"Blue-black" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of opal and jewelers should learn to apply correct names to these types. Most prominent among the opals of to-day are the so-called "Black opals" from New South Wales. These give vivid flashes of color out of seeming darkness. In some positions the stones, as the name implies, appear blue-black or blackish gray. By transmitted light, however, the bluish stones appear yellow. Owing to the sharp contrast between the dark background and the flashing spectrum colors, black opals are most attractive stones and fine specimens command high prices. ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade
... the Nautilus drew near the surface, those denizens of the Mediterranean I could observe most productively belonged to the sixty-third genus of bony fish. These were tuna from the genus Scomber, blue-black on top, silver on the belly armor, their dorsal stripes giving off a golden gleam. They are said to follow ships in search of refreshing shade from the hot tropical sun, and they did just that with the Nautilus, as they had once done with the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Mr. Walraven's ward; "and your tall women, with flashing black eyes and blue-black hair, are apt to be good haters. Very well, Miss Oleander; it shall ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... the grass in front of his moccasins—tiny dried blades of yellow grass, and underneath them he saw the dark traceries of their shadows. Each had its own little shadow—its soul—its changeable thing—its other life—just as he himself was cut blue-black beside himself on the sandstone. There were millions of these grass-blades, and each one shivered in the wind, maundering to itself in the chorus, which made the prairie sigh, and all for fear of a big brown buffalo wandering by, which would ...
— The Way of an Indian • Frederic Remington
... as hour after hour the steamer passes from one small station to another, dropping a mail-bag, and perhaps a passenger or two. We pass farms lying close to the shore, the wooden houses being in many cases painted red or white, and thus forming a brilliant contrast to the blue-black mountains and dark green forests which rise up behind them. We see every now and then a clean white wooden church, and, away up on the mountain-sides we can discern tiny specks, which, we are told, are ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Norway • A.F. Mockler-Ferryman
... made her blue eyes so dark, and her hair was as black at midday as at midnight. So that now—when she shook her head at the boy—a wonderful long, thick, silky lock escaped its fastenings, and the wind caught it and spun it like silk into the finest blue-black floss. ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... blocked with cobalt shadows about it, and the hills were brooding in blue-black immensities—but over the valley was a flooding wash of ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... reached the place where the door hid itself under the ivy, she was startled by a curious loud sound. It was the caw—caw of a crow and it came from the top of the wall, and when she looked up, there sat a big glossy-plumaged blue-black bird, looking down at her very wisely indeed. She had never seen a crow so close before and he made her a little nervous, but the next moment he spread his wings and flapped away across the garden. She hoped he was not going to stay inside and she pushed the door open wondering if he would. ...
— The Secret Garden • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... soft, swishing sound of great wings and floated in a circle, uttering deep-throated cries, not unlike the dismal croak of ravens. Perfectly built for the air, they were like feathers blown by a breeze. Light, thin, long, sharp, with enormous spread of wings, beautiful with the beauty of dead, blue-black sheen, and yet hideous, too, with their grisly necks and cruel, crooked beaks and vulture eyes, they were surely magnificent specimens ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... complexion of her mother, which is more becoming to her mother than to her. Add to all this, blue-black hair in great silky masses. On the whole, one knows not what ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... and graceful, very beautifully dressed in purple and gold, and his blue-black hair was held in a net or coif of finest gold thread. His garments clung as tightly and smoothly as if he had been kneaded into them—as, indeed, he had. But it was his face that held my eyes. It was a sun-tanned, shaven hawk-face with black level brows, black ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... swashbuckling up the hill M'tela was prepared. The blue-black beard and hearty, deep-chested carriage of the Bavarian ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... drove his heavily packed burro over the round of the ridge above the camp spring, all the desolate Arizona waste around him was transformed by the splendour of dawn. Up out of mysterious velvety blue-black valleys loomed the massive purple-walled fortresses and cities of the mountain giants, guarded by titanic skyward towering pyramids and ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... and gold when we were within five miles of Shark Point; and, ten minutes afterwards, night—the glorious night of the tropics—was upon us in all its loveliness. The heavens were destitute of cloud—save a low bank down on the western horizon—and the soft velvety blue-black of the sky was literally powdered with countless millions of glittering gems. I do not remember that I ever before or since saw so many of the smaller stars; and as for the larger stars and the planets, they ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... of his pink cloak, ran a hand under one, and thrust into the firelight a foot-long embroidered presentment of the great god Krishna, playing on a flute. The heavy jowl, the staring eye, and the blue-black moustache of the god made up ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling
... crossed the yard and stood hesitating at the beginning of the open furrow he had left behind him. His gaze was bent upon the horses, and for a moment she watched him in attentive silence, her eyes dwelling on his massive figure, which cast a gigantic blue-black shadow across the April sunbeams. She saw him at the instant with a distinctness, a clearness of perception, that she had never been conscious of until to-day, as if each trivial detail in his appearance was magnified by the pale yellow sunshine through which ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... are most conspicuous. But that piece of blotting-paper! If I were a stationer and kept a circulating library, I think I should try to turn an honest penny by selling sand to my customers along with their packets of linen-wove and blue-black writing-fluid. "Simple, effective, and leaves no ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various
... The controversy had a good deal subsided, when the approach of still another party renewed it once more. The Agha himself was coming. He was a man of fifty years, with a once gray beard, dyed a bright red, and with his lower eyebrows stained a livid blue-black. He greeted us with a ferocious smile, and entered at once into earnest conversation with Mullah Mustafa. The conversation was interrupted, now and then, by one of his amiable sons leaping from his seat, and speaking violently, ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... tall. And he was of a spirited look and a golden complexion, and endued with eye large as lotuses; and he was shining and graceful as a god. And rich was his beauty blazing like the Sun; and he was exceedingly fair with eyes graceful and black. And his twisted hair was blue-black and neat and long and of a fragrant scent and tied up with strings of gold. A beautiful ornament was shining on his neck which looked like lightning in the sky. And under the throat he had two balls of flesh without a single hair upon them and of an exceedingly beautiful form. And his waist was slender ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... him in the blacksmith shop at Latonia, lazily observing the smith's efforts to unite Fan Tan and a set of new-made, blue-black racing-plates. I explained how a city editor had bowed my shoulders with the labors of Hercules during the last week, and began to acquire knowledge of the uncertainties connected with shoeing a ...
— Blister Jones • John Taintor Foote
... trouble you to advance. I'm sick of life on these terms: you could make life worth living. I must really trouble you: sorry to seem languid, but I am languid. You, with your fine sensibilities, ought to be the first to feel that; but no: you wait, looking exquisite, with eyes like blue-black water, and a mouth, a mouth like a flower. You soft gossamer beauty, I could crush you where you hover; but you won't come and be ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... sand is yet cozy as a blanket off the warm body of a squaw, and the jaguars are out to kill... with a blue-black night coming on and a painted cloud stalking the first star— I shall go alone into the Silence... the coiled Silence... where a cry can run only a little way and waver and ...
— Sun-Up and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... to look, for I knew the part was mortal. But at length I exerted my will, and controlled my fear, and saw my trousers torn. My first wound had deadened my leg, but I felt no great pain—the leg was numb. The new blow was torture. I managed to take down my clothing, and saw a great blue-black spot on my groin. I was confused, and wondered where the bullet went, and ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... of the yacht club were reflected in the blue-black mirror of the boat basin. Bud ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton
... an aureole around her stately and well-poised head, I could see that she was a woman of extraordinary personal beauty. Her face was Spanish rather than English in its type—oval, olive, with black, sparkling eyes, and a sweetly sensitive mouth. From under the broad straw hat two thick coils of blue-black hair curved down on either side of her graceful, queenly neck. I was surprised, as I watched her, to see that her shoes and skirt bore witness to a journey rather than to a mere morning ramble. Her ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the Dragoons. He now uses all sorts of stratagems to cover the bald place on his head, by combing certain thin grey sidelocks over it. He has, in revenge, a pair of enormous moustaches, which he dyes of the richest blue-black. His nose is a good deal larger and redder than it used to be; his eyelids have grown flat and heavy; and a little pair of red, watery eyeballs float in the midst of them: it seems as if the light which was once in those ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on the sand, the sunlight pouring like a silver liquid into the blue-black masses of her hair, her narrow brows, her thick eyelashes. Presently she fell asleep. Clara leaned against a low ledge of rock and spread her coppery mane across its surface. It dried almost immediately; she divided it into plaits and coils and wove it into an elaborate structure. Her fingers ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... distance a large flock had the appearance of a cloud, growing dark and thin alternately, and continually changing its form. It was somewhat larger than a starling, with a freer flight, and had a richer plumage, its color being deep glossy blue, or blue-black, and underneath bright chestnut. When close at hand and in the bright sunshine, the aerial gambols of a flock were beautiful to witness, as the birds wheeled about and displayed in turn, as if moved by one impulse, first ...
— A Crystal Age • W. H. Hudson
... come to the tree with its millions of pink figs, and enliven the scene with soft notes and eager whistles. Varied and fasciated honey-eaters, black and white, and Jardine's caterpillar-eaters, the tiny swallow dicaeum, in a tight-fitting costume of blue-black and red (who must bruise and batter the fruit to reduce it to gobbling dimensions), the yellow white-eye (who pecks it to pieces), the white-bellied and the varied graucalus, the drongo, the shining calornis—these and others ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... wore—a swift change from a noon-day of beaming calm. Now it was curtained completely with blue-black cloud, which sent out mutterings, and then long brooding silences more ominous still in their very ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... gauze, or lace, and are plain or worked, as suits the taste of the wearer. White veils are generally of lace: mourning ones are made of black crape. The jet-black is to be preferred, as it wears much better than the kind termed blue-black. Colored veils look well with a satin ribbon of the same color, about a nail deep, put on as a hem all round. For white ones, a ribbon of a light color is preferable, as it makes a slight contrast. A crape, or gauze veil, is hemmed round; that at the bottom being something broader than ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... that of the unhappiness arising from disparity of age in married life, on which she could descant by the half-hour. Dearest Maria had married the man of her heart, only eight years older than herself, with the sweetest temper, and that blue-black hair one so seldom sees. Mr. Hale was one of the most delightful preachers she had ever heard, and a perfect model of a parish priest. Perhaps it was not quite a logical deduction from all these premises, but it was still Mrs. Shaw's ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... beyond the still grey shoji For the breadth of innumerable countries, Is the sea with ships asleep In the blue-black starless night. ...
— Japanese Prints • John Gould Fletcher
... and empty world. To the west in sleeping Bethlehem, to the east in flaring Herodium, the life of man was infinitely far away from him. Even the stars seemed to withdraw themselves against the blue-black of the sky. They diminished and receded till they were like pin-holes in the vault above him. The moon in mid-heaven shrank into a bit of burnished silver, hard and glittering, immeasurably remote. The ragged, inhospitable ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... Whilst Mexico cannot be called a "sportsman's paradise," there is in certain regions a great profusion of game, from turkeys to crocodiles. The guajalote, or Mexican wild turkey, with its great red beard and shimmering blue-black plumage, is a conspicuous inhabitant of Tamaulipas and other wild regions, and its low flight and plump body render it comparatively easy of securing, whilst it forms an excellent addition to the bill of ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... a beautiful ball, as all military balls are, and lasted late. When the C. O. and Mrs. Fortescue and Anita got home it was Christmas morning, and the stars that led the Magi to the crib at Bethlehem were shining gloriously in the blue-black sky. ...
— Betty at Fort Blizzard • Molly Elliot Seawell
... she did to anything in the least suggestive to sentiment in the leave-taking. Oppose it, however, did the small hand which drew itself away with decision, the pretty lips which smiled again that coolly friendly smile, the blue-black eyes which were steady as ever in their straight look. Max, peering in upon the two to tell Jarvis to come along, saw his sister break down in her self-command, but only at sight of himself. As Jarvis turned away she ran after him to reach beyond ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... a good deal thicker, if you mean that. 'Blue-black, lustrous, thick like horse-hairs!' That's what Percy quoted to me one day when I was grumbling, and I said I wasn't sure he wasn't rude. Addie, are Horace and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, October, 1877, Vol. XX. No. 118 • Various
... the Crab, and the half darkness allowed him a glimpse of that vast blue-black back, and the motionless eyes. Now and again he thought that he heard some one sobbing, but the ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... and set his eyes watering. Raw as the day had been, it had turned colder now, but the night was superbly clear. The sky seemed to have drawn nearer to the earth, and the stars twinkled so sharply and clearly against its deep blue-black that they resembled in form their conventionally five-pointed counterfeits of silver paper. A brisk wind whirled a few dried leaves in whispering eddies across the smooth asphaltum of the driveway, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... the shaded parlor, in a blue-black satin dress, that might almost have stood upright without assistance from the flesh or bones inside; with the dress was combined a mass of lace and jewelry that represented a large amount of money, and the mass as it sat there, ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
... almost hot with the fierce beams, there sat the lovely wife of Summer, the same being whom we have seen as a child and as a bride; and her glance was fixed upon the black gathering clouds, which in wavy outlines—blue-black and heavy—were piling themselves up, like mountains, higher and higher. They came from three sides, and growing like a petrified sea, they came swooping towards the forest, where every sound had been silenced as if by magic. Every breath of air ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... with scales of gold and green The high star-lilied banks between, Nosing our old black hulk unseen, Great alligators shimmered: Blood-red jaws i' the blue-black ooze, Where all the long warm day they snooze, Chewing old cuds of pirate-crews, ...
— Collected Poems - Volume Two (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... two, for the Spindle Tree is in seed, which has a quite insignificant blossom. But the plant I mean is a wild peony, which I dug up in a brake on the slopes of Helikon. It is a single white whose flower lasts, perhaps, three days. It makes a large seed-pod, which burst a short time ago, and revealed blue-black seeds sheathed in coralline forms of the most absolute vermilion. You could see them fifty yards away. It seems to have no purpose in life but to pack the seeds—or perhaps, they are beacons for the birds. I took ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... and in the steely chill of dawn he came out upon a spacious lake. The night had been windless, and now, in the first of the coming light, the water was smooth like blue-black oil under innumerable writhing wisps and streamers of mist. A keen smell, raw but sweet, rose from the wet shores, the wet spruce and fir woods, and the fringe of a deep cedar swamp near by. The tired animal sniffed it with an uncomprehending delight. He did not recognize it, yet it made him ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... the barn to harness Jack into the worn, old-fashioned sleigh; which sleigh was built high in the back and had a curved dasher of monstrous proportions, ornamented with a prancing horse in an impossible attitude, done in bright vermilion on a blue-black ground. ...
— How Deacon Tubman and Parson Whitney Kept New Year's - And Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... Eulodia, was about fifteen as I first remember her, a tall slim handsome girl with blue-black hair, black eyes, coral-red lips, and a remarkably white skin without a trace of red colour in it. She was no doubt just like what her mother had been when the dashing impressionable young George Royd had first met her and lost his heart—and ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... youth, his foreign name, his limited acquaintance, the impossibility of giving definite information regarding his father's past occupations or present whereabouts. Moreover, his spare young figure, his thin shapely hands and feet, his blue-black Irish eyes and black hair, his energetic colourless face, his ready yet reticent speech—all these marked him as unusual and exotic. And for the unusual and exotic the British employer of labour—of whatever sort—has, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... in the doorway, appeared the head of a young woman, covered with blue-black hair, then the questioning face of an old woman with a skin ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... Brande was walking to the gangway, a lamp shone full upon her gypsy face. The blue-black hair, the dark eyes, and a deep red rose she wore in her bonnet, seemed to me an exquisite arrangement of harmonious colour. And the thought flashed into my mind very vividly, however trivial it may seem here, ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... she "sequestered" for use during the talk, had tastefully "draped" herself on a comfortable couch. Mollie, with a mind to color effect, had seated herself in a big chair that had a flame-colored velvet back, against which her blue-black hair showed to advantage (like a poster girl, Betty said), while Amy, like the quiet little mouse which she was, had stolen off into a corner, where she was half-hidden ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Ocean View - Or, The Box That Was Found in the Sand • Laura Lee Hope
... was sent to the rope by Molly McKeever's blue-black eyes he withdrew from the Stovepipe Gang. So much for the power of a colleen's blanderin' tongue and stubborn true-heartedness. If you are a man who read this, may such an influence be sent you before 2 o'clock to-morrow; if you are a woman, may your Pomeranian greet ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... fashion; nothing is felt of the tempest save unquiet breaths of wind that raise dust-eddies from the country roads and lash the sea into a mock frenzy of crisp little waves. It is the merest interlude. Soon the blue-black drifts have fled away from the mountains that stand out, clear and refreshed, in the twilight. The wind has died down, the storm is over and Cotrone thirsts, as ever, for rain that never comes. Yet they have a Madonna-picture ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... of the Hili-lites. So strict and inclusive was this command, that the natives were ordered to take each of their descendants as soon as his teeth appeared, and color them with an indelible, metallic blue-black dye, repeating the operation every year up to ten, and thereafter once in five years. The command closed with the statement that the natives would be allowed to retain the whites of their eyes, but only ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... by my duplex lamp, And write, and write, and write; They come and drown in the blue-black ink, Or fry themselves in the light. They pop, and drop, and flop, and hop, Like catherine-wheels at play; And die in pain down the back of my neck In a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, August 1, 1891 • Various
... had had ashes sprinkled on the planks on purpose. But she begged him to let her alone, she almost pushed him back; she drew Verena out into the dark freshness, closing the door of the house behind her. There was a splendid sky, all blue-black and silver—a sparkling wintry vault, where the stars were like a myriad points of ice. The air was silent and sharp, and the vague snow looked cruel. Olive knew now very definitely what the promise was that she wanted Verena to make; but it was too cold, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... sward; but there was not another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the color of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it showed a reddish 15 gray behind the pines to where it showed a glossy blue-black between the stars. ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... third species of blackbird, larger than either of the above, whose colour is of a glossy blue-black, very like our rooks. These birds are just as troublesome as the rest; but it must be admitted that their destroy an immense quantity of caterpillars and grubs. They are easily frightened away by firing a few shots. There is, however, no doubt but that they are a greater ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... Jonathan— who took the station of lookout man in the fore-sheets, while David steered, being more at home with the rudder oar than his friend— observed something white, standing out in relief against the dark background of the horizon, which was piled up with a wrack of blue-black storm-clouds. ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson
... my good-bye; and they all bow very, very low,- one blue-black head, three glossy heads like balls of ivory. And as I ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn
... the loss of the pullet brought with it a still further depression, and Jimmy forgot all about his impersonation of the "Bald Eagle." He lost his conceit in the red ochre stripes on his face, and the iridescent feathers in his hat, and the blue-black mud on his nimble feet. For a few moments he was just a sad-eyed boy who saw the hand of the whole world raised against him. The cry of the new baby rang in his ears. The thought of the other boys teasing him about the number ...
— The Court of Boyville • William Allen White
... silent for the rest of their day in the field for one thing, they had to work at a high pitch, for then were blue-black clouds in the west! At a little after three Edith came out again, but not ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... hadn't and to judge by the colour of her face, Mademoiselle didn't need it. Did Mademoiselle think the chemist sold rouge or had she any false hair to spare? At this challenge Mademoiselle's pale fingers pulled out a dozen hairpins, and down came the loveliest blue-black hair, hanging to her knees in straight, ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... Jess's letter which made me hot was this: "What is the matter with you and Billy? Pat says (Pat is Patricia, Billy's sister) that you've been pretty horrid about writing him, and he's been blue-black at not getting letters from you; but at present he is having a good time with a very jolly girl from the West who is at their hotel. Chirp him something cheerful, Canary Bird. If I were younger or Billy older you shouldn't have him. I'd have him myself. I'm ...
— Kitty Canary • Kate Langley Bosher
... measure of support. And from this last-mentioned fact arose a final political development of large significance during the Caprivi period, namely, the creation of that bloc, or affiliation, of Centre and Conservatives (popularly referred to as the "blue-black" bloc) upon which the Government was destined regularly to rely through upwards of a decade and a half. During the chancellorship of Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe-Schillingsfuerst (1894-1900) the struggle with the Agrarians was continued and the preponderance of the bloc ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... teeth, but its tail is much longer and finer than that of the rattle-snake. It can, however, open its jaws wide enough to gulp down a good-sized bird. It gains its name of the blue or black snake from the colour of its back, which is, as you see, blue-black; while the underside is of an ashen slate hue. The tints vary slightly, and hence the two names. Its tail is fine in the extreme, and enables it to steer its ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... regard as the appointed ordinance of God. The women, to be sure, as women always will be, were true to the instinct of their sex, and crawled out of the damp and vile-smelling recesses of their homes with solid gold ear-rings shaking in their ears, and their blue-black lustrous hair ornamented with a glittering circle of steel pins or other quaint coiffure. There was sense in all this: for had not even Dukes of Milan been found so condescending and affable as to admire the charms of the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... girl, to his surprise, stood still and looked past him over his shoulder. Van Bibber motioned again for her to pass on, and then, as she still hesitated, turned and glanced behind him. The street had the blue-black look of a New York street at night. There was not a lighted window in the block. It seemed to have grown suddenly more silent and dirty and desolate-looking. He could see the glow of the elevated station at Allen Street, and it seemed fully a half-mile ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... William Penn in the glory of a new bridle and saddle and a blanket of crimson cloth; his coat smooth as satin, his mane a tumbling cataract of white silk; bunches of wild roses at his ears; his blue-black eyes never so soft, and seeming to lift his feet cautiously like an elephant bearing an ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... height, leafless, hollow, swollen just below the middle, and tapers to the top. The flowers are either white or rose-colored, and are produced at the extremity of the stalk in a regular, globular group, or umbel. The seeds ripen in August. They are deep blue-black, somewhat triangular, and similar in size and form in all the varieties. An ounce contains about seventy-five hundred seeds, which retain their ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... the pyramid: a narrow passage, hidden behind the slabbing of the second chamber, descended into a secret crypt, lined with granite and covered with a barrel-vaulted roof. The sarcophagus was a single block of blue-black basalt, polished, and carved into the form of a house, with a facade having three doors and three openings in the form of windows, the whole framed in a rounded moulding and surmounted by a projecting cornice such as we are accustomed to ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... of instances alterations are made some time after the original has been written, in which case a difference in the shade of the ink will be perceptible, even to the unassisted eye. This is particularly true when the now almost universal blue-black ink is used. ...
— The Detection of Forgery • Douglas Blackburn
... graceful, pink-and-white Bertha Buckolt, blue-eyed and blue-black-haired, and little Mary Carey with the kind, grey eyes and red-gold hair; there was Mary's wild brother Jim, with curly black hair and blue eyes and dimples of innocence; and there was Harry Dale, the drover, Jim's shearing and droving mate, a tall, good-looking, brown-eyed ...
— Children of the Bush • Henry Lawson
... poured a deluge, and the morning beheld the Aivron in roaring spate, the familiar landmarks of the banks having mostly disappeared and also many of the mid-channel rocks; while the blue-black current that came whirling down the strath seemed to bring with it the dull, constant thunder of the distant falls. The western hills looked wild and stormy; there was half a gale of wind tearing along ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... a mouth like a remembered kiss and shadowy eyes and blue-black hair inherited from her mother who had been born in Budapest. Jim passed her often on the street, walking small-boy fashion with her hands in her pockets and he knew that with her inseparable Sally ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... maundered weakly as I reached the door, but it was not this that detained me at its threshold. It was Miss Caroline, who had actually knelt at his side. At first I thought she wept over one of his blue-black hands, which she clung eagerly to with both her own. Then I saw that there seemed to be no tears—yet silently, almost impassively, she gave me a sense of hopeless grief that I thought no outburst of weeping ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... Blue-black, the sky over Venice, With a pricking of yellow stars. There is no moon, And the waves push darkly against the prow Of the gondola, Coming from Malamocco And streaming toward Venice. It is black under the gondola hood, But the yellow of a ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... blue-black mineral, allied in composition to the sapphire, but containing a varying quantity of iron oxide; is found in large masses; is exceedingly hard, and largely used in polishing metals, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... darkening of the landscape and a breath of cool air accentuated the silence which fell at this point. We both looked up, and saw the edge of a blue-black cloud peeping over the ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... cakes of lake, of gamboge, of sepia, of blue-black, of cobalt, and vermilion; and prepare gradated columns (exactly as you have done with the Prussian blue) of the lake and blue-black.[8] Cut a narrow slip, all the way down, of each gradated color, and set the three slips side by side; fasten them down, and rule lines at equal ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... Every small oasis of turf, amongst the heath and by the wayside, carried its pretty crop of centaury and wild thyme, of bed-straw, milkwort, and birdsfoot trefoil. Furzechats tipped about the gorse bushes, uttering a sharp, gay, warning note. A big flight of rooks, blue-black against the ethereal blue of the distance, winged their way slowly homeward to the long avenue of dark trees leading to a farm in the valley. The charm of the place was clear and sane, its beauty simple almost to austerity. This the young girl welcomed. It washed her imagination free of the ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... enters, the anteroom is crowded with gentlemen, and the chief reception-room seems like a large omnibus, lighted, dressed with flowers, and having a row of ladies on each side. The personal beauty is perhaps less than one expects, though one sees some superb dark eyes and blue-black hair; they dress with a view to the latest French fashions, and sometimes rather a distant view. At last a lady takes her seat at the piano, then comes an eager rush of gentlemen into the room, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... This is just plain ordinary 'prentice work; but pocketin'"—he straightened up his back and spoke reverently—"but pocketin' is the deepest science and the finest art. Delicate to a hair's-breadth, hand and eye true and steady as steel. When you've got to burn your pan blue-black twice a day, and out of a shovelful of gravel wash down to the one wee speck of flour gold,—why, that's washin', that's what it is. Tell you what, I'd sooner follow a pocket ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... was, that man, tall and broad of shoulder, but the head of the woman, shining like blue-black satin in the morning sun, was ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... house happens to stand where I look down upon the busy scene, as from a hill-top upon a river meadow in haying time, only here figures stand out much more sharply than they do from a summer meadow. There is the broad, straight, blue-black canal emerging into view, and running nearly across the river; this is the highway that lays open the farm. On either side lie the fields, or ice meadows, each marked out by cedar or hemlock boughs. The farther one is cut first, and when cleared, ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... by his own weight. He had probably died from picking up poisoned grain somewhere, or from a parasite. The weather had been open, and he could not have been starved. At a distance, the rook's plumage appears black; but close at hand it will be found a fine blue-black, glossy, and handsome. ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... greens of England, exaggerated and impossible—distant mountains, pink and lilac, quivering in pale blue haze—vast sheets of yellow sand, across which the lonely rock or a troop of wild asses or gazelles throw intense blue-black shadows—rocks and cliffs not shrouded, as here, in soil, much less in grass and trees, or spotted with lichens and stained with veins; but keeping each stone its natural colour, as it wastes—if, indeed, it wastes at all—under ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... a bonnet to be seen. Women of the better classes affect lace and flowers, those of the lower wear their own hair flowing down their backs, in a long, blue-black wave. Jewelry is profusely worn. Every woman sparkles with bracelets, earrings, and chains. Many of the males are similarly attired. Everybody smokes. Cigarettes at fifteen for a cent are in chief favour with the ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... Burying Ground are the tombs of many whom history has gathered and recorded as her own. But history looks in vain among the blue-black slabs of semi-slate for the name of one who was greatest perhaps of them all; but whose last days were so strangely clouded and whose sepulchre was so obscure as to leave the world in doubt for more than a half century as to where ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... charming nook where the streamlet of water falling from the tragic mask into the ancient sarcophagus ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! So dolorous was ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... hyacinthinus. It was most touching to see the pathetic devotion which existed between master and bird and vice versa. Only the people of the hotel where we both stayed did not appreciate the magnificent blue-black visitor, for when its master was out it spent all its time chipping off pieces from tables and chairs, and took the greatest pride and delight in flinging forks, knives and spoons off the dining-room tables, and tearing ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... under the leaves, from the axils of the true Solomon's seal. Later in summer, when hungry birds wander through the woods with increased families, the wild spikenard offers them branching clusters of pale red speckled berries, whereas the latter plant feasts them with blue-black fruit, in the hope that they will ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... when it had been long cut but could not be carried on account of the wet weather. It was a large field of fifty to sixty acres, and as I walked by it the birds came flying leisurely over my head to settle with loud cawings on the stocks. It was a magnificent sight—the great, blue-black bird-forms on the golden wheat, an animated group of three or four to half a dozen on every stock, while others walked about the ground to pick up the scattered grain, and others were flying over them, for just then the sun was shining on the field and beyond it ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... intense—fitted either to reflect laughter or sharp anger. But what rendered this man, who appeared to be close to thirty-five years of age, ridiculous to American eyes was his mustache. This was blue-black in color, waxed to two fine, bristling, upturned points—a fashion that this dandy had undoubtedly caught from some former Spanish ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... no interference with the prisoners, either male or female, for how could they escape in the centre of that huge plain? The Emir came towards them once, and stood combing out his blue-black beard with his fingers, and looking thoughtfully at them out of his dark, sinister eyes. Miss Adams saw with a shudder that it was always upon Sadie that his gaze was fixed. Then, seeing their distress, he gave an order, and a negro brought ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... to be a wild night. The tumbling blue-black clouds of late afternoon fulfilled their promise of evil things for the dark. There were fierce pounding hours when the wrath of the sea seemed centred upon the Hydrographer and her lumbering barges, when the towing-lines ...
— Dan Merrithew • Lawrence Perry
... lay fast asleep upon the bed, dressed as he had left him, with the exception of the slouched hat and the red cotton handkerchief. They lay on the carpet; and over the pillows, and over the coarse velveteen jacket streamed such a wealth of blue-black hair as the baronet in all his ...
— The Baronet's Bride • May Agnes Fleming
... midst of the trees, where this light seemed to be, was our wooden image of Thor the Hammer Bearer, older than any of us could tell; and in front of this was what we used as his altar —-four roughly-squared stones set together. These stones were blue-black in colour, and whence they came I do not know, unless it was true that my forefathers brought them here when first Odin led his folk to the northern lands. Always they had been the altar for my people, and my father held that we should have ...
— Havelok The Dane - A Legend of Old Grimsby and Lincoln • Charles Whistler
... very glad to see the pond again. The water-gnats were taking dimensions as usual, a blue-black beetle sat humming on the stake, and dragon-flies flitted hungrily about, like splinters of a broken rainbow; but the Water-Soldier's place was empty, and it was never refilled. He ...
— Brothers of Pity and Other Tales of Beasts and Men • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... orchard called Tibb's hole, because, as our schoolboy legend ran, a boy called Tibb had once cast himself thereinto, and was drowned, through dread of being tortured by this Monster. I grew to be very fond of standing alone by the bank of this Pond, and of looking at my pale face in its cool blue-black depth. It seemed to me that the Pond was my friend, and that within its bosom I ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... are 'grand, John'! If I never had come here, I never should have appreciated them or her—making up that wonderful world, all pomegranates and jasmin-stars, and curls like clustering blue-black grapes, and staturesque limbs, out of the back of her head. Yes, and the golden dust of centuries, and time's mellow caressing touch—oh, I wish I could ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... motion beneath the blue-black shadows of the pines, I quickly lost all sense of direction. After we had ridden in wordless silence a short half hour or less, and I supposed we should be nearing the head of our descending ravine, our little ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... sound-looking men; two or three were middle-aged, the rest young. No one looked unequal to the work, and no one proved so. All wore the inevitable blue cotton of the Chinese, varying with wear and patching from blue-black to bluish-white, and the fashion of the dress was always the same; short, full trousers, square-cut, topped by a belted shirt with long sleeves falling over the hands or rolled up to the elbow according to the weather. About their heads they generally twisted a strip of cotton, save ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... of what's happened to us, or where we are?" Miss Ruse persisted. She was a rather small girl with large, beautiful gray eyes and thick blue-black hair. At the moment, she was barefoot and in a sleeping outfit which consisted of something soft wrapped around her top, soft and floppy trousers below. The black hair was tousled and she looked around fifteen. ...
— The Winds of Time • James H. Schmitz
... homesteader in upon himself. From the pioneer time of the Old Southwest to the last frontier of the Far North today, the service berry is cherished alike by white men and Indians; and the red men have woven about it some of their prettiest legends. When June had ripened the tree's blue-black berries, the Back Country folk went out in parties to gather them. Though the service berry was a food staple on the frontier and its gathering a matter of household economy, the folk made their berry-picking jaunt a gala occasion. The women and children ...
— Pioneers of the Old Southwest - A Chronicle of the Dark and Bloody Ground • Constance Lindsay Skinner
... Gradually other cactus forms showed a harder struggle for existence, and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded, glistening choya began to show pale and gray and white upon the rising slope. Round-topped hills, sunset-colored above, blue-black below, intervened to hide the distant spurs and peaks. Mile and mile long tongues of red lava streamed out between the hills and wound down to stop ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... die." With this belief, probably, she gathered three large stones, which she could hardly lift, for the purpose of throwing a great distance; put two hair-pins in her mouth; and carefully re-adjusted with both hands two stray braids of her lovely blue-black mane, which had fallen in gathering the stones. Then she felt in the pockets of her linen duster for her card-case, handkerchief, pocketbook, and smelling-bottle, and, finding them intact, suddenly assumed an air of easy, ladylike unconcern, went up the steps of the veranda, and ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... attention to matters more useful to the human family—digging cellars, wheeling baggage, driving teams, &c. So lawyer Bunker turned his attention from Blackstone, Chitty, Coke on Littleton, and those fellows of deep-red, blue-black law, to the manufacture of quack nostrums. Bunker found that the great appetite we Yankees have for quack medicines, pills and powders, suffered no diminution in the gold country; on the contrary, the appetite became rather sharpened for those luxuries, and Bunker found ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... than in summer; one nest examined had a roof 25 cm. thick and wall 40 cm. The garden consists of two parts, differently coloured, but not very sharply marked off from each other. The older part is yellowish-red in colour; the newly-built portions, forming the surface of the garden, are of a blue-black colour. It is this part which is of the greater importance ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... a singing breeze That creeps through the laughing air To the wide-flung boughs of a blue-black tree— It touches your joyous hair; And the touch of it is as soft and light ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... Phoebe and her little girls, so calling at the cottage one fine afternoon, to my surprise the door was opened by a beautiful girl of about fourteen, neatly dressed in a bright cotton frock, just short enough to display the contour of her finely shaped legs and ankles, with a mass of blue-black hair hanging over her shoulders and down her back, so I should think she might have sat on it. She was a vision of delight, and at a glance I recognised she must be a sister ...
— Forbidden Fruit • Anonymous
... me three girls of her own age, or less, who stood talking together at the gates of the Foundling Hospital. They were all three very pretty children—quite singularly so—and became great beauties; one golden-haired, one chestnut-brown, one blue-black. The black-haired one was the youngest and the tallest—a fine, straight, bony child of twelve, with a flat back and square shoulders; she was very well dressed, and had nice brown boots with brown elastic sides on arched and straight-heeled slender feet, and white stockings ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... simply. "Oh, Audrey, I am so happy!" She turned her pale face to the window, her eyes to the stars in the blue-black sky. "I am so happy that I feel I must get out and say my prayers again. A few minutes ago everything seemed black and ...
— Anxious Audrey • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... had a strain of Indian in me, sir," he explained, "my hair would be straight, thick, coarse, and blue-black. You will observe that it is wavy, a medium crop, of average fineness, and ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... tall, keen-faced man with blue-black side-whiskers and a furtive eye, was talking with Mr. Windsor, and though he saw his wife's signals, of course, did not pay any attention to them. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in rusty clerical garb, smiled benignly at the ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... solemnity of his secret thoughts was reflected on his face, the olive tones of which he inherited from his mother. This ivory pallor, so fine by candlelight, so suited to the expression of melancholy thought, brought out vigorously the fire of the blue-black eyes, which gazed from their thick and heavy lids with the keen perception our fancy lends to kings, their color being a cloak for dissimulation. Those eyes were terrible,—especially from the movement of their brows, which he could raise or lower ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... 'all the brown,' though some of us, it is true, are condemned to wear our hair brown or blue-black. But such are only unhappy exceptions. Yellow or gold is the rule. The bravest men and the fairest women have had golden hair, and, we may add, in reference to another distinction of the colour we are celebrating, golden hearts. Hair at the present time ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... she was dreaming, her thoughts at loose-ends, her eyes studying the incalculable depths of blue-black night that swirled and eddied beyond the window-glass. The most shadowy of smiles touched her lips, the faintest shade of deepened color rested on her cheeks.... She was thinking of—him? As long as he dared, the young man, his ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the streets on to the broad, hard road, and crept upwards with scarcely a sound, through the blue-black twilight. Around and in front of them little lights shone out from the villas and small houses dotted away in the mountains. Almost imperceptibly they passed into a different atmosphere. The air became cold and exhilarating. ...
— Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted, the sunlight metallic and the shadows mixed with blue-black ink. ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... at him with inscrutable eyes—deep as velvet, grave and meditative. She was slight and girlish, with dull blue-black hair, and a face that might have been faithfully cut on a cameo. It was the colour of a sun-burnt peach, and usually wore that air of gentle pride which the Moors seem to have left behind them in those lands through which they passed, to the people ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... of the cleanest ships afloat. Her blue-black side, anointed daily with some mysterious compound rubbed on with serge, a compound the exact ingredients of which were known only to her commander and the painter who mixed it, was as smooth and as shiny as a mahogany table. Her decks were ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... itself. He realized the grandeur of the abstract in the individual. What was any spoiled, sweet young girl to that? And Mrs. Ewing was, in truth, a wonderful creature. She was a large woman with a great quantity of blue-black hair, which had the ripples one sees in antique statues. Her eyes, black at first glance, were in reality dark blue. Her face gave one a never-ending surprise. James had not known that a woman could be so beautiful. Vague comparisons with the Greek Helen, or Cleopatra, ...
— 'Doc.' Gordon • Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
... village of Northern New York—a white Christmas, clear and cold. In the dark, blue-black of the sky the glittering stars were spread thick; the brilliant moon poured down its silver light over the whiteness of the sloping roof-tops, and upon the ghostly white, silently drooping trees. A heaviness hung in the frosty air—a stillness ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... surface of the leather; sometimes they took quick backward and forward strokes. Usually four men worked together enameling a single skin. Amateurs would have spread the japan too thickly in some spots, too thinly in others; but not so these veterans at their trade. Deftly the blue-black liquid—so elastic and so oily—was coated over the leather, and the glistening finish put out in the sun to dry. After the second coat had hardened it was rubbed down with pumice that the surface might be perfectly smooth before the final layer of japan was applied. The last ...
— The Story of Leather • Sara Ware Bassett
... clear, starlit night, without the faintest suspicion of a cloud anywhere in the soft, velvety blue-black dome of the sky; and presently, when the professor's eyes had grown accustomed to the dim, mysterious radiance of the twinkling constellations, he was able to see the landscape steadily unfolding around him like a map, in a rapidly widening circle, ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... fronting heavens were a black purple. The thunder, which had been growling in the distance, swept forward and roared above the town. The crash no longer rolled afar, but cracked close to the ear, hard, crepitant. Quick lightning stabbed the world in vicious and repeated hate. A blue-black moistness lay heavy on the cowering earth. The rain came—a few drops at first, sullen, as if loath to come, that splashed on the pavement wide as a crown piece; then a white rush of slanting spears. A great blob shot in through the window, open at the top, and spat wide on Gourlay's ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... feet. Hale's arm was stiffened to his side by a wet, clinging snow-wreath. The figures of the others were almost obliterated and shapeless. It was not snowing—it was snowballing! The huge flakes, shaken like enormous feathers out of a vast blue-black cloud, commingled and fell in sprays and patches. All idea of their former pursuit was forgotten; the blind rage and enthusiasm that had possessed them was gone. They dashed after their new leader with only an instinct for shelter ...
— Snow-Bound at Eagle's • Bret Harte
... rag. I got down on my knees, sir, and prayed to God for the salvation of my soul, and when I got up and climbed to the living-room it was half past twelve by the clock. There was rain on the windows and the sea was running blue-black under the sun. I'd sat there all that time not knowing ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... chasms. And no living thing was seen there, not even an insect, nor a blade of grass; and the silence of the grave was over all. And the earth was dry and parched, and the sun hung above them like a painted shield in a blue-black sky, and there was neither shade nor water anywhere. But Siegfried rode onwards in the way which Regin pointed out, and faltered not, although he grew faint with thirst and with the overpowering heat. Towards the evening of the next day they came to a dark mountain-wall which stretched far out ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin
... and thou shalt have dancing—or art thou tired, my lad?" cried a girl with blue-black hair, and a wild dark fire in her eyes. She tripped up and down, and clapped her hands. She had white teeth and hot breath, and would have dragged him ...
— Weird Tales from Northern Seas • Jonas Lie
... Again he repeated the musical syllables. And yet—and yet—he'd have sworn she was English. There wasn't the faintest trace of a foreign accent in her speech. If anything, there was a hint of Irish,—the soft intonation of the Emerald Isle. Her colouring, too, was Irish, the blue-black hair, the dark violet eyes—he had discovered that they were violet; looking, for all the world, as if they had been put in with a smutty finger, as the saying goes. He revolved the problem in his mind, ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... hurried two men, pushing the terrified negro porter ahead of them. Each of the intruders wore a black cloth tied over the lower part of his face, and before the bewildered passengers knew what had happened they found themselves looking along the blue-black barrels ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... her earliest years, had affected her appearance and her manner. She was a very neat, very trim, even a very attractive little person, with dark brown, roguish eyes, blue-black hair, a fairy-like figure, and the prettiest hands and feet imaginable. She had first attracted Mrs. Greyne's attention by her devotion to St. Paul's Cathedral, and this devotion she still kept up. Whenever she had an hour or two free she always—so she herself said—spent ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... And blue-black beetles transact business, And gnats fly in a host, And furry caterpillars hasten That no time be lost, And moths grow fat and thrive, And ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... . . . He who made the world, created the Eternal Maiden Sukh-eh-nukh, and placed all the stars in the skies . . . Whose voice, far, far away, itself comes as the faintly remembered music of long bygone dreams preceding birth . . . And now, out of the blue-black sky, great globes of swimming liquid fire floated constantly, and dispersing into feathery flakes of opal light, melted softly ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... doubtless the channel through which the molten granite flowed. Some mischief-loving god has let in the sea while things were yet red-hot, and there has been a time here. But the channel still seems filled with water from the mid-Atlantic, cold and blue-black, and in places between seven and eight thousand feet deep (one and a half miles). In fact, the enormous depth of the Saguenay is one of the wonders of physical geography. It is as great a marvel in ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... streaming net from the sea And sails toward the far-off city, that seems Like one vague tower. The dark bow plunges to foam on blue-black waves, And shrill rain seethes like a ghostly music about him In ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... happiness to her friends; and replied chiefly by smiles to the conversation of the gentlemen at her side. It is true that these were for the most part elderly dignitaries, distinguished military officers with blue-black whiskers, retired old Indian judges, and the like, occupied with their victuals, and generally careless to please. But that solemn happiness of the Colonel, who shall depict it:—that look of affection with which he greeted his daughter as she entered, flounced to ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... has a mangled outline. Below that horizon, sometimes blue-black and sometimes red-black, ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... over her abundant blue-black curls. Its two points of heavy, gold-embroidered cloth extended to her slim hips. The golden serpent, emerald-eyed, was clasped about her little round, determined forehead, darting its double tongue ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... attractive one, my pretty Dung-beetle of the pampas, but your industrial methods are most remarkable. I know some among your fellow-countrymen, however, who surpass you in ingenuity. One of these is Phanaeus Milon, a magnificent insect, blue-black all over. ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... commencing one of those unusually transparent, full-starr'd, blue-black nights, as if to show that however lush and pompous the day may be, there is something left in the not-day that can outvie it. The rarest, finest sample of long-drawn-out clear-obscure, from sundown to 9 o'clock. I went down to the Delaware, and cross'd ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... floor came steam and a roaring sound. The steam blew here and there among the pines on the floor; rose to eddy about the naked painted hills. At one end we saw intermittently a broad ascending canon—deep red and blue-black—ending in the cone of a smoking volcano. The other seemed quite closed by the sheer hills; in fact the only exit was the route by ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... made, and gathered at the waist with a broad blue ribbon, her slim white hands playing with the book upon her knee, her eyes gazing afar off across the water, her mouth drooping in the curve which it had never known till recently, her wealth of blue-black hair forming a halo round her head. Ah, that she were there when I open my eyes again, that I might speak to her! For the bitterest thought that ever came to me is one which troubles my rest from time to time even now: Did I love her as she deserved; was I a staff for her to ...
— A Soldier of Virginia • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... made him dizzy. Clara Vavrika smiled a hard, enigmatical smile at him and walked rapidly away. Nils' eyes followed her white figure as she went toward the house. He watched her walking alone in the sunlight, looked at her slender, defiant shoulders and her little hard-set head with its coils of blue-black hair. "No," he reflected; "she'd never be like them, not if she lived here a hundred years. She'd only grow more bitter. You can't tame a wild thing; you can only chain it. People aren't all alike. I mustn't lose my nerve." He gave Hilda's pigtail a parting tweak and ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... with him. What sort of man was the colonel? Wasn't he a stout man, with a large quantity of jewelry, and a wig, and large black whiskers, very black (here Pen was immensely waggish, and caused hysteric giggles of delight from the ladies), very black, indeed; in fact, blue-black; that is to say, a rich greenish purple? That was the man; he had met him, too, ...
— The History of Pendennis, Vol. 2 - His Fortunes and Misfortunes, His Friends and His Greatest Enemy • William Makepeace Thackeray
... I am certain." Partah Singh paused, and his eyes wandered over the dark gardens, with their gleaming white colonnades and kiosks and graceful towers rising into the blue-black sky. He traced the starlight down to its reflection in the great tank before he spoke again. "If I should place my son and my kingdom under the protection of the English, what would happen in ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... suggesting that it will rub if too impetuously caressed. Yes, a man would hesitate to kiss her unless he were well shaved. At the very thought of kissing her Grant felt a thrill and a glow she had never before roused in him. She had an abundance of blue-black hair, and it and her slender black brows and long lashes gave her hazel eyes a peculiar charm of mingled passion and languor. She had a thin nose, well shaped, its nostrils very sensitive; slightly, charmingly-puckered lips; ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... those dearest friends who had so recently and merrily assisted him in his "rags" that he was not playing the game and was no sportsman. He was moreover a ludicrous sight, his trousers being torn, one blue-black eye staring from a confused outline of dust and blood, his hair amazingly ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... deep violet-blue waters of the Gulf Stream and the sun began to shine refreshingly and the light-hearted folk made music and danced on the deck. Then for us too it became more endurable and we sat for hours hand in hand gazing at the glorious play of colors on the waves, blue-black, seething light-blue, and foaming snowy-white. From time to time we spoke of the great things that always occupied our thoughts. For we felt that in these great things alone could lie our justification and ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... pure as it otherwise would be. This is shown by the increasing depth of the sky-colour when seen from the tops of lofty mountains, while from the still greater heights attained in balloons the sky appears of a blue-black colour, the blue reflected from the comparatively small amount of dust particles being seen against the intense black of stellar space. It is for the same reason that the "Italian skies" are of so ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... 6 inches. A trifle smaller than the English sparrow. Apparently considerably larger because of its wide wingspread. Male and Female — Steel-blue above, shading to blue-black on crown of head and on wings and tail. A brownish-gray ring around the neck. Beneath dusty white, with rufous tint. Crescent-like frontlet. Chin, throat, sides of head, and tail coverts rufous. Range — North and South America. Winters in the tropics. Migrations ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... keep his secret. He peered across a shining lake, and tried to pierce the gloom. No living thing moved before his vision. Silver rippling waves shimmered under that starlit sky; tall weird pines waved gently in the night breeze; slender cedars, resembling spectres, reared their heads toward the blue-black vault of heaven. He listened intently. There was a faint rustling of the few leaves left upon the oaks. The strange voices that had always haunted him, the murmuring of river waters, or whispering of maidens, or muttering of women were ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... was chiefly in Somers Town, as I understood: and those open pavements about St. Pancras Church were the general place of rendezvous. They spoke little or no English; knew nobody, could employ themselves on nothing, in this new scene. Old steel-gray heads, many of them; the shaggy, thick, blue-black hair of others struck you; their brown complexion, dusky look of suppressed fire, in general their tragic condition as of caged ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... kinds of Antarctic penguins—the little Adelie with his blue-black coat and his white shirt-front, weighing 16 lbs., an object of endless pleasure and amusement, and the great dignified Emperor with long curved beak, bright orange head-wear and powerful flippers, a personality of 61/2 stones. Science singles out the Emperor as being the more ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... pain made him lose contact with that shadow. He looked down. From the gravel, from under rocks, gathered an army of blue-black, hard-shelled things, their clawed forelimbs extended, blue sense organs raised on fleshy stalks well above their heads, all turned towards the ...
— Star Hunter • Andre Alice Norton
... old hunchback, a hundred years old at least, and stone-deaf, who took care of the gondola, spending the whole day, waiting for his master, washing the trim, graceful, blue-black boat, arranging the awning with the white cords and tassels, and polishing the little brass lions at the sides. People tried to question the old hunchback, but he gave no secrets away. The master always stood up behind and rowed; ...
— The Mintage • Elbert Hubbard |
