor man. He had never received any regular tuition such as Handel received from Zachau, Mozart ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden
... the Embankment, a few yards out into the stream, was moored a string of barges; between them and the shore the reflected lamp-light made one unbroken breadth of radiance, blackening the mid-current. From that the eye rose to St. Thomas's Hospital, spreading block after block, its windows telling of the manifold woe within. Nearer was the Archbishop's Palace, dark, lifeless; the roofs were defined against a sky made lurid by the streets of Lambeth. On the pier below signalled ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the brown beech-twigs. She remembered long afterward the sweet simpleness of her feelings as she took in the scent of wild flowers along the lanes and entered the woods jaws of another monstrous and blackening experience. He fell into the sentimental vein, and a man coming from that heated London life to these glorified woods, might be excused for doing so, though it sounded to her just a little ludicrous in him. She played tolerantly second to it; she quoted a snatch of poetry, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... which does the work at a blow, leaving the nails standing out a little below the lowest lift. Another lift is forced upon these; and that is why the heel of a new shoe shows no signs of nails. The heel is trimmed, and then come the final sandpapering and blackening. The bottom of a new shoe has a peculiar soft, velvety appearance and feeling; and this is produced by rubbing it with fine emery paper fastened upon a little rubber pad. A stamping-machine marks the sole with the ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... heart Listeth, will sail; Nor does he know how there prevail Despotic on life's sea, Trade-winds that cross it from eternity. Awhile he holds some false way, undebarred By thwarting signs, and braves The freshening wind, and blackening waves, And then the tempest strikes him, and between The lightning bursts is seen Only a driving wreck, And the pale master on his spar-strewn deck With anguished face and flying hair, Grasping the rudder hard, Still bent to ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... indispensable implement, the bellows. If the sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water, the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the fire from below. The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert the effects of ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson
... was not a long one, owing to the fact that but two avenues of trade were open to him—that of blackening boots or selling papers; and when he was called upon to decide, he chose the latter, very much ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... campaign fund. When he and others were threatened with criminal prosecution they produced letters by which they hoped to prove that Garfield was cognizant of and had approved their financial methods. How far they might have succeeded in blackening the President and stopping his prosecutions must remain unknown, for he was shot on July 2, 1881, while on his way to a college celebration, ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson |
