"Quaintly" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mediaeval embroideries, the christening-robes—these she flings quickly by—and the silver ornaments. She uncloses the carved coffers, and passes through her long fingers the wedding garments of brides turned to dust centuries ago—the silver veils, bridal crowns, and quaintly-cut robes of taffetas and brocade, once white, now turned to dingy yellow. She assures herself that ...
— The Italians • Frances Elliot
... libraries and chapter-houses to which they belong; for he thinks a black-letter volume reads best in one of those venerable chambers where the light struggles through dusty lancet windows and painted glass; and that it loses half its zest, if taken away from the neighbourhood of the quaintly-carved oaken book-case and Gothic reading-desk. At his suggestion, the Squire has had the library furnished in this antique taste, and several of the windows glazed with painted glass, that they may throw a properly tempered light upon the pages of ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... him, Mrs. Brown, dancing with Jim, was footing it in and out of the figures like a girl, holding her skirts quaintly on either side as she advanced and retired, and came back to sweep a curtsey that shamed the quick bow of the younger generation, while the tall lad she had nursed waited for her with a grave gentleness that sat prettily on his broad shoulders. Near, too, the old man's eyes dwelt lovingly ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... performed at the cottage door in the sandy enclosure surrounding the little homestead. Here the old men mend the nets, keeping a watchful eye on the babies, while the women clean and salt the fish, hanging them up in rows to dry in the sun. In these garden enclosures, also, many quaintly pretty miniature houses may be seen erected on tall poles. These are to encourage the starlings and other songsters to settle in them, as there are no trees. Hen-roosts and outhouses are adorned with the name-boards of wrecked boats washed up on the shore, while ...
— Denmark • M. Pearson Thomson
... head, when to my astonishment I beheld Kouaga, standing erect with arms folded beneath his white burnouse, talking in an undertone to a dark-bearded stranger who also wore flowing Arab garments and bore in his hand a long-barrelled flint-lock gun with quaintly-inlaid stock. The man seemed older than the Grand Vizier of Mo, for his beard was tinged with grey, and the brown hand that held the gun ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... with a lady whose costume and manner recalled to her imagination—Mrs. Acton's imagination was a marvel—all that she had ever read of the most stirring historical periods. But she had sent the Baroness a great many quaintly-worded messages and a great many nosegays from her garden and baskets of beautiful fruit. Felix had eaten the fruit, and the Baroness had arranged the flowers and returned the baskets and the messages. On the day that followed that rainy Sunday of which mention has been made, Eugenia determined ...
— The Europeans • Henry James
... something was disturbing me. Elizabeth. A daughter is being delivered unto me this morning. I have a feeling it will be more painful than the original delivery. She has been, as they quaintly say, educated; prepared ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... ice field and steaming past Cape St. John. This was the dividing line between the English and French in the settlement of their troubles in 1635. North of it is called the French or Treaty Shore, or as the French themselves so much more quaintly named it, "Le Petit Nord." It is at the north end of Le Petit Nord that ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... politely expressing that there was no saying what Rockquay owed to the hearty co-operation of such birds of passage as herself and her brothers, she travelled on to the charity stall, which Miss Mohun had quaintly dressed in the likeness of an old-fashioned school, with big alphabet and samplers, flourished copies, and a stuffed figure of a 'cont-rare-y' naughty boy, with a magnificent fool's cap. She herself sat behind it, the very image of the ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... later period is only from a foot to a foot and a half thick. Small blocks of sandstone were used for the latter. Heaps of debris cover a considerable space, in which, among other things, are relics of pottery and of ornaments made of sea-shells. Pieces of quaintly-carved cedar posts were found here, and their condition of decay, compared with that of the cedar beams at "El Moro," "indicated great antiquity." The place of this ruin is now one of the consecrated places of the Village Indians; it has "a Zuni altar" which is constantly ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... I owe it to my grandmother. I will perhaps be pardoned if I say that all my girlhood life was spent with my Grandmother Bronson, a very small woman, weighing less than ninety pounds, small featured, always quaintly dressed in the old-fashioned Levantine silk with two breadths only in the skirt, a crossed silk handkerchief with a small white one folded neatly across her breast, a black silk apron, dainty cap made of sheer linen lawn with full ruffles. She it was who entered ...
— An Ohio Woman in the Philippines • Emily Bronson Conger
... I ween, will in the woods reply, And quaintly answer questions: shall I try? Echo. Try. Shepherd. What must we do our passion to express? Echo. Press. Shepherd. How shall I please her, who ne'er loved before? Echo. Before. Shepherd. What most moves women when we them ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... unexplained. Is it perhaps an error for Karabugha, the name given by the Turks and Arabs to a kind of great mangonel? This was known also in Europe as Carabaga, Calabra, etc. It is mentioned under the former name by Marino Sanudo, and under the latter, with other quaintly-named engines, by William of Tudela, as used by Simon de Montfort ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the noble national spirit which it breathes throughout, and the vigour of its description, cannot easily be exceeded: it is not so generally known as it deserves to be; though some of its expressions may sound strangely and quaintly to our ears. It will be found ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... Canal Street, it was there and spreading (like the measles and other evils); everybody said so; even her paper, L'Abeille, referred to it in French—resentfully. She believed in it historically; but for herself, she "never travelled," excepting, as she quaintly put it, in her "acquaintances"—the French streets with ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... dead. I found that my second bullet had torn its heart almost completely away, and yet it had lived to charge ferociously upon me, and but for my third shot would doubtless have slain me before it finally expired—or as Bowen Tyler so quaintly puts it, before it knew that ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... there by her wood fire in the orderly uniform which made her so quaintly young and boyish, to understand the twisted mental processes that kept him away from her, now that he was free. And, in the end, she came rather close to the truth: his sense of failure; his loss of confidence ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... pipes, two inches in length, which, he observed, could be stuck in one corner of the mouth, or twisted in the hatband, and would never be in the way. Thus ended this alarming insurrection, which was long known by the name of the Pipe Plot, and which, it has been somewhat quaintly observed, did end, like most plots and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... little lady and used to sit with her hands folded in each other looking so very watchful while she talked to me that perhaps I found that rather irksome. Or perhaps it was her being so upright and trim, though I don't think it was that, because I thought that quaintly pleasant. Nor can it have been the general expression of her face, which was very sparkling and pretty for an old lady. I don't know what it was. Or at least if I do now, I thought I did not then. Or ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... old history book, but here's a bit you may like, since it's about our folks," answered Eph, turning the yellow page to look at a picture of two quaintly dressed children in ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... provosts and bailies trembled, who had drawn out leviathan with a hook from Tweed, and before whom the big fish of Forth could not stand—even he, brilliant fisherman as he was, could "come nae speed ava" on Spey, as the old Arndilly water-gillie quaintly worded it. ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... been a great traveller, had improved himself diligently in the art of war; and, as the old chronicles quaintly relate, "he visited most of the courts of Europe, even as far as Constantinople; wherein he made such advances in the school of Mars, that his superior skill in arms was generally applauded in every country he passed through." So distinguished and widely-extended a reputation for bravery could ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... said Aunt Ruth, in her quaintly friendly way, as she bade her guests good-night and shook hands with them, receiving ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... said Harry, and I saw Lee standing beside a slender figure in unbecoming dress among a group of men in blue shirts and quaintly mended jackets; also that some planks had been laid ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... was a secret compact between them, for he said, quaintly: "They all sing one song, and she hath set the ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... kept mumbling queer words under his breath, for he had a way of talking to himself when anything "upsot him," as he would quaintly remark. Trot always knew he was disturbed or in trouble when he ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... employment outside of mills. They are a plain, honest, enthusiastic, home-spun class of folk. A few there may be amongst the lot who are authoritative, or saucy, or ill-naturedly solemn; but the generality are simple-dealing, quaintly-exhuberant, oddly-straightforward, and primitively-pious people—distinctly sincere, periodically eccentric, and fond of a good religious outburst, a shining spiritual fandango now, ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... was a handsome boy, too, notwithstanding the deplorable state of his wardrobe. Thick, clustering curls of jet-black hair fell in tangled disorder around a forehead broad, white and smooth as that of a girl; slender and quaintly arched black eyebrows played above a pair of mischievous, dark-gray eyes that sparkled beneath the shade of long, thick, black lashes; a little turned-up nose, and red, pouting lips completed the character of a countenance full of fun, frolic, ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... time I know what he's thinking about, and—and I'm thinking about it, too! We don't read and sing and talk all the time—" She clasped her hands ecstatically, lines and all. "Oh, Phil darling, I wish you were in love, too! It's so perfect.—But you will be some day, and then I hope," she added quaintly, "that you'll have somebody as dear and comfortable as you are to confide in. A spiritual pastor and master is so safe, too. You may scold me, Reverend, and you may laugh at me—you're doing it now—but you can never ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... perfectly honorable. I think you will accept the fact that I'm an Englishman as a guarantee that I am not a man to act hastily or romantically, though I confess that your voice had such an extraordinary effect on me just now when you asked me so quaintly whether I was making love ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... domestic Mont Blanc; some climb about the bellows; some scale the shaft of the shovel; while some, forming in magic ring, dance festively on the yet glowing hearth. Tiny troops promenade the writing-table. One perches himself quaintly on the top of the inkstand, and holds colloquy with another who sits cross-legged on a paper weight, while a companion looks down on them from the top of the sandbox. It was an ingenious little device, and gave me the idea, which I often expressed to my wife, that ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... spirits seen at a distance appear like the things they most resemble in disposition, as doves, hawks, goats, lambs, swine, and so on, I'm sure that I shall see his true and kindly soul in the guise of a noble old Folio, quaintly lettered across his back in old English text, ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... I'm too material for such imaginings," Francis replied, "but there is a quaintly artificial air about it all. We must go and look ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... done between 1631 and 1635, and in 1636 Charles I and his Queen visited Oxford and were entertained in the newly-finished college. Much bad verse was written on this event, two lines of which as a specimen may be quoted from the quaintly-named ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... French owners of the ships and of the cafes in the narrow streets near the jetties catered especially to the British soldier and sailor. English tobacco, English rosbif—they advertised these in quaintly ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... swans could have been cited in a simile illustrating profusion. Bass quaintly stated that the "dying song" of the swan, so celebrated by poets, "exactly resembled the creaking of a rusty ale-house sign on a windy day." The remark is not so pretty as, but far more true than, that of the bard who would have us believe that ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... this unavoidable defect in the materials of the induction is, that we can rarely obtain what Bacon has quaintly, but not unaptly, termed ...
— Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... and Verrall is in her company. She comes back into my memories now, just as she came back then, rather quaintly at first—at first not seen very clearly, a little distorted by intervening things, seen with a doubt, as I saw her through the slightly discolored panes of crinkled glass in the window of the Menton post-office and grocer's shop. It was on the second day after the Change, and ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... people's" favorite dancing ground. "They had always fine music among themselves, and danced in a moonshiny night around or in a ring, as one may see to this day upon every common in England where mushrooms grow," quaintly says one old writer. And the Rev. Gerard Smith still further voices the belief of the people as to the nature of ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard
... be polite," she said to herself. And so when the servants, who took their tone from their mistress, were insolent and ordered her about, she would hold her head erect, and reply to them sometimes in a way which made them stare at her, it was so quaintly civil. ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... alluring picture of the South Sea house, and is followed by the reminiscences of Christ's Hospital, where Lamb was a schoolboy for seven years. These show one side of Lamb's nature—the quaintly reminiscent. Another side is revealed in "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist," with its delicate irony and its playful humor, while still another phase is seen in the exquisite phantasy of "Dream Children," with its tender pathos and its revelation of a heart that never knew the joys of domestic ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... in my morning sheet I'd seen it bruited, Mid talk of Jazz and Fox Trot, plaids and checks, That boxing was a sport precisely suited To what it quaintly called the gentler sex; I thought about the coming day when bevies Of beauty would be found inside the ropes, And saw you, eminent among the "heavies," The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... eucalyptus trees, the most picturesque town of the higher Andes, Tarma. The narrow, neat streets were paved with cobble-stones. All the houses were painted white, and had red-tiled roofs. The streets swarmed with quaintly attired Indians and tidily dressed Peruvians. There were many Italians and Spaniards in Tarma. Two or three hotels existed here—a capital one, actually lighted by electric light, being kept by a most honest ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... young girl at an early meet held at the castle, who had attracted her attention by her air of breeding, beauty, and faultless seat on her mare. She had learnt that the girl was the daughter of an old yeoman farmer who lived on his farm, quaintly called 'The Bower,' far outbye on the moorland beside ...
— Border Ghost Stories • Howard Pease
... Buxoma in a morning fair, With gentle finger stroked her milky care, I quaintly stole a kiss; at first, 'tis true, She frowned, yet after granted one or two. Lobbin, I swear, believe who will my vow, Her breath by ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... of the treasure-chest experts came down from Philadelphia to appraise its value. It was not easy to decide, immediately, what market price the old jewels, set in quaintly chased gold, would bring. But the least that the coins and stones would be worth was ten thousand dollars! It might be more. An extra thousand dollars or so was hardly worth considering, when ten thousand would make things ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... brilliant class of composites, including the asters, sunflowers, daisies, dandelions, and thistles, nearly seventy-five per cent. of the visitors were steady, industrious bees. Certain dingy blossoms which lay themselves out to attract wasps, are obviously adapted, as Mueller quaintly remarks, "to a less aesthetically cultivated circle of visitors." But the most brilliant among all insect-fertilized flowers are those which specially affect the society of butterflies; and they are only surpassed in this respect throughout all nature ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there ...
— The Ghost Girl • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... "Quai-au-sel," I saw in 1910, a number of ancient facades, most picturesque and quaintly pinnacled. There also a small botanical garden floriated most luxuriantly, and here again the Dyle reflected the mossy walls of ancient stone palaces, and there were rows of tall, wooden, carved posts standing in the stream, to which boats ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... ancient houses of our gentry are yet for the most part of strong timber', and he even thinks that houses made of oak were luxurious, for in times past men had been contented with houses of willow, plum, and elm, but now nothing but oak was good enough; and he quaintly says that the men who lived in the willow houses were as tough as oak, and those who lived in the oak as soft as willow. There are very few mansions left of the time before Edward III, for being ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... local expressman, owner of a rickety wagon and a tumble-down mule. He was coffee-colored in complexion. His feet projected quaintly behind as well as in front. His lips projected also, as did his eyes, wide-rimmed and bulging. His trousers were too long for him, and his coat hung limp from his stooped shoulders. His speech was low and soft. Not an heroic figure, you would have ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... great colourists, Velasquez is the greatest master of the black chords: his black is more precious than other people's crimson. Yet it is not simply black and white that must be made valuable, rare worth must be given to each colour employed; but the white and black ought to separate themselves quaintly from the rest, while the other colours should be continually passing one into the other, being all plainly companions in the same gay world; while the white, black, and neutral grey should stand monkishly aloof ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... in academic shades, Ours in lewd hops and midnight masquerades. So changed the times! say, philosophic sage, Whose genius suits so well this tasteful age, Is the Pantheon, late a sink obscene, Become the fountain of chaste Hippocrene? Or do thy moral numbers quaintly flow, Inspired by th' Aganippe of Soho? Do wisdom's sons gorge cates and vermicelli, Like beastly Bickerstaffe or bothering Kelly? Or art thou tired of th' undeserved applause Bestowed on bards affecting Virtue's cause? Is this the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... it is "an ethnological treasure, which tells us as much of Hindu human nature as The Thousand Nights and a Night of Arab manners and customs in the cinquecento." In India the book is known as the Kama Shastra or Lila Shastra, the Scripture of Play or Amorous Sport. The author says quaintly, "It is true that no joy in the world of mortals can compare with that derived from the knowledge of the Creator. Second, however, and subordinate only to his are the satisfaction and pleasure arising from the possession ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... mouth, and finally tore up the benches in order to attack the judges with the fragments. He was sent first to the castle of Edinburgh and afterward to the Bass (an island), "for a change of air," as the record quaintly says. Finally, he was despatched to Blackness Castle, where he remained close in hold till ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... as a Liberal. He was frightened into Conservatism, and WORDSWORTH, then a hot young youth, goes for him as youth does sometimes gird at Respectability. 'Upon what principle,' he asked the Bishop, 'is your conduct to be explained? In some parts of England it is quaintly said when a drunken man is seen reeling home, that he has business on both sides of the road. Observing your Lordship's tortuous path, the spectators will be far from insinuating that you have partaken of Mr. BOURKE'S intoxicating ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, 1890.05.10 • Various
... The church was begun (1517) as late Gothic; but before it was finished, the Renaissance style had come into fashion, and the architects accordingly jumbled the two in the most charming manner. The incongruity here only adds to the beauty. The quaintly original Renaissance portal bears a dedication to St. Stephen the Protomartyr, beneath which is a relief of his martyrdom, with a Latin inscription, "Stone destroyed the temple of the Lord," i.e., Stephen, "Stone rebuilds it." Right and left of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... strips of pink and green with a fond hand, and cast on Jane a look which pleaded indulgence. "Isn't it just too quaintly ugly for anything?" ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... proceeded to London Bridge, often put out of his course by wrong directions, and as often by forgetting and misconceiving true ones. It was with old London Bridge that Shamus had to do (not the old one last pulled down, but its more reverend predecessor), which, at that time, was lined at either side by quaintly fashioned houses, mostly occupied by shopkeepers, so that the space between presented perhaps the greatest thoroughfare then known in the Queen of Cities. And at about two o'clock in the afternoon, barefooted, ragged, fevered, and agitated, Shamus mingled with the turbid human stream, that roared ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... discovered brought a smile to his eyes. From the summit of a drift, which stood the height of the timbered walls, he found himself gazing down upon the quaintly associated figures of little Marcel and his nurse. They were busy, particularly the boy. Amidst a confusion of coiled, rawhide ropes An-ina, hammer in hand, was securing a rope end to the angle of the wall, while Marcel, with ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... She said it so quaintly that Lynette laughed, though there was a pained contraction between the delicate eyebrows and a vexed and sorrowful shadow on her face. Greta ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... miscellaneous, consisting as it did of the trophies of Miss Schuyler's European tour. A Parisian clock, rich in gilded scroll work to the verge of barbarity, contrasted with the artistic severity of one or two good Italian marbles, while these in turn stood quaintly upon choice examples of time-mellowed English cabinet-work. There was taste in them all, but they suffered from the juxtaposition, which, however, was somewhat characteristic of the country. Still, Miss Schuyler had not spoiled the splendid ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... me no harm." The Israelites, on entering Canaan, instead of obeying the Divine injunction of extirpating their enemies, made a hollow truce with them. What was the result? Years upon years of tedious warfare. "They were scourges in their sides, and thorns in their eyes!" It is quaintly but truthfully said by an old writer, "The candle will never burn clear, while there is a thief in it. Sin indulged, in the conscience, is like Jonah in the ship, which causeth such a tempest, that the conscience is like a troubled sea, whose waters ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... the damnation of an opponent because he did not agree with him in his theory of irregular verbs. Freeman, whose self-assertion was perpetual, represented himself throughout his libel as fighting for the cause of truth. His own reverence for truth he illustrated quaintly enough at the close of his last article. "I leave others to protest," said this veracious critic, "against Mr. Froude's treatment of the sixteenth century. I do not profess to have mastered those times in detail from original sources." I ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... ancient mansions in the United Kingdom, and there is still, happily, a large selection, none perhaps is so picturesque and quaintly original in its architecture as the secluded Warwickshire house Compton Winyates. The general impression of its vast complication of gable ends and twisted chimneys is that some enchanted palace has found its way ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... figure upon which Ned's eyes rested was seated in the centre of the group, on a quaintly made stool, and his gorgeous dress immediately suggested that this must be the great man himself whom they had come to see. For he was evidently got up expressly for the occasion, with his courtiers carefully arranged about him, some standing behind and on either side, ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... of an Autumn sun fell upon the richly stained glass, sending a flood of soft, mellow rainbow tinted light through the quaintly curved and deeply mullioned windows which adorned a portion of the eastern wing of that grand old Baronial residence, Vellenaux, on a fine September morning, at the period during which our story opens. This handsome ...
— Vellenaux - A Novel • Edmund William Forrest
... hall quickly, and arrived at the door of the Laureate's private sanctum, where, gently drawing aside the silken draperies, he looked in for a moment without being himself perceived. What a picture he beheld! ... How perfection every shade of color in every line of detail! Sah-luma, reclining in a quaintly carved ebony chair, was toying with the fruit and wine set out before him on an ivory and gold stand,—his dress, simpler than it had been on the previous evening, was of fine white linen gathered loosely about ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... a chair not far off. There were piles of new music and some tempting, small, neatly bound books lying about. A fire glowed on the hearth and a little brass kettle sang merrily on the hob. The cocoa-table was drawn up in front of the fire and on a quaintly shaped tray stood the bright little cocoa-pot and the ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... Prince of Huxonia, has fallen in love with both the daughters of the merchant, whom he agrees to serve in all kinds of manual labour as Juan de las Brozas. His brother, Don Gilberto, arrives in search of him and a quaintly charming and technically skilful play ends with a double wedding (the Crown Prince of Portugal, present at the acting of this play, had to decide for Don Rosvel which ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente
... thrilling times and Aunt Edie confesses that she was exceedingly glad when the troubles with the red men were over. Another happening of the thirties which Aunt Edie recalls quite distinctly is the falling of the stars. She says quaintly that there was more religion that year in Georgia than there ever was before or has been since. The wonderful manner in which the stars shot across the heavens by the thousands, when every sign seemed to point to the ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... stopped her outburst with a kiss, fully understanding the profound truth she so quaintly expressed, he smelt the trees and mountains in her hair, and her fragrance was mingled there with the fragrance of that old earth on which ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... to talk like that, Olga, even in jest," she said, with a little touch of matronly dignity that sat rather quaintly and sweetly upon her. "I know you don't like Max—never have liked him—but please recollect that you're ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... scrambling away like ants or beetles to shelter, and that tiny insolent bird sailing slowly far overhead. This was a bit of the modern war one reads about—it was a picture from some fanciful story of Mr. H. G. Wells. They scattered for the arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran under the trees in the near-by Champs-Elysees. There was a "Bang!" at which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the absurd fusillade that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel Tower, whence they might possibly have ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... GIRL is discovered alone, sewing. She is faintly, quaintly pretty in a mild New England way, no longer young, yet with a pathetic, persistent girlishness about her. A faint whistle is heard. She rises, goes to door of rear room and calls to BROTHER that the train ...
— Jane Journeys On • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... other." And thousands who are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves. "When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47] This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ in ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... words which she had told John Eames that she would write in her journal. The reader will remember those two words;—Old Maid. And she had written them in her book, making each letter a capital, and round them she had drawn a scroll, ornamented after her own fashion, and she had added the date in quaintly formed figures,—for in such matters Lily had some little skill and a dash of fun to direct it; and she had inscribed below it an Italian motto:—"Who goes softly, goes safely;" and above her work of art she had put a heading—"As ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... friend, that, all my days, Has poured from thy syringa thicket 30 The quaintly discontinuous lays To which ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... whom all eyes turned, was an aged woman of unusual height; her snow-white hair was confined by a metal circlet, her eyes were keen and searching, her gestures imperious; her dress was simple and would have been rude but for the quaintly ornamented silver girdle that bound her waist, and the massive bracelets on her arms. Like the girl she was seen for the first time; her almost supernatural appearance inspired wonder and awe. She bent over the prostrate form: "Marie said with her last breath," she muttered to herself, ...
— The Forest of Vazon - A Guernsey Legend Of The Eighth Century • Anonymous
... court formed by a high wall completely covered with ivy, running along in a line from the right hand turret of the gateway till it joins the house. Along its course are a number of yew-trees. In the centre of the open space is a quaintly disposed grass-plot, dotted about with stunted box, and in the centre of that stands ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... thee quaintly Beneath the leaf; thy shell-shaped winglets faintly— (As thin as spangle Of cobwebbed rain)—held up at airy angle; I hear thy tinkle With faery notes the silvery ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein
... another state of society. At least, we might be spared the parade in the journals, and the offensive appearance of monopolizing the land, which these accounts assume. Intelligent travellers observe and comment on these things, and one of them quaintly asked me, not long since, "if really there were no Americans in America?" Can it be matter of surprise that when the stranger sees these men so prominent in print and in society, (in many instances ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... shameless in their extravagance of green and crimson, red and white carnations, red, white, and yellow roses. The sunshine broke into colour, it laughed, it danced, it almost rioted, among the flowers; but in the prim alleys, and on the formal hedges of box, and the quaintly-clipped yews, and the old purple brick walls, where fruit trees were trellised, it lay fast, fast asleep. Without the walls, in the deep cool greenery of the park, there was a perpetual drip-drip of bird-notes. This was the web, upon ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... north and south, nearly all the cottages are old and nearly all have gardens. One perfect little building stands not far from Seale on the road to Puttenham, bowered in vines and quaintly chimneyed, with white-curtained windows opening on a low wall and stone-crop and high box borders, and, when I saw it in July, bunches of pink and white mallows glowing under an old oak door. No cottages count sunnier hours than these that stand about the long strip of green ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... strange devices that my newly acquired knowledge enabled me to recognize—to express the matter in the terms of our system of heraldry—as the arms of a king quartered with the arms of certain princely houses or tribes. On these shelves, also, were many quaintly wrought vessels and some small square boxes, all of which were of gold—together with a score or so of small idols moulded in clay or roughly carved in stone, in which last the workmanship was so far inferior to ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... Western humour, and the quaintly untrammelled American intelligence, focussed upon diverse and age-encrusted civilizations, which caught the instantaneous fancy of a vast public. It was a virgin field for the humorous observer; Europe had not yet become the playground of America. It was rather a terra incognita, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... foundation for all that we call music.[12] The example of a loud tone with gradually ascending inflections has only been found in the most perverted types of humanity; for instance, an English writer quaintly alludes to the songs of the Polynesian cannibals as consisting of "gruesomely suggestive passages of rising quarter-tones sung gloatingly before their living captives who are soon ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... Danish ballad which quaintly tells the tale of such old long-distance days, with that blending of humour and pathos that forever goes to the heart of man. A certain Danish lord had but yesterday taken unto himself a young wife, and on the morrow of his marriage there came to him the summons to war. Then, ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... eyne of burning coal, Now couches fore the mouse's hole; And crickets sing at the oven's mouth, E'er the blither for their drouth. Hymen hath brought the bride to bed, Where, by the loss of maidenhead, A babe is moulded. Be attent, And time that is so briefly spent With your fine fancies quaintly eche: What's dumb in show I'll plain ...
— Pericles Prince of Tyre • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... an old tree leans across From bank to bank, an ancient tree, Quaintly cushioned with curious moss, A bridge for the cool wood-nymphs and me: Half seen they flit, while here I sit By the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... amends for all that was revolutionary in his politics or economics, by reaction on two subjects—art and divorce. He had old-fashioned ideas on the family, and did not want to see divorce made easy. And he was quaintly Ruskinian in matters of art, believing that all art should appeal to ethical or ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... visiting! I never saw anything quite so quaintly pretty as these rows of little dolls in their brilliantly gay garments, tied up with their big sashes. They are sitting on the floor and laboriously making strokes with a paint-brush. That is to say, they are learning to write. The Chinese ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... the road near by. Sighing, Barnabas turned thitherwards and beheld advancing towards them one who paused, now and then, to look about him as though at a loss, and then hurried on again. A very desolate figure he was, and quaintly pathetic because of his gray hair, and the empty sleeve that flapped helplessly to and fro with the hurry of his going—a figure, indeed, that there was no mistaking. Being come to the finger-post, he paused to look wistfully ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... the press was more encouraging—that is to say, by the provincial press, for the London papers took mighty little notice of the newcomer. The "Morning Advertiser," it is true, quaintly declared in praise of the "exquisite woodcuts, serious and comic," that they were "executed in the first style of art, at a price so low that we really blush to name it;" while the "Sunday Times" ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... all of them united to adore. There is an actual photograph of her here, taken at the age of twenty, which goes far to explain how she came to be the heroine of the story; the lurking gaiety and laughter of it quaintly foretelling the great ecclesiastical lady who, on one occasion when the Archbishop was absent, could announce to her enraptured children that family prayers should be remitted, "as a treat!" Schooldays at Wellington; Cambridge; some topical memoirs of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... still in the old quaintly spacious house with its great bowery garden, for the plausible reason that Dr. Millar could not, on the spur of the moment, find a purchaser or an available tenant. He took some credit to himself for having more ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... court. The grandeur of the place, its magnificent proportions, terminating in the great, upward sweep of steps, and the mellow stained window, struck her more than ever after coming from the crowded and inconvenient little court within. The vaulted roof, with its quaintly carved angels, was for the most part dim and shadowy, but here and there a ray of sunshine, slanting in through the clerestory windows, changed the sombre tones to a golden splendor. Erica, very susceptible ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... the fineness of its diction and for its clear presentation of the subject, relieved here and there by a quaintly humorous turn of phrase that is altogether delightful."—Colin C. Stewart, Ph. ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre
... at me? 'Tis true— Voluptuousness, grotesqueness, ghastliness, 85 Environ my devotedness as quaintly As round about some antique altar wreathe The rose festoons, goats' horns, ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... there is favour for me. Yea, as I told you, such a one is a continual spectacle in the church, for every one by to behold God's grace and wonder by.[84] These are the 'things the angels desire to look into' (1 Peter 1:12), or as Bunyan quaintly says, this is the music which causes 'them that dwell in the higher orbs to open their windows, put out their heads, and look down to see the cause of that glory' ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... nice as could be. They went about in white cotton gowns—amazingly clean, considering that they lived under a tree—tied at the waist with red scarfs; their black hair was smoothly gathered at the backs of their pretty heads, and they had a demure and quaintly maternal air; they looked at you with a tranquil, moon-like gaze, which seemed to say that their ideas, which were on the way, had tarried for the moment ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... remedy for his distress is a supper of roses, could such be found, and many are his quaintly picturesque attempts to come by them at that adverse season; as he contrives to do at last, when, the grotesque procession of Isis [60] passing by with a bear and other strange animals in its train, the ass following along with the rest suddenly crunches ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... misery which she could so little imagine; however she let the subject drop as to any more words about it. She was only what the doctor called "quaintly sober," all ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner
... on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Everywhere may be seen the fat figures of the Seven Gods of Wealth, the deities most beloved in every Japanese household. Then there are the God and Goddess of Rice, who protect the crops, and who are attended by the figures of foxes quaintly carved in wood or moulded in white plaster. The Goddess of Mercy, with her many hands to help and save, is also ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Japan • John Finnemore
... general learning. Doubtless, in the ruin of the sixteenth century, many original works of monkish authors perished, and the splendor of the transcript rendered it still more liable to destruction; but I confess, as old Fuller quaintly says, that "there were many volumes full fraught with superstition which, notwithstanding, might be useful to learned men, except any will deny apothecaries the privilege of keeping poison in their shops, when they can make antidotes ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... conservatory, forming an entrance to the room through a winter-garden of rare plants and flowers. On your right hand, as you stand fronting the conservatory, the monotony of the paneled wall is relieved by a quaintly patterned door of old inlaid wood, leading into the library, and thence, across the great hall, to the other reception-rooms of the house. A corresponding door on the left hand gives access to the billiard-room, to the smoking-room next to it, and to a smaller hall ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... covered in with arched masonry, and the effect is that of a long side aisle in a very untidy and greatly secularized cathedral. From time to time glimpses of the dark-blue, star-filled sky showed through openings overhead, and sometimes a quaintly framed view of a dome ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... just was a glimpse of something strange and dangerous. It was curiously alluring, though not exactly beautiful. Her hair was clustering and boyish, reaching only to the neck. It was of a strange indigo colour. She was quaintly attired in a tunic and breeches, pieced together from the square, blue-green plates of some reptile. Her small, ivory-white breasts were exposed. Her sorb was black ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... induce the rest to commence any enterprise without him, and the tidings from Europe induced him to conclude a peace, and return home. Malek-el-Afdal came to visit him, and a truce was signed for three years, three months, three weeks, three days, three hours, and three minutes—thus so quaintly arranged in accordance with some astrological views of the Saracens. Ascalon was to be demolished, on condition free access to Jerusalem was allowed to the pilgrims; but Saladin would not restore ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Maverick left upon the old swaying stage-coach,—looking out, as he passed, upon the parsonage, with its quaintly panelled door, and its diamond lights, of which he long kept the image in his mind. That brazen knocker he seemed to hear in later years, beating,—beating as if his brain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... the laughing-bird, called Cockatoo, Who drops them a courtesy, and cries "How d' ye do?" Or Mungo, the negro, who quaintly and sly Takes his tea, Cayenne pepper, and cold apple-pie. Some gaze on the Cygnets that glide like a dream, And bend down to admire their fair forms in the stream; Some laugh at their fancies, or muse on a flower, And all are delighted, so happy the hour. Wouldst thou gaze ...
— The Peacock 'At Home' AND The Butterfly's Ball AND The Fancy Fair • Catherine Ann Dorset
... body and very little physical endurance. In spite of this physical handicap he was very vivacious and gay. He was a genial and companionable man, loved by all who knew him. He was very modest, even to the point of shyness, exceptionally sincere, and quaintly humorous. He established homes in New Jersey and West Virginia, where he spent the greater part of his time from 1882 until ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... and all around lay the garden—flowers and fruit quaintly intermingled. Down the long path to the gate, where three roads met, great bunches of peonies lifted white blossoms—luminously white in the moonlight; and on either side rows of currant bushes cast low, dark shadows, and here and ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... because few have so completely abandoned themselves to that care. He dared to trust Him, with whom the hairs of our head are all numbered, and who touchingly reminds us that He cares for what has been quaintly called "the odd sparrow." Matthew records (x. 29) how two sparrows are sold for a farthing, and Luke (xii. 6) how five are sold for two farthings; and so it would appear that, when two farthings were offered, an odd sparrow was thrown in, as of ...
— George Muller of Bristol - His Witness to a Prayer-Hearing God • Arthur T. Pierson
... "Persia and the Persians," wood is abundant; and the Persian architect, taking advantage of his opportunity, has designed his houses with wooden piazzas—not found elsewhere—and with "beams, lintels, and eaves quaintly, sometimes elegantly, carved, and tinted with brilliant hues." Another feature of the decorative woodwork in this part of Persia is that produced by the large latticed windows, which are well adapted to ...
— Illustrated History of Furniture - From the Earliest to the Present Time • Frederick Litchfield
... adorned with pennons of russet and black, the chosen colors of the five knights challengers. The cords of the tents were of the same color. Before each pavilion was suspended the shield of the knight by whom it was occupied, and beside it stood his squire, quaintly disguised as a salvage[40-2] or silvan man, or in some other fantastic dress, according to the taste of his master and the character he was pleased to assume during the game. The central pavilion, as the place of honor, had been assigned to Brian de Bois-Guilbert, whose ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... long, spring market-wagon, drawn by two noble horses, stopped before the gate of Glen Morris Cottage. It contained Carrie Sherwood and her party, all but the Carltons and their visitors. Mr. Sherwood sat on the driver's seat. He went with the young folks to drive, and, as he quaintly said, "to see that the hawks did not pounce on his chickens;" by which figure of speech, I suppose, he meant that he went to keep the young ...
— Jessie Carlton - The Story of a Girl who Fought with Little Impulse, the - Wizard, and Conquered Him • Francis Forrester
... "Oh," she said quaintly, "there was a good genie who let me in through the keyhole. I didn't meddle with anything, you know—I just looked at the beautiful room where you work. And I didn't glance, even, at the picture on the ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... of never having heard of him, inclines to condemn the whole business beforehand as an impossible fable. I fancy Mr. SOMERSET MAUGHAM felt something of this difficulty with regard to the protagonist of his quaintly-called The Moon and Sixpence (HEINEMANN), since, for all his sly pretence of quoting imaginary authorities, we have really only his unsupported word for the superlative genius of Charles Strickland, the stockbroker who abandoned respectable London to become a Post-impressionist ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 7, 1919. • Various
... 50: The folds of his robe.—Ver. 267. 'Rorant pennae sinusque,' is quaintly translated by Clarke, 'his wings and the plaits of ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... quaintly neat, All pride and business, bustle and conceit; With looks unalter'd by these scenes of woe, With speed that, ent'ring, speaks his haste to go. He bids the gazing throng around him fly, And carries fate and ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... neuk, this Braehead, preserved almost as it was two hundred years ago. "Lot and his wife," mentioned by Maidie,—two quaintly cropped yew-trees,—still thrive; the burn runs as it did in her time, and sings the same quiet tune,—as much the same and as different as Now and Then. The house is full of old family relics ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... introducing the principal members of the company, we will now ask the reader to follow the ladies into the drawing room. Government House drawing room was indeed an apartment of costly elegance. Richly covered and gilded furniture was arranged in stately profusion. Quaintly and gorgeously embroidered silken draperies were festooned with graceful effect. Rare paintings adorned the frescoed walls. Priceless cabinets, vases and statuary were grouped with artistic hand. ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... St. Catherine is very quaintly told in the old legend.[4] She was the daughter of "a noble and prudent king," named Costus, "who reigned in Cyprus at the beginning of the third century," and "had to his wife a queen like to himself in virtuous governance." Though good ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... described quaintly, but with real insight, in a sentence which a Spanish novelist, Don Perez Galdos, puts into the mouth of one of his characters: "Nelson, who, as everybody knows, was no fool, saw our long line and said, 'Ah, if I break through that in two ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... cliff had given place to green-clad bluffs sown thick with cottages of all sorts, from the quaintly hideous and the obviously inexpensive to the bewitchingly pretty and the pretentiously ornate —a haphazard arrangement that ran suddenly into a plot of streets linking a clutter of utilitarian buildings, all converging upon the focal point ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... were in his wishes, years in which to provoke her quaintly inflected English, and its quaint little slips. She had learned it in London long before, playing with wee Honorable toddlers while her father played France's diplomacy with grown-ups. That accent of hers, then, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the proceedings opened he furtively transferred his buttonhole to his coat-pocket. Among those who remained faithful were Lord LAMBOURNE (in the Peers' Gallery), who had for this occasion substituted a posy of primroses for his usual picotee, and, quaintly enough, Mr. HOGGE, who had not hitherto been suspected ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... he, with his head on one side, quaintly, "wasn't that a blasphermous yarn old Dave was givin' us about the wind blowing that log chain away a link at a time? Old ...
— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels
... [Bishop Hall quaintly remarks, that "No devil is so dangerous as the religious devil." "Suppose the ends of this Engagement to be good, (which they are not,) yet the meanes and ways of prosecution are unlawful, because there is not an equall avoiding of rocks on both hands, but a joyning ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... the Nightingale perches, while the Goldfinch flies to the Lady of the Flower. The pageant gone, the gentlewoman quits the arbour, and meets a lady in white, who, at her request, unfolds the hidden meaning of all that she has seen; "which," says Speght quaintly, "is this: They which honour the Flower, a thing fading with every blast, are such as look after beauty and worldly pleasure. But they that honour the Leaf, which abideth with the root, notwithstanding the frosts and winter storms, are they which follow Virtue and during ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... dignified melody. The expression soon becomes tender, but is interspersed with jocular little passages. MacDowell illustrates in his characteristic manner a lonely tramp at night, with the grotesque streaks of the moonlight breaking quaintly into the pedestrian's contemplative mood. The music is curiously lonely and suggestive of a quiet moonlight night in the country. Particularly lovable are the soft, characteristic chord progressions, followed by lonely silence, on the second page, just before the opening ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... memoir concludes, and in which he adds a few additional facts illustrative of his grandmother's character, and describes her personal appearance. The description will remind our readers of one of the more graphic pictures of Wordsworth, that of the stately dame on whose appearance the poet remarks quaintly, but significantly, ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... Valis and other officials were, each in his district, to see to the thoroughness of its cessation. Sometimes, as happened at Erzerum, the Vali in question, not having the broad out-look of Enver, or quaintly and curiously having a womanish objection to the national duty of flogging men to death and giving over young girls to a barbarous soldiery, remonstrated with the authorities, or even refused to obey orders. Such ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... table, and smiled quaintly, with eyes which roved out at window, and from mast to bare mast of the few small junks that lay moored against the distant bank. He bore himself, to-day, like a lazy cock of the walk. The rest of the council, Nesbit, Teppich, Sturgeon, Kempner, and the great ...
— Dragon's blood • Henry Milner Rideout
... in preparation for some great and beautiful adventure which was to befall me by and by, and dazedly I toiled forward. Whereas behind me all the while was the garden between dawn and sunrise, and therein you awaited me! Now assuredly, the life of every man is a quaintly builded tale, in which the right and proper ending comes first. Thereafter time runs forward, not as schoolmen fable in a straight line, but in a vast closed curve, returning to the place of its starting. And it is by a dim foreknowledge of ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... were contained in these epistles; while the advice in them was quaintly put, it was always helpful, ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... had floated there throughout the week in spite of shot and shell was suddenly lowered, and one of the rebels was seen to climb on the parapet and tie a white scarf, quaintly enough, on to the arm of the central statue, which stood out against the ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... dead, if God's good will were so. For what is in this world but grief and woe? O God! methinks it were a happy life To be no better than a homely swain, To sit upon a hill as I do now, To carve out dials quaintly, point by point, Thereby to see the minutes how they run: How many make the hour full complete, How many hours bring about the day, How many days will finish up the year, How many years a mortal man may live. When this ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... that their side of the question would (if stated through official channels), be fairly or fully represented. Even were their case presented through these channels they were not sure but that (as strikingly and quaintly put by Dr. Ryerson, on ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... green table that I remembered well sat a small boy, rather quaintly dressed in a by-gone fashion, with a frill round his wide shirt-collar, and his golden hair cut quite close at the top, and rather long at the sides and back. It was Gogo Pasquier. He seemed a very nice little boy. He had pen and ink and copy-book before him, and a gilt-edged volume ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... could retort she rose and went into the buttery, returning after a moment or two with a foaming brown jug in one hand and a quaintly shaped Toby-mug in the other. She placed them both on the table in ...
— North, South and Over the Sea • M.E. Francis (Mrs. Francis Blundell)
... wait no longer. Some one is already in a fever of impatience. 'Tis a quaintly pretty room; I am happy to have seen its curious treasures. Good-by again, child; my service once more to your mother and sister;" and so, with many compliments, she passed chatting and ...
— The Bow of Orange Ribbon - A Romance of New York • Amelia E. Barr
... bandages were removed they found themselves in a sumptuous chamber, alone with the captain. The brilliant light from a quaintly-shaped candelabrum, in the centre of the chamber, dazzled them, but in a few minutes their eyes had ...
— The Land of the Changing Sun • William N. Harben
... seen a quaintly despondent little figure, whose curly head issued from a hooded cloak, staggering hopelessly from a hammock, and seating herself on a mossy stump. From the limpness of her attitude and the pathetic expression of her eyes, I fear Polly was reviewing former happy nights spent ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... views. The thirteenth lecture discusses two topics which are not touched by Mr. Darwin, namely, the origin of the present form of the solar system, and that of living matter. Full justice is done to Kant, as the originator of that "cosmic gas theory," as the Germans somewhat quaintly call it, which is commonly ascribed to Laplace. With respect to spontaneous generation, while admitting that there is no experimental evidence in its favour, Professor Haeckel denies the possibility ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... us wave our branches gently With a murmur low and loving; He will say we sang him quaintly Some old ballad, sweetly moving. 'Tis of all the ways the surest To awake a poet's fancies, For he loves these things the purest— Sigh of leaves, and scent of pansies. He has loved us, we will love him, And will cheer his hour of sadness, Spirits, wave your boughs above ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... of the river, in mazes of little narrow streets; curious old quays project over the water at different points; coast-trade vessels are being loaded and unloaded, built in one place and repaired in another, all within view; while the prospect of hills, harbour, and houses thus quaintly combined together, is beautifully closed by the English Channel, just visible as a small strip of blue water, pent in between the ridges of two promontories which stretch out on either side to ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... one comfort,' said Gillian, rather quaintly, thinking of the length of time that Dolores would thus ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge
... least, missed the suffering behind Miltoun's mask; his eyes were still good, and there was a little matter of some twenty years' suffering of his own on account of a woman—ancient history now—which had left him quaintly sensitive, for an old man, to signs of ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and was buried with his duchess in Westminster Abbey. His literary labours are now almost forgotten, if we except his principal production, "A new method and extraordinary invention to dress Horses," &c., which has obtained much praise from judges in the art. Grainger quaintly remarks, that "the Duke of Newcastle was so attached to the Muses, that he could not leave them behind him, but carried them to the camp, and made Davenant the poet-laureate, his lieutenant-general of the ordnance." His second ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, - Issue 566, September 15, 1832 • Various
... before his arrival. His only embarrassment, in fact, arose from the difficulty which he naturally experienced in adapting himself to the speech and address of the Mitchenor family. The greetings of old Eli, grave, yet kindly, of Abigail, quaintly familiar and tender, of Moses, cordial and slightly condescending, and finally of Asenath, simple and natural to a degree which impressed him like a new revelation in woman, at once indicated to him his position among them. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... as though it were carven out of one great burning jewel? ... Golden hangings, falling in rich, loose folds, draped it gorgeously from stem to stern,—gold cordage looped the sails,—on the deck a band of young gals clad in white, and crowned with flowers, knelt, playing softly on quaintly shaped instruments,—and a cluster of tiny, semi-nude boys, fair as young cupids, were grouped in pretty reposeful attitudes along the edge of the gilded prow holding garlands of red and yellow blossoms which trailed down to the ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... latest volume of them is My Remembrances (CASSELL), in which Mr. EDWARD H. SOTHERN recounts, with the pleasant humour to be expected from him, what he quaintly (and quite unjustifiably) calls "The Melancholy Tale of Me." One has heard that Mr. SOTHERN, now that he has retired from the stage, proposes to live in England; the book explains such an intention by its evidence of the writer's intense love for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... permission to do so during the padre's absence. After we had breakfasted, and the light had become sufficient, we made our way to the old church, in front of which are some beautifully gnarled and irregular ancient olive trees, amid which the old bells are quaintly hung. Entering the church, we soon found the Titian, a descent from the cross. The figures are boldly painted and skillfully grouped; the action and lighting concentrate upon the figure of the Christ. Padre Ponce ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... is Law. Three kinds of Vyavahara or Law are here spoken of. The first is the ordinary Law, according to which the disputes of litigants are decided, it includes both civil and criminal law, it is quaintly described here as Vattripratyayalakskana, i.e., 'characterised by a belief in either of two litigant parties.' When a suit, civil or criminal, is instituted, the king or those that act in the king's name must call for Evidence and decide the matter by believing either of the two parties. Then follows ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... can write at once so beautifully, so quaintly, so suggestively, and so evangelically as John Bunyan. 'The Lord Willbewill,' says John Bunyan, 'took special care that the gates should be secured with double guards, double bolts, and double locks and bars; and that Ear-gate ...
— Bunyan Characters - Third Series - The Holy War • Alexander Whyte
... I considered It was a jest, and carried off so quaintly, It made me merry: very merry, Gentlemen, I do confess I could not sleep to think on't, The mirth so tickled me, I ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... richly dressed old woman threw handful after handful of small silver coins among us. In several places we trod upon great quantities of flowers thrown in our path by peasant girls. The flags of England, Germany, France, and Italy, were everywhere to be seen. The quaintly uniformed corps of firemen turned out in splendor to do us honor, and we saluted with grave dignity the immense statue of Columbus standing in the centre of the town. By those who entered Mayaguez that day none of these things will ...
— From Yauco to Las Marias • Karl Stephen Herrman
... had nothing to do with what he called the "tam pizness" of the morning. It was most inconvenient. He had reckoned upon another day up in town to settle his bills and sign certain papers. There were also some few stores to come, and sundry pieces of "my ironwork," as he called it quaintly, landed for repairs, had been left behind. Now he would have to hire a native boat to take all this out to the ship. It would cost five or six dollars perhaps. He had had no warning from Falk. Nothing.... He hit the table with his ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... be seen. The hill, which had a slope on one side, had evidently been split, as on reaching the top I found that an almost vertical precipice was on the other side. Quantities of quartz and crystals were to be found on that hill. All over that region quaintly-shaped rocks were also to be found, some like small cubic or rectangular boxes, others not unlike inkstands, others in hollowed cylinders or spheres. Many—and those were the quaintest of all—were of a rectangular shape, which when split disclosed a ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... to Cain's heresy," he used to say quaintly: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way." In this character, it was frequently his fortune to be the last reputable acquaintance and the last good influence in the lives of down-going men. And to such as these, so long as they ...
— Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde • ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON |
