"Mottled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... rocky isle. It is still known as Ellen's Isle. "It is rather high, and irregularly pyramidal. It is mostly composed of dark-gray rocks, mottled with pale and gray lichens, peeping out here and there amid trees that mantle them,—chiefly light, graceful birches, intermingled with red-berried mountain ashes and a few dark-green, spiry pines. The landing is beneath ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... slough; a half tide, exposing mud surfaced with gangrenous slime; the water itself filthy and discoloured by the waste from the vats of a near-by tannery; the marsh grass on either side mottled with all the shades of a decaying orchid; a crazy, ramshackled, ancient wharf; and at the end of the wharf a small, white-painted sloop. Nothing romantic about it. No hint of adventure. A splendid pictorial argument against the alleged joys of small-boat sailing. Possibly that is what ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... Terai at the foot of the mountains, but is only an occasional visitor to Sikkim proper. But the leopard and the clouded leopard are permanent residents and fairly common. This last is of a most beautiful mottled colouring. Another leopard is the snow-leopard, which inhabits high altitudes only. The marbled-cat is a miniature edition of the clouded leopard, and the leopard-cat of the common leopard. The large Indian civet-cat is not ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... given her—sombrero, bandana, chaps and all! She could not see his face, but she knew he must be fine-looking like the "Virginian" or like Dick at the Hunter ranch. He was galloping through the sagebrush on a mottled, ugly-looking broncho, doubtless bent ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... the flight through space. Behind lay a world, unlike the earth, which the spheres called home. It was a gaseous, flaming world where matter and energy mingled as one substance. It was mottled with spots of cold gases which warred with the whispering spheres. It was ...
— The Whispering Spheres • Russell Robert Winterbotham
... game of me rather than I of it, and would rise and flirt its tail in my face when I should be near enough to make the mockery poignant. No, the poor thing's game was up. It was a large bird, of an orange-brown hue, mottled with faint white and shadings of black. A powerful relenting came over me, and I could have sat down and cried like a baby, had that been suitable for a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... exclaimed, whilst the skin of his face took a mottled hue that was the nearest approach he ever made to a blush. "The tallow've been a dropping, Abel, my boy. I think 'twas the wind when you opened the door, maybe. And I've been a trying to fix un more firmly. ...
— Jan of the Windmill • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... two pairs of mottled brown eyes staring at each other, and, as she listened to Floyd's petition, the likeness of the boy to the man struck her forcibly. The expression that swept over Governor Vandecar's face frightened her, and she held her breath. But quicker than hers ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... said nothing, but led the way to her garden. It was normally a fair-sized garden, but it looked small in comparison with the ox, a huge mottled brute, dull red about the head and shoulders, passing to dirty white on the flanks and hind-quarters, with shaggy ears and large blood-shot eyes. It bore about as much resemblance to the dainty paddock heifers that Eshley was accustomed to ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... all colours, which, on his sunburnt face, mottled it till it looked like jasper. The duke and duchess suppressed their laughter so as not altogether to mortify Don Quixote, for they saw through Sancho's impertinence; and to change the conversation, and keep Sancho from uttering ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... long it sail'd its balls of unearthly light over our heads, Then departed, dropt in the night, and was gone;) Of such, and fitful as they, I sing—with gleams from them would gleam and patch these chants, Your chants, O year all mottled with evil and good—year of forebodings! Year of comets and meteors transient and strange—lo! even here one equally transient and strange! As I flit through you hastily, soon to fall and be gone, what is this chant, What am I myself but ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... disappointment that Pattie Batch might easily have wept. A boy—a boy! Oh, shoot! But still, she reflected, considering the scarcity, a boy—this boy, in fact, cleaned up—Pattie Batch was all the time running the mottled infant over with sharply appraising eyes—yes, the child had possibilities, unquestionably so, which soap and water might astonishingly improve—and, in fine, ...
— Christmas Eve at Swamp's End • Norman Duncan
... glorified mullet, with bright green, longitudinal bands on a dark shining head, a purple body of different shades, and a blue spotted tail with a yellow tip. The Ohua too, a pink scaled fish, shaped like a trout; the opukai, beautifully striped and mottled; the mullet and flying fish as common here as mackerel at home; the hala, a fine pink-fleshed fish, the albicore, the bonita, the manini striped black and white, and many others. There was an abundance ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... (their) juicy, fat colour, the parts completed one after another upon the bare pannel, the same as frescoes upon the flattened wall. Simplicity of tint and of colour prevails; no staining or mottled varieties: the flesh, both in light and shadow, is produced by one mixed up tint so melted that no mark of the brush is seen. There is here no scratching or scumbling—no repetitions; all seems prepared at once for the glaze, ...
— The Mind of the Artist - Thoughts and Sayings of Painters and Sculptors on Their Art • Various
... beautifully—yes, spectacularly—built. Her hair, fully as thick as Belle's own and worn in a free-falling bob three or four inches longer than Belle's, was bleached almost white. Her eyes were not really speckled, nor really mottled, but were regularly patterned in lighter and darker shades of hazel. She was, Garlock decided, a really remarkable ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... was a marvellous ill-favoured, ill-conditioned old lady, of a stooping figure, with a mottled face, like bad marble, a hook nose, and a hard grey eye, that looked as if it might have been hammered at on an anvil without sustaining any injury. Forty years at least had elapsed since the Peruvian mines had been the ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... considerations, there are good reasons for supposing our Milky Way to possess a double-armed spiral structure. And the great patches of dark absorbing matter which are known to exist in the Milky Way (see Fig. 22) would give very much the mottled appearance we notice in the arms (which we see edge-on) of the nebula in Coma Berenices. The hypothesis, therefore, that our universe is a spiral nebula has much to be said for it. If it be accepted it greatly increases our estimate of the size of the material universe. For our central, lens-shaped ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... opportunity for quiet, informing interviews. There was a woods path to the Upton place, and it was a walk through a fairyland. A part of the way was through such a growth of beech timber as I have never seen elsewhere: tall, straight, mottled trees with an undergrowth of laurel, the sunlight sifting through; one found it easy to expect there storybook ladies, wearing crowns and green mantles, riding on white palfreys. Then came a more open way, an abandoned ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... smaller seeings began to charm her fancy and her eyes.—Pinkish yellow starfish, long ribbons of madder-red or emerald seaweed, their colours the more living and vivid for the clear water covering them. Presently a company of five birds—their mottled brown and olive bodies raised on stilt-like legs thin as a straw—claimed her notice. So bewitched was she by their quaint and pretty ways, that she could not but follow them as they chased one another in and out of the rippling waves, ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... this slight and doubtful encouragement, Rollo again took the way to Morton Hollow. It was early October now; the maples and hickories showing red and yellow; the air a wonderful compound of spicy sweetness and strength; the heaven over their heads mottled with filmy stretches of cloud, which seemed to float in the high ether quite at rest. A day for all sorts of things; good for exertion, and equally inviting one to be ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... Italian cheese, is shown at k. It is not unlike Roquefort in appearance and in use, but it is made from whole cow's milk coagulated with rennet. Into this cheese is also introduced a mold that gives its center a streaked or mottled appearance. ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 2 - Volume 2: Milk, Butter and Cheese; Eggs; Vegetables • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... all set out on a walk, in the course of which we called at a bookseller's shop to show U—— an enormous cat, which I had already seen. It is of the Angora breed, of a mottled yellow color, and is really a wonder; as big and broad as a tolerably sized dog, very soft and silken, and apparently of the gentlest disposition. I never imagined the like, nor felt anything so deeply ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... at its height, and I observed many of the Costa Rica Red-Rumps nesting. In almost every instance where possible I collected both parents of the nests, and in the majority of cases found the males wearing the same dress as the females. In a few instances the male was in mottled plumage, evidently just assuming the adult phase, and in a lesser number of examples the male was in fully adult plumage—velvety black and crimson red. From the above it is clear that the males begin to breed ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [January, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... Mottled black and rusty above. Barred on the under parts with black and white or buff. A white collar on the throat, a white spot going entirely through the wing, and a ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... ambassador of a great power meeting the delegate of a barbarous tribe whom an absurd accident had enabled for the moment to be abominably annoying. The ambassador, at all events, had passed a bad night, and his faultlessly careful toilet only threw into relief the frigid rancor in his eyes and the mottled tones of his refined complexion. He stood before Newman a moment, breathing quickly and softly, and shaking his forefinger curtly as his host pointed ...
— The American • Henry James
... had been cleared there appeared a new figure upon the scene. This was a tall, thin person clad in black, with a gaunt and austere face. The aspect of the man made me shudder. His clothes were all shining with grease and mottled with stains. He bore himself with a slow and impressive dignity, as if he took command of all things from the instant of his entrance. In spite of his rude appearance and sordid dress, it was now his business, his room, his to command. ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... a load of the supplies they had brought, and carried them out under the shade of an immense pine-like tree—a gigantic column of wood that stretched far into the sky to lose its green leaves in a waving sea of foliage. The mottled sunlight of the bright star above them made them feel very much at home. Its color, intensity, and warmth were all exactly ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... vibrated until it was noon, when eight more connecting brown ribbons were stretched beside their predecessors back to the ranch-house. In the afternoon the labor was repeated, until by night the clearing, a gigantic mottled fan with an abnormally long handle, lay in vivid contrast against the ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... he was disgusted to find upon his plate—not, as he had confidently expected, a couple of plump poached eggs, with their appetising contrast of ruddy gold and silvery white, not a crisp and crackling sausage or a mottled omelette, not even the homely but luscious rasher, but a brace of chill forbidding sardines, lying grim and headless ...
— Vice Versa - or A Lesson to Fathers • F. Anstey
... scene. People in numbers almost as great as the standing army of the United States were packed so closely together that all individuality was lost, and the pulsating aggregate looked like the exposed and mottled back of some submerged sea monster. Between the parts of the programme the combined hum of ten thousand voices floated upon the air like the deep boom of the surf on the seashore. When the raised seats were well filled in the vast gallery ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson
... yesterday. I guess I'll just take something kind of dainty. Tell Clarice to cook me up a nice little steak with plenty of fat on it, and some fried potatoes, and a cup of coffee and a few waffles to come. The Judge he wouldn't get up yet. He looked kind of mottled and anguished, but I guess he'll pull around all right. I had the chink take him up about a gallon of strong tea. Say, listen here, the Judge ain't so awful much of a ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... nature. It also holds the mirror up in a limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... in the house than it had been in the wood, and the cold was as deadly, though not so fierce. If the Cat had not received his fur coat unquestioningly of Providence, he would have been thankful that he had it. It was a mottled grey, white on the face and breast, and thick ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... oval shape, about ten inches long and four or five thick. It was of a mottled-gray colour, and had a thick rind. We found it somewhat like an Irish potato, and exceedingly good. The yam was roundish, and had a rough brown skin. It was very sweet and well- flavoured. The potato, we were surprised to find, was quite sweet and exceedingly palatable, as also were the ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... her—a young woman of the working classes, her plump face sagging and mottled with terror, her eyes staring, her clothes torn ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... of the scuta and terga are yellow along the middle, plainly marked by zones of growth, and finely ribbed longitudinally: the internal surfaces and sides of the horns of the two valves, are coloured fine blue or purple; in the terga, however, the internal surface is mottled with yellow. In some specimens, especially in one from Tavoy, each zone of growth was only very narrowly edged with blue. When a thin layer is removed from one of the valves, the dark blue or rather purple appears ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... talking of a very rare bird which they called Avestruz Petise. They described it as being less than the common ostrich (which is there abundant), but with a very close general resemblance. They said its colour was dark and mottled, and that its legs were shorter, and feathered lower down than those of the common ostrich. It is more easily caught by the bolas than the other species. The few inhabitants who had seen both kinds, affirmed they could distinguish them apart ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the evening air grew more motionless and cool; the russet gold of the sunshine mottled only the hill-tops now; in the valleys there was a duskier brown, deepening every moment. Margaret turned from the road and went down the fields. One did not wonder, feeling the silence of these hills and broad sweeps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various
... a true word. Caliente with his proud neck, small but shapely head, powerful but not too heavy frame, and color of mottled gray was magnificent. ...
— Frontier Boys on the Coast - or in the Pirate's Power • Capt. Wyn Roosevelt
... acquaintance had, by this time, emerged into one of those regions of brown, broken, heathery waste, thinly mottled with tree and shrub, which seem usually to distinguish the first steppes on the approach to our mountain country. Though undulating, and rising occasionally into hill and crag, the tract was yet sufficiently monotonous; rather saddened ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... face a mottled red, his mustache bristling, looked like a walrus about to charge. And Rajcik, eyes ...
— Death Wish • Robert Sheckley
... clamor, calmly aloof, yet withal watchful of eye, sits the coachman, beshawled to the ears of him, hatted to the eyes of him, and in a wondrous coat of many capes; a ponderous man, hoarse of voice and mottled of face, who, having swallowed his hot rum and water in three leisurely gulps, tosses down the glass to the waiting pot-boy (and very nearly hits a fussy little gentleman in a green spencer, who ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... cracked, and I saw the blood spurt from the front of Woodley's waistcoat. He spun round with a scream and fell upon his back, his hideous red face turning suddenly to a dreadful mottled pallor. The old man, still clad in his surplice, burst into such a string of foul oaths as I have never heard, and pulled out a revolver of his own, but before he could raise it he was looking down the ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... doors, and the little steamer lay silent, dark, and motionless in the shadow of the high Haifa bank. And beyond this one point of civilisation and of comfort there lay the limitless, savage, unchangeable desert, straw-coloured and dream-like in the moonlight, mottled over with the ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... the brickfields near Hertford to Hatfield Park; thence to the kilns on Watford Heath and at Bushey; they may also be traced from Watford to Harefield Park. These beds contain flints, usually found close to the Chalk, and consist chiefly of mottled clays, sands, and pebble-beds. Fossils are but rarely found. From the Woolwich and Reading Beds come those conglomerate masses of flint pebbles commonly called Hertfordshire plum-pudding stone. ...
— Hertfordshire • Herbert W Tompkins
... about it. And so to supper, with huge hard biscuit and stony cheese, and the full wine jug passed from mouth to mouth. To every man a fork and to every man his place within arm's length of the great basin—mottled green and white within, red brown and unglazed on the outside. But the man at the helm has an earthen plate, and the jug is passed aft to him from ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... and particular: Abeleia grandiflora, Laurestinus, Olea fragrans, Ligustrum napalense, Rosa watsoniana—— Now really could that thing be a rose? It looked more like a cross between a fern and an ostrich plume. I looked closer. Each slender light green leaf was mottled with lighter green, a miracle of exquisite tracing, and the thing was in bud, millions and millions of buds no bigger than the eggs in a shad roe. Yes, it was a rose. I looked at the drop of blood on the ball of my thumb, and thought ...
— We Three • Gouverneur Morris
... early 1930's we have seen occasional individuals with abnormal foliage—somewhat mottled, usually curled and often misshapen. Thinking that a virus might be the cause of this trouble the senior author tried grafting some of the shoots on to healthy stocks. The grafts were in no case successful because the scions were too weak. Finally he succeeded in grafting ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... He is nearly a third larger than Yowler. From the tip of each ear long tufts of black hair stand up. On each side of his face is a ruff of long hair. His tail is even shorter than Yowler's, and the tip of it is always wholly black. His general color is gray, mottled with brown. His face ruff is white with black border. Yowler's feet are large, but Tufty's are immense for his size. This is because Tufty lives where the snow lies deep for many months, and these big, broad ...
— The Burgess Animal Book for Children • Thornton W. Burgess
... with almost no nails, which, as they rested on the white table cloth, spoke of their past with embarrassing eloquence. Opposite the host, on the other side of the table, at which he was a regular guest, was the Marquis de Monpavon, but a Monpavon who in no wise resembled the mottled spectre whom we saw in the last chapter; a man of superb physique, in the prime of life, with a long, majestic nose, the haughty bearing of a great nobleman, displaying a vast breastplate of spotless ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... communing with the powerful sylvan spirits that labor there, watching with what miraculous delicacy of touch their unseen fingers weave the rich fantastic shrouds of fern and moss that deck the dead and fallen trees or anon give to the living their faint and mottled tints of green and gray;—to live thus through the summer hours, and through autumn, winter, spring watch the unrolling of the gorgeous scroll of Time,—this, you think, were living ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... darling crows, moos, jumps in his nurse's arms, and holds out a little mottled hand for a biscuit of Savoy, which mamma supplies.) "I can't help thinking, Arthur, that Rosey would have been much happier as Mrs. Hoby than she will be ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... than one there is a vast deal of "soft soap" used in Birmingham, but its inhabitants ought to be cleanly people, for the two or three manufactories of hard yellow and mottled in and near the town turn out an annual supply of over ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... remarked Sherlock Holmes, sticking a small piece of plaster over the prick on his finger. "I have to be careful," he continued, turning to me with a smile, "for I dabble with poisons a good deal." He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... time-line; the same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue above. The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of the mountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumn colors, but where the little village of Rutter's Fort stood on that other line of probability, the white towers of an apartment-city rose—the living quarters of ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper
... approach of the breeding-season the bobolink undergoes a complete change; his form changes, his color changes, his flight changes. From mottled brown or brindle he becomes black and white, earning, in some localities, the shocking name of "skunk bird"; his small, compact form becomes broad and conspicuous, and his ordinary flight is laid aside for a mincing, affected gait, in which he seems to use only the very ...
— Bird Stories from Burroughs - Sketches of Bird Life Taken from the Works of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... days they took their fill of the delight of young fatherhood and motherhood. After its morning bath Bartley was called in, and allowed to revere the baby's mottled and dimpled back as it lay face downward on the nurse's lap, feebly wiggling its arms and legs, and responding with ineffectual little sighs and gurgles to her acceptable rubbings with warm flannel. When it was fully dressed, and its long clothes pulled snugly down, and its ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... temptingly spread with little heaps of corn salad, of chicory, and of yellow endive placed in adorable contrast to the scarlet carrots, blood-red beetroot, pinky-fawn onions, and glorious orange-hued pumpkins; while ready to hand are measures of white or mottled haricot beans, of miniature Brussels sprouts, and of pink or yellow potatoes, an esculent that in France occupies a very unimportant place compared with that it holds amongst ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... house servants, stout dairymaids from the mainland, stood awhisper, their sonsy red cheeks pale and mottled with fear, and among them came the bullock-feeders; for the Red Laird fattened stock for the mainland markets, and had his own quay, where the carrying vessels moored in these days, and from the kitchen came the moaning ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... maples arched over the narrow path, and a wild canary, singing in the sun, hopped from bough to bough. A robin's cheery chirp came from another tree, and the clear notes of a thrush, with a mottled breast, were answered by another ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... the man had not yet beaten her to the level of the woman. She was dressed in a faded calico, frayed at the bottom, and with the sleeves bobbed off just above the elbows of her slim white arms. Her stockings were mottled with patches and mends, and her shoes were old, and worn ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... was mottled and crimson with anger. Madge's face was very white. She held her head high and looked her ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... mention among these precepts a new means of study, which, although it may seem trivial and almost ridiculous, is nevertheless extremely useful in arousing the mind to {105} various inventions. It is as follows: when you look at walls mottled with various stains or stones made of diverse substances, if you have to invent some scene, you may discover on them the likeness of various countries, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... down the great main staircase, and burst into the breakfast room, her face mottled with terror, her hand spread above her heart ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... He had on his waistcoat and coat now, and his hair was brushed. Arkwright could not but admit that the personality took the edge off the clothes; even the "mottled mica"—the rent was completely hid—seemed to have lost the worst of its glaze and stiffness. "You'll do, Josh," said he. "I spoke too quickly. If I hadn't accidentally been thrust into the innermost secrets of your toilet I'd never have suspected." He looked the Westerner ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from the mottled spiders of the tombs. But the face of Lazarus, patient or joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of some secret which gives ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... of Lars and Klaus were, however, peasants. They worked on their farms, and above their green pastures rose lofty mountains clad in fir-trees, dusky pines, mottled beeches, and silver birches. Klaus and Lars explored together the recesses of these mountains; together they hunted for bears; together they sailed over the blue waters of the fjord, in and out of the swift currents, and on and up into the streams fed ...
— Harper's Young People, January 20, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... that one, four dark and one light; look at this, four light and one dark; and at this, six light mottled, and one among them ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English
... from the sockets, as he peered up into the tree, apparently at some terrible object. I looked up also, and saw a large yellow snake, nearly ten feet long, let itself gradually down directly over the coffin, between me and the bright glare, (the outline of its glossy mottled skin glancing in the strong light, which gave its dark opaque body the appearance of being edged with flame, and its glittering tongue, that of a red hot wire,) with its tail round a limb of the cottontree, until its head reached within an inch of the dead man's face, which it licked with its ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... breeds are crossed, neither of which is blue or has any of the above-specified marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt suddenly to acquire these characters; for instance, I crossed some uniformly white fantails with some uniformly black barbs, and they produced mottled brown and black birds; these I again crossed together, and one grandchild of the pure white fantail and pure black barb was of as beautiful a blue colour, with the white rump, double black wing-bar, and barred and white-edged tail-feathers, as any wild rock-pigeon! ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... that the paper gets mottled or wavy, instead of evenly gradated; this is because at some places you have taken up more water in your brush than at others, or not mixed it thoroughly on the plate, or led one tint too far before replenishing with the next. Practice only will enable ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... had given a stamp of originality to an ursine physiognomy; his nose had developed till it reached the proportions of a double great-canon A; his veined cheeks looked like vine-leaves, covered, as they were, with bloated patches of purple, madder red, and often mottled hues; till altogether, the countenance suggested a huge truffle clasped about by autumn vine tendrils. The little gray eyes, peering out from beneath thick eyebrows like bushes covered with snow, ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... gradually opens into a beautiful valley and here the old abbey is charmingly situated on the banks of the river. The ruins are not extensive, but the crumbling walls, bright with ivy and wall flowers, and with the soft green lawn beneath, made a delightful picture in the mottled sunshine and shadows of the ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... and by and by came the sunset on the Sweetwater Valley, and a new heaven and a new earth were revealed to the sons of men. Like a chariot of fire, the great sun rolled in all its gorgeous beauty down the west. The eastern sky grew radiant with a pink splendor, and every brown and mottled stretch of distant landscape was touched with golden light or deepened into richest purple, or set with a roseate bound of flame. Somewhere far away, a feathery gray mist hung like a silvery veil toning down the earth from the noonday glare to the sunset glory. Down ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... mottled with patches of dead grass and weeds. Along it, here and there, like kernels of seed scattered on fallow ground, a sprinkling of one-story houses. This the background. In the midst of it all, covering his lawn, overflowing into the yards of his neighbours, ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... as far as the cloudless zenith, and the long strip of sea lay like a rosy ribbon across the horizon. From the coast inland stretched dreary sand-plains, dotted over with thick clumps at mimosa scrub and mottled patches of thorny bush. No tree broke the monotony of that vast desert. The dull, dusty hue of the thickets, and the yellow glare of the sand, were the only colours, save at one point, where, from a distance, it seemed that a land-slip of snow-white stones had shot itself across a low foot-hill. ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... generally to be found in splendid isolation; one such I visited and I marvelled at its appearance; it resembled nothing so much as the mottled trunk of a decayed plane-tree except for its girth. "Futurist art," explained the major deprecatingly as I stared at its daubed surface; "it makes it unrecognisable." It certainly did. Close by were what looked at a distance like a bed of copper ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... you the ladies he woos are sought For form or color or beauty's sake?— That, touched with sorrow, he mourns to-day Some mottled ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... is almost a passion, O passion immoral for pie! Unknown are the ways that they fashion, Unknown and unseen of the eye. The pie that is marbled and mottled, The pie that digests with a sigh: For all is not Bass that is bottled, And all is ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... marbles, feldspar and other stones. It is as hard as natural rock and as smooth as half-polished marble. A tessellated fret pattern is made along the borders of the corridor floor, consisting of triple rows of smooth cubes of marble inserted in the cement. The square balusters are of red-mottled marble, with base and entablature of dull rose. The square corner pillars support figures allegorizing the six divisions of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... brightness worthy Of her? 'Tis what she wishes most; witness Her confusion and her telltale blushes. Do me justice, man; my thoughts are pure And dwell on lawful marriage only. Thou, thou Alone, couldst see impurity in that. I spoke of thee, man, of thee; and who Beside thyself would think a mottled thought Could touch a maiden linked to thee ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith
... with our firewood, our locust-beans, and our armadillo—the last of which horrified my wife, when I told her I was going to eat it. It proved a great curiosity to the boys, however, who amused themselves by running their fingers all over its mottled armour. But I had something that amused the little Mary and Luisa still more— the delicious, honey-like pulp from the pods of the locust-tree, which they greedily ate. The seeds we extracted from the pulp, intending to roast them as soon as we ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... generations, and ornamented with a ship under full sail on one side and a coat-of-arms on the other, not now remembered, the whole article having recently disappeared in some way or direction unknown and untraceable unless by the most indefatigable of ceramists. The third is a smaller pitcher in mottled unglazed clay, antique in shape and ornamentation, except that a figure in the costume of Queen Bess's time stands cheek-by-jowl with a group resembling that on the Portland Vase. This anachronism caused us to be puzzled by the word Herculaneum impressed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various
... furnished with a cookstove, a table, a small side-board, an old conch and a few chairs. The floor was splintery and only partly covered by frayed rugs and worn oil cloth. The paper on the walls was a dark mottled green. The ceiling was ...
— Mary Minds Her Business • George Weston
... carefully polished. A disconnected meander of incised lines encircles the rather high neck, and parts of the body and its attached features are painted red. As usual this color was applied along with the slip and in polishing has become much mixed up with it, giving a mottled effect. The handles take the form of curious human-appearing figures which sit against the constricted neck, their heads supporting the rim and their feet resting upon the shoulder of the vessel. In one case the hands ...
— Ancient art of the province of Chiriqui, Colombia • William Henry Holmes
... again, they dipped playfully in tightening circles toward the plot-mottled earth. The fields expanded beneath them, and the leader brought up and hovered over a farm road whose dust already stirred in the ...
— A Fine Fix • R. C. Noll
... older manner. Mather wrote in the full and pregnant style of Taylor, Milton, Browne, Fuller, and Burton, a style ponderous with learning and stiff with allusions, digressions, conceits, anecdotes, and quotations from the Greek and the Latin. A page of the Magnalia is almost as richly mottled with italics as one from the Anatomy of Melancholy, and the quaintness which Mather caught from his favorite Fuller disports itself in textual pun and marginal anagram and the fantastic sub-titles of his books and chapters. He speaks of Thomas ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... midst of which loomed up a dark-gray rock, like a lone sentinel to the rapid waters, and the scene made his heart bound again. There he had angled for trout for many a summer, and looked down delighted into the music-breathing waters, watching the silver and mottled fishes as they went trooping swiftly past, like guests to a fairy wedding. The tears gushed into his eyes as old recollections came thronging to his mind, and he faltered in his determination. He turned, and took one step toward home, but vicious impulses triumphed, and the rainbow ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... possible tourist, he witnessed the arrival of a tubby schooner, dirty gray and blotched as though she had run through fire. Her two sticks were bare and brown, her snugged canvas drab, her brasses dull, her anchor mottled with rust. There was only one clean spot in the picture—the ship's wash (all white) that fluttered on a line stretched between the two masts. The half-nude brown bodies of the crew informed Ah Cum that the schooner ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... gone far before a ruddy-hued fox tried to back out of their way on the trail, and managed successfully to merge his color with that of the yellow-brown verdure about him. Further on, Alec suddenly lifted his rifle and aimed, but the furtive mottled animal that had been crouching along the mottled limb of a tree leaped back with the least possible noise or disturbance of the foliage, and ...
— Girl Scouts in the Adirondacks • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... had spent below, her features had become frightfully changed. Her face was livid and mottled with purple spots, her eyes were distended and glittered with a strange brilliancy. She let the plates which she held fall upon ...
— The Honor of the Name • Emile Gaboriau
... without mottling. After respiration they expand and occupy the whole thorax, and closely surround the heart and thymus gland. The portions containing air are of a light brick-red colour, and crepitate under the finger. The lungs are mottled from the presence of islands of aerated tissue, surrounded by arteries and veins. The weight of the lungs before respiration is about 550 grains, after an hour's respiration 900 grains; but this test is of little value. The ratio of the weight ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... could once obtain an aedileship, and mount to the higher offices of the State, he would in time become the procurator or proconsul of a province, which he might pillage almost at his will. Enter the house of a Felix or a Verres. Those splendid pillars of mottled green marble were dug by the forced labour of Phrygians from the quarry of Synnada; that embossed silver, those murrhine vases, those jeweled cups, those masterpieces of antique sculpture, have all been torn ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... tables with gollops of wicker; plain black wooden tables that were like kitchen tables once removed; folding-tables that may have been suitable to card-playing, if you didn't play anything more exciting than casino. Flat silver that was heavily plated except where it was likely to wear. Tea-pots of mottled glaze, and cream-jugs with knobs of gilt, and square china ash-trays on which one instinctively expected to find the legend "Souvenir of Niagara Falls." Too many cake-baskets and too few sugar-bowls. Dark blue plates with warts on the edges and melancholy landscapes painted in the ...
— The Innocents - A Story for Lovers • Sinclair Lewis
... only through and for the good of each being, yet characters and structures, which we are apt to consider as of very trifling importance, may thus be acted on. When we see leaf-eating insects green, and bark-feeders mottled gray; the Alpine ptarmigan white in winter, the red grouse the color of heather,—we must believe that these tints are of service to these birds and insects in preserving them from danger. Grouse, if not destroyed at some period of their lives, would increase in countless numbers; they are known ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... days we sat shivering around the fires, now and then casting looks of gloomy inquiry around the sky. The same dull grey for an answer, mottled with flakes slanting earthward, for it still continued to know. Not a bright ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... aren't we?" he said, as he, too, displayed himself, and then he followed Kitty to the child's bedside. She bent over the baby, removed a corner of the cot-blanket that might tease his cheek, touched the mottled hand softly, removed a light that seemed to her ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... below gave place gradually to a wilderness—ugly brown and pock-marked. The roads became bare and dented, the fields were mottled by shell-holes, the woods looked like scraggy patches of burnt furze. It was a district of great deeds and glorious deaths—the desolation surrounding the Fronts ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott
... Mrs. Woodchuck answered. "He's mottled—that means about the same as spotted," she explained. "I've heard him called the 'tiger among birds.' But whether it's because of the spots, or because he's so fierce, I ...
— The Tale of Billy Woodchuck • Arthur Scott Bailey
... that punched on the check. The cashier explained that this always gives a pleasant surprise to the customers, and has proved such a good advertising dodge that the proprietor made it a habit. And I saw, in a clothing dealer's window on Ninth Street, some fuzzy caps for men, mottled purple and ochre, that proved that the adventurous spirit has not died in the ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... of them home, and put it in a jar of water, it will expand into a delicate compound flower, which can neither be described nor painted, of long pellucid tentacles, hanging like a thin bluish cloud over a disk of mottled brown and grey. ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... marks, the mongrel offspring are very apt to acquire some of these characters. Mr. Darwin gives instances which he observed himself. He crossed some white fantails with some black barbs, and the mongrels were black, brown, or mottled. He also crossed a barb with a spot, which is a white bird with a red tail and red spot on the forehead, and the mongrel offspring were dusky and mottled. On now crossing these two sets of mongrels with each other, he obtained a bird of a beautiful ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the front as La Panne, but the windows rattled incessantly from the bombardment of Ypres. I glanced through one of the windows. The red tiles I had grown to know so well were not in evidence. Most of the roofs were blue, a weathered and mottled blue, very lovely, but, like everything else about the town, exceedingly cold to ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sounds but dimly. The fire was filled with pictures; her thoughts were wandering here and there, bridging the gap between the past and the misty future. After awhile the savory odor of the young speckled rooster, that had fought all the other chickens but was now stewing in a mottled blue-and-white granite pan, smote her nostrils and won her thoughts from dreaming. She sat up and pushed back her hair like one ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... hour they burned brightly yet, trying hard to pierce the bitter cold outside with a ray of warmth and cheer. Where the lamps in the delicatessen store made a mottled streak of brightness across the flags, two little boys stood with their noses flattened against the window. The warmth inside, and the lights, had made little islands of clear space on the frosty pane, affording glimpses of the wealth within, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... had brought over from home. It was set for Surrey, Hodges told me once, and no manner of use, consequently, but very settled and home-like to see, if you understand me. In the middle was an old stone basin, all mottled and chipped, and the water ran out from a lion's mouth in some kind of brown metal, and trickled down its mane and jaws and splashed away. We cleaned it out, she and I, one day, pretending we had help, and Hodges went to town and got us some ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... one side of the stem and hanging down one over another. Floral-leaves sitting, taper-pointed. The numerous purple blossoms hanging down, mottled within; as wide and nearly half as long as the finger of a common-sized glove, are sufficient marks whereby the most ignorant may distinguish this from every other British plant; and the leaves ought not to be gathered for use but when the plant ...
— An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses - With Practical Remarks on Dropsy and Other Diseases • William Withering
... ancestors,—none to speak of. You could see that in the coarse, shaggy hair, like a door mat; the awkward ungainly walk, the legs doubling under him; the drooping tail with bare spots down its length, suggesting past indignities. He was not a large dog—only about as high as a chair seat; he had mottled lips, too, and sharp, sawlike teeth. One ear was gone, perhaps in his puppyhood, when some one had tried to make a terrier of him and had stopped when half done. The other ear, however, was active enough for two. It would curl forward in attention ...
— A Gentleman Vagabond and Some Others • F. Hopkinson Smith |
