"Speckled" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain heavy, brooding air relieved of moroseness by twinkling black eyes marked him as a man with a personality. He was short and thick set, with shaggy, iron-gray eyebrows, a smooth-shaven face speckled on one side as by a powder scar. Beneath a thin-lipped mouth a stubborn chin protruded. He was dressed in a flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, fastened by a black belt. He had the self-sufficient air of the ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... held her little trembling hands fast in his cool grasp, while the letter that Holroyd had written in Ceylon with such wild secret hopes flared away to a speckled grey rag, and floated lightly up the chimney. 'Too late now, Dolly!' he said, with a ring of triumph in his voice. 'You would only have blistered those pretty little fingers of yours, my child. And now,' ...
— The Giant's Robe • F. Anstey
... life the range is greater. I have mentioned the ever-present bats, and dozens of them were seen. There were also small, white eyeless salamanders, small, yellow, speckled salamanders, with signs of eyes but no sight; also a jet black salamander, which like the rest, was blind. The bats were of two species—the common brown bat and the larger light grey or yellow species. But this was not the time of the year to see many ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... at the farm, I found a sparrow's nest in a small bunch of hard-hack, a few rods from the cow-pasture bars, with four eggs, resembling, only a little larger than, speckled garden beans; and I visited it every morning, till the sprawling, skinny little chicks were hatched. But on the third morning the nest was empty; something had taken them. Addison said that it was most likely a crow, but possibly a snake. ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... on moors or other waste lands. It builds a shallow nest composed of twigs lined with fibrous roots, on low trees or thick underwood, only a few feet from the ground, and lays four or five eggs of a bluish-white colour speckled and streaked with purple. The young remain with their parents during autumn and winter, and pair in spring, not building their nests, however, till May. In spring and summer they feed on the buds of trees and bushes, choosing, it is said, such only ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... if such holy song Inwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold; And speckled vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous sin will melt from earthly mould; And hell itself will pass away. And leave her dolorous mansions to the ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman
... soon be washed out? let me see; When screech-owls croak upon the chimney-tops, And the strange cricket i' th' oven sings and hops, When yellow spots do on your hands appear, Be certain then you of a corse shall hear. Out upon 't, how 'tis speckled! h' 'as handled a toad sure. Cowslip water is good for the memory: Pray, buy me three ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... peculiar call. Instantly there came tumbling into the hut, until it nearly overflowed, a strange medley of creatures,—hares, mice, birds, kittens, squirrels. Last of all peered into the doorway a deer and her little speckled fawn. ...
— John of the Woods • Abbie Farwell Brown
... boating!—row out far beyond the bay, right up to the town! One day, as he rowed along the coast, beyond the bay, he noticed that the clay and flag-stone formation in the hills and ridges was speckled with grey. Helene had told him how extraordinary it looked out there now that the trees were gone, but as they would have had to come out in the boat to see it he had let the remark pass. Now he decided to land there. The shore rose steeply from ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... explained, we must be well to the north of the speckled bottom before it was safe to head for the shore, and away we went again. In about an hour Burroughs quietly asked for another sounding. Again she was gently stopped, and this time ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... farm-house, with its stables and other outhouses, with its garden and fields, and horses and cattle! The distance was too great for us to distinguish what sort of cattle they were, but there appeared to be many kinds, both red, and black, and speckled. We could see several figures of men and boys—four of them in all—moving about the enclosures, and there was a woman near the door of the house. It was impossible in the distance to tell whether they were white people, ...
— The Desert Home - The Adventures of a Lost Family in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... of a summer's morning, and the little birds had begun to chirp their matins, and the lark to brush the dew from her speckled breast, waiting for the first gaze of the sun. The old man pressed the infant closer to his bosom as he drew nigh to the steep acclivity, the solitary dwelling of the eagle. He kissed the babe; then looking round, fearful of intruders, he laid the wicker cradle at the foot of the precipice, ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... in the trees, there were six or seven thrushes, all declaring that they were the best singers, and had the most speckled necks; and up in the sky the swallows were saying that they had the ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... nest with insect food and attending to its sanitation; the wastage being taken away and dropped at a distance from the nest at almost unbelievable short intervals, proving the wonderful rapidity of digestion and the immense amount of labor required to supply the mill inside the little speckled throats ...
— Ohio Arbor Day 1913: Arbor and Bird Day Manual - Issued for the Benefit of the Schools of our State • Various
... the speckled mirror beneath the antlers and surveyed herself anxiously. Her own travelling suit of dark green tweed, with its white silk shirt, was as carelessly perfect as his own, and the little green turban, with its shaded, drooping ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... lugging five plump speckled fellows, weighing some seven and a half pounds, out of his creel, and laying them out for the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... be it," said he: "the lubber! to take it for a man's head. Why, it is nothing but a thundering old bladder, speckled white." ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... in garden gladioli was brought about by Max Leichtlin, Baden Baden, Germany, who extensively hybridized the best Gandavensis varieties with G. Saundersii, then a newly introduced species characterized by large widely opened scarlet flowers speckled with white on the lower divisions. The resulting seedlings, without doubt the finest strain of modern times, were bought by V. H. Hallock and Son, Queens, N. Y., then the most extensive American bulb growers, and for many ...
— The Gladiolus - A Practical Treatise on the Culture of the Gladiolus (2nd Edition) • Matthew Crawford
... not seem to mind the smell, and they love the slime, and they had played there for several days in great peace before the unfortunate accident of the June baby's falling in and being brought back looking like a green and speckled frog herself, revealed where it was they had persuaded Seraphine to let them spend their mornings. Then there was woe and lamentation, for I was sure they would all have typhoid fever, and I put them mercilessly to bed, ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... don't act like there was anybody dyin' around here. An' by chaowder! this smell is jest ther same ez I struck when I crawled under dad's old barn to find where the speckled hen was layin', an' crunched up some aigs that hed bin there two or three months. Ef that Dutchman loaded his pistol with a ripe aig an' shot me in the neck, I'll paound the stuffin' aout of ...
— Frank Merriwell's Chums • Burt L. Standish
... chambers. In that where I lay, there was just room for two beds, without curtains or bedstead, an old rotten table covered with dried figs, and a couple of crazy chairs. The walls had been once white-washed: but were now hung with cobwebs, and speckled with dirt of all sorts; and I believe the brick-floor had not been swept for half a century. We supped in an outward room suitable in all respects to the chamber, and fared villainously. The provision was very ill-dressed, ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... called over the banister one afternoon a week later, "there's some one at the door." Anthony, who had been lolling in the hammock on the sun-speckled south porch, strolled around to the front of the house. A foreign car, large and impressive, crouched like an immense and saturnine bug at the foot of the path. A man in a soft pongee suit, with cap to match, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the most remarkable of the different species of snake that infest the western wilds. It is of the small speckled kind, and about eight inches long. When any thing approaches, it flattens itself in a moment, and its spots, which are of various dyes, become visibly brighter through rage; at the same time it blows from its mouth, with great force, a subtle wind, that ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... after one of these informative intervals, succeeding a brilliantly topped drive by the lecturer, that Patricia Whipple, full in the flooding current of Merle's discourse, turned her speckled face aside and flagrantly winked a greenish eye at Wilbur Cowan; whereupon Wilbur Cowan winked his own left eye, that one being farthest from the speaker. The latter, having concluded his remarks for the moment, went to find his ball, and the ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... flashed into points of light. Now the leaping, glittering sea was so bright it made one's eyes ache to look at it. The shepherd drew a pipe, the bowl as small as an acorn, out of his breast pocket, fumbled for a chunk of speckled tobacco, pared off a few shavings and stuffed the bowl. He was a grave, fine-looking old man. As he lit up and the blue smoke wreathed his head, the dog, ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... and hollowed into deep holes filled with water, in which were abundance of fishes and some molluscs. Some of these cavities also contained sea-snakes from four to five feet long, which were described as having the head "hooded like the cobra de capello, and of a light grey colour, slightly speckled. They coiled themselves like serpents on land, and darted at poles thrust in among them. The Singhalese who accompanied the party, said that they not only bit venomously, but crushed the limb of any intruder ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... about the top of his broad flat desk, and the floor beside the waste-basket was flaked with the remains of various futile lines and epigrams. The ash-pan was littered with burnt matches, ends of cigars and pipe tobacco, while the ash-crumbs speckled all dark objects, not excepting the green rug under his feet. Warrington smoked incessantly while at work, now a cigarette, now a cigar, now a pipe. Specialists declare with cold authoritative positiveness that the use of tobacco blunts the ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... were bare. But the line of demarcation between the Old Red Sandstone and the granitic districts formed also a separating line between an earlier and later harvest; the fields of the less kindly subsoil derived from the primary rocks were, I could see, still speckled with sheaves; and, where the land lay high, or the exposure was unfavorable, there were reapers at work. All along in the course of my journey northward from Aberdeen I continued to find the country covered with shocks, and laborers employed among them; until, crossing the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... arms above her head. The loose sleeves of her gown fell back and disclosed arms speckled as if from an ...
— The Bell in the Fog and Other Stories • Gertrude Atherton
... Christiania are remarkably beautiful. From the quiet basin of the fjord, which vanishes between blue, interlocking islands to the southward, the land rises gradually on all sides, speckled with smiling country-seats and farm-houses, which trench less and less on the dark evergreen forests as they recede, until the latter keep their old dominion and sweep in unbroken lines to the summits of the mountains on either hand. The ancient citadel ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the wound. Next Anger rushed, his eyes on fire. The moping Owl doth to the Moon complain. True Hope is swift and flies with swallow's wings. Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated needs but to be seen. Speckled Vanity will sicken soon ...
— The Art Of Writing & Speaking The English Language - Word-Study and Composition & Rhetoric • Sherwin Cody
... Five speckled thrushes, In leafy bushes, Singing sweet songs to the hot summer sky. In and out twitting, Here and there flitting, Happy in life as ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... woman appeared with twenty brightly polished daggers and swords," we read in the Irish Tain Bo Cuailgne of the Badhbh or Banshee who appeared to Meidhbh, "together with seven braids for the dead, of bright gold, in her right hand; a speckled garment of green ground, fastened by a bodkin at the breast under her fair, ruddy countenance, enveloped her form; her teeth were so new and bright that they appeared like pearls artistically set in her gums; like the ripe berry of the mountain ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... for Acorn Island in good season, with a nice string of speckled trout and some two dozen white perch—the promise of a splendid "fish-fry" that evening. On the way they passed the heavy canoe seen several ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... scarcely moving current, and gaze upon the leafy groves of the sub-aqueous wilderness lit up by the rays of the sun, and watch the fish moving singly or in shoals at various depths—the bearded barbel, the spotted trout, the shimmering bream, and the bronzen tench. Watch, too, the speckled water-snakes gliding upon the gravel or lurking like the ancient serpent in mimic gardens of Eden. Mark all the varied life and wondrous beauty of nature there. Above all, do not hurry, for little is seen by those ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... but I answer no, not thine, with respect to justification from the curse of the law, unless it be as perfect as the justice it is yielded to, and as the law that doth command it. But thine is not such a righteousness: no, thine is speckled, thine is spotted, thine makes thee to look like a speckled bird in ...
— The Pharisee And The Publican • John Bunyan
... He put his gnarled hand over one of hers. Rosie looked up curiously from the speckled beans she was counting into a bag, and then went on singing to herself an unformed, baby song. "Folks'll talk," said Enoch gently. "They do now. A man an' woman ain't never too old to be hauled up, an' made to answer for livin'. ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... GUIDE; or Repository of Designs for every article of Household Furniture in the newest and most approved taste. A complete facsimile reproduction of this rare work, containing nearly 300 charming Designs on 128 Plates. Small folio, bound in speckled cloth, gilt, old style, price L2 10s. net. (1794.) Original copies when met with ...
— Art in Needlework - A Book about Embroidery • Lewis F. Day
... called Dan. "This is one of our own pigeons—right out of dad's cote. This is the speckled ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... motionless marble there steeped in the diffuse light falling from the glazed roof on high. Looking southwards, some holland screens barred half of the nave, which showed ambery in the sunlight and was speckled at both ends by the dazzling blue and crimson of stained-glass windows. Just a few visitors, tired already, occupied the brand-new chairs and seats, shiny with fresh paint; while the flights of sparrows, who dwelt above, among the iron girders, swooped down, quite at home, raking up the sand and ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... us, Heitman, is a goddess that wears a speckled garment and has black wings. She can boast of no temples, and no priests cry to her anywhere, because she is the only deity whom no prayers can move or any sacrifices placate. I allude, sir, to the eldest ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... furthermore remarkable in that they are laid, not one by one, as a hen lays, but in thousands, and in water, forming an enormous speckled mass. Take a portion of such a mass and watch it. Day by day you will see the black spot gradually assume a distinct shape (fig. 1, A): a little later a head and tail can ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... his tail on the stackyard wall, just as they reached Garum Firs, was enough to divert the mind temporarily from personal grievances. And this was only the beginning of beautiful sights at Garum Firs. All the farmyard life was wonderful there,—bantams, speckled and topknotted; Friesland hens, with their feathers all turned the wrong way; Guinea fowls that flew and screamed and dropped their pretty spotted feathers; pouter pigeons and a tame magpie; nay, a goat, and a wonderful brindled dog, half mastiff, half bulldog, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... catching sight of something grey that went rustling swiftly downwards between the straws. She thrust her hand down, thinking it was a field-mouse, and caught the thing. A speckled toad wriggled in her fingers, lustily enough, but it was a toad that had seen tragedy. The keen edge of a scythe must have caught it, for one side of its head was shorn away; the eye had just been missed, but the inside of the poor little animal's mouth and throat lay exposed, ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... he had an irresistible desire to hop, and he was very thirsty. There was a rivulet near, and instead of walking to it he leaped, and stooping to drink, he saw himself reflected in its smooth surface. No longer did he see Arthur; no longer was he a mortal boy. Instead of this, a frog—a green speckled frog, with great bulging eyes and a fishy mouth—looked up at him. He tried to call, to shout, but in vain; he could only croak, and this in the most dismal manner. What was he to do? Sit and stare about him, try to catch flies, plunge down into the mud—charming ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... yellow puppy, And I've got a speckled hen, I've got a lot of little Spotted piggies in a pen. I've got a gun that used to shoot, Another one that squirts, I've got some horehound candy And a pair of woolen shirts. I've got a little rubber ball They use for playing golf, ...
— The Peter Patter Book of Nursery Rhymes • Leroy F. Jackson
... they get to be speckled, Uncle Remus?" asked the little boy, seeing that the old man was disposed to leave the subject and devote his attention to ...
— Nights With Uncle Remus - Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation • Joel Chandler Harris
... degrees 23 minutes 55 seconds. At our last camp, I observed a Platycercus, of the size of the Moreton Bay Rosella, with blackfront, yellow shoulders, and sea-green body; the female had not the showy colours of the male, and the young ones were more speckled on the back. I believe it to be the Platycercus Brownii, GOULD. A black and white Ptilotis, the only stuffed specimen of which was taken by a kite almost out of Mr. Gilbert's hand, was very frequent at the wells ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... came to the Phasis; there they fought with dark-faced Kolchians even in the presence of Aietes. And there the queen of keenest darts, the Cyprus-born, first brought to men from Olympus the frenzied bird, the speckled wry-neck[15], binding it to a four-spoked wheel without deliverance, and taught the son of Aison to be wise in prayers and charms, that he might make Medea take no thought to honour her parents, and longing for Hellas might drive her by persuasion's ...
— The Extant Odes of Pindar • Pindar
... frozen thing, For no more nesting, For no more speckled eggs In pattered cup of clay,— Soon your song shall come to this You who make the twilight yours, And echoes of the abbey, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... children! A little child would go out into the garden, and there would be a little tree laden with blossoms, and the little fellow would lean against it, and there would be a bird on one of the boughs, singing and swinging, and thinking about four little speckled eggs, warmed by the breast of its mate—and singing and swinging, and the music in in happy waves rippling out of the tiny throat, and the flowers blossoming, the air filled with perfume, and the great white clouds floating in the sky, and the little boy would lean up against the tree ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... much. Maybe they'd try you and maybe they wouldn't. Anyways, they'd sure wind up by hangin' you by the neck till you was as dead as the speckled rooster." ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... fatal blow, he would probably grow an old man when he could no longer come from his home to the ministry, sit in the same chair and copy a certain number of pages. Poiret's eyes were dim, his glance weak and lifeless, his skin discolored and wrinkled, gray in tone and speckled with bluish dots; his nose flat, his lips drawn inward to the mouth, where a few defective teeth still lingered. His gray hair, flattened to the head by the pressure of his hat, gave him the look of an ecclesiastic,—a ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac
... of sabbath drives, in fair June mornin's, through the old lane alder and willow fringed, with the brook runnin' along on one side of it; where the speckled trout broke the Sunday quiet by dancin' up through the brown and gold shadows of the cool water, and the odor of the pine woods jest beyend comin' fresh and sweet ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... school she made an excuse to go down to see Billy. He was engaged in hulling walnuts by driving them through holes in a board. His hands were protected by a pair of Margaret's old gloves, but he had speckled his face generously. He appeared ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... which looks very picturesque on the map, and sometimes striking, as where Lynn stretches out a slender arm with knobby Nahant at the end, like a New Zealand war club. We sit and watch this shore as we glide by with a placid delight. Its curves and low promontories are getting to be speckled with villages and dwellings, like the shores of the Bay of Naples; we see the white spires, the summer cottages of wealth, the brown farmhouses with an occasional orchard, the gleam of a white beach, and now and then ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... I have made this trip so often, I know. St. Petersburg to Paris, a few weeks on the Riviera, then back by Constantinople and the Crimea. It is nothing. I remember last year—" He pushed a large pearl pin more deeply into his speckled tie and began a story that proved chiefly how luxuriously he traveled. His eyes tried to draw the whole end of the table into his circle, but while the Armenian listened politely, with smiles and bows, Dr. Stahl turned to the Irishman again. It Vas ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... hear the music float Along the gloaming lea; 'Tis sweet to hear the blackbird's note Come pealing frae the tree; To see the lambkins lightsome race— The speckled kid in wanton chase— The young deer cower in lonely place, Deep in her flowing den; But sweeter far the bonny face That smiles in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... or dirty-looking, or sandy. Persevere, however, in trying to bring it to evenness with the fine point, removing any single speck or line that may be too black, with the point of the knife: you must not scratch the whole with the knife as you do the ink. If you find the texture very speckled-looking, lighten it all over with india-rubber, and recover it again with sharp, and excessively fine touches of the pencil point, bringing the parts that are too pale to perfect evenness ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... called the Knight, scratched in the earth, and thereupon began to crow merrily, in order to make it known that he had something nice to invite to, and as two neat grey-speckled hens sprang towards him, he let first one grain of corn and then another fall out of his beak, of which, agreeably to a clever hen-instinct, they availed themselves without ceremony or compliments. How easily the ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... out by the alley-gate until he came down-stairs and told us how badly Phil was burned. His front hair and eyebrows and beautiful long curly lashes were singed off, and his face was so full of powder that it was as speckled as a turkey egg. The grains would have to be picked out one by one,—a slow and painful proceeding. The doctor could not tell how badly his eyes were hurt until next day, but thought he would have to lie in a dark room for a week at least, with his eyelids covered ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston
... to most of them. The cock is Peter, of course. A much-speckled hen is Dolly Varden. A slim, trim thing that dogs Peter's heels she calls Cleopatra. Another hen—the mellowest-voiced one of all—she addresses as Bernhardt. One thing I have noted: whenever she and the ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... brook or speckled trout, for it has no speckles, and it's not a relative of the late William Basse, for it isn't deep enough in the body, nor a perch, for it's too big and has no stripes. It's either a salmon trout or ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... he's been up to?" thought Little Jack Rabbit, and, being a curious little bunny, he hopped over to find out. Carefully peeping through the tall grass he saw a nice round nest, but it was empty. Only a gray speckled feather was left. ...
— Little Jack Rabbit's Adventures • David Cory
... said, holding up his hand for silence. "I've just composed a tune called 'The Speckled Alligator.' It's in patch-time, which is much superior to rag-time, and I've composed it in honor of the Patchwork Girl, who ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... entered the thorny enclosure, which was almost a rude teepee, and, tucked away in the furthermost corner, lay something with a trout-like, speckled, tawny coat. She bent over it. The fawn was apparently sleeping. Presently its eyes moved a bit, and a shiver ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... darkness fell. He saw they were gesticulating to him wildly, running back towards him. A great shouting came from across the ways. Then it seemed as though the whole face of the darkened building opposite was lined and speckled with red-clad men. And they were pointing over to him and shouting. "The Sleeper! Save the Sleeper!" ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... [said] 'One of these two garments is pure white: the other is speckled of divers colors; he layeth them down before him, he layeth also a speckled cap down before him at his feet; he hath no cap on his head: his hair is long and yellow, but his face cannot be seen.... Now he putteth on his pied coat and his pied cap, he casteth ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... of downy, half-grown birds, which responded with a low, anxious piping to his alluring cluck, then scattered with sudden alarm, only to return again in the same curious, cautious fashion as before. Now and then there was a great flapping of wings in the trees overhead, and a heavy brown and black speckled mountain-hen alighted close to the man's head, stretched out her neck toward him, cocked her head, called her scattered brood together, and departed with ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... were stripping off their clothes. Then one went to the shallows at the lower end of the pool and began to beat the surface with a leafy branch, while the other two crouched on the bowlders in midstream. Suddenly, one of the boys plunged his head and arms into the water and emerged with a beautiful speckled trout clutched tightly in both hands. He had seen the fish swim beneath the rock where it was cornered and had caught ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... place. "And take that," she cried, "for a present, you father of a speckled toad!" And seizing the heavy quarto Bible from the table, she flung it with all her might full in his face. It happened to hit him on the bridge of ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... channel through the solid rock. In the afternoon they caught in the falls some of both kinds of the white fish, and half a dozen trout from sixteen to twenty-three inches long, precisely resembling in form and the position of its fins the mountain or speckled trout of the United States, except that the specks of the former are of a deep black, while those of the latter are of a red or gold colour: they have long sharp teeth on the palate and tongue, and generally a small speck of red on each side ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... a well-thumbed volume of the wisdom of the inspired pagan Slave, Epictetus, in the hand, and the eyes fixed, not on any printed page, but on a spray of warmly- blushing almond blossom, where a well-fed thrush, ruffling its softly speckled breast, was singing a wild strophe concerning its mate, which, could human skill have languaged its meaning, might have given ideas to a nation's laureate. Yet John Walden found unalloyed happiness in this apparently vague and vacant way. There was ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... week) with having altered the wise line 'Cold as a lizard in a sunny stream' to 'Cold as a newt hid in a shady brook'—for 'what do you know about newts?' he asked of the author—who thereupon confessed. But never try and catch a speckled gray lizard when we are in Italy, love, and you see his tail hang out of the chink of a wall, his winter-house—because the strange tail will snap off, drop from him and stay in your fingers—and though ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... between her beauty-breathing lips. As I swung aloft, with a motion gentle as that of the cradled infant, and looked out upon the splendours beneath and around me, my bosom swelled with the most rapturous emotions. Everywhere, as far as my eye could reach, the transparent and beryl-dyed waters were speckled with white sails, actually "blushing rosy red" with the morning beams. Far, far astern, hull down, were the huge dull sailers, spreading all their studding-sails to the wind, reminding me of frightened swans with expanded wings. Conspicuous among these were the two men-of-war brigs, ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... from day to day, A green nest full of pleasant shade, Wherein three speckled eggs were laid: But when they should have hatched in May, The two old birds had grown afraid ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... height, and find it again on the other side at the village of Breglio. Here we come to the river Roia, which, after receiving the branch on which is Sospello, leads to the sea at Ventimiglia. The Roia is about twelve yards wide, and abounds with speckled trout. Were a road made from Breglio, along the side of the Roia to Ventimiglia, it might turn the commerce of Turin to this last place instead of Nice; because it would avoid the mountains of Braus and Brois, leaving only ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... or in the nooks and eaves of buildings. A pair of London sparrows once made their nest in the mouth of the bronze lion over Northumberland House, at Charing Cross. They are very much attached to their nest, and after the little speckled eggs are laid will cling to it even under difficulties. The sailors of a coasting vessel once lying in a Scotch port frequently observed two sparrows flying about the topmast. One morning the vessel ...
— Harper's Young People, February 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... hearken in the house of Atli's weal, Save the feet slow tramping onward, and the rattling of the steel, And the song of the glorious Gunnar, that rang as clearly now As the speckled storm-cock singeth from the scant-leaved hawthorn-bough When the sun is dusking over and the March snow pelts the land. There stood the mighty Gunnar with sword and shield in hand, There stood the shieldless Hogni with set unangry eyes, And watched the wall of war-shields o'er the dead men's rampart ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... were the corn-flowers peeping at him with dewy blue eyes; the vineyards, where the fruit hung faintly touched with bloom; the field birds, the rosy-breasted finches, the thrush, as speckled as her own eggs—no, nor did he hear them; for the silence that weighed on his heart came from his heart. Yet all the summer wind was athrill with harmony. Thousands of feathered throats swelled and bubbled melody, from the clouds ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... spring shone on blossoms and grasses where the world of the stream-side sent forth a warm, living smell. The wildness of the upland moors stretched down into the valley below them. There glimmered blue-green patches of bracken, speckled with the red and white hides of calves which fed and scampered dew-lap deep; and the fern was all sheened with light where the sunshine brightened its polished leaves. The stream wound through the midst, bedecked and adorned with purple bugle flowers, bridged with dog-roses and honeysuckles, ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... if you studied your history, has been tried many times and always with disaster. The bomb-torn soil of that black land is speckled white with the bones of World armies who were sent on landing invasions before you or I was born. But it was only heroic folly, one gun popping out of a tunnel mouth can slay a thousand men. To pursue the gunners into ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... is he, the best of warriors, drives The golden chariot of the sun Among the speckled ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... Nimble, kept close beside her. Slowly as his mother moved, he found the traveling none too easy. And he was glad when she stopped in a pocket-like clearing. There she spoke to a proud speckled bird who was sitting on a log and amusing himself by spreading his tail feathers into a ...
— The Tale of Nimble Deer - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... see yon yard sae green, Speckled wi' mony a mossy stane? A few short weeks o' pain shall fly, An' asleep in that bed shall thy ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... architecture. Milkweed, lint and its strips of fine bark are glued to twigs, and form the exterior of the nest. Its inner lining is made of the silky down on dandelion-balls woven together with horse-hair. In this dainty nest are laid four or five creamy white eggs, speckled with lilac tints and red-browns. The unwelcome egg of the Cow-bird is often found in the Yellow-bird's nest, but this Warbler builds a floor over the egg, repeating the expedient, if the Cow-bird continues her mischief, until sometimes ...
— Birds, Illustrated by Color Photography, Vol. II, No 3, September 1897 • Various
... soon have been drowned. Of lizards there were many kinds, but only one (Proctotretus multimaculatus) remarkable from its habits. It lives on the bare sand near the sea coast, and from its mottled colour, the brownish scales being speckled with white, yellowish red, and dirty blue, can hardly be distinguished from the surrounding surface. When frightened, it attempts to avoid discovery by feigning death, with outstretched legs, depressed body, and closed eyes: if further molested, it buries itself with great ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... to grow up to shut off a part of his view of the Drayton place, as he came out into the meadow his eye fell on a scene which made him forget the present with all its wrongs. On the green turf before him where butter-cups speckled the ground with golden blossoms, was a little group of four persons busily engaged and wholly oblivious of the differences which divided the masters of the two estates. The two mammies were seated side by side ...
— The Christmas Peace - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... the Parnassia palustris, "which springs up in the damp meadows, below the beech-wood to the west of the village; which bears a superb white flower at the top of a slightly twisted stem, having an oval leaf about its middle"; the purple digitalis, "whose long spindles of great red flowers, speckled with white inside, and shaped like the fingers of a glove," border a certain road; all the ferns that grow on the wastes, "amid which it is often no easy task to recollect one's whereabouts," and on the arid hills all the heathers, pink, white, and bluish, with different ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... pure its waters—its shallows are bright With colored pebbles and sparkles of light, And clear the depths where its eddies play, And dimples deepen and whirl away, And the plane-tree's speckled arms o'ershoot The swifter current that mines its root, Through whose shifting leaves, as you walk the hill, The quivering glimmer of sun and rill With a sudden flash on the eye is thrown, Like the ray that streams ...
— Selections From American Poetry • Various
... ferrage, Gertrude added a dime for Tim, the helper, who watered the horses. As George was about to start his team, a twelve-year old farm boy ran aboard the boat with a string of fine speckled trout strung on a willow twig. All the spring the boy's anticipations for "a day off" had now been fully realized. Since daylight the little fellow had tramped up and down the brook, his feet were bruised and sore, and his face and hands ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... grass, Too blue the silver speckled sky, For me to linger here, alas, While happy winds go laughing by, Wasting the golden hours indoors, Washing windows and ...
— The Book of American Negro Poetry • Edited by James Weldon Johnson
... spotted tiger. The same term, derived from the adjective chhita, spotted or sprinkled, applies in various forms to the other creatures, such as Chital, the spotted deer (Axis), Chita-bora, a kind of speckled snake, &c. Leopardus or lion-panther was, without doubt, the name given by the ancients to the hunting leopard, which was well known to them from its extending into Africa and Arabia. Assuredly the prophet Habakkuk spoke of the hunting chita ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... got when I wuz little 'bout a big matter dat looked little at de time. Mens would come by in kivered wagons, (we called dem speckled wagons) an' steal Marse Gus' nigger chilluns. He had lost a heap of money dat way, so he forbids us of goin' out ter de road an' he orders us ter stay 'way back in de rear uv de house. One day we sees a drove uv ...
— Slave Narratives: a Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves, North Carolina Narratives, Part 2 • Works Projects Administration
... song Inwrap our fancy long, Time will run back, and fetch the age of gold, And speckled Vanity Will sicken soon and die, And leprous Sin will melt from earthly mould And Hell itself will pass away, And leave her dolorous mansions to ...
— Bible Stories and Religious Classics • Philip P. Wells
... sat on a slope that dipped down to a long narrow park, and beyond that to a beach on which slow rollers from the outside broke with a sound like the snore of a distant giant. Along that slope and away to the eastward the city was speckled with lights, although it was barely five o'clock, so early does dark close in in that latitude when the year is far spent. And when the maid trundled in a tea-wagon, that vista of twinkling specks, and the more distant flash of Point Atkinson light intermittently ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... I take my pen To tell you where, And how, and when, I found the nest Of our speckled hen. She would never lay, In a sensible way, Like other hens, In ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... white rabbit just over the hill, He's eating a lettuce for tea; And a fat speckled duck, with a very large bill, Is quacking, "Oh, where can she be?" And two little mice are there, standing quite still, They're all of ...
— Very Short Stories and Verses For Children • Mrs. W. K. Clifford
... upper part of an enormous green sloping pasturage, covered all over with cows. The red cow, the white cow, the brown cow, the brindled cow, the colley cow, the dappled cow, the streaked cow, the spotted cow, the liver-and-white cow, the strawberry cow, the mulberry cow, the chestnut cow, the gray speckled cow, the clouded cow, the black cow,—the short-horned cow, the long-horned cow, the up-curling horn, the down-curling horn, the straight-horned cow, and the cow with the crumpled horn—all are here—between two and three hundred—spread all over ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... of forming a government entirely on his own conditions. The result was a cabinet, strong much beyond the average in its individual members, but weak to powerlessness in the diversity of its composition. Burke, in a memorable passage of a memorable speech, has described this "chequered and speckled" administration with great humour, speaking of it as "indeed a very curious show, but utterly unsafe to touch and unsure to stand on." Pitt chose for himself the office of lord privy seal, which necessitated his removal to the House of Lords; and in August he became ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... away than the length of a beak, the ape turned, crept ashore as a water-snake and hid in the grass. Yang Oerlang, when he saw the water-snake creep from the water, turned into an eagle and spread his claws to seize the snake. But the water-snake sprang up and turned into the lowest of all birds, a speckled buzzard, and perched on the steep edge of a cliff. When Yang Oerlang saw that the ape had turned himself into so contemptible a creature as a buzzard, he would no longer play the game of changing form with ...
— The Chinese Fairy Book • Various
... do,' replied Mr. Pickwick. 'Don't you see I am dressed for the purpose?' Mr. Pickwick called attention to his speckled silk stockings, ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... with compressed shells, chiefly bivalves, that it may be regarded as a shell breccia. There occur, besides, slabs of fibrous limestone, exactly resembling the limestone of the ichthyolite beds of the Lower Old Red; and blocks of a hard gray stone, of silky lustre in the fresh fracture, thickly speckled with carbonaceous markings. These fragmentary masses,—all of them, at least, except the fibrous limestone, which occurs in mere plank-like bands,—represent distinct beds, of which this part of the island is composed, and which present their edges, like courses ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... odious mono-literal; thinnest, feeblest, most insignificant of letters, I dread your egotistic influence as my bane; they will not suffer you, nor bear with a book so speckled with your presence. Still, world, hear me; mercifully spare a poor grammarian the penance of perpetual third persons; let an individual tender conscience escape censure for using the true singular in preference to ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... smile in their eyes the scrambling crowd in front of them. They paused, however, at the bridge, and, leaning their elbows upon the stonework, they stood looking down at their own faces in the glassy stream, and at the swift flash of speckled trout ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... peculiar cry, or "drumming," as it is called, sounds through the woods like tapping hard on a hollow log. His equally shy neighbor is the mountain-quail, while through the farming lands and all along the hillsides the valley—quail are plenty. Perhaps you have seen a happy family of these speckled brown birds. Papa quail has a black crest on his head, and he calls "Look right here" from the wrong side of the road to fool you, while Mamma and her little, cunning chicks scatter like flying brown leaves in the brush. After the danger is past, you hear her low call to bring them round her again. ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... From the tawny flowers, speckled with purple, there came a penetrating odor which scented the whole room. Then Helene, with a passionate movement, drew Jeanne to her breast, while the nosegay fell on her lap. To love! to love! Truly, she loved her child. Was not that intense love which had pervaded her life till now sufficient ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... straight or slightly curved, the chest deep, broad, and prominent, the legs short and thick; the belly, when well fattened, should nearly touch the ground, the hair be long, thin, fine, and having few bristles, and whatever the colour, uniform, either white, black, or blue; but not spotted, speckled, brindled, or sandy. Such are the features and requisites that, among breeders and judges, constitute the beau ideal of ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... of mighty whips—notably of a never-to-be-forgotten dinner at the Pelican Inn, Newbury, to which were gathered the elite of the Bath-road cracksmen. At that great repast we heard how "for wittles there was trout, speckled like a dane dog, weal as wite as allablaster, sherry-wite-wine, red-port, and everything in season. Then for company there was Sir Pay (Sir H. Peyton), Squire Willy boys (Vielbois), Cherry Bob, Long Dick, and I; ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... the visitor will receive is the curiously Biblical character of their life, which constantly suggests the Old Testament stories; the shepherds watching their flocks, ring-streaked and speckled; the cattle ploughing in the fields; the women grinding at the handmill, or grouped about the village well, all recall incidents in the lives of Isaac and Rebekah, and episodes of patriarchal times. Their salutations and modes of speech ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... down to rest, he and his servants, and soon sleep overcame them all and they were as dead men. But the old woman abode awake and looking at Sherkan, saw that he was drowned in sleep. So she sprang to her feet, as she were a bald she-bear or a speckled snake, and drew from her girdle a poisoned knife, that would have melted a rock if laid thereon; then going up to Sherkan, she drew the knife across his throat and cut off his head. After this, she went up to the ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... By-and-by, I came upon a great common, with a picturesque mill standing high against the sky. All around and about stretched a vast prospect of woodland and tufted heath, bounded far off by a range of chalk-hills speckled with farm-houses and villages, and melting towards the west into a distance faint and far, and mystic as the horizon ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... if you could see our cabin just now. There are nine men in the room and three women. For want of seats most of the men are lying on the floor; all are smoking, and the blithe young French Canadian who plays so beautifully, and catches about fifty speckled trout for each meal, is playing the harmonium with a pipe in his mouth. Three men who have camped in Black Canyon for a week are lying like dogs on the floor. They are all over six feet high, immovably solemn, neither smiling at the general hilarity, nor at the absurd changes ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... of a child throwing its whole imagination into playing with a Noah's Ark that he describes his queer house. It is in this spirit that he sees the fields around his house "speckled with cows, horses and sheep." The very phrase suggests toy animals. Walpole himself declared at the age of seventy-three: "My best wisdom has consisted in forming a baby-house full of playthings for my second ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... life at a call from her—had come to bring her ease. He talked at random of brooks that start nowhere and go nowhere, save over white stones and past watercress; of thin ribbed ferns and of scarlet bunchberries. He told her of a stream he knew, where, if you lie very quiet in the moss, you see speckled trout dart over white pebbles into the darker water beneath the lichened rocks. He told her of the shallows, and pools, and falls you find if you keep to its banks for the miles it sings by the grave trees. He told her of mountain tops where he had lain near the stars and ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... its dam," says one; and, "How it must feel at this moment!" "How soft and sleek its speckled coat!" adds another. "And how mild are its little eyes, and gentle as a sperit's," ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... divers sorts of flies, and such an abundance of mosquitoes, that we are more tormented with them than ever we were with the cold weather. Here be likewise ants, and frogs in the ponds upon the land, but we durst not eat of them, they looked so speckled like toads. By this time there are neither bears, foxes, nor fowl, to be seen; they ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... gate-house, and then ushered to the door of a rude, half-fortified whitewashed house. A small table and three chairs were placed in a large outer corridor, and an old dirty-faced man with grey hair and a grimy beard, dressed in a speckled blue cotton jacket and loose red trousers, came forward, shook hands, and asked me to be coated. After a quarter of an hour's conversation on my pursuits, in which his Majesty seemed to take great interest, tea and cakes-of rather better quality than usual on such occasions-were brought ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... about the ends they're as black as a niggers in billing time, and near the roots they're all speckled and streaked. ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... the sand silvers whitely to the moon, one sees them whisking to and fro on innumerable errands of seed gathering, but the chief witnesses of their presence near the spring are the elf owls. Those burrow-haunting, speckled fluffs of greediness begin a twilight flitting toward the spring, feeding as they go on grasshoppers, lizards, and small, swift creatures, diving into burrows to catch field mice asleep, battling with chipmunks at their own doors, and getting ...
— The Land of Little Rain • Mary Austin
... habit, of course, acquired through precisely the same causes that had given to animals their protective coloration—the stripes, say, of the zebra and tiger that blend so cunningly with the barred and speckled shadowings of bush and jungle, the twig and leaflike shapes and hues of certain insects; in fact, all that natural camouflage which was the basis of the art of concealment so astonishingly developed ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... through the sleeping silence his feet must track the tune, When the world is barred and speckled ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... were Ullrans. They stood erect on stumpy legs and broad, six-toed feet. They had four arms apiece, one pair from true shoulders and the other connected to a pseudo-pelvis midway down the torso. Their skins were slate-gray and rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been formed from perspiration, since their body-tissues were silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly saurian; they had small, double-lidded ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... sixty-two, and forty-eight yards, black and indigo-dyed calicos in lengths of sixteen yards, nets or fillets worn by the married women, iron and steel in small bars, lead and zinc, beads of various kinds, especially white porcelain and speckled ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton |
